Since about 2011, global farm output growth has slumped as productivity gains have dropped sharply, and extra land and inputs have only partly filled the gap. Regional growth, in South Asia from added inputs and in sub-Saharan Africa from added land, shows the same dependence on expansion rather than efficiency.
— via Conversable Economist, conversableeconomist
India's overtime law doubles pay and caps hours weekly, stricter than Germany's. A simulated iPhone order shows an Indian factory taking 23% longer and costing at least 18% more than the fastest global competitor, with Germany beating India on both counts at equal wages.
— via Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok
This year's economics Nobel honors work on "microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation": but the real story is how spectacularly the field's prior approach collapsed. A 1,000-equation forecasting model from the 1960s made stagflation "literally impossible," and then the 1970s delivered it anyway.
— via Conversable Economist, conversableeconomist
African immigrants already out-earn native-born white Americans, with Kenyans and Cameroonians topping $91,000 in household income. The catch: those results depend on strict selection, not open borders.
— via Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen
Two of the economics Nobel's own laureates thought the prize should never have existed. In his 1974 banquet speech Hayek warned it hands economists "an authority which in economics no man ought to possess," while Myrdahl later said he'd skip meetings on the award altogether.
— via Conversable Economist, conversableeconomist
Robert Hall's Nobel win was decades in the making, built on a 1978 paper showing consumption follows a random walk, upending how economists modeled spending and income. He also once proposed pegging the dollar to fertilizer, copper and plywood instead of gold.
— via Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok
Tyler Cowen doesn't fit neatly into optimist or pessimist camps, according to one analysis. The real pattern: heavy doses of both appreciation and worry, delivered with almost no emotional heat at all.
— via Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen
Federal debt just matched its World War II peak, with $1.9 trillion in fresh borrowing planned for 2026 alone. One proposal counters with five tax "buckets", from a 27% corporate rate on the biggest firms to a 5% sports-wagering levy, aimed squarely at high earners, not new wealth taxes.
— via Conversable Economist, conversableeconomist
About half of Americans flunk basic money questions on a decade-old literacy test, and the score hasn't budged in ten years. Older people do a bit better, but no group comes close to passing.
— via Conversable Economist, conversableeconomist
Independent AI agents acquiring their own computing power and acting without human oversight sound like science fiction, but they run into a very old economic problem: they can't read minds. The fix dates to 1945, when Friedrich Hayek argued that scattered, local knowledge gets compressed into a single number, the price, and that's exactly what a rogue algorithm would need too.
— via EconLog (Econlib), Joy Buchanan
West Virginia's economy shrank 2.3% last quarter, the worst of six states in contraction, while New York led the nation at 4% growth on a finance and insurance boom. Alaska's Q1 number just got revised from +2.8% to -3.8%, the biggest swing in the latest BEA data.
— via FRED Blog (St. Louis Fed)
Gita Gopinath explains why a weaker currency won't let China or anyone else slash dollar prices much: their own imports are dollar-priced too, so there's little margin to squeeze. She also tells Tyler Cowen why Argentina's hardest inflation fight is still ahead, even after cutting from 150% to 30%.
— via Conversable Economist, conversableeconomist
I need an article excerpt with actual content to write an accurate deck. The text provided only contains generic comment-form boilerplate (Email, Author, Website, Comment, notification checkboxes) with no story details, headline, or substantive information to summarize. Please share the actual article text, and I'll write a deck that captures its most surprising or consequential concrete detail.
— via Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen
Singapore's government just built its own dating app, and it only gives users one match at a time. FirstDate, born from a GovTech hackathon, runs on a Nobel Prize-winning matchmaking algorithm and is piloting among public sector workers as the city-state scrambles to fix its collapsing birth rate.
— via Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen
The new loan rule isn't a ban on any major, and the bar for passing is embarrassingly low: beat high school grads' earnings, or for grad degrees, beat bachelor's holders. The real scandal is who's been footing the bill for failing programs all along: not students, but taxpayers stuck as involuntary co-signers.
— via Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok
Modeling car demand once required 40,000 price coefficients and more data than existed. An economist explains how switching to "characteristic space" cracked the problem, and how General Motors quietly tested the method against its own internal markup data.
— via Conversable Economist, conversableeconomist
Financial markets already price in a permanent 32.6% jump in software engineering productivity from AI, according to a new estimate. The knock-on effect on GDP: 3.6%, or 6.5% once R&D gains are counted, and it more than doubled by mid-2026 as coding agents improved.
— via Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen
Homeowners whose houses just got more valuable are furious about the taxes that come with it, and states are answering by gutting property taxes on owner-occupied homes while shifting the bill to landlords and commercial owners. The catch: cutting the tax raises home prices further, handing more wealth to people who already have plenty.
— via Conversable Economist, conversableeconomist
Two decades of refinements to a classic 2005 model just flipped the story on global poverty: measurable inputs like human capital now explain 55–70 percent of income gaps between countries, not 30 percent. Better data on labor, capital and management quality is squeezing out the old mystery variable, productivity.
— via Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen
The US government still owns 21% of the lower 48, roughly 473 million acres, run under vague "multiple use" rules instead of markets. Gary Libecap argues the switch from private land sales, halted in 1891, was never justified by any actual market failure and has left agencies with no real incentive to use resources efficiently.
— via Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen
