2026-09-29 01:53:27
When it comes to bear encounters in or near the wild, dogs are the aggressors in 54 percent of incidents, according to a recent study conducted by bear experts at Brigham Young University and other institutions, and published in the Journal of Wildlife Management. In approximately 36 percent of the encounters, dogs did not come to their owners’ defense. And they only successfully alerted their owners to the presence of a bear in about 9 percent of cases.
Here is more from the NYT.
The post Man’s best friend? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-09-29 00:36:21
1. Should more men move to Alaska?
2. The world’s oldest known peace treaty found.
3. In praise of Joyce, Whitman, and Crane.
4. Background explainer on the Chinese AI ecosystem.
5. YIMBY working in Portland (WSJ).
7. Human frailty.
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-09-28 21:56:32
Here is the NYT obituary.
The post Mighty Sparrow, RIP appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-09-28 19:18:03
An updated version of our Marginal Revolution University (MRU) video on defining the unemployment rate. Free to use for anyone but goes best, of course, with Modern Principles of Economics, the best principles of economics textbook.
The post Defining the Unemployment Rate appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-09-28 12:34:12
At times we forget what an amazing wonder the Bundesrepublik Deutschland was. At the end of the World War II, Germany was one of the sickest and cruelest human societies in history, ever. Not too many years later, it was one of the best and most successful societies ever.
By the 1980s, living standards had caught up to the United States, with the provision of public goods sometimes superior. The country was fully democratic, pro-Western, and largely pro-American.
Their rail system and postal service were amongst the best ever created.
For thinkers of note there were Hans Blumenberg, Habermas, Peter Weiss, Gadamer, late Heidegger and late Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck, the underrated Klaus Theweleit, Niklas Luhmann, and perhaps you value some of the other members of the Frankfurt School.
The visual arts were very strong, with Richter, Polke, Baselitz, Beuys, Penck, Palermo, and much more.
Music produced Stockhausen, Henze, Lachenmann, Rihm, Zimmerman, Kraftwerk, Can, and all of Krautrock, later techno, though right at the time of unification rather than during the BRD per se. The list of vocalists, instrumentalists, and conductors is strong. Was there anywhere better for hearing opera?
Perhaps I prefer the fiction from Austria and Switzerland, but at the very least Germany provided a major market for those authors and it was an extraordinarily literate country with amazing bookstores. For domestic authors there were Böll, Patrick Süskind, Siegfried Lenz, Wolfgang Koeppen, can I count Uwe Johnson?, and Arno Schmidt maybe? I do not like Grass, but it seems wrong not to list him.
The food could be very good, especially in the southwest. There were Michelin star restaurants all over the country (still are, to be clear on this point). So many well-functioning cities, with many of the world’s best transit systems. Lots of nuclear power and a strong industrial base. West Berlin was an exciting city with an air of mystery. Some might say no speed limit on the Autobahn, though I am less sure that was a virtue. Plenty of beautiful women and reasonable attitudes toward sex.
If you had to choose, what was the worst thing about the country? No shopping on Sundays? Workplace and shopping hours discrimination against women? Too much smoking? Obsession with Waldsterben?
Are there features of post-unification Germany that can compare to this earlier era? So much seems not to work well. So many policy mistakes have been made. So much leadership lost in the areas mentioned above. So much pessimism, sadly a lot of it seems to be justified.
Where did all the good performance go? And why did it leave? Lack of a communist enemy? Absorption of East Germany? The simple accretion of distance from pre-WWII German creativity?
The wonder that was the Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Johannes, we hardly knew ye.
The post Bundesrepublik Deutschland appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-09-28 03:03:12
Scientific progress is a key driver of economic growth and prosperity. There is great excitement- but also concerns- about the impacts of AI on science, but so far little data. We provide early insights on this from three data sources: a sample of 15 million Gemini interactions, an inventory of over 2,600 specialized AI models across disciplines, and a survey of over 600 scientists. We map these data to a new taxonomy of scientific tasks to study how scientists are using AI. Four main findings emerge. First, we find broad adoption and coverage: scientists use AI more than most other occupations. Specialized AI models have broad disciplinary coverage and are highly cited. Nearly half of the scientists surveyed report using some form of AI every day. Second, we document evidence that LLMs (proxied through Gemini usage) and specialized models act as complements—LLMs are used for general analysis, coding, and manuscript preparation, while specialized models provide domain-specific predictions, data generation and classification. Third, scientists report large productivity gains from using AI: a saving of nearly 7 hours per week, time which is primarily re-invested in more research. Finally, we show that AI is already changing the scientific process. As some stages of scientific research become easier, bottlenecks shift downstream. Scientists report an increased backlog of untested hypotheses and substantial demand for output verification. Our findings suggest that AI holds significant potential to increase scientific productivity. However, as with other sectors, its ultimate impact will be governed by complex task interdependencies and investment into the elimination of emerging bottlenecks.
That is from a new paper by Mihai Codreanu, et.al.
The post AI in science appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.