Ciaran Marshall

New post: I'm a supporter of both policies, yet one should never be unequivocal. As always, there's no free-lunch and legitimate tradeoffs matter. Nonetheless, the stupid populism of their opponents suggests that this bundle is the smart position to have. open.substack.com/pub/microfound…

Any news article about pollution from plastic bags or other plastic products that does not point out that the US produces essentially zero per capita plastic pollution is ridiculously misleading. You can't even see the US here because it's basically on the x-axis. In a lot of countries, people literally just throw all their trash in the river. That's the plastic problem.

I wrote about the weakest attempted MeToo-ing in recent history for @WSJFreeEx It's not 'grooming' for two 20-somethings to go on a few dates. And it is neither empowering nor particularly feminist to view women as perpetual schoolgirls, unable to consent to any romantic relationship that has a whiff of power imbalance.

Most people: "Wow, you wrote a paper with a famous professor! You must be smart!" Economist hiring committees: "You wrote a paper with a famous professor? We're discounting your contribution to zero."

This must be the most aggressively Ottoman flavour combo

Enjoyed this piece on rural pubs from @johndotwills - I hadn't joined the dots on how it's daft to have community "hubs" competing with the community pubs already there (as with many things, suspect this is an ongoing failure, not just the current govt) capx.co/labours-war-on…

Shut up, nerds! Dynare 7 is out and now it does HANK. HANK confirmed for commoditized. Your missed this train (too)! dynare.org/download/

Another fun hiring spot at Jane Street: we're looking to hire some great hybrid writers-and-engineers. As we grow and do more, communication becomes ever more important, for both internal and external audiences.

English speaking countries are experiencing lower levels of happiness, driven primarily by what's happening to young people. The British rank as the saddest of the bunch.

@anup_malani Exactly. Here is my take and overview of the model: open.substack.com/pub/microfound…

Why do smokers keep smoking when they know it might kill them? The standard answer: addiction is a disease that overrides choice. My advisor Gary Becker and my friend Kevin Murphy argued the opposite. Addicts are rational.

The internet must be free. 4Chan is an American company with no assets in the UK. Its only content regulator is the First Amendment. The Brits don’t get to colonize American companies operating out of America. See Declaration of Independence, American Revolution, etc.

Over 12,000 people were arrested in the UK in 2023 for speech-related offenses, including social media posts. Bizarrely, this has only been a right-wing talking point, "liberals" largely remain quiet. Standard indicators of democracy do not flag any issues. So if 4chan wants to mock the UK Censorship Agency with hamster pics, it seems quite deserved.. ht @glukianoff

@_alice_evans The British establishment is a coalition. It has been increasingly difficult not to notice that this coalition is made up of people who take offence quite easily at the tone rather than content of language. I think the British elite is basically trying to outlaw being mean.

Everyone has stripes known as Blaschko's lines. These are normally not visible and are generally only present if there's an issue, chimerism, etc. But some birds can see them!

"Traders with above-random accuracy earn negative returns because they arrive late and pay unfavorable prices; traders with near-random accuracy profit through superior execution." papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

In 2023, just 579 people were born in the Northern Mariana Islands. Total. You can read this entire post and not know that births there have been falling for years, from under 1,500 a year in 1998 to around 500 a year in the 2020s. And Rep. Tiffany is giving this situation a 🚨?

Calling IVF techniques "molecular rape" is a stunning new form of discourse I didn't even realize was theoretically possible. Consent, but going individual cell by individual cell. This is going to be in some critical theory paper by next year.

The UN estimates that 90% of Port-au-Prince is now controlled by criminal groups, using rape as a 'weapon of terror'. At MSF's clinic, 58% of survivors experienced a group assault, with an average of 3 perpetrators. ggd.world/p/can-women-wa…

Plausible that Brexit ends up producing sinilar growth dynamics to some endogenous growth theories such as Lucas 1988. An initial shock harms output, yet raises growth in the long-run. Increasingly Brexiteers have been proven right on regulation, which matters in these debates.

Dr @nathancofnas’s appointment at Ghent University has prompted a campaign by members of the institution calling on the university to reverse course, citing his published work on race, heredity and intelligence. In response, CAF Advisory Board member Professor Abhishek Saha helped organised a counter-petition in support of Cofnas’s right to #academicfreedom of expression. CAF Director Dr Edward Skidelsky is among the signatories, alongside a number of senior academics from leading universities. This is not about endorsing Cofnas’s views, but about defending the principle that disagreements of this kind should be addressed through open inquiry, criticism, and civil debate. Of course, academics must be free to strongly contest ideas they regard as deeply objectionable. But that does not extend to a veto over appointments. Universities cannot function if controversial or provocative lines of research are treated as grounds for exclusion rather than argument. You can read the statement and sign the counter-petition here: drive.google.com/file/d/1RRsGma… @ObhishekSaha @ProfDHayes @epkaufm @Furedibyte @HJoyceGender @drianpace @aytchellesse @JoPhoenix1 @sapinker

The ‘Masculo-Barbarian’ is probably one of the larger cultural & aesthetic shifts we’ve seen Generally in the past we would have considered a lot of these traits to be vices rather than virtues