Here is Sebastian Galiani on the concept of marginal revolution: ⊕ ᔥTyler Cowen on his blog, Marginal Revolution

In the 1870s, almost simultaneously and largely independently, three economists overturned classical political economy. William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Léon Walras broke with the Ricardian tradition that explained value through labor, costs, or embedded substance. Value, they argued, does not come from the total amount of work put into something. It comes from the last unit—from what economists would soon call marginal valuation.

This was not a semantic tweak. It was a change in how economic reasoning itself works.

If those last four sentences triggered you it is for good reason, because there is more:

We see microeconomics arguments based on levels instead of changes, on identities instead of incentives, on stocks instead of flows. We see decisions justified by who someone is rather than by what happens at the margin. We see calls to preserve structures because they exist, to freeze allocations because change feels uncomfortable, to judge outcomes by averages rather than by trade-offs.

From a marginalist perspective, these arguments are not just wrong; they are incoherent.

And so on. To be clear, this is AI slop plain and simple and is identified as such in one of the top Marginal Revolution comments. It also has 38 likes, 7 reposts and 7 comments on Substack, none of which recognize that much of the text came from a Large Language Model.

Sebastian Galiani doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, but here is the first paragraph of his academic biography:

Sebastian Galiani is the Mancur Olson Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. He obtained his PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford and works broadly in the field of Economics. He is a member of the Argentine National Academy of Economic Science, and Fellow of the NBER and BREAD. Sebastian was Secretary of Economic Policy, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Treasury, Argentina, between January of 2017 and June of 2018.

Lovely.

As a palate cleanser, here is an early 2000s article about inequality that the economist Branko Milanović recently re-published on his own Substack:

Many economists dismiss the relevance of inequality (if everybody’s income goes up, who cares if inequality is up too?), and argue that only poverty alleviation should matter. This note shows that we all do care about inequality, and to hold that we should be concerned with poverty solely and not with inequality is internally inconsistent.

That is only the first paragraph. The text is not easily summarized or excerpted but it is a wonderful read with which I very much agreed and which only got better and more relevant as years went by. Here are the first two paragraph of Milanović’s Wikipedia page:

Branko Milanović (Serbian Cyrillic: Бранко Милановић, IPA: [brǎːŋko mǐlanoʋitɕ; milǎːn-]) is a Serbian-American economist and university professor. He is most known for his work on income distribution and inequality.

Since January 2014, he has been a research professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and an affiliated senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). He also teaches at the London School of Economics and the Barcelona Institute for International Studies. In 2019, he has been appointed the honorary Maddison Chair at the University of Groningen.

Milanović has 8 mentions on Marginal Revolution, including a 2015 post in which Cowen recognizes him as his favorite Serbian economist and blogger. But maybe he fell out of favor, as the last link from Cowen to anything of Milanović’s was back in 2023 (and the one before was in 2020, from Alex Tabarrok, who disagreed with what Milanović wrote about comparing wealth across time periods).

Galiani has 10 mentions, the most recent before this AI slop being his NBER working paper in which he and his co-authors measured efficiency and equity framing in economics research using, yes, LLMs. I actually don’t have a problem with such papers since the LLM use is clearly identified. But selling an LLM’s voice as your own is a different matter altogether and would deserve a posting to the academic Wall of Shame if there was one.

By the way, this is what students at the University of Maryland have to do per UMD guidelines (emphasis mine):

Students should consult with their instructors, teaching assistants, and mentors to clarify expectations regarding the use of GenAI tools in a given course. When permitted by the instructor, students should appropriately acknowledge and cite their use of GenAI applications. When conducting research-related activities (e.g., theses, comprehensive exams, dissertations), students should refer to the guidance below for research and scholarship. Allegations of unauthorized use of GenAI will be treated similarly to allegations of unauthorized assistance (cheating) or plagiarism and investigated by the Office of Student Conduct.

Everything on Substack should be marked as LLM-generated until proven otherwise, and increasingly anything Cowen links to as well.

📺 His & Hers (2026) was an interesting contrast to another Netflix murder mystery — Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials — in how much more sex and graphical violence was crammed into it. Whether it is the place or the time that made the difference, who knows?

Its TV-MA rating aside, His & Hers had strong acting, a tight story, and a satisfying twist at the very end. Can’t ask for much more than that from the tah-dum company.

“The pessimist and the prophet” is the current title of the online version but only if you read the article itself — everywhere else on the website it is the more verbose and I presume SEO-friendly “The Harvard professor who foresaw our age of anger – and what happens next”. Neither is what is used in the print edition, the more poetic “Meditations in an emergency”. Common to all three is that they are nowhere to be found on the FT’s home page, though to be fair it is referenced in the top right corner of the front page in print, above a Mad Men-esque illustration and with an altogether different teaser title: “The limits of liberalism; Philosopher Michael Sandel”.

I have never heard of Sandel before, of his 12-part lecture series about Justice (available on Youtube free of charge) or of his 1996 book Democracy’s Discontent which seems to have predicted the perils of globalization and neoliberalism without having to reference lizard people or secret cabals. ⊕ In this it reminded me of False Dawn which came two years later, though of course I will have to read Sandel’s book first to confirm. In the article, FT commentator Martin Sandbu, who is also a former student of Sandel’s, retells their recent conversations about, well, the current goings on and what happens when you take morals out of politics and rely on “free” markets for guidance:

Sandel’s j’accuse is that this kind of liberalism took what should have been the most political questions out of politics, leaving them to be settled by market mechanisms. I proposed that this was similar to the appeal of “effective altruism”, the neo-utilitarian moral theory popular among students and tech bros, which reduces moral questions to basic calculations of effectiveness. “Exactly,” he said.

In an updated edition of Democracy’s Discontent, Sandel gives the example of Barack Obama’s approach to the 2008 financial crisis. “By standing between the bankers and ‘the pitchforks’,” as the public demanded legal limits on bonuses and no bailouts for banks, “Obama sought to mollify the public outrage, rather than give it voice. [He] treated the financial crisis as a technical problem for experts to solve, not a civic question about the role of finance in democratic life.”

On America’s fake meritocracy:

One derivation of market-friendly liberalism Sandel has long questioned is meritocracy, the idea that society should be organised to give the most able the advancement they deserve. I remember how he would warn us teaching fellows that in the classes debating distributive justice, undergraduates would all preach meritocracy. They were adamant they had earned their Harvard places through hard work alone. In the lecture hall, Sandel would then ask the 800 or so assembled undergraduates to raise their hand if they were their parents’ first (or only) child. He still does this today, and when he does, “75 to 80 per cent of the students raise their hands and there’s an audible gasp when they look around and notice that”. The over-representation (more than half of US children are second born or later), combined with plausible reasons why birth order matters for parental attention and other advantages, is a powerful prompt for Sandel’s students to rethink whether they can really claim meritocratic achievement.

On the class divide: ⊕ But of course as more and more people attain the right to the skybox, those who do not want to mix with the rif-raf build skybox on top of skybox on top of skybox to form an ever-growing hedonistic mountain.

Then there was what Sandel calls “the skyboxification of public life”, a reference to corporate boxes in sports stadiums. Sports events were once a class-mixing experience. Ticket price differences were modest. “Everyone had to stand in the same long queues to use the bathroom, everybody had to drink the same stale beer and eat the same hot dogs. When it rained, everyone got wet. But with the advent of luxury skyboxes, that no longer was the case.” It’s a specific example of what he calls one of the most corrosive effects of growing inequality: that winners and losers increasingly “live separate lives”. This is not just a matter of distributive justice, of unequal incomes, but that we lose the “chance encounters” [that] remind us of our common citizenship, “of what it is we share”. How many of us at the winning end of these developments have given much thought to what we have collectively lost in the process?

Unlike the cadre of neoliberali journalists across the pond — e.g., the editorial board of The Atlantic — Sandbu owes up to his generation’s failure to make the world better and can at least contemplate the possibility that our current predicament is the direct consequence of their hubris. And surprisingly considering FT’s target audience, the comments to the article are uniformly positive. There may be hope yet.

From American Economic Journal: Economic Policy about the effects of ransomware on patients: ⊕ ↬Tyler Cowen

Ransomware attacks decrease hospital volume by 17–24 percent during the initial attack week, with recovery occurring within 3 weeks. Among patients already admitted to the hospital when a ransomware attack begins, in-hospital mortality increases by 34–38 percent.

The implication is that the computer systems being down has a huge detrimental effect on patient outcomes. What the abstract doesn’t get into — and I don’t have access to the full article — is how they calculated the in-hospital mortality among the already admitted patients. Many of them will have been discharged early or transferred to other hospitals if stable enough, decreasing the denominator and overestimating mortality. At least I hope that’s the case!

The numbered items are from Kelley’s recent post, comments below are mine after a bit more than a decade of experience.

1. Having children is a good – perhaps the best – way to disseminate your values to the next generation.

Provided you have values to disseminate, know what they are, and especially know the difference between values and opinions because while your values may be identical your opinions will often clash.

2. Children are entertaining, much better than any other streaming option you might pay for.

Absolutely true. My wife and I have a running list of every brilliantly stupid and stupidly brilliant thing our progeny has said. It is long and growing ever longer.

3. There is a profound and primeval joy in helping a helpless infant become a functioning adult.

Experiencing this right now while having both an infant and a teenager at home. You tend to forget how large that gap actually is since you cross it in daily — nay, hourly — increments, but it is complete helplessness on one end and taking the metro from school by yourself and going on a field trip to China on the other.

4. A primeval and foundational need of all humans everywhere is to belong, and to be loved.

For being loved alone you could also get a pet, but there is also a need to love that — and please fellow cat lovers do not kill me for writing this — no pet can completely fulfill.

5. It is exceedingly rare for anyone born to later regret having been born, so the gift of birth is huge.

Well put. Though of course you also take a piece of your heart and put it into someone else, and then things may happen to them or they may be the thing that happens to other people, with strong feelings either way.

6. If it all works out through adolescence, you will have friends for life.

Amen.

Last month I linked to two things that are now worth following up on:

• John Nerst’s book “Competitive Sensemaking” is out. The only non-Amazon option is an ebook, so I will leave this one for the Daylight tablet.
• Steven Johnson’s NotebookLM project “Planet Of The Barbarians” is also live, accompanying the newsletter series of the same name. Even more interesting to me are [the notebook][3b] and [newsletter post][3c] titled “The Architecture of Ideas”, referencing Johnson’s work on tools and workflows for writing. Warning: both are full of rabbit holes.

And on the abandoning Apple front:

• Matt Gemmell has concerns about Apple much better baked than my own. He also has thoughts on detaching but seems less willing to give up on the ecosystem than I am. (ᔥJohn Brady)
• My own toe in the Apple-less pool is giving up on the essential Mac-only apps. OmniFocus was the first on the chopping block, replaced by Emacs org-mode, though instead of going through now pretty dated tutorials behind that link I just asked Google Gemini how best to convert Kurosh Dini’s Creating Flow with OmniFocus into Org. And it worked! The idea is be to keep replacing apps with open-source equivalents until making the switch becomes easy. It will probably take years but you have to start somewhere.

❄️ A bit of a thaw yesterday, and various artifacts of bygone eras encased in ice for decades begin to emerge.

• Technology Connections on YouTube: You are being misled about renewable energy technology.
• Silje Grytli Tveten: Pretty soon, heat pumps will be able to store and distribute heat as needed
• Das Surma: Ditherpunk — The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering
• Christopher Schwarz: Free Now & Forever: ‘Campaign Furniture’
• Doug Belshaw: The strange magic of the third week

OK, these two are included more for saliency than positivity, but they are also good!

• Michael Lopp: I Hate Fish. Because I am in the middle of a gtd identity crisis
• Akash Bhat: Curate or die. Which is about this very post, and those like it.

Update: Adam Mastroianni’s latest post fits here like a glove.