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.