Marginal Revolution Saturday Roundup: AI Constitutions, Ferguson vs. Banks, and a Niederhoffer Obituary
Key Takeaways
- •The roundup featured the launch of Model Constitution, a publication focused on AI constitutions and model behavior principles.
- •A Free Press essay compared historian Niall Ferguson with novelist Iain Banks and his fictional machine-intelligence-driven Culture civilization.
- •The New York Times published an obituary for Victor Niederhoffer, who was a hedge fund manager, commodities trader, author, and squash champion.
- •The post cited an SSRN paper describing “harnesses” and noted that its claims were speculative.
- •An X post on prediction markets and another on the flypaper effect in AI safety were included among the six linked items.
Marginal Revolution, the economics blog written by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University and running since 2003, published its recurring "Saturday assorted links" roundup on August 22, 2026. The post gathers six items spanning artificial intelligence, commentary, and research.
1. New publication analyzing AI constitutions. The item links to the launch post of Model Constitution, a new publication dedicated to examining "AI constitutions" — written sets of principles designed to guide a model's behavior, an approach associated with research such as Anthropic's Constitutional AI.
2. Niall Ferguson vs. Iain Banks, and against some other stuff too (TFP). A new essay in The Free Press, the outlet founded by Bari Weiss, pits historian Niall Ferguson — a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution — against Iain Banks, the late Scottish novelist best known for his Culture series, whose post-scarcity civilization is administered by powerful machine intelligences known as the Minds.
3. NYT obituary for Victor Niederhoffer. The New York Times published an obituary on August 21, 2026 for Victor Niederhoffer, the hedge fund manager and commodities trader who authored "The Education of a Speculator," traded for George Soros earlier in his career, and was a champion squash player — a multiple-time U.S. national champion whose funds suffered large losses in 1997 and 2007.
4. On "harnesses." A research paper on SSRN, the Social Science Research Network's repository of preprints and working papers, states: "Engineered systems known as harnesses largely complete contracts in real time, make external work more observable than employment, and carry context and control across the firm's edge." The post flags the claim as speculative.
5. Flypaper effect for AI safety work? An X post raises the question. In public finance, the flypaper effect is the empirical finding that money "sticks where it hits": grant funding to governments tends to translate into spending more readily than an equivalent rise in residents' private income. The blogger's take on applying the idea to AI safety work: "A bit unfair, but not altogether wrong either. Always ponder the possible secondary consequences!"
6. Amended results on prediction markets. An X post presents amended results on prediction markets — exchanges where traders buy and sell contracts whose payoffs depend on real-world event outcomes. Prediction markets have been studied by economists since the University of Iowa's Iowa Electronic Markets began operating in 1988, and they are a recurring subject on Marginal Revolution itself.
