Marginal Revolution Sunday Assorted Links (August 23, 2026)
Key Takeaways
- •Venkatesh Rao argued that reflexively dismissing AI-generated writing as slop parallels underestimating someone because they speak with a non-prestigious accent in one's native language.
- •Profiles in The Washington Post and The New York Times examined Joe Lonsdale, the Palantir co-founder and 8VC venture capitalist, including the Cicero policy institute he founded and its work on homelessness.
- •Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who formerly headed the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under Barack Obama, contributed an essay on John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek, and the liberal tradition.
- •The roundup includes an interview with Peter McCrory, head economist at Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staff that develops Claude and runs the Economic Index on AI's labor-market impact.
- •A linked essay contends that economic growth has made Elvis Presley's Graceland, bought in 1957 and opened as a museum in 1982, appear less remarkable against today's far higher material baseline.
Marginal Revolution — the economics blog co-authored by George Mason University economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok — published its weekly Sunday assorted links on August 23, 2026. The seven-item roundup spans judgments about AI-generated writing, tech-driven policy influence, economic growth, and the intellectual history of liberalism:
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"Underestimating something that has an AI "accent" by reflexively dismissing it as slop rhymes curiously with underestimating someone because they have a funny accent in your native language (and it isn't one of the accents that you think signals superiority, like the BBC British accent for English)." — V. Rao, Venkatesh Rao on the Contraptions Substack.
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A profile of Joe Lonsdale, the venture capitalist and Palantir co-founder, who also co-founded the venture firm 8VC, examining how his once-fringe crusade has spread across Trump's America. And from the NYT, mostly on Cicero, the policy institute Lonsdale founded, and homelessness.
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Graceland just isn't that impressive — an argument that economic growth has made Elvis Presley's Memphis estate look less remarkable by comparison. Presley bought Graceland in 1957, and it opened to the public as a museum in 1982; the essay measures the estate against today's far higher material baseline.
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Mill, Hayek, and liberalism — Cass Sunstein on John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek, and the liberal tradition. Sunstein is a Harvard Law School professor who headed the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Barack Obama; Mill and Hayek remain two of classical liberalism's most-cited thinkers, through works such as On Liberty and The Road to Serfdom.
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Interview with Peter McCrory, Head Economist at Anthropic, the AI company that develops Claude. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staff, including chief executive Dario Amodei, and is based in San Francisco; it also runs the Economic Index, a research effort studying AI's impact on labor markets.
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Will AI intensify or weaken market competition? — a question economists and antitrust regulators are actively debating as AI adoption spreads.
