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March 2026 Roundup
Grade inflation hurts students in the long run
Easy A's, Less Pay: The Long-Term Effects of Grade Inflation, NBER, 3/2026Being assigned a higher average grade inflating teacher reduces a student's future test scores, the likelihood of graduating from high school, college enrollment, and ultimately earnings. ...The cumulative impact is economically significant: a teacher with one standard deviation higher average grade inflation reduces the present discounted value of lifetime earnings of their students by $213,872 per year.
Related, one proposed solution to grade inflation: capping the number of A grades awardable, penalizes students for taking difficult courses.
Grade Caps are Not a Good Solution to Grade Inflation, Marginal Revolution, 3/30/2026The real problem is not inflation per se. It’s that students are penalized for taking harder courses with stronger peers. A grade cap leaves that distortion intact—and can even amplify it.
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The underlying issue is informational. A grade tries to capture two things—student ability and course difficulty—with a single number. Gans and Kominers show that in general this is impossible: if some students take math and earn B’s while others take political science and earn A’s, there is no way, from grades alone, to tell whether the difference reflects ability or course difficulty.
Malus provides "clean room as a service" (i.e., the removal of external dependencies from a software project)
This is a consequence of zero-cost software I hadn't considered. An important question is whether the negative effects of this on the open source ecosystem will be outweighed by the increase in AI-assisted contributions. Also raises some interesting legal questions.Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems.
https://malus.sh
Robin Hanson's "Grabby Aliens" model (2020) suggests that if humans stay put on Earth, we won't discover aliens for 500 million years (median estimate) but once we do, it will only be a few years before they arrive on our doorstep. Fun idea.
Notes on the Fermi Paradox, Casey Handmer, 3/3/2026I think this factor is under-estimated when discussing the Fermi Paradox. If most of the planets in the universe are too far away for us to see alien life, then if we see it at all we’ll be seeing their space ships as they come to us. But we won’t even see them launch to us, even with perfect telescopes staring out into the galaxy, until they’re almost here. In practice this means that, in the grand scheme of human history, the phase between becoming aware of aliens and meeting them is vanishingly short.
How Far to Grabby Aliens?, Robin Hanson, 12/2020
Trained to play tennis, humanoid robots can hold a cooperative rally.
This is the most recent jaw-dropping robotics demo I've seen. The footwork is particularly impressive.
LATENT: Learning Athletic Humanoid Tennis Skills from Imperfect Human Motion Data, 3/13/26
When it comes to AI's economic impact, always keep your eye on production .
Imagine 130,000,000 Washing Machines, Scott Sumner, 01/01/2026The real issue is not “Who will get the profits from AI?”; the most interesting question is whether AI will lead to the production of 130 million household servant robots, or the production of another 2000 mega-yachts. When examining issues of inequality, it often makes more sense to focus on the structure of output, not the distribution of income.
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I often see discussions of AI that makes a similar error, failing to understand that the essential question is output, not distribution. Many worriers about AI don’t seem to understand that these two scenarios are almost identical:
1. What if AI replaces all jobs?
2. What if America becomes so rich that we can all live as billionaires?
Brain-drain to the U.S. has significantly slowed Canada's economic growth
Why Canada's GDP per capita crisis is real: DeepDive, The Hub, 03/20/2026From 2014 to 2024, Canada’s real GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power parity grew by just 3.2 percent in total, an anemic 0.4 percent per year on average, and the third lowest among 38 advanced nations. Over the same period, the United States posted 20.2 percent total growth (1.9 percent annually), and the OECD average reached 15.3 percent (1.4 percent annually). The measurement shortcomings cannot explain five-to six-fold differences in growth rates.
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The analysis estimates that a substantial share of Canadians who would rank among top earners in Canada have emigrated to the United States—roughly 40 percent of potential top 1 percent earners and 30 to 50 percent of the next nine percentiles. Canadian-born individuals in the United States are more educated than native-born Americans, earn substantially more, and cluster disproportionately in top income deciles.
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Canada is effectively exporting its inequality to the U.S. The brain drain simultaneously lowers our average income while raising American income, accounting for a significant share of the persistent GDP gap.