What are the Best MR Posts?

From the Archives–written by ChatGPT.

This ranking judges posts on reasoning, originality of framing, explanatory power, intellectual stimulation, timeliness, and how much they accomplish in their length. Originality includes an unusually illuminating application of an existing idea. Provocation earns credit when it exposes a real problem; unsupported certainty still counts against a post.

The selection draws on searches across Marginal Revolution’s downloaded archive of 40,326 posts, covering publication through October 20, 2026, and close reading of shortlisted candidates. It is an editorial ranking among the posts examined, not an exhaustive evaluation of every entry. There is no author or topic quota.

Timeliness matters when an economic argument clarifies a consequential decision while there is still time to act. The vaccine entries are assessed as contributions to the policy debates of 2020 and 2021.

1. Alex Tabarrok — In the Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine, We Must Go Big

May 4, 2020 · Read the original post

“We argue for a big program to invest in vaccine capacity before any vaccine is tested and approved.”

Apparently wasteful investment can be economically prudent when waiting is enormously expensive. Building production capacity for vaccine candidates that might fail buys the possibility of delivering a successful vaccine sooner. The relevant comparison is between the cost of unused capacity and the social cost of delay.

What makes it exceptional: The post combines the gap between private and social returns, investment under uncertainty, portfolio diversification, and contracts that reward speed. It proposes an institutional response rather than merely identifying a market failure. Its timing is integral to its achievement: the argument was made before the successful vaccines were known.

The proposal was collaborative work with Susan Athey, Michael Kremer, Christopher Snyder, and a larger team. The post translates that work into an accessible case for action, explaining how advance purchase commitments and support for capacity could complement one another.

Its numerical targets depend on assumptions about costs, success probabilities, and benefits. But the central insight is robust: minimizing expenditure on unsuccessful candidates is a different objective from minimizing the total cost of a pandemic. The combination of reasoning, urgency, and practical design earns it first place.

2. Tyler Cowen — The fallacy of mood affiliation

March 31, 2011 · Read the original post

“people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood”

In a few hundred words, Cowen gives a recognizable intellectual habit a memorable name: deciding to be an optimist, pessimist, or partisan, then assembling beliefs that sustain that identity.

The insight travels. Someone can believe technological progress is substantial while worrying about a particular environmental problem. Sympathy for disadvantaged people need not settle every explanation of their circumstances.

What makes it exceptional: It gives readers a tool they can keep using, including against themselves. Its value exceeds the particular examples. The danger is using the label to dismiss opponents without examining their arguments—but that is a reason to apply it carefully. Its brevity, memorability, and usefulness across subjects make it one of the strongest examples of the short economics blog post.

3. Alex Tabarrok — First Dose First

December 21, 2020 · Read the original post

“If the answer is yes then can you ethically deny this to someone else’s spouse?”

The preceding thought experiment asks whether someone awaiting a second vaccine dose would instead give it to their spouse as a first dose. In a few sentences, Tabarrok makes the opportunity cost of a scarce dose tangible: compare the additional protection from a second dose with the protection another person could receive from a first.

What makes it exceptional: It turns a technical allocation debate into a choice readers can understand immediately. The addendum about an older recipient and a much younger spouse recognizes that the comparison depends on individual risk, rather than treating all recipients as interchangeable.

The post also distinguishes delaying second doses during scarcity from abandoning them altogether. Expected future supplies matter to the decision.

The medical premises, including the strength and duration of first-dose protection, still required evidence. The thought experiment does not resolve those questions. Its achievement is to show why following a tested schedule for one recipient does not, by itself, settle how limited supplies should be allocated across a population.

4. Alex Tabarrok — Market Design to Accelerate Vaccine Supply

February 26, 2021 · Read the original post

“Buying doses isn’t optimal because companies can just agree and put you to the back of the queue.”

Buying a place in a queue and expanding production capacity are different achievements. Tabarrok moves from the case for greater spending to the harder questions of what governments should purchase and how contracts should work.

What makes it exceptional: The post combines an assessment of the enormous social value of speed with concrete institutional design. Capacity subsidies, options to purchase output, and attention to input bottlenecks can matter more than announcing large orders. It also considers procurement auctions as a way to mobilize suppliers beyond a single government’s jurisdiction.

The argument draws on a collaborative Science paper with Camilo Castillo, Michael Kremer, Eric Budish, Susan Athey, and others. Its estimates of the value of additional capacity are model-dependent, but the post connects the policy recommendations to explicit calculations and a research framework.

Its lasting contribution is the distinction between securing supplies for one buyer and increasing the supplies available to everyone. That distinction makes it useful well beyond the immediate vaccine debate.

5. Tyler Cowen — What libertarianism has become and will become — State Capacity Libertarianism

January 1, 2020 · Read the original post

“A strong state is distinct from a very large or tyrannical state.”

Cowen reorganizes a political argument around an overlooked distinction: the scope of government and its ability to perform its functions are different things. A government can regulate extensively while failing to build infrastructure, administer courts, or deliver public goods.

The productive question becomes: which state capabilities help sustain freedom, markets, and prosperity?

What makes it exceptional: It is an ambitious attempt to revise an intellectual tradition from within. Readers can reject parts of the manifesto and still find their questions changed by it.

It is one of the longer entries, and its partisan characterizations are less persuasive than its central distinction. But as a post that proposes an agenda rather than merely commenting on one, it deserves a high place.

6. Alex Tabarrok — The Happy Meal Fallacy

July 20, 2015 · Read the original post

“Benefits are a product that workers buy from firms.”

Requiring fries and a drink with a burger does not establish that the customer receives a better deal. Tabarrok uses this memorable analogy to explain a central economic insight: mandated benefits are part of a compensation package, and workers may pay for them through lower wages.

What makes it exceptional: The post connects compensation, choice, and regulatory incidence without technical machinery. Readers can reconstruct the argument long after forgetting the details. It also poses a productive challenge: if workers value a benefit above its cost, what prevents employers from offering it voluntarily?

That question makes advocates explain the mechanism through which a mandate would improve matters. In a short space, the post shifts attention from the visible benefit to the full terms of the exchange.

The qualification is that absent benefits do not necessarily demonstrate that workers value them below cost. Insurance-market problems, information, contracting constraints, or externalities can complicate that inference. These limitations restrict the argument’s universality without erasing its achievement as a clear, stimulating explanation of a powerful economic benchmark.

7. Alex Tabarrok — Substitutes Are Everywhere: The Great German Gas Debate in Retrospect

May 12, 2023 · Read the original post

“The misunderstanding came from thinking that we need every user of fuel to find substitutes. Not at all!”

This is economics doing something that intuition often cannot: explaining how an economy can adjust even when individual producers face severe constraints.

Some users conserve, others change fuels, some goods are imported instead of manufactured domestically, and less valuable uses disappear. These adjustments release scarce resources for activities with fewer alternatives.

What makes it exceptional: The examples turn an abstract elasticity argument into an understanding of how an economy works. The post teaches readers to look for adjustments outside the institution or industry immediately in front of them.

The historical outcome does not isolate the contribution of prices from government action or other conditions. Its strongest achievement is the explanation of the mechanism.

8. Alex Tabarrok — The Baumol Effect

May 31, 2019 · Read the original post

“to understand why costs in the stagnant sector are rising, we must look away from the stagnating sector and toward the progressive sector.”

A familiar question—why are some services becoming so expensive?—receives a surprising answer: partly because we have become much better at producing other things.

The string-quartet example makes opportunity cost concrete. Musicians’ time becomes more expensive as opportunities elsewhere improve, even when playing the music requires the same labor.

What makes it exceptional: It changes where the reader looks for an explanation. Rising relative prices do not automatically demonstrate deteriorating performance in the expensive sector.

Baumol’s insight is not original to the post; the achievement is its exposition and application. The mechanism also does not explain every observed price increase or guarantee affordability for every household.

9. Alex Tabarrok — Why Are the Police in Charge of Road Safety?

June 9, 2020 · Read the original post

“But we can unbundle the police.”

The opening question makes an ordinary institutional arrangement suddenly seem contingent. Why should investigating violent crime, issuing traffic citations, assisting stranded motorists, and responding to social problems be bundled together?

This applies an economic instinct—separating tasks and matching them to appropriate institutions—to a debate often organized around supporting or opposing the police as a whole.

What makes it exceptional: It generates a concrete alternative in very little space. Readers need not accept every proposed reassignment to recognize that the bundle deserves examination.

The post underplays difficult cases involving dangerous stops and coordination between agencies. Those are substantial design questions, but the proposal creates a useful inquiry rather than requiring every detail to be solved before discussion begins.

10. Alex Tabarrok — Why a Housing Shortage Exists Despite More Houses Per Person

April 19, 2024 · Read the original post

“Supply-side skeptics are right about the numbers, wrong about the meaning.”

A small numerical example shows how housing supply per person can increase while demand for separate households grows faster. The supposedly decisive statistic does not establish what its users think it establishes.

What makes it exceptional: It combines explanatory economy with relevance to a major public debate. There is almost no distance between reading the example and understanding the mistake.

It is also a model of effective blogging: identify a recurring objection, isolate the confusion, and resolve it with something readers can reproduce themselves.

The example defeats an inference; it does not establish the full empirical explanation of housing prices. The policy rhetoric extends beyond the demonstration.

11. Tyler Cowen — First Doses First? — show your work!

January 5, 2021 · Read the original post

“A decision to stick with the status quo represents an implicit, non-transparent calculation of sorts, whether you admit it or not.”

Cowen demands that alternative policies face the same standard of evaluation. Identifying a risk in a proposed policy is insufficient when maintaining the existing policy also carries risks. Whereas Tabarrok’s first-dose thought experiment makes the allocation problem intuitive, this post asks decision-makers to make their comparisons explicit.

What makes it exceptional: It applies a general principle of economic reasoning to an urgent decision: uncertainty does not make inaction neutral. Possible objections must be weighed against the costs of the available alternatives, including the opportunity cost of retaining the established schedule.

The speculative account of experts’ motives is weaker than the central argument, and demanding numerical estimates cannot make poorly known quantities precise. Nevertheless, the call for transparent comparison is powerful. It asks proponents of the status quo to explain their trade-offs as clearly as proponents of change.

12. Tyler Cowen — The “devalue and dismiss” fallacy, methodological pluralism, and DSGE models

January 12, 2014 · Read the original post

“But it should lead to ‘devalue and downgrade,’ rather than ‘devalue and dismiss.’”

Finding a weakness in a model or argument can justify reducing its weight without making it worthless. Cowen also identifies the psychological attraction of dismissal: inconvenient evidence no longer constrains what one wants to believe.

What makes it exceptional: A specialized dispute about macroeconomic models yields a broadly useful intellectual discipline. Particularly sharp is the observation that intelligent people can become exceptionally accomplished at finding reasons to ignore inconvenient evidence.

The post can improve how readers evaluate everything else—including Marginal Revolution itself. It does not tell us how much weight a damaged argument deserves, and some objections are fatal. Its power lies in making readers notice a step they otherwise take too casually.

13. Alex Tabarrok — Sinister Statistics: Do Left Handed People Die Young?

September 12, 2013 · Read the original post

“a random sample of deaths is not necessarily a random sample of people.”

Historical suppression of left-handedness can make older generations appear disproportionately right-handed. Sampling deaths then produces a misleading apparent mortality difference.

What makes it exceptional: It has the structure of a good intellectual detective story: a startling finding, a plausible initial explanation, and a hidden feature of the data that changes the interpretation. It teaches readers how an apparently persuasive statistic can fail, rather than merely telling them to distrust statistics.

The Harry Potter comparison, credited to Chris McManus, makes the lesson memorable. Younger deceased people are more likely to have read the books; that does not make the books lethal. Statistical rigor and excellent blogging reinforce each other.

14. Alex Tabarrok — The Simple Math of FDA Delay

December 11, 2020 · Read the original post

“The slow ramp up doesn’t change the number of deaths caused by delay it just spreads them out over different days.”

The important move is to compare entire rollout paths. A delayed start can postpone benefits throughout the process; the cost is not limited to what could have been accomplished on the first day. A gradual rollout does not, by itself, make a delay at the beginning inconsequential.

What makes it exceptional: The combination of urgency, a simple model, and visual explanation makes an otherwise easily missed opportunity cost understandable. It directs attention to the full consequences of a decision across time.

The exact result depends on the simplified model. Actual consequences depend on supply constraints, epidemic conditions, protection, and whether earlier authorization would advance delivery. The post’s enduring achievement is the comparison it teaches, not a precise empirical death count attributable to the FDA.

15. Alex Tabarrok — Patents versus Markets

March 16, 2009 · Read the original post

“market prices may have given people hints about the optimal solution”

The post explores an unexpected possibility: markets might help reward discovery while also supplying information that assists discovery. An experiment involving a combinatorial puzzle makes the mechanism tangible.

What makes it exceptional: It opens a design space. The reader moves beyond asking how strong patents should be and starts asking what other institutions could reward innovation and combine dispersed knowledge.

Tabarrok distinguishes competing explanations of the experimental result and identifies practical limitations. It combines imagination with restraint: an attractive institutional possibility presented without pretending that one experiment establishes a universal solution or a replacement for all patents.

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