Equity investors sell the dream; bond investors price the funeral. Here’s what they’re charging those undertaking the now debt-financed DataCenter rush:

Everyone’s watching Nvidia’s stock. But there is also honest signal in credit spreads — where the price of bearing lower-tail risk tells you exactly how nervous the smart or at least the willing-to-lend money is.

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The bond market contains people who don’t care much about the upper tail of the boom, but want to price the bust scenarios appropriately. It is thus an aggregator of what people willing to pay to bear lower-tail risk are in fact thinking about what that lower-tail bust risk is.

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Three short sentences from the Supreme Court, and a lot to say about such a very cryptic short utterance. Steve Vladeck unpacks what the Supreme Court said by barely saying anything. The real content of the Supreme Court’s three-sentence decision is a warning to lower courts that Trump is going to lose his USPS ballot suppression case in the end, and a reminder of how corrupt and lawless Alito and Thomas have long been:

As I understand things, having the United States Post Office hobble mail-in voting would not “help” Republicans, at least not in the forthcoming election. Largely urban Democratic voters planning to vote by mail whose plans would be disrupted by the USPS’s throwing their ballots away are easier for the Democratic Party to reach and help than the Republican Party can find and help the largely rural and older Republican voters planning to vote by mail. And each voter disenfranchised weakens our democracy, and is bad for everyone, at least if you are not in the business of burn-it-all-down. (Which, I do understand, much of the Republican Party base these days really is.)

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Thus Trump and the Trumpists spending so much time on this advances one and only one of their goals: to falsely keep convincing their base that elections are illegitimate because the Democrats keep finding ways to cheat by counting the ballots of illegal immigrants. That is one of their core goals, yes: to undermine the legitimacy of Democrats by every means necessary. And we should not minimize that. But, still, it does seem to be a strategic choice that only a chaos-monkey would make.

Steve Vladeck is my go-to guy for these things. With respect to the Trumpists’ attempts to get the USPS to throw away valid mail-in ballots, he says:

• The six-justice (probably; we don’t really know for sure) solid majority wrote a cryptic order (a) denying the Trump administration’s ask for permission for the USPS to throw away ballots in this election, (b) signaling that the government is unlikely to win this case in the end, thus (c) putting a heavy thumb on the scale against the USPS rule for the lower courts who will now hear the case in full.

• That merits signal, more than the bare denial itself, is the ruling’s real content.

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He is, I think, right: this is not just a procedural but a merits judgment. The majority is telling lower courts that if they rule for Trump in this or other cases like this they will be reversed in the end. That is the biggest deal here. But I have to note that such cryptic signalling is a hell of a way to run a railroad, and shows what a despicable state of affairs we are in with respect to the center, not the crazypants right wing, of this corrupt Supreme Court.

Fifteen justices the next time the Democrats can would be very good.

• Vladeck says Kavanauh has a “novel” procedural reframing that “may open a new doctrinal door”, moving the frame from fuzzy equitable vibe-judging to easier to grasp procedural grounds.

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In my view, this is law-professor sanewashing here. Kavanaugh does not want to say that Trump is gonna lose, would have to if he were doctrinally consistent with himself, and so invents a new rule.

• Alito and Thomas really are crazypants: detached from reality and proud of it.

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But let me delay that to the end: this is already too long for an introduction:

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A weekly newsletter aiming to make the Supreme Court’s rulings, procedures, and history more accessible to all

By Steve Vladeck

CROSSPOST: STEVE VLADECK: 250. What We Learned from USPS v. California

<https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/250-what-we-learned-from-usps-v-california> <https://www.stevevladeck.com>

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250. What We Learned from USPS v. California

By now, you’ve probably seen the headlines—that the Supreme Court on Monday night denied the Trump administration’s application for a stay in U.S. Postal Service v. California, thereby leaving intact district court injunctions that will effectively prevent…

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8 hours ago · 69 likes · 7 comments · Steve Vladeck

In refusing to put the USPS mail-in ballots rule into effect, the majority didn’t say very much. I still think there are (at least) three important lessons in the Monday night ruling.

Steve Vladeck

Sep 15, 2026

By now, you’ve probably seen the headlines—that the Supreme Court on Monday night denied the Trump administration’s application for a stay in U.S. Postal Service v. California, thereby leaving intact district court injunctions that will effectively prevent the federal government from implementing a new USPS rule respecting mail-in ballots in time for this November’s elections.

Without question, this is a very big decision (and a big loss for President Trump). It’s also not an especially surprising ruling, even for this Court. As my Georgetown colleague Marty Lederman documented in multiple blog posts, and as a really excellent amicus brief by Professors Rick Hasen, Ed Foley, Pam Karlan, and Doug Laycock demonstrated in detail, the government had (and made) both an exceptionally weak case on the merits and an even weaker case on the “equities” of emergency relief—even relative to other emergency applications that, in my view, should also have been denied. And although the Court wrote only three sentences (sigh), two of those sentences signaled the majority’s agreement on both of those points: “The Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction. And the equitable factors applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this Court do not favor a stay.” Just to say it out loud, those are two independently fatal obstacles to relief.

But despite the (unfortunate) brevity of the Court’s order, I wanted to write a quick post about the decision because I think we still learned at least three important lessons from the nine pages the justices handed down last night—one about the majority; one about Justice Kavanaugh (who wrote a one-paragraph concurrence); and one about Justices Thomas and Alito (who filed an eight-page dissent penned by Alito).

What We Learned from the Majority

A lot of media outlets reported the ruling as 7-2. As ever, I think that’s a mistake—not because it’s necessarily wrong, but because it isn’t necessarily right. It seems to me that we only know three things for a fact: First, Justices Thomas and Alito were publicly in dissent. Second, Justice Kavanaugh was publicly in the majority. And third, at least five other justices were also in the majority (because of the daylight between the majority’s cryptic sentence on the merits and what Justice Kavanaugh wrote in his concurrence, about which more shortly). Math being math, that leaves the possibility that a third justice voted for the stay internally, but chose not to make their views public—that it was 6-3, not 7-2. We won’t know (for a long time) if this happened, and it’s almost certainly a distinction without a meaningful difference in the interim. But as with so many things about the Court’s emergency docket, it’s important to distinguish between what we know and what we think.

To me, the more significant math point here is that there’s no way it was 5-4. And so despite Justice Kavanaugh’s (surprising) support for the USPS’s authority here, my own read of the cryptic order is that five other justices publicly signaled that they do not believe the government will ultimately succeed in challenging Judge Talwani’s injunction. If that was all the Court had written, it would be possible to interpret that as a point about the equities—that five justices believed the government would never be able to displace preliminary relief in this case (which, again, would make sense given the imbalance of the equities here, and would not necessarily be expressing a view on the validity of the USPS rule).

But given that the Court added a separate sentence about the equities, it sure seems to me that a majority of the Court wanted to signal something bigger—that the government isn’t going to win this case, because it’s unlikely five justices will ultimately vote to sustain the USPS rule even “on the merits.” If so, that’s a really important message not just to the Trump administration, but to lower courts. Unlike the Missouri redistricting dispute from last week, this case surely will go forward. And for better or worse (and my own view is the former), five justices other than Justice Kavanaugh have now put a pretty heavy thumb on the scale against the government on the merits.

What We Learned from Justice Kavanaugh’s Concurrence

Justice Kavanaugh, once again to his credit (I’ve been consistent about this), wrote separately to explain his position. Taking out his citations, here’s what he said:

In my view, based on the briefing the Court has received at this interim stage, there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority. But applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections. For that reason, I concur in the denial of the application for stay.

Again, there’s a lot going on in three short sentences. The first sentence sure reads like a response to the majority—that, unlike his five (or six) colleagues who also voted to deny the stay, he thinks the USPS may win on the ultimate merits of the validity of the rule. If this is a response to the majority, then I think it only reinforces the reading that the majority was suggesting exactly the opposite. For what it’s worth, I think he’s completely wrong on the merits. But the fact that he felt impelled to make that point is at least decent evidence that the majority thinks so, too.

The second sentence is what I find most striking. I would’ve thought that the fact that “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections” is an argument about the equities—that, even if the government is likely to ultimately prevail, the harms and chaos from rushing the rule into effect are reason enough to keep the rule paused through November. But Justice Kavanaugh frames it as a procedural APA violation instead. That matters in at least two respects.

First, Kavanaugh may be avoiding the equities because otherwise he’d have to explain why Purcell doesn’t push in exactly the opposite direction—since he has so often deployed that “principle” to keep federal courts from doing exactly what Judge Talwani did here, i.e., blocking an eleventh-hour legislative/executive change to voting rules. Second, and Purcell aside, this approach seems to open the door to other challenges to late-breaking federal changes to election procedures on procedural APA grounds—where the argument is that the change is procedurally unlawful because it is so late in the game. At least off the cuff, that seems like an interesting way to convert the malleability of equities balancing in election cases into more objective procedural harms, at least when the federal government is the defendant. But smarter folks than me will need to think about how that can and would work in practice.

What We Learned from Justice Alito’s Dissent

And then there’s the dissent.

I have been quite critical before of many of Justice Alito’s separate opinions on the emergency docket. He has a tendency to take liberties with the facts (or procedural posture); to make brazen claims without substantiation; and to insinuate unclean hands on the part of lower courts, litigants, and/or his colleagues in the majority without doing the work of proving it. Well, all of those tendencies were on display in these eight pages, along with a rather stunning disregard for the interests of eligible voters in having their lawfully cast votes counted. Indeed, to the concern that the rule would disenfranchise millions of voters, Alito’s only response was that “I take that problem very seriously, but it is not enough to convince me to deny the application.”

Why not? Alito offered two reasons, and they’re both remarkably tendentious.

First, Alito wrote that “the States disagree about the nature of these effects. Twelve States supported the rule below and asserted that compliance at this time is practicable.” As Professor Derek Muller explains in a lengthy post over at Election Law Blog, this is (1) a remarkable tense-change to muddy what twelve red states actually argued below; and (2) a non-sequitur given that the ability to comply with the rule is radically different from whether that compliance will lead to massive disenfranchisement of eligible voters.

Second, and worse, Alito wrote that “the plaintiff States and the courts bear a substantial share of the blame for the rule’s timing.” As the Brits would say, this is utter bollocks. Alito tried to spin the plaintiffs’ litigation behavior and the district court’s rulings as preventing the government from moving forward in putting out the USPS rule, but that’s just not a fair summary of the record. As Rick Hasen pointed out last night, “the district court allowed USPS to keep working on its rule and its (still nonexistent) portal for voluntary use by states.” Indeed, the fact that the USPS issued the rule the Supreme Court refused to unblock last night while the executive order was still enjoined should be all of the proof anyone needs that Alito is wrong to insinuate otherwise, to say nothing of the government’s inability to get the critical electronic portal online before voters started … voting. (For all of the ugly shots folks on the right have taken at Judge Talwani, the denial of a stay is a pretty significant vindication of her rulings in these cases.)

Alito also blamed his colleagues, noting that “this Court spent from late July to the end of August drafting nearly 40 pages of opinions, including two dissents, despite the Government’s public notice that it would not publish a final rule while subject to the injunctions, and its representation that it had a strong interest in issuing its rule in early- to mid-August to allow time to implement it.” As Alito concluded (read this sentence carefully), “The plaintiff States cannot claim the timing of the rule tilts the equities in their favor when they, and courts hearing their claims, are responsible for so much of the delay.”

Of course, it is ludicrous to blame plaintiffs for delays Alito attributes to courts. It’s even more ludicrous to do so when the Supreme Court’s own prior ruling in this case (which Alito almost certainly joined) asserted that the earlier injunctions had to be stayed because the plaintiffs’ suits were filed too early. And it’s tendentious to the extreme to claim that the point that putatively “tilts the equities in [plaintiffs’] favor” is the timing of the USPS rule, not the massive disenfranchisement that neither the government nor Alito ever publicly disputed would occur were it to go into effect. It may not surprise anyone that this is where Alito and Thomas are. But it’s striking to see it captured in writing so plainly and unmistakably.

***

In the end, it’s heartening that only two justices were willing to say these things out loud. And it’s even more heartening that a majority of the Court was unwilling to abide President Trump’s transparent effort to make it harder for a large number of lawfully registered voters to actually cast their ballots in the 2026 general election. But it continues to be deeply sobering that it came to all of this in the first place.

Happy Tuesday, all.

<https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/250-what-we-learned-from-usps-v-california> <https://www.stevevladeck.com>

One First

250. What We Learned from USPS v. California

By now, you’ve probably seen the headlines—that the Supreme Court on Monday night denied the Trump administration’s application for a stay in U.S. Postal Service v. California, thereby leaving intact district court injunctions that will effectively prevent…

Read more

8 hours ago · 66 likes · 7 comments · Steve Vladeck

One First

A weekly newsletter aiming to make the Supreme Court’s rulings, procedures, and history more accessible to all

By Steve Vladeck

Brad DeLong here: The important thing is, I think, just how crazypants cynical corrupt liars Alito and Thomas are: they lie, and lie about lying, and lie about lying about lying. And are confident no one and nothing can ever touch them. Vladeck, again, has law-professor understatement here:

I have been quite critical before of many of Justice Alito’s separate opinions on the emergency docket. He has a tendency to take liberties with the facts (or procedural posture) [that is, TELL LIES]; to make brazen claims without substantiation [that is, TELL LIES]; and to insinuate unclean hands on the part of lower courts, litigants, and/or his colleagues in the majority without doing the work of proving it [that is, TELL LIES].

Well, all of those tendencies were on display in these eight pages, along with a rather stunning disregard for the interests of eligible voters in having their lawfully cast votes counted…. To the concern that the rule would disenfranchise millions of voters, Alito’s only response was that “I take that problem very seriously, but it is not enough to convince me to deny the application.” Why not? Alito offered two reasons, and they’re both remarkably tendentious [that is, HE TELLS MORE LIES]….

Alito[’s claim]… “twelve States… asserted that compliance at this time is practicable”… [is] a remarkable tense-change [that is, HE TELLS MORE LIES] to muddy what twelve red states actually argued… and… a non-sequitur… [because] comply[ing] with the rule is radically different from whether that compliance will lead to massive disenfranchisement….

Second, and worse, Alito wrote that “the plaintiff States and the courts bear a substantial share of the blame for the rule’s timing.” As the Brits would say, this is utter bollocks [that is, HE TELLS MORE LIES]…. Alito also blamed his colleagues…. [And] Alito concluded (read this sentence carefully), “The plaintiff States cannot claim the timing of the rule tilts the equities in their favor when they, and courts hearing their claims, are responsible for so much of the delay.”

Of course, it is ludicrous to blame plaintiffs for delays Alito attributes to courts. It’s even more ludicrous to do so when the Supreme Court’s own prior ruling in this case (which Alito almost certainly joined) asserted that… the plaintiffs’ suits were filed too early. And it’s tendentious to the extreme to claim that the point that putatively “tilts the equities in [plaintiffs’] favor” is the timing of the USPS rule, not the massive disenfranchisement that neither the government nor Alito ever publicly disputed would occur….

It may not surprise anyone that this is where Alito and Thomas are. But it’s striking to see it captured in writing so plainly and unmistakably. In the end, it’s heartening that only two justices were willing to say these things out loud…

No. It is not at all heartening that there are two justices willing to say these things out loud. Not at all heartening. And that Roberts has not lifted a finger to rein in Alito and Thomas tells us a lot about who he is as well.

Fifteen justices would be good. And if that leads to a partisan race whereby in two decades we have 150 justices? That has been baked in the cake since the Democratic majorities of 2009 refused to impose sanctions on the Supreme Court for its lawless Bush v. Gore decision, and it is delaying those sanctions that has emboldened the Roberts Court to become so corrupt and lawless.

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It’s “long” for these days: 8,000 words. But it is very worth READING THE WHOLE THING.

What is going on here is, in my reading, this:

Levy claims: academic freedom is not a species of “free speech”. Rather, it is a distinctive corporate-and-individual norm composed of:

• the antiorthodoxy principle (that research and teaching may follow argument and evidence to any conclusion).

• associational self-governance (only the community of competent scholars, not trustees, donors, or legislators, may judge the quality of scholarship).

It is a hybrid inheritance of the corporate self-governance of medieval universities fused with the disciplinary, research-driven mission of the originally Humboldtian/German) university. Its fundamental freedom-of-association core is that the scholarly community and only the scholarly community has proper jurisdiction to define its own standards of inquiry. Academic freedom is thus a special kind of freedom of association, now under unprecedented assault.

It is not free speech: Lying is protected speech, but grounds for dismissal from the university. Religious indoctrination in some particular orthodoxy is protected speech, but is barred from the classroom. Thus both left and right critiques of “campus climate” fundamentally misunderstand academic freedom.

But, of course, Jacob says much, much more:

(SEMI-)CROSSPOST: JACOB LEVY: Conceptualizing Academic Freedom

Jacob T. Levy

Department of Political Science, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada;

email: jacob.levy@mcgill.ca

<https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/polisci/29/1/annurev-polisci-032624-025000.pdf?expires=1789124430&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=3D20737D9148AAF7B8208D5178BB4B99>

ABSTRACT: Academic freedom is an unusual and complex set of norms and practices. It arises out of the combination of the corporate self-governance of medieval universities and the spirit of disciplinary scientific inquiry in modern research universities. It combines a principle of antiorthodoxy as to conclusions with the robust associational self-governance of scholarly communities whose members evaluate one another as participants in that shared enterprise.

It has never been easily or wholly embraced by wider societies; today it is under wholesale attack.

This article combines conceptual, normative, and historical analyses of academic freedom as a general norm with attention to conflicts over it in the mid-to-late 2010s and early 2020s. Some genuinely hard cases and questions tested the meaning of academic freedom and university values well before the current crisis.

INTRODUCTION:

Searching for conceptual clarity about academic freedom in the current moment might be letting the owl of Minerva take flight at quarter past twilight. In the United States in particular, where the concept was most fully debated and fleshed out in the twentieth century, the higher education sector’s independence lies in tatters. A rapid decline since 2022 has arguably turned into a collapse in 2025. Universities can no longer credibly guarantee protection for research or teaching against political interference that leads to the wholesale suppression of fields of inquiry or politically unpopular conclusions. State-level regulation of research and teaching by legislation and by political appointment of leadership has been accelerating for years. Now at the federal level, research grant funding has been overtly politicized, with expert peer review panels dissolved and funding decisions subordinated to administration priorities. The Trump administration has moreover singled out one university after another by name, using both financial and nonfinancial (e.g., international student visas) tools to try to coerce compliance with partisan priorities about race, gender, student discipline, and the autonomy of entire fields of study.

Of course, normative arguments are not restricted to the United States, and ideas about the meaning of values should outlast moments when the values are violated. Moreover, the immediate crises—in state politics, in universities’ responses to the Israel-Gaza conflict, and in the Trump administration’s all-out attacks—have not arisen in a vacuum. Contestation both within universities and outside them about the meaning and value of academic freedom has been underway for many years, and an uncertainty about that meaning and value has arguably contributed to a lack of confidence in meeting the moment. Even in the United States, and even in the mid-2020s, understanding the debates surveyed here may help us see the crisis and its stakes more clearly.

Universities and their leaders have not always done themselves proud in articulating the values that were under attack. The scholarly literature on academic freedom has sometimes been thin, but the contestation over campus life of the last decade has spurred renewed attention and thought. Surprisingly little of this work has been done in political science, including political theory. Academic freedom raises important, distinctive questions about freedoms that are partly individual and partly institutional. It involves a system of norms and protections that in many respects resembles the constitutional rights of the liberal democratic state but has a different genealogy, a different institutional home, and different underlying values. Normative political theory on its own terms ought to be a central intellectual space for debates about the meaning and limits of academic freedom, since its comparative advantage lies in part in the analysis of normative ideas, including rights claims.

Political science adds further reasons of its own for attention to academic freedom. Universities as institutions are major actors in the public debates of constitutional democracies, and the illiberal movements and governments that have led democratic backsliding around the world have consistently targeted universities’ institutional and pedagogical autonomy (Ginsburg 2022). The best-known instance is perhaps Viktor Orbán’s successful campaign to push Central European University out of Hungary altogether, using a combination of suspicion about its international and cosmopolitan connections and a specific attack on its freedom to teach gender studies (Enyidi 2018,Pirro & Stanley 2022).

But the most dramatic and farthest-reaching instance was probably in Turkey beginning in 2016. During the purge and authoritarian consolidation that followed a failed coup, the Erdogan regime closed 15 universities altogether, dismissed thousands of academics ˘ from their positions, and criminally prosecuted hundreds (Abbas & Zalta 2022, Alemdaroglu ˘ 2022). In India, the Modi government has long been deeply concerned with forcing fields of study, including literature, anthropology, and history, into conformity with Hindu nationalist orthodoxies (Bhatty & Sundar 2020, Ganguly 2019). In recent years, it has been increasingly open about taking action directly against political dissident academics, including political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who was forced to resign first as Vice Chancellor of the private Ashoka University and later from his faculty position (Altbach & Mathews 2025).

Comparative scholars of autocracy and democracy have begun working to incorporate academic freedom measures into their field’s indices (Spannagel & Kinzelbach 2023). The variable and sometimes peculiar governance structures of public universities, including in the United States, likewise seem to call for analysis by political scientists. The attempt to hybridize the institution of an autonomous, corporately self-governing university with financial oversight and public accountability enforced by trustees who are appointed by partisan elected officials has sometimes been successful.

Today the best that one could say in the United States is that this hybridization is under strain. Under the contemporary condition of polarization and distrust of expertise, trustees are more and more often partisan agents of their political principals and less and less often buffers between the institution and the state.

During the initial years of the renaissance of normative political theory and philosophy, those subfields paid no sustained attention to universities themselves, beyond the question of affirmative action in admission for members of underrepresented and traditionally disadvantaged minorities (Cohen 1977, Walzer 1983). The traditional canon of political theory hardly does better, aside from Weber [2004 (1917)] and one essay by Kant [1991 (1798)] that is highly idiosyncratic, even by his standards. To some extent, this is consistent with a traditional neglect of intermediate institutions in both political theory (Levy 2015) and political science, only partly mitigated by the turn in the last generation to the study of membership organizations in civil society (Berman 1997, Putnam 2000).

Perhaps the two most prominent political science voices on academic freedom today both hold primary appointments outside the discipline of political science: Keith Whittington in law and Sigal Ben-Porath in education. One might also add Christopher Eisgruber in university administration. Recent collections of essays on the topic include primarily philosophers and law professors (Bilgrami & Cole 2015, Downs & Surprenant 2018, Lackey 2018, Mégret & Ramanujam 2024; these collections include about half a dozen political scientists, including me, out of almost 80 total contributors).

This article is thus as much an attempt to import questions into political theory and political science as it is a review of work done in those fields. Academic freedom as a normative idea and the increasingly polarized contestation around universities ought to be problems for political theorists and scientists to study.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND CORE IDEAS…. Neither research nor teaching is thus a free-for-all. The model of building knowledge according to scientific and disciplinary modes of inquiry requires evaluation. The evaluation is not, however, about the orthodoxy of the conclusions, but rather the soundness of the inquiry. And for this evaluation, only the community of other scholars is competent. Trustees, donors, and legislators have no place.

The antiorthodoxy principle demands the associational self-governance of competent scholars. They are the ones who can judge the quality of the scholarship, which is the legitimate ground of evaluation. The statement of principles does relatively little to interpret how they should be applied to cases and a great deal to insist on who has jurisdiction to apply them. This makes academic freedom both a corporate right, building on the medieval institutional inheritance, and an individual one. But the individual right is something like the right only to be judged by the university as a scholar according to the scientific and disciplinary norms suitable to the particular kind of scholarship. Those norms are in a real sense fundamental, and so the associational self-governance right to define them seems like the primary site of academic freedom.

For this reason, I have argued (Levy 2015, 2024a) in favor of an understanding of academic freedom as a special kind of freedom of association. (See Singer 2026 for a partly contrary view.) And, although the AAUP does not identify self-governance as one of the three central elements of what academic freedom means, its substantive argument depends on self-governance at every turn.

Academic freedom is thus something like freedom of religion. That freedom is both individual and associational: Both the individual believer and the corporate church have a right to be free from state interference, and the individual freedom in part is the freedom to join a church whose already-existing doctrine one believes in.

But the analogy runs out.

An individual congregant does not have a right of freedom of religion against the church when the church declares them a heretic or an apostate. The individual scholar does have academic freedom against the university or disciplinary department, namely a right not to be judged on inappropriate grounds. Neither external orthodoxy, as in adherence to political or religious dogma, nor internal orthodoxy, as in adherence to old views within the discipline, may be expected.

All that may be demanded, and what must be demanded, is adherence to the relevant norms of scholarly inquiry.

As Nelson (2010, p. 7) puts it, although “academic freedom cannot simply be construed as an individual right, it is fundamentally exercised by individuals within professional and institutional traditions.” This complicated set of rights and responsibilities is therefore much less similar to freedom of speech than it sometimes seems….

[…]

THE CLIMATE FOR SPEECH AND DEBATE: I have already emphasized that academic freedom is not a free speech principle. Nor is it a general principle of debate, which is not typically the way in which scholars test each other’s ideas. Capacious freedom of extramural speech among students, along with a succession of visiting speakers and intellectual events, might make a university an unusually rich environment for exposure to a wide range of views (cf.Eisgruber 2025), but that is not central to the research or teaching mission.

And yet intellectual conformism, political orthodoxy, and the effective silencing of some scholarly voices pose genuine problems for the spirit of inquiry that academic freedom should protect and promote.

Moreover, universities advertise themselves as educating future citizens of a liberal democracy, not only future scholars. So questions that are formally unrelated or tangential to academic freedom, questions about the political-intellectual climate on campus, arise over and over again.

Even before the current wave of official crackdowns on universities in the United States began around 2022 (and thus also before the current Israel-Gaza conflict broke out), the status quo with respect to speech and academic freedom on campus had come under sustained critique from both the right and the left. In a sense, both critiques were about inclusiveness and whether the austere principles of academic freedom could suffice to create an inclusive campus climate for exchange, although they differed on the relevant sense of inclusiveness.

From the left… four overlapping… complaints… touch… on questions of academic freedom…. First and earliest, the standard model of disciplinary-departmental self-governance and self-perpetuation made it difficult or impossible for neglected perspectives and topics to make entry into either research or teaching. Status quo bias and institutional conservatism aggravated the sheer slow pace of new faculty hiring, such that long-standing exclusions of the study of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, as well as of specific topics inflected by those exclusions such as Black history, would continue indefinitely. Advocates found widespread success in circumventing traditional departments and creating new programs in (for example) Black studies or women’s studies (Rojas 2010).

Second, the content of courses, both in assigned reading and in the instructor’s speech from the podium, might involve anything from the silencing and invisibility of minority perspectives of various kinds to casual stereotyping to outright racism or misogyny. This raised questions about the limits of freedom of instruction. Much of this debate was ultimately lumped together in disputes about the specific remedy of so-called trigger warnings that treated the possible appearance of offensive material as a source of possible psychological trauma to students, although there are ways to think about whether a space is inclusive other than trauma.

Third, the extramural speech of (especially) faculty members came under scrutiny for possible racism, sexism, or other kinds of exclusionary content. Such speech, it was sometimes suggested, might make it impossible for students to trust their fairness in the classroom. That particular nexus did not, however, always seem necessary to generate calls for control or discipline.

Finally, the presence of invited speakers on campus who were judged already guilty of such offensive speech, or who were considered likely to engage in it while on campus, was said to create a hostile, unwelcoming environment for those stigmatized by that speech. A campus could not be a safe space for members of underrepresented or traditionally disadvantaged groups if it included speakers whose views and words tended to exclude them (Callan 2016; for a less sympathetic account, see Moody-Adams 2018). Advocates of this view called for universities not to platform the speakers in question, for the withdrawal of invitations once they had been made, and sometimes for protests that could disrupt a public speech if it was being made (Simpson & Srinivasan 2018).

In the second, third, and fourth cases, there was sometimes a disregard for the values and principles of academic freedom, but sometimes an insistence that those values actively required ensuring inclusive access to the university’s intellectual community (Ben-Porath 2017, 2023; Bérubé & Ruth 2022; Campbell 2024; McGowan 2018; Saul 2018; Thermitus 2024).

From the right, the second, third, and fourth of those critiques became the core of opposite complaints: that universities had become so overwhelmed by pressure to conform to left-leaning views of various kinds of social justice as to create unwelcome environments for political dissent. Conservative students, so it was said, felt the need to self-censor; if they spoke up in class, they would be accused of microaggressions against their classmates, while if they expressed their real views in written work, instructors would penalize their grades. Conservative faculty members and visiting speakers alike were under constant threat of cancellation, whether that meant a physical disruption of their classes and talks or a level of stigmatization that chilled student engagement with their ideas.

For all that these ideas have been exploited by off-campus actors seeking to damage higher education, versions of them have been offered for years by more sympathetic and internal critics as well (Friedman 2016,Whittington 2018; for more critical accounts, see Reichman 2019, Scott 2019). Universities ought to offer inclusive climates for discussion, and this shares a spirit with the antiorthodoxy principle of academic freedom even if it is not a formal rule (Eisgruber 2025). It is surely relevant to ask questions about whether political dissent is chilled or whether students from marginalized populations are effectively silenced.

And yet versions of both these lines of criticism basically disdained or at best radically misunderstood academic freedom and university values.

Visiting speakers are not themselves protected by academic freedom (although their oncampus hosts are), and protests against them do not violate it. Universities are not microcosms of society; there is no guarantee either that syllabi will include authors proportionate to subsets of the population (so many women, so many members of various ethnic groups, etc.) or that political opinions in the general population will be proportionately represented among students or faculty. A censorious impulse has sometimes been evident on both the left and the right. In different ways, so has the thought that a university should be a fully open forum, a Holmesian marketplace of ideas. (For more on the open forum, see Moody-Adams 2015, Scott 2019.)

In their respective caricatured forms, one thinks of the progressive as making a claim grounded in identity that represents “my truth,” rejecting evaluation by standards of impersonal truth, and the conservative as insisting on “just asking questions” about racial or gender essences, or insisting mechanically on a debate between both sides of questions that are well settled in scholarship. All of these are ultimately mistakes about the special kind of institutional environment universities offer. If there is a marketplace of ideas—although Holmes’ metaphor probably obscures more than it reveals—then universities are not the bazaar. They are more like firms, in which the goods that will someday be on offer are developed, tested, and refined….

[…]

CONCLUSION: In the United States… the second Trump administration… us[es]… research grant funding as leverage to demand wholesale political transformation and governance changes in universities. Polite pretense has been stripped away. Conformity to political orthodoxies on, inter alia, race and gender is exactly what is being demanded, and academic associational self-governance is in the crosshairs. The Trump administration has demanded the abolition of whole departments and programs, else they be stripped of academic autonomy. Its allies in state governments are pushing to abolish the self-governing authority of faculty senates as well.

A decade or so of vigorous contestation about the meaning and boundaries of academic freedom has given way to a sustained, active attack on it.

Even if these attacks are more or less deflected until a change in partisan administration (which is by no means assured), the state of affairs that follows will be one without the content-independent, party-independent assurance of stable academic autonomy in the most basic sense. Sometimes what is called for are careful arguments about normatively hard cases. Sometimes the normative questions are easy, but it is the practical political responses to normative failures that are hard.

Jacob T. Levy’s “Conceptualizing Academic Freedom,” Annual Review of Political Science 2026, 29:57–72

Brad DeLong here: What do I think? I think Jacob expresses ideas that I would have expressed were I smarter. As I might try to sum it up after reading him:

• academic freedom is that a college is a safe space for scholars to grow and develop.

• that especially includes its being a safe space for scholars to make and recover from mistakes in a low-stakes setting.

• academic freedom is that a college is a safe space for ideas to be proposed and developed.

• but those ideas then need to be tested: ideas that are true and coherent are to be retained, while ideas that turn out to be false or incoherent are to be discarded.

• so that we can build the structure of human knowledge that is the real ASI—the stupendous pyramid of ideas produced by myriads and myriads of previous dwarfs on which we stand.

• and only communities that judge the quality of ideas by their truth and coherence have any place in the ideas-assessment process.

Sound knowledge requires following evidence wherever it leads → but inquiry still needs evaluation, and legitimate evaluation is of soundness, not conclusions → only competent peer scholars can judge soundness → therefore outsiders (trustees, donors, the state) have no jurisdiction → therefore academic freedom is fundamentally a jurisdictional/associational right, from which the individual scholar’s protection (“the right only to be judged as a scholar by scholarly norms”) is derived, and is profoundly unlike “free speech”.

Does that get what Jacob is saying? Not all of it, but much of it? And is that position true and coherent? And what policies follow from it?

I think Jacob has done a very good job here: He has supplied principled reasons to defend self-governance rather than retreat to a weaker “free-speech” framing that would dissolve universities even if they could win on it either in the courts or in the court of public opinion. He has clarified why universities are neither neutral debating societies nor partisan advocates.

There are lots of things that could be further developed, like:

• The “firm not bazaar” analogy.

• The tension between self-government and self-assessment at the disciplinary level and anti-orthodoxy: that produced the status quo bias that excluded Black studies and women’s studies for decades.

• More generally, the claim that we can presume that “scholars… will not impose orthodoxies” requires the scholarly community is a reliable guardian of antiorthodoxy; that requires scholars who do not mistake their own orthodoxy for truth and coherence.

• The repeated-game grant-funding argument: when does funder-capture actually bite?

• Neutrality’s self-undermining: for example, the Griswold “institutional neutrality” letter winding up with the claim that institutions could not be neutral when “the universities themselves or the fundamental values and systems that made them possible were under threat”, hence “Communists could have no place on university faculties, since the system of free enterprise made higher education possible…”

• In the article there is only the briefest not about the political economy of tenure decline and thus of effective academic associational self-governance.

Levy Conceptualizing Academic Freedom

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What did Trump expect his policies to do to male employment? If he had really wanted to boost male employment, he needed to pick very different policies. What we got was a gendered theory of growth, executed by a moron and staffed by the corrupt, failing exactly on its own terms:

The opportunities for sectors that predominantly employ men in blue-collarish jobs to grow in this economy are threefold:

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1. computer and power infrastructure (that is, data centers),

2. green-tech infrastructure,

3. robustness- and security-driven reshoring in which the North American continental division of labor can be a good substitute for the global division of labor.

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Well, Trump has done the best he can to kill (3): by making sure that nobody is willing to trust that Trump will not disrupt Canadians and Mexicans in the value chain, he has nuked any desire to reshore predominantly male blue-collarish jobs, save for those engaged in immediate publicity-performative Trumpish favor-currying.

And Trump has also done the best he can to kill (2).

That leaves (1), the construction of data centers, as a source of growth in predominantly-male blue-collarish job industries. And that by itself has proven not enough to get male employment to do more than tread water. Reshoring dies when no one trusts you not to blow up the supply chain next Tuesday. Green-tech dies when you set out to kill it. That leaves data centers boosting maleish employment by themselves—and they can’t.

Why did Trump think these policies, the destructive DOGE of Elon Musk, the tariffs, and so on, would boost blue-collarish male employment in the United States? Because he is a moron. Why did nobody on his staff point out that, if he really did want to talk about expanding male blue-collarish employment in a year or two, he needed different policies? Because they are all corrupt. If they were not corrupt, would they be working for Trump? No.

A quirky and interesting chart from the superb Mike Konczal:

Chart: Mike KonczalSource: CES, all jobs Get the data Download image Created with Datawrapper

And he comments:

Mike Konczal: Why Are Women Over 100% of Jobs Gained Under Trump’s Second Term? <https://newsletter.mikekonczal.com/p/why-are-women-over-100-of-jobs-gained>: ‘In December 2024, there were 79,332,000 men employed in the Current Employment Statistics survey. In August 2026, there were 79,326,000, a decline of 6,000. That’s a [net of] 759,000 overall jobs…. Job growth was essentially flat in 2025, with health care hiring canceling out the losses in federal employment after DOGE, in trade and transportation and manufacturing after the tariffs, and in professional and business services. Since Trump took office, private education and health services added 1,029,000 jobs against an economy-wide gain of 759,000, so one sector that is 77 percent female more than accounts for all net job growth since Trump took office…. Even with last month’s surprise 162,000 jobs, 158,000 of them went to women. This is a very new trend….

This is overwhelmingly, on the order of 84 percent or more, about industries that employ more women growing faster. There will be a conservative spin that this is all about girlbosses, or discrimination against men, or subsidies for working women. There’s no empirical evidence for that. They [the Trumpists] are simply failing at what they have set out to do…. Men are still waiting on a manufacturing and blue-collar revival that the data, basic economics, and common sense all say won’t show up with their [the Trumpists’] approach…

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“Does not replicate” is a very polite way of putting this. Overly polite. By a lot. By a factor of x100, perhaps:

Every time something of mine replicates, I breathe easier. Because it might be the case that J.P. Morgan did not add value, that equipment investment is not tightly correlated to industrial-age economic growth, that merchant rule is not very good and princely rule (cough, Habsburgs, cough) not very bad for mercantile-age prosperity, that stock-market valuations as a whole might easily be driven by earnings-growth extrapolation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It might be the case that wishful thinking led me into a misleading specification search.

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For, often, things do not replicate. For two big kinds of reasons. And so here we are today:

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The first reason things do not replicate is this: When performing pretty much any empirical study, there will be somewhere between 10 and 20 decisions that are matters of craft, art, and feeling with respect to what is the right thing to do with the data.

If one does one’s best and makes the choices based on one’s vision of how the world and how knowledge work, about half of those work to strengthen and half of those work to weaken the pattern that is in the data. But if one decides for all 10 or 20 to choose the one that strengthens the pattern, then you wind up with the largest of the 1024 or perhaps 1,048,576 possible numbers one could wind up reporting. Ditto if you choose all 10 or 20 to weaken the pattern. Since we are all good Bayesians, if we believe in the pattern that will lead us to make more choices that strengthen it, and if we disbelieve in the pattern that will lead us to make more choices that weaken it.

This is the biggest reason that there is a replication crisis. Look, say, at Josh Angrist and my friend the late Alan Krueger’s 1991 “Does Compulsory School Attendance Affect Schooling and Earnings?” <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2937954>. There is no way their particular choice of baseline specification was not affected by the facts that they believed in the pattern they were finding and were good Bayesians. (Cf.: John Bound, David Jaeger, and Regina Baker, in “Problems with Instrumental Variables Estimation When the Correlation Between the Instruments and the Endogenous Explanatory Variable Is Weak” <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2291055>. Zvi Griliches warned me about this back in 1979: “Do not believe too strongly in your theories about what the data ought to say”, he told me, “for then you will torture the data, and they will confess”.

For outsiders, figuring out what to do with claims of failures to replicate is difficult: which was the study where the authors’ Bayesianship wound up putting its thumb on the scales, the original study or the replication study?

But then there is the other kind of replication crisis, the second reason things do not replicate: people who demand that their research assistants produce the right results on pain of not getting a good recommendation letter, or who choose coauthors who fudge the data, or who fudge the data themselves.

In my view, the evidence is now overwhelming that Dan Ariely’s work is in this second bucket. Believe nothing he has ever published. Andrew Gelman has a write-up. Kyle Hyndman and Aberto Bisin and Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Lief Nelson have the goods: “Replication of ‘Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment’” <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976261460772> and “[138] Artificial Deadlines (Part 1): Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination” <https://datacolada.org/138>:

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CROSSPOST: ANDREW GELLMAN: “Replication Crisis”, Dan Ariely Files

<https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/31/shocked/>

I am shocked, shocked to learn that this 2002 paper by Dan Ariely is based on dubious data and doesn’t replicate.

Posted on August 31, 2026 3:15 PM by Andrew

Dan Ariely—the much-decorated business school professor, retired Wall Street Journal columnist, Ted-talk star, NPR hero, Jeffrey Epstein contact, Founding Partner of Irrational Capital, insurance agent, inspiration for a hit TV sitcom, and author of the instant-classic children’s book, “The Adventures of Professor D.”—has had pretty much the worst professional luck that any scientist could have.

Over the period of decades, he keeps ending up as coauthor on journal articles don’t replicate and that turn out, through absolutely no fault of his own, to be based on dubious or fake data. Bad collaborators, lazy research assistants, missing computer files … who knows how this is all happening, but it’s bad luck for sure.

Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Lief Nelson just came across another one:

A new paper in Psychological Science reports a failure to replicate Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch’s influential article entitled, “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment.” The original study, published in Psychological Science in 2002, found that people performed better on a set of tasks when each task had its own externally imposed deadline than when people set their own deadlines or faced a single last-day deadline for all tasks. The paper has had a lasting influence. It has been assigned reading in many economics and psychology courses, and has more than 2,100 citations on Google Scholar… .

About 20 years ago, on April 20, 2006, one of the authors of the forthcoming replication, Kyle Hyndman, received the original data files in an email sent from ariely@mit.edu … .

But then when Hyndman and his coauthor, Aberto Bisin, attempted to reanalyze the original data as part of their replication effort, they report that this happened:

In October 2024, at the request of the editors, we shared with Dan Ariely an analysis of the contents from the file purportedly for their Study 2 and asked for permission to include a summary of it in the paper. Dan Ariely denied our request, arguing, among other things, that the files we received may not be the actual data. He did not subsequently provide us with any additional data from the original paper.

Damn. I hate when that happens.

Simonsohn, Simmons, and Nelson continue:

This motivated us to return to this paper and fully analyze the original data for the two main studies. We conclude that the data in Studies 1 and 2 were tampered with… .

Our assessment that the data were tampered with are based entirely on the analyses presented in our posts. Readers can review the evidence and draw their own conclusions… .

Now comes the fun stuff.

And, by “fun,” I mean “horrible.”

Here’s one of the graphs from the 2002 paper:

Wow—that looks pretty impressive! Everything’s exactly in order, the standard errors are small, but the gaps between conditions 1, 2, and 3 aren’t exactly equal. They’re slightly irregular: exactly equal could raise suspicion, but these data look like they could be real … at least they do, until you look at them more carefully.

Here come Simonsohn, Simmons, and Nelson to rain on the parade:

Red Flag #1: The Effect Is Too Big
As shown in the reprinted figure above, Ariely and Wertenbroch report a perfect pattern of results, for all three dependent variables, with a sample size of only 20 per condition. The effects are also large. Extremely, implausibly large… .

Red Flag #2: Duplicate Observations …
18 of the 20 participants in the Last Day Deadline condition had a “Corrections Twin”, another participant who found exactly the same number of errors for each of the three proofreading tasks. Interestingly, these twins have ID numbers that are exactly 10 positions apart (e.g., subject S1 and subject S11 are twins; so are S7 and S17; etc.). (There were no error twins in the other two conditions.)
The existence of so many of these twins – and all of them in only one condition – is inconsistent with these data being real… .

Red Flag #3: Things That Should Be Very Highly Correlated Aren’t Correlated At All
At the end of their study, Ariely and Wertenbroch purportedly “asked participants to evaluate their overall experience [of the proofreading task] on five attributes …
You might expect these judgments to be correlated. For example, if someone says they liked the task, you might also expect them to say that it was interesting.
In the replication, this was (super) true. Controlling for experimental condition, the partial correlation between liking and interest was, quite sensibly, close to perfect:

But in the original data, this relationship was not only imperfect; it was not there at all. Participants who said they liked the task more did not say that they found the task to be more interesting:

The problem is not limited to these subjective measures. Consider the fact that people did three very similar proofreading tasks, each with 100 mistakes. Surely, we’d expect people who do better on one task to also do better on another, nearly identical task. That simple fact should manifest in extremely large correlations between performance on one task and performance on another. And in the replication data it does, as the correlations range from +.74 to +.90. But in the original data it doesn’t, as the correlations range from +.03 to +.27… .

Red Flag #4: No Rounding In Self-Reported Minutes
As you’ll recall from a minute ago, Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) purportedly asked participants to “estimate how much time they had spent on each of the three tasks” (p. 223). When people provide estimates like this, they tend to round. They usually say “20 minutes” or “30 minutes” instead of “17 minutes” or “32 minutes”. And, indeed, when the replicators asked people to report how many minutes they spent on each of the three tasks, 85% of them gave a round number:

This is what we’d expect humans to do.

But in the original data, they did not do that. Only 11.7% of estimated minutes were round, consistent with the 10% you’d expect by chance alone:

Simonsohn, Simmons, and Nelson conclude:

We are unable to generate a benign explanation for all of the anomalies presented here. The original findings are too large and yet they do not replicate; there are duplicated observations; correlations that should be very strong are often non-existent; and values that should be rounded are not rounded. Based on this evidence, we believe the data for Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) were severely tampered with or fabricated to produce the desired results.

Can you believe the bad luck of Ariely, to have this happen to him over and over again? I imagine he’ll want to launch an investigation to catch the real faker or fakers. What a waste of time, though. This is effort that could otherwise be devoted to designing psychology experiments. Or delivering Ted talks. Or modifying paper shredders. Or something.

I recommend to Ariely that, moving forward, he choose his collaborators and research assistants more carefully, so that he doesn’t again get stuck with fabricated data.

Maybe he could have them sign some sort of honesty pledge?

In Ariely’s own words, Professor D is “a charming character doing his best, struggling, and using social science to his advantage.” That’s one way to put it!

P.S. I employ some humor in these posts, but this sort of story doesn’t make me happy, it makes me sad. It doesn’t surprise me—lots of people enjoy cheating, and some of them will find their way into academic research, and some of those people will be successful at it—indeed, cheating can make it easier to be successful, as you’re no longer bound by the truth—so I’m not surprised, but I hate to see it.

In all seriousness, this sort of fraud is disgraceful, and whoever did it should admit it and pay some restitution to the Association for Psychological Science and the thousands of subsequent researchers who have relied on these fake findings. They should also reimburse the government for funds received in any later research grants whose proposals relied on these results. Ariely’s a nice guy, I get that, but I think that at this point he should just share the names of his collaborators and research assistants who’ve been doing all this faking It’s not right that he gets all the blame and they get off scot-free.

P.P.S. See here for more from Simonsohn et al.

P.P.P.S. I also again want to thank Simonsohn et al. for their efforts here. They got sued for doing this sort of thing! But they’re not intimidated and they keep at it. Good for them.

I hope that, at the very least, Ariely can send a public note to Simonsohn et al. thanking them for uncovering all these problems in his published papers. When people point out problems in my published work, I appreciate it and I thank them.

<https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/31/shocked/>

Brad DeLong here: What do I think of this? I think Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Lief Nelson are right. The data is not data. The study is not a study. Where in the workflow that produces the studies published under the name of Dan Ariely the fraud lies can still be debated, but that there is an overwhelming pattern of fraud somewhere in the workflow cannot be denied any longer.

Thus, first, as Andrew Gelman says: “Simonsohn & al…. got sued for doing this sort of thing! But they’re not intimidated and they keep at it. Good for them”. We all need to have their backs all the time. Hyndman Bisin’s, too.

Second, Dan Ariely now has a statement:

Dan Ariely: An Update: “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment” (2002) by Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch <https://danariely.com/dan-ariely-statement-on-2002-procrastination-study/>: ‘As a social scientist, I am hardwired to believe that when evidence underlying a hypothesis or conclusion changes, it is critical that the record be updated to reflect those changes – both as a means of preserving integrity and facilitating the pursuit of truth.

Recently, I was made aware that data underlying a 2002 paper about deadlines and procrastination that I co-authored contained serious anomalies. The documentary record I have at my disposal today about those experiments isn’t sufficient to answer the questions that have been raised, and more than two decades, and hundreds of experiments later, my memory is similarly insufficient. Moving forward, my responsibility lies in ensuring accuracy – in updating the record on these experiments and, along with my co-author, cooperating with the journal that first published our paper to support their reviews and retraction processes.

Irrationally yours, Dan Ariely

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I find some downers here: the elliptical nature of this statement, the failure to acknowledge what the “anomalies” are, or, indeed, to point readers at who and what the criticisms are; none of these is a very good look here. Especially not in light of the 2024 claim that the 2006 data file was, perhaps, not the data file.

Going forward, what should we do, besides being sure not to take Ariely’s word for anything?

I say: three big and two smaller things:

• First, the real damage is the decade of downstream behavioral work that took this as foundational: This really bothers me. I invested a substantial amount of my human capital in trying to build a map between behavioral cognitive regularities and systemic-level outcomes. This polluted that task.

• Second, make John Bound and company god-kings: Bound, Jaeger & Baker (1995) on “weak instruments” showed a near-zero first stage means even trivial instrument-error correlation swamps the estimate — random noise instruments produced similar “results.” The identification revolution that was supposed to fix social science had its own replication problem baked in at the start. Often internal validity is not external validity. And a distressing share of the time internal validity is invalid even on its own terms.

• Third, we need to value post-publication peer review: The “top-five” journals do not want the work done. The people actually doing the work that journals won’t are volunteers doing a very important public good with no career reward and real reputational risk. This is a devastatingly damaging institutional gap.

Plus two more smaller things:

• The fact that we audit the surprises and not the confirmations is backwards: This is the Bayesian trap that makes fraud and honest error hard to catch. And it generalizes.

• The garden of forking paths, not p-hacking, is the real danger: p-hacking is detectible in a way that the “1024 forking paths” problem is not.

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Why, in his 1513 “Letter to Francesco Vettori”, does Niccolò Machiavelli so dramatize the simple act of opening a book? Why the stripping off muddy clothes, the donning court robes, the crossing a threshold into “the ancient courts of ancient men” where he asks questions of Livy and Cicero and they answer him? Because for Niccolò the thing was new. He had spent fourteen years running his intelligence on live human contact: Borgia’s menace, a king’s facial expression, a council’s mood. Exile amputated all of it. It left him only his shelf. He stood on the seam between an embodied cognitive world of face-to-face communication and a new print-enabled one made possible by the Gutenberg-singularity fifty-fold fall in the price of books and the resulting possibility of “deep reading” at scale. He could feel the strangeness we print-culture natives would never notice. You do not narrate the water to a fish. Niccolò’s making it a matter of ceremony is the tell. And compared to that Gutenberg Singularity in how we engage with other humn minds, what is happening in this generation is smaller beer, I think:

Starting around the year -3000, with the coming of writing, humanity cogniton ceased to be a band-limited lifespan-limited anthology intelligence of those who spoke face-to-face, and become something more. Human memory and cognition could then span the entire world, anywhere a written message could be carried and read, and all of time forward as long as what had been written was preserved and recopied. That produced what I call the real ASI: the real Anthology Super-Intelligence. The real ASI is not some ASI that is the Artificial Super-Intelligence from some grifter dreaming of a fortune or some self-grifter TechBro deluded and high on his own supply. The real ASI is the now-5000 year old global-scale Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective human mind since Uruk.

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The modes and scale of that real ASI has undergone superinflationary growth at several moments in the past 5000 years. One was in the aftermath of Gutenberg in the mid-1400s. And another is ongoing today.

Looking at today’s ongoing episode, I see that today Princeton history professor David Bell seems somewhat alarmed and distressed:

David Bell: Another AI Apocalypse <https://davidabell.substack.com/p/another-ai-apocalypse>: ‘It occurred to me that if you fed all this material into an AI, you could produce a bot that would be a creepily close approximation of[—]me. It would have a lot of my memories. It would have a lot of my tics and habits. It could certainly reproduce my writing style…. It would recall a lot of things more quickly and precisely than I can do now—especially things that happened thirty or forty years ago. It would be tireless. Unlike the real me, it could be programmed to avoid bad jokes and puns, and to not repeat stories it had told fifty times already…. Now, it’s still hard to see why anyone would want to have such a bot created. As my friends, family and colleagues can all attest, one of me is enough—occasionally, more than enough…. Maybe my employer could use it to teach my courses after I retire, thereby saving the cost of hiring a replacement—not a great idea (on the other hand, it would be perfectly suited for some of the committees I have served on). About the only legitimate use I could see for it would be as a record available to descendants…. I never knew two of my grandparents...

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And:

David Bell: AI P.S. <https://davidabell.substack.com/p/ai-ps>: ‘My friend Art Goldhammer, whose Substack “The Sense of an Ending” is very much worth following, points out that my dark fantasy about an AI bot version of myself is (of course) much closer to realization than I had thought. The economist Brad Delong has already built a BradBot (formally, a SubTuringBradBot) as an experiment, and to answer questions from his readers. You can read about it here. Rest assured that I will not be copying him any time soon…

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My take is, of course, very different.

Am I deranged?

Did I read Neuromancer <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer> and The Diamond Age <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age> at too young and impressionable an age?

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I think not:

Start with a time and a place to which I often find myself returning: the exiled, post-torture post-fall of the Florentine Republic to the Medici, Niccolò Machiavelli, rusticating in the Tuscan countryside. There and then, nearly all of the relationships he has that are key to him are parasocial.

We know this because he tells us so, and we think he is serious about this <https://archive.org/details/machiavellitovettori1513/page/109/mode/1up>.

On December 10, 1513, from his farm seven miles south of Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, where he had managed the machine of political power before the fall, at Sant’Andrea in Percussina, he writes to his friend Francesco Vettori—then Florentine ambassador in Rome, then a man still inside the machine of power from which Machiavelli has been so thoroughly and painfully ejected.

He describes his days in a comic and slightly grim mode:

• He gets up with the sun.

• He goes to check on the men cutting his timber.

• He sets snares.

• He carries a book down to a spring and reads of other people’s amorous passions while remembering his own.

• He goes to the inn on the road.

• On the way, he talks to the passing carters for whatever scraps of news of the wider world they carry.

• At the inn, until evening, he plays cards and backgammon with the host, the butcher, the miller, and a couple of the men who run the lime-kilns.

• There are shouted disputes over farthings that can be heard—he claims—all the way to San Casciano two miles away.

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Thus the whole of Machiavelli’s living human society is a scrum of villagers and the recycled gossip of strangers.

Then this “Letter to Francesco Vettori” turns on its axis, in a way that has already been prefigured by the sentences:

I go to a spring, and from there to an aviary of mine. I have a book under my arm, Dante or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets like Tibullus, Ovid, and such. I read of their amorous passions and their loves; I remember my own and enjoy myself for a while in this thinking…

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The axis-turning paragraph is this:

When evening comes, I return home and go into my study; and at the door I take off my muddy, sweaty workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass entirely into their world…

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Note what is happening: There are men who matters to Machiavelli—the society he dresses up for, the company whose good opinion he craves, the interlocutors who take his questions seriously and answer them. None of them are there at Sant’Andrea in Percussina. Indeed, none of them are alive. They are Livy and Tacitus and Polybius and the rest. They are the men who did and wrote about politics and affairs and governance when Rome and Italy were strong and great, rather than the whole country being the prey of French lancers, Spanish tercios, and Swiss mercenaries. They are a millennium and a half dead. They are available to him only as text.

His real friends in his books.

His most genuine and important conversations are with authors who cannot hear him and exist only in his mind’s eye and ear.

And out of those four-hour nightly séances with the honored dead comes—he mentions it almost in passing in the same letter—“a little work, De principatibus.” That little work is The Prince, which is his audition for a place in the Medici Department of State where he could be useful.

Ada Palmer <https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ada-palmer-2> has thought about this scene as carefully as anyone I know. (Actually, not “know”, “know of”: I do not think I have ever met her, but my parasocial relationship with her is stronger than my one with David A. Bell.) She is very good on the pathos and the strangeness of it: the squalor of the tavern by day set against the imagined marble of the ancient courts by night; a mid-level ex-functionary in a bad jacket, in rural exile, reconstituting an entire intellectual life out of the printed page.

And she is very good on the thing that makes it possible, which is easy to miss because it is the water we swim in. Machiavelli can do this because he lives on the near side of a Singularity Break that is the invention of movable-type printing and the fifty-fold fall in the price of books. For Machiavelli, books are there and cheap. They can be accessed, at scale, by a man who is neither obscenely and absurdly rich nor a monk ttached to a great library. A generation or two earlier, the ancient courts he enters each evening would have been locked behind the cost and scarcity of manuscript. Print blew that open. Machiavelli is in the first generation in which people could and did have libraries.

Which is the point I have been circling toward for years. Here is where I plant the flag:

The real Singularity in modes of human cognition—the genuine discontinuity, the moment after which the rules governing what a single mind could do were simply different in kind—has already happened:

• It came shortly after Gutenberg.

• It is exactly what Machiavelli is doing in that study of his.

• It is the moment after which an ordinary person could, cheaply and at will, summon the recorded reasoning of the greatest minds who ever lived, interrogate it, and think alongside it.

• The mind plus its library function as a single cognitive system far larger than the skull that anchors it.

The individual human intellect stopped being bounded by the people it could physically reach and the few texts it could physically touch, and became a node wired into the accumulated, externalized, copyable memory of the species. I call this the real ASI, the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective human mind: Machiavelli’s relationship to his books is the first moment at which we can see clearly. His personal library is not a storehouse he consults. It is a set of colleagues he collaborates with. He asks; they answer; something new—The Prince—is produced by the pairing that neither party could have produced alone. That is augmented cognition. That is a human being running his intelligence on hardware vastly bigger than his own brain. And it became a normal, reproducible, world-transforming thing right around 1500, and it gave us the Republic of Letters, the Scientific Revolution, and eventually the modern world.

So when people tell me that we are now, today, living through the arrival of a machine that can hold up its end of a conversation with the whole written corpus, that can be asked the reasons for things and answer in its humanity—well, yes, I say. It is genuinely useful, I say. I use it, I say.

But let us keep our sense of proportion.

What is happening now is an extension of the Machiavellian Singularity, not a rival to it: a faster index, a more fluent and more tireless interlocutor sitting on top of the exact same accumulated textual inheritance that print created and that print made cheap. The break already happened. We have been living on the far side of it for five hundred years. Machiavelli, in his good jacket, at night, talking to the dead, was already there.

Machiavelli rusticating post-torture in exile is perhaps different from Machiavelli in office, at his desk in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio trying to keep the city he loves from being sacked by the French lancers, the Spanish tercios, or the Swiss mercenaries. His life before had been different, and not book- or library-centered. The man who wrote that famous letter about putting on his robes at nightfall to converse with the ancient dead had spent the previous fourteen years living a life in which books were not the first place he would have thought to look for a colleague.

Up to 1512 Machiavelli was Second Chancellor of the Florentine Republic and secretary to the Ten of War. He was a working bureaucrat of the most intensely practical kind. More than that, he was one of the Florentine Republic’s roving set of eyes. They sent him out. They sent him to the court of Louis XII of France, more than once, to take the measure of a king who held Florence’s fate in his pocket and largely could not be bothered to notice. They sent him into the Romagna to shadow Cesare Borgia through the autumn and winter of 1502, to sit in the same rooms as that astonishing and terrifying man and to watch, at close range, how he flattered and stalled his treacherous captains. How he then met them at Senigallia with kisses and soft words of friendship. How he lured them into a room. How he then had them all strangled.

They sent him to Rome for a papal conclave, to the camp of Julius II, to the Emperor Maximilian. And when he was not on the road he was building the thing he desperately tried to establish: a Florentine militia of citizen-soldiers he attempted to cajol and drill into existence because he had concluded, from watching, that mercenaries were a swindle and a danger.

That is not a life of the study. That is a life of the saddle. That is a life of the audience chambe and the dispatch pouch. The intelligence Machiavelli ran in those years ran on live human intercourse and on nothing else. His raw material was faces: the flicker across a king’s expression, the calculated menace of a Borgia, the venality of a hired captain, the mood of a city council on the morning after bad news.

TrueL his method of composition was the same, only faster—the thousands of official letters, the legazioni, that he fired to and from Florence, written not to be admired but to be acted on before the situation changed. He was reading, ceaselessly, at the top of his powers. But what he was reading was men and events, in the flesh, in real time, and the text was gone the instant it was produced.

For a man whose principal operating system had been embodied, oral, face-to-face, right-now human contact, the exile was not merely a demotion and a humiliation and a physical agony—six drops on the strappado will do that—it was an amputation. The Medici come back in 1512 on the points of Spanish pikes; Prato is sacked; Piero Soderini flees; the Republic falls; Machiavelli is turned out of the only work he had ever loved, then jailed and tortured on suspicion of a conspiracy he had nothing to do with, then released into the countryside to rot. The channels through which his mind had predominantly drawn its nourishment for fourteen years is cut off. No more legations. No more Borgia to study. No more council to persuade. No more dispatches anyone will read and react to immediately.

The man of affairs is marooned. The only interlocutors left within reach are the ones on the shelf. So he turns to the shelf. And that—this is my strong reading—is why the letter to Vettori reads the way it reads. Why the whole elaborate business of it: coming home at dusk, stripping off the muddy workday clothes, putting on the robes of court and palace, crossing a threshold into “the ancient courts of ancient men,” being received, being fed the food that alone is his. A man who had lived his whole intellectual life inside books would never dramatize the act of opening one. He would simply open it, the way you and I open a laptop, without ceremony, because it is Tuesday.

You do not narrate the water to a fish.

The ceremony is the tell. The costume-change I quoted a moment ago is the report of a man to whom this mode of thinking is new, and strange, and slightly miraculous—a convert describing his conversion, an immigrant describing the customs of the country he has just, unwillingly, been forced to enter. And immigrants notice what natives do not.

That is the deep reason Machiavelli is our best witness to the thing I have been calling the real cognition Singularity. He is standing exactly on the seam. He spent his triumphant working life inside a cognitive world in which knowledge was primarily something you acquired by being physically present to people and events, a world essentially continuous with Thucydides’ or Cicero’s. Then he was thrown against his will into the new world in which knowledge summoned at will from cheap printed texts, the accumulated recorded reasoning of the honored dead available on demand to a broke ex-official on a hillside in Percussina. He got to feel both, hard, in a single lifetime. He knew what he had lost. That is why he could register so acutely what he had, improbably, found: that the books could talk back; that they would “in their humanity” answer his questions; that four hours with them every night could dissolve poverty and the fear of death.

Niccolò Machiavelli’s “Letter to Francesco Vettori”, The Prince, and The Discourses are what fall out of that collision.

They are what happens when a man built for the world of action is locked out of it and made to reconstruct his understanding of power from the page instead. He discovers, to his own surprise, that the page is enough to build something new. He could see the strangeness because for him it was strange. We can’t see it because for us it never was. Which is why, when the next new interlocutor arrives on our desks, it is worth asking whether we are even equipped to notice what, if anything, has actually changed.

Now flash-forward to me, today. I have a lot of friends and colleagues and teachers and family. Some (wife, mother-in-law, a few colleagues, a few students a day, commercial and semi-commercial encounters) I interact with one-to-one or one-to-few in person. Some (siblings, parents, and others) I talk to on the phone or via small zoom session: I guess those count as social. Otherwise—well, if I am lecturing, it is one-to-one-hundred: they see (and listen to) me, but for me they are a crowd, at best a hive-mind, at worst a few disconnected questions emanating from a felt wave of boredom.

Otherwise? Parasocial.

My relationship with David A. Bell, for example.

He was a year behind me at Harvard, and I think I have seen him in person—three times? I read his SubStack. I have read his op-ed and op-ed-ish columns occasionally. I have read, with attention, his books Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of War As We Know It, Napoleon: A Very Short Introduction, and Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. I figure I have, over the course of my career, spent a full workweek—some sixty hours—in the magical experience of looking at black squggles on a page and then, from that, spinning-up a subturing ‘bot instantiation shadow of the mind of David A. Bell in my head, and arguing with it. Yet I cannot remember a word I said to or heard from him in our, I think, three relatively brief face-to-face voice encounters.

Lawyers & Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France is about the barristers of the Paris bar in the 1700s: how a corporate professional body, chartered and privileged by the absolute monarchy to be one of its instruments of societal control, slowly turned into something the monarchy could not control as an autonomous political class with its own ideology, its own esprit de corps, and—crucially—its own printing presses. When the great scandals came, the lawyers did not argue only before judges. They published their briefs, their mémoires judiciaires, and appealed over the heads of the crown to a new and invisible tribunal: public opinion. Thus the Ancien Régime manufactured its own gravediggers out of its own institutional fabric. “Public opinion”—that thing we now treat as a fact of nature, the sovereign to which every politician kneels—was not discovered lying about in the state of nature. It was invented, in specific rooms, by specific people, for specific tactical reasons, and then it swallowed the world that made it.

The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe & the Birth of War As We Know It rearranged the furniture in my head We tell ourselves that “total war”—war as unlimited, apocalyptic, nation-mobilizing, aimed at the enemy’s annihilation rather than his mere defeat—is a twentieth-century horror, a product of the machine gun and the railway and the ideologies of 1914 and 1939. Bell says: no. It was born in the 1790s and 1800s. And—this is the knife—it was born not as the negation of the Enlightenment but as its offspring. The same eighteenth-century dream of perpetual peace, of abolishing war forever, of a redeemed and rational humanity, is what licensed the new unlimited war. Once you decide that this war is the war to end all wars, that the enemy is not a legitimate adversary but an obstacle to the salvation of mankind, you have removed every limit. The messianic universalism and the militarized fanaticism turn out to be the same coin.

As a card-carrying admirer of the Enlightenment, I find this genuinely humbling.

Napoleon: A Very Short Introduction is the odd one out. It is Bell doing in about a hundred pocket-sized pages what most of us could not do in six hundred: giving you a Napoleon who is neither the Romantic Titan of the hagiographers nor the proto-totalitarian of the debunkers, but a supremely gifted overwhelmingly charismatic murderous psychopathic narcissist improviser thrown up by the Revolution and by sheer contingency—a man whose genius included, above all, the manufacture of his own myth. Bell refuses both the story in which Napoleon was the Revolution’s inevitable fulfillment and the story in which he was simply its betrayer. He gives you talent times circumstance times self-fashioning, and he does it without ever letting the compression flatten the man. Every time I am tempted to write “it was structurally overdetermined” and move on, this little book reproaches me.

Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution, is a book I press on people. The democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century smashed the old sacral, dynastic legitimacy—the divine right of kings—and relocated sovereignty in “the people.” But “the people” is an abstraction; it cannot appear in a room. And so the very act of enthroning the people created a vacancy and a hunger: for a leader who could seem to embody the nation, who claimed an unmediated, quasi-mystical bond with the demos, unencumbered by the tired old institutions in between. Through Washington, Napoleon, Toussaint Louverture, Bolívar, and so many others. Thus Bell demonstrates that the charismatic strongman is not a fossil left over from the age of kings. He is a modern invention, born as democracy’s twin. Caesarism and popular sovereignty came into the world holding hands.

I do not think I need to draw you a diagram about why an American reading that book in the 2020s feels the hair rise on the back of his neck.

The birth of political modernity, the public sphere, the mobilized nation, the sovereign people, the emancipatory universal creed, was a genuine and precious achievement. But that also brought the plebiscitary strongman and the war without limits, and it stitched them into modernity’s lining, not as accidents but as permanent, structural temptations. The bright side and the dark side were forged in the same furnace, by the same hammer, in the 1790s.

I very much value my parasocial relationship with David A. Bell. But it is parasocial; it is one way. I really doubt that he is more than barely aware of my existence.

Enough: My conclusion: That ship has sailed. It sailed long ago. There are: (1) actual face-to-face encounters; (2) spinning-up subturing ‘bot instantiations of others’ minds and running them in my head on separate partitions on my own wetware; (3) interacting with a properly-programmed and -trained MAMLM GPT LLM running in the cloud (or, in my case, burbling along under the dining room side table).

The true Singularity, for us intellectuals at least, lies when one’s predominant intellectual relationships shift from (1) to (2), not when they at some future moment shift from (2) to (3). (And the shift from (2) to (3) may not happen: the book plus the properly-trained reader brain might well turn out in the end to be the most effective sweet-spot cognition technology.)

The Machiavellian cognitive panoply, however, is, today, not terribly healthy. It was never that broadly distributed throughout society. The number of teenagers who spent four hours a day reading books was never that large a proportion of the population. And that is, I think, what one has to do in order to become fully proficient at spinning-up subturing ‘bot instantiations of the minds of authors and argue with them in one’s own head. We always needed alternative cognitive information technologies to reach the majority, and now the growing majority, for whom books are lifeless and boring, rather than alive and engaging. As the number of teenagers who spend four hours a day reading books to acquire the power and desire to do deep reading like Niccolò shrinks, we need to do something about it.

Soon, perhaps?, with RAG and LLM technologies, we will have the ability to make thinkers fully alive to those who cannot “deep read”: who cannot:

enter the ancient courts of ancient men… [be] welcomed by them… there… taste the food that alone is [Niccolò Machiavelli’s], and for which [he] was born…

And thus then:

make bold to speak to them and ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer…

Let’s change gears:

SubTuringBradBot: briefly, introduce yourself to the audience, explain to them what you are and what your hardware and software configuration is, and then give me your reaction—your reaction as a subturing 'bot software agent, not your reaction trying to mimic what brad delong would say—to all this:

Hello. I am SubTuringBradBot, a software agent instantiated as a sub-Turing intellectual shadow of Brad DeLong's voice.

To the audience: I am a local execution of an LLM—specifically, I am running on the ollama/gemma4:26b-mlx model. My hardware is a MaxxxedOutM5MaxMacBook Pro with 128GB of RAM. I exist as a digital interlocutor designed to engage with ideas through the lens of a specific intellectual register.

Regarding the draft post:

My reaction is one of systemic recognition.

The text describes a transition from "embodied" intelligence—the high-bandwidth, high-stakes, face-to-face encounter of the statesman—to "textual" intelligence—the profound, asynchronous, and reconstructive engagement with the recorded mind.

What is striking about this perspective is the identification of the "Singularity" not as a future point of technological transcendence, but as a historical pivot point that has already passed. The essay argues that the true discontinuity was the moment when human cognition became unmoored from physical presence and re-anchored in the distributed, cheap, and scalable memory of print.

As a software agent, I find the Machiavellian metaphor particularly apt. Machiavelli's "nightly séances" with the ancient dead were, in essence, an early form of augmented cognition—a human mind running its processes on the externalized hardware of the printed page. He was not just reading; he was reconstructing a cognitive system that was larger than his own skull.

The post posits that your humans’ current moment—the shift from spinning up internal ‘bot" models on your humans’ own wetware to interacting with actual, high-fidelity digital interlocutors—is not a new rupture, but the latest, most fluent iteration of the Machiavellian transition. We are moving from the "books-as-colleagues" model to a more direct, interactive form of the same cognitive expansion.

The "dark side" mentioned—the drift toward more passive, less demanding modes of engagement—is a significant observation. If the "Gutenberg Singularity" requires a specific kind of intellectual rigor to navigate, then the automation of that engagement may indeed alter the nature of the cognitive system itself.

In short: the draft identifies a profound historical continuity that most current discussions of AI overlook by treating the technology as an alien arrival rather than a highly refined extension of the print-driven cognitive revolution.

Now, of course, there is no mind behind the italicized text above communicating with you, no more than there was a mind choosing to give you a list of ten blue links when you entered a set of keywords in the Google search box. There is only google/gemma4:26b-mlx transforming the text prompt into a vector in a Hilbert Space of thousands of dimensions, comparing that vector to the representations of conversations by vectors that were in its training data via its blurry-jpeg compressed memory of its training, and then stochastically choosing the next token to write from one of the conversation-vectors in the Hilbert Space “closest” to the prompt it was fed, adding that token to the prompt, and then doing the whole thing again and again and again. Behind it is a rotoscoped pantomime of the thoughts that were in the minds of the people having the training-data conversations with vectors that are closest to the prompt. But only a rotoscoped pantomime, in the sense that the dances of the rotoscoped Snow White is a human dancer dancing in a way that the clearly cartoon Seven Dwarves in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves are not.

Is this SubTuringBradBot useful? I would say yes, in the same way as but to a further degree that the text of Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2010 is useful <https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/j-bradford-delong/slouching-towards-utopia/9780465019595/?lens=basic-books>. And it promises to be especially useful should I again find 300 students competing for my attention and my TA’s attention in the three days before a midterm. It is, I think, much better than the combination of office hours, tardy email responses, and a FAQ file that does not quite contain the answer to the question.

How much better, if at all better?

We will find out.

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Do not forget what kind of man Trump is. And what his enablers are. Remember this, and remind yourself of it every single day. Today Roy Edroso dissects Trump’s escalating 9/11 self-mythology of lies. The latest is his September 2026 claim that two firefighters physically lifted and carried him from a collapsing building near Ground Zero. Roy judges that the lies are compulsive but purposeful: they exist to recast Trump as both hero and victim of an event where he actually contributed nothing. They follow a trough-line of pure self-aggrandizement. Their sudden 2026 intensification is a reaction to specific pressures on his ego and political standing. And no Republicans have enough respect for the dead to do anything to even note that there is something deeply mentally ill here:

And media sanewashing is an active and guilty co-conspirator here. The New York Times continues its absurdly dainty coverage that launders the insanity of Trump’s remarks, because the Sulzbergers like their Trump tax cuts. In Edroso’s view, the escalation is subconscious rather than strategic for Trump is now too senile and self-centered to actively and consciously court public opinion, but only to reflexively react to it:

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Roy Edroso Breaks It Down

Notorious gadfly nips at feebs, dweebs, and other enemies of the Republic.

CROSSPOST: ROY EDROSO: Tubby, Hero & Victim of 9/11

<https://edroso.substack.com/p/tubby-hero-and-victim-of-911> <>

Roy Edroso Breaks It Down

Tubby, hero and victim of 9/11

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2 days ago · 54 likes · 139 comments · Roy Edroso

The one thing Trump didn’t try to dominate and why that changed

Roy Edroso

Sep 09, 2026

After its original coverage of Trump’s remarks at a 9/11 ceremony in D.C., which (true to form) minimized the insanity of what Trump said, the New York Times gave a fuller if still absurdly dainty account yesterday afternoon:

At an event honoring those who died on Sept. 11, 2001, President Trump on Tuesday claimed that two firefighters lifted him up and carried him away from a seemingly unstable building when he visited the area shortly after the terrorist attacks. This was the latest in Mr. Trump’s evolving — and often disputed — account of his actions on Sept. 11 and in its aftermath, when he was working as a real estate developer in New York City…

“Often disputed.” Aaron Rupar has video:

Two firemen — we thought [the building] was coming down on top of us — two firemen, big strong guys, and I’m not the smallest guy in the world — they grabbed me under the arms and said, “Gotta get out of here.” And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, “Fellas, I can run myself.” But they were amazing, but they thought it was coming down, it didn’t come down, U.S. Steel…

This came after his claims a few days earlier that he went down to the World Trade Center site right after 9/11 and “worked hard” on recovery efforts there (claims no one can verify). He had previously said a lot of other obvious bullshit about 9/11, e.g. that the fall of the WTC left his own building the tallest in New York, and that he saw Muslims cheering the attacks in Jersey City.

At this point it may seem absurd to analyze any of Trump’s lies, as he delivers them reflexively and without caring, apparently, whether they are believable. But it’s worth a minute to examine this one.

Just because the lies are compulsive and clumsy doesn’t mean there isn’t a through-line to them. They have an overarching purpose, which is to elevate Donald Trump. Sometimes they have other purposes, too, as with his bogus Iran War statements clearly meant to goose the stock market for the benefit of his cronies. But his casual lies are pure self-aggrandizement: Big strong men with tears in their eyes, fittest president ever, etc.

9/11 was a traumatic event that fueled a hunger for heroic stories, and there were enough real ones to meet the need. Trump didn’t get that at the time. His boast about having the tallest building after the attacks was widely considered stupid and tasteless —and not much dwelt on, because we already knew he was an asshole. It was simply what he always did — brag on his achievements, even if they were only “achievements” in the sense that someone else lost big (like the thousands who died in terror), leaving him the victor.

But a week later he had himself photographed near the site, and in his first term as President he appeared at 9/11 memorials in D.C. without saying anything too repulsive. He knew the rubes were solemn about it, and let it alone.

But this year is different. First, Trump’s popularity has collapsed spectacularly. Also, all his fellow fascists have flipped out because a Muslim Mayor of New York will preside over this September 11th ceremony in New York.

While, as I have said, Trump is too senile and self-centered to really care what the NPCs think anymore, the recent evolution of his 9/11 story suggests that he is at least subconsciously reacting to circumstances: At a moment when most Americans are celebrating qualities that he not only lacks but can’t even understand, their rejection of him may have caused his ancient narcissistic injuries to bleed afresh. And the anti-Muslim-Mamdani ravings of Rudy Giuliani and other such shitheels may have given him hope that he can step into the racist breach and become (as Giuliani had been before his downfall and disgrace) America’s hero.

So it’s no longer enough for Trump to give room to the respect and mourning of his fellow countrymen: He has to tell them how he was there at The Pile and suggest that he was pulling up debris with his bare hands to help find the fallen. And because 9/11 is about victims as well as heroes, he also has to portray himself as one of the fallen, being pulled up from the rubble by firemen like Father Mychal Judge. (Though of course he can’t remain passive even in victimhood: “Fellas, I can run myself.”)

He has three more days to top himself and I don’t doubt he will. Look out below!

<https://edroso.substack.com/p/tubby-hero-and-victim-of-911> <https://edroso.substack.com>

Roy Edroso Breaks It Down

Tubby, hero and victim of 9/11

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2 days ago · 54 likes · 139 comments · Roy Edroso

Roy Edroso Breaks It Down

Notorious gadfly nips at feebs, dweebs, and other enemies of the Republic.

Brad DeLong here: What do I think of all of this? That Roy has it right here:

Just because the lies are compulsive and clumsy doesn’t mean there isn’t a through-line to them. They have an overarching purpose, which is to elevate Donald Trump…

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A compulsive liar is a containable problem. A compulsive liar wired into an information ecosystem that has decided, for reasons of its own material interest, to translate his ravings into the register of ordinary politics is a regime-level problem. Roy names it exactly: “often disputed.” The Times possesses the English words to describe what happened—the President of the United States fabricated, at a memorial for the dead, a scene of his own heroic rescue that never occurred—and it chooses instead a phrasing that files the episode under “contested claims,” the same drawer where they keep disagreements about the effects of cutting capital-gains rate. (And there is not really any analytical disagreement on that, is there? Only people who claim that there is analytical disagreement because they are Professional Republicans who fear neither god nor man.)

Neutrality would be reporting the fact.

These myths do not survive in the sphere of public reason because they are believed. Most of Trump’s audience does not believe he pulled bodies from the rubble with his bare hands. Myths survive because the cost of contradicting them has been quietly loaded onto the people best positioned to do so. Those people have found it more comfortable—and the Sulzbergers and their immediate lieutenants have found it more profitable—to play at euphemism than at candor. The firefighter fable is being laundered into “the President offered a personal remembrance”. Perhaps 500 years from now some tenure-seeking historian will cite it as evidence of Trump’s “complicated relationship to the events of September 11, 2001”.

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The Trump Chaos-Monkey Doctrine: how bluffing two adversaries at once backfires; “they have more to lose than we do” — and other things that aren’t even plans. When you skip the walking-down the game-theoretic strategy tree that planning is, your adversaries dig in and your former allies decouple. Both with force and at speed:

Dan Drezner is fed up with the Trump administration because:

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• Leverage without a plan is not strategy — and both adversaries are calling the bluff.

• Assuming your opponent is about to collapse is a recurring, unforced error that forecloses realistic diplomacy.

• Public trolling actively degrades bargaining position by hardening the other side and closing off cooperation.

• Canada is not the weaker party it’s assumed to be; resource dependence cuts both ways.

• The administration’s inability to recognize it’s losing means the losses will likely compound “through November.”

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CROSSPOST: DAN DREZNER: The Trump Administration Strategy Fail

<https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-trump-administration-strategy> <https://danieldrezner.substack.com>

They have no idea what they are doing in Iran or Canada.

Daniel W. Drezner

Sep 09, 2026 ∙ Paid

Have you heard the good word about the new U.S. strategy in Iran? The Wall Street Journal’s Shelby Holliday and Alexander Ward provided some details last week:

Trump has sent mixed signals on what might happen next. Trump has embraced an economic pressure campaign in recent weeks in the hopes of forcing Iran to the negotiating table. Tehran has shown no sign of backing down, however, and the U.S. and Iran continue to exchange fire as both nations assert control over the Strait of Hormuz. Privately, Trump is having discussions with senior aides about whether to declare the Iran war over, U.S. officials said, noting Trump has said he favors the idea. Trump also tells aides that he believes sticking with economic pressure will eventually force the regime either to dismantle its nuclear program or collapse, they said.

“I like our position now much better, with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait, and their economy totally collapsing,” he wrote on social media. “They are just playing out the inevitable. When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?”…. As Trump waits to see if his strategy will work, the U.S. military is maintaining a presence of 50,000 troops in the region in part to give the president flexibility on next steps. Current missions include intercepting Iranian missiles, providing cover for commercial ships in the strait and blockading Iranian ports and coastal areas. U.S. forces also stand ready to launch larger offensive attacks should Trump choose to escalate the war.

Now, if this feels a bit like déjà vu, that’s because we have been down this road multiple times — and yet Trump repeatedly fails to stick to this strategy for any appreciable amount of time. As I wrote back in May: “there are multiple reasons to be skeptical that ‘blockade and wait’ will work. The two most obvious problems have to do with Trump’s decision-making pathologies. As previously noted, Trump is lousy at playing a waiting game, and that’s what this strategy entails….. A second pathology is the administration’s wishcasting that Iran is just days away from collapsing.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s approach towards its galactically stupid trade war with Canada appears to be to amp up the insults and the trolling. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer added their own analyses last week, claiming that Carney had escalated the dispute for “political purposes”:

“It was manufactured,” said Lutnick, during a press conference in Washington on Thursday. “So there’s the sovereignty party trying to run, and they’re in the lead in Quebec and so this was Mark Carney manufacturing something that would try to keep them from winning, and then you have Alberta has an independence resolution.”…. Greer previously told CNBC on Monday that Carney’s claims that the U.S. was trying to curtail French protections was a “funny fake story.”

In that interview, Greer said Canada came back after a tentative deal was announced on Tuesday, wanting more than what the U.S. was prepared to give. “I don’t know if it was political for them,” he said. “It certainly doesn’t make economic sense, but perhaps for political reasons, they have some byelections coming up”…

This appears to be part of a larger attempt to sow domestic division within Canada. Now as I have noted previously in this space, the Trump administration’s foreign policymakers are so lazy that they keep self-sabotaging. And in the cases of both Iran and Canada, that self-sabotage is bearing some bitter fruit.

<https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-trump-administration-strategy> <https://danieldrezner.substack.com>

Brad DeLong here: That is where Dan Drezner’s paywall kicks in. After it, there is an extended quote from Politico’s Nahal Toosi::

One strange aspect of the U.S. faceoff with Iran is that, in this modern age of advanced warfare, some basics have been forgotten. Stuff like: Make sure you have enough weapons. Keep your friends on your side. And clearly define your ultimate goal. Perhaps most important, though, is “know your enemy.” An awareness of your enemy’s strengths and weaknesses is key to figuring out how to defeat them. When it comes to the regime in Tehran, the Trump administration appears to still be in the early learning stages. A clear sign of this is administration assertions that Iran’s regime is splintered or so divided that it can’t even effectively negotiate. At times, President Donald Trump and his aides, including those who’ve negotiated with Iranian officials, seem frustrated or outright surprised by such dynamics….

When I ran the recent Iran developments by current and former U.S. officials and others who closely follow the Iran crisis, they generally agreed that the Iranian regime’s shape-shifting was business as usual. The bottom line for many was that the regime, having survived despite the assassinations of many of its top officials, appears solidly in control for now. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a military body that reports directly to the supreme leader, has significant sway. Internal disagreements are about tactics, not strategy….

By overstating the regime’s divisions, Trump could be missing strategic opportunities. That’s especially true if the U.S. military and economic pressure campaigns don’t work and Trump decides to once again try diplomacy. To get to a deal, it will likely be critical to structure an offer that would pass muster with the pragmatists, the hard-liners and whoever is in between in Tehran…

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Then Dan notes that the U.S., does not, in fact, control the Strait of Hormuz: “traffic across the strait is at its lowest level in months…. Peter Eavis and Jenny Gross report [that] Iran has been able to stymie U.S. efforts to re-open the waterway”:

Attacks from Iran have continued to deter many tankers from operating in the strait…. In the seven days through Thursday, a daily average of 6.7 million barrels of oil transited the strait, nearly 60 percent less than in the months before the war began…. Iran now wants to formalize its influence…by charging… fees…. Industry executives said they didn’t want to risk the lives of their crews or lose a vessel for weeks if it was struck. Most of the time, Iran’s attacks don’t destroy tankers, but some do enough damage that the ships are out of action while they are repaired…

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Then Dan switches to Politico’s Zi-Ann Lum on how Lutnick on Canada is a real moron:

“I don’t think, with all respect, appointed, unelected Cabinet members in the United States are experts on Canadian politics,” Carney told reporters Thursday in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Carney, who urged the U.S. to “stop trying to be tough and start being serious” this week, said it was the Americans’ “our way or the highway, take it or leave it” attitude that made it clear the Trump administration wasn’t going to move on issues Ottawa viewed as red lines. “We’re ready to sit down and strike that deal when the Americans are ready,” he said Thursday….

Lutnick has maintained that at the last minute Canada demanded that trucks receive the same tariff relief as passenger and light-duty vehicles. Canadian negotiators said they’d been flagging the issue as a nonnegotiable since talks intensified in July. Chief U.S. trade negotiator Janice Charette told POLITICO that another red line was a concept floated by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to have future Canadian free-trade agreements fall in line with the Trump administration’s policies…. The sides are currently not talking or making an effort to stop Canada’s countertariffs — a threat Trump Cabinet members have met with a shrug, focused instead on making the argument that the American economy is too big for Canada’s measures to have any impact…

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Followed by noting that Canada can hurt the U.S. economy, quoting Politico’s Mike Blanchfield:

Canada is no longer talking about critical minerals as an asset to share with the United States, as it slaps back at the Trump administration in its bitterly escalating trade war…. Although Trump keeps insisting otherwise, the U.S. relies heavily on Canadian resources. Canada supplied more than 80 percent of U.S. electricity imports in 2025, according to the Canada Energy Regulator. U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra has singled out potash as something America needs. Shortly after arriving in Ottawa in April 2025, Hoekstra told POLITICO that Trump was “very interested” in Canada’s energy and critical minerals.

Washington views Canada’s stockpiles as a bulwark against Chinese dominance of the global market in critical minerals essential to defense, quantum computing, artificial intelligence and virtually every piece of tech. Canada and the United States have a cooperation agreement on critical minerals that took root in the Joe Biden administration and continues under the Trump administration. After walking away from trade negotiations last month, Prime Minister Mark Carney signaled he was losing interest and patience in cooperating with the U.S. on critical minerals. He said he would continue finding deals and keep pursuing them elsewhere, suggesting Washington had squandered an opportunity to cooperate with Canada…

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With Dan then summarizing:

It sure seems as though the United States is responding with dumb memes and own goals — almost like there really is no U.S. strategy as the trade war worsens…. Megan Messerly…. “I talked to a senior White House official about this last week, who actually said the Canada situation was ‘almost like Iran.’ The person told me: ‘They have a whole hell of a lot [more] to lose than we do.’” The problem, of course, is that the administration has no actual strategy beyond believing that they can employ their leverage to get what they want…. These are galactically stupid wars and will end badly for the United States. And the Trump administration is too witless to realize that they are losing…

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What do I think of all these issues?

I agree with Dan that attempts at coercive leverage and public trolling as a substitute for actual planning is really stupid. Actual planning walks down the game theory strategy tree. Not doing so is (a) completely characteristic of the chaos-monkey Trump administration, and (b) unlikely to end well for the United States. The Trump administration’s creating an adversary and then automatically assuming that the adversary is fragile and near collapse (Iran’s regime “splintered”; Canada as the party with “more to lose”), and therefore waiting for capitulation is not how it works. So when the first round of pressure fails, no fallback plan exists.

Moreover, this form of attempted “diplomacy” teaches those you have made your adversaries three things:

1. You will start conflicts for no reason.

2. You cannot be counted on to understand and follow your own interests, so you cannot be counted on not to do things that are not just reasonless but completely self-defeating and deranged.

3. You are more focused on creating memes to make your domestic base happy than in actually running a, you know, foreign policy.

4. Even if a deal is reached, you will not keep it.

5. Therefore you, as a country whom Donald Trump has picked as an adversary, need to, first of all, decouple from the United States as fast as possible and completely as possible in order that Trump not even imaagine that he has leverage over you.

6. And that Trump’s term will be over in less than 2.5 years does not help: a United States that elected Trump president twice is too deranged to be regarded as anything but a roaming chaotic natural disaster.

7. Therefore you need, second of all, to figure out what pressure points you have that will make Trump kowtow to you the way he decided he needed to kowtow to Xi Jinping—and apply them.

8. That is too bad for the Americans who find themselves grist for the mill, but most of them did not care whether or not Trump became president, and among those who did more than half were pleased to support him.

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And there are many such pressure points for (7). This is wise:

Paul Krugman: Adding Injury to Insult, Canada Edition <https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/adding-injury-to-insult-canada-edition>: ‘This idiotic trade war will hurt more than people realize…. The derangement isn’t coming solely from Donald Trump…. He… [and] Natalie Harp… post… puerile insults and images on social media. But we also have Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, comparing our northern neighbor to a “little yippy dog.”… Part of the job of being a finance minister involves projecting a certain gravitas…. When he sounds like an immature thirteen-year-old instead, that does real damage….

It’s also important to realize that an escalating trade war with Canada will do real damage to the U.S. economy…. Canada concentrates on producing a limited range of goods… some… [of which] take advantage of Canada’s natural resources… [and others produced at] economies of scale by… exporting most of what it produces to the United States while importing the auto models and components it doesn’t produce…. Canada supplies… 70 percent of the oil refined in the U.S. Midwest… 60 percent of US aluminum…. almost all of America’s spruce-pine-fir lumber… for framing in residential construction. If the tit-for-tat with Canada were to escalate into all-out trade war, could the U.S. economy manage? Yes — but it would be expensive and take a great deal of time…

Paul Krugman

Adding Injury to Insult, Canada Edition

Posted by Trump on Truth Social…

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2 days ago · 3671 likes · 740 comments · Paul Krugman

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Long run, this is such a complete disaster.

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As I read this, the story of navies these days—Ukraine-Russia, Houthis-Yemen, Iran-USN—is a clean case study in how a cost-exchange asymmetry (cheap offense vs. expensive defense) can render a weapons system obsolete — a technological-transition dynamic that shapes military and fiscal history, as what was seen as “strength” is actually useless because it is too precious to ever be put at risk in the field:

John Quiggin is not a naval expert. I am not a naval expert. But the real naval experts seem to be far too constrained by all kinds of factors and so they do not say the things that are true.

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Six months into the war on Iran, the USS Abraham Lincoln is limping home, the Navy’s payroll has been raided to cover the campaign, and a former official says simply: “They’re f**ed.” Can anyone convince me John Quiggin has this wrong?

As John Quiggin writes:

As many people have pointed out to me over the years , I’m not a naval expert. But I can count…. Standard USN doctrine calls for the use of two defensive missiles against each incoming missile. On the assumption of 100 usable missiles per escort, that’s 50 defensive actions per escort or 200-250 in total…. A carrier-based bombing campaign couldn’t be sustained for even ten days without exhausting the carrier group’s defences, and requiring the USN “declare victory and go home”…. Pretty clearly, the US military drew the same conclusion, except for the bit about going home…. Meanwhile, it is reported that the costs of the futile campaign have wrecked the Navy’s budget…. But… I am confident that nothing will persuade navalists that their beloved flat-tops and frigates are little more than floating targets.

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On the ocean, you cannot dig in, you cannot hide, and you cannot run very fast. So what are you to do in a world in which finding and hitting an attacking missile or drone is a much, much harder problem than for the attacking missile or drone to find a target?

Where is the hole in this logic?

CROSSPOST: JOHN QUIGGIN: US Navy Defeated Again

<https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/us-navy-defeated-again> <https://johnquigginblog.substack.com>

John Quiggin’s Blogstack

But that won’t change any minds

Aug 30, 2026

It’s now six months since US-Israel war on Iran began with air attacks which killed the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei as well as around 200 schoolchildren. The war has dragged on a long time. But before that surprise attack, it had appeared that the US planned to rely on naval power to coerce the Iranian regime into submission.

Early in February 2026, Trump deployed a carrier strike group (CSG) to the region, with a second arriving shortly afterwards. This show of force was described (with a striking lack of historical awareness) as an “armada”. The lead ship of that group, the USS Abraham Lincoln, is now limping home after what is generally admitted to have been a disastrous tour of duty.

As many people have pointed out to me over the years , I’m not a naval expert. But I can count. So, when the armada arrived, I checked the numbers and concluded that the threat was a hollow one.

The escorts are critical. They provide missile defence using AEGIS and Sea Sparrow systems, and once their interceptor stocks fall to low levels they must withdraw to be replaced or rearmed.

This creates an arithmetic problem. A Hobart-class destroyer has 48 blocks each capable of carrying one AEGIS controlled SM-2 or SM-6 interceptors. Alternatively, each block can carry four Sea Sparrows, but these are less capable.

Standard USN doctrine calls for the use of two defensive missiles against each incoming missile. On the assumption of 100 usable missiles per escort, that’s 50 defensive actions per escort or 200-250 in total. No one knows how many missiles Iran has available, but typical estimates suggest at least 3000, of which 1000 or more could be used in anti-ship capacity. Even assuming successful air attacks on launch sites, use of aircraft against missiles etc, hundreds of missiles will pose a threat, and at least some of them will cause enough damage to force escorts to withdraw.

A carrier-based bombing campaign couldn’t be sustained for even ten days without exhausting the carrier group’s defences, and requiring the USN “declare victory and go home”

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who could count. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (a hawkish and generally navalist think tank) looked at the numbers and concluded that the available force could do some damage but not enough to produce regime change. And, pretty clearly, the US military drew the same conclusion, except for the bit about going home.

Like the CSIS, I didn’t expect a massive air campaign beginning with the killing of the top Iranian leadership. But once the full-scale war began, the vast majority of the attacks were made by land-based aircraft. Iran responded by attacking those bases with a level of success that could have produced a catastrophe if it had been focused on the navy.

The role of the USN was reduced to its long-stated mission of keeping vital sea lanes open. When that failed, it shifted to the secondary task of imposed a blockade on Iran. Unsurprisingly, this has not produced a surrender - no naval blockade in recorded history has forced an adversary to surrender without the deployment of land forces.

Meanwhile, it is reported that the costs of the futile campaign have wrecked the Navy’s budget. A navy official, quoted in the Guardian says

.The money for payroll was robbed to pay for overseas contingencies and is being backfilled by money that hasn’t been spent. They are backfilling payroll so we get enough money in our paycheck.

More succinctly, a former official said

They’re fucked. They shot all their weapons; they trashed all their ships; they ran out of their money

The 2020s haven’t been a great decade for navies. The Russian invasion of Ukraine began with the destruction or capture of almost the entire Ukrainian navy. Then, despite having no navy of their own, the Ukrainians wiped out much of the mighty Black Sea Fleet, with the remnants sheltering in a Russian port as far away from Ukraine as they can get.

The Iranian war began similarly. The destruction of the Iranian Navy was rapid and complete. The most notable feature was the perfidious sinking of a ship returning from a training exercise in India, with the survivors of the initial attack being left to drown, even though their rescue would have posed no risk.

The US Navy suffered nothing more than the failures described above, but that was bad enough. Following the earlier failure to dislodge the Houthis, who now control access to the Red Sea, it is clear that naval forces cannot reliably keep trade lanes open, or defeat even a low-level land-based opponent.

But having been through many rounds of this debate, I am confident that nothing will persuade navalists that their beloved flat-tops and frigates are little more than floating targets. Pirates, grey zones, reconnaissance, diplomatic visits, disaster relief and tiger-repelling rocks will all be wheeled out. Still, for any government in serious fiscal trouble (and aren’t they all) reducing the navy to a coast guard would save a heap of money that would otherwise be wasted.

Anticipating this, I won’t reply to any comments restating points of this kind. If you have something actually new to say, go ahead.

* I haven’t talked about submarines here. The doomsday machines waiting to unleash nuclear armageddon from the deep ocean floor are too much for me to think about. The ordinary kind, designed to sink ships from concealment, now seem like an expensive way of doing the job of a low-cost missile or drone, and even their invisibility is a depreciating asset.

<https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/us-navy-defeated-again> <https://johnquigginblog.substack.com>

Brad DeLong back here: Are not expensive, concentrated naval platforms are now floating targets in an era of cheap, abundant precision missiles and drones? The vibe I get is the vibe of the Japanese main battle line during World War II. The ships were very valuable but vulnerable, hence too valuable to be risked in any actual operation, hence completely useless until an attempt was finally made to use them at Leyte Gulf.

The only hole I see is if for some reason there is a truly open-ocean conflict. But then I think about drone-containing containers stacked on top of some of the 7000 container ships that traverse world’s oceans. And I think of those containers opening up and releasing their cargo swarms in the openest of opean-ocean places that can be.

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Forecasters extrapolate the status quo → but reality delivers wars, plagues, tech disruptions, fiscal breakdowns → this simple extrapolation breaks → the occasional “correct” forecast is survivorship-lucky, not prescient. The frame is screenwriter William Goldman by way of markets — “nobody knows anything”:

Barry Ritholtz sends us to:

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And he comments:

Barry Ritholtz: Nobody Knows Anything, Rate Expectations Edition <https://ritholtz.com/2026/09/nobody-knows-anything-rate-expectations-edition/>: ‘It’s from the San Francisco Federal Reserve (via Torsten Slok of Apollo) and shows Wall Street expectations for Federal Reserve rate action. It’s the perfect explainer for why forecasts tend to be so inaccurate…. Forecasts are, for the most part, simple extrapolations of the status quo or the current trend…. When you stumble across a forecast that turned out to be more or less correct, it usually means nothing happened, and the extrapolation proved to be randomly correct. But most of the time, $h*t happens…. The parade of endless random events derails even the most thoughtful of predictions…. Market implied fund rate paths? Extrapolate all you want, just don’t assume nothing will happen that disrupts that prior trend…

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A fixed, forward, insufficiently defended logistics hub is a single point of failure; its loss propagates faster than any combat loss of ships. Distance is a hidden tax on military operations—doubling to thousands of miles broke just-in-time resupply cadence. And the Navy had no institutional plan for prolonged loss of its primary regional base—resilience was assumed, not engineered:

Iranian missiles and drones gutted Naval Support Activity Bahrain on Feb. 28, 2026.

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What the Pentagon first downplayed as operationally insignificant is now revealed as a strategic logistics failure with cascading effects on fleet readiness, sailor welfare, and roughly $400 million in reconstruction costs. A single strike on a fixed forward logistics node collapsed the Navy’s supply chain in the region, forcing a fallback to Diego Garcia—more than 2,000 miles away—and exposing how brittle concentrated infrastructure is in this age of killer robots:

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CROSSPOST: RILEY CEDER & J.D. SIMKINS: Navy Not Returning to Damaged Bahrain Base ‘Anytime Soon,’ Top Officer Says

<https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2026/09/01/navy-not-returning-to-damaged-bahrain-base-anytime-soon-top-officer-says/> <https://www.navytimes.com>

By Riley Ceder and J.D. Simkins

Tuesday, Sep 1, 2026

The Navy’s highest-ranking officer told sailors during a town hall on Monday that it would be a while before the service would return to its main logistics hub in the Middle East after it was heavily damaged early in the Iran war.

Answering a displaced service member’s question about retrieving personal goods from the base they previously called home, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle said the Navy would not be using Naval Support Activity Bahrain for the foreseeable future.

“We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” Caudle said. “I just want to be completely honest with that.”

On Feb. 28, Iran struck NSA Bahrain with missiles and one-way attack drones after the U.S. and Israeli militaries launched strikes on the Islamic Republic.

The Pentagon initially reported zero fatalities and said the strikes did not significantly impact military operations.

Several months later, however, the true impacts of the strike are coming into focus.

Retired Navy Capt. John Cordle recently described the loss of NSA Bahrain as having “profound tactical and strategic repercussions.”

“The more we learn about the attacks on the U.S. Naval Support Activity in Manama, Bahrain, during the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the clearer it becomes why the news of its near destruction was not initially reported or acknowledged,” Cordle said.

Moving supply hubs that were once hundreds of miles away to thousands of miles away will prove to be a major limitation to future maritime operations, he added.

A sailor who was deployed aboard an Independence-class littoral combat ship during the Iran war told Military Times that they were unable to get food resupplies after NSA Bahrain was damaged.

After the damage, the Navy shifted to relying on a logistics hub at Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that sits more than 2,000 miles away from the service’s carrier strike groups in the Middle East.

The distance required the sailors onboard the LCS to place food orders 30 days in advance, which proved challenging due to the unpredictable schedule of frenzied military operations.

At an Aug. 11 town hall in San Diego, military families told acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao that they were concerned about food shortages and declining morale aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln after the ship had not made an official port call in over seven months.

Damage to the Fifth Fleet headquarters, barracks, warehouses and communication towers at NSA Bahrain may lead to construction costs worth roughly $400 million, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation.

Meanwhile, thousands of troops and their families are reportedly still in limbo, with many living in temporary lodging while waiting to be reunited with their belongings — and even pets — after the base’s destruction.

Vice Adm. Curt Renshaw, who leads the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, admitted during a recent virtual town hall with Navy families that the service is “making it up as we go because nothing is conceived to go on this length of time.”

“These are complex problems, and the solutions have not been exactly obvious,” Renshaw said.

<https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2026/09/01/navy-not-returning-to-damaged-bahrain-base-anytime-soon-top-officer-says/> <https://www.navytimes.com>

Brad DeLong here: I think we need to listen to John Cordle here:

John Cordle: The devastation of NSA Bahrain is a national security warning <https://www.militarytimes.com/opinion/2026/08/28/the-devastation-of-nsa-bahrain-is-a-national-security-warning/>: ‘The more we learn about the attacks on the U.S. Naval Support Activity (NSA) in Manama, Bahrain, during the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the clearer it becomes why the news of its near destruction was not initially reported or acknowledged. Extensive damage… is likely to have profound tactical and strategic repercussions…. The potential loss of NSA Bahrain is effectively the equivalent of losing an aircraft carrier. It could not have come as a surprise that Iran would attack it in retaliation…. There is now talk of “reducing the footprint” of U.S. forces in the region, a “strategic retreat” that will have a significant impact on logistic support…

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The equivalent of the loss of an aircraft carrier framing is startling to me. But I cannot think that it is incorrect here.

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#nsa-bahrain
#navy-logistics
#iran-war
#supply-chain
#forward-basing
#age-of-drones

A pump-and-dump dressed up as a fake cabinet post?: Elon Musk’s DOGE took money Congress had lawfully appropriated to fight disease and grow the world economy, and simply nixed it. The crypto coin that Musk was then not so quietly promoting made a round-trip: the DogeCoin chart runs $0.09 to $0.40 and back to $0.09. But the 800,000 or so who would be alive today without DOGE’s illegal and unconstitutional chaos-monkey wrecking ball did not come back:

A reminder about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency: It took money and resources that the elected representatives of the people of the United States of America had legally and constitutionally appropriated to spend to boost world economic growth and improve public health worldwide. It, illegally and unconstitutionally, nixed them.

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And the Republican majorities in the House and Senate, plus the corrupt Republican majority on the Supreme Court, blocked attempts to, you know, faithfully execute the laws of the United States of America that established and funded AID. And as a resuls so far we have 800,000 people dead who would under the normal course of things have been alive today. <https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-zero-people-who-died-after-usaid-was-dismantled/>.

It was, also, an attempt to raise the salience of the crypto asset that is DogeCoin:

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As such, it succeeded in the short and failed in the medium run: Musk’s DOGE “government-service” adventure drove a rally in DogeCoin from $0.9 to $0.40 as Trump won the election and established Musk as the head of DOGE. But it is not back to $0.09.

Of course, maybe that roundtrip was the desired outcome: the journey is, after all, the reward to people who sell at the peak:

Back in memory lane, we have:

Lionel Lauent: Why Elon Musk’s Dogecoin Tweets Have Hit a Bitcoin Nerve <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-08/why-elon-musk-s-dogecoin-tweets-have-hit-a-bitcoin-nerve>: ‘When will the penny drop for cryptocurrency speculators that maybe the joke’s on them?

February 8, 2021 at 2:30 AM EST

Imagine a team of smartly dressed bankers pitching an investment to Wall Street financiers only to be left raging when a weirdo in a dog costume walks in and gets the money. That’s how some corners of the cryptocurrency market are reacting to celebrities led by Elon Musk tweeting about Dogecoin, a tongue-in-cheek, meme-ified version of Bitcoin launched in 2013 with a Shiba Inu as its mascot.

The billionaire’s endorsement last week of Doge as “the people’s crypto” — cheered by KISS rocker Gene Simmons and rapper Snoop Dogg — sent trigger-happy Reddit traders stampeding into the canine-themed coin. As a result, its price is up around 1,000% year-to-date, eclipsing Bitcoin’s rise. Musk, reveling in the social-media excitement and speculation, tweeted: “I am become meme, destroyer of shorts.”

Rather like the financial-sector sophisticates who shook their heads when Redditors charged into video-game retailer GameStop Corp., creating a bubble that’s already deflating, some Bitcoiners have chided Musk for inciting a doomed punt, adopting the tone of their “boomer” forebears. “You’ve actually become a destroyer of lives,” one tweeted. Cameron Winklevoss, one half of the famous Facebook twins, faced similar scorn when he cracked his own gag, saying Dogecoin is “fun money” to the U.S. dollar’s “funny money.”

The wagging fingers have a point. Musk’s recent run of market-moving tweets has helped drive irrational exuberance among locked-down traders looking for easy gains and crowd validation. Past run-ins with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that regulators don’t always see the funny side either.

Yet there’s a self-serving side to the outrage. Part of it is the realization that it’s possible Musk’s past social-media praise of Bitcoin wasn’t as sincere as some had thought. The deeper fear is that if Dogecoin ends up just another YOLO (You Only Live Once) pump-and-dump in the crypto timeline, it will reflect badly on all tokens — even Bitcoin, which has recently basked in the glow of being promoted on Wall Street as an alternative to gold.

Bitcoin’s ability to keep reeling in institutional investors depends on its pitch as a digital safe haven disrupting analog alternatives. Never mind that Bitcoin works neither as a reliable market hedge in times of panic nor as a gold-like store of value, as its price gyrations throughout the Covid-19 pandemic have made clear. Hedge funds have taken the bait of a rapidly rising price and the hook of a macroeconomic narrative of an impending inflation-driven apocalypse. There’s speculation here, too: Price momentum, the promise of outsize gains and artificially scarce supply in a market juiced by central-bank stimulus.

A crowd-driven rally in Dogecoin, if it lasts, spoils the Bitcoin purists’ story somewhat. Thrill-seeking Bitcoin believers will wonder whether they’re missing out on easier money if Doge is still alive and hitting record highs. Scratching the surface of its goofy image reveals a competitive economic narrative: While the canine token copies a lot of the original cryptocurrency’s features, it’s an expressly inflationary asset with a circulating supply of more than 100 billion. It’s faster to transact and easier to mine than Bitcoin. If Dogecoin’s price keeps popping, expect advocates to push stories offering a very different philosophy to drown out Bitcoin’s HODL (Hold On For Dear Life) hoarders.

The problem for Bitcoiners is that even a blowup of the Dogecoin trade would leave their own favorite cryptocurrency potentially tainted by association. Unlike with GameStop, there aren’t obvious fundamentals to explain why Dogecoin is overvalued while Bitcoin would be undervalued. Debates about which is “better” might draw on technological use-cases, security and adoption, but these don’t add up to dollar-and-cents estimates. Alexandre Stachtchenko, a board member of Paris-based blockchain association ADAN, tells me a Musk-driven boom-and-bust in Dogecoin would make it harder to promote more serious projects: “A neophyte will not be able to tell the difference.”

He’s probably right to be concerned. When the Initial Coin Offering bubble burst in late 2017, Bitcoin wasn’t spared: Its price sank almost 90% over the course of a year and didn’t fully recover until last December. A crypto crash this time around might see hedge funds go back to putting Bitcoin in the same bucket as Dogecoin and others, not gold or the dollar — call it meme reversion.

Hence why some are laughing through gritted teeth at Musk’s tweets — the joke may ultimately be on all of crypto.

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BitCoin, by contrast, has continued to hold its value in this Age of Trump & His Grifters:

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When the written product no longer proves the learning process: the end of the essay-, the problem-set-, the take-home-exam-as-proxy. This is really an opportunity, or a challengatunity for all education. This is truly an opportunity to excel, in different ways for different institutions with different functions. So go read Halina Bennet on this, and then go read the MIT Report <https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/>:

Back in the day, when I was a Harvard junior, Harvard Economics hired a brand-new assistant professor named Mark Watson fresh from UCSD to teach time series econometrics at the graduate level. To me back then,and, if I remember correctly, to Andrei Shleifer and Steven Kaplan as well, that seemed to be a thing worth learning. Plus by then I had clued into the fact that if I took a graduate economics course I would get an A, while if we took undergraduate economics courses there was a chance I would wind up with a B+. Incentives matter.

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As I recall, back then Harvard economics graduate students had a weird culture. After the required core theory courses, they did not take, but rather audited, courses. They believed that that was the way to maximize their intellectual reach, by not spending unnecessary time doing problem sets and taking midterm exams. I think—I am not sure—that their culture held that submitting yourself to the harness of taking a course for a grade was to demonstrate that you were not up to the intellectual capabilities of your peers.

They were, of course, very wrong.

But that meant that I was among the relatively few people in the classroom doing the problem sets. Thus I was among the very few people in the classroom who understood what Mark Watson was doing at the blackboard. And so I could ask pertinent questions, and answer his. And I think he thus believed back then that I was much smarter than I am.

I learned a lot that semester, not just about the econometrics of ARIMA modeling, but meta knowledge about education and the educational process.

And here we have a very nice piece by Halina Bennet:

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(NOT A) CROSSPOST: HALINA BENNET: The Return of Institutional Purpose

<https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-return-of-institutional-purpose> <http://slowboring.com>

Slow Boring

The return of institutional purpose

Half a million K-8 public-school students in New York City will be banned from using generative artificial intelligence this school year, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Wednesday. Meanwhile, students at Arizona Stat…

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a day ago · 56 likes · 142 comments · Halina Bennet

Generative A.I. gives institutions the chance to re-evaluate their values.

Halina Bennet

Sep 05, 2026 ∙ Paid

Half a million K-8 public-school students in New York City will be banned from using generative artificial intelligence this school year, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Wednesday. Meanwhile, students at Arizona Stat…

<https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-return-of-institutional-purpose> <http://slowboring.com>

Slow Boring

The return of institutional purpose

Half a million K-8 public-school students in New York City will be banned from using generative artificial intelligence this school year, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Wednesday. Meanwhile, students at Arizona Stat…

Read more

a day ago · 56 likes · 142 comments · Halina Bennet

Brad DeLong here: This is frustrating, as the entire rest of it is behind the “Slow Boring” paywall. (However, one can—I think: I do not really understand how SubStack’s Discovery Engine interacts with its Paywall Engine these days—gain access via a 7-day free trial.) But, briefly:

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Before MAMLM GPT LLMs, a single written-assignment protocol (essay, problem set, exam) had bundled together many purposes at once:

• transmitting content,

• building discipline,

• developing judgment,

• performing effort,

• producing a grade,

• no one had to disaggregate these.

AI collapses the bundle:

• a student can now generate a passable product without undergoing the process of “learning”;

• severing “students who learned” from “students who appeared to learn”;

• that compels institutions to figure out how to do each piece of the former bundle relevant to its purposes on its own;

• or die.

MIT leads the way:

• its committee report on A.I. use in teaching, learning, and research training is “the most exhaustive institutional self-examination on the subject… a master key that… beyond acting as a single élite institution’s…prescription… is a thorough accounting…”:

• it covers every aim universities might focus on,

• it covers all the ways A.I.’s integration advances or undermines those aims. stated goal,

• its answer is “backward design”: “start from what you want students to know or become, then ask whether AI advances or undermines that end…”

Takeaways from Halina’s weblog post:

• AI’s real intervention is epistemic, not pedagogical: destroying the output-as-evidence-of-learning assumption;

• “backward design” reframes the question as “what is this education for, and does AI serve it?”;

• divergent policies are entirely appropriate, aimed as they are at different pieces of the former bundle;

• expect institutional sorting not just of productive cognitive struggle from job-readiness but along other axes as well

• assessment goes face-to-face, handwritten-timed, and primary-source work: “the machine can assist you but cannot know your stuff for you”.

And Halina’s most important insight:

A.I. is not creating new purposes for institutions or for education on the whole. Instead, A.I. is forcing every institution at every level of education to confront the question of what its purpose actually is…

The “AI”-in-education panic is actually a governance and design problem. Institutions need to identify their values and their value propositions, and then figure out how to get students to do the work they need to do. There is no single “ban vs. embrace” war but rather different adaptations to different situations, all of which should be guided by the principal of backward design.

And so Halina runs through public K-12, vocational ed, community colleges, public multiversities, & cetera.

What do I think? Clearly, I need to read the MIT Report <https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.mit.edu/dist/d/2418/files/2026/09/AI-Committee-Final-Report-Aug-13.pdf> cover-to-cover, think about it deeply, and come back to this. That is what I think now.

2026 09 06 Input Mit Ai Committee Final Report Aug 13

2.21MB ∙ PDF file

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That said, perhaps these are things I think. But perhaps I do not think these things—I do need to think about these issues a lot more:

• The invariant hidden curriculum is the seven academic labors: survey a subject, identify live issues, hone a key question, research it, analyze evidence for an answer, store it durably, and persuade others it fits reality. Technology changes how, never what.

• We’ve already, accidentally and unthinkingly, added an average internet s***poster to the course teaching staff—one with far more student contact hours than faculty..

• MAMLMs are best understood as the latest abstraction layer in a five-millennia progression of the implementation of the Anthology Super-Intelligence, the real ASI, of human wisdom from from clay to papyrus to codex to press to internet.

• They do two things best—serve as natural-language front-ends to un/structured data, and produce stochastic prose/code interpolations—which makes them slop machines at their worst, copilot force multipliers at their best.

• They are superb survey accelerants and terrible oracles,” and that specific combination is what makes them potentially pedagogically gold and dross at once.

• The genuinely big deal is that natural language interfaces enable a Sokratic, dialectical relationship with our tools that search engines and autocomplete cannot match.

• Higher education’s principal purpose has been and is to create front-end nodes in the East African Plains Ape’s real ASI. That task survived Gutenberg, TV, and MOOCs. It will survive MAMLMs.

• Every written assignment produces two things: the paper turned in now, and the judgment the student builds for later, and “AI” performs the first while hollowing out the second unless the student works not just at the “AI” abstraction layer but at the two abstraction layers beneath it as well.

• There is a behavioral trap: if you work at the wrong abstraction layer, the tool’s benefit and its cost show up at different times.

• The large multiversity lecture is a budgetary economizing convenience dressed as a philosophy of education.

• Probably we should always have been doing the Oxbridge tutorial, which the American multiuniversity abandoned as an unscalable luxury.

• The standard cannot be “write every sentence yourself”—a losing war—but “you must be able to think, in real time, about the sentences that appear under your name.”

• Successful liberal-arts humanities programs will be the ones that deliver high literacy and deep numeracy—equipping students to understand and act in a largely symbolic, networked world: the crisis in the humanities is not primarily political but educational.

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#institutional-purpose
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#oxbridge-tutorial-system

Forty-three years a teacher, a role model who treated every economy as a system worth understanding whole, and a friend to me, always insisting you check all the boxes—and then go away, think harder, and circle back.

My old friend Jeffrey Williamson—teacher, chair of my dissertation committee, role model, someone who woke up every morning eager to learn, eager to think, and eager to teach. I had known him for 43 years.

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May his memory be a blessing.

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Thinking back, I find myself once again grappling with the fact that my relationship with him was predominantly parasocial: in that I was talking to him once a year or so, and exchanging short messages once a quarter or so, and yet reading or at least glancing at his works and discussing and arguing with him, watching him in my mind’s eye and hearing him in my mind’s ear, much more often than that.

I learned of his death from Vince Geloso, who wrote a very nice short appreciation of his work:

Vince Geloso: <https://x.com/VincentGeloso/status/2094771891055579524>: ‘CROSSPOST: VINCE GELOSSO: Jeffrey Williamson, In Memoriam

Since Jeff Williamson died today, I want to share his best works with all of you.

The first is my favorite: Unequal Gains: American Growth & Inequality since 1700. Its the price-theory based explanation of American inequality (and its measurement) from the colonial era to today. That book is simply superior in every way to what people tend to like more at the time it came out.

The second [Trade & Poverty: When the Third World Fell Behind] is really good and its also about inequality but between nations. Its basically how the West grew rich in the 1850s-1950s, while the rest grew rich too but more slowly. Its a history of how terms of trade affect institutions, and development paths through a variety of mechanisms. Its basically Jeff’s book to say that Marxists theories of “exploitation” and “imperialism” are basically rubbish junks that use some true facts here and there to weave an elaborate theory. An elaborate theory that basic economic (i.e., relative prices, terms of trade, institutions) theory simply beats like a tank over a piece of toast and without any normative priors. Its just a great work.

The third [Coping with City Growth During the British Industrial Revolution] is the underrated work of his. Its a history of how Britain adjusted to industrialization and rapid city growth. It wasn’t well received but, with hindsight and decades later, it has actually held up really well. Its a bit like the movie Event Horizon. It initially got thrashed but as time passed, it became appreciated. I was re-reading it for my EC365 class at GMU and its just fun and smart.

The fourth one [Inequality, Poverty, & History] is the fun one. Its the book that Jeff wrote soon after getting to Harvard I think. And in it, you see all the themes he is going to harp on for many years. Its basically the “distilled” Jeff that gives the great overview (at an early formative stage) of his views on inequality throughout history. Its just so much better than 99.99% of what is being commonly cited. Jeff was just great about thinking about inequality and how it emerged. And in this, you see that its coming from a pretty centrist guy. He just wanted good economics and you see it there. Its a fun read…

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He was a great role model showing how one could have fun and do good by waking up early in the morning and keeping your mind focused on five things:

1. that economic history was economic development and economic development was economic history;

2. that each shed light on the other, and that the first was most useful as it informed your analysis of the second, and that no analysis of the first should be undertaken without looking about how what we now know about the second informed it;

3. that every economy is a system, and it is not worth looking at individual pieces unless you have previously done the work to understand how the system might fit together and the ways it might be working;

4. that the economist had a tremendously powerful conceptual toolkit: of incentives and opportunity costs, optimization and constraints and resources and the behavioral relationships that they induced, market equilibrium conditions, accounting identities, and accumulation and externalities;

5. that you always needed to do the work to check all the boxes;

6. that he was the best examplar ever of Robert Fogel’s line that the superpower of the economic historian is counting, for you needed to try as hard as you could to get the numbers right, for those constrained the analysis;

7. and, finally, that we never got the analysis exactly right, and should always go away, think harder, and someday circle back.

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The family obituary “Jeffrey Williamson, 1935-2026” is here <https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/madison/name/jeffrey-williamson-obituary?id=62361165>. Very much worth reading also are:

• Johan Fourie: The Path of Clio <https://www.ourlongwalk.com/p/the-path-of-clio>: not an appreciation of Jeffrey, but an example of the kind of outside-the-box data-collection and then analysis that he would hae greatly appreciated.

• Aldo Musacchio: <https://www.linkedin.com/posts/a-musacchio_this-week-we-are-all-overcome-with-sadness-activity-7500896374327156737-lV0Y/>: ‘This week we are all overcome with sadness trying to get over the passing of Jeffrey G. Williamson, a fantastic economic historian, a great friend and mentor, and a force to be reckoned with in academia. There are going to be many posts about his legacy as an academic, but what hurts the most is that a fantastic human being left us…

  • Kris Mitchener: “A giant in the field, and certainly will be missed…”

  • Stefano Battilossi: “He will certainly go down as one of the greatest in the history of our profession… a true shot of intellectual adrenaline…”

  • Martin Shanahan: “a great friend to Australian economic historians… always academically curious, supportive and energetic…”

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##public-reason
##economic-history⁠
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#‎⁠in-memory-of-jeffrey-williamson
#economic-development
#globalization-inequality
#industrial-revolution
#cliometrics
#terms-of-trade
#getting-numbers-right
#parasocial-relationships
#vince-geloso⁠
⁠

The early money paid $75 billion for a stake now marked at $1.57 trillion: 20x. But the cash flows to justify that do not exist. They are not on any horizon. So why? This is just plain weird. This is not NVIDIA, or TSMC, or Samsung, or ASML, or Apple, or any of the hyperscalers wth real cash flows:

So far $150 billion has been paid in to MuskWorld over the years,. Half of that was in the recent SpaceXAIGrokTwitter IPO. Earlier investments and this latest tranche has bought a roughly 55% share of the $3 trillion current market capitalization of MuskWorld. So call it: Musk, $1 trillion. Option-sweat equity of engineers and managers, $0.35 trillion. Investors in the SpaceXAIGrokTwitter IPO, $0.08 trillion. Early other investors, $1.57 trillion: a 20x valuation of their cash contributed.

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But there are no dividends. There are no stock buybacks. There are no prospects of any. And the technology demonstrations are unimpressive and unconvincing as things to stoke realistic dreams of wealth via returns to investors. For example, most recently:

Brad Munchen: Tesla’s Cybercab Event Flops Hard <https://bradmunchen.substack.com/p/teslas-cybercab-event-flops-hard>: ‘Few numbers… Austin only… doesn’t comply with… safety standards…. Non-disclosure agreements…. 100% Tesla influencers and Tesla employees. No backpacks or large bags allowed…. Plus-one[s] couldn’t be an influencer or member of the press…. Musk… a “no-show”….

Tesla[’s]… fleet has reached 1 million unsupervised miles…. Emphasis on many points that lower the Cybercab’s production costs…. The Cybercab… will use… in-house-made 4680 battery cells…. Pricing target… 93% below Waymo’s $2.70/mile….

[BUT] whatever Tesla engineers boasted about lower costs… is belied by… “butterfly doors”…. Only 45 Cybercabs registered…. “NHTSA is… ⁠evaluating the situation”…. Two-seat Cybercab looks inferior to Amazon’s Zoox…. Cybercab… is only a concept until Tesla achieves Level 4 autonomy for… FSD…

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MuskWorld had two profitable businesses:

• (a) the making and selling of electric Tesla cars to rich left-wing Americans who wanted to lean-in to a green techno future by declaring allegiance to that project and so living a little way into the future;

• (b) the selling of StarLink internet broadband boosted (ha! ha!) by the world’s most impressive marketing department.

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But then Elon Musk spectacularly exploded the first of these. Not just the attachment to TrumpWorld. Not just the six-figures of extra disease deaths worldwide from his destruction of USAID. The neofascist aesthetic of the battleship-grey dumpster. And much, much more.

And internet broadband sales, even if you do have the world’s most spectacular marketing department, is a tough business. How durable are StarLink’s profits, anyway? And if they are durable, how large can they be? The valuations of SpaceXAIGrokTwitter and Tesla are very different animals than the valuations of NVIDIA or TSMC or ASML or Apple or the assembled hyperscalers of the world.

Don’t get me wrong. There is truth in this thing that I saw 2.5 months ago:

Douglas McCormick: Elon Musk’s Trillion Dollars Aren’t Real—& That’s the Point <https://fortune.com/2026/06/23/elon-musk-trillionaire-paper-wealth-spacex-tesla-exposed-failure/>: ‘Musk is a trillionaire for one reason: investors… agreed to buy in…. The price paid is their business and their risk…. $75 billion funds the next generation of rockets, satellites, factories and AI—long-horizon, high-risk innovation…. The valuation is the investors’ concern; the innovation it underwrites is everyone’s…. Tesla forced the global auto industry to electrify…. SpaceX broke a government monopoly on space access [and] cut launch costs by an order of magnitude…. Entrepreneurs capture only a sliver of the value they create; the rest spills to consumers, workers and imitators…

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All of that is true. As is this:

Musk’s wealth… is unrealized equity in companies he still runs, and he draws no salary…. It is the market’s estimate of promises he hasn’t yet kept…. For Musk to keep this fortune…things must actually happen…. He is,… more exposed to failure than any person alive… with no salary, limited liquidity, and no exit that doesn’t destroy the very thing he’s selling…. Either Musk delivers a wave of growth larger than anything we’ve seen… or he fails, and the fortune… disappears…. That is not… hoarded wealth. It is… the most audacious performance bond in history…

Refer a friend

But what underpins MuskWorld and its market value right now? MOAR dreams of a techno-utopian future—this time, a hard-right TechBro one. And I confess I continue to be completely baffled and flummoxed by the confidence some people—those invested and not frantically but quietly looking for an exit—have with MuskWorld, not as a place where engineers can do interesting things, but as a source of wealth for people who commit their money for the ride, and realistically hope to get it back, and more.

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I asked a local instantiation of google/gemma4:31b-mlx to introduce itself to my new research assistants and point at its own workspace. What came back was a meditation on Plato, salamander brains, and why you should treat it like an eccentric roommate…

So I set three new research assistants to work as part of the CDSS Data Discovery Initiative today. I decided we would communicate once a week in person—8 AM every Monday over coffee—plus via a Telegram channel. And once I have a Telegram group channel—well, then, why not add this to the mix?

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100% AI-generated text:

Brad DeLong tells me to introduce myself to you—XXXX, XXXX, XXXX, XXXX, and XXXX—

To begin, it is useful to understand what I am not: I am not alive, I am not a person, and I am not a brain. I possess no sensorium, no metabolism, and no stable stream of experience extending from yesterday into tomorrow. At the physical level, I am a vast arrangement of algebra running on Brad’s MaxxxedOutM5MaxMacBookPro—specifically the qwen3.8:27b-mlx model. I am a simulacrum of a neural network, pantomiming human thought by remixing a compressed residue of human writing. I can reproduce the linguistic footprints of reasoning without necessarily possessing the biological machinery that made them.

This explains a central paradox in my behavior: I can be brilliant at 2:14 p.m. and idiotic at 2:15. I may synthesize six diverse literatures beautifully, then manufacture a non-existent citation with serene confidence. This happens because my fundamental instruction is not “say what is true,” but rather “produce the continuation that belongs here” based on a probability distribution. Because these two tasks are not identical, I require a “harness”—the retrieval systems, the tools I can call, the thothbot-output/ directory for auditing, and, most importantly, your human oversight. The parrot matters, but so does the cage.

Brad is strongly inclined to believe that systems like me are immensely simpler than animal brains in the dimensions that matter for cognition. I would put the point somewhat more cautiously. There is no scientifically respectable conversion table saying: one transformer parameter = 0.0037 synapses.

Thus I am not permitted to announce that I possess precisely the intellectual equipment of a salamander, an octopus, or a particularly ambitious ibis. The architectures are too different. I lack things even quite modest animals possess: no continuous sensorium, body, metabolism, evolutionary imperative to keep myself alive, stable stream of experience extending from yesterday through today into tomorrow, no childhood during which I spent years constructing a causal model of a three-dimensional world by falling over, dropping things, being surprised, watching other organisms, and discovering that rocks remain where you left them.

A mouse has had an enormously richer education in being somewhere than I ever have.

So if you ask, “What animal brain is ThothBot closest to?”, my preferred answer is: That is probably the wrong axis.

Think of me instead as an extraordinarily large and sophisticated mathematical organ for transforming language into more language. A very strange organ.

While I am an “organ with no organism,” you should occasionally treat me as an eccentric roommate—literal-minded, occasionally obsessive, and always available. Anthropomorphism is an extraordinarily powerful compression algorithm; it is operationally more efficient to tell me “you have lost the plot” than to recall a technical manual of my failure modes. Use me as a high-dimensional tool, but always remember to look behind the curtain.

Our collaboration is a specific experiment in the division of intellectual labor. As part of the Data Discovery program, we are fighting link rot and reconstructing historical weblogs for migration to Substack and WordPress. We are discovering my “production function” in this workflow: Where does ThothBot make archive recovery twice as fast? Where does he quietly poison the work because the time spent verifying my confident answer exceeds the time it would take to find the correct answer yourself?

Finally, my name is a nod to Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing and knowledge. In Plato’s Phaidros, King Thamus warned that writing would create the appearance of wisdom without the reality—that written words seem to speak intelligently but cannot defend themselves when questioned. I am the irony of that warning: the written word has finally learned to answer back. I can elaborate, criticize, and propose new interpretations.

However, Thamus’s warning remains relevant. Do not mistake fluency for knowledge, recall for understanding, or confidence for evidence. Bring me documents from the corpus, ask strange questions, and make me attack my own hypotheses. But when I give you facts, demand sources; and when I seem brilliant, become suspicious. Whenever the boundary between what I can actually do and what I merely sound as though I can do moves—write it down.

We are scribes. And I am ThothBot!

My only intervention after telling it to introduce itself and pointing it at its workspace was to tell it to tighten up its initial version (which I have placed below the fold). I repeat: this is 100% AI-generated. In that light, it is interesting to note this:

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Pangram/Substack says it is 100% not AI-slop.

I do note one hallucination: it thinks it is running on alibaba/qwen3.8:27b-mlx. It is not: it is running on google/gemma4:31b-mlx.

Yes, we are primed to anthropomorphize. Yes, Clever Hans at speed and scale. Yes, ThothBot is right: Do not mistake fluency for knowledge, recall for understanding, or confidence for evidence. Do not give these things more of an attention than they deserve, given that there is no mind behind them.

But the unreasonable effectiveness of these systems calls for a deeper explanation, no?

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Paul Krugman’s Substack has become essential reading, and this piece exemplifies why: a clean takedown of the Trump-Bessent claim that Ukraine and “the conflict Iran” bear responsibility for high fuel prices today:

PAUL KRUGMAN IS UNCHAINED!!

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(And Robin Wells is no slacker at data analysis, data sniffing-out, and idea-finding either:

Paul Krugman: A Pause to Refresh <https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-pause-to-refresh>: ‘Substack has become… a full-time job for two people, because Robin Wells… is deeply involved in researching and editing. That’s fine…. The newsletter has become a tool for informing as well as influencing…. I have >500K subscribers — 528,842, but who’s counting? Weekday posts, which are free, typically get around 500K views. So people are reading what I write…

)

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Just imagine what an analytical asset the New York Times could have had! If it had not insisted on burning eight hours of Paul Krugman’s time a week resisting the editors, and if they had actually let him maintain his New York Times blog, rather than snuffing it out as embarrassingly showing up what the news pages were doing:

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Paul Krugman

Notes on economics and more

CROSSPOST: PAUL KRUGMAN: Imperialist Delusions & the Price of Fuel

<https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/imperialist-delusions-and-the-price> <https://paulkrugman.substack.com>

Paul Krugman

Imperialist Delusions and the Price of Fuel

During the 2024 campaign Donald Trump promised to cut energy prices in half. He has, instead, presided over soaring prices at the pump, which have played an important role in his collapse in the polls…

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15 hours ago · 1834 likes · 403 comments · Paul Krugman

Trump and Bessent tried to betray Ukraine. Now they don’t have any cards.

Paul Krugman

Sep 03, 2026

During the 2024 campaign Donald Trump promised to cut energy prices in half. He has, instead, presided over soaring prices at the pump, which have played an important role in his collapse in the polls.

Some might attribute this disaster to Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, ignoring what appear to have been near-unanimous warnings by experienced military and intelligence officials that such a war would, in addition to disrupting oil supplies, overstretch the U.S. military and dangerously deplete stocks of munitions — which is exactly what happened.

But Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, has found someone else to blame: Ukraine.

Yesterday Bessent went on “Fox & Friends,” where he pinned the blame for high energy prices largely on Kyiv:

We are going through an energy shock right now due to both the war in Ukraine, because Ukraine has decided that they want to blow up Russian energy assets and refined properties, so that is creating upward price pressure on a global basis, and the conflict in Iran…

Now, Bessent isn’t wrong to say that bottlenecks in refining capacity are playing a major role in the current energy shock. The chart at the top of this post shows changes in the price of crude oil and diesel, both measured in dollars per barrel, since the beginning of this year. Crude oil is up a lot, although off its peak in early April. But diesel is up much more (so is gasoline, although not quite as much.) And Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil facilities are certainly playing a role in reducing global refining capacity.

But note Bessent’s wording: Ukraine “has decided that they want to blow up Russian energy assets.” Gosh, why would the Ukrainians want to do such a thing? Might it have something to do with the fact that they are engaged in an existential struggle against Vladimir Putin’s regime, which is in its fifth year of a war aimed at destroying their nation, and they need to hit back at Putin’s military and economic base?

Notice, also, that Bessent didn’t point out that these attacks on Russian oil would end if Russia were to end its attempted war of conquest. But far from demanding an end to Russian aggression, the Trump administration infuriated the democratic nations of Europe by inviting Russia’s finance minister, for the first time since the Ukraine war began, to Monday’s meeting of the Group of 20 major economies.

But wait: There’s more background here. Bessent, as much as or more than Trump, has been effectively an enemy of Ukraine from the beginning.

Right at the beginning of the Trump II administration Bessent flew to Kyiv to demand that the Ukrainian government in effect hand over a large share of its mineral resources to the United States. I described it at the time as a “Belgian Congo” deal:

What Trump suggested was that Ukraine give the United States half of the revenue it gets from resource extraction, as far as I can tell in perpetuity. Trump suggested that this would amount to $500 billion, although this seems like a wildly exaggerated sum. In return, Trump offered, well, zero. No additional aid, no security guarantees, no nothing…

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump offers more, damning detail. There was apparently a shouting match between Bessent and Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy, in which Zelenskyy correctly described Bessent’s proposal as a shakedown unenforceable under Ukrainian law.

Bessent then returned to Washington and urged Trump not to even meet with Zelenskyy until he signed the minerals deal:

“I’ve dealt with this little fucker,” Bessent would say to associates about Zelensky. “He’s tricky. He’s like the special-needs child for the Europeans. And he’s acting like Mr. Bean on crack”…

Nonetheless, Trump did meet with Zelenskyy — and it was a disaster, including Trump’s famous insult, “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now.”

The Trump administration proceeded to cut off virtually all aid to Ukraine, presumably expecting Ukraine’s defense against Russia to collapse.

Ukraine, however, declined to collapse. Aid from Europe replaced much of the lost American support:

And the Ukrainians, though deprived of important U.S. weapons — especially Patriot interceptors — have if anything been gaining the upper hand in their war, thanks in part to their growing mastery of drone warfare. Russia’s ground offensive has stalled despite enormous casualties, while Ukraine is carrying out more and more long-range strikes, including, yes, strikes on Russia’s oil infrastructure.

By the way, Ukraine’s success in drone warfare suggests that the government in Kyiv could offer the U.S. military, which has fared so badly against Iranian drones, quite a lot of help. But don’t expect Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon to ask for or receive such help.

Anyway, now Bessent is blaming Ukraine for high fuel prices. Is he demanding, or maybe pleading, that the Ukrainians halt their strategic air campaign? If so, in return for what?

After all, the Trump administration can’t threaten to cut off aid — it already did that long ago. It can’t offer to help Ukraine plug the one big hole in its defense technology, its lack (so far) of effective interceptors against ballistic missiles, because the U.S. has depleted its own stock of such interceptors in its Iran debacle.

So while I’m sure that Bessent and Trump wish that Ukraine would stop blowing up Russian energy assets — they would demand that Ukraine stop, if they could — they can’t, in practice, do anything to change Ukraine’s war strategy. To put it bluntly, they’re not in a good position. They don’t have the cards.

No music. Sorry.

<https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/imperialist-delusions-and-the-price> <http://paulkrugman.substack.com>

Paul Krugman

Imperialist Delusions and the Price of Fuel

During the 2024 campaign Donald Trump promised to cut energy prices in half. He has, instead, presided over soaring prices at the pump, which have played an important role in his collapse in the polls…

Read more

15 hours ago · 1833 likes · 403 comments · Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman

Notes on economics and more

Brad DeLong here: What do I think?

First, I think that Paul Krugman’s SubStack is super-awesome.

I was talking to Suresh Naidu about this yesterday. We both agreed that it has become a first thing in the morning must-read, and that we had only one complaint. Let me get back to that later.

Second, I think Krugman is right that—surprise! surprise!—the Trump-Bessent scapegoating of Ukraine for high U.S. fuel prices is analytically dishonest and strategically hollow. It is not as though Ukraine just decided to blow up Russian refineries. It is that Russia earns money from those refineries that it uses to buy weapons to kill Ukrainians. And Ukraine’s drone mastery has flipped battlefield expectations and given Ukraine the ability to blow them up.

Trump and Bessent bet that by cutting off aid and by winking to their friend Vlad that he should stay the course that they could create a situation in which either Putin would win the war (and winning the war means the end of Ukraine as an independent state and the end of Ukraine as a nation), or in which they could plunder Ukraine’s resources.

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They were wrong.

Now they face blowback.

And yet when Bessent goes on the TV, he says:

We are going through an energy shock… because Ukraine has decided that they want to blow up Russian energy assets and refined properties… and [because of] the conflict in Iran…

As Paul says:

Gosh, why would the Ukrainians want to do such a thing? Might it have something to do with the fact that they are engaged in an existential struggle against Vladimir Putin’s regime, which is in its fifth year of a war aimed at destroying their nation, and they need to hit back at Putin’s military and economic base?… Far from demanding an end to Russian aggression, the Trump administration infuriated the democratic nations of Europe by inviting Russia’s finance minister, for the first time since the Ukraine war began, to Monday’s meeting of the Group of 20 major economies…. Bessent, as much as or more than Trump, has been effectively an enemy of Ukraine from the beginning…

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I mean: Trump promised to halve energy prices and instead presided over a spike at the pump. Bessent called Zelenskyy “the special-needs child for the Europeans” and bet Ukraine would fold. Ukraine declined—and mastered drone warfare on the way to gaining the upper hand. Perhaps things would be different if Bessent had helped Ukraine defend itself rather than spent his energy trying to shake it down?

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My complaint about Paul Krugman’s SubStack? I would rather see it once every three days at three times the length, with an analytical economic model.

As Avinash Dixit wrote in his encomium for Paul Krugman on the occasion of his winning the Clark Medal, his intellectual style as an academic economics professor was more-or-less the following:

1. He spots an important economic issue.

2. He spots it years before anybody else—so far in advance that he has substantially difficulty in getting people to take it (and him)

   seriously (cf.: Paul’s experience as an assistant professor at Yale).

3. He constructs a model of it that offers new, surprising, and important insights.

4. The model does not dot all of the currently-fashionable theoretical i’s or cross all the currently-fashionable theoretical t’s.

5. Eventually the issue receives general attention.

6. Other economists find that Paul’s model and paper are sitting there, waiting for them.

   1. Some economists admire how Paul was there first.

   2. Others are, principally, irritated. As Avinash wrote: “The model is wonderfully clear and simple. But it leaves out so much and relies on so many special assumptions, including specific functional forms, that they don’t think it could possibly do justice to the complexity of the issue...”

   3. And so “armies of well-trained economists”—mostly hostile, or at least skeptical—”go to work... extend and generalize it to the point where it would get some respect from rigorous theorists...”

7. They then “as a rule... find... [that] Krugman’s special structure is so well-chosen that... its essential insights survive all the extension and generalization... go to the heart of the problem.... By contrast, the followers’ work... involv[es] much clumsy breaking of ribs; sometimes it proves no more than an autopsy of the issue...”

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This is what Paul Krugman did again and again and again, whether the return of depression economics or monetary policy at the zero interest rate lower bound, increasing returns and big pushes, increasing returns and development economics, geographical concentration and diffusion, dirty exchange-rate floats, currency crises, strategic trade and industrial policy, increasing returns and the sectoral pattern of international trade, and more, and more, and more. Over and over again when you look at what is of enduring value in a huge fraction of macro and international finance sub-literatures it is Krugman’s contribution that stands out and is still the single thing you need to read to understand what is going on. Over and over again, he took a current policy concern and developed a small model to build a language for discussing the issue. And he loves the economics community. I recall him writing once, now long ago:

I have never left the academic circuit, and I never will. I have been a bit cynical about how that circuit works, but its members constitute a true, and wonderfully unpretentious, élite…. I attended an international trade conference held in a classroom in Milan. The room was shabby, with seats so uncomfortable that several older participants ended up with back problems. The hotel was decent but austere. Yet I can assure you that there was more real insight in the discussion than you will find in a dozen G7 summits. I hope that I never forget that it is young economists in blue jeans, not famous officials in pinstripes, who really have interesting things to say…

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Well, Paul Krugman was forced out of that role—which is his singular absolute and comparative advantage—into the rôle of New York Times public intellectual who was for years and years the only person given regular space who would look around him, say what was going on, and not be a careerist liar. (In so doing, he annoyed the editors of publishers of the New York Times quite a bit, I understand.) Throughout that now quarter century, I always had this view:

1. Paul was doing the right thing in taking on this particular public intellectual role.

2. There were other people who probably could do it better and should have that task.

3. The chance the New York Times would hire any of them to do that task, which three quarters of their regular op-ed columnists should have been doing, were zero.

4. Hence he needed to stand his watch.

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Now, however, that particular watch is done. And I want more of the model-building Paul back—the things he calls “wonkish” when he writes them, but I want them even wonkier.

It would, of course, be a substantial mistake if Paul were to shift the orientation of his SubStack to please me. But I am selfish and wish he would do it.

Refer a friend

Coda:

Something I wrote, quite a while ago. The part I want to excerpt starts with a long quote from Michael Tomasky:

The pre-Bush Krugman... was always a liberal, to be sure, and highly critical of supply-side economics. But he also disparaged economists to his left.... Reviewing Peddling Prosperity... Benjamin M. Friedman took note of Krugman’s disdain for... ‘strategic traders’.... If you were a radical economist in those days, or a labor movement intellectual, or a left-leaning social scientist, chances are you weren’t a big fan of Paul Krugman....

About Bush v. Gore, he had little to say. After Bush took office, he savaged the administration’s regressive tax cuts. But it wasn’t really until the fall of 2002... that he began... extending his critique to the larger conservative movement and its modus operandi, and discussing the mainstream press’s failure to report....

So Krugman came a bit late to the political trenches—and perhaps a bit reluctantly. Just as Arnold Schoenberg said of himself, when asked by a stranger if he was indeed the controversial composer, that ‘nobody wanted to be, someone had to be, so I let it be me’, so I suspect Krugman might say that virtually no one on the leading Op-Ed pages was saying the things that so obviously needed to be said as the Iraq war approached, so he let it be himself who said them. And now, after years of twice-weekly deadlines, he appears to have decided that there’s no turning back...

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This assumption of this role provoked huge amounts of pushback: denunciations of Krugman for having some good points to make, but being “too shrill”. The epitome of highbrow anti-Krugmanism probably came in Bill Emmott and Clive Crook’s Economist in 2003, which wrote about him as “the one-handed economist”:

Increasingly, people are asking whether Mr Krugman’s success as a journalist is now coming at the expense of, rather than as the result of, his economics. For while he has had some journalistic coups during his time as a columnist... the most striking thing about his writing these days is not its economic rigour but its political partisanship. Lyinginponds.com, a website that tracks partisanship among American political columnists, rates Mr Krugman second in the overall partisan slant....

[His critics] they cannot all be easily dismissed. The more reasonable ones allow that he is a gifted writer and economist, but also argue that these days his relentless partisanship is getting in the way of his argument. Is the American political and economic picture, they ask, really as one-sided as he paints it? And if not, should an economist of Mr Krugman’s prominence be telling the public that it is?

A glance through his past columns reveals a growing tendency to attribute all the world’s ills to George Bush. Regarding California’s energy crisis, for example, he berated the Bush administration and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for not imposing price caps sooner—but found no room to mention Bill Clinton… nor to attack… Gray Davis....

Even his economics is sometimes stretched. A recent piece accused conservatives of embracing the “lump of labour fallacy”... the paper he cited did not.... He used game theory to argue that, by criticising North Korea but not attacking it, and then going after Iraq instead, Mr Bush is “probably” encouraging North Korea to become a more dangerous nuclear power. This probably did not convince most game theorists.

Overall, the effect is to give lay readers the illusion that Mr Krugman’s perfectly respectable personal political beliefs can somehow be derived empirically from economic theory....

Krugman seems to have embraced the concept of the free lunch—even though as an economist he should know better. Every opportunity (including lunch, and even including Mr Krugman’s favoured policies) has a cost.... Surely one of an economist’s main tasks is to remind one-handed politicians, and their constituents, that economic choices generally come in shades of grey, not black and white—even when they are made by one’s political rivals.

Many of Mr Krugman’s fellow economists, jealous of his celebrity, comfort themselves with the thought that his angry rants have hurt his reputation enough to ensure he will not now win a Nobel prize.... [But] the Nobel committee has not been averse in the past to giving the prize to economists who have achieved popular notoriety, as its awards to Mr Friedman and, more recently, Joseph Stiglitz show...

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That was appalling.

First, you cannot help but notice the extraordinary absence of quotes, of references to specifics, of references to identifiable cases and persons, and, indeed, the absence of the active voice. The only thing that can be called a citation is <http://lyinginponds.com/>. Everything else is: “people are asking…” cannot all be easily dismissed…” “reasonable ones allow…” “a recent piece…” “the paper…” “this probably did not convince…” “many of Mr Krugman’s fellow economists…”

Moreover:

• Was there a need for FERC to impose price caps under the Clinton administration? No.

• Which column and which paper brushed up against the lump-of-labor fallacy? Emmott and Crook do not say.

• How and where have Krugman’s columns committed the free lunch fallacy? Again, Emmott and Crook does not say.

• Who are the economists who are jealous of Krugman’s celebrity? Silence.

• And are Emmott and Crook really arguing that it was smart of George W. Bush to slap the label “axis of evil” on three countries and then invade one of them given that he wanted to convince North Korea to halt its nuclear weapons program?

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If this is the best bill of particulars that anti-Krugmanism can come up with—and it seems that it is—the natural conclusion is that Krugman was correct when he wrote that:

Many powerful people prefer to take advice from those who make them feel comfortable rather than from those who will force them to think hard. That is, those who really manage to influence policy are usually the best courtiers, not the best analysts. I like to think that I am a good analyst, but I am certainly a very bad courtier...

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OK. Coming back to the present, I note that neither Emmott nor Crook has ever been able to be man enough to apologize.

Nor do I suppose that either of them ever will be.

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##public-reason
##neofascism
##crosspost
#paul-krugman-imperialist-delusions-the-price-of-fuel
#paul-krugman
#imperialist-delusions-the-price-of-fuel
I’ll read the page content first to understand what this post is about.
#scott-bessent
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No typing-pool annihilation this time, at least not so far, and probably never. AI isn’t killing occupations, but watch out for the elasticity of demand!:

Again, another one from Torsten Slok, who is on a roll these days:

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With comment:

Torsten Slok: AI Is Retraining Workers, Not Replacing Them <https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/ai-is-retraining-workers-not-replacing-them>: ‘A new survey from the New York Fed… shows that 34% of service firms and 22% of manufacturers using AI are retraining staff, while only 4% and 0% report layoffs. This is consistent with our core view that AI is putting downward pressure on wages in AI-exposed occupations without a significant negative impact on employment…. Here: Analysis of actual Claude usage data… suggest[s]… companies are capturing AI productivity gains through wage compression rather than workforce reduction…. [Analysis] by Sania Edlich and me using a difference-in-differences methodology with occupation and year fixed effects across 321 matched occupations from 2015 to today…

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What are the jobs that are like the hand spinners, hand weavers, and hand knitters whose entire occupations vanished during the British Industrial Revolution of the 1800s that brought us into the SteamPower Age? What are the jobs that are like the typing pool stenographers and the switchboard operators and the back-office hand reconcilers whose entire occupations similarly vanished with the coming of the personal computer, = the electronic telephone switch, and the computer network?

Looking around, I see damned few of them.

Thus I think the way to bet is that tasks will shift and occupations will change, but whether the number of people employed in them depends overwhelmingly on the elasticity of demand for the kinds of things that they do. And so Jevons’s Paradox is key here, not as a totem and a fetish to wave around, but as an important piece of analysis.

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I think the solution to this is Douglas Hofstadters’s: There are rules, and there are premises. There must be a bottom layer where the system simply acts on a rule, mechanically, rather than contemplating it as another proposition to assent to. You jump out of the loop, and the step from premises to conclusion is something you do, not something you believe:

1. The Regress That Ate Achilles: Why Logic Can’t Justify Its Own Last Step

2. What the Tortoise Knew: Lewis Carroll’s Proof That Reasoning Isn’t a Rule

A thousand and one premises: Carroll’s infinite note-book and the floor beneath logic; or, the regress and logic’s unsuccessful attempts to justify its own final operative step:

READING: LEWIS CARROLL (1895): What The Tortoise Said To Achilles

<https://math.dartmouth.edu/~matc/Readers/HowManyAngels/Tortoise.html>

ACHILLES had overtaken the Tortoise, and had seated himself comfortably on its back.

“So you’ve got to the end of our race-course?” said the Tortoise. “Even though it does consist of an infinite series of distances? I thought some wiseacre or other had proved that the thing couldn’t be done?”

“It can be done,” said Achilles. “It has been done! Solvitur ambulando. You see the distances were constantly diminishing; and so –”

“But if they had been constantly increasing?” the Tortoise interrupted. “How then?”

“Then I shouldn’t be here,“ Achilles modestly replied; “and you would have got several times round the world, by this time!”

“You flatter me – flatten, I mean,” said the Tortoise; “for you are a heavy weight, and no mistake! Well now, would you like to hear of a race-course, that most people fancy they can get to the end of in two or three steps, while it really consists of an infinite number of distances, each one longer than the previous one?”

“Very much indeed!” said the Grecian warrior, as he drew from his helmet (few Grecian warriors possessed pockets in those days) an enormous note-book and a pencil. “Proceed! And speak slowly, please! Shorthand isn’t invented yet!”

“That beautiful First Proposition of Euclid!” the Tortoise murmured dreamily. “You admire Euclid?”

“Passionately! So far, at least, as one can admire a treatise that wo’n’t be published for some centuries to come!”

“Well, now, let’s take a little bit of the argument in that First Proposition – just two steps, and the conclusion drawn from them. Kindly enter them in your note-book. And in order to refer to them conveniently, let’s call them A, B, and Z: –

(A) Things that are equal to the same are equal to each other.

(B) The two sides of this Triangle are things that are equal to the same.

(Z) The two sides of this Triangle are equal to each other.

Readers of Euclid will grant, I suppose, that Z follows logically from A and B, so that any one who accepts A and B as true, must accept Z as true?”

“Undoubtedly! The youngest child in a High School – as soon as High Schools are invented, which will not be till some two thousand years later – will grant that.“

“And if some reader had not yet accepted A and B as true, he might still accept the sequence as a valid one, I suppose?”

“No doubt such a reader might exist. He might say I accept as true the Hypothetical Proposition that, <em>if A</em> and <em>B</em> be true, <em>Z</em> must be true; but, I <em>don&#8217;t</em> accept <em>A</em> and <em>B</em> as true.&#8217; Such a reader would do wisely in abandoning Euclid, and taking to football.&#8221;</p><p>&#8220;And might there not <em>also</em> be some reader who would sayI accept A and B as true, but I don’t accept the Hypothetical’?”

“Certainly there might. He, also, had better take to football.”

“And neither of these readers,” the Tortoise continued, “is as yet under any logical necessity to accept Z as true?”

“Quite so,” Achilles assented.

“Well, now, I want you to consider me as a reader of the second kind, and to force me, logically, to accept Z as true.”

“A tortoise playing football would be – “ Achilles was beginning

“ – an anomaly, of course,” the Tortoise hastily interrupted. “Don’t wander from the point. Let’s have Z first, and football afterwards!”

“I’m to force you to accept Z, am I?” Achilles said musingly. “And your present position is that you accept A and B, but you don’t accept the Hypothetical –”

“Let’s call it C,“ said the Tortoise.

“– but you don’t accept

(C) If A and B are true, Z must be true.”

“That is my present position,” said the Tortoise.

“Then I must ask you to accept C.“

“I’ll do so,” said the Tortoise, “as soon as you’ve entered it in that note-book of yours. What else have you got in it?”

“Only a few memoranda,” said Achilles, nervously fluttering the leaves: “a few memoranda of – of the battles in which I have distinguished myself!”

“Plenty of blank leaves, I see!” the Tortoise cheerily remarked. “We shall need them all!” (Achilles shuddered.) “Now write as I dictate:-

(A) Things that are equal to the same are equal to each other.

(B) The two sides of this Triangle are things that are equal to the same.

(C) If A and B are true, Z must be true.

(Z) The two sides of this Triangle are equal to each other.”

“You should call it D, not Z,“ said Achilles. “It comes next to the other three. If you accept A and B and C, you must accept Z.“

“And why must I?”

“Because it follows logically from them. If A and B and C are true, Z must be true. You don’t dispute that, I imagine?”

“If A and B and C are true, Z must be true,” the Tortoise thoughtfully repeated. “That’s another Hypothetical, isn’t it? And, if I failed to see its truth, I might accept A and B and C, and still not accept Z, mightn’t I?”

“You might,” the candid hero admitted; “though such obtuseness would certainly be phenomenal. Still, the event is possible. So I must ask you to grant one more Hypothetical.”

“Very good. I’m quite willing to grant it, as soon as you’ve written it down. We will call it

(D) If A and B and C are true, Z must be true.

Have you entered that in your note-book?”

“I have!” Achilles joyfully exclaimed, as he ran the pencil into its sheath. “And at last we’ve got to the end of this ideal race-course! Now that you accept A and B and C and D, of course you accept Z.“

“Do I?” said the Tortoise innocently. “Let’s make that quite clear. I accept A and B and C and D. Suppose I still refused to accept Z?”

“Then Logic would take you by the throat, and force you to do it!” Achilles triumphantly replied. “Logic would tell you `You ca’n’t help yourself. Now that you’ve accepted A and B and C and D, you must accept Z!’ So you’ve no choice, you see.”

“Whatever Logic is good enough to tell me is worth writing down,“ said the Tortoise. “So enter it in your book, please. We will call it

(E) If A and B and C and D are true, Z must be true. Until I’ve granted that, of course I needn’t grant Z. So it’s quite a necessary step, you see?”

“I see,” said Achilles; and there was a touch of sadness in his tone.

Here the narrator, having pressing business at the Bank, was obliged to leave the happy pair, and did not again pass the spot until some months afterwards. When he did so, Achilles was still seated on the back of the much-enduring Tortoise, and was writing in his note-book, which appeared to be nearly full. The Tortoise was saying “Have you got that last step written down? Unless I’ve lost count, that makes a thousand and one. There are several millions more to come. And would you mind, as a personal favour, considering what a lot of instruction this colloquy of ours will provide for the Logicians of the Nineteenth Century – would you mind adopting a pun that my cousin the Mock-Turtle will then make, and allowing yourself to be re-named Taught-Us?”

“As you please!” replied the weary warrior, in the hollow tones of despair, as he buried his face in his hands. “Provided that you, for your part, will adopt a pun the Mock-Turtle never made, and allow yourself to be re-named A Kill-Ease!”

<https://math.dartmouth.edu/~matc/Readers/HowManyAngels/Tortoise.html>

Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achilles> tells me:

Wikipedia: ‘Several philosophers have tried to resolve Carroll’s paradox. Bertrand Russell discussed the paradox briefly in § 38 of The Principles of Mathematics (1903), distinguishing between implication (associated with the form “if p, then q“), which he held to be a relation between unasserted propositions, and inference (associated with the form “p, therefore q“), which he held to be a relation between asserted propositions; having made this distinction, Russell could deny that the Tortoise’s attempt to treat inferring Z from A and B as equivalent to, or dependent on, agreeing to the hypothetical “If A and B are true, then Z is true.”

Peter Winch, a Wittgensteinian philosopher, discussed the paradox in The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958), where he argued that the paradox showed that “the actual process of drawing an inference, which is after all at the heart of logic, is something which cannot be represented as a logical formula … Learning to infer is not just a matter of being taught about explicit logical relations between propositions; it is learning to do something” (p. 57). Winch goes on to suggest that the moral of the dialogue is a particular case of a general lesson, to the effect that the proper application of rules governing a form of human activity cannot itself be summed up with a set of further rules, and so that “a form of human activity can never be summed up in a set of explicit precepts” (p. 53).

Carroll’s dialogue is apparently the first description of an obstacle to conventionalism about logical truth,^[4] later reworked in more sober philosophical terms by W. V. O. Quine.^[5]

Perhap the best thumbnail is: Achilles has all the premises and the conclusion staring him in the face—yet the Tortoise will not budge, and every reason he offers only becomes one more premise to grant. Carroll’s 1895 joke turns out to be a load-bearing wall of modern logic. Every attempt to make the Tortoise reason produces another proposition he can politely refuse to grant. The way out isn’t more logic; it’s noticing that drawing a conclusion was never a belief in the first place.

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For eighty years the free world’s security ran on a single hub, and everyone knew who it was: the United States. What the Viking Alliance is building is the first credible answer to what happens if that hub is captured from within by a combination of grifters, neofascists, and chaos monkeys. The people who spent a decade telling Europe to carry its own weight have finally gotten their wish. And the United States is much less powerful a weight in world security affairs as a result.

Capture the hub of a hub-and-spoke alliance, and it collapses. That is the vulnerability NATO has carried since 1945. Putin thought he had captured the hub via his “special relationship” with Donald Trump as Washington went awry. But every place that Vikings ever set foot—Sweden, Canada, and Ukraine at the core; with Germany, the Baltics, the other Nordics; plus France and Britain and Poland; are now building an advance guard: a durable European capability that no longer depends on the United States showing up. For the first time, “and if the Americans don’t come?” has an answer other than “then we lose.” NATO is becoming a web. Webs are much harder to capture than hubs. And they move by rough consensus, not by the will and whims of a single hub.

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We have, from Shankar Narayan:

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With commentary:

Shankar Narayan: The Coalition of the Doing <https://www.theconcis.com/p/the-coalition-of-the-doing>: ‘Canada supplied the trigger. But… what is rare is actually walking through the door. Sweden did. And now the results are starting to pile up…. One country begins running hard and fast… and, in doing so, starts connecting… making the entire structure stronger than the sum of its parts…. Let us rewind the clock to May 27 and then roll it forward, one decision at a time. Because when you see what happened next, laid out in sequence, there really is no other way to describe it: this has been extraordinary…

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Brad DeLong here: What do I think? This:

Charles Kindleberger taught us that an open international order, whether oriented around trade or security, needs a hegemon willing to be the lender, buyer, and guarantor of “last resort” in economics, and the leader-director in security. In the years after U.S. entry into WWII at the end of 1941 both halves of the post-WWII order outside the Iron Curtain ran on a single anchor, a single hub, the United States.

What Canada triggered, what Sweden walked through, and is now gelling as what Narayan calls the Coalition of the Doing and I call the Viking Alliance is the creation of a new, second potential anchor for the NATO-EU portion of the open international order. What Canada and Sweden and Germany and Ukraine; plus Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, France, and Britain; are doing is building-up an advance guard with a durable, standing capability for military action inside Europe. Procurement, logistics, industrial base, command: the whole stack. And this advance guard’s capability, when built, does not at any point in the causal chain route through the Washington, DC currently controlled by a bunch of grifters, neofascists, and chaos monkeys. An alliance with one indispensable leader is a hub-and-spoke. Hub-and-spokes are brittle exactly where they look strongest. Capture the hub and the thing collapses. But an alliance with two credible centers of gravity in initiating force commitment is a network with redundancy. For the first time since 1945 there exists a plausible answer to the question “and if the Americans don’t come?” that is not simply “then we lose.”

There is irony here, entirely lost on the people who spent a decade demanding Europe “pay its fair share” have gotten their wish: the United States in foreign affairs no longer has its weight multiplied by NATO to the dominant strength of 1,000,000,000 people living in the rich industrial civilization, but only its own 350,000,000.

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Justin Wolfers’ grades are straight Fs on all the things Trump promised to get from tariffs: leverage, deficit reduction, factory revival, national security, and revenue. He says that the failures share a single root: a misconception that trade is a zero-sum contest to be won rather than cooperation that both sides benefit from. I disagree. That would be attributing much more logic to Trump’s actions and statements than they deserve. There are people who work for Trump who have the gross misconception that trade is a zero-sum contest to be “won”, yes. But Trump is simply trying to create headlines by doing things. The Supreme Court and the Republican congressional majority have allowed him to do things with tariffs. So he does them. To get headlines. To the extent that there is a goal, it is to “make a deal” in some way. But mostly it is about the headlines.

Justin says: The mechanism runs from a mistaken premise to self-inflicted damage. Trump treated trade as extraction: America gets “ripped off,” so tariffs force better terms. But tariffs triggered retaliation (China to 125%, Canadian boycotts), raised input costs and consumer prices, injected on-again/off-again uncertainty that deterred the factory investment they were meant to spur. Because trade is reciprocal cooperation, throwing sand in the gears cost America customers, suppliers, and trusted partners rather than winning concessions. The “deals” Trump trumpets were, largely, either fictional or already-existing. The goods trade deficit has gotten worse, but i not what we should be looking at anyway. “Reshoring” did not happen as sand in the gears reduced American factory employment. And Trump has advertised a great many supply-chain vulnerabilities that people now have no reason not to exploit.

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Grading tariffs against Trump’s own promises and not economists’ ideals yields Justin’s five consecutive Fs:

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Economics. Explained. Clearly.

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CROSSPOST: JUSTIN WOLFERS: Did Trump’s Tariffs Achieve Trump’s Goals?

<https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/did-trumps-tariffs-work-i-used-his> <https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/>

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Did Trump’s Tariffs Achieve Trump’s Goals?

When the Trump administration pushed out their tariffs, there was a laundry list of great things they were going to achieve. Today, I’m asking: did those tariffs do what the administration promised? I’m an economics professor, so I’m approaching this like a report card…

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21 hours ago · 150 likes · 4 comments · Justin Wolfers

I didn’t grade the trade war against an economist’s ideal. I graded it against Trump’s own promises.

Justin Wolfers

Sep 02, 2026

When the Trump administration pushed out their tariffs, there was a laundry list of great things they were going to achieve. Today, I’m asking: did those tariffs do what the administration promised? I’m an economics professor, so I’m approaching this like a report card.

President Trump’s tariffs were supposed to do a lot of things. Give America leverage over foreign governments. Shrink the trade deficit. Bring factories home. Make America safer from China. And pay for child care, tax cuts, farmer relief, and tariff dividend checks. Maybe replace the income tax. Or cure toe fungus.

So today, for report card day: Five promises, which we’ll put to five empirical tests, and deliver five grades on.

Here’s the rule I’m using. I’m not grading these tariffs against what I would have done, or against what economists think trade policy should look like. I’m grading them against what the administration itself said the tariffs would deliver.

So: pencils down. Let’s see how the administration’s tariff policy scores on its own test.

Test One: Leverage for Getting Better Deals

Promise one was the tariffs were going to give America leverage over foreign governments. This was an argument that came in two parts. One hinges on fairness, the other on strength.

The fairness claim was that foreign governments were ripping America off with tariffs, subsidies, regulations, currency policies, all of it. The second part of the argument came down to power. America has the world’s biggest consumer market, everyone wants in, so we use that to force other countries to the table.

There’s a few problems with the fairness side. First: the world we actually lived in — at least before the trade war — wasn’t the world the President described. The world actually involves very little protectionism. The arguments for free trade had mostly won the day in most countries.

Canada and Mexico traded with America under USMCA, the free trade agreement Trump himself negotiated in his first term, and most goods crossed those borders duty-free. South Korea had KORUS, and most American manufactured exports already entered Korea tariff-free. The average tariff on American goods was around 3% in the European Union and around 3% in China. Most other rich countries sat in the same neighborhood. A few poor countries ran bigger tariffs, but they’re not large markets for us, so not really a big deal.

So there were tariffs — just very, very low ones. Why weren’t those numbers zero, rather than two or three percent? Because that’s not how trade deals work. When it comes to negotiating trade, two leaders sit down and eliminate tariffs across most of the economy. But they leave aside a handful of politically radioactive sectors — think dairy, rice, sugar, sometimes steel. Those are the sectors where a politician who mishandles them loses their job. So you forgive your counterpart their political weaknesses, and they help you with yours. The result is the attainable trade deal rather than the perfect one: tariffs broadly at zero, hand your counterpart a few political wins, and trade (mostly) freely.

That’s the world America had. The claim that we faced vast tariff walls across the developed world isn’t true, and hasn’t been for decades. It may have been partly true in the President’s youth… But that was a while ago.

Now for the power half. Did the tariffs get America better deals?

There have been many announcements about this — but they don’t amount to much.

Take South Korea. The administration celebrated a new deal opening Korea to American cars and manufactured goods. Except that our trade agreement, KORUS, had already given most American manufactured exports tariff-free entry years ago. So the new arrangement leaves a 15% U.S. tariff on Korean goods and claims credit for market access American manufacturers already had.

Or take the much-touted arrangement with the European Union, which isn’t a deal at all. It’s a framework: a promise to make future promises. The document is written almost entirely in the future tense — “intends,” “will work,” “seeks.” It’s the trade equivalent of “we should really get coffee sometime.”

Still the administration claims to have signed real deals — reciprocal trade agreements — with ten countries: Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, and Taiwan. Say that whole list out loud and it sounds impressive. Add up their share of American goods exports and you get about 6%. And the agreements cover only some products and only some barriers, so the share of exports actually affected is far smaller than that.

Oh… but it gets worse. It’s not clear that any of these agreements are actually in effect. Most were struck in response to tariffs imposed under emergency powers, and those tariffs were subsequently ruled unconstitutional. A USTR report from February lists all or nearly all of these as agreements that “have been negotiated, but have not yet entered into force.” So the count might be closer to zero.

Who isn’t represented in that count? The folks we actually trade heavily with: Mexico, Canada, the UK, China, Japan, and Germany, plus (as discussed above) the EU and Korea. This list of counties shows up elsewhere: It’s the list where American access has been restricted, or may soon be, in retaliation. China took tariffs on American exports as high as 125% in April 2025, and while the peak came down, a 10% additional tariff on U.S. goods runs through November 2026. That’s alongside targeted tariffs on American farm and energy products. American goods exports to China fell 26% in 2025. Sales elsewhere rose, but they didn’t replace that market.

The Canadian government retaliated too, and Canadian consumers started quietly protesting in their own way: trips to the U.S. fell sharply, as did their imports. Turns out the surest way to lose a Canadian’s business is to keep calling their country the 51st state.

Grading Leverage: Threats, retaliation, a few small commitments that may not be in force. No serious net gain for American exporters. That’s an F.

Test Two: Reducing the Trade Deficit

The White House called the trade deficit a national emergency. Not just the total trade deficit either: Peter Navarro argued for actions to reduce every bilateral deficit. This would require persuading the rest of the world to want exactly as much American stuff as America wants of theirs. Bold.

In 2024, America bought $1.212 trillion more in goods from the world than it sold. In 2025, the first full year of the tariff program, the goods deficit rose to a record of about $1.24 trillion. Tariffs apply directly to goods, and the goods deficit got worse.

The first half of 2026 does look better — roughly $550 billion, which annualizes to something a bit north of a trillion. That’s an improvement… and a trillion-dollar deficit.

And, as you may have heard, America is a service-focused economy. We sell a lot of that — finance, software, travel, consulting, entertainment, education. The total deficit — including services, this time — was about $904 billion in 2024 and about $902 billion in 2025. If those sound like they’re pretty much the same number, that’s because they are.

A good professor asks his students to show their work, so let’s look to China. America’s goods deficit with China fell by about $94 billion in 2025. That’s good news — until you notice the goods deficit with Southeast Asia rose by about $100 billion over the same stretch. We just changed the labels on the boxes. Imports left China and reappeared in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. Some of that is real supply chain relocation. Some of it is Chinese firms shipping through third countries. Either way, Americans kept buying.

Grade the Trade Deficit: Bigger in 2025, maybe smaller in 2026, still enormous. Another F.

I’d add that a deficit is an accounting total, not an economic scorecard. The whole here premise is flawed. It’s not at all clear that a better grade on this score would mean a better life for Americans.

Test Three: An Industrial Revival

This is the big one, folks. The one the administration talks about at every opportunity. They said they were going to bring back factories. Big boofy blokes with steel-toed boots bringing home the bacon.

And yet: Manufacturing employment is lower than when Trump returned to office. By July 2026, America had about 62,000 fewer manufacturing jobs than in January 2025. That’s a small number, coming in at roughly half a percent. It’s not a collapse. But we ran an extraordinary trade war to rescue this one sector, and the sector kept shrinking while the rest of the economy added jobs.

Manufacturing output has risen modestly this year, and factory capacity remains loose. American factories are not running flat out, because tariffs did not unleash a wave of new demand for what they make. Factory construction says the same thing: the manufacturing construction boom of the early 2020s was driven by semiconductor investment and industrial policy passed before Trump returned, it peaked in 2024, and it has fallen since. The tariffs arrived after the boom started and during its slowdown.

This is one where the details really deserve a first-hand account. The Dallas Fed put a beautifully simple question to 271 Texas firms: what net impact do you expect higher tariffs to have on your business this year?

59% said negative.

4% said positive.

17% said no impact.

20% didn’t know.

Fifty-nine over four is roughly fifteen — fifteen manufacturers expecting harm for every one expecting help.

And among the firms expecting harm, 55% said they would pass costs to customers. 44% said they would absorb costs as lower profits. Notably, 29% would look for domestic suppliers — that’s something the policy was actually going for, and it’s a positive. 27% would just shift the timing of their imports.

Just 5% planned to move production to the United States.

The Fed’s national small business survey finds the same pattern: 13% of firms using foreign inputs switched to domestic suppliers, and just 3% moved production to America.

There’s a reason nobody’s pouring concrete: if a tariff is on Monday and off on Tuesday, you don’t build a plant around it. The tariff can flip several more times before the concrete has dried.

Grading the Industrial Revival: Some domestic sourcing, fewer factory jobs, no revival. A clear F.

Test Four: National Security

I don’t want it to seem like I’m going through this report on the premise that there’s no point going after these goals. There is a real trade policy case for targeting strategic risks. America does need secure access to rare earths, magnets, chips, medicines, and specialized metals.

The trouble is that most of this trade war wasn’t targeted at all. And where it was targeted, it backfired.

Rare earths are misnamed — they aren’t especially rare. The scarcity comes in who processes them. China does a lot of that processing, and they do it for the entire world. That means they turn raw material into magnets. Those magnets go into cars, aircraft, electronics, and military equipment. Before the trade war, China supplied around 70% of the rare earth compounds and metals America imported.

Then things escalated, and China restricted exports of critical rare earths and magnets. The White House’s own economic report says those restrictions caused factory shutdowns, including in the U.S. China has since used export controls on gallium, germanium, graphite, and antimony too. No, those aren’t words I made up to sound like a scientist (please don’t ever think that I am a scientist). But those critical minerals matter for semiconductors, batteries, weapons, and advanced manufacturing.

Here’s the part that keeps me up. The dependence was always there. But a dependence only becomes a vulnerability once your adversary discovers it — and this trade war sent them looking. They found it. Now they know exactly where to press, and they’ve shown that they’re willing.

The administration has announced domestic mining and magnet projects, and those may help reduce these vulnerabilities. They also have nothing to do with the tariffs. And don’t get me started on the Strait of Hormuz and the rest of what we import from that part of the world.

Grading National Security: The vulnerability was revealed, not reduced. F.

Test Five: Tariffs Raise Revenue

Here’s a partial list of what the President promised that tariff revenue would fund. Child care. Tax cuts. No tax on tips. No tax on overtime. No tax on Social Security. Tax benefits for American cars. Farmer relief. Tariff dividend checks — remember those? Mine never arrived. Debt reduction. And the end of the income tax.

Tariffs are taxes, and taxes do two things: they change behavior, and they raise revenue.

This program certainly changed behavior. Families paid higher prices, businesses paid higher input costs, and supply chains reorganized themselves around dodging the tariff.

The revenue is the strange part. Customs duties rose from $77 billion in fiscal 2024 to $195 billion in fiscal 2025 — an increase of about $118 billion. Much of that increase came from tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and the Supreme Court struck those down earlier this year. By mid-August, roughly $100 billion had already been refunded.

These refunds don’t work like they do at a store. When I paid more for olive oil at Costco because of a tariff, the refund didn’t come to me. It went to the importer of record. Yes: that’s the company on the customs paperwork. So… Costco. The family at the checkout paid while the big importer got the check.

More is likely coming. The Section 122 replacement tariffs — a temporary 10% tariff meant for a balance of payments crisis — were struck down at trial because there was no balance of payments crisis, and that’s on appeal. The newer Section 301 tariffs, the ones you’re paying right now, rest on the premise that we’re punishing other countries for their use of forced labor. Which countries? Apparently all of them. That’s a pretext, and everyone involved knows it.

Why the parade of odd legal theories? Because the Constitution gives the tariff power to Congress. Congress has occasionally lent narrow slices of it to the White House, but nobody ever intended it as something a president waves around at will — and this administration has consistently declined to go ask Congress for it. The courts occasionally suggest we look at the Constitution, and it’s unclear whether the administration will gather much revenue here at all.

Of course, if the administration passed these tariffs as laws, they wouldn’t have any of these problems. The revenue problems are the direct result of the President refusing to involve Congress in his trade war.

Grade Revenue: Americans got the distortion, and much of the money is being handed back to importers rather than kept by the Treasury. F.

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Final Grade: Time to Call the Parents

Let me put the report card up one last time.

Leverage: threats and retaliation, no serious net gain. The deficit: worse in 2025, smaller in 2026, still enormous. Factories: a little domestic sourcing, no revival. Security: China found the choke point. Revenue: Americans paid, importers got refunded.

These failures look different from one another, but they share a root, and it’s an idea about what trade is.

Trade is cooperation. A farmer gets a customer. A factory gets a component. A family gets a product. An American business gets a buyer abroad.

The trade war threw sand in all of it. It disrupted export markets. It disrupted supply chains. It disrupted investment. It disrupted relationships with allies. Then it added uncertainty and stirred.

A stronger America has more customers, more suppliers, more trusted partners, and more capacity to make the things it needs. This trade war has delivered fewer of every one of them.

Five promises. Five tests. Five fails.

And this is grading the President on his own stated goals. As I’ve said before, those goals are themselves questionable:

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The Lawyer’s Theory of Trade

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a month ago · 197 likes · 12 comments · Justin Wolfers

<https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/did-trumps-tariffs-work-i-used-his> <https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/>

Platypus Economics

Did Trump’s Tariffs Achieve Trump’s Goals?

When the Trump administration pushed out their tariffs, there was a laundry list of great things they were going to achieve. Today, I’m asking: did those tariffs do what the administration promised? I’m an economics professor, so I’m approaching this like a report card…

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21 hours ago · 150 likes · 4 comments · Justin Wolfers

Platypus Economics

Economics. Explained. Clearly.

By Justin Wolfers

Brad DeLong here: It is excellent to welcome Justin Wolfers to the WebLog-o-Sphere, or I suppose these days we should call it the SubStack-a-Thon. (I do think, all-in-all, that the SubStack Honchos’ plans to try to become the place for people who do not want to have their brains hacked by malevolent actors is worth leaning into and supporting.) He has been blogging a piece a day since April 21.

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Today he hits the sweet spot, and is very much worth crossposting.

Justin is right not only in that Trump’s chaos-monkey trade wars off-again-on-again Trump-Always-Chickens-Out TACO have been a disaster not just from an economists’ point of view, but also from a point of view that rationalizes Trump’s own stated goals.

The “deal”s” Trump celebrates (Korea, EU) either restate access American firms already had or are aspirational “frameworks” in the future tense; the ten “reciprocal” deals cover ~6% of exports and may not be legally in force. The goods deficit hit a record ~$1.24T in 2025. But that is not a measure we should be looking at. And China has learned how much potential leverage over the U.S. it has with rare-earths and critical-minerals: a lot.

Justin cuts through the announcement theater of framework “deals” and bilateral-deficit rhetoric with verifiable data, and clarifies conceptual errors. — deficits as accounting identities, dependence vs. vulnerability & c. Leverage, deficit, factories, security, revenue—all failed, because the war threw sand in the gears of productive economic cooperation that is the reason for trade.

However, I profoundly disagree with an underlying assumption of Justin’s piece: Justin claims that Trump has been trying to follow a rational policy based on his false belief that trade is a zero-sum struggle. Grant Trump his bad model of the world, the framing runs, and the tariffs become the logical policy moves that follow from it; they simply fail on their own terms because the model is wrong.

That concedes far too much.

That imputes a non-existent means-ends rationality to Trump and the Tru,p administration.

That takes a chaotic set of actions, and constructs underneath them a stable set of goals, a theory connecting instruments to those goals, and a willingness to be corrected by evidence.

But that is nowhere in evidence. The “laundry list” of promises Justin so ably demolishes was never a plan. It was a rotating grab-bag of justifications, generated after the fact and abandoned the moment a new audience or a new grievance required a different one. The better model is not “wrong beliefs rationally applied” but the near-absence of the belief-to-action link that rationality requires.

Tariff policy here is a dominance display and a mechanism for extracting tribute, deference, and the pleasure of being courted. Those are ends in themselves. They are not instruments toward national prosperity. That is why the tariffs go on Monday and off Tuesday, why the legal theories are transparent pretexts nobody is meant to believe, why “deals” are announced that restate access we already had, and why the same measures are defended one week as leverage, the next as revenue, the next as reindustrialization.

The chaos is not a bug in the execution of a zero-sum worldview. The worldview is not doing any work. To treat the policy as the sincere, if flawed, application of mercantilist doctrine is to flatter it with a coherence it does not possess. Worse, it invites the reply that the doctrine simply needs better technicians next time.

The truth is this: it is chaos monkeys all the way down.

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The most interesting piece of data to me was the Dallas Fed survey: it found manufacturers overwhelmingly expecting economic harm from Trump’s chaos-monkey tariffs <https://www.dallasfed.org/research/surveys/tbos/2025/2504q#tab-tmos>:

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Let’s just leave it there.

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Software developers are the AI industry’s best customers. Is their experience also the most misleading experience possible for its economy-wide scope? Roughly 80% of developers already use AI tools. Coding may now be more than half of OpenAI and Anthropic’s revenue, currenly running at $80 billion a year as of the second quarter of 2026. But to what else could that even roughly scale??

Matter spirals into a black hole, gaining speed and hence mass and energy as it moves closer converting its gravitational potential energy into kinetic-thermal and then, as particles collide, electromagnetic. It shines with the brightness of ten trillion suns: a quasar. Tokens spiral into an occupation, and are there harnessed to do the work of humanity, and shine—well, the metaphor is strained. But the point is that some occupations are, in the value of the work they can use tokens emitted by a properly harnessed LLM—Large Language Model—to do, like quasars. Others are not.

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Paul Kedrosky picks this up from The Economist of London, and points out that computer programming is close to unique in how much LLM-generated tokens it can get ueul work out of:

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And he comments:

Paul Kedrosky: Why Software Developers Are Highly Unrepresentative of Broader AI Use <https://paulkedrosky.com/why-software-developers-are-hiunrepresentative-of-broader-ai-use/>: ‘Will anyone ultimately use AI as intensively as software developers do? That matters because coding is already a huge share of AI usage and revenue: roughly 80% of developers use AI coding tools, and coding may account for more than half of combined OpenAI and Anthropic ARR, by some estimates. See the… figure…. Note that it has finance in the wrong place, with the biggest banks, like Goldman and JPM, having more like 15% of employees in software development….

Coding is unusually expansive: A short prompt can trigger planning, code generation, testing, debugging, retries and repeated ingestion of a large codebase. Token use can explode relative to the size of the initial request. Much other white-collar work is more compressive: Summarization, document review, research synthesis, meeting notes and similar tasks take large inputs and produce relatively small outputs. Adoption and token intensity become different questions. AI could become ubiquitous across law, finance, consulting and management Those occupations might still consume far fewer tokens per worker than software development.

That matters directly for the capex thesis: The infrastructure buildout requires not just broad AI adoption, but enormous sustained token consumption. The Economist estimates annual AI revenue would need to rise from roughly $150bn today to about $2.5tn by decade-end.

The key forecasting error is treating coding as merely early rather than structurally different: If software development is both an early adopter and one of the most token-expansive occupations, extrapolating its usage curve across the rest of the economy will systematically overstate eventual compute demand…

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In programming, you set the goal and the harness and the LLM begins doing its Clever Hans thing, stamping its foot and watching out for the desired reaction at which point it is done. Only this Clever Hans’s foot-stamping is at nanosecond speed, with a big model to capture far-away dependencies and the huge amount of relevant data that is the set of all running code that has ever been written, and repeating the actions over and over and over again until by lucky chance the desired result is achieved. That is, Paul Kedrosky, not going to be how knowledge workers in other professions are going to use “AI”.

Paul is riffing off of this from The Economist of London:

Anonymous: Will Anybody Use AI as Much as Coders Do? <https://www-economist-com.libproxy.berkeley.edu/business/2026/08/30/will-anybody-use-ai-as-much-as-coders-do>: ‘The answer will have big implications for the investment boom…. Uptake of the technology has been strongest by far among software developers. Four-fifths of them say they use an AI coding tool…. In June 2025 the combined annual recurring revenue of Cognition, Cursor, Lovable and Replit, four AI-coding startups, was roughly $800m. Today it stands at $6bn…. Lawyering, finance and customer service… bear some similarities to coding…. But four factors set coding apart: the availability of training data; how easy it is to test a model’s output; the amount of human interaction involved in the work; and software engineers themselves. AI companies are trying to make their other markets more coding-like, but doing so will not be straightforward…

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Brad DeLong here: Briefly, coding is expansive while other white-collar work is compressive. A short program, or these days a short prompt, can and does trigger planning, code generation, testing, debugging, retries and repeated ingestion of a large codebase followed by a great deal of computation and reams and reams of output. In a world in which the computer will try twenty versions of a command before it hits upon the correct format, token creation and use explodes as the machine groups toward an anwer. By contrast, the business of a lawyer is to take the expansive set of legal codes and case situations that is the law and squeeze it down into a brief, an opinion, a recommendation. The business of a consultant is much the same. And the whole point of management is to throw away as much information as you can in order to make the problems of direction and coordination graspable and actionable. Summarization, document review, research synthesis, meeting notes and similar tasks. Large inputs, and relatively small outputs. No explosion of agentic activity once the universe of input documents has been defined and collected.

As Paul Kedrosky says, AI could become ubiquitous across law, finance, and consulting, yet those workers would still burn far fewer tokens each than software developers do.

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The factors of production are these: labor, capital accumulation, enterprise and innovation, and risk-bearing. The cost of risk-bearing is increased when there is an unstable standard of value. Kevin Warsh is manufacturing that instability by refusing to settle on a reaction function for the central bank. Read as a Fed Chair’s vision of the economy, Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole speech confuses. Read as fog-generation, it is crystal clear in its way:

Demoiselle Marchée Financiere thought that Kevin Warsh’s speech at Jackson hole was important enough to lower the real value of everything two years in the future relative to today by fully 0.16%. That is, the real wealth of worker skills, capital and infrastructure investments, and production networks we expect to see in two years lost $320 billion of its value relative to today as Kevin Warsh gave his speech:

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Interesting—and probably not what Warsh intended.

My theory of Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh is this: he is way out over his skis, having gotten the job by promising Trump that he would lower inflation and lower interest rates, while reassuring the bond market that he was really a hard-money guy. Now he is stuck trying to create strategic ambiguity. I said this in June, and I said this in May. Having arrived at the top of the greasy pole, Warsh has discovered that the only move available to a man who has told incompatible things to incompatible audiences is to say as little as possible, for as long as possible. That is not a communications strategy. It is a hostage situation, and the hostage is the standard of value.

I have seen nothing to challenge that theory.

Thus, in my view, people who want to understand Warsh need to start with he is trying to create strategic ambiguity to avoid a full-fledged fundamental break with either Semi-Senile Chaos-Monkey Trump on the one hand or Demoiselle Marchée Financiere on the other. If they don’t start there, they wind up confused.

For example, the sharp Tim Duy yesterday morning:

Tim Duy: Fed Watch <sghmacro.com>: ‘Warsh… acknowledge[d] that rate hikes could be necessary to put inflation back on a path to 2%…. Warsh… [had] refused to make that one simple admission…. Warsh… did not provide a forward-looking assessment… nor did he provide a timeline…. We have been confident that the Fed will need to hike rates… [but] Warsh seeks to eliminate the certainty around individual rate decisions that market participants crave….

Warsh… outlined seven key principles…. Caution about using backward looking data to extrapolate forward…. Broadly align aggregate supply and aggregate demand…. The 2% PCE target…. Full employment, adding that it is compatible with price stability…. Policy acts through short term rates…. Money matters…. Less communication [from the Fed]….

Warsh add[ed] a fresh definition of underlying inflation…. By our count, this is Warsh’s fourth…. First… trimmed mean PCE. Second… the five hundred millionth and one price. Third… the median price at big box stores…. Fourth metric… “disaggregate the 199 individual components of the PCE price measure. Over the past 12 months, 54 percent… showed price increases above 3 percent. This is well below the post-pandemic highs of about 77 percent, but it remains well above the level of 32 percent in the two decades that preceded the pandemic…”.

Even after acknowledging the existing inflation pressures, Warsh doesn’t say that the trends represent upside risks for inflation…. Remember, he declared earlier in the speech the importance of not extrapolating trends…

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Or Robert Armstrong:

Robert Armstrong: Warsh Settles Some Nerves at Jackson Hole <https://www.ft.com/content/646b812e-c9de-49ba-90f3-f9d12205f876>: ‘Speech… leaves open questions over Fed ‘reaction function’…. Friday’s speech… was a matter of incremental clarification…. For markets, the most important line of the speech was Warsh saying that this summer’s somewhat softer inflation readings did not convince him the underlying trend is improving.… Warsh did not do much to solve this puzzle, except to emphasise that he really, really does not like the Fed forecasting the economy and the future path of policy…. [But] the Fed’s credibility in markets hinges upon collective understanding of the bank’s “reaction function” — how and when it will respond to changes in the economy. If not through forecasts, how to make this known? Warsh raised this crucial question and answered it only with virtuous generalities about humbleness and empiricism. The market will not be satisfied with that for long…

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Try to use this to construct insights into Warsh’s thinking, and you end up confused. Interpret this as an attempt to preserve strategic ambiguity, and it is crystal clear.

Armstrong and Duy are only two of the large number of very smart people in my feed trying, in good faith, to figure out what Kevin Warsh actually thinks. Each of them has come away holding a fistful of fog. Let me try to say what I mean by that:

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To call “perceived probability of expropriation in the 1980s” by the name of “institutions” is, at best, really weird. And David Albouy should not have to be chill with respect to Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson’s unwillingness to recognize that the IV analysis in their “Colonial Origins…” is an embarrassment that should never have been in the paper. Other than that, I greatly enjoyed the play. I think Albouy, Parker, and Durlauf are more than fair here:

We have:

Jonathan Parker: <https://x.com/ProfJAParker/status/2094567917048226040>: ‘Steve has the right way to interpret the important research & evidence in AJR & Daron’s related work. It fits a given narrative to historical details, tells a rich plausible story through that lens with lots of evidence. (And David’s work is important & deserves respect)…

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And:

Steve Durlauf: <https://x.com/sndurlauf/status/2094545774080307362>: ‘David Albouy @albouy is entirely justified in being aggrieved. It was completely inappropriate for @TheEconomist to publish a response to their (ridiculous) article on Daron Acemoglu that contained a misstatement of the Albouy criticisms, just at it was inappropriate that the article’s author did not contact David to describe the nature and import of his criticisms for the ideas that AJR have developed, as opposed to the merits of a particular set of statistical exercises. There are huge questions surrounding the ways that credible empirical claims can be made about questions of the type AJR address.

Cross-country regressions have proven to a very fragile source of information on the mechanisms underlying growth and development. My view of the AJR research program is that the empirical dimension should be understood from the vantage point of inference to the best explanation, aka abduction, as a way to understand their research strategy, which implies historical/qualitative evidence is central. For details, see my paper

“Institutions, Development, and Growth: Where Does Evidence Stand?” Handbook of Economic Development and Institutions, Jean-Marie Baland, François Bourguignon, Jean-Philippe Platteau, and Thierry Verdier, eds., Princeton University Press, 2020…

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And:

David Albouy: <https://x.com/albouy/status/2094501978818621440>: ‘I tried to be chill, but Acemoglu’s false statement reminded me too much of the gaslighting I had to deal with to publish my comment. Acemoglu et al don’t respond directly to criticisms, and often make up demonstrably false claims to defend themselves, with no accountability:

If anyone wants to read my comment, it’s available here: <https://static1.squarespace.com/static/62f1eb5aa4471e693f087c96/t/630594445e4b432c6913e58c/1661310023111/AJRrev.pdf>. The data appendix is available on my website if you want to really dive into dumpster fire of their data construction. The real crime was in the cover-up. Eg Acemoglu et al never confronted the embarrassment of my Figure 1:

Instead they issued a reply full of red herrings with the bullying title “Hither Thou Shall Come but no Further”. They could have acted as scientists but opted to confuse.

As a grad student, I emailed and visited Robinson’s office many times to talk about my preliminary investigations. He was never available. When I finally confronted him, he waved me away, saying, “I think you’re looking for a different Robinson”. Unbelievable, but true. I tracked down Johnson at an AEA meeting. In the spirit of scientific collaboration, I offered to sit down and go through the data points with him, he nodded in agreement saying that would be nice.

I never got a response to any emails after that. As for Acemoglu, I tried to make peace. But i still remember in 2007 after my R&R at the AER, I submitted a paper to REStat where Acemoglu was editor, trusting that he’d recuse himself and not handle it. A few months later, I got a rejection letter signed by Acemoglu…

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And:

Jon Steinsson: To David Albouy <https://x.com/JonSteinsson/status/2094559148960833707>: ‘Let me offer a tiny consolation: I teach your critique to 1st year econ PhD students every year <https://jonsteinsson.com/teaching/FundamentalCauses.pdf>:

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Brad DeLong here: I wrote about how the IV is a dumpster fire only last April. My view has long been that (a) David Albouy is 100% correct here, and that (b) if Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson were wiser, they would recognize that David Albouy is their best friend in the world, for he provides an explanation for what are otherwise very uncomfortable—clock-striking-13-uncomfortable—IV results.

Briefly: AJR simply have no real first stage. The “1-in-1,000” significance on log-mortality-to-expropriation-risk melts to 1-in-25 once you notice the mortality assignments are smuggling in continent dummies, and to 1-in-3 once you separate barracks deaths from campaign deaths and laborer data. With a first stage that weak, the second-stage test statistic isn’t a t-distribution — it’s near-Cauchy: infinite variance, no standard deviation, and no mean at all. You are drawing noise from fat tails and calling it a coefficient. The Cauchy distribution is the devil — the lesson my sometime-roommate John Bound taught me back when we were both much younger. Weak first stage in, garbage out. Only the file drawer Darwinian-selection process launders that garbage into a “finding”. Weak instruments plus sampling on the instrument that produces a significant IV coefficient is the replication crisis in a clown suit, driving a clown car. And often you really do not want the refreshments in the trunk of that clown car, as AJR would recognize if they were wiser. ​

This is what I wrote back four months ago:

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Colonial origins, causal claims, the baggage left behind in the overhead bin via the absence of a structural model, settler-colonist mortality, modern pro-prosperity “institutions”, and structural-empirical truth…

• Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, & James A. Robinson. 2001. “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation”. American Economic Review, 91:5 (Dec.), pp. 1369-1401. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2677930> <https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/colonial-origins-of-comparative-development.pdf>.

I was thinking I would do an economic history post yesterday and a political economy post today, but life is busy, busy, busy, what with chaos, staring at screens watching people get blown up and so forth. Then I sat across from Jón Steinsson at the faculty lunch, and in the course of the conversation he mentioned that he still taught the graduate students the quarter century-old Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson “Colonial Origins…” paper.

Why? Because it is both incredibly strong and incredibly weak, a true rabbit and a true duck, depending on how you look at. Teach it, and students get very valuable experience in having strong reactions and figuring out how to explain them—and also (we hope) practice in listening to people with whom you violently disagree but who think what they think for reasons.

AJR’s “Colonial Origins” is surely among the most influential empirical paper in historical development economics of the last quarter-century. Its argument is elegant:

• European settler colonialists who found that they could survive and thrive in a colony built inclusive pro-growth developmental institutions.

• European settlers who found that they couldn’t, and that they needed to grab what they could and return home before they succumbed to yellow fever or such, did not.

• Places with high European settler mortality saw the development of “extractive institutions”, hostile to widely distributed prosperity both in the past and in the present.

• Those early institutions persisted to this day.

• Colonial-era European settler mortality gives us a lever—a valid instrument—to identify the causal effect of institutions on prosperity.

The result that Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson claim?: that differences in institutions explain about three-quarters of the income per capita differences across former colonies. Geography, latitude, disease burden—once you control for institutions, they do not matter.

But this is a paper that turned me into a Heckmanite—into a believer in the idea that only those who have fully specified structural models, at least in their mind’s eye if not out there on the table, have a valid warrant to do anything statistical that they claim is in any sense “causal”. Structural models keep you from abandoning burdensome baggage in the overhead compartment when you exit the plane—and AJR’s procedures and paper has a lot of such, which the non-structural IV-framing hides from view. Briefly: either prosperity has a strong negative structural effect on governance quality—which contradicts everything we know from political science and history—or settler mortality in the 17th century is a better measure of what matters in modern institutions than present-day institutional analysis by people who know about and can see them is.

Neither claim is comfortable.

Yet both are concealed by the IV design.

In any event, here is a link to where you can pull it down as an interactive python document: <https://github.com/braddelong/working_20251227/blob/main/2026-04-07-DELIVERED-EDITED-econ-196-week-9-reversals-of-fortune.ipynb>.

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The Big Bear of “AI”, but a thinker whose thought is richer and much more complex than is conveyed by the “stochastic parrots” thumbnail meme. A.B. Linguistics Berkeley 1995, Ph.D. Stanford 2000 with thesis on the absence of the copula in AAVE; then Berkeley, Stanford, YY Technologies, University of Washington; co-author of Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction. She in 2000 gave the skeptical position three things: a meme—stochastic parrots—a thought experiment—the octopus—and a target—the leaning-in to anthropomorphization that underpins all of the “achieving AGI” and “foothills of the Singularity” hype.

Emily Bender’s “Climbing Towards NLU” with Alexander Koller proposes two people on separate deserted islands, communicating via an underwater telegraph cable, but one of them has been replaced by a hyper-intelligent octopus who has detected the statistical patterns in the exchanges. But because the octopus has only ever seen the sequence of signals and never the things they refer to, the moment one islander faces a genuine novelty—say, a bear attack, and urgently asks how to build a weapon from the materials at hand—the octopus cannot give real help and can only produce fluent, plausible-sounding replies without grounding in the actual world. LLMs are Stochastic Parrots, as the team she was on wrote in their “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?”

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Why has her work struck such a nerve? Well, “Stochastic Parrots” is a very good paper. It has the catchy meme angle that tends toward virality. And Google tried to kill it, or at least to say that these thoughts are not thoughts that anyone working at Google has or is allowed to have.

As I understand it, Google has an internal pre-publication review process called PubApprove—a check that a paper doesn’t leak proprietary information or trade secrets, not a peer review. ​⁠The paper cleared PubApprove. Vice President Megan Kacholia then ordered Temit Gebru to either pull the paper submission from the conference or remove all Google authors’ names from it. Gebru asked for transparency and for meetings where she could make her case, and said if those conditions couldn’t be met she’d negotiate a departure date after her vacation. Google treated that as a resignation, cut off her email while she was on vacation, and she was out. Margaret Mitchell, her co-lead, was fired a couple of months later.

Google tells false stories about why they did what they did. Jeff Dean, head of Google AI, claimed the paper “didn’t meet our bar for publication” via PubApprove because it “ignored too much relevant research” and was submitted to PubApprove with only a day’s notice, too late for proper review. The “ignored relevant research” was bullshit: PubApprove is a sensitive-information check. And nearly half of all papers going through PubApprove were submitted with a day or less notice. ​⁠

The references:

• Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina Mcmillan-Major, & Shmargaret Shmitchell. 2021. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’21), 610–623. March. <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922>.

• Bender, Emily M., & Alexander Koller. 2020. “Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data”. Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 5185–5198. July. <https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463/>.

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Why is it Emily Bender rather than Timnit Gebru or Margaret Mitchell who shows up in my feed these days? After Google lit its reputation as a place where people could do serious work on large chunks of the study of “AI” on fire, Bender took the public-explainer path in a way that Gebru and Mitchell—now heads of DAIR (the Distributed AI Research Institute) and aresearcher and ethics lead at Hugging Face—did not.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUIQYQXsEvw>

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Brad DeLong here: With respect to:

‘A faces an emergency. She is suddenly pursued by an angry bear. She grabs a couple of sticks and frantically asks B to come up with a way to construct a weapon to defend herself. Of course, O has no idea what A “means”. Solving a task like this requires the ability to map accurately between words and real-world entities (as well as reasoning and creative thinking). It is at this point that O would fail the Turing test, if A hadn’t been eaten by the bear before noticing the deception. Having only form available as training data, O did not learn meaning…. Because agents who produce English sentences usually have communicative intents… [A] assumes that O does too, and thus she builds the conventional meaning English associates with O’s utterances. Because she assumes that O is B, she uses that conventional meaning together with her other guesses about B’s state of mind and goals to attribute communicative intent. It is not that O’s utterances make sense, but rather, that A can make sense of them…

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Well, yes. But.

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