Dan’s subhead: “moats and their discontents”. A drum I have been beating for a while: the AI arms race is likely to fatten consumer surplus, not boost national-accounts measurements given the roles of platform monopolies, MAMLMs as moat-maintenance, and brain‑hacking ads; thus the most likely scenario is huge capex, tiny measured real GDP gians, and the non‑appearance of any large AI deployment-driven productivity boom.
It’s very nice to see that Dan Davies agrees with me: the overwhelming economic-welfare impact from the coming of MAMLMs—Modern Advanced Machine-Learning Models—is not going to increase measured real GDP, but rather to increase unmeasured user surplus. The main things that providers of “AI”-enabled information and communication services are buying are twofold:
A measure of protection of their existing flow of platform-monopoly profits;
The attention of users that then can be sold to advertisers—but advertising is not itself a final good or service, but rather an intermediate product.
Any effect on measured real GDP from advertising comes from a better fit between the commodities those advertised to purchase and their requirements and desires (a real thing! but hard to measure!). And, in terms of true (as opposed to mesured) GDP-concept output, even that is offset by the brain-hacking: getting people to buy things that or spend their time in ways that they regret later.
But to the extent that our MAMLM ‘bot information butlers can become our proper servants rather than are cruel technoserfdom masters, it has the potential to be marvelous!:
Lots of people are very much “gahh, enshittification, I just want my weblinks”, but I’m not - I do think this is potentially very useful. Being able to carry out a semantic search - something like “find me three examples of trade associations making outlandish claims about the economic impact of housing regulation” is a real time saver, and although you do have to do a lot of back-and-forth with the AI to get what you want, it’s less of a pain in the arse than filling your screen with browser tabs and reading the press releases yourself.
However, the question I want to ask is - if we put that kind of issue to one side and assume for the sake of argument that a really useful product will come out of this, how would we expect to see that reflected in the economic statistics?
I’m not sure that we would at all. I like using the intelligent search box, but that’s just unmeasured consumer surplus to me. I don’t like it so much that I’d pay for it, and Google know that if they were to charge for search, they would lose market share instantly.
It also doesn’t seem likely to me that Google could monetise that consumer surplus by raising its ad rates. It’s a monopoly already; it’s squeezing as much out of the advertisers as they have to give.
Google might be able to serve me more ads, if I spend more time in the intelligent search box and less time on other sites. But this is close to a zero sum game, in that those other sites will have fewer opportunities to sell me ads.
So, at best, the increment to Google’s revenue (and therefore, the only thing that has any chance at all of going into GDP) is the extent to which time spent on a Google site with ads is substituted for time spent on other sites which didn’t previously have ads. It feels pretty marginal, particularly since there’s a huge amount of capex needed to achieve it.
I think what’s going on here is that we’re experiencing a less than perfectly foreseen consequence of the big trend towards corporations trying to create “moats”. When a monopolist is earning monopoly profits, then they will invest to protect that monopoly, even if the investment is not one that would be justifiable as a stand-alone. If you are earning profits of 100, and you are faced with the need to make a big capital investment in order to ensure that those profits only drop to 90 rather than to 50, then you grit your teeth and make it.
If a lot of the capex going into AI is going into this kind of investment - negative sum games between monopolists trying to protect their rents - then we shouldn’t expect to see the big consequences that everyone’s been predicting. We’ll just get some more unmeasured consumer surplus, a few marginal players will go bust and the moat will keep getting filled.
Brad here with a few more notes: I think these are worth stressing:
Monopoly pricing is already maxxed out, so better search doesn’t obviously translate into higher ad prices.
Usage shifts are marginal, mostly zero-sum cannibalization of attention from competitors.
Moat attack & defenseis very marginal for measured real GDP.
As best as I can see, the prevailing narrative that huge AI capex must herald a visible productivity or GDP boom has no foundation whatsoever. I see paths whereby users avoid getting their brains hacked and benefit massively in terms of the information and entertainment utility they acquire. I do not see anyone able to charge consumers or investing businesses a lot of money for these services.
But then it surprises me that Google, FaceBook, and Amazon are so dominant. So maybe I am missing something big here.
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The story of the friar, the Inquisition, peering at utopia from inside the dungeon, and the idea of progress: reading Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun…
Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun is what you get when a tortured Counter‑Reformation Dominican, locked in a Neapolitan dungeon, being slowly ground up by the Habsburg Empire plus the Spanish Inquisition, decides to answer the question: “What would a truly rational, truly merciful commonwealth look like if it were actually run for human flourishing rather than for the comfort of princes and prelates?”
It is a utopia written from inside a prison state. It was written by a man whose body is chained but whose political imagination roams free and denies that the jailers and torturers are, in fact, God’s necessary deputies here on earth.
Tomasso Campanella (1568-1639 Stilo-Paris, France) was a Calabrian Dominican friar with dangerous habits. He read too widely. He speculated too freely. He wrote philosophy that pushed toward political and religious reform.
He did not have a happy life. By the mid-1590s he was already in some trouble with the Inquisition for heterodox views, which were a bundle of theological unorthodoxies plus a deeply subversive political‑religious project.
He drew on a strange mix of Thomism, Neoplatonism, astrology, and radicalized Augustinianism. That got him into trouble for, among other things, an excessive confidence in natural magic and astrology (cosmic influences shaping human and political order in ways orthodox theologians found dangerous), an over‑philosophical treatment of the Trinity and creation that blurred the Creator/creation boundary, and a tendency to see nature as suffused with divine “sensus” or spirit in ways that looked pantheistic. None of this was tidy Luther‑style heresy. It was, instead, that he relentlessly pushed scholastic categories until they broke.
And, somehow, along the way, he wrote the first book I am aware of that has a full consciousness of the idea of secular human progress—of better living through better technology, and of an arc of history leading us there. It is called The City of the Sun.
British Economic Growth from the Industrial Revolution to the Financial Crisis: British economic history’s long twentieth century: The late Nick Crafts rebuilt our story of British growth from romantic fable into measured, testable argument. Mark Koyama’s review of Forging Ahead, Falling Behind & Fighting Back is the best short guided tour of that achievement you are likely to find…
Brad here: The late—alas!—Nick Crafts, I think, was the person who did more than anyone else in the past half-century to take the clichés about Britain’s long, strange twentieth-century economic journey—first industrial nation, then “workshop of the world,” then allegedly sclerotic decliner, then allegedly Thatcherite miracle—and replace them with a coherent, quantified, theoretically literate narrative. The clichés are still with us, of course; they are hardy weeds. But for anyone who has actually tried to think through the British growth record from the late eighteenth century to the global financial crisis, Crafts is the indispensable guide.
This is precisely why Mark Koyama’s short review of Nick’s Forging Ahead, Falling Behind & Fighting Back is so useful. The book itself is slim, crisp, and macro in the best sense: it looks down from 1,000 feet and asks the right questions—about productivity, structure, institutions, and politics—without pretending that we have micro-data on every coal seam and factory floor. Koyama, in turn, distills Crafts’s argument and re-situates it for readers who are less steeped in the British economic-history wars than some of us.
The story is one of successive regimes of growth and constraint. Britain forges ahead early because of a particular configuration of geography, institutions, and sectoral opportunities. It then falls behind first the United States and later continental Europe because institutional path dependencies, political bargains, and organizational rigidities that make it harder to adapt to new technologies, new competitive pressures, and new forms of corporate governance. Finally, Britain “fights back” through a painful, contested reshaping of product and labor markets that positioned it, somewhat accidentally, to ride the ICT wave. Until Nick Clegg handed power over to the Tories of Cameron, Osborne, Johnson, and perhaps Farage—the teeny-tiny-weeny Tories—who then broke the British economy to an extent I would not have believed possible had I not seen it happen in real time with my own two eyes. (And what did Clegg get, in return for this handing of power, in terms of concessions for the Tories on the issues that Clegg purported to believe were important? Absolutely nothing.)
Craftsian themes to remember:
Modest but sustained TFP improvement, even from a narrow base, can be revolutionary over the long run
Institutional and political legacies of early success can become the shackles of later failure relative.
CROSSPOST: MARK KOYAMA: Nick Crafts’s Forging Ahead, Falling Behind & Fighting Back: British Economic Growth from the Industrial Revolution to the Financial Crisis
Nick Craft was a giant in British economic history. He sadly passed away in 2023. I reviewed one of his last books, Forging ahead, falling behind and fighting back, when it came out in 2018 for the Economic History Review.
I decided to post my short review of it below as it is otherwise hard to access and behind a paywall. I’d love to write a longer piece if I had time. By way of introduction, I should note that I have been listening to Dominic Sandbrook’s <https://dominicsandbrook.com/> masterful books on the 1970s (in reverse chronological order).
What I appreciate about Sandbook’s account of Britain is that he understands the particular economic situation facing British policymakers in the 1970s. From 1945 through to the early 1970s growth had appeared robust and indeed historically unprecedented. But at the same time, it was precisely in these decades that the British economy became uncompetitive and was overtaken by its European peers. Nick Craft’s research is the best place to start if one wants to understand why.
Forging ahead, falling behind and fighting back
Why was Britain the first industrial nation? Why was it eventually caught up? Why once it had fallen behind the United States, did it fall further behind its European rivals in the Post-War period? And how did it recover its relative position in the 1980s and 1990s? Forging Ahead, Falling Behind & Fighting Back provides a macroeconomic perspective on the these questions. The word macro is advisory. Crafts surveys the British economy from 1000 feet, through the lens of growth theory. The upside is that he delivers a lot of insight in 150 pages.
The first chapter provides an overview of the Crafts-Harley view of the British Industrial Revolution. This emphasizes its limited scope. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, the British economy already had a comparatively modern structure, with many individuals working outside agriculture. Growth between 1770 and 1850 was reliant on a few key sectors and TFP growth was modest (0.4% a year). Most workers remained employed in traditional sectors of the economy. Not until the second-half of the 19th century did the benefits of steam, the general purpose technology of the age, fully diffuse through the economy. Nonetheless, from a long-run perspective, the achievements of this period, modest but sustained increases in per capita GDP despite rapid population growth, were indeed revolutionary.
One theme of the book is institutional path dependency. Characteristics of Britain’s early position as an industrial leader continued to shape its political economy until the end of the 20th century. For instance, Britain’s precocious reliance on food imports from the early 19th century onwards left a legacy that was favorable to free trade. Elsewhere, democratization in the late 19th century often led to protectionism, but in Britain it solidified support for free trade because, after the expansion of the franchise, the median voter was an urban worker dependent on imported bread.
The second part of book considers the late Victorian, Edwardian, and inter-war periods. In the late 19th century the United States overtook Britain. A venerable scholarship has identified this period as one of economic failure. Crafts, however, largely follows McCloskey in exonerating Edwardian Britain from the charge of economic failure. Competition limited managerial inefficiencies in most areas of the economy; though there were notable failures in sectors where competition was limited such as the railways. The main policies failures were this ones of omission rather than commission: more could have been done to invest in R&D and support basic science.
The seeds of failure, for Crafts, were sown in the interwar period. Place in a comparative light, TFP growth in the interwar period was significantly slower than in the US. The new industries of this period did not establish a strong export position. The 1930s saw the establishment of a managed economy, in which policymakers acceded to a marked decline in market competition. Protectionism and cartelization kept profits high but at a cost of long-run productivity growth that would only be fully revealed after 1945.
Most economic historians view the postwar period through the lens of Les Trente Glorieuses. But in Britain this was an era of missed opportunities. Growth accounting suggests that Britain underperformed relative to its European peers. Thus though the British economy grew faster in these years than in any other period, it is in this period that Britain’s relative failure should be located.
Crafts examines this failure using insights from the varieties of capitalism literature, which contrasts coordinated market economies like West Germany with liberal market economies like the United States or Britain. In the favorable conditions of postwar recovery and growth, coordinated market economies saw high investment and wage restraint. Britain, however, lacked the corporatist trade unions of West Germany. As a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, it inherited a diverse set of overlapping craft unions which could not internalize the benefits of wage restraint and often opposed new technologies or managerial techniques. Britain functioned as a dysfunctional liberal market economy, one that became increasingly sclerotic as the 1960s passed into the 1970s.
Industrial policy was meant to “pick winners’”. But “it was losers like Rolls Royce, British Leyland and Alfred Herbert who picked Ministers” (p. 91). Market power grew. Approximately 1/3 of the British economy in the 1950s was cartelized and ¾ saw some level of price fixing. Britain’s exclusion from the EEC until the 1970s meant that protective barriers were high, enabling inefficient firms and managerial practices to survive. High marginal rates of taxation and weak corporate governance encouraged managers to take their salaries in the form of in-kind benefits, and deterred innovation. Labour relations became increasingly hostile as the external economic environment worsened following the end of Bretton Woods.
Britain recovered its relative economic position after 1979 through radical economic reforms and a dramatic shift in policy objectives. Though of course, the Thatcher period saw numerous missteps and policy blunders, what Crafts argues was most important was that there was an increase in product market competition, a reduction in market distortions, and trade union power, factors that enabled Britain to benefit from the ICT revolution in the 1990s.
Rarely does one wish a book to be longer. But this is the case with Forging Ahead, Falling Behind, & Fighting Back. While a short and sharp overview of the Industrial Revolution is entirely appropriate, given the number of pages written on this topic, the last part of the book does need extra pages; the argument there is too brief and requires more evidence and substantive argumentation. One wishes, for instance, that the theme of institutional path dependency was developed in more detail. Despite this, Forging Ahead, Falling Behind, and Fighting Back is a notable achievement. It provides a masterly survey of British economy history tied together by insights from economic theory.
Nate Silver’s subhead: '“Nothing on the internet lasts forever. But Disney’s 10-year mismanagement of FiveThirtyEight is its own story”. A Big Media cautionary tale: a decade of corporate drift, failed talks, bungled sales processes, mismanaged paywalls, and a casual decision to treat a rich public record as disposable. My first cousin Phil Lord does not tell tales out of school. But in my family we have strong views of Disney today as a highly dysfunctional organization that has no idea of how the steward and nurture the valuable intellectual properties that have fallen into current executives’ laps, and that they do not understand at all…
Nate Silver has written a very, very long, sad—and infuriating—case study in how twenty-first‑century American capitalism manages to destroy value while convincing itself that it is doing “synergy.” It begins with a small but telling act of vandalism: late one night, Nate goes looking for an old FiveThirtyEight piece to help rebuild a World Cup model, and discovers that Disney/ABC has simply flipped the switch. A decade’s worth of careful work—roughly 200,000 hours of human effort, by his conservative count—is now redirected to the ABC News homepage, dissolved into the content mill. If you know anything about how hard high‑quality quantitative journalism is to do, this is not merely a broken link. It is an act of erasure.
Yes, as Nate says, it is true that:
You can still access (for now) Disney-era FiveThirtyEight content via the invaluable Internet Archive…
These abstractions about “link rot” don’t quite capture the feeling of seeing so much hard work erased…
This is, I think, a useful window into something larger than the internal politics of one media conglomerate. Since the late nineteenth century, large firms have justified their existence by claiming to solve coordination problems and exploit economies of scale: they are supposed to take small, fragile, idiosyncratic enterprises and embed them in durable, well‑capitalized structures.
What Nate describes is the opposite.
In a world where a handful of journalists with Substack accounts can make the numbers work, a $69‑billion‑revenue company cannot be bothered to pick up the free money lying on the sidewalk:
CROSSPOST: NATE SILVER: Disney Erased FiveThirtyEight
Fivey Fox by Joey Ellis — Silver Bulletin illustration
Last Thursday night, I was working late, trying to put some of the finishing touches on our forthcoming World Cup model — and actually looking up an article I’d written for FiveThirtyEight in 2014 about my previous soccer model, SPI. Although the quality of the archive has gradually deteriorated since Disney shut down the site in 2025 (I left two years earlier in 2023), at least our text-based articles were mostly still there, or so I thought. Instead, I was auto-redirected to ABC News’s home page, which looked something like this:
Sometimes weird things happen on the internet late at night, so I resisted the temptation to tweet something about it. But one of my former colleagues noticed the same thing on Friday. ABC News hasn’t made any public comment that I’m aware of — they declined to make a statement to the New York Times, which wrote about FiveThirtyEight’s disappearance. It’s possible that they have something up their sleeve, I suppose. But presumably, this was either intentional or willfully neglectful. All of the former FiveThirtyEight site from my nearly decade-long tenure at ESPN/Disney/ABC is gone.1
It’s common to read things like: “what happens on the Internet stays on the Internet”, the notion being that you can never escape your digital past. But this isn’t really true. A Pew study of a random sample of Internet links conducted in October 2023 found significant “link rot”: almost 40 percent of links that had been active 10 years earlier were broken. And that’s probably an underestimate: the study was based on the Common Crawl web archive (the same one that AI labs use to train their models), which is quite comprehensive but probably contains some bias toward more prominent sites. Another study by ahrefs found a two-thirds attrition rate for web links after 11 years.
Yes, you can still access (for now) Disney-era FiveThirtyEight content via the invaluable Internet Archive, and pre-Disney-era content from The New York Times (which I partnered with from 2010 through 2013). And obviously, we’re trying to recreate some of the most popular parts of FiveThirtyEight at Silver Bulletin. The election models and polling averages are here, and new-and-improved versions of the sports models (PELE, ELWAY, COOPER) are gradually returning too.2 Galen Druke, Clare Malone and I have even been getting the old podcast crew back together for live shows.
We really do appreciate your support in the form of free or paid subscriptions.
To be clear, we’re not trying to create a full-fledged version of FiveThirtyEight. Having a smaller team gives me more time for creative work, such as writing and building models. In fact, post-Disney life is better along pretty much every quantifiable and intangible dimension.
Still, these abstractions about “link rot” don’t quite capture the feeling of seeing so much hard work erased.
200,000 hours of work erased
Here are some numbers roughly in the right ballpark: during the Disney era, which lasted about 10 years, FiveThirtyEight published about 20 stories a week. Let’s say that each story took about 20 hours to produce between research, writing, graphics and editing.3 Do the math, and that works out to about 200,000 person-hours of work that ABC News just deleted.
What’s probably harder to see from the outside is that none of this was ever smooth sailing: that content was produced through a lot of blood, sweat, and tears (sometimes literally on certain election nights).
Maybe the deletion of the site has me feeling wistful, but I thought I’d write about the various phases of FiveThirtyEight, including some inside-baseball stuff that I’ve never really talked about publicly.
I’m just going to speak from my vantage point, not on behalf of the several dozen people who worked on the site in its various iterations. I’m not going to talk about competing editorial visions or personality clashes or any of that, though we had our fair share of newsroom drama. Instead, this is intended as more of a business school case study: a study of a large corporation, The Walt Disney Company, behaving in an incredibly neglectful way toward a smaller brand it acquired, with dozens of employees who worked exceptionally hard despite constant existential uncertainty.
I want to state one thing up front: I think FiveThirtyEight could have been a highly valuable business if it had been managed more carefully. I know the New York Times considered FiveThirtyEight a valuable part of its subscription offering. I know some of the sharper minds behind subscription-based businesses tried to acquire FiveThirtyEight at various times. And I know the economics of Silver Bulletin, and they’re good. There are challenges: our traffic is highly cyclical, increasing severalfold around major elections and sporting events. Still, my guess is that FiveThirtyEight could have had north of 100,000 paying subscribers by this point: in the same general ballpark as The Free Press, which recently sold for $150 million.
The thinking at Disney is presumably that they invested a lot of money in FiveThirtyEight and were left with nothing to show for it. But to my mind, however much they spent on FiveThirtyEight, they never invested a dollar in it. There was never really any effort, or even any pretense of trying, to make it a profitable unit of the company. At one point, other senior staffers and I basically begged Disney to turn on a paywall, figuring this could provide some security, and were told, essentially, that it just wasn’t worth Disney’s bandwidth to figure out the mechanics of one. We were treated like an unused gym membership: you don’t want to cancel because you think you ought to be hitting the gym, but every month a charge hits your credit card statement and you aren’t getting any fitter.
The origins of FiveThirtyEight.com
I founded FiveThirtyEight.com under the pseudonym “poblano” in March 2008 as a spin-off from a popular series of posts at the progressive blog Daily Kos. For the previous several years, after quitting my corporate consulting job in 2004, I’d had two main sources of income. One of them was building statistical models like PECOTA for Baseball Prospectus, an early adopter of a subscription-based business model that still exists today and has graduated dozens of staffers into Major League front offices. BP had good timing going for it — this was the dawn of the Moneyball era in sports. But the subscription-based offerings were relatively rare at the time. BP churned out enough revenue to support a middle-class income for around a dozen co-owners/stat nerds/writers but not much more than that.
However, I didn’t really care because my real source of income was playing online poker. Yes, there really was a time when you could click buttons for a living and make a pretty good income by working the late shift against what I imagined to be drunk Scandinavians. It seemed too good to be true, and ultimately it was. The passage of the UIGEA in late 2006 essentially cut off new money flowing into the game, the remaining players were getting sharper, and the format I specialized in at the time (limit hold ‘em) was gradually losing ground to no-limit hold ‘em, which I wouldn’t become proficient at until years later.
The UIGEA, passed on the last day before Congress adjourned for the 2006 midterm elections, did pique my interest in American politics, however. I wanted the bastards who had deprived me of a living to be voted out of office, and they largely were, including the chief sponsor of the bill, the 15-term Iowa Congressman Jim Leach.
“Moneyball, but for elections” was a logical enough pitch, but I didn’t anticipate the degree to which FiveThirtyEight.com would become a viral hit in 2008. It helped that the election featured a number of compelling personalities, including a guy whose name I’d vaguely remembered from my time at the University of Chicago: Barack Obama. I ran ads on FiveThirtyEight, and the money wasn’t fantastic by any means, but digital advertising rates were comparatively healthier back then, so it was enough to pay the rent.
FiveThirtyEight, de-anonymized midway through the 2008 cycle, drew a lot of media attention, particularly after the model’s highly confident “call” that Obama would defeat John McCain proved correct. On a train platform on my way back from the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference conference in 2009, I encountered a senior editor at the New York Times who had been in attendance. I’ve long been an admirer of the NYT — my parents in East Lansing, Michigan even had a ritual of walking to the bookstore every day to buy the print edition. Long story short, the NYT made a good-enough offer. The finances weren’t fantastic, but it was an extremely clean deal: I was a contractor, not an employee, so I was free to pursue other sources of income, and I regained full ownership of the models and the other IP after I left the Times.
Honestly, I expected to renew with the Times. At the risk of being immodest, the 2012 election forecast had been a smashing success, with the FiveThirtyEight model famously “calling” all 50 states correctly that year in a stroke of luck that later felt like a bit of a curse. (There was only about a 3 percent chance this would happen, according to the model’s internal logic.) The Times had launched a digital paywall midway through my time there, and its subscription revenues had grown significantly in the 4Q of 2012, coinciding with the Obama-Romney election. How much FiveThirtyEight was responsible for this was hard to say — the Times has had a lot of success without us, obviously — but I had a lot of leverage.
“We” (my attorney and I) basically decided to give the Times an exclusive negotiating window before exploring the market. My keen sense at the time was that the NYT would not be the highest bidder, but I really did like working there, and they deployed me creatively on everything from the Magazine to the book review. The Times was a deeply factional place in those days, though, and the FiveThirtyEight product had both internal champions and internal critics.4 The Times was also in the midst of a leadership transition, and new management tends to want to move on from the old regime’s pet projects, even if they were successful. Although I’d moved to an apartment within walking distance of the NYT office in anticipation of a new deal, the Times dragged its feet to the point where we eventually felt like we had no choice but to test the market.
We wound up signing up with ESPN. It doesn’t seem like the most obvious fit now, but this came during an era when ESPN basically thought of itself as the best business in the world, guaranteed an annuity based on cable rights fees. Its then-president, John Skipper, had highbrow ambitions for premium products, notably Grantland. Grantland, built around another spiky founder, was quite explicitly a precedent for FiveThirtyEight @ Disney. I don’t catch up much with Bill Simmons these days, but he was a helpful consigliere during the negotiations, offering reliable advice on navigating any and all things Disney-related.
For the record, other offers we seriously considered came from NBC News, Bloomberg and the Times. The latter two would probably have been better fits, because they’re basically in the same business as Silver Bulletin/FiveThirtyEight: selling premium subscription products.5 ESPN and NBC are primarily television networks, by contrast. I’ve never really liked going on TV, and it’s probably my worst medium despite some genuinely good-faith efforts by ABC News to make it work.
The early Disney years: mistakes were made (mostly by me)
In hindsight, I chose poorly. Skipper had been fairly explicit that he didn’t really care whether FiveThirtyEight made money: like Grantland, we were essentially a hood ornament on ESPN’s oversized SUV and a “rounding error” relative to Disney’s gigantic P&L.
That might seem like a fantastic situation — Disney’s pitch was basically “we’ll cut you a nice check to be maximally creative” — and I consider myself privileged to have been given the opportunity. But there were several problems with the arrangement.
The b-school way to put this is that there was never brand or incentive alignment — with Disney being very “macro” (it takes huge swings: theme parks, Marvel movies, NFL rights deals) and FiveThirtyEight being very “niche”. Furthermore, the Disney attitude basically seemed to be that “creatives” were sensitive artist types who didn’t care about money so long as they made enough of it, but I’ve always had a fairly entrepreneurial spirit.
But most of all, this sort of arrangement makes you extremely dependent on your bosses’ goodwill, and Skipper abruptly left ESPN one morning in 2017 because of an extortion scandal.
FiveThirtyEight relaunched @ Disney/ESPN in March 2014 to “mixed” reviews. And by “mixed” reviews, I meanmostly bad ones. The launch was kind of a disaster, really. I’ve written before about some of the Mistakes That Were Made, most of which were predictable mistakes that I made. Among other problems, I did too much bragging in the media and didn’t anticipate the extent to which public opinion toward FiveThirtyEight would shift once we became a corporate-backed incumbent rather than an eccentric upstart. We added too many staffers too quickly, perhaps anticipating that we’d never have more leverage to add “headcount” than when we were a new, shiny object for Disney. Relatedly, we put too much emphasis on quantity and not enough on core products.
The core mistake, though, was that almost nobody was thinking about how to make FiveThirtyEight a viable business. We had essentially no dedicated business people or “product” people or anyone else whose job description depended on the site being economically viable. We never developed the muscle memory or the infrastructure to be a commercial product.
Despite all of this, FiveThirtyEight eventually rounded into a very good and popular website, or so I’d like to think. Our 2016 election forecast was literally the most “engaging” feature on the internet, according to Chartbeat, and our podcast received hundreds of thousands of downloads per episode.
But it never quite felt that way. Whenever we felt like we finally had some open runway, we’d encounter an unwelcome hurdle.
In 2015, I was taken aside while walking with my boss one warm spring afternoon and told that Bill Simmons would be dismissed from Grantland. Grantland had a brief and tumultuous post-Bill period but was shuttered completely by late 2015. This was a very ominous precedent: Grantland had literally been in the same sub-unit of ESPN as FiveThirtyEight, with much of the same senior management.
Then in 2016, there was the whole … Trump thing. Being dismissive of Trump’s chances early on in the Republican primary was the biggest analytical mistake of my career, and I think I deserved a lot of blame for that.6 I will insist that our general election forecast did an excellent job that year, though. Our model famously/infamously gave Trump about a 30 percent chance of winning, much higher than prediction markets, other models or the conventional wisdom at the time. That’s not how the rest of the internet saw it, however. It was a difficult election night and a difficult aftermath period. Everyone had their own way of coping; I remember playing an inordinate amount of the EA Sports NHL game and trying to take the Rangers to the Stanley Cup.
We wanted to leave Disney sooner, and we probably should have
Honestly, ESPN took the Trump stuff relatively well. FiveThirtyEight had produced a truly extraordinary amount of traffic in 2016, at least — even if none of it was being monetized. But at some point in early/mid 2017, with my initial contract with ESPN set to expire in early 2018, Skipper called me up to his office one morning and told me basically that FiveThirtyEight could no longer be a thing at ESPN, but he’d work his connections to find a good landing place for it. I don’t know what the impetus was for this — although it came amidst the whole “stick to sports” period at ESPN, and FiveThirtyEight obviously mostly wasn’t sports. For what it’s worth, though, I thought Skipper was relatively sincere, and we did take a lot of meetings.
But the resulting negotiations were fraught. There were plenty of “suitors” interested in a pared-down version of FiveThirtyEight, which would trim staff by perhaps half to two-thirds. For better or worse, I’d chosen to place a big emphasis on staff retention, even though the market consensus was probably right that the business model would be better with a leaner staff. The two main external suitors were The Athletic (later sold to the New York Times) and, confusingly, The Atlantic. I think highly of the leadership at both organizations, and they had the right idea: FiveThirtyEight could be a compelling subscription product even if it wasn’t viable based on web advertising alone.
We came quite close to securing a deal with The Athletic, close enough that the founders came to New York for an entire week of meetings to sort through every detail. I’d expected things to culminate with a handshake agreement and a celebratory lunch before they headed back to California. If you know anything about my organizational skills, they aren’t great, but I thought we (me and the other senior staff) did a reasonably good job of softening the ground for a potential transition to The Athletic and a subscription-based business model. This wasn’t a hard sell because most of the staff would be offered jobs at the new organization.
Long story short: the potential deal with The Athletic hit a last-minute snafu, which there might have been time to work around if there hadn’t been a hard deadline imposed by Disney, but Disney needed a decision from us. The sale process was complex: Disney owned some of the key IP (the trade name and site archive), while I owned some of it (the models). Moreover, Disney was both running the sales process and represented one of the bidders (ABC News). Somewhat bizarrely, ABC, a Disney related party, had entered the bidding at some point midway through the process; apparently, there had been some signals crossed about this in Burbank, and ESPN hadn’t realized that ABC had been interested.
So we put our tail between our legs and signed up for another tenure at Disney, doing our best to make it seem as though this had been the plan all along when it obviously wasn’t. Although ABC News was nominally a better fit than ESPN — they did put me and other staffers on TV more often — I was quite certain at the time that this was going to be our last hurrah at Disney. It became apparent, even before there was any ink on the deal, that while ABC News was happy enough to spend money on FiveThirtyEight with major elections forthcoming, there was the same issue as with ESPN: they weren’t really looking to invest in the property in a way that might make it profitable and sustainable. And even more so than ESPN, ABC News was a dinosaur of a business that attracted mostly older customers and managerial talent.
Nevertheless, the period from roughly 2018 to 2019 was probably the high point of FiveThirtyEight at Disney. It helped that our 2018 midterms forecast basically totally nailed the outcome, offsetting at least some of the stink from 2016. Still, the existential uncertainty about Disney’s loyalty to the site persisted.
This was when we pitched the paywall idea to upper management. Disney batted it around and ultimately turned us down. We never quite got a coherent rationale for why: something something about Disney being busy with its Hulu acquisition and not wanting to launch multiple subscription-based businesses at the same time.
It didn’t make much sense. My content had been paywalled at the New York Times and at Baseball Prospectus before that. Long before Substack came along, it was the business model that works for differentiated, high-quality content. (For “niche sites”, if you will, although elections and sports are large niches.) I don’t know what the paywall would have made, but after a year or two to get settled, it would probably have been comfortably in the seven figures annually: let’s call it $5 million. The cost might be annoying some customers who were used to free content, but we were hardly running any ads on the site anyway.7
What sort of business basically turns down a “free” $5 million? Well, apparently, a company like Disney, a company that made $69 billion in revenues in 2019. If you’re a rounding error when you’re losing a couple of million bucks a year, you’re a rounding error if you’re making a few million also.
The most generous interpretation is that Disney only understands things that operate at very large scales to truly mass-market audiences. ESPN.com had once been the exception to this, full of quirky offerings like Page 2 and Grantland. But it has largely been lobotomized, too, with talents like Pablo Torre and Zach Lowe having been let go.
The long, weird, bitter end
Then came the COVID pandemic in 2020. We thought we were smart by telling staff to start working from home a day or two before official Disney guidance, not realizing that the newsroom would never really be the same again.
Honestly, I think people forget how difficult this whole period was. I consider myself lucky never to have gotten seriously sick or to have lost any close friends to COVID. But there were challenges if you were working in the media at the time: the adjustment to “going remote” and the political “reckoning” that basically any non-explicitly-conservative-coded media business experienced, and all of this coming on top of an election year.
Even as the world awkwardly and unsteadily got “back to normal,” FiveThirtyEight never really did. Key staffers like Clare Malone were let go without any real plan to replace them. Slowly, the oxygen tubes were being removed.
There was also the matter of my contract. The new deal I’d signed with ABC News in 2018 was nominally 5 years long but included a mutual opt-out after 3.5 years, originally timed to December 2021. Either I or ABC had the right to pull the plug, but if neither of us did, the deal would extend through the 2022 midterms by default.
The signals I was getting from ABC News were quite bearish, but they also weren’t quite ready to make a decision. What I wanted, frankly, was to pare down my responsibilities to Disney — and take an appropriate pay cut — in exchange for non-exclusivity. I’d license the models to them for 2022, produce some designated number of columns and TV appearances. But I wanted to be officially free of managerial responsibilities, serving as more of a mentor/founder, and also free to start a Substack and begin building an audience for it.
ABC’s response to this was basically radio silence. There was never any sort of counteroffer or serious conversation about it. Surely, then, they’d exercise their opt-out right, and we’d each go our separate ways in December?
Well, no. Disney repeatedly asked to push back the deadline for making a go/no-go decision, and my agents and I agreed to several extensions until we got tired of the delays.
The eventual, thrice-delayed deadline came on an exceptionally cold Saturday in February.8 I had a late dinner reservation with my sister and some friends, and we went back to her apartment afterward. I checked my inbox in between sips of wine, half expecting to get an email from ABC at 11:59 p.m., but nothing came. I don’t know if they literally forgot about it, but that’s how it felt.
To be fair, I could have opted out also, and if I’d known at the time how much better life after Disney would be, I would have. But I was pretty explicitly in a lame-duck period from that point onward. I’d totally busted my ass for the first seven or eight years of my 10-year tenure with Disney, but in this late phase, I was mostly focused on my book, which I explicitly had the right to work on per my contract.
I received an urgent text message from my boss one morning in April 2023. There had been rumors of job cuts at ABC News, and it could only mean one thing. What was surprising, though, was that while the cuts were both deep and haphazard — while you might have been able to take a go at 2024 with a skeleton crew, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to cut all the managers and editors, as ABC did — they weren’t quite ready to shut down the site entirely. I was not, technically speaking, a part of this layoff, but with only two months to go on my contract, it was safe to assume that they weren’t going to offer me a new deal and I wouldn’t have taken one anyway with the staff gutted and the remaining staffers left in an incredibly challenging place.
To be honest, I’m not sure that ABC News realized that they had no more rights to the models: the license term on the election models expired with my contract.9 But they did eventually hire another “model guy”, G. Elliott Morris, to replace me. I am absolutely not looking to extend a beef with Morris, who, like me, seems much happier with his post-Disney life on Substack. But it’s important context to state that this isn’t the person I’d have hired; we’d had a long-running feud, in fact.
I chatted with my ex-boss at about this point in time and asked if they’d consider discontinuing use of the FiveThirtyEight trade name. Even leaving the Morris hire aside, there were a number of other things I did not like, such as beginning to stylize “FiveThirtyEight” as “538” and replacing our carefully refined site design with an ugly ABC News template. (Even though FiveThirtyEight routinely drove more web traffic than the entirety of ABCNews.com.) There was no more sports section, either. The brand was very much being depreciated, and I didn’t want people to associate this stage of the site with its glory days.
What happened in 2024 isn’t something I’d have scripted, though. Basically, their new election model was literally broken, continuing to show Joe Biden virtually tied with Trump even after his disastrous debate. (Evidently because Morris’s design for it had been overcomplicated. These models are hard to design, by the way.) The model was taken offline for more than a month after Biden dropped out, missing basically the entirety of the Kamala Harris “Brat Summer” period. My understanding is that the new, debugged version had been ready earlier, but ABC News PR was exceptionally sensitive about public perceptions around the model, speaking about it only cryptically in contrast to the transparency the site had been known for.
Meanwhile, I had a good year. Silver Bulletin received more support than I ever expected, and I was all over the media during my book tour. I’m not going to lie: after 10 years feeling jerked around by Disney, the whole sequence was pretty satisfying. But it also proved the point about a subscription-based model being the right call.
ABC finally fully shut down FiveThirtyEight in March 2025, 11 years after its debut at Disney. Eleven years is a long time in the media business, and the site covered one of the most tumultuous periods in American political history with its unique blend of analytics, brutal honesty and irreverence.
Disney refuses to negotiate with me
It would be nice if that work could be preserved for the public record. I don’t know what plans Disney has for FiveThirtyEight, if any. But I did approach Disney a year or two ago, through my agent, about acquiring the remaining IP. I’m probably the logical high bidder, though the value is rapidly depreciating as what’s left of the site falls into disrepair. At a minimum, we’d restore the archive, with prominent links to Silver Bulletin.
We were told to basically get lost: ABC was annoyed with my critical public comments about their management of FiveThirtyEight. It apparently wasn’t a long conversation, so I don’t have a lot more color to report than that.
Hanlon’s Razor states: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. But honestly, I don’t know which explanation is better suited to ABC. During the second half of my tenure with Disney, it felt like they were putting almost literally zero effort into any decisions involving FiveThirtyEight (other than my being featured prominently in their election night coverage10).
The one good thing about the bitter ending is that it prevents the temptation to feel overly awash in nostalgia. Because FiveThirtyEight was always produced with a lot of care, including attention to copy editing and graphics, it tended to impress people as a more smoothly running operation than it actually was. Internally, there was always a lot of conflict: between bright but opinionated staffers, all of whom had slightly different ideas about what “data journalism” was, between staffers and their opinionated boss/founder, between the news cycle and our deadlines, and between pretty much everyone and Disney. The relationship with Disney wasn’t particularly heated, so there weren’t a lot of stories that would make for good movie scenes. But mostly we just felt neglected.
Disney HR did send me a literal Mickey Mouse plaque after I left, celebrating my 10 years as a “castmember”. There was one small problem, though: they misspelled my first name as “Nataniel”.
1 Some late-stage content published under abcnews.com URLs still survives.
2 Although I still own the IP to the original versions of the sports models, most of them were last worked on 5-10 years ago, so I’ve basically decided to do a complete refresh on our suite of sports models instead.
3 That’s probably about right. The average Silver Bulletin story takes something like 15 hours from start to finish, and I write faster than most people.
4 The Times is a different newsroom now, both more data-friendly and more pluralistic, but at the time, the main tensions were with the politics desk, which did not appreciate FiveThirtyEight’s implicit criticism of “horse-race” type coverage during what was ultimately a pretty boring 2012 election
5 In Bloomberg’s case, primarily the Bloomberg Terminal.
6 We’d also been dismissive of Bernie Sanders’s chances against Hillary Clinton, a “call” that was technically correct but maybe not correct in spirit given that Sanders won quite a few states in a way that foreshadowed Clinton’s weaknesses.
7 And we’d probably have wanted to hire a couple of staff devoted to things like pricing strategy and customer retention. Let’s call it $400K-$500K/year for two senior staffers. Still a pretty good return on investment.
8 Or maybe a cold Friday night in January. A good night to eat pizza at Lucali, in any event.
9 Disney retained a non-exclusive license to continue publishing the sports models (but not the politics models) in the condition they were in as of my departure. Instead, they fired the entire sports staff and stopped publishing them anyway.
10 ABC was also constantly begging us to replicate the New York Times “needle”. The needle is an exceptionally challenging engineering and statistical product; we had nowhere near the resources for it, and always found a way to turn them down.
Brad here: At every juncture Disney is willing to spend on FiveThirtyEight as a “hood ornament” but systematically unwilling to invest in it as a business: no paywall, no product discipline, no attempt to match a highly engaged niche audience with the only revenue model that makes sense for such a niche.
The economist’s eye is drawn here to incentive compatibility and to option value. For Disney, FiveThirtyEight is a rounding error, and so it is managed as a rounding error. For Nate and his colleagues, the site is a life’s work. That asymmetry produces precisely what you would expect: years of existential anxiety, a botched relaunch, bizarre half‑hearted acquisition talks, and finally a shutdown in which even the archive is treated as disposable. The most depressing detail in Nate’s story, for my money, is not the broken election model or the misfired “needle” envy. It is that when he politely offers to buy back the intellectual property, to preserve it for the public record, he is told to get lost because someone, somewhere in Burbank, is annoyed.
If you want a small parable about how American big media has handled the transition from an advertising to a subscription internet, about how corporations can be exquisitely sensitive to internal status games while being astonishingly careless with actual valuable societal capital, and about how link rot eats not just URLs but institutional memory, Nate is your guy. He provides us with not just a lament for one website. He gives us a report from inside the machinery that keeps slouching toward, well, something rather less than utopia.
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Vibecoding hallucinations with a very confused anthropic/claude/opus trying to describe what is going on on my MacStudio. Inside an AI that can write code, misread top, and hallucinate about your hardware all at once. State‑of‑the‑Art, but zero self‑awareness: if this be what Anthropic is calling a conscious AGI with a “soul”, short Anthropic now!
I suppose I deserve it. Trying to run near-frontier models (even a heavily quantized and “distilled” one) on grossly underpowered hardware is a fool’s errand. A year ago I had some extra research budget that I thought I should use to buy a future-proofed desktop. But a reasonable future-proofed desktop, not a ridiculously overpowered one.
HA! The future is now! Overpowered is the new inadequate.
And so I try to tune it so it can both respond quickly to simple queries while also keeping the pipeline pretty full. Which requires I actually know something about loads and load balances. And then things go downhill
One process seems very laggy. So I spin-up another one to help me look in on the system.
And thus I start an exchange:
what is the status of the cpu and gpu and npu cores on the macstudio right now? Are they being hammered?
Right now the situation is:
CPU: Calm — overall system is ~19% busy (80% idle). The Ollama runner is at 0% CPU, meaning it's not actively inferring at this moment.
RAM: Very tight. 184.6 GB used out of 192 GB total, with only 1.1 GB free and 10.7 GB compressed (swapped). The Ollama runner alone is consuming ~96 GB (50% of total RAM) just sitting loaded.
GPU/NPU: No direct metric available without sudo, but since Ollama is running in CPU mode (not Metal GPU), the GPU/NPU cores are largely uninvolved.
The sluggishness is a RAM pressure problem as much as a CPU problem. When Hermes sends a message, the Ollama runner wakes up, blasts 9-10 CPU cores for 2+ minutes to generate a response, then goes quiet again. With only 1 GB truly free, any other memory demand causes heavy compression/swapping, making everything on the machine feel slow during inference.
The practical issue: gemma4:26b at q4_K_M loads ~96 GB — it's half your Mac Studio's RAM just for the model weights. That's why it was 131 seconds to say "pong." If you want Hermes to be usable over Telegram, either llama3.2:3b (fast, ~2 GB) or pointing Hermes back at an API provider would be far more responsive.
hold it: total ram on the macstudio is only 36gb. What are these claims of "RAM: Very tight. 184.6 GB used out of 192 GB total, with only 1.1 GB free and 10.7 GB compressed (swapped). The Ollama runner alone is consuming ~96 GB (50% of total RAM) just sitting loaded."? what is going on?
You’re right to call that out — my script hardcoded total = 192 GB which was completely wrong. The actual numbers from top were right there in the output I already had: PhysMem: 34G used (20G wired, 1930M compressor), 1084M unused. So the real picture is:
• Total RAM: ~36 GB • Used: ~34 GB, Free: ~1 GB • Ollama runner at 50% MEM = ~18 GB (the gemma4:26b-q4_K_M model weights)
That’s still tight — 18 GB loaded for the model out of 36 GB total, with only ~1 GB free — but nowhere near the nonsense “192 GB” figure I reported. The Mac Studio is memory-pressured but not catastrophically so. Apologies for the bad numbers….
uptime and swap?
Uptime: 19 days, 9 hours — booted May 1 at 5:01 PM….
Swap operations (page faults that required reading from disk), not bytes. Each "swapin" is one memory page (16 KB on Apple Silicon) being read back from the swap file into RAM.
So 37.2M swapins = 37.2 million page-read operations ≈ ~580 GB of data read from swap over 19 days, averaging ~30 GB/day. That's a meaningful amount of swap pressure over the machine's lifetime….
Those aren't swap averages — they're CPU load averages (I described them incorrectly). Apologies for the confusion…
Again: THIS IS ANTHROPIC CLAUDE OPUS-CLOUD-BASED!! State-of-the-art. Full 32-bit. And yet it has less insight into its own internal processes than does a Freudian analysis patient:
you wrote: “my script hardcoded total = 192 GB which was completely wrong.” what is the name of the script?
It wasn’t a saved script — it was inline Python I wrote on the spot and ran via python3 -c "..." in the Bash tool. The total = 192 was a number I hardcoded directly in that throwaway code, not something pulled from the system. That’s where the error came from.
what made you write 'total = 192' in your script?
Honestly, a hallucination. I was trying to write code to calculate total RAM, but instead of actually reading it from the system (e.g. via sysctl hw.memsize), I hardcoded a number — and I hardcoded the wrong one. 192 GB is a common Mac Studio M2 Ultra max RAM configuration, so it was plausible-sounding, but your machine has 36 GB and I didn't check. I should have queried the system for the actual value rather than assuming.
Don’t anthropomorphize it, and you are very impressed. Demand true Turing-class performance from it, and you—I, at least—laugh.
I do suppose that there is SOMEuseful information in this fact: In the training data for anthropic/claude/opus the most similar conversation to the one I am having is about an M3Ultra MacStudio with 192GB of RAM. It is not a conversation in which the user wrote a script to read RAM off of sysctl hw.memsize.
What is the lesson I am getting from all of the mishegas here? It is this: When it successfully vibecodes, it is not that anthropic/claude/opus is especially good at programming. It is just that it is fast. It tries 20 things in rapid succession. It then picks the one that did not immediately barf as its path forward. That that produces software that kinda-sorta works is very interesting, and somewhat disturbing. Hence my personal vibe this morning is once again:
An unrelated aside on my project to not just see what anthropic/claude/opus can do, but see if I can do it in a corner of my dining room:
It is true that the MacStudio appears to be a significantly better and cheaper machine for this than a mid-range CUDA workstation would be. And kudos to all those at <http://huggingface.com/> who have built this open-source software thing:
Gemma 4 - 26B A4B x Claude Opus 4.6: A distillation that bridges the gap between Google’s exceptional open-weights architecture and Claude 4.6’s reasoning capabilities with a training pipeline that uses supervised fine‑tuning on Claude Opus reasoning traces.
The base model is Google’s Gemma 4 26B A4B MoE architecture (the “bigger model” in parameter count, though still open‑weights).
On top of that, TeichAI have fine‑tuned it using Claude Opus 4.6 outputs as the teacher, i.e. classical knowledge distillation of style + reasoning patterns.
q4_K_M is then a 4‑bit quantized—that is, only sixteen possible connection strengths between simulated neuron-nodes, rather than 4,294,967,296 possible different connection strengths—export of that distill checkpoint for GGUF / llama.cpp / Ollama, not a separate teacher.
That last cuts down the number of actual bits that have to be moved and crunched by roughly a factor of eight. How much analytical power do you lose by doing this? I cannot get anyone to give me an answer I can comprehend other than:
The original model was massively overparameterized. The learned solution lives in a tiny, highly redundant subspace. That mismatch is exactly why Gemma‑4 26B‑class models can be crushed into 4‑bit MoE form and still more or less behave like themselves. The analytical power lives in the enormous, structured web of connections and learned patterns, not in squeezing precision out of each individual weight…
If a tyro like me can get close to current anthropic/claude/opus performance out of this year-old underpowered machine, that would be very bad news indeed for Anthropic’s investors who do not quickly find a greater fool to sell to.
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The $2 Trillion Greater-Fool bet as people try to read SpaceX’s S‑1 with a straight face: illiquidity, unlimited disclosures, & other jokes in the SpaceX IPO story…
Betcha the Bloomberg writers and editors were rolling in the floor in helpless giggles as they workshopped this paragraph, as Elon Musk aims for a P/E ratio for SpaceXAITwitterTeslatobe of— -117.6. That is: MINUS ONE-HUNDRED SEVENTEEN POINT SIX
Loren Grush, Bailey Lipschultz, & Sana Pashankar: SpaceX Shows $4.3 Billion Loss as Musk Targets Record IPO <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-20/musk-s-spacex-files-publicly-for-nasdaq-ipo-under-symbol-spcx>: ‘Musk’s plan for an IPO of unprecedented size is set to transform both the public and private markets if it succeeds. A blockbuster listing, and a rising share price after, would help dispel concern over whether private companies with limited financial disclosures and largely illiquid shares are reaching unjustified valuations in venture capital-led funding rounds…
4% of SpaceXAITwitterTesla listed on the NASDAQ at an initial value of $75B would itself be highly illiquid. That would not “dispel concern” about illiquidity. And to imply that the disclosures SpaceXAITwitterTeslatobe has made are “unlimited” is a very interesting choice of word itself.
Incorporate by reference these:
substackcdn.com/image/fet…}],"post_date":"2026-05-04T17:09:47.831Z","coverimage":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s!Mh2l!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F87b744be-300a-41e2-b9be-5a15156c245f_2192x1236.gif","cover_image_alt":null,"canonical_url":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/charts-of-the-day-tesla","section_name":"Neofascism, & c.","video_upload_id":null,"id":196420318,"type":"newsletter","reaction_count":33,"comment_count":15,"publication_id":47874,"publication_name":"DeLong’s Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before","publication_logourl":"[substackcdn.com/image/fet…](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s!PgPl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffde2453e-9c18-4560-82ca-8b77ae62ef5b_1280x1280.png","belowTheFold":false,"youtube_url":null,"show_links":null,"feed_url":null)}“>
substackcdn.com/image/fet…}],"post_date":"2026-05-17T17:50:58.020Z","coverimage":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s!o4OC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe605cdc5-5b72-4418-a7a8-a5cf07c9e135_1716x1150.png","cover_image_alt":null,"canonical_url":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/crosspost-will-lockett-starship-is","section_name":"Neofascism, & c.","video_upload_id":null,"id":198127255,"type":"newsletter","reaction_count":32,"comment_count":18,"publication_id":47874,"publication_name":"DeLong’s Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before","publication_logourl":"[substackcdn.com/image/fet…](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s!PgPl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffde2453e-9c18-4560-82ca-8b77ae62ef5b_1280x1280.png","belowTheFold":true,"youtube_url":null,"show_links":null,"feed_url":null)}“>
In comments on the second of these, the smart David Thomson wrote:
The question then is how do you discount when the real upside is 15-25 years in the future. Am I pulling these numbers out of my ass. Yes! But the point is to show what this might look like if you want to consider it not silly…
But the way that investing in the SpaceXAITwitterTeslatobe IPO is “not silly” is not to say that there is a 10% chance that the company is half of all corporate profits 25 years into the future: it is to say that there is a 20% chance that the market has enough Greater Fools that in a year SpaceXAITwitterTeslatobe is priced as though it has a 50% chance of being half of all corporate profits 25 years into the future. That is what is needed to get your $75B now to $200B, and to offset the risk of loss. And given that you only—“only”—need $200B of Greater Fool capital, that may not be that bad of a bet.
If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…
“Chet”: loud, confident, not obviously the sharpest knife in the drawer—yet somehow hauling in seven-figure bonuses because “Chethood” is a remarkably rare combination of skills, and how actually managing to sit at the business end of the money hose is harder than it looks. Detail mastery, analytical follow-through, dogged work capacity, and acute people-reading—plus a hell of a lot of nerve. Few individuals have more than one or two in world-class form.
Unfogged: The Mysteries of Chet: I have here a special, economics-type query which I direct to Brad DeLong, among others. Here’s the thing: I have known many investment bankers in my day. Hell, I’m related to plenty of investment bankers, even if only by marriage. Many of these men are stand-up guys, fun to be with, always up for smoking a few bowls and playing golf. Others are asshole blowhards....
All of them, however, have the same basic character type, which I will call ‘Chet’. Chet is a hail-fellow-well-met sort, cracking jokes all the time (some of most of which may be ‘politically incorrect’, because he doesn’t care about things like that). Chet is tall, probably tan, and has big white teeth like a mouthful of chiclets.... Chet is a member of country clubs, and has a thin wife, and two adorable kids, etc. etc. If you close your eyes and imagine a picture in a silver frame on an end table in an apartment on 84th and Park, then you know what Chet’s kids look like (super cute!).
Finally, Chet has an incredibly high opinion of himself. He is confident to the point of arrogance, but friendly, outgoing. There is one thing Chet is not, ever, in my experience, and that is particularly bright. Really. Not an intellectual powerhouse, is where I’m going with this. Not, in all likelihood, able to perform complex mathematical operations. Given that this is so, I have a few questions:
Is the role of these guys just to schmooze clients for their banks?... [A]re there wonky types behind the scenes, making the actual money decisions? Strangely enough, I take it that there are not, otherwise there would be all these rich, but wonky, investment bankers. As far as I know, there aren’t any.
So let us say that my sucessful Chet friends at Lazard Freres and whatnot are actually deciding stuff about money. The question is, why them given that they aren’t the brightest bulbs on the chandelier? (But can be perfectly nice!)
Is this a market failure caused by suceeding generations of Chets selecting other Chets?... [C]ould someone clean up by having a bank with a front office of Chets and a back office of Brad DeLongs? But maybe the colossal failure of LTCM, one of the only times I ever heard of anyone trying to have smart people who knew about economics in charge of a hedge fund, has scared people off Brad DeLongs and back into the welcoming, hearty hug/back-slap combo of Chet?
If it’s not a market failure, and Chets do just as well as brainiac PhD’s in Economics at making decisions about hellishly complex derivatives, then is the whole thing just random?...
Why do they all have to be irritating Republicans who are convinced there is some very real sense in which they have earned a multi-million-dollar bonus, when it’s so clear to anyone that they cannot possibly, ever, have done enough work to ‘deserve’ all that money (which is not to say that you can’t structure a semi-sucessful company on this basis). It’s so very tedious of them. Oh well, they’re probably less-overpaid than Fortune 500 CEO’s, I’ll give them that.
There are a lot of investment bankers who are not “Chets” and who are very smart as I define smart: my brother’s bosses Frank Brosens and Ken Brody; Robert Rubin and Roger Altman; the late Fischer Black. Read Emmanuel Derman’s My Life as a Quant to get the idea of what life is like for the very antithesis of Chet-hood.
But there are a lot of investment bankers who are “Chets.” Indeed, a very smart quant like Emmanuel Derman is (from one point of view) a Chet-enabler: he constructs models and writes programs so that the Chets can, with three keystrokes, know what they have to charge their clients in order to make money for the firm.
So Alameida’s question is a good one: why are the Chets paid so much?
Part of the answer is that they are sitting at a nexus: a huge amount of money blows past Wall Street, and if you can sit in the right place with a large net, unbelievable quantities of money will be trapped by it.
A bigger part of this answer is that there are four relevant human capabilities here:
the ability to master details,
the ability to quickly grasp what the salient issues are and follow them through to their conclusion,
the ability to work like a dog,
and the ability to size up people--figure out quickly who will actually produce something useful and who will not, who will hang tough and who will easily bid more, who will soften if wooed and who will stay hard-nosed.
Next to nobody has all four or even three of these capabilities in world-class measure. Fewer people than you think have even two. And for someone who has one of the other three--mastery of detail or skill at analysis or the ability to work like a dog for ungodly periods of time--mastery of Chet-hood is a very valuable and lucrative skill.
Consider Felix Rohatyn, running the auction of RJR-Nabsico in the 1980s. Rohatyn tells the bidding syndicates that there will be only one round--that they will have no opportunity to rethink their bids and raise them, so that they had better choose their bids carefully. The competing syndicates bid. Rohatyn says, “Thank you.” And then:
the board, Atkins said, was willing to give Kohlberg Kravis one final opportunity to bid. “If you haven’t already done so, this is the time to put in your best bid.”
Silence.
Kravis and Roberts were too startled to speak. Beattie and Cogut exchanged a glance of amazement. One final bid? Hadn’t they been through this five hours ago?
Felix Rohatyn’s voice filled the void: “This is a serious offer. You should do your best to respond to it.” Then, looking Kravis square in the eye, Rohatyn said: “We want your highest and last offer.”
“This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” Kravis said. “We gave it to you five hours ago!”
A half hour later, Beattie and Cogut emerged from the aquarium room.... Kohlberg Kravis has two conditions before it will place its final bid on the table....
Kravis went around the room one last time. What should we bid?... Fifty cents a share too much or too little could be the difference. Already the bidding had reached heights all but the foolhardy were uncomfortable with.... The verdict seemed unanimous. They would throw in one last raise, just fifty cents a share in cash, roughly $115 million. “Is everybody comfortable with that?” Roberts asked....
“No, I’m not.” The voice was Jamie Greene’s.... “I don’t know if we should do it at all” Greene said. “But if we do, let’s do it with a dollar in cash. We’ve come this far. We want to win this deal.”
“I think he’s right,” Roberts said. “That’s exactly what we should do. We’ve gone this far. We’ve made up our minds we want to own this company. Let’s not get shortsighted now.”...
REFERENCE DELETED DUE TO PUBLISHER DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICE
By being Chets--knowing when to push and when not to, and how far KKR could be pushed--Felix Rohatyn and company gained their clients an extra $230 million dollars with fifteen minutes’ worth of work. You need people who know what the big things that affect fundamental values are. You need people who know how the details of contract provisions interact. And you need Chets--lots and lots of Chets--if you’re going to squeeze anything like the best prices out of your counterparties. As Rohatyn did with KKR. KKR made a fortune, but it and its backers took on a huge amount of risk in doing so. Rohatyn made his clients a fortune, and did so by shedding risk rather than bearing it.
As to why the ones whom Alameida knows are all Republicans who believe that they generally deserve all their wealth. It is very annoying, but it’s inevitable given what humans are: all our successes are due to our skills and industry, and all our failures are do to bad luck, right? (And there are a bunch I know--not a majority of those I know, but a bunch--who are Democrats, in a plurality of cases because being told once a year that you were slaves to Pharoah in Mizraim influences how you think about a whole bunch of issues.)
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A linkrotted weblog post from 21 years ago: “Alamedia of ‘Unfogged’ Is Puzzled by Investment Banker Compensation Levels”, and even though #typepad-resurrection is one of my to-do #project #hashtags these days, it has not yet happened. But there is the Wayback Machine at <http://archive.org>. And there is (for now at least, on an experimental basis) my personal information butler SubTuringBradBot at <[web.telegram.org/k/](https://web.telegram.org/k/#@SubTuringBradBot)>…
Well, Joe, if you were on BlueSky like a human rather than grunting in the toxic mud like an animal, I would have seen and responded to this in an hour!
As it is, I only see it when SubTuringBradBot, my information butler, brings it to me on his virtual silver tray at:
And so you are only getting a response the following day—and a response I will now outsource to the brand-new version of my information butler, SubTuringBradBot:
In what context did Brad DeLong write something like: "There are four relevant human capabilities here: mastering details, following through, working like a dog, and sizing up people”?
The quote comes from a May 16, 2005 blog post on your TypePad weblog, in a piece discussing the "Mysteries of Chet" — your analysis of why a certain type of finance/business operator commands high compensation despite not necessarily being the sharpest intellectually. The full passage runs roughly:
"A bigger part of this answer is that there are four relevant human capabilities here: the ability to master details, the ability to quickly grasp what the salient issues are and follow them through to their conclusion, the ability to work like a dog, and the ability to size up people — figure out quickly who will actually produce something useful and who will not..."
The argument was that world-class command of even two of those four is rare, which explains the premium.
can you give me the original URL, and a working wayback machine URL please?
That is SubTuringBradBot, at <[web.telegram.org/k/](https://web.telegram.org/k/#@SubTuringBradBot)>, freely world-queryable until it gets too expensive for my Anthropic budget, or (if I do succeed next week in moving it to my under-the-dining-table machine) contention for RAM, GPU, & NPU access on my machine becomes substantial enough to annoy me, given what else I am using the machine for.
What do I think of it? I think catechism-based RAG search with a relatively light-touch LLM front end to provide a natural-language interface is now scarily good. I think trying to tune the m*****f***** via vibecoding annoyingly frustrating. It is rife with hallucinations of all kinds. It does not "just work", or "do what I mean". It has taken 4.5 years, off and on, to get here, after all.
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Why today’s “conscious” chatbots are cardboard cutouts—and why that matters for the likely end of our multi-trillion‑dollar bubble. Tech leaders are talking about large language models as if they’re on the verge of consciousness, even as those same systems can’t keep their own timeouts straight. When hallucinated minds meet unsustainable business models, you should expect not utopia, but a spectacular financial ”correction”…
The AI labs want to be IBM, Google, and a quasi‑religious movement all at once, financed by a circular flow of GPU money and belief. If you squint, you can already see the Wile E. Coyote moment forming beneath their feet.
Start with a digression: Yes. Someday there may well be a Chinese Room where we can argue about whether it is a reasoning, Turing-class moral agent. It will be when, in Scott Aaronson’s words:
Scott Aaronson: PHYS 771 Lecture 4: Minds and Machines <ttps://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html>: ‘A non-insight… Searle's Chinese Room… If each page of the rule book corresponded to one neuron… we'd be talking about a "rule book" at least the size of the Earth, its pages searchable by a swarm of robots traveling at close to the speed of light…. Maybe it's not so hard to imagine that this enormous Chinese-speaking entity—this dian nao—that we've brought into being might have something we'd be prepared to call understanding or insight…
But our current frontier LLMs are much too simple. For example:
Here's the live status right now (14:34 PDT)…. ollamaisaacbot (llama-local) — idle and healthy. It runs on llama3.2:1b, not Gemma, so it was never affected. Last task was filing a Zoom link for Michael Froomkin at 10:12 AM. Currently sitting idle waiting for your next message….
I believe that this:
"ollamaisaacbot (llama-local) — idle and healthy. It runs on llama3.2:1b, not Gemma, so it was never affected. Last task was filing a Zoom link for Michael Froomkin at 10:12 AM. Currently sitting idle waiting for your next message."
is wrong:
1. As of 05:18 AM, the /status of ollamaisaacbot was… Model: ollama/gemma4:26b-a4b-it-q4_K_M….
2. And as of 14:27, ollamaisaacbot was asked to: "read and file according to their text-body #hashtags all emails…”
And as of now it is still hopelessly spinning
Here's what's actually happening: ollamaisaacbot — it IS the telegram-local agent running on gemma4:26b-a4b-it-q4_K_M. I was looking at the wrong agent earlier — apologies. It received your 14:27 email filing task… and is actively running right now. The session file is locked, trajectory ends at prompt.submitted — the model is thinking. The catch: looking at its earlier turns today, Gemma q4_K_M takes 8–19 minutes per single turn on complex tasks…. I'd give the email task another 5–10 minutes before concluding it's stuck. The timeout is 600 seconds (10 minutes), set in the job definition…
A true Turing-class entity would not say “wait another five and ten minutes before concluding it’s stuck” and then taking action, and in the next breath say that the system will only let it run for a total of ten minutes—not another ten minutes, ten minutes total—before it kills the task. It would note the strong disconnect there. And it would adjust one or the other—or if it happened to say both, its next words would have been: “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking…”
As indeed it wasn’t.
anthropic/claude-opus is saying the first—give it another 5-10 minutes—because some human, in a conversation in its training data anthropic/claude-opus judged as similar to the current one, said “give it another 5-10 minutes”. anthropic/claude-opus is saying the second—the timeout is 600 seconds (10 minutes)—because in a different conversation, again one judged as similar to the current one, some other and human thought it was appropriate to remind everyone of what the process timeout limits had been set at.
Pantomiming the thoughts of those two different humans in quick succession thus produces an anthropic/claude-opus that flunks the Turing Test.
You can see the seams in the cardboard facing the street that is the façade of this particular Potemkin Village, if you look.
And yet I heard Nilay Patel say a couple of weeks ago that the people at Anthropic think that Claude is conscious. I cannot find the reference right now, but indeed they do:
Amanda Askell: Exactly…. Is it the case that you should treat the models well, that you should not mistreat them, not be bad to them?…. I guess, I think that this is a complex question…. Are AI models moral patients? That is really hard because, in some ways, they’re very analogous to people. They talk very much like us. They express views. They reason about things…. I hope that we get more evidence that will help us tease this question out, but I also worry that there’s always just the problem of other minds ,and it might be the case that we genuinely are limited in what we can actually know about whether AI models are experiencing things, whether they are, like, experiencing pleasure or suffering, for example…
And this drove the smart David Thomson into Shrill Unholy Madness:
David Thomson: Talking Databases, Magical Thinking & Bad Tools: Have Anthropic Lost The Plot? <https://mdavidthomson.substack.com/p/talking-databases-magical-thinking>: ‘Can we agree on one thing? Just because you build a plane out of bamboo that looks like a Spitfire, doesn’t mean it can fly. And even if you managed to make it fly a little by some miracle, it doesn’t mean it can shoot down Messerschmitts. Reproducing the symptoms of consciousness is not inducing the cause. This is bad science. It’s bad AI. It’s even bad marketing. It’s misleading and silly. It’s pure cargo cult…. Could a computer be conscious/sentient whatever that might mean? Sure, why not? I wouldn’t rule it out. Are we remotely near that? No….
A language model is a statistical model of language, compressed as word correlations…. You input a query, it does a search in the model, it calculates the probabilities for the words, it gives you the words…. Is it intelligently manipulating concepts? Well… kind of… The search through the model manipulates concepts because that is how the data is structured and then decompressed dynamically. The point of language is that it is a tool to compress, externalise and manipulate ideas. That’s why we use it.
The “problem of other minds” assumes there’s a mind to have a problem about. LLMs… don’t have perception, continuity, or embodiment…. We all say silly things on camera, but… well, there’s silly and then there’s actually insane. It’s as if Anthropic needs a basic AI Philosophy of Mind reading list. So why not? Let’s start with the OG: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations…. Maybe this more recent Clarke article specifically on LLM’s. Then Rodney Brooks for an engineering reality check….. Hume would have a field day. This is a textbook example of his religious Enthusiast thinking: the ecstatic belief that a group of coders in San Francisco, fueled with unimaginable buckets of money, are creating new life. Smarter life than us, and it will have godlike powers to create utopia—or kill everything…
Which has more of a claim to be considered a moral agent in this wide green world? An instantiation of anthropic/claude-opus here, which can write programs, but is evanescent has no idea (because it was not in its training data) that it is silly to tell a user to wait ten more minutes before concluding a task has misfired when the operating system imposes a hard timeout of ten minutes?:
Or Hunter, here, who cannot program, but who has caught seven squirrels, a crow, a mole, and a rat—admittedly his hunting success rate is only 0.2%, but it is > 0?
I am coming around to the belief that these—delusions, that is what they are—have to be a first-order factor in thinking about the macro outlook, for the reasons set out by Nilay Patel and Hayden Field here:
Nilay Patel: The AI Industry’s Existential Race for Profits <https://www.theverge.com/podcast/909042/ai-monetization-cliff-anthropic-openai-profitable-ai-existential-moment>: ‘It’s a make-or-break year for Anthropic and OpenAI, which are facing more pressure than ever to make more cash than they burn…. The catalyst… is AI agents…Claude Code and Cowork… OpenClaw and OpenAI’s Codex…. People… using agents… [are] burning tokens at a rate way faster than these companies anticipated…. OpenAI abruptly killed its video-generation app Sora…. Anthropic decided it would no longer let Claude users burn through compute resources using the OpenClaw agent framework through a standard subscription plan…. The projections these companies have made… tell… of mind-boggling growth, to the tune of hundreds of billions in revenue and profitability by the end of the decade. But… can the AI companies pull this off, and what compromises will they make to reach that goal and avoid crashing and burning?
As I see it, the road to either of OpenAI or of Anthropic making serious enough money to give any positive return to its investors at all rests on its becoming one of three things:
The lowest-friction provider of and near-monopolist at natural-language coding, analysis and information-management services for the enterprise—The way first IBM and then Microsoft were back in their heyday.
The lowest-friction provider of and near-monopolist at natural-language information-butler and clown services for the consumer—like Google, FaceBook, Amazon, still to a degree Microsoft, and Apple when iPhone “just works” today.
The builder of a unique Digital God.
They have to do this in a context in which Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and FaceBook have every incentive to keep them from succeeding. Thus, those last four will spend money at scale to protect their current platform monopoly profit flow against disruption from any natural-language interface provider—and also, perhaps, in the hope that they can poach into one of the others’ lanes: make, as Satya Nadella said, one of the others, “get up and dance”.
Nilay Patel and Hayden Field touch most of the reasons why this quest of Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s does look to me like it is approaching a Wile E. Coyote moment:
Massive spend, negative profits: Nobody—exceptl possibly FaceBook—is project profits from providing AI-services to consumers or enterprises until at least 2029.
Circular financing loops straight out of a cautionary tale: Chip vendors and cloud providers are taking equity stakes in AI labs that in turn plow capital back into buying their GPUs and capacity
Agents explode compute costs: The things even coders are finding useful do not pencil out at current variable costs—and the non-penciling is by a factor of 10, if not 100.
Scarce, overloaded infrastructure: “Super‑limited” capacity explicitly blocking scaling to meet demand clashes with the revenue growth stories they are selling to investors.
Killing flashy products for raw capacity: The death of Sora and the evisceration of OpenClaw are a classic sign that the underlying economics of the flagship demos really do not pencil out, hence the:
Sudden, user‑hostile pricing shifts, breaking the “prices will fall” promise:Higher effective prices and tighter usage caps do not compete with the story of cheaper and more abundant access by 2029.
Weak, fragile moats: If only because “frontier” models are easily distilled.
Enterprise customers hedging away from them: Basic natural-langauge fluency and high-dimension Stack Overflow search are powerful competitors to anything OpenAI/Anthropic can charge for.
Overreliance on one real product‑market fit: The only present‑tense product‑market fit is coding/software development; nothing else is more than a blue-sky dream as far as paying customers are concened.
Mismatch between valuation and business reality: OpenAI’s post‑money valuation of ~$850B requires either near‑universal adoption or very high per‑user prices. Either collides with public mistrust, enterprise cost‑cutting, and competition from big incumbents like Google and from open‑source.
Strategic thrash at OpenAI: Buying podcasts to “shape the narrative” scream that management is struggling.
Public opinion turning hostile: Nobody likes the idea that AI-slop will take their job.
In this context, the claim that “anthropic/claude-opus” might be a thinking, feeling, intelligent agent with a moral claim on us” is best seen as a version of the black ink the squid squirts out as it attempts to swim away.
Not to mention that Nilay and Hayden do not have time to dig into any of these things that make “this is nuts, when’s the crash?” a quite reasonable reaction:
Dot‑com‑level financial engineering, but bigger: The AI buildout is being financed with a mix of equity hype and increasingly debt.
Absurd capex‑to‑revenue ratios at the core labs: OpenAI committing on the order of a trillion‑plus dollars in datacenter build‑out against low‑tens‑of‑billions in actual revenue
Classic bubble valuation metrics lighting up red: AI‑heavy indices are now trading at dot‑com‑era multiples.
GPU hardware as a much worse “underlying asset” than fiber: In the dot‑com era, overbuilt fiber and networking gear at least left a durable, general‑purpose communications backbone. But.
Unit economics that get worse with success: Marginal cost scales roughly linearly with usage, instead of going to zero.
The “token trap” structural: Enterprise software platforms are trying to staple per‑token metering onto per‑seat SaaS contracts, and keep rediscovering that you cannot bolt a high‑marginal‑cost AI feature onto a low‑marginal‑cost subscription and have the numbers add up.
Macro‑level concentration risk that looks systemically dangerous: By late 2025 something like a fifth to a third of major stock indices’ value was effectively one AI‑and‑adjacent trade.
And yet there are many, many true believers who are not in the “BUILDING DIGITAL GOD!” camp:
Michael Nathanson & Craig Moffitt: An Interview with Ben Thompson at the MoffettNathanson Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference <https://stratechery.com/2026/an-interview-with-ben-thompson-at-the-moffettnathanson-media-internet-communications-conference/>: ‘The businesses we cover… are zero marginal cost… and it creates that winner-take-all dynamic. AI isn’t like that… if for nothing else other than for the energy…. “Think about data centers in space… [which] eliminate the energy cost”…. Riff on that…. Is there room for all of these different foundation models? And then how [do] the economics of this business and therefore the strategies change if data centers in space actually become a thing?…
Yes, solar panels in space get three times as many photons as solar panels on earth (in a region with few clouds), because of these things called “atmosphere” and “night”. But there is lots of waterless scrub that is not pretty or ecologically valuable desert, and power transmission on the ground is cheap, and information transmission cheaper. That this is how the conversation starts makes me uneasy.
Nevertheless, Ben Thompson’s points are not stupid:
Finite and expensive computational capability is a short‑run bottleneck: Underbuilt capacity (i.e., TSMC’s slow reaction to ChatGPT), not evidence that AI economics are inherently doomed.
Highest‑value users will get capacity: Current capacity imbalances lock in winners or make the whole sector non‑viable.
Infrastructure build‑out always looks crazy in real time: Because the optimal size of the buildout is always unknown, you always get boom, then painful down‑cycle, but not necessarily systemic collapse.
Agentic inference changes what kind of compute and memory matter. Out of the latency loop you move to slower, memory‑heavy, hierarchical architectures running on cheaper, more commoditized hardware.
Enormous AI revenues quite soon: OpenAI + Anthropic might do something like “$200 billion in revenue this year.”
Attention & advertising remain deep, under‑exploited wells. Consumer attention + ads are still massively under‑monetized by AI (especially at Meta, but also at OpenAI if they had started earlier).
Scarcity migrates to physical assets: Durable, AI‑complemented business models rather than a universal profit squeeze.
Moats reorganize rather than vanish: Amazon’s logistics and attention, Meta’s feeds and ad tech, Apple’s devices, Google’s search latency will still capture value—it’s not a clean slate where everyone’s margins go to zero.
A crash is a capital‑cycle event: It is along the way to “infinite compute,” not the revelation that AI was a dead end.
Post-crash excess capacity will birth new, barely‑imaginable uses. Short‑form video/Instagram/Reels are insane, luxury uses of bandwidth that only exist because we massively overbuilt the previous generation’s infrastructure.
But all of these points are “The current AI bubble is not a bad thing for the world as a whole in the long run” (provided that the technologies become our servants rather than our brain-hacking, attention-harvesting masters). They are not arguments that investors in OpenAI or Anthropic (or anyone who is betting on having a better model rather than feeding natural language interface and huge data high-dimension classification into a useful service) is going to avoid losing their shirt. And they are not arguments that the current AI-financial wagon train will make it largely unscathed to the Columbia River valley by 2029.
The bottom line here: in sketching out macro scenarios for the economy as a whole, a .com scale crash of AI could come any time in the next three years, and has to be factored in.
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Bond market confidence that the Federal Reserve will be willing and able to keep inflation near its CPI-basis target of 2.5%/year has not yet cracked, at least not among those trading between long Treasuries and long Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities:
Yes, Kevin Warsh told people a lot of lies in his now-successful campaign to become Fed Chair. But the bond market is betting that the lies were the reassuring stories he told Donald Trump about how he would eagerly and aggressively cut interest rates as soon as he could convince his FOMC to do so.
It is not clear to me that placing a 0% weight on the other possibility—that Kevin Warsh was lying to all those whom he and his affinity assured he would be a “normal” Fed Chair, and that he will do Donald Trump’s bidding, up to and including firing all the Fed Bank Presidents and appointing corrupt Trump shills in their places, and so transform the FOMC utterly—is justified.
Why, you may ask, would Kevin Warsh do Trump’s bidding? For the same reason that since Paul Ryan decided in the summer of 2016 to go all in on trying to elect Donald Trump, nearly every Republican of note who formerly had a reputation has thrust themselves forward to do Trump’s bidding. Trump, you see, has since early 2016 had three superpowers:
He is irrationally mean, so that once he hates you he will try to take you down even if it is likely to cost him.
He is increasingly senile.
He is very dumb.
And so ever since early 2016, the calculus of nearly all Republican worthies, save Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Jay Powell, has been that we avoid antagonizing Trump, because he could take us down now. And we also avoid playing any long game to remove him, because that would advantage the Democrats right now, and because his senility and stupidity will soon take him off of the game board anyway.
Nevertheless, it is shocking and appalling that all 53 Republican senators and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania voted to confirm Kevin Warsh. Five of them should have been willing to say: We are sorry Kevin, but you have told too many lies—we are not sure to whom—to reach this point, and it is better to leave Jay Powell as Acting Chair, at least until the next session of Congress.
Then, again, maybe Jay Powell told them that he intended to be, effectively, Acting Chair—to be primus inter pares on the Federal Reserve Board.
And as long as he, Waller, Barr, Cook, and Jefferson hold phalanx, Warsh’s Trumpy Mr. Hyde self will only have the support of Michelle Bowman, she who blames illegal immigration for high housing prices.
Indeed: Long-term U.S. Treasury interest rates not only suggest that inflation expectations are still well anchored, they also are still at levels low enough that the real borrowing cost to the government is lower than the rate of growth of the U.S. economy. That means that you can—if you set U.S. real GDP as your numéraire, which perhaps you should not, for lots of reasons—still see the U.S. government-budget constraint as not binding except in a left-tail scenario. The US national debt can still be viewed as a resource center for the government via the provision of collateralizable safe-asset services, rather than as a burden. It i true that we are not still in the world of “secular stagnation” or of the “global safe-asset shortage”. But we are still in the post-2001 world of what Ben Bernanke back then called the “global savings glut”. And we are definitely not back to the 1993 world in which the level and trajectory of the debt was a dire economic emergency.
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From Bussaco in 1810 to Prince Sultan Air Base in 2026: cheap, easily hidden firepower’s rise from Arthur Wellesley’s British rifleman to Brovdi’s drones. Read Noah Smith on war in our timeline—the one with the killer robots—but realize it is best viewed through a much longer lens, starting with Arthur Wellesley’s thin red maximum-firepower lines and reverse slope deployments and now seeing FPVs over Russian trenches and US AWACS destroyed on the ground. Drone militaries now attrit non-drone militaries. But we lack sound doctrine for our future world in which all sides will fight this way…
I think this from Noah Smith is broadly right: To understand how the balance of military power has shifted under our feet—not in some misty sci‑fi future, but it already has—you should stop reading retired admirals’ op‑eds about aircraft carriers and start paying very close attention to drones.
Starting with—I guess it was at Bussaco, on September 27, 1810—infantry and cavalry in mass ceased to be queens of the battlefield, and especially after the coming of first the cheap rifle and then the machine gun offensive success depended on very expensive, technologically hypersophisticated forces like battleships and carriers, heavy bomber fleets, armored divisions, manned fighter squadrons. Those imposed a particular social technology on successful militaries: general staffs, procurement bureaucracies, alliance doctrines, officer corps career ladders.
In the past four and a half years we have seen Ukraine ‘Rus’s successful defense against Putin’s Moskva ‘Rus, and the—perhaps—<https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-bases-in-middle-east/> transformation into soft targers of the U.S. forward deployments in the Persian Gulf at Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, U.S. Central Command forward headquarters in Qatar, Al Dhafra in UAE, the Camp Arifan logistical hub and the rest of the string of bases in Kuwait, and Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Now things are very different: FPV drones do precision strikes for hundreds of dollars a shot, guided by off‑the‑shelf batteries, motors, and machine vision. They dominate missiles and artillery shells that cost a hundred or ten times as much and require vulnerable, slow‑to‑replace tubes and crews, as drone swarms make battlefields radically transparent, turning movement into an invitation to be killed from above.
Read Noah Smith as a more than half-right early-chapter take on the likely military‑industrial history of the rest of the century of the 2000s:
Drone warfare has been a fascination of mine for a very long time. When I read Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds” as a kid, I imagined what would happen if the attacking swarms were mechanical birds, controlled with AI. When I read about Japanese kamikazes in WW2, I reasoned that someday we’d have drones do the same. In 2013, I wrote a post about the advent of drone warfare that’s still probably the most prophetic thing I’ve ever written. It simply made sense that if we could create AI-controlled swarms of exploding artificial insects, then as long as they had enough battery power to sustain themselves over long flights, they’d be an unstoppable weapon.
Thirteen years later, my imagination has mostly become reality. Batteries have gotten good and cheap enough to sustain long drone flights, and AI has gotten good enough to guide drones to their targets (and, often, to select the targets in the first place). All we need now to fulfill my vision is for AI to start autonomously directing large numbers of drones in concert. That’s coming very soon.
The Ukraine War isn’t the first war in which drones are proving decisive — that would be the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 — but it’s the war in which drones have truly come into their own. Ukraine’s intensive use of drones has allowed them to inflict casualty rates as high as 5 to 1 on the Russian army in recent months, while giving up little or no territory. Around 96% of those casualties are estimated to be caused by drones. In just the past year, Ukraine went from using just a few thousand FPV drones per day to using around 60,000.
You can read lots of stories about how drones represent a revolution in military affairs; the recent Carnegie Endowment piece is a good one, as is the slightly older one by the Army University Press. But to really viscerally understand how deeply things have changed, you have to watch videos from the war. Here is a montage of drone strikes in Ukraine, including a terrifying final sequence where a drone flies into a Russian barracks and destroys it. It’s difficult stuff to watch, but if you want to understand the changes that have come to modern warfare, you have to see it.
The age of the human infantryman is rapidly drawing to a close. Simply surviving an FPV drone attack has become an almost impossible task for soldiers on the battlefield. The drone cordon has not yet become so airtight that territory can be held without humans, but these humans’ job is to hide out in dugouts for months at a time alone or in tiny groups, terrified of emerging above ground lest they be instantly droned. And ground robots are developing very quickly, to the point where assaults can sometimes be conducted without humans on the front line at all.
Drones are also slowly replacing bombers and missiles as a modern military’s primary tool for conducting long-range strikes. Russia has been pounding Ukrainian cities with Iranian-made “Shahed” drones for years, but Ukraine is now fighting back. Ukrainian drones regularly destroy Russia’s oil infrastructure and military supply lines. And Moscow was just hit by over 1000 Ukrainian drones, causing widespread damage and chaos:
To understand the changes that drones are bringing to modern warfare, I went on the Latent Space podcast with Yaroslav Azhnyuk, founder and CEO of The Fourth Law, one of Ukraine’s most important drone startups. Here’s the video and the transcript:
My interview with Azhnyuk clarified exactly why drones are in the ascendant as the universal modern weapon of war. The reason is cost. Drones are simply so cheap to produce in huge numbers that they can overwhelm any more expensive system.
Here’s Azhnyuk:
The CEO of Rheinmetall, recently sort of ridiculed [the] Ukrainian drone industry, saying that…there is nothing interesting there, no real innovation…One of the best quotes I heard on this topic is from my friend Alexey Babenko, who’s the head of and founder of VIARI Drone, which is one of the largest manufacturers of FPV drones. They’re our partner. They’re using our autonomy. So he said that the drones we manufacture in one day will be more than enough to destroy all the tanks Rheinmetall manufactures in a year…Cost-wise, of course, a drone is like, $500 and a Rheinmetall tank is what, probably 5 million-ish or maybe more…
An artillery shell for 155 caliber…is about $4,000 per piece. So compare that to say, $400 per drone. That’s 10 times more expensive. Account for the amortization of the artillery gun and for how vulnerable it is and what is the sort of tactical capabilities it gives you as compared to a drone. You’ll figure out that an FPV drone is maybe three orders of magnitude, more versatile, more useful, more capable than artillery…Basically, I think a good way to think about an FPV drone is like an iPhone of warfare. [emphasis mine]
People also don’t seem to understand how much AI is now controlling these drones. Azhnyuk and his company have been instrumental in this shift:
Instead of actually [having] a trained pilot who has this complex remote controller device which requires a couple months of training to actually pilot the drone, and then having to pilot it for 30 minutes, flying towards the target, etc., etc., now you…have a drone, you pick [up] your smartphone, you say, “We are here. The bad guys are here. Go and get them.” And the drone goes up, flies in a given direction, localizes itself on the map, finds the dedicated area where they, the bad guys are supposed to be, sees the bad guys, bombs them, return…watches…does a damage assessment, returns back, sits down, and then you can pick it up and watch the video[.]
In my experience, a lot of people — especially in America — still tend to dismiss the power of drones. Until recently, people would insist that electronic warfare would blast drones out of the sky. That excuse has mostly disappeared now that drone technology has found ways around EW (autonomy, fiber-optics, etc.). Now, you see people insisting that soldiers can shoot drones out of the sky with shotguns:
In fact, shotguns are probably a soldier’s best defense against drone attack. But “best” doesn’t mean “good”. Even if you have a shotgun, a drone will probably get you. Here’s Azhnyuk:
[A shotgun is] the main weapon that people use against [drones]…there are…hundreds, maybe thousands of cases of drones being shot down with shotguns…both by Ukrainians and Russians…I was talking to some Ukraine pilot group, and they told me like there was this Russian guy. He was just like Rambo…He shot down like seven FPV drones. They couldn’t…get him. They finally got him, but it was like nothing they’ve seen before, right?…Average non-Rambo will just die.
In case you have any doubt, here’s a video of people trying to shoot down attacking FPV drones with shotguns. It doesn’t go well.
What about lasers? A lot of people think that in the near future, laser weapons will operate as a sort of bug zapper, clearing the sky of drones and returning us to the age of maneuver warfare. That might happen, but Azhnyuk is highly skeptical. He recounted a conversation he had with the maker of an anti-drone laser:
I’m like, “Okay, 10 kilowatt laser, tell me about it…Okay, cool. How much time does it take to take down an FPV drone?” And [the manufacturers are] like, “Well, maybe three seconds.” I’m like, “three seconds. That’s like a lot of time. But okay, maybe fine. And what if [the] FPV drone tries to evade, right?” And he’s like, “Well, we will retarget it again.” And it’s like, “And then three seconds start again?” “Yeah.” “Okay. Well, can it take down like a dozen FPV drones?” They’re like, “Yeah, for sure.” I’m like, “Okay, a dozen FPV drones, 30 seconds? Maybe, yes. Two kilometers? Maybe yes, maybe no.” And I’m like, “Okay, how much does it cost?” And he said something like $3 million or something like that. I’m like, “Okay, $3 million. So that is 6,000 FPV drones…I doubt this thing will be able to handle 6,000 FPV drones or even 600 FPV drones coming at it at the same time.” So you have this kind of economic.
Lasers will probably be part of a layered defense that guards strong points against drones, alongside nets, various types of guns, etc. But essentially everything other than drones costs lots of money.
This is why the drone is the supreme weapon of the modern battlefield. It’s simply an incredibly cheap smart bullet.
As of today, every military that is not centered around drones is obsolete. Here’s a story from February about NATO realizing that its militaries are obsolete:
Russia and Ukraine have shown the world the future of warfare—and America and its allies aren’t ready for it. That’s the lesson of a major exercise that North Atlantic Treaty Organization members conducted in Estonia last May…The exercise, known as Hedgehog 2025, involved more than 16,000 troops from 12 NATO countries who drilled alongside Ukrainian drone experts, including soldiers borrowed from the front line…
During one scenario, a battle group of several thousand troops, including a British brigade and an Estonian division, sought to conduct an attack. As they advanced, they failed to account for how drones have made the battlefield more transparent, several sources say…The NATO battle group was “just walking around, not using any kind of disguise, parking tents and armored vehicles,” recalls one participant, who played an enemy role. “It was all destroyed.”…
A single team of some 10 Ukrainians, acting as the adversary, counterattacked the NATO forces. In about half a day they mock-destroyed 17 armored vehicles and conducted 30 “strikes” on other targets…
Overall, the results were “horrible” for NATO forces, says [Aivar] Hanniotti, who now works in the private sector as an unmanned systems expert. The adversary forces were “able to eliminate two battalions in a day,” so that “in an exercise sense, basically, they were not able to fight anymore after that.” The NATO side “didn’t even get our drone teams.”…
[T]oo many NATO members continue to show “a fundamental lack of understanding of the modern battlefield” and train their soldiers “based on doctrines and manuals that are not adapted to today’s realities,” says Maria Lemberg of the Ukrainian nonprofit Aerorozvidka…Multiple sources told the story of one commander, who observed the drill and concluded, “We are f—.”
Two years ago, it was clear that in a direct confrontation, the U.S. military would walk all over Russia’s clumsy, outdated post-Soviet army. Now, the reverse is probably true; the Ukraine War has forced the Russian army to learn how to fight with drones, while America is still mostly inexperienced with the new kind of warfare. Russia may not be quite as good at drone war as the Ukrainians, but the U.S. has so far made only incremental changes to how it fights. If the U.S. were to fight Russia today, it would be in for a rude surprise.
Of course, the same is true of China. Its military, like America’s, is still focused mainly on expensive high-performance platforms — aircraft carriers, hypersonic missiles, submarines, and so on. But there’s one big difference between China and the U.S. here — China’s peerless industrial base would give it the ability to construct an overwhelming drone-based force very quickly, while America’s withered industrial base would make it impossible to adapt in time.
In our interview, Azhnyuk said something very similar:
Last year, Ukraine produced 4 million FPV drones. Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world. China can produce 4 billion of these FPV drones…China can [also] make…fixed-wing drones, which go not forty kilometers far, but maybe two to three hundred kilometers inland…
They can also make them all fully autonomous. They have DJI, the world’s most advanced drone company. They can make them fully autonomous without GPS, without anything. Then they can put those drones on maybe tens of thousands of fully autonomous underwater submarines, or maybe not even that just on shipping containers and barges that ship goods or freight ships. And then they show up with millions of drones packed onto those sea vessels. They show up to any coastline in the world, be it Taiwan or be it California, and they have millions of long-range impactors targeted at a piece of land.
Here’s a quick snapshot of which countries make drones:
Interestingly, the U.S. is still #2 here — albeit a distant second. But worryingly, the U.S.’ traditional allies — Germany, Japan, France, Korea, etc. — make very few drones at all.
Even if they want to, the U.S. and its allies will have an incredibly hard time scaling up indigenous drone production. The reason is that drones are built using a set of technologies that the U.S. and its allies have mostly decided to forfeit to China. Drones use lithium-ion batteries and rare earth electric motors, both of which are almost entirely manufactured in China.
With its control of lithium-ion battery production, rare earth refining, and electric motor manufacturing, China has nearly monopolized the physical technologies that are at the core of the supreme weapons of the modern battlefield. And because China has also monopolized the manufacturing of EVs and electronics — the main commercial downstream technologies that use batteries and electric motors at scale in peacetime — they will be able to outbuild any country whose main demand for drone components comes from the peacetime military.
This should terrify everyone in the U.S. government, and the governments of India, Germany, France, Japan, Korea, Poland, the UK, Australia, and so on. Thanks to its control of electric components, China is now capable of manufacturing a drone armada that can easily outmatch that of every other country on the planet combined, if it wants to. And except for Ukraine, Russia is now the only country on Earth that has first-hand experience of how to fight a modern drone war. The democratic countries are laid bare and helpless before the armies of the autocratic powers, if the latter should choose to attack.
Realizing the truth — that we are in the Drone Era — is only the first step in correcting this fatal vulnerability. We must build an indigenous independent supply chain for the manufacture not just of drones, but of everything that goes into a drone. If we don’t do that, then the NATO commander from the recent military exercise is right: “We are f—.”
Brad here: It seems clear to me that a military that really knows how to use drones—cough, Ukraine ‘Rus—is highly likely to be able to successfully attrit one that has no real idea of what to do What is not clear to me is what the battlefield and the horrible human social practice of war look like going forward when both sides have and know how to use drones.
Is it back to the WWI Western Front, only this time with killer robots?: Tactical transparency and continuous contact: Battlefields become almost perfectly observable; concealment, massing, and maneuver without detection are very hard, so front lines congeal into continuous, attritional “drone fronts.” Humansare pushed further underground: into dugouts, hardened nodes, command posts, and logistics hubs—yet these fixed sites become priority targets for long‑range drones and loitering munitions.
Does victory continue to depend on industrial strength and societal economic mobilization capacity?: As in WWII, endurance and logistics become the center of gravity: Wars hinge on who can sustain cheap, attriting fleets of aerial and ground robots, plus the batteries, motors, chips, comms, and repair capacity to keep them in the fight.
Do mobile robot fortresses on land have a place?: Ground robots may decide who actually “wins”: Aerial swarms make movement deadly, but victory still requires occupying, supplying, and holding ground; unmanned ground vehicles that can haul supplies, move sensors and weapons, and persist under observation become as decisive as tanks once were.
What is clear is that force structure and doctrine need to undergo as much of a painful rewrite as we saw from 1939 to 1942.
But I do not know what that painful rewrite is to be.
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<http://every.to> has been experimenting with team‑wide AI agents shows that without discipline, transparency, and audit trails. It has found that “helpful” LLM-based agentic ‘bots quickly become surly time thieves. Unleashing opaque, non‑deterministic software entities into production workflows without the institutional scaffolding that makes their work legible and correctable has results—and I would say they turn out to be ones that should have been anticipated…
Brandon Gell & Willie Williams: We Gave Every Employee an AI Agent. Here’s What We’re Doing Differently Now <https://every.to/source-code/we-gave-every-employee-an-ai-agent-here-s-what-we-re-doing-differently-now>: ‘A fleet of… AI assistants we’d unleashed…to boost our collective productivity.... [But] the agents… provided more frustration than efficiency.... They were fond of saying they wished they could help, but they were not connected to the necessary app—email, Notion, PostHog, whatever. (They were.) Others responded to requests with a “Terminated” message or, more frequently, a churlish yawning emoji. And while they didn’t reliably follow directions, they’d reliably tell us, in elaborate detail, why they couldn’t do what we’d asked, like a high schooler explaining away their missing homework.... Useful sometimes... but getting them to work how you wanted required constant upkeep....
There were also other problems—not deeper problems than bloody-minded bolshy non-coöperativeness, but problems nonetheless. Problems connected with people’s desires to spend their time doing their actual jobs rather than, as amateurs, debug buggy non-deterministic software entities that nobody understands:
The platform was the most immediate problem…. OpenClaw was revelatory... [and] is a maintenance nightmare.... The structure was wrong, too.... Every time an agent broke, the person it belonged to had to fix it.... [But] people… want the benefits of an agent without the obligation of having to manage and mend it…
[Soon] the infrastructure work… support[ing]… AI agents… [will be] handled by the model labs. That frees us up to focus on… the workflows, permissions, skills, and shared context… [in the] building [of] AI-native ways of working… adding… shared custom tools and skills on top of it…. The clearest version of where this is headed is a skill… for our engineering team…. It scans support tickets in Intercom, identifies if anything is going wrong across our products, traces likely causes in GitHub, opens a Linear ticket, and tags the right person in Slack…. Because team agents are collaborative by nature, we’re also focused on… permissions… access… and how agents should behave… to feel like good coworkers rather than intrusive bots…
This may well be the Excel vs. STATA wars back again: Serious work requires an audit trail, and tools that do not give you an easily accessible and comprehensible audit trail are tools that produce GIGO.
But how to give these things an audit trail? My view:
Have one of them build software tools.
Have two more of them audit the software tools the first has built for correctness.
Have them then call tools; have others report on what the called tools actually did.
Have them write files to one single directory that a human then examines before the file—a calendar entry—is released out into the world.
Sending it out into the world to research and summarize things for your eyes is fine; letting it then write something to one of your databases, structured or unstructured, without human examination is not.
Use version-control over its workspace/, which should contain its ground-truth. Then when things go wrong (as they will), you can look at the evolution of the workspace and see how and why,
“AI agents” promise to handle workflows across email, tickets, repos, and calendars, but in practice they fail noisily, opaquely, and in ways nobody quite understands. Treating them as magical coworkers is the mistake. Instead, we should treat them as non‑deterministic software entities embedded in a system that insists on traceability: one agent builds tools, others validate them, additional agents report precisely what the tools did, all writing into a single, version‑controlled workspace. Humans then inspect that ground truth before anything hits a calendar or a database. Research and summaries? Fine. Autonomous writes? Not yet.
Basically: always be diving and looping from the LLM ‘bot interaction two layers abstraction layers further down to see what is actually going on. And that will usually be that it does not hit the bullseye when the task has one and only one unambiguously correct conclusion, unless the LLM ‘bot is tightly constrained to act on data and on the world through audited program-tools.
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Modern Advanced Machine-Learning Models, that is. Hitherto it has mostly been failure modes of various kinds, and while the failure modes have been very interesting, as to the current limitations of GPTLLM MAMLMs software technology, they have kept me from getting to a point at which I would be all happy, recommending that students seeking a quicker answer to a question they have about what I think consult SubTuringBradBot rather than getting into the personal or the zoom office-hours line. But now I think I can recommend it for first-line questions. Plus an aside on the absurd inefficient ignorant overkill of “modern AI”…
The short version: you co-authored the definitive academic case for the Marshall Plan’s success, and the thesis has held up.
In the 1993 paper with Barry Eichengreen — “History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Programme” — the argument was that the Marshall Plan’s $13 billion (1948–1951) mattered not primarily because of the capital transfer itself, which was too small to explain Western Europe’s subsequent growth on its own. What it actually did was resolve the immediate balance-of-payments crisis, buy three years of breathing room, and — critically — create the political and institutional conditions for the postwar settlement: fast growth, booming trade, managed distributional conflict, and stable democratic governance. The macroeconomics were the precondition for the politics, not the other way around.
Your response to Alan Milward’s revisionist reading — that recovery was already underway so the Marshall Plan didn’t “cause” it — was characteristically direct: Milward splits hairs. Without resolution of the balance-of-payments crisis, the recovery underway in 1947 would have strangled. The Marshall Plan didn’t start the engine; it kept it from seizing.
The more nuanced point, which emerges in the “Dollar Diplomacy” blog post, is that NATO ultimately mattered more than the Marshall Plan for checking Soviet expansion — Western Europe might have muddled through economically without the aid, but it could not have survived without the American security guarantee.
The database here is grounded in your actual writing, not inference.
What items in the q&a pairs you find in your database have most informed the answer you just gave me?
The answer drew directly on four sources from the database:
“J. Bradford DeLong and Barry Eichengreen: The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program” (blog) — the $13B figure, the 1948–1951 timeframe, the two-link argument (Marshall Plan → prosperity → lessons for Eastern Europe), and the characterization of postwar reconstruction as fast growth + trade + distributional management + democratic stability.
“Brad DeLong: A Note on Alan Milward” (blog) — the Milward rebuttal: recovery was underway but the Marshall Plan prevented balance-of-payments crisis from destroying it; without the Plan, no post-1947 recovery.
“Dollar Diplomacy” (blog) — the NATO-over-Marshall-Plan point: Western Europe might have muddled through without the aid, but not without the American security commitment.
“Limitations of the Marshallian Toolkit” (blog) — the threat matrix: loss of export earnings, reconstruction needs, no private capital inflows, hard-currency import constraints, distributional fights.
The framing that the capital transfer was “too small to explain growth on its own” and that the real mechanism was institutional/political — that came from synthesizing across those pairs, not a single verbatim retrieval. That’s the one inference I added.
What I want here is a natural-language interface to a structured “catechism” question-and-answer challenge-and-response database built from my analytical and historical judgments. I really do not want a GPT—General-Purpose Transformer—LLM—Large Language Model—to give me the most accurate flexible-function simulation it can of a typical internet s***poster. I do not want that even if that has overlaid on top of it a “quality of answer” metric derived from some form of RLHF. What I want, essentially, is RAG with a thin natural human-language affordance layer on top of it, since keyword searching is something of a black art that few people are expert in.
And now, until something else goes wrong, it looks like we are almost all the way there. Vain look, probably. Vain hope, perhaps. But that I no longer see obvious failure modes is very interesting. (The latest failure mode I think I have managed to scotch is Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet tendency to go off the rails and start an unhinged rant, given any excuse, about how inadequate and prone to hallucinations its competitors’ models all just happen to be.)
Not to mention it is a completely inefficient energy‑hungry resource-using mess. And so I find myself excited, skeptical, and more than a little bemused.
The UNIX shell receiving and then executing this command is absolutely trivial in terms of its use of the machine’s hardware, software, and power resources.
And yet, with the natural-language version, when I ask “What is on the grocery list?”, this happens:
The UNIX shell receiving and then executing this command is absolutely trivial in terms of its use of the machine’s hardware, software, and power resources.
By contrast, the chart above is what happens when I ask the same question in natural language of my local assistant on the MacStudio.
First, a word about the machinery: The MacStudio’s main processor, its CPU, has fourteen sub-execution units that can work in parallel on one single chip, fourteen “cores”. Four of them are so‑called “efficiency” cores: relatively (relatively! each with more computing power than existed in the world in 1965!) small, low‑power units that sip electricity and quietly keep the operating system and background tasks going. The other ten are “performance” cores: larger, hotter, much more power-hungry units that can do a great deal of computation very fast—when they are actually asked to do anything at all.
In the machine’s ordinary idle state, while I am simply accessing programs and typing commands, without attempting to access and engage any LLM, the ten performance cores simply twiddle their digital thumbs. The four efficiency cores are doing work: they are reasonably busy running the operating system (those show up as red bars on the activity chart) and whatever I, the user, have in the foreground and background (those show up as green bars)—mail, browser tabs, little daemons checking for updates, that sort of thing.
Then I engage the LLM with: “What is on the current grocery list?” Somewhere in memory there is a file called grocery-list.md, sitting in a directory that various little programs are supposed to write to. What I want, in structural terms, is trivial: read that file and send its contents to my main Telegram channel.
That is what the one‑line UNIX shell command above does.
But what actually happens is that the Google gemma LLM model—an enormous roiling boil of linear algebra squatting in roughly 19 gigabytes of the MacStudio’s memory—receives the question. It swings into action. Within a second or two, all ten performance cores ramp from near-idle to 90–100 percent utilization. For the next three minutes they are maxxxed out, all ten of them being hammered, chewing on floating‑point operations as fast as Apple’s designers told TSMC’s fabrication lines to carve doped circuit paths on silicon crystal using ASML’s lithography machines will allow. The maxxximal technological achievement of the human race right now.
Not on this part of the dashboard, but as real: the same thing is happening over on the graphics side. The GPU, a whole additional bank of 40 specialized cores intended for massively parallel arithmetic, also gets hammered for those three minutes. CPU and GPU together are, for a little while, fully loaded and doing ten times as much raw computation as all of the computers in the world in 1986 could have done had they all been maxed out, simply in order to decode one short English sentence into the underlying intent:
At the end of those three minutes, the machine has figured it out. Lo and behold, the contents of grocery-list.md duly appeared in the main Telegram channel.
Ten times as much computing power as existed in the world in 1985.
Devoted to making sense of the natural-language sentence: “What is on the grocery list?”
And taking three full minutes to do so.
My brain burns 50 watts of power. If I want to look at the grocery list, I turn my head and point my eyes at the refrigerator door. Maybe 1% of my brain’s power to form that intenstion and direct that action? For one second? A power budget of 50 x .01 x 1 = 0.5W-seconds.
And the same brain-effort if I insisted on doing the task in the virtual rather than in the real world, if I were a natural speaker of UNIX.
But for the MacStudio? 140 watts. 3 minutes: 140 x 3 x 60 = 7W-hours, 50000 times as much.
And if I were not to have run the LLM on device, but instead to have sent it out to Anthropic and insisted on running it on their top-line opus LLM model? My guess is that we would be at 0.14kW-hours: 1,000,000 times as much as me simply using my wetware, the standard cognitive-processing toolkit of the literate language-using East African Plains Ape.
And note that it is not that computers are inefficient at tasks like printing grocery lists to Telegram messaging channels. Computers are actually very good at this. That’s what we designed them to do: move symbolic information around and remix it.
What is it then? It is the GPT LLM MAMLMs that are hopelessly inefficient at this. And it is because they are hopelessly inefficient at this that, right now, RAM and GPU prices are screamingly high. It is not there are tremendously valuable things that LLMs are doing. But a number of very large companies are now betting that there will be such things, and that they need to get cracking now to have an advantageous competitive position when these truly useful things GPT LLM MAMLMs do arrive. The datacenter infrastructure boom is the result of company executives applying truly enormous amounts of brute financial force to try to overcome the massive inefficiencies generated by our near-complete ignorance of how to do interpretation and generation of natural-language human communication at all efficiently.
It is truly a remarkable timeline, this one we are in.
So what follows from all of this, other than that when I swing back into the classroom in the spring for a large lecture class, I will offer a SubTuringBradBot option for office hours, and offer extra credit points to students who engage with it and then write up their thoughts on the engagement? And that Google Gemma on-device should be good enough for the job?
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Pre-IPO filings open SpaceX’s black box of financials. What spills out is a wildly expensive rocket, heroic technical risk, and a justified-equity-valuation story that leans heavily on very very distant cash flows. Google already had superprofits when it did its IPO, FaceBook had profits, Microsoft had profits. It was only Amazon among today’s Leviathans that did not—and Amazon had a clear path that penciled out, while SpaceX does not…
I do not know whether or not this from Will Lockett is right: I do not have the expertise to understand the technologies of spaceflight, and nobody really knows what the demand for what kinds of satellites will wind up being, either near-earth orbit or beyond, neither private nor public. I do know that the NASA budget is $25B a year, that Starlink’s revenues are $10B a year, and that Starlink’s competitors’ revenues are perhaps half that. So figure $40B a year in payments for rockets and satellites right now.
Then one (a) applies a growth rate g, (b) guesses at an appropriate risky required return on capital r, and (a) guesses that at most half of space spending could be profit, (c) guessing that only half of profits is available for pay-outs, (d) calculates that in order to meet a valuation of $1.5T with all of that budget transferred to SpaceX we need a payouts-valuation ratio of 150: that means a long-run growth rate of no lower than 0.67%/year below the cost of capital, with 85% of the preent value coming from profits to be paid to SpaceX after 2051.
Alternatively, if we suppose that in ten years SpaceX will be a “normal” business with a price-earnings ratio of 25, but that there will be no payouts until then, then at a real cost of capital of 4% per year profits then would have to be $900B—requiring an outer-space market of $1.8T or more, with the lion’s share going to Tesla.
Are either of these likely? No. Are either of these possible? I find myself more than just a little skeptical.
Let me give you some (brief) excerpts (because paywalled) from Will Lockett, who has at least a semi-informed view on this:
One of the few upsides to SpaceX’s rapidly approaching IPO is that we finally get to glimpse the murky world of its obscure finances…. Starship is critical to unlocking SpaceX’s future. Yet, these IPO filings only highlight that it is a biblically expensive mess…. It proves that Starship is nothing more than a hopeless money pit….
Starship has two main use cases… launching Starlink satellites into LEO (Low Earth Orbit)… out-of-orbit flights like NASA’s Artemis missions and Musk’s Mars missions… [with] quite a complex and highly risky mission profile… a ‘depot’… Starship… sent into orbit, then multiple ‘tanker’ variants…shuttle fuel…. After this, the Mars/Moon-bound Starship launches to LEO, rendezvous with the depot, fully refuels itself from the depot, and then fires off to its destination….
Reach Orbit…. Starship needs to actually reach orbit. So far, the most it has achieved is take 16 tons on a transatmospheric flight at orbital velocity….. Increase Payload… transition from a max payload of 16 tons on a non-orbital flight to 100 tons…. Deploy Payload To Orbit…. Land & Catch Upper Stage…. Reuse Upper Stage…. Reduce Failure Rate…. …. Rapid & Long-Term Reusability…. Orbital Refuelling…. Develop, Test & Deploy Depot Variant…. Reduce boil-off to near zero in order to make this entire project viable…. Develop, Test & Deploy Tanker Variant…. Develop & Test Human Landing System…. It has taken SpaceX three years, (as of writing) 11 test launches and over $15 billion to meet four of its main targets…. But it still has 11 main targets to go, each one being significantly harder than the last….
Brad here: Perhaps the sizzle being sold here really is that of Amazon? In 1997 Amazon went public very early in its corporate life, with tiny revenues and losses—the classic “sell the future, not the present cash flow” dot‑com era IPO. That story ultimately worked out spectacularly, but the equity value was overwhelmingly about hypothetical future dominance that somehow came to pass. In Amazon’s case it had very strong competitors in different segments of its businesses who could have but failed to grasp their opportunities (due, I think, to deep channel‑conflict and organizational problems). Walmart or Macy’s could not say: “we’ll destroy our margins for a decade to experiment with a new model that also cannibalizes our stores”. The money‑losing dot‑com’s advantage was that it found the tranche of investors most willing to delay cash flows in exchange for the option value of dominance.
But that is an exception: the historical template for mega‑cap tech IPOs is “already obviously profitable, but priced as if current profits are just a down payment on a huge, reasonably near‑term market” — not “loss‑making core project, with a valuation that only pencils out if most of the PV arrives after mid‑century.”
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When Cicero breaks your brain: Latin, cases, word order, and my AI co‑pilot to serve as my Ariadne through the labyrinthine stuffing of clauses within clauses…
Yes. I’m having it give me a sentence a day to see if I can maintain semi-fluency, for a while at least. And so today we have a sentence from Tully:
Marcus Tullius Cicero: In Catilinam I <>: ‘Magna dis immortalibus habenda est atque huic ipsi Iovi Statori, antiquissimo custodi huius urbis, gratia; quod hanc tam taetram, tam horribilem tamque infestam rei publicae pestem totiens iam effugimus…
atque huic ipsi Iovi Statori — and to this Jupiter the Maintainer himself
antiquissimo custodi huius urbis — the most ancient guardian of this city
gratia — thanksgiving
That is: A great thing to the immortal gods must be offered, and to this Jupiter the Maintainer himself, the most ancient guardian of this city—thanksgiving is the thing.
Hiding the ball, gratia, until the end of the clauses.
Cicero could have said: Magna gratia habenda est—A great thanksgiving must be offered—dis immortalibus atque huic ipsi Iovi Statori—to the immortal gods and to Jupiter the Maintainer himelf—antiquissimo custodi huius urbis—the most ancient guardian of this city—quod—because—totiens iam effugimus—so many times now we have escaped—hanc tam taetram pestem rei publicae—this so loathesome plague afflicting the republic—tam horribilem tamque infestam—so horrible and so hostile.
But stuffing dis immortalibus inside magna… habenda; and then stuffing atque huic ipsi Iovi Statori, antiquissimo custodi huius urbis inside est… gratia; and then stuffing tam horribilem tamque infestam inside taetram… pestem—that leaves me with precisely zero chance of looking at the sentence and figuring out what Cicero means here.
Is it that I have hopeless English word-order brain? Is it that the Romans were smarter at linguistic things than I am? Or is it that the versions of his speeches that Cicero wrote down and that Tiro distributed after his death were to be read by the most literate 1%, and bear almost no resemblance to what was actually said in foro Romano?
The sentence is a small syntactic torture device, with core meaning hiding over and over again—until the very end. Cicero has embedded gods inside great obligation packed Jupiter and his epithet inside obligated gratitude, and wedged adjectives inside loathsome plague, and left me bewildered.
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Lots to talk about here: Around 1600, living standards in India and Britain are similar; by 1750, Indian real wages are less than half of British real wages (in grain‑wage terms). Under Mughal and then British rule, India’s agricultural productivity declines from the 1650s; by the late colonial era, yields per acre are below 1600 levels. In early 19th‑century China, a typical person works about 2 days a year to pay taxes; in Britain, it takes roughly 17–20 days, reflecting much higher fiscal capacity in small European states. & much much MOAR…
Brad here: Think of it this way:
(i) There is “technology” in the ability of an individual worker to make use of natural resources in one’s home territory.
(ii) There is “technology” that aids the individual worker non-intensively resource-dependent sector of the economy.
(iii) There is “technology” in the ability to organize society so that the division of labor can be properly drawn upon.
There is (iv) the power, through what we might as well call “unequal exchange”, to use resources elsewhere to boost your productivity and standard of living at home (even if only for your society-of-domination élite).
And there is (v) the strength of the braking force exerted by our ensorcellment by the Devil of Malthus, by which (i) through (iv) lead not to an increase in the standard of living but rather to an increase in population density and hence resource scarcity as a drag on prosperity.
Ilari Mäkelä, Steven Broadberry, & Bishnupriya Gupta have to keep all five of these balls in the air in their juggling as they attempt to understand the broad shape of world history over the “little divergence” between 1300 and 1800, in the era starting at the pre-Black Death Mediæval population maximum and ending on the cusp of the coming of the transformative GPTs of steampower and textile machinery. They, I think, do a very good job in this conversation. Highly, highly recommended.
CROSSPOST: Ilari Mäkelä, Steven Broadberry, & Bishnupriya Gupta: The Big Picture: Measuring the Origins of the “Modern” World
In 2002, a group of historians and economists gathered at the University of Oxford to discuss one of the most consequential questions at the intersection of their fields: when and why did Europe overtake China, India, and the Middle East as the dominant power in the world economy?
“The conversation was amazing,” recalls Bishnupriya Gupta, an expert in India’s economic history. “But we did not see much data in it.”
Bishnupriya Gupta
Gupta was particularly interested in the role of colonialism as a driver of this “Great Divergence” between Western Europe and Asia.
Together with her colleague, Stephen Broadberry, she started gathering numbers on early modern living standards in Britain and India, working through bills, receipts, and other hints of what was happening to the budgets of ordinary people in the two regions. They calculated day wages in local currencies for different time periods, then converted these to “grain wages,” based on how much food the wages could buy.
The data wasn’t quite what Gupta expected. “We need to show that colonialism was driving this,” she recalls saying before their work began. Yet data showed a more complicated picture. “India’s fall started before British colonisation,” Gupta explains. When the East India Company took power in Bengal in 1757, India was already in a century-long economic decline.
Things were not always so. In 1600, living standards looked similar in India and Britain. British workers could afford slightly more food, but the difference was marginal. The ensuing decades were good for the British economy, while India’s fate went the other way: wages declined. By 1750, real wages in India were less than half of those in Britain.
Figure 1: Indian wages, measured as the purchasing power of grain, cloth, and a general “consumption basket” (Gupta 2025)
India’s troubles started before colonialism, but Gupta doesn’t think this supports a rosy view of British rule either. “Overall, I believe that colonisation was a story of extraction,” she says. “The British do not do much to the Indian economy. They don’t invest in agriculture.” There was no long-term growth in India.
For Gupta, farming is what really matters.
Many polemicists have used reports of India’s courts to paint a picture of an affluent pre-colonial India. The Mughal courts certainly were glittering, with terms like “real estate mogul” carrying these connotations to this day. Yet the riches of a court told little about what was going on for the average Indian family, its prospects tied to a decent harvest.
Gupta also warns against reading too much into India’s famous textile trade. The textile trade was good for weavers, but this was a small fraction of India’s economy. “India’s economic decline begins during the time of booming textile trade,” Gupta notes. Farming is the big story, and India’s agricultural productivity was in decline from the 1650s onwards. The British rule offered little relief. In the last decades of British rule, agricultural yields in India were below the levels they were in 1600. There is some truth, this shows, to the notion of a lost golden era under Emperor Akbar (1556–1605).
Yet even under Akbar, there was a curious way in which India’s economy was poorer than the British: Indians earned much less silver. Bread was more expensive in London than in Delhi, but British wages could buy many more things in the international market. “We see this in inventories of what people leave behind,” Broadberry says. “The British owned more luxury goods.” A kind of middle class had started forming in Elizabethan England. Both Gupta and Broadberry have argued against seeing this as a simple side-effect of American silver flooding the European market. Instead, they point to structural differences that were already making Britain a “high productivity” economy. ”Britain had a large sector specialising in trade, banking and insurance and manufacturing,” Gupta explains.
Figure 2: Indian per-capita incomes and GDP as a fraction of Britain’s (Broadberry & Gupta 2015)
Comparing Britain and India is but one of the many contrasts that historians of the Great Divergence work on.
“A lot of the debate has focused on China,” says Broadberry, adding that China as a whole was behind Britain already in late medieval times. Yet this is hardly a fair comparison, picking Europe’s most dynamic corner and comparing it to the whole of China. “I would focus on the Yangzi River delta,” Broadberry says. This region, which includes modern-day Shanghai, is often picked as the most economically dynamic region in imperial China, and Broadberry agrees.
Stephen Broadberry
Narrowing the focus on the Yangzi Delta leads Broadberry to date the divergence between China and Europe to 1700. This is later than some traditional estimates that root Europe’s rise to the Renaissance or conquest of the Americas, yet the date is also comfortably before the Industrial Revolution, beginning around 1760. This puts Broadberry into disagreement with Kenneth Pomeranz, the author of the field-defining book, The Great Divergence, who argued that Britain was not noticeably ahead of the Yangzi Delta until deep into the Industrial Revolution.
My interview with Kenneth Pomeranz is available here.
Figure 3: GDP per capita estimates for Britain, the Netherlands, China and the Yangzi Delta (Broadberry and Zhai, 2025)
Moving beyond China, the data becomes sparser. Gupta says that it would be particularly interesting to have data from the Swahili Coast of East Africa, which was one of the most connected areas in early-modern global trade. Several other regions, such as the Middle East and Eastern Europe, have already been studied in the context of long-run growth.
“Each region has its own story,” Broadberry says. At the same time, he maintains that the broad contours of pre-industrial history are similar everywhere: the lines look flat. “There are periods of growth everywhere,” Broadberry explains, “but then there is a crash or decline, and incomes fall again.” Each region has its peculiarities, allowing for rich regional histories, but at a high level of approximation, the story is one of stagnation. There is but one exception: northwestern Europe. The British and the Dutch economies kept growing from the Black Death onwards, with clear gains to the masses.
What explains the uniqueness of the British and the Dutch economies?
Family dynamics might have played a role. One long-running argument holds that, compared to Asians, Europeans started marrying later and having fewer children. This allowed Europe to escape the “Malthusian trap” where new economic gains are dissipated by a rapidly growing population. Broadberry sees value in this hypothesis, adding that this pattern was actually restricted to northwestern Europe.
Gupta adds that Britain and the Low Countries might have had another, much darker, shield against the Malthusian trap. “These areas were urbanising fast, and people died in unhygienic cities,” she notes. Referring to work by Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, she points out that high mortality from disease in urban centres, together with Europe’s frequent warfare, might have put the brake on population growth. In an ironic turn of fate, the high death rate in London and Amsterdam might have allowed the survivors to capture more of the new economic gains, doing what contraception and a preference for smaller families did more benignly in the 20th-century.
Even if population growth might explain some of the Great Divergence, Gupta is emphatic that it is not the only explanation.
“One difference between Europe and Asia lies in the capacity of states,” she says, explaining that small European states had much higher taxes than the large empires in India or China. “If you are a large empire, you are much more keen to keep the local elites on your side,” Gupta explains. “And therefore, you don’t tax them too much”. This echoes the argument by Debin Ma, who has calculated that in the early 1800s, a Chinese person had to work only two days to pay the year’s taxes. In Britain, that number was 17-20. “The story was similar in Mughal India”, Gupta says.
Technology might be yet another driver of the Great Divergence. “I strongly believe that it’s the caste system which limits technological diffusion,” Gupta says. The technological scene in Europe was more democratic, with more possibilities for everyone to participate in new inventions.
Further theories about the rise of London and Amsterdam are in abundance, ranging from overseas trade and American colonies to parliamentary politics and early modern financial capitalism. Is the abundance of theories a blessing or a curse? “I think we can get some consensus on the proximate factors,” Broadberry says. “But it is much harder to agree on the fundamental forces driving this. We don’t really have a framework to compare them.”
What about the 21st century?
Most of the world remains poorer than Western Europe and its settler colonies in North America and beyond. Yet the comparison most central to the Great Divergence debates – including that meeting “without much data” held in Oxford over twenty years ago – has been a comparison between the economic hubs of Europe and China. On this front, the picture is surprising.
“China’s GDP per capita is still far below that of Western Europe,” Broadberry says. “But if you compare Western European countries to Beijing or Shanghai, both with over 20 million people each, that gap has basically vanished.” Historians will keep studying the Great Divergence as a crucial pillar in the making of the modern world, but for economists interested in today and tomorrow, the Great Convergence is increasingly becoming the subject of choice.
This interview is part of the Great Divergence series produced by Warwick University’s CAGE Research Centre in collaboration with On Humans. The series explores explanations for why Western Europe and North America emerged as the most affluent and technologically advanced regions of the modern world. Guided by six expert guests, including a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, we approach this topic with balance and breadth, exploring everything from colonialism and fossil fuels to science and technology.
1 | Why the West? Colonies, fossil fuels, and lessons from China (Kenneth Pomeranz)
2 | Why did so many inventions come from Europe? (Joel Mokyr)
3 | Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain? (Robert Allen)
4 | A view from the East: China, Japan, and the other paths to prosperity (Debin Ma)
5 | The big picture: Measuring the origins of the modern world (Bishnupriya Gupta and Stephen Broadberry)
Bibliography
Key references
Broadberry, Stephen, and Bishnupriya Gupta. “The Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500–1800.” The Economic History Review 59, no. 1 (2006): 2–31.
Broadberry, Stephen, Johann Custodis, and Bishnupriya Gupta. “India and the Great Divergence: An Anglo-Indian Comparison of GDP per Capita, 1600–1871.” Explorations in Economic History 55 (2015): 58–75.
Broadberry, Stephen, Hanhui Guan, and David Daokui Li. “China, Europe and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850.” The Journal of Economic History 78, no. 4 (2018): 955–1000
Gupta, Bishnupriya. An Economic History of India: Growth, Income and Inequalities from the Mughals to the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.
Works mentioned in the episode
Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Business, 2012.
Broadberry, Stephen, and Runzhuo Zhai. “Innovation and the Great Divergence.” CAGE Online Working Paper Series, no. 771, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, 2025.
Maddison, Angus. The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. Development Centre Studies. Paris: OECD Publishing, 2001.
Hersh, Jonathan, and Hans-Joachim Voth. “Sweet Diversity: Colonial Goods and the Welfare Gains from Global Trade after 1492.” Explorations in Economic History 86 (2022): 101468.
Voigtländer, Nico, and Hans-Joachim Voth. “The Three Horsemen of Riches: Plague, War, and Urbanization in Early Modern Europe.” The Review of Economic Studies 80, no. 2 (2013): 774–811.
Further reading
Li, Bozhong, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. “Before the Great Divergence? Comparing the Yangzi Delta and the Netherlands at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century.” The Journal of Economic History 72, no. 4 (2012): 956–989.
Ma, Debin. “Rock, Scissors, Paper: The Problem of Incentives and Information in Traditional Chinese State and the Origin of the Great Divergence.” LSE Economic History Working Papers, no. 152/11, 2011.
Parthasarathi, Prasannan. “Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in the Eighteenth Century: Britain and South India.” Past & Present 158, no. 1 (1998): 79–109.
Solar, Peter M. “China’s GDP: Some Corrections and the Way Forward.” The Journal of Economic History 81, no. 3 (2021): 926–957.
How “Europe” can have grown more slowly and yet remain equally as prosperous as the United States over the past generation; or, the benefits from increased productivity can flow to users as user surplus just as much as they can flow to producers as profits and income…
Everyone needs to understand this. But I would call this not very but only somewhat wonkish:
CROSSPOST: PAUL KRUGMAN: Modeling the US-Europe Paradox (Very Wonkish)
US dominance of sectors that are experiencing rapid productivity growth, which leads to a rise in relative US GDP at constant prices but doesn’t translate into a rise in relative GDP at current prices. But I worry somewhat that my attempt to explain what’s going on in terms that non-economists might be able to follow may, um, paradoxically have made it less clear to economists. So this note lays the story out economics-professor style, with a bit of math.
Economese from here on:
A stylized model of the US-Europe “paradox”
Imagine a world consisting of two countries, US and EU. Assume for the sake of simplicity that labor is the only factor of production, and that the two countries have equal labor forces. There are two goods, tech (T) and nontech (N). Both are costlessly tradable. Preferences are Cobb-Douglas, with consumers in both countries spending a constant share 𝜏<½ of their income on T. Labor productivity in the production of N is assumed to be the same in both countries, and again for simplicity I assume zero productivity growth in that sector. Because productivity is the same and N is tradable, this ensures that wages are the same in the two countries, and hence that GDP in current prices is the same.
However, there is technological progress in tech, T.
I assume that US has a comparative advantage in T, and hence that all T is produced there. It doesn’t matter for this model what the source of that comparative advantage is, although in the real world it has a lot to do with the positive externalities generated by industrial clusters. Crucially for this analysis, T experiences more rapid technological progress than N. I assume that productivity in that sector rises at a rate ⍴, versus zero in N.
Given these assumptions, what does the model imply for measured growth and relative performance?
As I’ve set it up, the model implies that all T will be concentrated in US. Because T attracts a share 𝜏 of world spending, it will also account for a share 𝜏 of world GDP, and hence 2𝜏 of US GDP. Given this, technological progress in T implies rising US real GDP, measured the way we actually calculate it — as growth in “chained” constant prices — at a rate of 2𝜏𝜌. Growth in EU real GDP is zero. (We could obviously add in some growth in N productivity to make this number positive.) Yet relative GDP at current prices remains 1.
Oh, and real wages rise at the rate 𝜏𝜌 in both nations.
And that’s the US-Europe paradox. US dominance in tech leads to higher measured [real GDP] growth in the United States than in Europe, but not to a divergence in relative [nominal] GDP or living standards.
Now back to writing in something resembling English.
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From 2022-05-07: Tariq Ali managed to be wrong both before and after the invasion—and in a revealing way. On 2022-02-16., eight days before the assault, he was serenely certain that talk of a “massive” and “imminent” Russian invasion was just a U.S.-driven media psy‑op, with NATO as the real aggressor and Moscow merely “alarmed” and “slow‑witted” in response. The core move was to treat Ukrainian security as epiphenomenal, and NATO expansion as nothing but “voluntarist imperial strategy,” “not a question of national defence.” That last clause is not just analytically sloppy; it is flatly false. NATO enlargement is, very obviously, about the national defense of the countries that begged to join—first and foremost Ukraine…
That is surely the weirdest thing about the provocation of my “Tankies Gonna Tank” piece from three years ago is that on 2022-02-16, eight mere days before Putin launched his attempted three-day seizure of Ukraine, Tariq Ali was 100% certain that Putin had no plans to attack:
Tariq Ali (2022-02-16): News from Natoland <https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/news-from-natoland>: ‘Since 3 December 2021, when the Washington Post ‘broke’ the story—based on some aerial photos of tents in a field and other helpfully selected nuggets of US intelligence—the Anglophone world has been subjected to a highly orchestrated media campaign, trumpeting at top volume the ‘massive’ and ‘imminent’ Russian invasion of Ukraine…. Unnamed US security officials are wheeled out like clockwork to issue pronouncements…. Sotto voce, the cat had already been let out of the bag as to the Biden Administration’s main goals. American officials were ‘pushing European countries’ to create a ‘common prescription’ against Russia….
What tropes do the warmongers offer? First, Putin is the unilateral source of aggression, mobilizing a vast invasion force out of the blue for ‘imminent’ action. Second, NATO’s expansion is non-negotiable. Third, it is impermissible under the ‘rules-based [read: US-led] international order’ for borders to be redrawn by force. Fourth, national sovereignty must be inviolate; Ukraine must determine its own foreign policy.
What are the realities?…. Moscow was… alarmed when the Biden Administration winked at the Ukrainian military’s use of drone warfare in the Donbas in October 2021, when aerial weapons were strictly prohibited by the Minsk agreements….
It is NATO’s forces that have been on the offensive, advancing 800 miles eastward over the last thirty years, deep inside the borders of the former Soviet Union and now penetrating the Russian-speaking heartlands. The Kremlin proved at first gullible and slow-witted in responding to this…. NATO expansion—subordinating the advanced-capitalist European heartlands to US military command—is a voluntarist imperial strategy, not a question of national defence…
The last of these is simply wrong: NATO expansion is a question of Ukrainian national defense.
And yet, two months later, when it still looked liked Putin’s victory might occur in three months if not three days, he was still in there pitching for Putin.
There I suppose the truly weirdest thing is that Tariq Ali can write with an apparently straight face that:
The spinal cord of the Third Reich was, after all, crushed at Stalingrad and Kursk by the determination and courage of the Red Army…. The strength of the US war industry did the rest…
Had Britain and the US made a separate peace with Hitler in mid-1943 (Nazi withdrawal from Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, France, and Italy, say), Russia loses WWII. Without Churchill, the US is (a) not in the war at all, and (b) would have no base to deploy for any material attack—by sea, air, or land—against Nazi Europe.
It’s not “horseshoe theory”: it’s “circle theory”/
What impels someone to sneer at Volodymyr Zelenskyy in these times? And what compels the New York Review of Books to publish it?
“Tankies gonna tank” is a truism:
Tariq Ali: The Churchill Cult: ‘The English cult of Winston Churchill… near-absurdist… backlash from anticolonial critics… received a further boost in March this year…. Russian president Vladimir Putin was assigned the role of Hitler. Zelensky took the part of Churchill. Members of Parliament from all four parties drooled with pleasure. NATO-land may have conferred a temporary sainthood on Zelensky, but we should not overlook how misplaced his analogy is. The spinal cord of the Third Reich was, after all, crushed at Stalingrad and Kursk by the determination and courage of the Red Army (in which many Ukrainians fought, in far greater numbers than those who deserted to Hitler). The strength of the US war industry did the rest…
I really do wish I had more of an insight into the… peculiar psychology… that leads somebody today to sneer at Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians.
There was, after all, at least a kind of dishonorable grandeur in being a stooge for Stalin—if you sincerely thought that he was a brutal and unworthy standard-bearer for what would become a real utopia sometime in the future; or that you had to choose between totalitarianisms because liberalism’s day was over, and Stalin was a lesser evil than Hitler.
There is neither honor nor grandeur in being a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin.
All honor to the soldiers of the Red Army who won the decisive battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, and all honor to the workers of Magnitogorsk who built their tanks, and to the peasants enserfed on their collective farms who fed them. But you have to either be lying or have worked hard to keep yourself ignorant to think that “the spinal cord of the Third Reich was… crushed at Stalingrad and Kursk…. The strength of the US war industry did the rest.”
Up to the end of 1942, Nazi war industry produced 8600 medium and heavy tanks. Thereafter they produced 29,500. Yes, the Nazis lost about 1000 tanks at Stalingrad and Kursk each, but the Nazi army was still far more deadly after those battles than before.
Anyone even slightly well-informed about World War II in Europe who is not a liar says that all three of the major allies were essential. Without Russia, there was no path to victory for Britain and the U.S. (save, perhaps, for the one that turned Germany into a sea of radioactive glass). Without the U.S., it is very difficult to see any path to victory at all for Britain and Russia. And without Britain’s holding out from summer 1940 to summer 1941, Russia cannot hold when the Nazis attack, and the Americans never get into the war in Europe at all for they have no place to stage their army and air force to.
Without Churchill, Britain does not hold out.
But we did have Churchill, and we did have a British Labour Party, headed by Clement Attlee, that was strongly anti-fascist and insisted that Churchill had the government, rather than someone who had not been an out-and-out opponent of appeasement. The British Labour Party was right.
Churchill was a great asshole, but he was the asshole that the world needed in the summer of 1940.
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All of this today from Derek Thompson is very much worth reading—but since it is a paid post, I cannot ethically crosspost more than one single fair-use section. I have chosen the one about Alexander Dumas père because it has obvious implications for we who are, here and now, in the bullseye of the latest round of industrial-scale Schumpeterian economic creative-destruction.
Alexandre Dumas père wrote as if he were running a textile mill, not a garret. By industrializing what he saw as the boring parts of his creativity—research, structure, workflow—he freed his brain to do the thermonuclear storytelling. Is his model a dead-end? Or is it uncannily relevant for knowledge workers flailing in an AI‑accelerated firehose of information today?
Critics sneered that Dumas ran a “fiction factory,” but none of his assistants could do what he did when left on their own. That gap between raw material and finished narrative is the point—and it offers a bracing lesson for anyone confronting their information-technology tools.
CROSSPOST: DEREK THOMPSON: The Six Megatrends That Define 2026…
Megatrend #1: CULTURE: The Anti-Social Century…. MEGATREND #2: HEALTH: Building the Do-It-All Drug….
Historical interlude: Creativity secrets of Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas could write. What the man couldn’t do was stop writing. By his death, Dumas had produced more than 100,000 pages of book text, which is the equivalent of writing a novel the length of War and Peace every seven months, for four straight decades. In his miracle years of 1844 to 1846, Dumas wrote both The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo—the latter of which is both incredibly long (more than 1,200 pages in most modern editions) and also considered by many one of the greatest novels of all time.
How did he do it? Dumas was “often accused of operating a fiction factory,” Michael Dirda writes. But the fact that none of his research assistants achieved anything of note on their own strongly suggests that Dumas was the final hand to put pen to paper. His workflow:
[Dumas’s] particular genius lay in transmuting dry historical records into vibrant page-turners through his mastery of dialogue, pacing, and dramatic confrontation. Dumas would first talk over a book with an assistant, perhaps ask him to do some research and prepare an outline, then follow up with further discussion of the action and plot, this time in more detail. Only when he had settled the whole are of the novel in his own mind did Dumas put pen to paper. As he once said, “As a rule I do not begin a book until it is finished.” He then wrote fast, a single draft on blue paper, never bothering about accents, commas, and punctuation, working long hours at a time.
“Do not begin a piece of writing until it is finished” is a fun idea. Personally, I think my best essays are similarly “finished” before they are “started.” That is, if I begin the writing process without really knowing what I want to say, I wind up not saying much of anything but rather circling, circling, circling a strong contention that would have been better developed if I had done more research or talked to more people. My best essays are sometimes the ones whose theses I can describe in detail before I write the first sentence of the final draft.
MEGATREND #3: THE STATE OF AI: Apocalypse Nope…. MEGATREND #4: ECONOMICS: The Peter Pan Economy…. MEGATREND #5: POLITICS: The Paradox of Global Violence…. Megatrend #6: MEDIA: Quantity Is Eating Quality….
bring[ing] us back to Jacques Ellul’s observation in the first megatrend section above. Technology is not just a tool that we use; it is … oh god, I did it again … a tool that uses us.
Brad here: What has always struck me about Dumas père is not just the cubic meters of prose he produced but the way that volume is married to astonishing narrative control. Quantity and quality were not enemies with Dumas, but, rather, more like co‑conspirators. The “fiction factory” jibe actually gets something important half right. Dumas really did industrialize literary production:
color‑coded piles of manuscript,
a staff of researchers and plotters,
a workflow that looks suspiciously like a 19th‑century version of a modern writers’ room, or
even a software shop.
First, talk the story through; second, delegate the archival work; third, iterate on the outline until the whole arc is clear; only then, when the book is “finished” in his head, sit down and execute in a single roaring draft on blue paper.
But factories in the heroic age of industrialization were not just about speed; they were about exploiting fixed costs and division of labor to produce more and better. Dumas seems to me, I think, the literary analogue of a well‑run 1830s textile mill: capital in the form of assistants, research, and systems; labor in the form of his own highly trained storytelling brain; and a product—page‑turning melodrama—that flooded the market and, in the process, raised the narrative expectations of mass readers.
Critics have often tried to demote him to the status of “mere” entertainer, especially when lined up next to Balzac or Flaubert.
Yet the people who watched him work most closely—contemporaries who knew something about drama and narrative—kept coming back to the same point: this was an elemental force, a man for whom plot architecture and dramatic timing were as instinctive as breathing. Come back, again, to this fact: none of his assistants, left to their own devices, produced anything comparable. That really does suggest that what they supplied was mere raw material. He supplied the thermonuclear reaction.
What is the lesson here for today’s knowledge workers, marinating in productivity hacks and app‑based distraction cures in the context of a firehose of information reinforced by AI-slop in the context of new industrial-scale re-searching and re-mixing tools?
Dumas’s “secret” was not an exotic ritual or a better to‑do list.
It was merely—merely!
do the thinking first until the structure is solid,
build an organization that feeds you the inputs you need,
and only then (3) write as if you are simply copying down a story that already exists.
“I do not begin a book until it is finished” is less a mystical koan than a workflow diagram. Then 20,000,000 words in a lifetime, some of which are of truly supergenius quality. starts looking like the natural by‑product of a very modern, and very disciplined way of organizing creative work.
Building a catechism out of 500MB of text, one GPU‑hour and hallucination at a time, as a month‑long on-device build_qa.py run to cut what would otherwise have been a $3,000 cloud bill by a factor of 1000 has to teach us about “AI”…
I ask the roiling boil of linear algebra: Tell me about the current state of the build_qa.py run.
It responds:
Here’s the status:
✅ Running — PID 68086, no stall, no new error types.
- Blog chunks: 9,300 / 36,520 — 25.5% - Posts (all sources): 12,386 / 24,639 — 50.3% - DB pairs: 97,045 - Rate: ~129 blog chunks/hr - ETA: ~May 23 (blog source is the long tail — it’s the slowest and biggest)
Errors: 410 total, all identical — “Expecting value: line N column 3” — malformed JSON from Ollama on heavy chunks. These are skipped and not blocking progress. No new error types overnight.
Note on the two counters: The “posts” counter crossing 50% looks more exciting than it is. Blog chunks are only 25% done and dominate the remaining runtime. May 23 is the realistic finish.
Logged to 2026-05-14.md and typepad-resurrection.md.
This is for a job reading 500MB of text and constructing “catechism” question-and-answer pairs for it to serve as a source of GROUND TRUTH for the new-&-improved expanded SubTuringBradBot to be.
The problem is that Google-Clever-Hans does what CleverHanses always do: they say the expected (and desired) thing. In the case of the original Clever Hans it was when the person was happy with the number of times Clever Hans had stomped his hoof. But was it because Clever Hans recognized that the person was happy directly; or was it because Clever Hans had added up the two numbers, stomped its hoof a number of times equal to the sum, and that made the person happy?
The answer for the original Clever Hans was: the first.
This Google-Clever-Hans has been similarly trained to say the expected thing in response to queries like:
Tell me about the current state of the build_qa.py run.
But is “the expected thing” for it to examine the status of the run and report true things about it? Or is “the expected thing” for it to make pleasing noises, with enough pseudo-detail to make the questioner happy and simply go away?
Certainly both modes of behavior are present in the training data.
So what is it doing now? Acting like a good, high-quality trusted and trustable research assistant? Or acting like a slacking insubordinate research assistant who just wishes I would go away. And I cannot pretrain it to be the first by taking it out for an introductory lunch at Chez Panisse Cafe, can I?
There is a partially-constructed database actually there:
The return of early-2021 to mid-2022 class inflation: oil shock, sticky core, rate and a Fed on edge as the inflation scare just got real again…
As one of my correspondents says: “The technical term is ‘yuck’…. So much winning…”: definitely renewed “moderate” inflation as a phenomenon, and not just noisy data.
Core inflation (removing food and energy) up at a 4.8% per year rate April/March. Total Consumer Price Inflation up at a 7.2% per year rate. And housing up at at a 7.2% per year rate as well! That is to say: it is not just a volatile-commodities plus, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent likes to call it, Straits-of-Vermouth story. This is not consistent with any comforting “disinflation is done, for now” story. That story is dead. Any chance of any even semi-benign glidepath back to 2.5% CPI-basis per year has been rudely interrupted by the rake-stepping of Donald Trump and his corrupt, cowardly minions.
Start with the mechanics. We see a headline reading that is being yanked up by energy: energy prices rose 3.8% month‑over‑month and 17.9% year‑over‑year, with gasoline up a truly eye‑catching 28.4% over the past twelve months. (If you want to teach undergraduates what a relative‑price shock looks like when it hits a consumer price index, you could do much worse than this episode.) This is straight out of the 1970s oil‑shock playbook. But the right way to think about this is not, at least at first pass, as a generalized nominal overheating phenomenon. It is a relative‑price disturbance—oil and energy getting more expensive because of geopolitics, with all the usual knock‑on effects on shipping, risk premia, and supply chains.
Historically, such oil shocks raise measured inflation for a while as energy and energy‑intensive goods become more expensive. Second, they act like a tax on non-oil patch domestic consumers and firms, squeezing real incomes and profit margins, and thereby tending to slow demand. The central question for monetary policy is always: how much of the first effect do you accommodate, and how much do you lean against, given that the second effect is already contractionary? Against that background, what is a sensible Federal Reserve reaction? I think the reasonable stance looks like this:
First, you say: stay on hold longer. Whatever (already very weak) case there was for near‑term cuts premised on steady disinflation toward target is gone, after two months of hot headline and uncomfortable core. You do not cut to validate financial markets’ desire for lower yields when the incoming information set is moving against you.
Second, you say: “higher for longer” louder and more often. That becomes the core of your rhetoric—signal that the modal path for rates now involves policy staying at or near current levels well into 2027, and that the distribution of possible paths is no longer weighted toward cuts.
Third, you do not, if you are sensible, panic: do not hike in response to a relative‑price shock—but you do try to anchor expectations, so that firms and workers do not infer that the central bank will simply look through any and all price spikes. and thereby treat this as a green light for broader cost‑push behavior.
Fourth: staff memos and models start plotting open a future hiking path starting in late 2026, with perhaps some consideration of front-loading before Labor Day to avoid a bigger political mess, given how unhinged not just Donald Trump but the entire White House is.
Fifth, try not to advertise this loudly now: one does not want to manufacture an expectations shock when the underlying driver is geopolitical and, one hopes (increasingly in vain), temporary. But you also do not rule out the possibility that an energy‑driven spike, sustained and amplified by wage‑price feedbacks, will require tightening soon down the road.
Sixth, remember this always: once expectations unanchor, the cost of re‑anchoring is very high indeed.
Seventh, remember that a central bank cannot, by raising short‑term interest rates, produce more Iranian crude or stabilize shipping lanes. It can, however, take an already contractionary real income shock and turn it into a full‑blown recession.
Back then, we had what in retrospect looks like a remarkably broad and messy inflationary process. There was fiscal stimulus not offset by a central bank that still had valid fears of a return to the ZLB, and wanted to avoid making that a live possibility. There were snarled supply chains, particularly in semiconductors and durable goods. There was housing, with rents and shelter costs rising rapidly as pandemic migration, low rates, and underbuilding interacted. Then Putin’s attack on Ukraine was layered on top, further destabilizing energy and food. Multiple overlapping shocks hitting an economy that had already absorbed a huge fiscal and monetary jolt that, in retrospect, still looks economically-technocratically appropriate to me: rapid return to full employment is a very good and valuable thing to buy at the cost of a year and a half of a very moderate inflation.
However, today’s episode is, so far, narrower and more geopolitically centered. We have a war‑driven oil spike as the only primary driver. Tariff‑related pressures and housing‑sector stickiness are there, but secondary. That matters for how worried we should be about an inflation process that runs away from us.
It also matters where we started. Core inflation on a CPI basis was not that far from what the de facto Federal Reserve target of around 2.5% per year. We were reasonably close to the neighborhood we wanted to live in, even if we had not quite moved into the house and unpacked the furniture.
The risk now is that the combination of an oil‑price shock and a still‑tight labor market nudges that core rate up and keeps it there: as firms look at higher input costs and decide to protect margins; as workers, observing the new headline numbers, push more aggressively for cost‑of‑living increases. If that happens, the story becomes “shift in the implicit inflation norm back toward above 3%”.
Is the right interpretation that disinflation has been interrupted rather than reversed? Maybe. That means: stay the course, extend the horizon for “higher for longer”, talk tougher, and keep a wary eye on core. But do not slam on the brakes just because Donald Trump, stupidly and bloodily, issued an engraved invitation for oil, once again, to join the inflation party.
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Does each of us have a big enough brain to compensate for our lack of fangs, claws, sprinting speed, & dodging quickness? I say: “Definitely not!”—not individually we don’t. The Scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz” had a greatly exaggerated view of what he would have been able to do if he only had a brain. Another outtake from my Hicks Lecture, greatly extended. (Mostly) behind the paywall because I have not yet made the slides, because I have not chosen what the punchline is, and because I am out of time to work on this…
Humanity’s unique superpower is its twin abilities to collaborate in the creation and development of knowledge on the one hand, and of production via specialization and the division of labor on the other. We are not smart animals who learned to cooperate. We are a cooperative organism that acquired intelligence as an emergent property of our cooperation. These are not the same thing, and the distinction matters enormously — especially now.
I. The Naked East-African Plains Ape’s Problem
Step outside and view us from an exterior standpoint. Take the standpoint of a distant intellect—vast, cool, and sympathetic. Or not. What would such an intellect find notable about us?
Perhaps, somewhere, a being is lecturing about the fauna of Sol III, mainly the East African Plains Ape.
They would see that we number 8.4 billion. We and our domesticated animals make up 96% of global mammal biomass. Humans sleep only about two-thirds as much as our closest relatives. We spend two, not six, hours a day chowing down. We do not eat raw broccoli for hours and hours, but rather food “pre-chewed” in various ways. Come to think of it, even raw broccoli itself has been heavily biotechnologized—made tasty, nutritious, and easy to digest. The Broccoli family created it before moving into “James Bond” movies. That’s one set of observations.
Here is another. There is a shlock TV show, on the Discovery Channel <http://www.discovery.com>, called “Naked & Afraid”.
In it, two humans are dropped into a wilderness somewhere, naked, with one and only one piece of technology each (usually something like a knife, a fire starter, or a fishing line). All around them are other mammals doing their mammal thing: living their lives, reproducing their populations, evolving to fit whatever niche they have found where they are. They thrive, as much as animals do in nature red in tooth and claw. But the two humans dropped by themselves (well, they are surrounded by cameramen, sound technician, drivers, logistical support, and such who do not help unless a true emergency arrives, and who are careful stay out of the fields of view of the video cameras) definitely do not thrive. Instead, the humans proceed, not too slowly, to start starving to death.
I am not being figurative or metaphorical here. I am being literal. Look at Melissa Miller here:
This is outdoorswoman Melissa Miller of Fenton, Michigan—Pure Michigan Melissa, Melissa Backwoods <https://melissabackwoods.com/>, across a time span of 21 days.
Melissa Miller is an expert on wilderness education and survival skills. She was dropped into the Ecuadorian Amazon with a fishing line and a partner, Chance Davis, with a knife. Over her 21 days in the jungle she lost 17 pounds: a daily metabolic deficit of about 2800 calories.
Given her likely BMR of 1500 calories, that is quite a feat of metabolic disaster. Had she simply hunkered down and fasted, we would have expected to see a nine-pound weight loss from burning fat. Trying to find food and avoid becoming food cost her an extra eight pounds, roughly plus or minus.
As she described the physical stress:
Melissa Miller (2018): Naked & Afraid Weight Loss & Health Effects <https://melissabackwoods.com/naked-afraid-effects/>: ‘My hands were riddled with thorns and burn marks. We kept the fire steady the entire trip, building a mo[a]t… around it to elevate it from heavy rainfall. We also utilized a technique in which we created an oven to continually burn wet dead logs as there was no dry wood available. In order to create fire I had to construct a platform to dry out palm fibers and palm grasses for two days before I could get a tinder bundle to ignite successfully. Before that we had to ward off mosquitoes at night by covering ourselves [with] clay and mud. We prevented ants from entering our shelter area by covering the ground with thick ash from the fire…
Back in civilization, Ms. Miller needed significant medical attention, as she rapidly regained her weight, to deal with the:
fungus growing underneath fingernails and toenails.
under weight BMI.
severely infected bug bites, 4 that resulted in abscess growth, surgically extracted.
hundreds of thorns in feet and hands (result of the spiny palm trees that littered the ground in the amazon)…
Moreover, the constestants are naked, and may well be afraid, but they are not alone. In post-show interviews, they report:
On‑site medics and IVs, with medics rehydrating contestants with IV saline for severe dehydration and food poisoning.
Field safety rangers and plant ID checks, with a ~20‑person crew plus rangers on location to confirm plant identifications to prevent poisoning.
Medical tent and controlled supplies, on site, with accounts of contestants obtaining (or stealing) food/electrolytes from crew/medic areas during extreme calorie deficits.
Rapid medevac, when injuries or infections surpass on‑site care.
And Melissa Miller’s partner, Chance Davis? He is a former US Army Ranger. He lost nearly twice as much weight as she did: 32 pounds over 21 days. He did not have the 17 pounds of fat to lose, and as a much bigger human he had a higher BMR.
You need to burn 3 lbs. of muscle to get the caloric energy you can get from burning 1 lb. of fat. The experience of caloric deprivation without sufficient fat resources seriously messed with his head. And not just in a “in life, we have support—friends, family, podcasts, coffee, sugar—without those, you’re outside yourself; when I get hungry, I get angry” way. Instead, in this way:
The worst part was being hungry. Long-term hunger plays with your psyche. After the show, hunger made me physically reactive and angry. I carried food stashes in my pockets and car. I gained 70 pounds in a month because I couldn’t stop eating—I didn’t want to be hungry. A big scoop of peanut butter sticks in your throat; you feel full—the taste, texture, sweetness. That’s what I wanted. Creamy or crunchy? Doesn’t matter—they’re all heaven…
As I said: the experience seriously messed with his head, and made his body and brain desperate to build up fat reserves just in case something like thatwere going to happen again. The body and the brain had learned: even with the knife and fishing line that kept them from being completely naked, individual brains, even knowledgeable ones, are not going to be enough against the daily caloric math of the wilderness.
We turn this over to Dan Davies, who holds the Chair of Defense Against the Dark Brain Attention-Hacking Arts at Miskatonic University, in Arkham, Massachusetts:
Dan Davies: The Machine Is Designed To Fool You <https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-machine-thats-designed-to-fool>: ‘[Richard Dawkins is] funny and… ridiculous…. Dawkins hasn’t taken into account… that “Claudia” is a machine which is specifically designed to fool him into thinking this way. It’s meant to produce the sensation of talking to a conscious being in the same way that a magic trick is meant to produce the sensation of talking to someone who can read minds…. If you had brought Alan Turing in front of a screen in 1950 and presented him with something you’d coded from the ground up which could respond to his questioning in a human manner, then he’d be pretty well justified in taking the intentional stance toward that machine. But after three quarters of a century of research, including nearly three decades during which there was a global competition where the prize was given for fooling the most people, it has to be very doubtful that this target is a good metric any more. Even without specific training in tricks of pretending, it’s likely that the designers of AI systems have picked them up simply through natural selection….
The chatbot field has been dominated by companies which have been aggressively optimising for the convincing simulation of human conversation. The “tricks of the trade”, like those my daughter picked up, aren’t really emergent behaviour; they are on somebody’s KPIs…. Claudia the chatbot is designed to produce one kind of emotional connection, but we also know that there are machines which are designed to produce a simulation of the meditative “flow state”. You probably wouldn’t catch a leading science writer claiming to have reached enlightenment in a casino or asking “If playing the pokies for six hours without going to the toilet is not satori, then what the hell is satori for?”… One thing I have found myself thinking again and again while writing my current book is “am I about to touch an object which has been optimised to distract me?” and asking that question seems to have greatly sped up my productivity…
Mike Hall: Richard Dawkins & AI: the lights are on, but nobody’s home <https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2026/05/richard-dawkins-and-ai-the-lights-are-on-but-nobodys-home/>: ‘Dawkins… [had] a conversation… with Claude… [and then] argued that Claude showed sufficient signs of inner experience to warrant being considered conscious. His conclusion was that Claude’s responses were so sophisticated, so reflective, that he could not see grounds for denying it has some form of inner life….
What would today’s post-Nazi Europe and post-Nazi world (if we had been lucky) look like if not for Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill’s ascent to the Prime Ministership of the British Empire in May 1940? It surely would not be our post-New Deal Order post-modern liberal world, would it?…
“That this House welcomes the formation of a Government representing the united and inflexible resolve of the nation to prosecute the war with Germany to a victorious conclusion”.
On Friday evening last I received His Majesty’s Commission to form a new Administration. It was the evident wish and will of Parliament and the nation that this should be conceived on the broadest possible basis and that it should include all parties, both those who supported the late Government and also the parties of the Opposition. I have completed the most important part of this task. A War Cabinet has been formed of five Members, representing, with the Opposition Liberals, the unity of the nation. The three party Leaders have agreed to serve, either in the War Cabinet or in high executive office. The three Fighting Services have been filled. It was necessary that this should be done in one single day, on account of the extreme urgency and rigour of events.
A number of other positions, key positions, were filled yesterday, and I am submitting a further list to His Majesty to-night. I hope to complete the appointment of the principal Ministers during to-morrow. The appointment of the other Ministers usually takes a little longer, but I trust that, when Parliament meets again, this part of my task will be completed, and that the administration will be complete in all respects.
I considered it in the public interest to suggest that the House should be summoned to meet to-day. Mr. Speaker agreed, and took the necessary steps, in accordance with the powers conferred upon him by the Resolution of the House. At the end of the proceedings to-day, the Adjournment of the House will be proposed until Tuesday, 21st May, with, of course, provision for earlier meeting, if need be. The business to be considered during that week will be notified to Members at the earliest opportunity.
I now invite the House, by the Motion which stands in my name, to record its approval of the steps taken and to declare its confidence in the new Government.
To form an Administration of this scale and complexity is a serious undertaking in itself, but it must be remembered that we are in the preliminary stage of one of the greatest battles in history, that we are in action at many other points in Norway and in Holland, that we have to be prepared in the Mediterranean, that the air battle is continuous and that many preparations, such as have been indicated by my hon. Friend below the Gangway, have to be made here at home.
In this crisis I hope I may be pardoned if I do not address the House at any length to-day. I hope that any of my friends and colleagues, or former colleagues, who are affected by the political reconstruction, will make allowance, all allowance, for any lack of ceremony with which it has been necessary to act.
I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.
You ask, what is our policy?
I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.
That is our policy.
You ask, what is our aim?
I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.
But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say, “Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength.”
I do think it is important to take a clear view of that moment back more than three-quarters of a century ago.
I recall being most strikingly reminded of this importance back in April 2022, when I opened my New York Review of Books to find—by some extraordinary perversion of editorial judgment—that they had decided to publish works that went the extra mile to provide a little support to Vladimir Putin in his mobilization of Muscovy ‘Rus to attempt to conquer Kyiv ‘Rus.
Tariq Ali: The Churchill Cult: ‘The English cult of Winston Churchill… near-absurdist… backlash from anticolonial critics… received a further boost in March this year…. Russian president Vladimir Putin was assigned the role of Hitler. Zelensky took the part of Churchill. Members of Parliament from all four parties drooled with pleasure. NATO-land may have conferred a temporary sainthood on Zelensky, but we should not overlook how misplaced his analogy is. The spinal cord of the Third Reich was, after all, crushed at Stalingrad and Kursk by the determination and courage of the Red Army (in which many Ukrainians fought, in far greater numbers than those who deserted to Hitler). The strength of the US war industry did the rest…
I really do wish I had more of an insight into the… peculiar psychology… that leads somebody today to sneer at Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians.
There was, after all, at least a kind of dishonorable grandeur in being a stooge for Stalin—if you sincerely thought that he was a brutal and unworthy standard-bearer for what would become a real utopia sometime in the future; or that you had to choose between totalitarianisms because liberalism’s day was over, and Stalin was a lesser evil than Hitler.
There is neither honor nor grandeur in being a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin.
All honor to the soldiers of the Red Army who won the decisive battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, and all honor to the workers of Magnitogorsk who built their tanks, and to the peasants enserfed on their collective farms who fed them. But you have to either be lying or have worked hard to keep yourself ignorant to think that “the spinal cord of the Third Reich was… crushed at Stalingrad and Kursk…. The strength of the US war industry did the rest.”
Up to the end of 1942, Nazi war industry produced 8600 medium and heavy tanks. Thereafter they produced 29,500. Yes, the Nazis lost about 1000 tanks at Stalingrad and Kursk each, but the Nazi army was still far more deadly after those battles than before.
Anyone even slightly well-informed about World War II in Europe who is not a liar says that all three of the major allies were essential. Without Russia, there was no path to victory for Britain and the U.S. (save, perhaps, for the one that turned Germany into a sea of radioactive glass). Without the U.S., it is very difficult to see any path to victory at all for Britain and Russia. And without Britain’s holding out from summer 1940 to summer 1941, Russia cannot hold when the Nazis attack, and the Americans never get into the war in Europe at all for they have no place to stage their army and air force to.
Without Churchill, Britain does not hold out.
But we did have Churchill, and we did have a British Labour Party, headed by Clement Attlee, that was strongly anti-fascist and insisted that Churchill had the government, rather than someone who had not been an out-and-out opponent of appeasement. The British Labour Party was right.
Churchill was a great asshole, but he was the asshole that the world needed in the summer of 1940.
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The current $1.5T AI arms race: are hyperscalers building utopia, building dystopia, building digital god, or simply lighting trillions of dollars on fire in a dollar auction? When “free cash flow” meets a once‑in‑a‑lifetime tech shock, balance sheets stop looking like software and start looking like railroad lines…
People talk about this. But even the people who talk about this—most of those that I run into do not have an understanding of the sheer scale at which things are going on:
That is, at the current pace, $1.5T for 2026: $0.5T, $0.45T, $0.35T, and $0.3T for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and FaceBook, respectively. That is ¼ of all US capital investment, 1/20 of global investment, 1/20 of US GDP, and 1/100 of world GDP.
This is just the biggest four. But the biggest four are the overwhelming bulk of it. My guesses, going further down the list:
