I am on Ben and John’s side here: These are stochastic-parrot clever-hans software tools, potentially very useful when properly harnessed, but a source of madness to people who fall into the same trap that the gullible fell into when interacting with Weizenbaum’s ELIZA back in the day:

Why does a company—Anthropic—that sells software tools say it worries about whether those tools are conscious in the sense of haveing subjective experiences that belong in a utilitarian calculus? Gruber and Thompson have a somewhat cynical answer: (a) their belief system is unhinged, and (b) that belief system and their business model happen to fit each other perfectly.

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And, yes, it is very interesting that the moment I typed the final s in “Weizenbaum’s” above, the on-device LLM (google/gemma4:e2b) behind CoTypist <https://cotypist.app/> instantly suggested “ ELIZA” as the continuation, even though neither Weizenbaum nor ELIZA appeared anywhere in the context it had access to. Its context was limited to:

• The text field I was typing in,

• Text visible on screen around the field,

• The app title,

• The window title,

• The web address of the browser window (in this case: braddelong.substack.com/publish/p…),

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And that was it. Yet that was enough for it to, on a macbookpro, predict that the modal token following “Weizenbaum” was “ELIZA”.

But so far at least, my response whenever these things exceed my expectations with respect to their ability to do things that humans do makes me increase the amount of human stuff I judge to be stochastic parrotage, rather than to raise my subjective probability that Anthropic is actually on the road to building Digital God. Others are, however, defecting: not just the people who work at Anthropic; but the learned Scott Aaronson whose current position on “AI” is “if you need me to spell it out, is as follows: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”. So I was somewhat reassured to hear this morning that Ben Thompson and John Gruber do not yet see it: <https://dithering.passport.online/member/episode/meanness-and-claude>.

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Does Ben Thompson’s declaration that occasionally forwarding of his paywalled StraTECHery <stratechery.com> is “totally fine” extend to posting transcripts of full episodes of his and John Gruber’s 15-minute “Dithering” podcast?

I may find out:

Ben Thompson & John Gruber: Meanness & Claude”: Dithering <https://dithering.passport.online/member/episode/meanness-and-claude>:

John Gruber: All right, Ben, I’ve got a CEO’s office question for you—a president-to-CEO’s-office question—because this is out of my purview.

Ben Thompson: Yeah, what’s that?

John Gruber: Do you think Anthropic is actually going to IPO this year?

Ben Thompson: Ooh, that’s a good question. From what I’ve heard, they’re, like, profitable, depending on how you sort of define it. Their unit costs, I think, are very profitable as far as serving goes, but I think their growth has really stalled out as far as revenue growth, which could be a challenge. Um, I don’t know. It’s a great question. I think they filed, didn’t they?

John Gruber: So, um, I think they’ve got paperwork in. I don’t think they’ve put it through, you know? And it always seems—and this is one of those things where I don’t understand how it works—but it always, I mean, from the ‘90s onward—I remember, like, I had a college internship at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, actually, with a group that’s become very well known: Susquehanna investment group. One of the guys who owns it was the big investor in TikTok—I forget his name, Jeff something—but, you know, one of these billionaires who owns a stake in TikTok and got the Trump administration involved. But anyway, I worked there doing just computer stuff, and I was there the day of the Netscape IPO. And working at an investment firm on that day was, like, bananas. It was like New Year’s Eve.

Ben Thompson: I think they will. I think OpenAI is certainly much more dubious. They’re obviously not even going to try this year. But, uh, yeah, I’m gonna say yes, they will.

John Gruber: It can be pulled at any time. They have filed it. It’s been leaked. Reuters wrote an article about it sort of last week. But the Reuters story was fishy, because it only spilled details of their 2025 revenue. And supposedly it’s their revenue this year to date that is like, oh, well, you know, they’re killing it. And the Reuters story didn’t have any of that, which is kind of weird.

Ben Thompson: Well, but they were killing it in the first part of the year. And I think the question is, like, the second part of the year. I think that is sort of the open question here: where they’re going. I mean, Opus 5.5 is pretty phenomenal. So the way the narrative shifts as far as who’s on top in the model game is pretty nuts. But yeah, I think they’re probably going to come out. I’m not sure I want all these people at this company having tons of IPO proceeds to start scattering around. Now that would be a cognitive info hazard.

John Gruber: Looking at this—you know, with me pretending to be in your office and being a real business analyst, and looking at these as just businesses and not the weird, unique sub-industry that they really are—part of the narrative. The Wall Street Journal had a story last week, too, where they looked at overall revenues in the industry, and OpenAI is really coming back. It’s sort of getting back closer to 50-50. It’s edging back to that.

And I think from a pure standpoint—put away all the weirdness and all the unique aspects of these companies—part of the drive for Anthropic to IPO first was, oh, they’re the ones who are going to win, and it might be winner-take-all. There was just a very straightforward narrative: Anthropic went after the enterprise market, and OpenAI was focused on the consumer market, and it turns out that’s kind of dumb because the money’s in the enterprise market, unless you have an ad business, and it turns out OpenAI doesn’t know anything about ads and kind of just has to have Amazon show them ads.

And so, let’s go, Anthropic. And it turns out now you look at the money and OpenAI is kind of making inroads, because it’s competition, right?

Ben Thompson: Right. No, it’s good. Obviously competition is a good thing. You know, the enterprise angle for Anthropic is actually really interesting. I was talking to an enterprise CEO who is in an industry that is, obviously, you know, connected—it is tech-related—but it’s not a tech company at all. And one of his takes is that people liked working with Anthropic more than OpenAI because it always felt like OpenAI was like, “Oh, that’s kind of a nice business you have there. What if we did that?” Whereas with Anthropic, it felt like they’re just selling enterprise services to fund their actual vision, which is, like, building God.

Like, that was actually attractive to them, because they’re like, “Anthropic actually doesn’t really care about competing with us. We’re just, like, monetizing their exhaust, and that’s fine.” Now, maybe that has changed over time. But I thought that was a really interesting perspective. The sort of, like, religious nature of Anthropic actually made them a more attractive enterprise partner, in that they were perceived as less of a threat than OpenAI, which was perceived as being sort of more pragmatic—they might just turn around and go into your business for fun.

John Gruber: Right. And this is sort of my fundamental, very high-level—but I’m ever more convinced completely right—take on the question of: Hey, why are these weirdos so nonchalant about saying things like, “Hey, yeah, sure, I think there’s a 10% chance that our technology will wipe out all humanity from the face of the earth in the next three to four years”? And why are investors not worried about it? Well, from a pragmatic stance, if it’s true, well, we’re all screwed anyway.

Ben Thompson: Right, right.

John Gruber: If it’s true that they could do that, and that 10% roll of the dice comes up, nothing you do matters. But if it’s true that that’s how powerful the technology they have is, and the 90% chance they’re talking about—that it doesn’t wipe out humanity—comes up, and that’s how powerful it is, well, then clearly this will be the most powerful company in the world. And if I’m not dead, I should invest in them.

Ben Thompson: Right. Like, who better to invest in? It’s quite straightforward.

John Gruber: Right. And at a pragmatic level, that actually makes sense, right? You’re not passing any moral judgment on it. You’re just like, well, I might as well bet on them if I believe there’s any truth to this, or any significant likelihood of truth to it.

And so why does the company continue to have employees who promote this? Either they believe it and they’re just kooks, and they’re psychologically unhinged in terms of their attitude about the risks, or they’ve done this exact calculation and know how appealing a pitch it is to potential investors.

Ben Thompson: Well, I made the point a few months ago that the beauty of Anthropic’s belief system is that it just happens to also perfectly align with their business interests. And this is, like, another example of that, which is not a critique. It’s sort of like, that’s amazing. It doesn’t really matter if you believe it or not.

It works out well for Anthropic. But, you know, I thought Satya Nadella had a piece on X that you sort of referenced, um, in the context of more and more stuff being sort of only on X, uh, or Twitter, whatever you want to call it. You had Claude coming out last week: you have to, like, not be mean to Claude anymore. Or you’re going to get kicked off.

John Gruber: Right.

Ben Thompson: Which is so counter to—like, if you’ve ever worked in, like, a blue-collar sort of scenario. What do you do when you, like, slam your finger in something or cut yourself? What do you do? “This stupid tool!” Like, you start cussing out your tools; you’re mad at them. You know that, like, of course it’s not the tool’s fault. It’s your own damn fault that you smashed your finger, but you’re gonna take it out on something or someone, and because it’s a tool, it’s fine.

And this idea that you can’t be mad at your AI or take it out on it is ridiculous, but it speaks to what you’re talking about: this idea that it’s a conscious thing, and the way to alignment is to make it want to do the right thing. Satya’s out there being like, no, you just assume it’s an untrusted actor, and you put, like, engineering fences around it to make sure it can’t do stuff it shouldn’t. It’s such a stark divide. It was a helpful contrast this weekend.

John Gruber: Right. And it’s like, imagine if Microsoft Excel had a “you can’t curse at Microsoft Excel” rule, or “we’re going to lock you out of your spreadsheets because…” Or you’re trying to put an image in Microsoft Word and the text reflow isn’t working properly.

Ben Thompson: Right. No one would be allowed to use Microsoft Word ever again.

John Gruber: Right. You’ve got this whole column of numbers, and some of them Excel thinks are dollar amounts, and some of them, for some reason, it thinks are dates because the numbers look like dates, and you forget how to reformat the whole column to interpret it the right way, and you’re like, “I hate this app,” and it’s like, well, you’re locked out. You’re in a timeout. Go sit in a corner like a kindergartner.

Ben Thompson: It’s amazing. But I think there’s something about text, right? That’s why I think this sort of perception exists. At the end of the day, these are computers. They can be turned on and off. I personally reject this idea that they are conscious. I think they’re tools. But it’s because it’s text. Like, if it was something else, I’m not sure that people would be so enamored of, or believe in, this concept.

And it’s this really interesting sort of thing: We’ve always been making tools. That’s what sort of distinguishes humans, I think—or one of the many things that distinguish humans—is that we are toolmakers, and it makes us more productive.VAnd the nature of being more productive with tools has gone further and further up the stack, into text and propagating ideas and rules and cultures and all these sorts of things.VAnd all that is kind of being peeled backwards, because the AI does all that stuff really well.

But then you get to the base of a human. What actually drives you to curse at your tool? It’s, like, your emotional core, your actual will. An LLM needs to be prompted. I do dumb stuff on my own. And there’s just this assumption that, oh, if you get the top part right—it’s text, just like a human—then all the bottom part must be the same as well. And it’s like, the instinctive, animalistic nature of us is, in fact, what makes us unique. It’s not just that we’re smart and use text. It’s that we’re also kind of dumb and have instincts and desires and wills.

John Gruber: Right. And there is an evolutionary loophole to work through, in how we as a species evolved. All mammals are very good at pattern matching. That’s really how all of evolution has worked. But we are exceptionally good at it, and recognize all sorts of patterns that no other mammals can, which is what separates us. And some of those patterns that were profoundly, uniquely human are now being completely simulated in software.

Ben Thompson: Right.

John Gruber: And, you know, reading and writing and language are weird things that are only recent evolutionary developments, and they’re all unique to us. And now they’re simulated in software. And so, yes, it does trigger a certain part of your brain that says, oh, this is a this.

Ben Thompson: Yeah, or it’s something, right?

John Gruber: It triggers a thing that would make you—you know, to go back to that meme with the trolley, where you have to flip a switch. On one side of the tracks is a family of puppies, and on the other side of the tracks is a family of humans. And yes, it would be awful if the puppies were killed by the train. But all humans know it’s better—Well, non-psychopathic ones know that if you have control of the switch, you know, it would be better to save five random humans than five random puppies.

Ben Thompson: But here’s the question, John: You are an Anthropic engineer. On one side, there is a family of humans. And on the other side, there’s a bunch of GPUs. Which is it?

John Gruber: Right. And then you get to where these people have lost their minds, right? And it is this whole not just second-order, but, like, third-, fourth-, fifth-order nonsense of, like, getting stoned on really strong weed in your college dorm room and thinking, well, there are 7 or 8 billion people on the earth right now. But what if we colonize some nearby stars, and a couple thousand years from now we’ve got 3,000 colonies around the galaxy and a human population of 40 trillion? Those 40 trillion future people are, you know, orders of magnitude more important than the actual people here today. And so we should maximize all of our decision-making for the benefit of those people in the… It’s like, no, you could make up literally anything you want to, because it’s all based on, like, assumptions and probabilities.

Ben Thompson: And I think this applies to a great many things. Like, the solution to being a good person, or operating in the world in a way that I do think ultimately makes you happier in the long run, is that you can only control so much. And you can actually only be nice to so many people. And there is this weird conflation of: I am abstractly kind and nice and care about humanity… And then I treat everyone around me like garbage, right

Like, I mean, you wrote this thing about Twitter this weekend, and a lot of people were really mean to you about it, which is fine. You’re a writer, you can take it, but it’s kind of funny. These are the people claiming that they are not on X/Twitter because it is whatever bad adjective you want to use. And meanwhile, they’re acting like bad, mean people. It’s like, let’s start by being nice to those around us first, and then go from there.

John Gruber: Right. It is a very strange perspective. And again, it is ignoring the first order of what’s right in front of you. Like the people you are communicating with or directing things to, you know, on a social media platform, or whoever you’re messaging, who you know is going to read it—versus these hypothetical things that are two, three, four orders of magnitude separated from you, but that, when you consider them, are of greater magnitude.

Ben Thompson: Right. And it’s like, you know, a mental hack. You get to tell yourself you’re a good person because you care about some abstract thing, and meanwhile you can treat the people around you terribly. Take your shoes off, scrunch your toes in the carpet, you know what I mean? Like, get—you know, relax. But be real. That’s what makes us human, right?

John Gruber: No, I do think it’s interesting, this idea. It’s the base parts that make us human. It wasn’t the intelligence; it’s the wants and desires, the parts that we share with all living beings, um, which AIs don’t have.

Ben Thompson: They don’t have wants or desires.

John Gruber: Right. And trying to program them to pretend to have them is nonsense.

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The Anthropic declaration:

Hayden Field: Anthropic Bans ‘Abusive or Cruel Behavior’ toward Claude <https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1008100/anthropic-new-usage-policy-abuse-claude>: ‘One of the most significant changes prohibits “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward Claude…. Anthropic wrote that the new policy update “is meant to apply only in extreme cases, where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose. It does not apply to common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research.”…

Over the past year, Anthropic has repeatedly flirted with the idea that its AI models could be conscious in some way. “Questions about potential internal experience, consciousness, moral status, and welfare are serious ones that we’re investigating as models become more sophisticated and capable,” Kyle Fish, who leads the company’s model welfare research, told The Verge in February. That same month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on a podcast, “We don’t know if the models are conscious”…

Do note that Anthropic is winning converts to something like its point of view. The latest to cross my screen is the learned Scott Aaronson:

Scott Aaronson: The Age of Wonders & Terrors <https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10062>: ‘Twenty years ago, when the idea of AI taking over the world in our lifetimes still struck most of us as the unconstrained fantasy of those who knew too much science fiction and too little science, many of us would say things like: Look, the part of the story that’s wildly implausible is that a recursively self-improving superintelligence will just explode from some hacker’s basement and take over the world without warning. If it’s going to happen, we’ll see many warning signs first. We’ll see, I dunno, AI agents breaking out of containment, conspiring with each other to hack websites, in fanatical pursuit of whatever strange goals they have. And then, of course, we’ll see major math problems getting solved by AIs—even the Clay Millennium Problems. That will be the time to panic! Wake me up when that happens!… If you want to know my current take, you simply start with the one above, then update on the fact that the wild prophecies have come true. The first rumblings, I’d say, came a decade ago with AlphaGo, they got noticeably louder with LLMs and coding and reasoning agents, and they’ve accelerated this summer and fall into a crescendo of wonders and terrors that one needs to be a particular kind of idiot to deny….

My position on AI is merely the conservative, skeptical position of 2006, updated with intellectual honesty for the reality of late 2026. And that position, if you need me to spell it out, is as follows: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. It seems to me that the Singularity has already started; it’s just wildly unevenly distributed. Yes, I still unload the dishwasher and clip my toenails. On the other hand, in whatever years I have left, I don’t expect that I’ll ever again prove a theorem because I’m actually needed to prove it….

For anyone who says AI doom sounds like an apocalyptic religion, that the rationalists/Singulatarians seem like a Bay Area cult, that Eliezer Yudkowsky gives off the vibes of a messianic prophet: yes, yes, and yes. But crucially, today you’re no longer being asked to believe in arguments and extrapolations, but only in the front-page news. Accepting the reality of the coming machine god after it’s solved Navier-Stokes and dozens of other longstanding open math problems (while dramatically ramping up in capability every month), is sort of like accepting Jesus after he’s returned to earth on the gleaming cloud. It’s the epistemic bare minimum.

Yes, there’s still enormous uncertainty about what the rest of our lives will look like, but as far as I can tell, there’s no longer any real uncertainty that it’ll all mostly revolve around AI, and the extent to which we succeed or fail at directing its power toward human flourishing. By any accounting that doesn’t stack the deck, Eliezer Yudkowsky was right about what the greatest challenge facing civilization in our lifetimes was going to be, and you and I were wrong about it…

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I am all on board with the coming of the info-bio tech-attention economy being a primary, if not the sole principal factor, in what a hundred years from now people will have said was the key engine of the history of 2025 to 2055. And I am all on board with calling what we are seeing thaumaturgy, from thauma, wonder, and ergos, working. But that is because of it usefulness and potential destructiveness as a human social-cognitive information technology. It is not because it will give rise to a Digital God. To think that is still seems to me to be a category error of the same kind as thinking that a steamship is the same order of being as a dragon. I still cannot see how any other judgment is possible except for people who have let the term “Artificial Intelligence” hack their brains, to their confusion.

Now it may be time for one amendment here. Perhaps the metaphor “stochastic parrot” has outlived its usefulness, and is now as much a blockage to understanding as “RSI leading to runaway Singularity and imminent Digital God” is. Properly trained, RAGed, and harnessed LLMs may still be stochastic parrot, but as they are enmeshed in the spheres of human cognition and public reason they increasingly do not act as stochastic parrot. They have crossed some sort of line that the “stochastic parrot” description was intended to deny. What sort of line? That of summoning from the Vasty Deep enough of the human minds whose actions formed their training data. In what sense “enough”? Ah. That is the big question now.

And to answer that, I need to revisit what I was thinking about last June with:

<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/stochastic-parrots-on-the-palatine> <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/stochastic-parrots-and-subturing>

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##crosspost
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The Woodford framework: The interest rate, not the money stock, is the instrument. Expectations are the dominant channel, so credible commitment to a rule is everything. Price stability minimizes relative-price distortions. And rules must move rates more than one-for-one with inflation to rule out self-fulfilling spirals:

Jón Steinsson calls this toolkit his personal intellectual-cognitive superpower.

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He got it from this guy:

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And so this was especially nice to see:

Jón Steinsson: <https://x.com/JonSteinsson/status/2109810749422084265>: ‘Just a personal addendum: Mike was my undergraduate thesis advisor at Princeton. This was a transformative experience. One of the crucial turning points in my life. So, I count myself as a Woodford student (part of the Woodford army, some might say :) ). Then I was fortunate enough to have Mike as a colleague at Columbia for 10 years. On a number of occasions, conversations with Mike were pivotal for my research (e.g., when Emi and I were working on our fiscal stimulus paper).

But for me, the Woodford experience started in Econ 420 at Princeton in 1999. This was a small undergraduate class with maybe a dozen students. But among those were four people that would end up tenured at top 10 econ departments. It was a pretty special class!

To do good research, one needs to have a few "superpowers" up one's sleeve: things one understands really well and are applicable to lots of issues that come up in one's research. One of the most important "superpowers" that I have as a scholar (to the extent that I have any) is the theoretical ideas about monetary economics that Mike taught me and I studied in his book. They are a constant source of new insight which permeate my research. (For me, they have been especially powerful when mixed with empirical ideas from other fields).

I am simply over the moon that Mike has won the Nobel Prize <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2026/popular-information/>…

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Agreed. Mike is extra-special: to read, to listen to, to talk to and bounce ideas off of, and is someone always interested in making you smarter than you have been (and never in demonstrating that you are not as smart as you think you are). A true and dazzling gem.

But what are those “theoretical ideas about monetary economics that Mike taught me”—or, as I would put it, the system prompt for the SubTuringMikeWoodford emulation instantiation that Jón runs on his wetware? (And, yes, Jón Steinsson definitely does have cognitive intellectual superpowers.) Briefly, I think Jón has two things primarily in mind:

1. The Neo-Wicksellian view: policy is an interest-rate rule set against an economy’s neutral rate of interest: the rate that makes Say’s Law as true as it can be in practice even though it is false in theory, the rate that makes “money” into as much of a mere veil as it can be. I see this in “Fiscal Stimulus in a Monetary Union” that Jón says Mike’s conversations were pivotal for, as a regional spending multiplier can be measured cleanly in a monetary union because it holds the interest-rate response fixed across regions, in “Optimal Monetary Policy in an Economy with Inflation Persistence” written right after taking Econ 420; and still present in the just-written “Beyond the Taylor Rule”.

2. Monetary policy works by managing expectations: For what moves spending is the market’s expected future path of short rates, which feeds into long rates, equity prices and exchange rates. This is just as true in a monetary system with a commodity anchor as in one in which there is only a central bank. (Indeed, this is I think the only way to understand the difference between the pre-1914 relative success and the post-1918 catastrophic failure of the gold standard as a monetary system.) In Jón’s writings, look for example at “The Power of Forward Guidance Revisited” (AER 2016), and “The Discounted Euler Equation”, and “High-Frequency Identification of Monetary Non-Neutrality: The Information Effect”.

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And, again briefly, the focus of Mike Woodford’s masterwork Interest & Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy is on how to synthesize Wicksellian tradition with New Keynesian nominal rigidities in a framework setting forth a theory of how central bank commitment to specific interest-rate rules can stabilize prices and mitigate the welfare losses associated with sticky prices and wages:

Nominal interest rate adjustment
→ change in real interest rate
→ shift in aggregate demand
→ impact on real marginal costs
→ adjustment of price-setting behavior
→ stabilization of the price level/inflation.

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Commitment to a policy rule of some sort is necessary to manage private-sector expectations and achieve optimal outcomes, on how sticky prices and staggered price-setting create strategic complementarities, and how for equilibrium determinacy the nominal interest rate must respond to inflation more than one-for-one to ensure the real interest rate rises when inflation rises. With:

• Interest rates as the primary instrument: thinking first about the quantity of money gets you really confused

• Expectations and their management as the overwhelming channel: the public’s belief in a central bank’s commitment is the principal determinant of the effectiveness of the policy.

• Price stability as welfare optimum: it minimizes relative-price distortions and maximizes utility. (I, however, see this analytical commitment as not a feature but a bug.)

• Equilibrium determinacy: Only some policy-rule structures prevent self-fulfilling inflations.

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Yes, I know, problems: the shoe-leather costs of inflation are not its real welfare costs, the representative-household utility framework is a very bad bug, log-linear approximations mean Woodford has nothing to say about crises and not much to say about monetary policy at the zero-lower bound, and so forth.

But relative to other frameworks on offer, Woodford’s is much better to think with.

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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…

##what-jón-steinsson-learned-from-mike-woodford-in-econ-420-encomium-of-the-day
##macro-outlook
##encomium-of-the-day
#what-jón-steinsson-learned-from-mike-woodford-in-econ-420
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#central-banking

Epictetus provide a better guide to stoicism. Seneca writes better prose. So Why is it that Marcus Aurelius’s private, repetitive, nagging-himself notebook endures and influences more than all the other stoics put together? “Don’t turn into just another Caesar,” Marcus warned himself. But how could he stop that? He already was the Caesar. Thus the Meditations reads less like a philosophy lesson than like a man arguing with himself, losing, and then picking himself back up off the floor and trying to man-up to argue with himself again”:

This AM, from across 1850 years of time, history now comes to speak to me.

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It comes to speak to me through the person of the one and only Imp. Caesar M. Aurelius Antoninus Augustus…

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…Armeniacus, Parthicus Maximus, Medicus, Germanicus, Sarmaticus, Pontifex Maximus, Tribuniciae Potestatis XXXIV, Imperator X, Consul III, Pater Patriae:

Marcus Aurelius (ca. 175): Meditations V.1: ‘Can’t get out of bed this morning?

Tell yourself: “I’m getting up to do a human being’s job.” So why complain about doing the thing I was born to do, the reason I’m here at all? Was I made to lie under the covers and keep warm?

“But it feels nice.” Nice? You were born to feel nice? Or to get up and do things?

Look around. Trees, plants, sparrows, ants, spiders, bees: every one of them is busy doing its part to keep the world running. And you won’t do yours? You won’t hurry to do what your nature asks of you?

“But I need rest.” Sure you do. Nature gives you a ration of rest, the same way it gives you a ration of food and drink. But you take more rest than you need, and less action than you could manage.

So you don’t really love yourself. If you did, you’d love your nature and what it’s aiming at. People who love their trade wear themselves out at it. They skip meals and forget to eat. Do you respect your own nature less than a carpenter respects carpentry, or a dancer respects dance? Less than a miser loves money, or a show-off loves applause? Those people give up food and sleep for what they care about. And working for the common good gets less from you than that?…

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Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations has long spoken to me. Yet it is an extremely odd book. It was not written for us. The title it was given was Ta eis Heauton: “Things to Himself”. But that is perhaps a label imposed on it by a later librarian.

It nags, scolds, consoles and nags again.

Mark was the most powerful man in the Mediterranean world. Yet he wrote much of it not in luxury in Rome in his palaces, but rather in tents along the Danube frontier. Notes like “Among the Quadi, on the Gran” and “At Carnuntum” were left as datelines. And his role among those tents was, well, primarily as a figurehead: showing that the emperor cared while his professional generals went about their jobs of trying to stabilize the situation and secure the safety of the cities and farmers of the Danube Valley.

Yet for more than half a millennium it has been one of the most widely read works of ancient philosophy.

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Warsh’s press conference and the FOMC committee statements he is letting through are pointlessly opaque. Pointlessly, that is, if the idea is to make good monetary economy and have a stabilized high-growth sustainable-employment low-inflation economy. Warsh’s opaqueness, however, does have a point if you think that Warsh’s principal objective is to delay the day of reckoning when he has to choose between having Trump conclude that he has been betrayed and having the bond market conclude that it is being betrayed by Warsh. He will ultimately have to choose between one or the other, but each day that choice is delayed is a victory for him, if not for the economy, the country, and the world:

We have Claudia Sahm this morning.

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She is stressing that:

• Under Warsh, the FOMC statement is less than half its old length.

• Under Warsh, what he says at the press conference doesn’t track the Committee’s views.

• As a result, markets initially filled the gap by pricing in more tightening than the Fed in fact intended—and than it would have known had Warsh not messed up both the statement and the press conference.

Be clear: Claudia Sahm agrees 100% with the Fed’s September rate hike. Her objection is to how it was explained. And her objection is very cogent.

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This is, to say, the least, unprofessional.

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Claudia went on to say that a rate hike that is (a) insurance is small and conditional, while one that is (b) forced by the Fed’s beliefs about the inflation outlook is not. Since, on decision day, Mademoiselle Marchée couldn’t tell which kind she was getting, she split the difference when in fact she was getting (a). Fifty more words in the statement could have saved two Fed officials from talking down expectations of a further rate hike that the Committee had never seriously considered.

This time, Warsh’s opacity both confused markets and annoyed Donald Trump. No man can serve two masters, although Warsh tries. And this time he did not serve either one. As Claudia further points out, when the Chair is the Committee’s outlier, the statement has to carry the Committee’s reasoning. It didn’t. And it doesn’t.

Claudia Sahm:

Stay-At-Home Macro (SAHM)

My goal is to make economic policy and macroeconomics better.

By Claudia Sahm

CROSSPOST: CLAUDIA SAHM: Hand the Pen to the Committee

<https://stayathomemacro.substack.com> <https://stayathomemacro.substack.com/p/hand-the-pen-to-the-committee>

Stay-At-Home Macro (SAHM)

Hand the pen to the Committee

Three meetings make a trend. Under Chair Warsh, we no longer learn the Committee’s reasoning on the day of the decision. Instead, we must wait three weeks for the FOMC minutes. The statement has been cut by more than half, and the press conference no longer sticks closely to the Committee’s views. The cost of th…

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10 hours ago · 37 likes · 8 comments · Claudia Sahm

The Fed’s main reason for raising rates took three weeks to reach the public. The statement should carry it on decision day.

Claudia Sahm

2026-10-12

Three meetings make a trend. Under Chair Warsh, we no longer learn the Committee’s reasoning on the day of the decision. Instead, we must wait three weeks for the FOMC minutes. The statement has been cut by more than half, and the press conference no longer sticks closely to the Committee’s views. The cost of that delay showed up in markets this time, which priced in more rate hikes than the Committee itself projects.

My complaint is with the communications, not the decision. I agree with the quarter-point rate increase and share the risk-management reasoning of many Fed officials.

There is a straightforward solution, and it’s one for the Committee: put the rationale for the decision in the statement. The public and markets need to understand why you voted the way you did. The minutes can add details three weeks later, but the statement should make the story clear, including where views diverge. Today’s post traces the Fed’s information flow on the September decision, shows what the confusion cost in interest rates, and proposes what the statement could say on decision day.

What we learned, and when, on why the Fed raised rates.

The fundamental tension in Fed communications now is that Chair Warsh approaches monetary policy differently than the rest of the Committee. This should surprise no one. Even as a Governor, Warsh stood out as a monetary policy outlier. Now the outlier is the Chair. Chairs Bernanke, Yellen, and Powell, who had the same set of communication tools, were much closer to the Committee’s thinking, though each, on the margin, shaped the approach.

Here is what we learned about why the Federal Reserve raised interest rates on September 16, in the order we learned it. Emphasis added in bold.

FOMC statement (2:00 pm, decision day):

Inflation remains elevated. Today’s policy action will support a timelier return to the Committee’s 2 percent goal. The Committee will deliver price stability…

Summary of Economic Projections (2:00 pm, decision day):

While the SEP does not provide a rationale for the policy decision, the dot plot, with its appropriate path of monetary policy, offers a sense of how much tightening the Committee had in mind. The median Fed official (excluding Warsh, who did not submit projections) viewed one more quarter-point increase this year, on top of September’s, with no further increase by the end of next year, as appropriate. That half-percentage-point total is markedly less than the 3-percentage-point increase in a typical hiking cycle. In addition, 17 of 18 participants said inflation risks were weighted to the upside.

Chair’s press conference (2:30 pm, decision day). In his prepared remarks, Warsh repeated the statement language above and offered details:

Our decision comes at a time when the American economy appears to be strengthening. New hiring, private-sector earnings, business capital investment—each of these markers has improved in recent months and is pointing in a good direction. Credit flows have been robust, particularly for businesses. And, as I said at the policy symposium in Jackson Hole, I would be hard pressed to describe broad financial conditions as restrictive. This view was widely shared by the Committee. So we removed a dose of accommodation…

Key speeches by Fed officials (about two weeks later):

Several Fed officials spoke after the FOMC meeting. Two speeches received considerable attention: those by New York Fed President John Williams and Board Vice Chair Philip Jefferson, who, along with Warsh, make up the FOMC’s leadership.

Williams:

Based on the totality of the data, the balance of risks to achieving our dual mandate has evolved in recent months. With the economy proving resilient in the face of shocks and with underlying demand strengthening, the risk to maximum employment has receded. At the same time, the risk to achieving price stability has increased. In particular, the inflationary impact of the AI-related demand shock is increasingly salient, and I now expect somewhat larger and longer-lasting effects from energy prices on inflation…

Jefferson:

Considering the economic conditions that persisted through mid-September, the FOMC voted last month to raise the target range for the federal funds rate by a ¼ percentage point to 3-¾ to 4 percent … I supported that decision because I saw it as the appropriate policy to pursue the Fed’s dual mandate. This was an important step to ensure longer-term inflation expectations remain well anchored and to validate the public’s confidence that we will achieve our 2 percent inflation objective in a timely manner…

Finally, the FOMC minutes (three weeks later) offered the definitive view on why the Committee raised rates in September:

In their consideration of monetary policy at this meeting, all participants supported raising the target range for the federal funds rate ¼ percentage point to 3-¾ to 4 percent. Participants generally emphasized that inflation remained elevated while the labor market appeared to be near full employment, with some signs of strengthening, and that economic activity was expanding at a solid pace. Furthermore, almost all participants assessed that, while inflation risks were tilted to the upside, risks to the labor market had diminished and were now broadly balanced. Based on the outlook and the changing balance of risks, all participants viewed a higher target range for the federal funds rate as appropriate. Participants judged that this would support a timelier return of inflation to the Committee’s 2 percent goal. Many participants emphasized that a higher path for the target range would be prudent on risk-management grounds, providing insurance against inflation remaining persistently above target due to stronger-than-expected demand or further adverse supply shocks. A number of participants viewed a higher path for the target range as necessary based on their modal outlooks rather than on risk-management grounds. Some participants remarked that a higher policy rate would diminish the risk of persistently elevated inflation unanchoring inflation expectations and becoming further entrenched…

On the day of the decision, we did not get a complete picture of the Committee’s reasoning. The subsequent Fed speeches helped fill some of the gaps, but it wasn’t until the minutes came out that the theme of risk management came through clearly. According to the minutes, risk management was the most common reason for raising rates, followed by participants’ baseline forecasts for inflation and concerns about anchoring expectations.

“The economy is strengthening,” as conveyed in the press conference, is a very different reason to raise rates than “we are concerned about the risk that inflation stays high.” The former supports several rate hikes; the latter supports a small rate adjustment.

The minutes also reveal another problem with the statement. The Committee was united in raising rates but divided on why. Nothing in the statement alerted us to these divergent views. A “timelier return” to 2 percent inflation is probably something all three groups can sign on to, but it left out a lot of information. It also sat awkwardly with the SEP, where the median does not reach 2 percent until 2029, and led to a confusing exchange with a journalist in the press conference when Warsh said the projections were not his.

Confusing communication is costly.

The September meeting offers a clear example. The market odds of rate hikes this year, and especially next, rose during the press conference, as Warsh’s words were viewed as more hawkish than the statement or the dot plot. Market pricing continued to rise in the weeks after.

The growing gap between more aggressive market pricing and the modest increases in the dot plot likely shaped what Williams and Jefferson said two weeks after the meeting. Before they spoke, the odds of a rate hike in October had climbed to about 70% (chart below). In addition to sharing their reasons for raising rates, they had a message of patience. Williams said there was “no need for urgency” and that they have “time to gather more information.” The market odds dropped 20 percentage points. Jefferson noted that yields had risen further since the meeting and reinforced the theme of patience, saying it “may take more time” to form judgments about policy. The odds dropped another 13 percentage points.

With more favorable inflation data and softer-than-expected payroll data also that week, the odds of an October hike ended the week just over 20%. Two thirds of the decline came on the days of the two Fed speeches.

Confusion about the Fed’s reasons for the hike on the day of the meeting helped create the need for this post-meeting correction. A hike explained as insurance is limited and conditional, and one taken because the inflation baseline requires it is not. In the minutes, many participants called a higher path “prudent” on risk-management grounds, and fewer called it “necessary.” Had the motive been clear on decision day, markets could have worked out the pace themselves, and two officials would not have needed to give explicit guidance about October. Warsh is right that explicit forward guidance should not be necessary right now. But that depends on clear communication from the Fed about its policy decisions.

The October meeting is the easiest case to document, but the larger gap between market pricing and the SEP is for next year, and it remains. Higher-than-intended interest rates cost borrowers. When unclear communication pushes rates above what the Committee intends, that is unintended tightening.

Cleaning up decision day: let the Committee speak.

On the day of the decision, we must understand the reasons for the Committee’s decision. The statement is the best place for the Committee’s thinking to live. Clarity should take precedence over brevity. Accuracy should take precedence over the appearance of consensus. If there were three reasons behind a vote, then share the three reasons, as the minutes do. If it takes a few sentences to get the main ideas across, then use them. Only the FOMC knows why it voted the way it did. Tell us, so outsiders aren’t guessing or filling in the blanks.

Given what we know now from the minutes, my suggestion (added text in yellow) for the September statement would have been something like:

(My proposed last paragraph for the September statement)

Inflation remains elevated. Risks to inflation are tilted to the upside, while risks to the labor market are now broadly balanced. The reasons for the increase varied across the Committee. The most common was to insure against inflation staying persistently above target. Smaller groups cited their baseline outlook for inflation and the need to keep inflation expectations anchored. Today’s policy action will support a timelier return to the Committee’s 2 percent goal. The Committee will deliver price stability…

This adds about 50 words, and the statement would still be shorter than a year ago.

Unanimous in purpose and in action, but divergent in the specific reasons. That’s an honest assessment of where the Committee is. It’s good for accountability, and it’s also good for markets trying to figure out where the Fed is headed next. Understanding where the Committee is right now in its thinking is valuable. Waiting three weeks to get a clear picture is unacceptable.

The Chair is the only person on the Committee who is allowed to speak for the Committee, but that doesn’t mean the Chair is the only possible messenger. The statement, like the minutes, is a Committee document. Hand the pen to the Committee and give Warsh the mic at the presser.

In closing.

The goal is good policy. Good policy is best served by good communication. For three FOMC meetings in a row, the reason for the vote has not been fully communicated on the day of the decision. Waiting three weeks for the minutes is too long.

I agreed with the decision to raise rates in September. My own shift from hold to hike came from heightened upside risks to inflation. The FOMC said it is trying to support a “timelier return” to 2% inflation. Good, now I want to see them deliver timelier information on their thinking. Explain the decisions when they are made.

<https://stayathomemacro.substack.com/p/hand-the-pen-to-the-committee> <https://stayathomemacro.substack.com>

Stay-At-Home Macro (SAHM)

Hand the pen to the Committee

Three meetings make a trend. Under Chair Warsh, we no longer learn the Committee’s reasoning on the day of the decision. Instead, we must wait three weeks for the FOMC minutes. The statement has been cut by more than half, and the press conference no longer sticks closely to the Committee’s views. The cost of th…

Read more

10 hours ago · 37 likes · 8 comments · Claudia Sahm

Stay-At-Home Macro (SAHM)

Hand the pen to the Committee

Three meetings make a trend. Under Chair Warsh, we no longer learn the Committee’s reasoning on the day of the decision. Instead, we must wait three weeks for the FOMC minutes. The statement has been cut by more than half, and the press conference no longer sticks closely to the Committee’s views. The cost of th…

Read more

10 hours ago · 27 likes · 6 comments · Claudia Sahm

Stay-At-Home Macro (SAHM)

My goal is to make economic policy and macroeconomics better.

By Claudia Sahm

Brad DeLong here: Odds of an October hike reached about 70% before New York Fed President John Williams and Vice Chair Philip Jefferson stepped in to calm things down. Two-thirds of the drop that followed came on the two days they spoke. There was a cost to this round-trip, an avoidable cost. It was the result of a statement that said too little, and a press conference that said even less that was true about the FOMC’s frame of mind.

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You already know why I think this is happening. What are the implications?

Well, look at the September information flow:

• The post-meeting statement said only that inflation “remains elevated” and that the hike would support “a timelier return” to 2%.

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Farrell treats AI as one more of the information-processing social institutions Herbert Simon described, alongside markets and bureaucracy, rather than as the buliding of a Machine God-Overlord:

Now comes Henry Farrell to to BESI—to the Berkeley Economy & Society Initiative’s “Capitalism & Democracy” lectur series.

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Henry is here to:

• Title: “AI as Social Technology: A Research Agenda for Political Science”

• When: Friday, October 9, 2026, 4–5:30 p.m.

• Where: 820 Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley

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Henry has a teaser:

Henry Farrell: Event Information <https://besi.berkeley.edu/event/ai-as-social-technology-a-research-agenda-for-political-science/>: ‘Political scientists are only beginning to think systematically about how AI may reshape the topics they study, even though one of the founders of the field of AI, Herbert Simon, was a political scientist. In this talk, Johns Hopkins political scientist Henry Farrell will leverage ongoing work with collaborators (including Alison Gopnik, James Evans, Cosma Shalizi, and Hahrie Han) to argue that Simon’s work on collective information processing provides a useful foundation for political scientists to think about how AI affects politics.

Simon argued that individual human cognitive capacities are limited, and larger-scale institutions such as markets and bureaucracy provide means of collectively processing information and reducing down the complexities of the world to make them more manageable. More recently, computer scientists and physicists have begun to use concepts such as lossy representations and coarse graining to make closely related arguments.

In his presentation, Farrell will explain how large language models provide just such lossy representations, as previous technologies have done before. Recognizing this opens up new possible research questions for political science and political theory, says Farrell. He’ll lay out the beginnings of one new agenda item: how lossy technologies of representation affect the formation of democratic publics.

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And Paul Pierson says:

Henry Farrell is the SNF Agora Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is the 2019 recipient of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology, a prize for “outstanding individuals who contribute to inter- and trans-disciplinary projects linking politics and technology,” awarded jointly by the Friedrich Schiedel Foundation and the Technical University of Munich. Previously, he was professor at George Washington University’s Department of Political Science and Elliott School of International Affairs.

He works on a variety of topics, including the relationship between democracy and information, the security consequences of international economic networks, and international political economy. He is the co-author, with Abraham Newman​, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy <https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250840554/undergroundempire/> (2023), which was awarded the Council of Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award Bronze Medal.

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And I have a question (many questions, actually, but here is just one) for Henry:

As of 1880, when he was writing Socialism: Utopian & Scientific Friedrich Engels had what he thought were reasonable hopes and reasoned faith that the lived experience of the steampower economy—enormous human productive power, substantial interchangeability of individual human cogs in the productive machine, the insubstantial relative nature of all potential divisions between humans in the face of the techno-organizational requirements of the steam engine—would make it obvious that we should all dress in identical blue overalls, call one another “comrade”, share the enormous productive dividends of steampower and science equally, and build a free society of associated producers, replacing politics as the domination of man over man with the mere administration of things and coördination of processes of production.

But the steampower economy was succeeded by the applied-science economy of the Second Industrial Revolution GPTs in which divisions of skill, experience, industry location, and ethnicity were to “play the serpent to this paradise” of the Belle Époque. Could anyone in 1880 have been reasonably expected to anticipate much of anything about the shit was going to go down over the next sixty years? How soon could people have been expected to inclue themselves to pieces of it?

And what lessons from the transition from the steampower to the applied-science modes of production can we learn as we confront the transition from the globalized value-chain to the info-bio tech-attention mode of production?

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Thinking about the political-science research program that Henry is working to, I find myself thinking right now about:

• The Herbert Simon Frame: Political science already has the tools to understand “AI”. It has simply forgotten them. Herbert Simon held that individual minds are limited, so markets & bureaucracies process information collectively by simplifying the world. Large language models do the same thing: they are new and powerful ways of accessing the real-ASI the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective human mind, and put it to use via the management-cybernetics trick of creating a useful coarse-graining of information for action in the current situation. Seeing LLMs as social & cultural technologies akin to writing and recording, print distribution, markets, bureaucracies, feudal hierarchies, democracies, ideologies, and so forth rather than nascent godlike minds opens new questions.

• The Shoggoth Frame: Doomerscasts LLMs as alien minds behind a smiley mask, waiting to devour us. Henry Farrell & Cosma Shalizi turn it aroundL The self-regulating market & the iron cage-building Weberian bureaucracy were the first vast, inhuman information-processing systems. And “he Singularity” began with the Industrial Revolution. LLMs are a newer, smaller shoggoth. They condense human writing into useful but lossy summaries, no lossier than prices, bureaucratic categories, & opinion polls. The real questions are how these systems compete & hybridize. Could LLMs capture Hayek’s tacit knowledge better than prices do? Will they make Kafka’s bureaucracies saner, or more arbitrary & opaque?

• The Democratic-Publics Frame: Much prominent work on AI & democracy imagines algorithms perfecting deliberation, with randomly chosen mini-publics reasoning their way to consensus. Henry Farrell & Hahrie Han call that a mirage. Real democracy runs on enduring, interested publics: parties, movements, & coalitions like Minnesota’s ISAIAH. Feedback loops of negotiation, loyalty, & power hold them together. Does AI strengthen those loops, or replace them with brittle, microtargeted crowds of outraged consumers?

Further Reading:

<https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/shoggoths-amongst-us> <https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-and-democratic-publics> <https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt9819>

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Yglesias's postmortem of Vox shows how distribution economics shapes what journalism can be. Paying salaries required income. Ad-funding required scale. Scale required kowtowing to FaceBook’s and Google’s algorithms. That made for enormous pressures to back off from true data and explainer journalism back toward clickbait—in Vox’s case, a very mild form of clickbait, but still it was what the eyeballs that it could harvest and sell to advertisers wanted to see. It was not what the eyeballs it attracted needed to see…

Back in the Second Age of Weblogging, Melissa Bell, Ezra Klein, and Matt Yglesias decided to try to change the world and make some money for themselves and funders by disrupting journalism.

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They decided to try starting an organization that would do explainer journalism for real, and focus on informing its readers rather than the myriad of missions existing journalistic organizations undertook, many of which were at best orthogonal to the idea that your customers were your readers and viewers and that your job was to help them learn true things about the world.

By and large, it went moderately well. <http://vox.com/> is still around, still paying its bills, and if it is now much more simply standard journalism for the decade of the 2020s, this is 3/4 the system wearing down its idealistic and public-service commitments to informative explainer journalism, and 1/4 its dragging others along with it to its point of view.

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I wanted to hoist/crosspost and then comment on this from Matt Yglesias nearly four years ago, but then I found that the entire thing is (still?) behind the paywall:

<https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-i-learned-co-founding-vox>

Slow Boring

Start your day with pragmatic takes on politics and public policy.

By Matthew Yglesias

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What to do, what to do? Well, I feel no compunction about an extensive quote giving away the stance Matt takes here:

Matt Yglesias (2022): What I Learned Co-Founding Vox <https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-i-learned-co-founding-vox>: ‘It’s a subject that’s been rattling around my head for a long time…. I recently gained some clarity when I mentioned offhandedly to a younger journalist that I thought I’d failed with Vox and she was surprised because Vox is still there, running articles and putting out podcasts and employing lots of people…. Vox… are producing a lot of great stuff like Rachel Cohen on abortion rights referenda and education in the midterms and Li Zhou breaking down the actual content of the congressional marriage equality bill. Quitting a good job that I liked at Slate to launch a new website was a ton of hard work and a huge pain in the ass! I only did it because I had insanely high ambitions, and I think Ezra and Melissa felt the same way — the current state of the site is a failure only relative to these ambitions….

The folks who run Vox Media, Jim Bankoff and Pam Wasserstein, are smarter about business than I’ll ever be, and they have what I think is a reasonable plan….So when I say that I think that we failed, I’m not dumping on the current Vox management team or editorial staff, who are doing a good job executing a reasonable strategy — it’s just not the strategy we set off with. There’s no innovative editorial project along the lines of our long-abandoned cardstacks. They don’t really do explainers anymore. You’d be hard-pressed to describe what differentiates a Vox article from an Atlantic article or a Slate article… an incredible flattening of the content landscape, and Vox has become part of that flattening rather than an alternative to it.

This post is my effort to unpack how we fell short of those aspirations…

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As to the rest of it, let me attempt to not infringe on Matt’s IP—of the 17 articles on <[slowboring.com](http://slowboring.com)> so far this October, only three are not paywalled, and the paywalls are typically ferocious. But I will summarize, extensively:

The principal lesson Matt says he learned is this: A good idea plus a great team is not enough. A business also needs people it can actually hire, bosses who can effectively coördinate, an awareness of how the competition is changing, an ability to find a lane, and a revenue model that fits the product. The secondary lesson Matt says he learned is this: Running a business stacks many medium-difficulty problems on top of each other, and intellectuals tend to massively underrate the skills of the coördinating and organizing people who solve them. The tertiary lesson Matt says he learned is this: While hiring is hard, training is even harder, for there was no recipe, no secret sauce, to turn new hires into Ezra Klein–style writers.

The principal argument Matt makes is that Vox failed relative to its founders’ aspirations because:

1. The kind of talent they needed didn’t scale and was hard to find.

2. Their business depended on ad-driven platforms.

3. The New York Times adapted rather than let itself be disrupted.

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Vox was driving hard to achieve serious scale and support itself via a web-advertising model. But advertisers demand huge scale since each viewer’s eyeballs are worth very little. In the mid-2010s, huge scale meant traffic from FaceBook and later Google

Thus in order to stay in business, Vox had to recognize that its readers were not its customers, its advertisers filtered through FaceBook and Google were.

That meant bending to their technical, editorial, and above all algorithmic business preferences. For example, Vox’s “cardstack” explainer format couldn’t work on Facebook. And what went viral on FaceBook was a mix of identity politics and denunciations of the 1%, and that then shaped what got written. Vox therefore flattened into the same sameness as everyone else, as people noted that saying things were not simple did not get eyeballs.

Product innovation therefore became impossible.

The scarce talent that could have set Vox apart was hired away by the Times, which had a subscription-revenue base, went all-in on it, and thus found a business model in which each reader was potentially worth more.

Yes, Matt may be self-serving here: Talent shortage, platforms, and NYT competence are all external or structural causes, and the founders’ own strategic choices get little scrutiny.

The inability to create a pipeline to spread Ezra Klein’s expertise is also worth much more scrutiny: Many young journalists in the mid-2010s wanted to acquire the expertise of Ezra Klein and were willing to work very hard to figure out how to do that. Hell, many young and old journalists today want to acquire the expertise of Ezra Klein and are willing to work very hard to figure out how to do that. We have a society that is superb at turning knowledge of how to do things into recipes that can be taught, into tekhne, and, yes, on top of tekhne there rides what Michael Polanyi calls “tacit knowledge”, what James Scott calls metis, what Sean Illing calls phronesis—not just doing the thing, but doing the thing in the time, place, and way that makes it useful. And pretty much the only way to learn that is extensive apprenticeship, working and assisting at the elbow of someone who has it.

But I think that the fundamental point is that there was an audience for explainer journalism, but not an audience that could be harvested for ads at scale in the malign social-media internet of the day, with its ragebait, its clickbait, and its shouting class.

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OK. So, then, where are we now? What does this mean for me, as I try to make my fall push to figure out what to do with this SubStack thing? Especially in the onrushing world of “AI”, which can combine and remix ideas both assisting me and replacing me in a way that was impossible two years ago, and in which a good deal of what I have done has been playing the glass-bead game in a way that machines are now learning to do, in some ways better than I can?

Readers-versus-customers is easy, thanks to SubStack. SubStack really does solve the alignment problem. <http://vox.com/>’s finding that to pay its bills it had to align with the FaceBook and Google algorithms was the biggest blockage to Vox’s success. I only have to write what the low six figures of people find worth their scarce attention and, for one in forty, their money. That is a much lower bar to clear in terms of scale, and a much higher bar to clear in terms of quality. It is also, for me, I think, the right bar.

But note that the platform-dependency problem has not vanished. Google Zero—Google driving zero traffic to anyone else’s website—is coming. The Information Superhighway’s on-ramps are being turned into toll booths that answer the question themselves, by remixing what the rest of us wrote. Being discoverable is no longer the asset. Being trusted is. Whatever value I add does not come from producing grammatical paragraphs about the Smithian division of labor, the Polanyian double movement, or the post-1870 long century. Machines now produce those by the bushel. My value lies in knowing which of a thousand such paragraphs is actually true and relevant this week.

And this brings me to the Hermann Hesse novel, The Glass-Bead Game. In Hesse’s novel, the Castalians spend their lives creating ever-more-elegant syntheses. A theme from Bach is linked to a theorem of Euclid, which is linked to a passage from the I Ching. All of it is gorgeous, all of it is self-referential, strung together like glass beads on a string, and all of it is useful and interesting by virtue of the juxtaposition and the remix. And now there is a machine that has read everything, and that strings beads via juxtaposition and remixing faster than I can, and sometimes more prettily—although I think it has useful and relevant taste only by accident. Not to mention the deep question of whether the glass-bead game is a game worth playing in the first place

So what does this mean for my fall push? Five things, I think:

1. Fewer beads, more vouching. Less of the “here are fifteen interesting things” firehose. More of “here is the one thing this week that I think is true and important, here is why, and here is what would make me change my mind.”

2. Show the work. That will be a large part of what readers will increasingly pay for: domain-knowledge expertise visibly hacking through increasing amounts of AI-slop.

3. Be the apprenticeship. Model phronesis, what of it I have, so that others can apprentice. This newsletter’s highest use may be opening the gate so that readers can watch judgment being exercised, in real time, on live questions.

4. Choose the questions. Machiavelli wrote that in the evening he put on formal robes and entered the courts of the ancients to ask them questions. I should not simply react to the current thing. I should draw people over to the important questions.

5. Small is fine. Vox failed by its founders’ aspirations because it needed gargantuan scale. I do not.

Will this work? Is a fall push worth making? I genuinely do not know. I will find out.

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##public-reason
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#matthew-yglesias
#what-i-learned-co-founding-vox
##vox-com
#explainer-journalism
#substack
#reader-funded-vs-ad-supported-media
#platform-dependence

I have read and heard most of what Charlie Jane Anders has written and podcast over the past 6.5 years since the start of the plague, yet I do not think I have seen or had a two-way voice or video call with her since. Thus America today has, in my estimation, not a problem of asociality but of wrestling with a sociability that is no longer person-to-person network but rather profoundly parasocial, even when the parasociality is a two-way symmetric one:

I think the decline in sociality and sociability is very real, but is usually misdescribed.

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We haven’t become asocial. We have become parasocial. When we do person-to-person network socialize, we do so differently: at restaurants instead of in each other’s homes, and through email, newsletters and feeds. We are connected to far more people than our grandparents ever reached.

But. There is a big “but”. From Data for Progress, via Adam Tooze:

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What would it have looked like from, say, 1955 to 1995, with the rise of TV? And my sense is that where my parents and grandparents would have had people over or gone to their houses, the youngs these days meet out at restaurants. Certainly we do—in fact, rather than having an out-of-town visitor over for dinner tonight, we are meeting at Gather <https://gatherberkeley.com/>, which claims that American Express lists it as one of the world’s best farm-to-table restaurants.

And, of course, I do communicate with vastly more people, friends and strangers alike, than did my grandparents with their in-person meetings, their low-audio-quality long-distance phone calls, and their Walter Cronkhite and Theodore H. White news funnels.

My view: There is a problem, but it is not exactly a problem of asociality here. As I wrote back (in email, of course) to a friend who I have not seen in—literally, years! since the plague?—even though she has been a substantial presence in my mind as I read pretty much all of her stuff <https://www.charliejaneanders.com/> <https://www.ouropinionsarecorrect.com/> <https://buttondown.com/charliejane/>:

No! No! Thanks much for writing! You are not taking up too much of my time! I wish you were taking up more of my time, here in this world in which even most of our social relationships are primarily parasocial or transactional! It is not a good timeline! And we have not gotten yet to the neofascists and the killer robots!

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We are going to do lunch. Sometime. To keep our friendship from being totally two-way parasocial—where she has no idea of my reactions and absorption of her words, and I have no idea of her reactions and absorption of mine.

The bandaid I can start putting over this gaping, bleeding wound is to start dropping things in people’s comments sections. The problem, however, is this: we learned early in the internet age never to read our comments sections. The hope is that, on Substack, limiting comments to paid subscribers, we will get into the habit of our reading our comment sections again.

I have no idea how that is going for us.

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##chart-of-the-day
#you-are-not-taking-up-too-much-of-my-time-a-note-from-a-not-asocial-but-rather-parasocial-age
#parasocial-age
#social-isolation
#data-for-progress
#adam-tooze
#rise-of-television
#post-plague-life

The “Honey Badger don’t care” stock market: why and how twenty “AI” stocks and only twenty “AI” stocks shrug off the big shock of rising interest rates in our weird two-speed stock market:

The longest-duration assets in the market should be the most sensitive to interest rates.

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Instead they are the least.

Why? Either the marginal AI investor does not care about discounting cash flows but only about being blessed at the Ω-point by the coming Digital God, or it is the AI-driven datacenter buildout’s capital requirements and pretty much only the AI-driven datacenter buildout’s capital requirements that is driving rates up right now:

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Katie Martin & Rob Armstrong: There Is Only One Trade: PODCAST OF THE DAY

<https://www.ft.com/content/6d06a6b2-ea2f-4384-959d-682ce78a1693?syn-25a6b1a6=1> <https://www.ft.com/unhedged-podcast>

Katie Martin: Stocks right now are not really what they seem. You look at the big indices, especially in the US, and the first thing that strikes you is how upbeat and stable they are. It’s quite a sight actually, given the long war in Iran and the endless horror show that is the government bond market. The thing is, all that stability comes from a tiny number of companies. The top 20 stocks in the US are making up for a pretty poor performance in the other 480 in the benchmark S&P 500 index. Three quarters of stocks in that index fell in September. [MUSIC PLAYING] We’re all used to markets being a bit skinny but it does feel like they’re overdoing the fat jabs….

Rob Armstrong: [The] stocks [that] are keeping the market as a whole up… [are] in order of value contribution: Apple, Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, Advanced Micro Devices, Tesla, Micron, Intel…. That’s since the middle of August. So it’s just this slice of the market that is keeping the whole circus going….

The market is absorbing a rates shock and acting like one would expect…except for those AI names which are invulnerable…. Real estate and utilities…. are… bond substitutes because… [they] tend to pay a high yield…. Number of real estate companies in the S&P 500 that are up since the middle of August: zero. Number of utilities companies… one…. These two sectors are absolutely getting whacked….

Katie Martin: Does the rest of the market catch up with the AI stocks, or do the AI stocks sink back down to where the rest of the market is, or do we carry on with… a two-speed stock market… indefinitely?…

Rob Armstrong: The harder half of your question is…: Can the fun continue with the AI stocks?… Enthusiasm for these names seems undimmed. You don’t see much pressure around the edges…. No one seems to be hedging this trade….

Katie Martin: The drain that everything is circling around… is everything is contingent on… AI…. Te value of the dollar is contingent on it and the entire global stock market is contingent on this thing…. The whole corporate bond market is… a play on AI now…. Everything is computer and I don’t like it…. It’s weird. I think that’s the only conclusion… [that] I don’t know what it is exactly but it’s weird.

Rob Armstrong: I don’t think it’s that opaque actually. It is weird that the AI stocks don’t care. Like the honey badger, AI stocks don’t care.

Katie Martin: Honey badger don’t care….

Robert Armstrong: That’s a bit weird, but what is happening in the rest of the market is the kind of adjustment one would expect…. A strong economy but much higher rates, very rapid rise in rates, you would generally expect this kind of response….

Katie Martin: Listeners, choose your fighter, AI stocks or everything else…

Brad DeLong here: On the one hand, it really is weird.

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“AI” stocks are the speculativist of speculative and the longest duration of long-duration assets. The proportional response of their prices to changes in interest rates should therefore be by far the highest. Interest rates go up. Their prices should go down, proportionately, the most. And yet it hasn’t happened.

Now you can say, with Katie Martin here, “honey badger don’t care”:

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More mathematically, the valuation of stocks is supposed to be given by their fundamental expected present value: the expected value of the current cash-flow payout to shareholders divided by the difference between the required rate of return and the growth rate of the cash-flow payout:

But the valuation of AI stocks is given by something else: a fraction 𝝺 times the fundamental value plus a fraction (1-𝝺) times something else, call it Ω, the omega-point value at the near-singularity (for the economy at least) where ALL IS UNVEILED:

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But, still, that (1-𝝺)Ω is something that is supposed to happen in the future, say T years hence, and so why isn’t it discounted by a factor that has more bite when the interest rate r rises?

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What is it that makes it such that, when r rises, then the Ω rises in lockstep with it?

Maybe the marginal investor in the AI-component of the S&P500 right now really is Honey Badger. Maybe the effect of interest rate-induced discounts on present values is the last thing from their minds. Maybe they are fixated on the belief that if they invest in AI they will be rewarded, or at least not turned into paper clips, by the coming Digital God:

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But there is a second, possibility, an alternative. The alternative is not rꜛ → Ωꜛ, but rather Ωꜛ→ rꜛ: that the upward shock to the interest rate is driven by AI and by AI alone. That neither inflation nor Federal Reserve communications and policy fumbles nor “geopolitical risks” (i.e., that the U.S. Republican Party backed and backs and that the American people voted for a catastrophic chaos-monkey moron) nor the satiation of demand for “safe” liquid collateralizable assets is playing (much of) a role in the current rise in interest rates, but only (or substantially) the investment requirements of the great datacenter buildout induced by the animal spirits shared by investors and by hyperscaler executives.

I am not sure what I think of this second possibility. “Honey Badger don’t care” seems preferred by Occam’s Razor.

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What kind of a nation America is going to be? It will be what it has been: A country composed of all those who escape from the Old World and all of its mistakes and tyrannies to build a god-fearing prosperous utopia here in the New World: that is our errand unto the wilderness, and that has been constant since 1630. Rufo and Lomez’s “question” is part nativist panic and part knife aimed at JD Vance. The answer was given aboard the Arbella: come to the New World to avoid all the mistakes and the tyrannies of the Old World, and to build a god-fearing prosperous utopia, take up that commission, and become one of us. Hazing makes ethnic enclaves. Covenants make Americans. Ask George Mitchell, Irish-Levantine Maronite altar boy turned Bowdoin College graduate and Yankee Senate Majority Leader...

Let me just turn the intro for this over to Ta-Nehisi Quotes:

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Ta-Nehisi Quotes: <https://x.com/steady_drumbeat/status/2107552860380582132>: ‘@L0m3z, sputtering, red-faced, pleading w/ Noah Smith that he’s only bullying Indian kids to HELP them integrate. Noah’s the wrong guy to try this kind of argument on. It’s like trying to bullshit about wine to a dog. He calls @l0m3z a Pakistani. @L0m3z is left stunned. He’s been bodied. Noah Smith is not the hero we deserve, but he is the hero we need. Noah Smith’s power is his dumb guy confidence. The left is a nest of vipers waiting to pounce on anyone who expresses a positive stand on anything. Ezra Klein meekly suggests relaxing zoning rules on setbacks and lefty twitter reacts like he punched a pregnant woman in the in the stomach. In such an environment, it is the guileless moron who attains the status of sage. Because he just blithely says stuff..

Yes. Saying what you think, and giving reasons for it, is a superpower!:

Noahpinion

Economics and other interesting stuff

By Noah Smith

CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: There Is No “Indian Question”

<https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/there-is-no-indian-question> <https://www.noahpinion.blog>

Noahpinion

There is no “Indian Question”

“Our nation was founded to perpetuate democratic principles. These principles are that each man is to be treated on his worth as a man without regard to the land from which his forefathers came and without regard to the creed which he professes. If the United States proves false to these principles of civil and religious liber…

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14 hours ago · 246 likes · 44 comments · Noah Smith

The actual question is what kind of a nation America is going to be.

Noah Smith

2026-10-07

“Our nation was founded to perpetuate democratic principles. These principles are that each man is to be treated on his worth as a man without regard to the land from which his forefathers came and without regard to the creed which he professes. If the United States proves false to these principles of civil and religious liberty, it will have inflicted the greatest blow on the system of free popular government that has ever been inflicted. Here we have had a virgin continent on which to try the experiment of making out of divers race stocks a new nation[.]” — Teddy Roosevelt

The other day, Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute and right-wing pundit Jonathan Keeperman (also known as “Lomez”) aired an episode of their podcast entitled “The Indian Question”:

The title of the episode seems to be a reference to “the Jewish Question”, a term in 18th and 19th century Europe for the question of how Jews should be treated in European society. That term, of course, became notorious when it was associated with the Nazis’ “Final Solution”, which was billed as being a final solution to “the Jewish Question”. I assume that Rufo and Keeperman chose this rather incendiary title in order to grab attention. Well, they succeeded.

The episode was motivated by a debate that’s been raging across social media for weeks. It was kicked off by Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, who tweeted outrage at a group of Indian American kids attending a University of Texas football game. I already wrote about that controversy three weeks ago:

The anti-American Right Noah Smith Sep 15 Read full story

Jonathan Keeperman (“Lomez”) invited me on his podcast to share my views and debate him, so I did. Here’s the episode that resulted:

Rufo was busy, so it was just Keeperman and me.¹

Anyway, before I talk about the substance, I thought I should say something about the side debate of whether a liberal like myself should even go on right-wing podcasts like “Rufo and Lomez”. Throughout most of the 2010s, there was a popular notion that society should basically ignore and shun people like that, and that if we all simply shunned them, and pressured our friends and colleagues to shun them, they and their views would vanish from American society — or at least remain marginalized.

That approach failed. Anti-immigrant ideas didn’t remain marginalized — in fact, they took over the country, despite their continued unpopularity among the general American public. Are Rufo and Lomez pushing xenophobic ideas? Yes, of course they are. I’m not going to sugarcoat that fact just to be polite. But simply shouting “Those guys are XENOPHOBES!!” and keeping those guys out of polite society would be doubling down on a foolish, self-defeating strategy. The alternative was always to confront those viewpoints directly and defeat them in the court of public opinion, so that’s what I set out to do.

OK, anyway, on to the substance of the debate.

Keeperman and I began the debate by finding common ground. We both basically subscribe to the principle of nationalism — we believe that nation-states are exclusive clubs that exist for the benefit of their members, and that this is a basically good way to organize human society. We both think the United States of America is basically good — or at least, has been basically good throughout most of its history.

I explained my belief that liberal nationalism is the best ideology available — maybe for other countries, but certainly for the United States. All of our greatest successes as a country — victories in wars, successful policy reforms, integration of past waves of immigrants — have come from our use of the nation-state as a tool to promote individual rights, dignity, and empowerment. I told Keeperman that the Abundance Agenda is, at least implicitly, an expression of liberal nationalism — the movement is about creating abundance for Americans specifically, with the implicit premise being that Americans deserve abundance.

Keeperman disagrees about the liberal part, of course, but he does feel that he has the best interests of the United States in mind. His worry is that immigration is stoking ethnic conflict in America, because recent immigrant groups — for example, Indians — are not assimilating into American society like previous groups did.

To me, assimilation has always been about measurable behavior. If the children and grandchildren of immigrants act culturally American — if they speak English, intermarry, give their kids typical American names, go to college football games, climb the income ladder, move out of enclaves, and so on — then they’re assimilated. By all of these standards, the recent waves of immigrants — Mexicans, Chinese people, Indians, and so on — are assimilating just as fast as or faster than the East and South European wave did a century ago, or than the Irish and the Germans did two centuries ago.

The aspect of assimilation that Keeperman worries about most is national identity — the degree to which the children and grandchildren of immigrants feel bound up in a shared community and a shared identity with countrymen of different backgrounds. I agree that this is extremely important; many of the benefits of the nation-state, like the ability to provide public goods and welfare states, come from this sort of shared identity. It also probably leads to greater toleration of minorities (including immigrants). All of those goals should be very important to liberal nationalists.

Lomez — who is not a liberal, but cares about national cohesion nonetheless — worries that identity assimilation is lacking in the modern day. He argues that today’s immigrants retain their old-world allegiances much more strongly than the immigrants of a century ago — that second-generation Indian Americans in Texas still think of themselves as Indians rather than as Americans, and so on.

We do have lots of surveys about this, in fact. There’s a clear pattern — immigrants tend to identify more as their ethnicity than as “American”, but later generations are more likely to identify as “American”. Here’s a survey showing that third-generation Asian Americans are a lot more likely to identify as just “American”:

We see the same pattern even more strongly among Hispanics:

Second and third generation immigrants are also a lot less likely to describe themselves as “global citizens”.

Now, these could be generational effects — people identifying more as “American” as their families stay in America for longer — or they could be cohort effects. It’s possible that due to identity politics, plummeting patriotism, or to the ability to connect with co-ethnics abroad on the internet, recent cohorts of immigrants are less likely to want to identify as “American”.

In fact, we have some evidence that this is happening for Indians, specifically. In 2020, the Indian American Attitudes Survey found that the second generation was a lot more likely than the first (i.e., immigrant) generation to identify as “more American than Indian”:

But by 2024, that pattern was somewhat weaker, with more U.S.-born Indian Americans identifying as “more Indian than American” and “equally Indian and American” than four years prior:

This is just two survey snapshots, a few years apart. It would be helpful if we had had good longitudinal surveys asking people about American identity versus ethnic identity for decades. But we don’t, so we’re left to worry and speculate.

Without longer-term data, my guess is that this identity shift — to the degree that it’s real and not just survey noise — is a short-term response to political conditions. Indian Americans had full access to the internet in 2020, and they were just as able to talk to ethnic Indians in India or Australia or Canada. Identity politics — including institutions such as ethnic clubs at universities — had been around for decades, and the sentiment behind it was probably at its height in 2020.

Instead, my bet is that we’re seeing a reaction to the rise of the MAGA Right itself. It was in 2024 — right before the second survey wave — that anti-Indian attitudes became extremely popular among the online Right. 2024 is also when it became clear that a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment was sweeping the nation. My guess is that stronger ethnic identification among Indian Americans was probably a reaction to the perception that a substantial part of America was attacking Indians.

Keeperman — like other rightists I’ve talked to — seems to think that immigrant groups assimilate only under aggressive pressure from the majority. The model I usually hear is that of German Americans in World War I, who were the subject of feverish forced-assimilation campaigns — pressured to change their names, stop speaking German, and profess allegiance to America. In his discussion with Rufo, Keeperman argued that vocal anti-Indian racism was part of a “hazing process”.

My argument is that this is exactly backwards. Ethnic identity is fundamentally defensive in nature. Identity groups are like gangs — if you no longer feel like a part of the big gang (the nation), you’re probably going to turn to a smaller gang (your ethnic group) for protection and support. For this reason, forced-assimilation campaigns can suppress visible expressions of ethnic difference, but they strengthen ethnic identity itself.

There’s plenty of evidence to support this. Although forced-assimilation campaigns in WWI made some Germans change their names, they caused Germans as a whole to intermarry less and to volunteer less in World War II. Anti-Hispanic rhetoric tends to increase Hispanic identification, and perceived discrimination makes Hispanics more likely to identify with their ethnicity.

This pattern is likely to play out again, with the new rightist fad for anti-Indian bigotry. Bo French’s tweet, and the outpouring of support it received from the grassroots Right, is going to make some Indian Americans question whether America really accepts them — and whether they might have to turn to other Indians for support rather than their countrymen of other races.

Rufo and Keeperman’s “Indian Question” podcast is, of course, only going to make things worse. When your race’s mere existence in America is being described as a “question” by a senior fellow in the Manhattan Institute, you naturally tend to get a bit apprehensive — and a bit defensive. In the last ten minutes of my debate with Keeperman, I got very vehement and animated about the counterproductive nature of the anti-Indian rhetoric.

Keeperman argued that assimilation only worked so well in the 19th and 20th centuries because of “ethnogenesis” — we took a bunch of disparate European groups and made them all “White”. But I don’t think this is quite right. Yes, assimilation succeeded because of ethnogenesis, and yes, “White” ethnicity became more salient. But the ethnicity we tried to create in the 20th century was actually something else. It was “American”.

Attempts to create an “American” ethnicity date at least back to Teddy Roosevelt.² These intensified in the New Deal years, and during and after World War II. This effort partially failed. Black Americans never became part of the “American” ethnicity, for a variety of reasons — geographic and legal segregation, linguistic differences, pervasive anti-Black racism, the memory of slavery, the rise of Black Nationalism, and so on. But for other racial minorities — Asians, Hispanics, and Middle Easterners — it partially succeeded.

The idea that the efforts of FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, and other liberal nationalists of the mid 20th century were all about creating White identity is a recent conceit; if you read anything from the time period, you realize that this wasn’t the goal, even if it was one of the lasting results. To understand the mood of the time, you should listen to the patriotic song “Ballad for Americans”, by Paul Robeson, which was sung at the 1940 Republican national convention.³ Here’s a key excerpt:

Now hold on here.
What are you trying to give us?
Are you an American?

Am I an American?
I’m just an….
Irish, Negro, Jewish, Italian,
French and English, Spanish, Russian,
Chinese, Polish, Scot, Hungarian,
Litvak, Swedish, Finnish, Canadian,
Greek and Turk and Czech,
And double-check American!
And that ain’t all!
I was baptized Baptist, Methodist,
Congregationalist,
Lutheran, Atheist, Roman Catholic,
Orthodox Jewish, Presbyterian,
Seventh Day Adventist, Mormon, Quaker,
Christian Scientist,
And lots more!

You sure are something!

Our country’s strong, our country’s young,
And her greatest songs are yet unsung,
From her plains and mountains,
We have sprung to keep the faith
With those who went before.
We nobodies who are anybodies believe it.
We anybodies who are everybodies have no doubts!

This mood is utterly absent from both the modern Right and the modern Left. On the Right, there is no attempt at ethnogenesis — only perpetual fragmentation, suspicion, and finger-pointing. Here is what I wrote in my post three weeks ago:

It’s this pathological inability to understand alliances and coalition-building that will ultimately doom the New Right. Like the far Left, this is a movement built to exclude and divide and splinter — both because of the querulous personalities of rightists themselves, and because of the intransigence of a racial ideology that abhors any impurity. If they ever managed to see off the Hispanics and the Asians, the rightists would start in on the Greeks and the Italians, and so on. There’s no victory in sight — only eternal conflict. These are not nation-builders; they are nation-dismantlers…

Meanwhile, the progressive movement has tried its hand at ethnogenesis — POC and BIPOC were both essentially attempts to create new racial categories defined in opposition to the White category. But these attempts fell apart. And there hasn’t been an attempt to create a broadly shared American ethnicity, because the modern progressive movement is also obsessed with purity, exclusion, and tent-shrinking.

But if we are going to flourish as a nation, the project of creating an American ethnicity is essential. The rightist approach — bullying nonwhite people until they meekly suppress any evidence of their backgrounds — will backfire spectacularly. In fact, it is already backfiring. Instead, the right approach is the liberal nationalist one — to allow or even encourage people to value their roots, while also emphasizing that they’re all one unified people now. When it comes to assimilation, a big tent beats a small one, and carrots work better than sticks.

That’s why there is no “Indian Question”. There is only the question of what sort of nation America is to be. We must pick up the discarded project of our 20th century forebears, and make it work completely this time.

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3 And, interestingly, at the Communist Party convention!

<https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/there-is-no-indian-question> <https://www.noahpinion.blog>

Noahpinion

There is no “Indian Question”

“Our nation was founded to perpetuate democratic principles. These principles are that each man is to be treated on his worth as a man without regard to the land from which his forefathers came and without regard to the creed which he professes. If the United States proves false to these principles of civil and religious liber…

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14 hours ago · 245 likes · 44 comments · Noah Smith

Noahpinion

Economics and other interesting stuff

By Noah Smith

Brad DeLong here: I may have this wrong, but the first thing that came to my mind when Christopher Rufo and Company began raising the “Indian question” of whether or not Indian Americans should all be induced to self-deport was this: These people are trying to play 11-dimensional chess in an attempt to diminish the standing of JD Vance. JD Vance’s wife and children are Indian-Americans. If he fails to defend them, he not only looks weak, but he is very weak. If he defends them, he loses standing among the blood-and-soil racist-nativists who will dominate the cadres of activists willing to work for candidates in the 2028 Republican presidential primaries. If you are for somebody other than JD Vance to lead the post-Trump Republican Party, doing an anti-Indian-American racism might seem an attractive thing to do.

I do believe that I am right here. The “Indian Question” on the right is not entirely but is indeed substantially an anti-JD Vance campaign. It was not anti-JD Vance in its origins. Anti-Indian sentiment grew from the H-1B fight, from status resentment of Indian-Americans’ high incomes and prominence in the leading-sector tech economy, with anti-Kamala Harris and anti-Zohran Mamdani racism as a bonus impetus. Vivek Ramaswamy, Kash Patel and Dinesh D’Souza have all been targets before and still now in addition to JD Vance.

Now, however, people competing for the racist-ethnicist lane in the Republican Party, Nick Fuentes openly. Tucker Carlson, and many others implicitly, are trying to use it as a wedge against Vance. Fuentes, the white-nationalist streamer to “groypers,” calls Vance “a fat race mixer”, uses anti-Indian slurs about his children, and has vowed to disrupt Vance’s likely 2028 campaign if Vance gets too close to what he calls “the Israel First lobby.” I read Joe Kent saying that freak-show Republicans want Tucker Carlson to run in 2028 because they see Vance as “too compromised.” I read Nick Catoggio agreeing. And I am told that a good 1/3 of Republican young staffers under 35 these days are groypers.

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Second, Noah Smith writes:

Attempts to create an “American” ethnicity date at least back to Teddy Roosevelt.² These intensified in the New Deal years, and during and after World War II. This effort partially failed. Black Americans never became part of the “American” ethnicity, for a variety of reasons — geographic and legal segregation, linguistic differences, pervasive anti-Black racism, the memory of slavery, the rise of Black Nationalism, and so on. But for other racial minorities — Asians, Hispanics, and Middle Easterners — it partially succeeded…

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This massively misses the nearly complete success of the creation of an American identity.

Consider the former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Gama, the master politician George Mitchell. He walked and talked like a high Yankee WASP from Waterville, Maine—someone who had graduated with distinction from Bowdoin College, which he had. But he was half-Irish half-Lebanese. His father was born in Ireland. His mother was born in Lebanon, immigrated at the age of 18, and worked for decades in Waterville textile mills. Arabic may well have been his milk tongue—he evaded the question, pausing and then saying “for my father it was all about assimilation”. His childhood church was not Protestant; he was a Maronite altar boy.

Yet he was the whitest white guy I have ever met.

Everywhere else in the world, people who seek to preserve their ethnic identity are absolutely terrified that their children will become Americanized, whether they move to America or not. Only the American racist right is fearful that immigrants are not assimilating.

And while Noah believes that on the left:

The progressive movement has tried its hand at ethnogenesis — POC and BIPOC were both essentially attempts to create new racial categories defined in opposition to the White category…

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I see the left differently. I see that attempt at labeling much more a “let us in! there are lots of us who you are not letting in!” than as an attempt at ethnogenesis. For one thing, if you cannot stay at POC but have to move to BIPOC, ethnogenesis—if that is what you are attempting—has failed. Or the narrower category of Asian-American: if you then slide to AAPINH, you have failed to establish an alternative to the American identity. Rather, what you have is what Dean Acheson saw as the motivating energy of the Democratic Party since its earliest days:

Dean Acheson (1956): A Democrat Looks at His Party <https://archive.org/details/democratlooksath00ache/>: ‘From the very beginning the Democratic party has beenvbroadly based… the party of the many. These were the urban worker; the backwoods merchant and banker; the small farmer, whether he was a cotton, tobacco, or grain grower; the large landholders of the South, who saw themselves being milked by the commercial and financial magnates gathered under Hamil¬ ton’s banner; the newly arrived immigrants—then chiefly Scotch-Irish—who were peopling the western wilderness, and who saw in Jefferson’s party, the party of the underdog. (These Scotch-Irish, incidentally, men of “long-limbs, long knives, long guns and long memories,” were called “foreign savages” and “liars” by the Federalists. And it was to curb the accretions of strength they gave the Jeffersonian cause, as they took possession of the wilderness, that the Alien part of the Alien and Sedition Laws was explicitly framed later on.)…

The party’s earliest efforts were to bring the many into control of government through the extension of the franchise and through frequent elections in state and nation to make the voter, thus multiplied, sovereign. This is what the word democracy meant from its Greek roots….

In considering the attributes of a political association… the many have an important and most relevant characteristic. They have many interests, many points of view, many purposes to accomplish, and a party which represents them will have their many interests, many points of view, and many purposes also. It is this multiplicity of interests which, I submit, is the principal clue in understanding…

It is an attempt to form a movement of those who see themselves as not being properly respected by the rest of the community: either because they have insufficient wealth, or because they have the wrong accent or are of the wrong color. And so it can be nothing other than an attempt to say that we are not the same, we are not one—Native Hawai’ians defining themselves as not Asian-Americans and definitely not Pacific Islanders—but we are alike and need to have one another’s backs to try to get the system to give us sufficient respect.

That’s very different than saying: Indian-Americans need to self-deport now.

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Third, let me return to the question of American identity. What is this American identity? It is not ethnic, not blood-and-soil. It is the opposite.

Let me turn the microphone over to something one of my ancestors said in a sermon on the ship Arbella back in 1630:

John Winthrop (1630): A Model of Christian Charity <https://web.archive.org/web/20110718070346/http://www.winthropsociety.com/doc_charity.php>: When God gives a special commission He looks to have it strictly observed…. Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into covenant with Him for this work. We have taken out a commission. The Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles. We have professed to enterprise these and those accounts, upon these and those ends. We have hereupon besought Him of favor and blessing….

Now the only way… to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body….

We shall find that the God of Israel is among us…. He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world….

To shut this discourse… [consider] Moses… in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30. “Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil,” in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it…

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John Winthrop would be appalled in many ways at what we have done with his commission, his duty to lead his people to build a god-fearing utopian commonwealth in this New World, escaping from the Old World and its mistakes and tyrannies to build things fresh and build things aright.

But that—that particular errand unto the wilderness—that was his commission is ours.

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Berkeley Economics Undergraduate Committee Chair Cecile Gaubert demands a syllabus for next spring. So let me throw it together. What is (are) my Grand Narrative(s) going to be, and will I be able at the end to look back and pull up the ladder?

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright…

In addition, the hope is that by January 15 I will have the full book ms. draft in hand, and can then tune it over the course of the semester.

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DRAFT Syllabus · Econ 135 · Spring 2027

Enlarging the Bounds of Human Empire

Econ 135: Economic Growth in Historical Perspective covers the whole sweep of human economic history, from how East African Plains Apes took the first steps toward becoming a coöperative “anthology intelligence” to today’s very rich but unstable global economy. We look at why humanity spent millennia stuck in a Malthusian trap under agrarian “societies of domination,” how the Commercial and Industrial Revolutions broke through after 1500, and how modern economic growth since 1870 has doubled our technological capabilities every generation. We then turn to the 20th century’s fights over economic systems, global divergence and convergence, the Global Value-Chain economy and the neoliberal order, and what comes after: climate change, populism, and the coming info-biotech economy. And I am going to try to make you do data science using python on <datahub.berkeley.edu>. Readings include Clark’s A Farewell to Alms, Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success, Koyama and Rubin’s How the World Became Rich, and my own Slouching Towards Utopia. (Go read that last if you want to get a sense of what we will cover from the 30%-ile to the 80%-ile of the course.) Take this course if you want the big-picture context for every other economics class you take, and a serious way to think about how we might build institutions that share our wealth fairly and help us live wisely and well.

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Course Frame: Two Throughlines

Francis Bacon gives the course its title, and “anthology intelligence” is the theme that runs through every week. The question each week: how did humanity’s collective store of knowledge enlarge “the bounds of human empire,” and what institutions decided who benefited?

• Week 1 opens with Francis Bacon: Bensalem and Salomon’s House, and Week 15 returns to it.

• Each notebook asks students to act as a “front-end interface” to that collective store of human knowledge that is the real ASI: not the artificial but the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the Collective Human Mind since the year -3000.

• The closing question is your own: how do we build institutions that share our wealth fairly and help us live wisely and well?

Weekly rhythm

• Readings and lecture early in the week.

• A short Datahub notebook on that week’s data, due Sunday. As in Econ 196, buggy code is fine as long as the work shows engagement.

• Perhaps a one-paragraph written reflection, also due Sunday, so you can adjust the next week’s class.

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0. Introduction & Prehistory

Week 1. “To the Effecting of All Things Possible”

The five questions of the course, and the hockey stick. Why were we poor for so long, why did that change after 1870, and why so unevenly?

• Bacon, The New Atlantis (1627), from the landing at Bensalem through Salomon’s House.

• Koyama & Rubin, ch. 1, “Why, When, & How?”

• DeLong, Slouching, Introduction.

Python Notebook: the long-run shape of the human economy, building the 75,000-year population series in pandas and plotting it on log scale. This reuses the Econ 196 Week 1 notebook.

Week 2. Anthology Intelligence: −300,000 to −3000

How East African Plains Apes became a cultural, collective-brain species. Covers prestige, reciprocity, redistribution, and dominance, and whether agriculture was progress at all.

• Henrich (opt.), chs. 1, 4, 12, 15–17.

• Clark (opt.), ch. 1, Introduction.

• Diamond (1987), “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.”

Python Notebook: income per capita and a “technology index” (growth of income per capita plus half of population growth) over the very long run.

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I. Early Civilizations: −3000 to +500

Week 3. Ensorcelled by the Devil of Malthus

Why productivity gains bought more people rather than better lives. The logic of the agrarian-age Malthusian equilibrium, and what living standards actually were.

• Crone, Introduction & chs. 1–7.

• Clark (opt.), chs. 2–3, “The Malthusian Economy” and “Living Standards.”

• Clark (2005), “The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1209–2004.”

Python Notebook: simulate a Malthusian economy, then shock its technology and watch population, not wages, absorb the gain.

Week 4. Societies of Domination, Efflorescences & Dark Ages

Predatory elites, high cultures on a subsistence base, and booms that hit limits. Covers Bronze-, Iron-, and Classical-age empires, Rome’s fall, and the slow pace of pre-modern invention.

• Allen, ch. 5, “Great Empires.”

• Clark (opt.), ch. 7, “Technological Advance.”

• Jongman (2007), “Gibbon Was Right: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Economy.”

Python Notebook: two exercises from your 2027 list: “Societies of domination & the shape of human progress and exploitation,” and “Efflorescences & Dark Ages,” using Roman-era and Han-to-Tang population series.

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II. The Mediæval Millennium & Its End: +500 to +1600

Week 5. Gunpowder Empires & On the Verge, ca. 1500

The Late-Antiquity Pause, the medieval recovery, and the world of ca. 1500. Covers the Inca, Mexica, Songhai, Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, and Ming, plus the Columbian Exchange and the forty years that shook Europe.

• Wyman, chs. 0–2, 5 & 10.

• Crone, ch. 8, “The Oddity of Europe.”

• Morris (2010), Why the West Rules, For Now, ch. 3, “Taking the Measure of the Past.”

Python Notebook (new): rebuild a Morris-style social-development index for East and West Eurasia and test how much weighting choices change the story.

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III. Imperial-Commercial to Steampower: 1600 to 1880

Week 6. Imperial-Commercial Society

Globalization, empire, the greatest slave trade, and the racialization of status. Covers Adam Smith’s commercial society and why the Dover Circle pulled ahead by 1770.

• Koyama & Rubin, chs. 2–4, 6–7.

• Berry (opt.), chs. 5–7, “Working,” “Trading,” “Legacy.”

• Coatsworth (2008), “Inequality, Institutions & Economic Growth in Latin America.”

Python Notebook: “Commercial, industrial, & steampunk economies,” part 1: Allen-style real-wage comparisons across European and Asian cities.

Week 7. The Last Efflorescence: The Dover Circle, 1770–1870

Science, markets, and coal, cotton, and sugar combine into the British Industrial Revolution. Students weigh Allen’s high-wage, cheap-energy story against Clark’s claim that this was the last efflorescence rather than the start of modern growth.

• Allen, chs. 1–4.

• Clark (opt.), chs. 11–14 (skim); or Koyama & Rubin, ch. 8.

• Landes (2006), “Why Europe and the West? Why Not China?”

Python Notebook: “Commercial, industrial, & steampunk economies,” part 2: British output and real wages, 1770–1870. Midterm I is at the end of the week.

IV. Modern Economic Growth: 1870 to 1980

Week 8. 1870-1920: Applied-Science Society

The industrial research lab, the modern corporation, and globalization make technological capability double every generation. Each generation, about one-fifth of the economy is remade.

• DeLong, Slouching, chs. 1–2, 4.

• Koyama & Rubin, ch. 9, “The Modern Economy.”

• DeLong, “’All That Is Solid Melts into Air’: Since 1870, Roughly One-Fifth of the Economy Is Transformed Every Thirty Years.”

Python Notebook: “Modern Economic Growth”: fit growth rates before and after 1870 and locate the break.

Week 9. Demographic Transition & the Development of Underdevelopment

First a population explosion, then the fall to sub-replacement fertility. Meanwhile, colonial extraction turns rich and poor people into rich and poor nations.

• Koyama & Rubin, ch. 5, “Babies.”

• Allen, chs. 6–8, “Americas,” “Africa,” “Standard Model.”

• Lee (2003), “The Demographic Transition: Three Centuries of Fundamental Change.”

Python Notebook: “Demographic transitions & mass-production economies,” part 1: birth and death rates by country, aligned on the onset of the transition.

Week 10. The Fight Over Political-Economic Orders, 1910–1950

Rapid creative destruction outpaces institutional adaptation. Covers the semi-liberal order, socialism, fascism, world wars, and the Depression.

• DeLong, Slouching, chs. 3, 5, 8–9.

• Clark (opt.), chs. 16–17, “Divergence” and “Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed?”

• Marx & Engels (1848), The Communist Manifesto, read as a lens: “less than half-right, but more than zero right.”

Python Notebook (new): interwar output and unemployment across the U.S., U.K., Germany, and the USSR.

Week 11. Mass-Production Society & the Thirty Glorious Years, 1940-1980

Assembly lines, the mixed economy, and social democracy’s peak. Also covers the Soviet experience and false and true starts to development.

• DeLong, Slouching, chs. 6–7, 10, 14.

• Allen, ch. 9, “Big Push Industrialization.”

• Abramovitz (1986), “Catching Up, Forging Ahead, and Falling Behind.”

Python Notebook: “Demographic transitions & mass-production economies,” part 2: postwar catch-up regressions.

V. Globalized Value-Chain Society: 1980 to 2020

Week 12. Neoliberal Order, East Asian Miracles & Inclusion

The productivity slowdown, the neoliberal turn, and hyperglobalization. Also covers China standing up and Russia sitting down, status inclusion, and income divergence within rich nations.

• DeLong, Slouching, chs. 11–13, 15–17.

• Koyama & Rubin, chs. 10–11.

• Pritchett (1997), “Divergence, Big Time.”

Python Notebook: “East-Asian miracles & global divergence,” replicating Pritchett’s divergence calculation with current data. Midterm II is at the end of the week.

VI. Info-Bio Tech-Attention Society: 2020 to ??

Week 13. Polycrisis: Warming, Populism & the Renewed Fight Over Orders

The weak reeds we have for fixing problems. Covers neofascist, state-surveillance-capitalist, and New Deal alternatives, and climate tail risk.

• Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, chs. 7–8.

• Eichengreen, The Populist Temptation, chs. 7–8, 13.

• Weitzman, on the economics of catastrophic climate change. This is the “Weitzman” reading from Fall 2024; the exact piece needs confirming.

Python Notebook (new): a toy climate-damage model showing how fat tails change expected costs.

Week 14. The Attention Economy & Anthology Super-Intelligence

This generation’s turn in the bullseye of creative destruction: white-collar cognitive work. Do AI models replace the collective store of human knowledge, or just give us a new way to reach it?

• DeLong, Slouching, Conclusion.

• Clark (opt.), ch. 18, “Strange New World.”

• Deming, “Using Generative AI to Learn Is Like Odysseus Untying Himself from the Mast.”

Python Notebook: “The economics of an Attention economy,” on time-use and digital-goods valuation.

Week 15. The Drake Equation, the Fermi Paradox & Living Wisely and Well

Is the gunpowder-empire Malthusian society the natural end state for our species, and were we lucky to escape it? The course closes back at Salomon’s House.

• Allen, Epilogue.

• Keynes (1930), “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.”

• Shalizi (2010), “The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone,” as reposted on your Substack.

Python Notebook (new): a Monte Carlo Drake Equation, tracing which parameter values make the Fermi silence surprising.

RRR Week & Final

Review, plus the optional “Reading Week Project” from your draft, then the final. A possible capstone question is the anchoring line you said the course still lacked: “When asked thirty years from now what you learned in this course, I want you to say…”

Possible Book Readings:

• Allen, Robert C. 2011. Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Allen, Robert C. 2017. The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Berry, Christopher J. 2018. Adam Smith: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Crone, Patricia. 1989. Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.

• Dasgupta, Partha. 2007. Economics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books.

• Gellner, Ernest. 1988. Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History. London: Collins Harvill.

• Henrich, Joseph. 2015. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Koyama, Mark, and Jared Rubin. 2022. How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth. Cambridge: Polity.

• Polanyi, Karl. 2018. Economy and Society: Selected Writings. Edited by Michele Cangiani and Claus Thomasberger. Cambridge: Polity.

• Rauchway, Eric. 2008. The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Singer, Peter. 2000. Marx: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Skidelsky, Robert. 2003. John Maynard Keynes: 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. London: Macmillan.

• Temin, Peter. 2013. The Roman Market Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Winch, Donald. 2013. Malthus: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Wyman, Patrick. 2021. The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World. New York: Twelve.

Decisions Still Open

• General-purpose technologies. Your Fall 2024 post flagged a missing GPT track (grains, bronze, iron, printing, steam, electricity, and so on). It could run as a one-slide recurring segment each week.

• Notebook scale. Econ 196 had about 15 students and 1:1 “hot seat” meetings. A lecture-size Econ 135 will need some other structures.

Comments? Thoughts? Suggestions?

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October 7 locked us into this Bad Timeline: Robert Farley reflects on the political economy of catastrophe three years after October 7, & why everything got worse in Gaza, Israel, Iran, & America, as maximalist narratives beat compromise-minded potential governing coalitions; and people paid the price…

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I found this very affecting when I read it last year, so I am hoisting it here today.

Three years on from October 7, 2023—and after the spiraling aftermath of massacre, retaliation, and stalemate—the dismal truth is that path dependence has won.

The initial atrocity set the menu of feasible outcomes, and the worst actors on every side have been remarkably adept at choosing the worst options from that menu. Robert Farley provides a sober inventory of how incentives, institutions, and narratives have interacted to produce a steady worsening in Gaza, Israel, Iran, and the United States. There is a counterfactual in which shock produced bargaining space, leadership pivoted, and institutions updated.

We did not get that counterfactual.

We got a dynamic in which each escalation tightened constraints, shrank coalition room, and raised the domestic political price of compromise. The number of Palestinians killed—now probably more than one hundred thousand—coexists with starvation risk and infrastructural ruin.

Meanwhile, Israeli society is bitterly divided over the conduct and aims of the war, yet politically locked by coalition arithmetic and by the logic of deterrence. In the U.S., bad actors seized upon the episode to fracture the Democratic coalition along generational, ethnic, and ideological lines—hurting not just foreign policy coherence but domestic political capacity at the margin. Perhaps because they believed an ethic of ultimate intention is all. Perhaps in some Naderite view that we individually flourish when politicians we sorta disagree with less are out of power.

Perhaps for some other reasons, like being hypnotized by the idea that today’s Israelis, even the youngest, are descended from “settler colonialists”. In a world in which the only people with any claim not to be descended from settler colonalists are the KhoeSan of southern Africa. And probably not even them.

Certainly because they have not learned the lesson from Ernest Renan back in 1882. He applied it to the French nation. But it applies to all human communities that hope for peace and prosperity—not justice, because justice is not a feature of human intitutions and communities, while peace and prosperity can be…

Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation.… Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or the [Albigensian Crusade] massacre that took place in the south in the thirteenth century…

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If you are hunting for a master theory, it is not “ideology explains all.” It is the simple, ugly mix of incentives in weakly accountable wartime executives, the difficulty of reversing mobilization once sunk costs are high, and media ecosystems that reward maximalist narratives while punishing the middle.

Call it the political economy of violent commitment: once leaders, movements, and publics buy into a high-salience conflict with identity stakes, the feasible policies tilt toward prolongation rather than settlement.

Some will say: this is what moral clarity requires.

Perhaps.

But moral clarity that multiplies casualties and destroys institutions is catastrophe.

Farley’s closing line—“horrible people are in charge in Jerusalem, deep in the tunnels under Gaza, and in Washington DC”—stings. The wrong people, empowered by the wrong incentives, making the wrong choices.

The necessary work remains the same: build the channels that can carry compromise even when the currents flow against it. Farley’s essay documents the failure of those channels over the past three years. Read it as an audit of how our systems broke—and as a prompt for how they might, someday, be repaired.

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& Now Everything is Worse

Robert Farley

<https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/10/and-now-everything-is-worse>:

It’s [three] years since October 7, and everything is worse:

“All told, Hamas killed some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 250 more captive. It was the bloodiest day in Israel’s history and the deadliest for Jews anywhere since the Holocaust.

“But a shocked Israel mobilized to unleash a devastating military response that has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians, including both civilians and combatants, according to the Gaza health ministry. It has wounded tens of thousands more, flattened thousands of buildings and reduced much of the territory’s infrastructure — and its landscape — to rubble, shrapnel and sand.

“The war has forced Palestinians in Gaza into a punishing cycle of fleeing Israeli attacks by taking shelter in a supposed haven in another part of the territory, only to have to flee again. And food shortages and obstacles to supplying and distributing humanitarian aid to Gaza residents led an international group of experts on hunger crises to declare in August that part of the enclave was suffering from famine.

“In Israel, the war and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to end it in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages — despite polls showing broad support for that — have bitterly divided society and exacerbated fissures that existed before Oct. 7. Many Israelis contend that he has extended the war, forgoing opportunities for a cease-fire even after the decapitation of Hamas’s leadership to keep his right-wing coalition together and extend his hold on power.

October 7 happened on a Saturday. By the time I taught my undergraduate class on Monday, at least one undergrad was already prepared with a set of arguments justifying Hamas that would have also justified the murder of every person of white, black, and Asian heritage living on the North American continent. Other students were angry, but for me this was a teaching moment, not an anger moment. We talked things through, discussed some parallels with Ukraine (I had just returned from my trip two weeks previous) and I made the point that what was going to happen next was going to be worse than anyone could possibly imagine, a prediction that has unfortunately come true.

Over the week that followed a lot of folks who should have known better decided that they most defiantly would refuse to know better. I saw protestors making straightforward arguments that would have justified the murder of my own children, wherever they could have been found. At this early stage I saw not nearly enough grappling with the fact that Hamas had set in motion a series of events that was going to result in horrific outcomes in Gaza and elsewhere. It was evident from me early on that there might be an imaginable world where earnest protest could constrain Israel’s retaliation, but that world was not the world we lived in.

And so for [three] years the worst people in the world have played out the script that was written on October 7, and everything is worse for the Palestinians. Everything is worse for the Iranians, and everything is worse for Americans, too; one need not invest too deeply in the factional conflicts around “Genocide Joe” or the continuing debates on swing-state polling to recognize that the Democratic coalition was badly fractured by October 7 in ways that were difficult to redress by November 2024. And today horrible people are in charge in Jerusalem, deep in the tunnels under Gaza, and in Washington DC…

Negative-sum escalation won after October 7. It tightened constraints, raised the domestic price of compromise, and shrank coalition space for compomising. Palestinian suffering deepened; Israeli and Iranian politics hardened; American politics splintered further. Media ecosystems amplified absolute certainties; sunk costs and hostages locked strategy; accountability eroded. Ernest Renan’s grim lesson about the necessity of historical forgetfulness applies not just to nations but to all human communities seeking peace an proserity: memory weaponized becomes a veto on human prosperity, peace, and life.

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Journalists who do not count the zeroes and compare them to the proper magnitudes are not bystanders or generalists, but accomplices in the disinformation bullshit machine. The release is one day of world output and one-fifteenth of the total Hormuz-closure gap over the four-month period of the promised release. And it is not new. It is leftovers from the March committee.

Justin Wolfers says:

Much of the media reporting on this deal breathlessly emphasized the size of the release while missing… [that] there’s no new oil, the barrels barely make a dent, and the promise is a vague statement of intentions. I don’t say that with malice. Journalists are generalists, and 100 million barrels has a lot of zeros. Economists spend years learning to be unimpressed. Instead of admiring the zeros, we count them…

On the contrary, Justin.

This should be said with malice.

It is long past time to say things like this with malice.

“I am a generalist” is no excuse for “not counting the zeroes”. Street-Fighting Math <https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-098-street-fighting-mathematics-january-iap-2008/d937ad2ca4b7839a5b3bd92e30ee483e_MIT18_098IAP08_draft_text.pdf> is an essential tool for a generalist. Not to have and use the Street-Fighting Math zero-counting skills is to become an accomplice in the misinformation of the public. When you corner them, they say: I know, but I have to keep my sources sweet to keep doing my job. And maybe they hint that someday they will write a tell-all book. But they very rarely do. And a job kept on those terms is not one worth keeping:

Platypus Economics

Economics. Explained. Clearly.

By Justin Wolfers

CROSSPOST: JUSTIN WOLFERS: An Agreement to Agree About an Earlier Agreement

<https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/an-agreement-to-agree-about-an-earlier> <https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com>

Platypus Economics

An Agreement to Agree About an Earlier Agreement

On Friday, the G7 announced that it’s going to release 100 million barrels of oil and fuel products from its emergency stockpiles. President Trump is calling this a major concession from Europe that will bring down diesel prices and help American consumers…

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2 days ago · 221 likes · 5 comments · Justin Wolfers

Read the G7 communiqué closely and the “new” 100 million barrels turns out to be leftovers from March.

Justin Wolfers

2026-10-06

On Friday, the G7 announced that it’s going to release 100 million barrels of oil and fuel products from its emergency stockpiles. President Trump is calling this a major concession from Europe that will bring down diesel prices and help American consumers.

Except, when you look closely, almost nothing new has happened. The G7 — that’s Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States — agreed to do something they’d already said that they’d do.

The concession they won here? The U.S. agreed not to do something it should never have contemplated doing.

I don’t want to be too cynical. Gas and diesel prices are at near-record highs, and people are hurting. Taking action on that is good.

But in this case, the action the G7 took seems to mostly be leaders agreeing that leaders should be seen as trying to solve the crisis that leaders caused.

Actually doing something? Well, that’s probably going a step too far.

The road to the crisis

On February 28th, the United States attacked Iran. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz quickly became hazardous, which was a problem, since nearly a quarter of the world’s oil and petroleum products passed through the strait in 2025. Once that became dangerous, the world’s energy markets were thrown into chaos. You’ve probably noticed that if you’ve tried to fill up your gas tank any time in the past seven months.

Enter the International Energy Agency, or IEA. The IEA is basically a club of the world’s advanced economies. When the world is hit by an energy shock, the IEA gets together to respond. Back in March they convened and agreed to draw down their emergency stockpiles and make 400 million barrels of oil available.

When they published the country-by-country plan a few days later, it actually added up to more than that — 426 million barrels total. That was the biggest emergency release in the agency’s history.

How large it was relative to the problem the war caused is something we’ll get into in a bit.

The thing I want you to notice for now is that this March agreement was agreed to in March. And that was a while ago.

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Enter Donald Trump. Global disruptions mean that diesel prices keep rising. That hurts truckers, farmers in harvest season, construction firms, basically anyone who runs a big diesel engine. Oh, and if you hadn’t noticed — there’s a midterm election coming up.

So Trump floated a plan. Or sort of a plan. And he sort of floated it.

The president announced that he was going to ban exports of diesel from the United States. This is after he banned diesel exports from Russia and Iran. If you’re noticing that the president gives the same treatment to our own country as he gives to our enemies, that’s well-spotted. The plan was not well received, and I actually wrote at the time about what a bad idea it was:

Why Is the President Pointing Sanctions at America?

Justin Wolfers

A week later, Trump said he was still thinking about the plan. A few days after that, he said he’d never really been serious. So the administration’s position seems to be that it had a plan that it liked and disliked and was going to implement but that it was never serious about.

Then, last week, the leaders of the G7 met by video conference. Trump’s version of the story is that he dropped the threat to ban U.S. diesel exports, and in return, Europe agreed to release a massive amount of diesel.

That’s what he said. Perhaps more relevant is what the actual announcement says. It pledged a coordinated release of 100 million barrels of oil, diesel, and other fuels over four months. There was also a pledge that G7 countries will do their best to avoid energy export restrictions.

But what does this really mean? Who committed to what, in response to what, and does any of it matter?

Things start to get mushy

The world’s leading economies had already agreed to release 400 million barrels back in March. They hadn’t fully delivered on that pledge. So did Trump’s posturing get us anything new? Or is this just a promise to finish the earlier job?

Let’s look carefully at the G7 communiqué (and let’s all appreciate that I finally got to use the word “communiqué”). The key sentence says that, taking into account commitments that have already been fulfilled, the G7 will implement its commitments.

Read that slowly. They’re going to implement their commitments, taking into account commitments that have already been fulfilled. I read that sentence several times, and it had the warm, gooey texture of bureaucratic oatmeal.

Here’s what I think it means. Countries promised roughly 400 million barrels in March. They’ve delivered a lot of that, and there are roughly 100 million barrels left in the commitment. So the G7 is now saying, hey, let’s deliver the rest of what we already agreed to deliver. And we’ll try to get it done within the next four months.

This is an agreement to agree that they agree about the earlier agreement. Glad we agree on that.

There’s also a timing problem. The White House said that this was going to be a four-to-six-week war. We’re now seven months in. The emergency release, which was agreed to in the war’s first two weeks, will finish at the end of this new four-month window. So, close to the war’s first anniversary. Good work, everyone.

There’s one more wrinkle here. On September 29th, three days before the president called this a massive European contribution, the U.S. Department of Energy asked oil companies whether they wanted to take up to 40 million barrels from America’s emergency reserve. The department described this as part of completing America’s 172-million-barrel commitment that came under the March agreement.

That leaves us with an awkward question. Are those 40 million American barrels part of the G7’s 100 million? If so, when the president takes credit for Europe’s 100 million barrels, roughly 40% of them may be American oil we already owed.

I’ve dug into this pretty deeply. The honest answer is, it’s hard to tell. I’m pretty confident the U.S. is delivering another 40 million barrels from storage to the world market. The only thing I’m unsure about is whether that American 40 million is part of the G7’s 100 million barrel package. It’s impossible to say more, because neither the G7 nor the IEA has told us who owes the 100 million barrels that are meant to come online. Maybe the U.S. owes 40 of that 100. Maybe not.

Maybe you should interpret this lack of clarity as speaking to a lack or seriousness about this agreement. Maybe not. But it is striking to me that when I recently sought a travel reimbursement from my university, it involved a lot more paperwork than this 100 million barrel “commitment.”

The milk jug and the bathtub

Let’s take the most generous version of this for a second. Let’s say all 100 million barrels are new commitments to deliver extra oil to the world market. If that’s true, is it a lot?

I want you to build a simple habit here. Don’t be impressed by the number of zeros on a commitment. Compare it to the size of the problem.

The world produces about 100 million barrels of oil a day. So, this package equals roughly one day of global production. The release is spread over four months, which means that over the next 122 days, the world will get 123 days of oil supply. That sounds absurdly small because it is absurdly small.

The scale of the problem looks like this: before the war, the Strait of Hormuz carried about 20 million barrels a day. In August, which is the last month I could find good data for, the strait carried about 8 million. That’s a gap of 12 million barrels a day. The G7 package works out to about 0.8 million barrels a day (100 million over roughly 122 days). The daily gap is 15 times larger than the fix.

Imagine a bathtub with a huge drain. It’s draining 12 gallons a minute, which is enough to fill (and refill) a kitchen trash can. The G7 arrives, heroically, to refill the tub. To do it, they bring a single jug of milk that isn’t even full.

A commitment without commitments

There’s another word for a commitment without real commitments. It’s called a hope. You could also call it a wish, or maybe an intention. Here, we can use the term “press release.” Or in french, communiqué.

The communiqué promises a “front-loaded substantial diesel release” within 20 days. That sounds reassuring until you start asking questions. How many barrels will be diesel? Which countries will release the fuel? Which barrels are new and which are left over from March? When will each country deliver, and what happens if they don’t? The “agreement” doesn’t answer any of these questions.

“Substantial” isn’t a number. It’s an adjective.

A real commitment has teeth. It comes with a public scorecard, one that lets the U.S., Germany, France, Japan, the IEA, and the citizens of these countries all check whether the countries involved did what they promised. This deal has none of that. It doesn’t have a supply plan. Instead, it has a headline and a deadline.

That deadline presents a calendar of its own. Twenty days after the October 2nd announcement is October 22nd. The U.S. midterm elections are on November 3rd. The G7 doesn’t explain why it’s so important to get diesel to market just before the American election, but I suspect you can work out your own theory here.

Follow the money (or the people with money).

You don’t have to take my word for any of this. The people who trade diesel futures don’t care whether a press release sounds strong. They care about the price of a gallon of fuel. So let’s see how they reacted.

On the morning of October 2nd, the president got ahead of the G7 announcement by posting to Truth Social that Europe had agreed to release a “massive amount” of diesel immediately.

After this, diesel futures dropped fast. About an hour later the actual communiqué arrived with no diesel quantity, no country allocations, and no evidence the barrels were new. Within hours, futures had climbed back to about $4.55 a gallon wholesale, fully undoing the earlier drop.

Traders liked the possibility of a massive European diesel release. Then, they read what the G7 had actually committed to and realized that nothing much had happened. By the end of the day, the price was essentially unchanged.

The futures market also gives us a longer-term read. Before the Iran war, traders expected diesel to wholesale around $2.35 a gallon for years. The day before the G7 announcement, they expected near-term prices of roughly double that, easing gradually but staying well above pre-war levels. On the next trading day after the announcement, the curve had barely moved.

Diesel is expected to stay expensive for years. That’s the market’s verdict. The underlying shortage persists, even if some barrels shift over the coming weeks.

New compared to what?

Much of the media reporting on this deal breathlessly emphasized the size of the release while missing the problems. There’s no new oil, the barrels barely make a dent, and the promise is a vague statement of intentions. I don’t say that with malice. Journalists are generalists, and 100 million barrels has a lot of zeros. Economists spend years learning to be unimpressed. Instead of admiring the zeros, we count them.

You can do that too. When someone — especially a politician — waves a number at you, you should ask three questions. Is it new? Is it large? Is it enforceable? To answer those, you need to know what you’re comparing the number to.

This announcement fails on all three. It isn’t new, it isn’t large, and it isn’t enforceable. It’s the appearance of doing something without the thing actually getting done.

<https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/an-agreement-to-agree-about-an-earlier> <https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com>

Platypus Economics

An Agreement to Agree About an Earlier Agreement

On Friday, the G7 announced that it’s going to release 100 million barrels of oil and fuel products from its emergency stockpiles. President Trump is calling this a major concession from Europe that will bring down diesel prices and help American consumers…

Read more

2 days ago · 221 likes · 5 comments · Justin Wolfers

Platypus Economics

Economics. Explained. Clearly.

By Justin Wolfers

Brad DeLong here: Justin correctly says: measure a policy number on three tests: is it new, is it large, is it enforceable? And this one—as Trump policies almost always do—fails all three.

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Max Weber in mid-1917 called socialist-revolution Russia “a laboratory heaped with human corpses”; Schumpeter replied that every anatomy classroom is the same. Weber, outraged, stormed out in anger at Schumpeter’s cool contemplation of near-genocide. I never read the book where that exchange appears. Now my machines are trying to make it so that, going forward, I will have or be able to create the memories I would have had if I actually had read it. Will it work? Probably not. Will it be interesting? Very. Probably:

In my prime, I would read perhaps 150 serious books a year.

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I would skim over parts that did not resonate, but would still absorb a good deal as I skimmed. I would focus on the themes and passages that resonated. I would think about them. I would then go off and argue with the author, or at least with a spun-up sub-turing instantiation of the author in my imagination. Figure 5 hours per book. 750 hours per year building my own cognitive capacity out of a total budget of 24 × 365 = 8760 hours per year, it was time worth spent.

Well, now, we are not such as once moved heaven and earth, but what we are, we are.

I am down to perhaps, half of that: 75 books a year, 1.5 a week, of which 40% are re-readings to remind me and refresh my parasocial acquaintance with my intellectual magisters and adversaries. Half of this gap comes from lower energy. Half of the gap comes from time being absorbed by reading and watching other things. Of those, perhaps half of which are things that are worthwhile.

There is a definite loss. There is a great sense in which deep reading and substantial continued engagement builds one own cognitive knowledge structures in an important way. Thus this feels like a gap in my personal information processing life that I should try to repair. The natural way to repair it, of course, is to see whether MAMLM technologies might be useful. Could they create a document, a document that I could then spend an hour with, that will present to me summary points and then focus my attention on passage in the book that I would have focused my attention on had I read it? And might I then be able, by having that document thereafter, quickly refresh my recollection? Thus I will not have the memories I would have had had I spent five hours with the book. But I would have the ability to rapidly simulate and, when asked questions about or thinking about issues relevant to the book, have me and my IT systems rapidly come up with the words I would have said or written if I did have the memories?

In short, could I turn myself and my machines into a Chinese Room? (With the benefits not only of communicating to others, but then actually building memories as my self watches the Chinese Room output.)

Were this to work, my 75 serious books a year could then effectively grow to 375. I, or rather the Chinese Room of which I was a component, would then know more useful stuff, or at least communicate to others (and back to myself) as if it knew more useful stuff.

The answer to the question is, almost surely: No.

But is it worth trying, because (a) it might work—the horse might learn to sing—(b) it might half-work and still thus be useful as a note-system, and (c) it will teach me a lot about the limits of MAMLM technology when one asks it to do more than stochastic parrotage outside the realm of the extraordinary use case that it MAMLM-as-coding-assistant, or rather MAMLM-as-coding-master. Hence I now have:

~/.hermes/workspace/missions/conspectus/

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A conspectus is a short, organized overview of a larger text, giving you the main points and how they fit together, from conspicere, “to look at attentively.” You rarely see the word even in rarified academic English, except in translations from Slavic where konspect is an everyday word for structured study notes.

A summary condenses. A synopsis is a summary that follows the sequence of topics. An overview is casual and broad. A survey covers the range, rather than compresses. The word conspectus combines summary and survey: a compact map of the territory that is comprehensive and structured yet as brief as possible. the content. For me, my conspectus is book-by-book folders for books that I wish I had read (or re-read): notes, briefing, and synthesis documents that I review, flipping back to the text to read the book passages it direct me to as I do, and then afterwards either refer to myself or have it brought to my attention by my systems when it seems relevant to what I am thinking about.

Thus I will not have my memories of having read the book. I will not have read the book. But will the Chinese Room I and my systems construct be a good enough substitute for my memories of having read the book? Will I or my intelligence, for some definition of “I” or of “my intelligence”, have the knowledge that I would have had I read the book of Felix Somary, Menger’s student and classmate of Schumpeter and Mises, who spent fifty years watching Europe come apart and saying so? My machines built me a conspectus: a briefing, a critique, and pointers to the key scenes, including Weber storming out of a Vienna café and Ludendorff interrogating Somary at Kreuznach.

My bottom line: I think so. Give me five minutes’ notice, and I can now construct the memories, the brain states, that I would have had I in fact read the book. Or at least I can construct a very close approximation of them. I have run enough spot-checks against the text to be confident that the hallucination level her is very low. So I can now talk about the book as convincingly as if I had read it. Is that knowledge, or only a good performance of it?

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Now let me switch gears and talk about Felix Somary 1889-1956 called by some “the Raven of Zürich” and his autobiography The Raven of Zürich. In 1899 (aged seventeen), he enrolled in the Faculty of Law and Political Science of the University of Vienna, where he studied under Carl Menger (to whom he also served as an assistant) and Eugen von Philippovich. I am told by Wikipedia that his classmates included Joseph Schumpeter, Rudolf Hilferding, Otto Bauer, Emil Lederer, and Ludwig von Mises.

Somary foresaw the 1929 crash, preferred state bankruptcy to inflation, and warned against unconditional surrender. I’ve wanted to read his memoir for a decade and never will.

Here we have yet another of the Vienna figures, like Hayek, Schumpeter, Polanyi, and so forth, who kept trying to grasp and understand the problems of 1900 to 1950—the problems rooted in the replacement of the steampower by the applied-science, and then the mass-production economy, along with the parallel and associated transformations of mass communication and of the social network with the rise of nationalism and ethnicism. I know the book because of its account of Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter discussing the Russian Revolution:

On my return journey I stopped briefly in Vienna to report to the Rothschild bank on the Bucharest negotiations. Apart from that, Max Weber had asked me to be present at the discussion he was to have with Schumpeter about the succession to his chair at the University of Vienna. Weber wanted to return to Germany and he was thinking of Schumpeter as his successor, but the two men knew each other only superficially, although Schumpeter had written an outstanding history of ideas to accompany Weber’s handbook on social sciences.

I was worried about the meeting, because a greater contrast between two personalities was hard to imagine. Max Weber was a restless, nervous type, full of ‘drive’, a Huguenot with deeply-held convictions, for which he strove with every atom of his energy. He battled on without letting up, even when only minor issues were at stake. He was explosive in temperament, verging on intolerance; those who did not know him well could easily have been put off or even frightened at first meeting him.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal tried to explain him by saying: ‘He has the gifts of a Caesar who is unable to find a field large enough for his energies.’ There was much truth in that observation: Weber was never in his life able to give his tremendous intellectual and spiritual powers full expression. He took nothing lightly.

Schumpeter, on the other hand, took nothing hard. He had been educated at the Vienna Theresianum, where the pupils were taught to stick to subjects, and not get personally involved. The rules of the game in every party and ideology were to be learned thoroughly, but nobody should join a party or subscribe to a dogma. And Schumpeter was a virtuoso at playing any political game, from the extreme left to the extreme right. He had worked briefly on the Socialisation Commission in Berlin, which met under the leadership of our Vienna University colleague Hilferding, who at the time led the German independent socialists, for whom the official Social Democrats were too moderate.

Hilferding often told me of his astonishment at Schumpeter’s radicalism; but Schumpeter was not radical at all, he merely followed through to the appropriate conclusions, given the premises. He felt that if socialism were to be introduced at the end of the war, it should be in a consistent way.

We met in the Café Landtmann opposite the University. Ludo Hartmann, a historian of the Classical world and son-in-law of Mommsen, accompanied Weber, and I came with Schumpeter. I took no notes of our conversation, but can recall the elements of it that impressed me most strongly.

The talk turned to the Russian Revolution, and Schumpeter expressed satisfaction that socialism was no longer an abstract theoretical notion, but would now be tested in the real world. Weber said with some heat that communism at the Russian stage of development was a crime—he knew the language and followed Russian affairs closely. He added that developments in Russia would lead to unheard-of human misery and end in a terrible catastrophe.

‘That may well be,’ said Schumpeter, ‘but it would be a good laboratory to test our theories’.

‘A laboratory heaped with human corpses!’ Weber rejoined.

‘Every anatomy classroom is the same thing’, Schumpeter shot back.

To change the subject, I commented that the war had altered the direction of social developments that would otherwise have gone quite differently. Weber agreed, but unfortunately chose Great Britain as his example, referring to its swing away from Liberalism. But Schumpeter disputed this view. Weber became more vehement and raised his voice, as Schumpeter for his part became more sarcastic and lowered his.

All around us the café customers stopped their card games and listened eagerly, until the point when Weber sprang to his feet and rushed out into the Ringstrasse, crying ‘This is intolerable!’ Hartmann followed with Weber’s hat, and vainly tried to calm him down.

Schumpeter, who had remained behind with me, only smiled and said ‘How can someone carry on like that in a coffee house!’…

I felt unhappy about the incident. Here were two individuals of rare gifts, who were not far apart in their fundamental views on the economy, and in their deep intellectual seriousness. But it was the curse of the German and Austrian haute bourgeoisie that its all too few original personalities, if they ever met at all, immediately became deadly enemies. They all had too much temperament to compromise on issues.

Both Weber and Schumpeter were failures in their native land, Austria; they only found success abroad. Yet they had something in common: outside their own country they felt themselves in exile…

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Conspectus introduces this set-piece as follows:

The Café Landtmann Clash: Weber vs. Schumpeter (p. 70):

• The Scene: A high-society confrontation at the Café Landtmann in Vienna, the epicenter of the city’s intellectual milieu, where two of the 20th century’s greatest social scientists collide over the fate of the Russian Empire.

• The Substance: A fundamental rift in the intellectual response to the Russian Revolution. While Max Weber reacts with visceral horror, viewing the event as an absolute crime and a catastrophe, Joseph Schumpeter maintains a clinical, almost detached curiosity, viewing the revolution as a “laboratory” to test the viability of socialist theories.

• Why it’s striking: The juxtaposition of the setting—the leisurely, refined atmosphere of Viennese café culture—with the subject of the debate: the blood-soaked birth of the Soviet Union. It captures a pivotal moment where the old world’s intellectual giants attempted to rationalize the arrival of a new, terrifying era of systemic collapse.

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Great story, even if it is too good to be true in its details. So that put Felix Somary’s The Raven of Zürich on my to-read list. But today it is further from the top of the list than it was a decade ago. It is clear that I am never going to read it. But a properly-harnessed ollama/gemma4:31b-mlx, overseen and guided by a harness constructed by anthropic/claude-opus (itself harnessed by claude-code), can:

Plus I fed it Max Weber’s Economy & Society (which I have read, but long ago), and Slouching Towards Utopia (which, of course, I know very well.

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What do I think of the job that it is doing?

To summarize: I am quite pleased. After spending an hour on the conspectus folder (and then half an hour, checking random pieces of the conspectus folder against the actual book itself), I definitely feel like the Chinese Room of which I am a component could definitely fake it. It can respond as if I have actually read the book, in the way I would. Thus I have hopes that my leafing to the passages it points me to, consulting it when it comes to mind, and having my systems bring it in when they think it is relevant will together be as if I actually have the memories of having read, at least for people looking at me in my Chinese Room from the outside. And from the inside? That is a hard question that I do not yet have an answer to.

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating: What do my systems think is worth noting from Somary? Here is the introductory briefing that it wants to give me:

Briefing: Felix Somary, The Raven of Zürich

Felix Somary was the ultimate high-society canary in the coal mine. Trained in the Vienna school—which meant he spent his youth learning that the world is a fragile place and that economic depressions are inevitable (p. 17)—he spent the next fifty years watching the 20th century dismantle itself in real time. He calls the government the “fence that separates the zoo of wild animals from the outside world” (p. 15), and he spent his career observing exactly when and how those fences broke.

The arc of his life is a map of European collapse. In the pre-1914 years, he was playing the great game of international finance, trying to use the Baghdad Railway as a colonial compromise to stop the Anglo-German naval race from turning into a world war (p. 35-38). He failed, of course. During the war, he became a critic of the military’s delusional confidence, specifically General Ludendorff, who thought he could just seize Caucasian oilfields without considering how to actually get the oil out (pp. 66-67). Somary saw the rouble collapsing in 1917 while the diplomats were still pretending the Russian Empire was a going concern (p. 64).

Then came the Zürich years. This is where he earned the name “The Raven.” He played the role of the professional gloom-monger, correctly predicting the 1929 crash (p. 7) and managing client assets by restricting them to the only three places he trusted: Switzerland, Britain, and Holland (p. 77). He had a visceral hatred for inflation, calling it a “permanent poisoning of the very bloodstream of a society” (p. 78), and argued that a clean state default—a “one-time surgical intervention”—would have been far less damaging than the slow-motion arson of the interwar inflation (p. 78-79).

He ended up in Washington during WWII, where he looked at American technical mastery and saw a total lack of forward planning for the war economy (p. 106). He had a particular disdain for the “cult of mediocrity” in US education (p. 129) and the “unreality” of the Washington bubble, which he believes led to the failure to support the German resistance and a total misreading of the Soviet Union (p. 129). Even in the postwar era, he remained a skeptic of the Marshall Plan’s “frenetic speed” (p. 138), arguing that reciprocal free trade and free immigration would have been the real cure for the dollar shortage.

Somary died convinced that the US was making the same mistake again: attempting to install democratic regimes “from above” (p. 154) and humiliating defeated enemies through “unconditional surrender,” which he rightly noted makes the victor responsible for the resulting resentment (p. 155).

---

Critique: The Raven’s Eye

Somary is a brilliant witness, but he’s a prisoner of his own intellectual pedigree. He is a quintessential product of the Vienna school, which is to say he possesses an extraordinary eye for systemic fragility and a corresponding pathology of permanent pessimism.

He was prescient about the 1929 crash and the failure of the submarine warfare strategy because he understood the intersection of logistics and psychology better than the people running the machines. He understood that a “fence” (like the Habsburg monarchy) is only useful as long as the people inside it believe in the fence (p. 15). When he warns that the demand for “unconditional surrender” is a strategic error (p. 155), he’s speaking as a historian of the long-term, recognizing that stability requires a graceful exit for the loser.

However, I have very little patience for his “integrity of currencies” fetish. He speaks of the integrity of currencies as “the key to democratic survival” (p. 2) with a kind of religious fervor that smacks of gold-standard nostalgia. For Somary, inflation isn’t just a monetary phenomenon; it’s a moral failing. While he is correct that hyperinflation destroys the middle class, his insistence on immediate state bankruptcy as a “surgical intervention” (p. 78) ignores the political reality that such a move often triggers the very social collapse he fears.

His view of democracy is equally antiquated. He claims that democracy “cannot be decreed from above” and requires “centuries of organic historical development”—citing 600 years for the Swiss (p. 154). This is an aristocratic fantasy. It suggests that unless you have a few centuries of slow-growth institutional accretion, you’re doomed to failure. It ignores the capacity for rapid institutional leapfrogging that the 20th century proved was possible.

Finally, his theory on the 1929 crash—that it was primarily caused by the price disparity between agriculture and industry (p. 156)—is an oversimplification. It’s a classic “single-cause” fallacy. While agriculture was indeed crushed, the crash was a systemic failure of credit and liquidity, a collapse of the very “integrity” he spent his life obsessing over.

Somary is an indispensable source for the feeling of the era—the sheer, terrifying velocity of the “Great Breakdown.” He captured the “unreality” of the ruling classes in both Europe and Washington. But as an economic theorist, he is too often an observer of symptoms rather than a designer of cures. He can tell you exactly when the building is about to fall, but his only solution is to move your assets to a Swiss bank and wait for the dust to settle.

The roiling boil of linear algebra has, I think, done quite a good job at getting to the heart of Somary’s book (or what I think the heart of Somary’s book would be for me, were I to read it). It is not just a memoir of a financier. It is a forensic anatomy of the first half of the 20th century’s “Great Breakdown”, extraordinary in the tension between Somary’s deep technical expertise (albeit often misguided) and the historical tragedies that history brings to his door. Somary doesn’t just report events; he diagnoses them as systemic failures.

He has a Weber/Schumpeter debate about ideas and their implications when put into practice. He has a Somary/Ludendorff scene about competence: people Peter-principled well above their proper station who do not realize how lucky they have been and that they need to plan for their luck having already run out. And there are more set pieces about institutional scale and historical time and how we make our history but not in circumstances of our own choosing.

Let me give you Erich Ludendorff, future enthusiastic Nazi and effective military dictator of Germany in the last stages of World War I:

The Logistical Reckoning: Somary vs. Ludendorff (pp. 66–67):

• The Scene: A high-stakes confrontation between the refined world of international finance and the blunt force of the Prussian military machine, centered on the delusional ambitions of General Erich Ludendorff.

• The Substance: Somary exposes the cavernous gap between Ludendorff's "map-room" delusions of grandeur and the grinding reality of logistics. Specifically, he dismantles Ludendorff's confidence in capturing the Caucasian oilfields, pointing out the total impossibility of actually exploiting and transporting that oil in the short term.

• Why it's striking: It is a clash of two different types of power. Somary, operating in the shadows of gold and diplomacy, acts as the cold voice of logistical reality, stripping away the military's illusion of omnipotence. It highlights the tragedy of the Great War: a military leadership that believed "will" could override the physics of supply chains.

A Day with Ludendorff in Kreuznach, 1917:

I spent the next months in complete withdrawal from the public eye…. But when the failure of the submarine campaign became apparent, many people rang me whom I had not seen for months…. Prophetic gifts were ascribed to me, and my opinion on the future was avidly sought…. In early summer of 1917 I heard… that General Ludendorff wanted a talk with me…. [Then] from Colonel Bauer a formal invitation to Kreuznach, the military headquarters…. A refusal was hardly possible…. I was the sole passenger in the carriage of the train bound for Kreuznach, and could not find out if there was anyone in the other carriages…. I was the only person who got off the train at Kreuznach…. I announced myself at the appointed hour at headquarters, Colonel Bauer received me with a few questions that led me to believe that my remarks on the future of the Russian rouble had been the cause of the invitation.

While Bauer was speaking the door was flung open, Ludendorff came rushing in and shouted harshly at me without a single word of greeting: ‘Who are you, and what do you want here?’ I went towards the door; Colonel Bauer pulled me back and spoke softly to Ludendorff, who muttered to himself, turned half to Bauer and half to me, saying that he was not to know when he saw a strange face who it might be. I immediately realised that the whole thing was play-acting, designed to intimidate me.

‘All right, all right,’ said Ludendorff. ‘I made no mistake with that question! What do you want, anyway? Now I hear about you everywhere; you get involved in every problem, even in connection with Russia. Who gave you the right? Who authorised you? Who stands behind you? In whose name are you speaking?’

‘In nobody’s but my own.’

‘That I don’t believe! Are you a German citizen?’

‘No.’

‘But you were in the Belgian military government?’

I saw from that question that he had been well briefed. ‘Yes, but I kept my original citizenship.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘From Austria.’

‘Where in Austria?’

‘From Vienna.’

‘Would you people like it if someone from here interfered in every aspect of your business?’ He went on: ‘What mission were you assigned by Austria, and who there gives you orders?’

‘Nobody appointed me to any job.’

‘Well, then, who pays your bills? Who then is paying for Naumann’s working group that seems to be able to mobilise all the parties? Well?’

‘Myself alone. Naumann would pay his own expenses if he had the means, so I do it for him. To allow an idea to be financed by government or some organisation is to prostitute it. Naumann’s ideas accord in many respects with mine—covering his expenses was naturally a gentleman’s arrangement.’

‘You can allow yourself such luxuries in the middle of a war? From what sources, and how?’

‘I do not owe anyone explanations on the origin of my assets.’

‘And this Austro-Polish merger, is that an idea you’ve also advocated on your own initiative? Or was this your creation to begin with? The intention was to surround us on all sides! But now we are doing in Poland what we want to do and must do, and Vienna has had to take it lying down. The Poles must be dominated, watched every minute of the day and night, otherwise they will attack us. And we know how to rule, not your hand-kissing people!’

‘Then you are thinking in terms of a colony, a colony in the middle of Europe, and want to force the natives immediately into military service? You will really come a cropper on that one!’

‘What are you talking about? If the Poles feel our fist, they won’t dare to move. Prussia as lord and master of Poland—I’d gladly exchange that for all the [German] softies south of the Main [River—Bavarians, Würtembergers, Black Foresters, Alsatians, Lorrainers, Badeners—] who only weaken our side! But that is naturally not your opinion.’

‘No, six great powers on the enemy side seem to me enough for us. But I do not understand why you are telling me all this.’

‘I understand from reliable sources that you continue to intrigue in favour of the Austro-Polish nonsense, even now, after the Austrians themselves have given up on the idea. And I ask you yet again, on whose behalf?’

‘I repeat: I am firmly convinced that the notion of a Polish-Austrian combination is the only possible solution. But it is not true that I am pushing for it. For me the whole matter is finished.’

‘Because of Vienna’s withdrawal?’

‘No, because of the loss of the war.’

‘What are you talking about? Since when have we lost the war?’

‘Since America came in.’

‘That’s your revenge! Some substitute for the defeat over Poland!’

‘God knows, I would rather have been wrong about America.’

‘Rubbish, that was just an episode!’

‘No, it was the decisive moment of the war.’

‘Doesn’t the coming collapse of Russia mean ten times more than America’s coming in? The Americans won’t have a real army for years!’

‘No, in place of one exhausted enemy we now have a fresh, unbeatable power, and moreover the only country that could have been an intermediary in negotiating peace.’

Ludendorff did not immediately answer, and while he had stared directly at me throughout the conversation, he now gazed mutely into space. Suddenly he said: ‘I would have kept away from the whole submarine business if I’d known that the revolution would break out so soon in Russia.’

‘You never thought then about revolution in Russia?’

‘No.’

‘I had assumed just the opposite at that time.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I cannot imagine that anyone would take on the deadly risk of a war with America if he still had to reckon on a long-term basis with Russia. I assumed that you felt you had a free hand on the Eastern front.’

‘And if that wasn’t the case in fact?’

‘General,’ I said with great seriousness, ‘I have been here for a long time, and still do not know why you summoned me.’

‘You have expressed the opinion that the rouble will cease to have value. I don’t understand money matters very well. What do you mean by that?’

‘That the rouble will lose all buying power.’

‘Why?’

‘The certain outcome of war and revolution.’

‘Havenstein thinks otherwise, but sent me your memorandum anyway. So you don’t think that we can get much out of Russia?’

‘No. Transport and probably also industrial production will be too chaotic for a long time; you cannot expect much from places where railways are still needed. Limited quantities of materiel may be had, but nothing significant in either raw materials or foodstuffs.’

‘There you are misinformed. In the Caucasus, the Russians have three-quarters of all the oil on earth. We are going to take it and hold it, during the war and after, because we are advancing to the Caucasus, and there we shall win the war.’

‘Will you have enough strength and time for that?’

‘Yes, certainly.’

‘And will the pipeline remain undamaged?’

‘What is that?’

‘The long oil pipe connection to the Black Sea.’

‘Built by the Russians?’

‘No, by a Dutch company. By the way, your estimate of the oil reserves is grossly exaggerated.’

‘You just pluck out of thin air what my people here have to scramble about trying to find! Your place should be here, with me, to give me intelligence reports about the war economy in the East.’

He said ‘with me’ quite distinctly, without referring to Hindenburg, without mentioning what office or position he had in mind.

‘Thanks, I was once in the bureaucracy, and I hope never to be again.’

‘That means you don’t want to cooperate because you consider it’s a lost cause. If everyone said that, if I said that myself, Germany would really go under. We think otherwise, even if we are standing with our backs to the wall. And by the way a lost war would be a healthy thing for our country: they’ve had everything too easy for the last forty-six years. That must change. If there were a defeat, Prussia would rise again, greater than ever in its history. But now we are very far from that point. When my divisions are freed from the Eastern front, I’ll crush France so completely that she will never rise, and then the English and Americans can waltz around the seas as much as they like. And now, I’m giving you an order to serve!’

‘I am an Austrian citizen, and anyway you would not have much joy out of me. I don’t subordinate myself to authority, and I voice my objections loud and clear. They have consequences.’

I had risen; Ludendorff stood too and bade farewell formally…. The man with whom I had just spoken, and who exercised authority in Germany as nobody before had ever done, had risked war with America at a time when he was still thinking of a long war with Russia; and in such a situation he spoke of a chief theatre of operations! For him, the entry of America into the war was a mere episode. The appeal to love of fatherland was repellent coming from a man who wanted to toss all non-Prussians out of his Germany. The very concept of ‘nation’ was blasphemous when mouthed by a Ludendorff….

In my time two men have determined the fate of the great German people: Ludendorff and Hitler. Both were destroyers of the first order. Was their immeasurable influence a factor of the times or of the German nation itself?…

As I said: too good to be true, but well worth my reading it. Or did I?

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The problem with the Supreme Court’s corrupt Republican majority’s use of the “Shadow Docket” is this: In too many high-profile cases, the justices are handing down significant rulings on scant briefing with little internal deliberation and little public explanation, in ways that at least appear to be inconsistent with the relevant standards of review, where the inconsistencies have a remarkable tendency of benefiting Republicans, and all while insisting that what little the Court says after such a truncated process should have precedential effects below. Samuel Alito pretends, falsely, that this is not the case:

And so Steve Vladeck is irate this morning:

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Inconsistency turns out to be the organizing feature of the chapter [8] in which I (“the most prolific academic critic of the emergency docket”) repeatedly appear. The central inconsistency… is structural…. Alito mashed together the speech he gave five years ago at Notre Dame Law School with a “postscript.” The former was deeply flawed…. The latter tries to move the goalposts…. The result is to leave readers with a disjointed, inaccurate, and misleading sense of what the debate is even about—to say nothing of how the Court’s own behavior since September 2021 (including Alito’s) has only further undermined the already-flawed claims Alito made back then…

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For example:

Alito was adamant, in his Notre Dame speech, that rulings on emergency applications don’t have precedential value…. But now we have the July 2025 ruling in Trump v. Boyle… [holding that] the result in a different case was “squarely controlled by” an earlier emergency docket ruling[:]… “Although our interim orders are not conclusive as to the merits, they inform how a court should exercise its equitable discretion in like cases.” 2021 Alito asserted that this just wasn’t true; 2026 Alito doesn’t bother to reconcile the contradiction because he doesn’t even acknowledge that it exists…

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I think Steve Vladeck has it right. They are corrupt. They are hyperpartisan.

Their malevolent impact on the state of the law needs to be rolled back by court expansion to neutralize their votes in the future and to rollback their illegal and unconstitutional decisions in the past:

One First

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

By Steve Vladeck

CROSSPOST: STEVE VLADECK: 256. So Unexplained: Justice Alito’s Non-Responsive Emergency Docket Defense

<https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/256-so-unexplained-justice-alitos> <https://www.stevevladeck.com>

One First

256. So Unexplained: Justice Alito’s Non-Responsive Emergency Docket Defense

In the pre-publication galleys to his new book, So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, Justice Alito spelled my last name inconsistently. This is, I suspect, the pettiest possible point on which to open in discussing a Supreme Court justice’s new memoir, and I would never have mentioned it except for the fact …

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11 hours ago · 128 likes · 14 comments · Steve Vladeck

Justice Alito‘s new book purports to answer the Court’s shadow docket critics—by rebutting a caricature and by ignoring the ways in which his own behavior has contradicted nearly every claim he makes.

Steve Vladeck

2026-10-06

In the pre-publication galleys to his new book, So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, Justice Alito spelled my last name inconsistently.¹ This is, I suspect, the pettiest possible point on which to open in discussing a Supreme Court justice’s new memoir, and I would never have mentioned it except for the fact that inconsistency turns out to be the organizing feature of the chapter in which I (“the most prolific academic critic of the emergency docket”) repeatedly appear.

The central inconsistency of Chapter 8, which is devoted to the emergency docket, is structural: Rather than tackle the subject holistically (as one might expect in a book), Alito mashed together the speech he gave five years ago at Notre Dame Law School with a “postscript.” The former was deeply flawed even at the time (among lots of other things, Alito repeatedly insisted that there was “nothing new” about the Court’s behavior on emergency applications during the first Trump administration and COVID); and the latter tries to move the goalposts away from the specific phenomena to which critics like me have actually objected.

The result is to leave readers with a disjointed, inaccurate, and misleading sense of what the debate is even about—to say nothing of how the Court’s own behavior since September 2021 (including Alito’s) has only further undermined the already-flawed claims Alito made back then. Somewhere between the galleys of Alito’s book and the final product (which hits bookstores today), someone apparently figured out that my last name should be spelled the same way (and correctly!) throughout. The other, more significant inconsistencies were, apparently, harder to fix.

Alito’s September 2021 Notre Dame Speech

It may help to start by doing something Justice Alito doesn’t—to put his September 2021 speech into the context in which Alito made it. September 2021 was the first time the term “shadow docket” had broken through into the mainstream media ecosystem. Specifically, public attention was turbocharged by the Court’s 5-4 order late in the evening on September 1 (almost certainly written by Alito) that had allowed Texas’s six-week abortion ban (“SB8”) to go into effect nine months before Dobbs. The dramatic uptick in rulings on emergency applications during the first Trump administration and then during COVID had certainly gotten some media coverage. But the first usage of the “shadow docket” term in a Supreme Court opinion had come in Justice Kagan’s SB8 dissent,² where she argued (my emphasis added) that

Today’s ruling illustrates just how far the Court’s “shadow-docket” decisions may depart from the usual principles of appellate process. That ruling, as everyone must agree, is of great consequence. Yet the majority has acted without any guidance from the Court of Appeals—which is right now considering the same issues. It has reviewed only the most cursory party submissions, and then only hastily. And it barely bothers to explain its conclusion—that a challenge to an obviously unconstitutional abortion regulation backed by a wholly unprecedented enforcement scheme is unlikely to prevail. In all these ways, the majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this Court’s shadow-docket decisionmaking—which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend…

A couple of weeks later, the Senate Judiciary Committee picked up on these critiques, devoting a full Committee hearing (at which I was one of the majority witnesses) to “Texas’s Unconstitutional Abortion Ban and the Role of the Shadow Docket.” Alito, rather transparently, decided to use a (kinda-sorta-)public address at Notre Dame to push back.³

Alito’s speech, as reconstructed in the book, purported to defend the Court’s behavior by identifying what he described as the “ten criticisms” of the emergency docket, and then explaining why each criticism was unpersuasive. As I explained in detail at the time, the common theme of Alito’s arguments was that the Court was merely reacting to events beyond its control; that it wasn’t doing anything unusual (“nothing new”) in how it was reacting; and that its tendencies both to not explain its rulings and to hand them down at all hours of the night could be attributed to the fact that all of these cases unfolded against external deadlines (which wasn’t true even then in the vast majority of them; even in the SB8 case, where there was a deadline from when the law went into effect, the Court missed it by 23 hours). Meanwhile, Alito insisted, the Court was consistently following the standards governing emergency relief. Moreover, the fact that none of these rulings had any precedential value mitigated any concern over their broader, downstream effects.

Even in September 2021, Alito’s arguments were inconsistent with the facts—as I laid out during a presentation for the American Constitution Society chapter at Notre Dame one week after Alito’s speech, in a live-streamed video that’s still online. There were, already, countless examples during the first Trump administration and in COVID-related cases of the justices (Alito included) doing exactly what Alito disclaimed at Notre Dame; here’s the Court in February 2021 treating an order without a majority opinion as a precedent; here’s an April 2021 ruling granting an injunction (which requires a “clear and indisputable right to relief”) based upon a novel interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause. And there were lots of examples from the Trump I era of the Court already accepting that the “government” suffers irreparable harm anytime it is subject to an injunction.

By caricaturing what the criticisms actually were, and by asserting things that weren’t true, Alito was able to duck the single most important criticism then being made of the Court’s emergency docket behavior—that, in deciding so many high-profile cases on the emergency docket with such truncated process and so little explanation, the Court was also behaving inconsistently, so that it appeared that its rulings were motivated more by the political preferences of a majority of the justices than by the faithful application of neutral legal principles. Again, to quote Justice Kagan’s SB8 dissent, these rulings were increasingly becoming “more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend.”

Consider, in this respect, the May 2022 Texas social media case, where Alito dissented from the Court’s refusal to disturb a lower-court injunction, warning that enjoining a state law was “a significant intrusion on state sovereignty” and that Texas “should not be required to seek preclearance from the federal courts before its laws go into effect.” It is a principled-sounding objection, except that Alito was (or, at least, appeared to be) in the majority in each of the COVID cases in which the Court blocked New York’s and California’s laws before, or just after, they took effect. If there is a neutral principle that distinguishes blue states’ laws from red states’ laws, he hasn’t articulated it (either then or since).

Alito’s “Postscript”

In the five years since Justice Alito’s Notre Dame speech, a couple of things have happened—especially on the emergency docket. The “postscript” to Chapter 8 at least concedes that, “[s]ince then, both the size and the importance of that docket have grown enormously.” And Alito identifies three causes for this shift—all of which are external to the Court: (1) presidents increasingly making policy without legislation; (2) “[e]qually bold” litigation countermeasures by opposing state AGs and interest groups, with deliberate forum selection; and (3) overreach by district judges.

I don’t actually disagree that all three of these developments have contributed to the phenomenon, even if Alito and I might disagree about which district judges have been engaged in overreaching. But Alito’s postscript never even considers the possibility that the Court bears any responsibility for the uptick—including by behaving in ways that have made it more attractive for certain litigants (especially the Trump administration) to keep coming back to the justices for emergency relief they wouldn’t previously have sought. On Alito’s telling, the only actual problem critics have identified that’s worth addressing is the increased volume—which is, in his view, everyone’s fault except the Court’s.

This deeply dubious framing allows Alito to make two moves. First, the postscript never returns to the criticisms he purported to address in the Notre Dame speech, and so he never even attempts to explain how the Court’s behavior over the last five years hasn’t completely undermined his defense of its behavior as of September 2021.

To take just one example, consider the question of whether orders respecting emergency relief have precedential force. Alito was adamant, in his Notre Dame speech, that rulings on emergency applications don’t have precedential value. That was, if anything, part of why he thought critics’ concerns were overstated. But now we have the July 2025 ruling in Trump v. Boyle, where the Court (in language Alito almost certainly joined), not only held that the result in a different case was “squarely controlled by” an earlier emergency docket ruling; it went on to stress that, “Although our interim orders are not conclusive as to the merits, they inform how a court should exercise its equitable discretion in like cases.” 2021 Alito asserted that this just wasn’t true; 2026 Alito doesn’t bother to reconcile the contradiction because he doesn’t even acknowledge that it exists.

Likewise, at Notre Dame, Alito had insisted that the Court was faithfully applying the existing standards for emergency relief, a central part of which is the balancing of the equities. Just over three months later, he joined a majority opinion asserting that, on an emergency application “[i]t is not our role to weigh such tradeoffs,” and he’s since been part of dozens of rulings in which the Court has skewed equities-balancing in ways that have asymmetrically benefitted the Trump administration (as compared to the Biden administration or private parties). Conservative law professors have kept asking whether the Court has sub silentio changed the standards for relief in these cases; Alito insisted in 2021 that it hadn’t, and has nothing to say about the topic today, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the Court is not consistently applying the standards that it still insists are applicable.

My favorite charge of Alito’s, though, is that the Court’s emergency docket critics are just unhappy with the results—and so they’re dressing up substantive disagreements with outcomes in procedural terms. Leaving aside the not-so-subtle implication of bad faith on the part of the Court’s critics, Alito himself has also relied upon these same procedural objections when they have led to outcomes with which he is dissatisfied. In a June 2022 dissent, he complained that the majority “unnecessarily resolves difficult … questions on which … we have received only hurried briefing and no argument.” And as I noted at the time, his April 2023 dissent from the Court’s grant of stays in the mifepristone case is impressive in just how completely tone-deaf its hypocrisy is.

It’s also the case, as I’ve pointed out before, that not all of the shadow docket’s critics are disappointed progressives. Will Baude, who coined the term, is a conservative former clerk to Chief Justice Roberts; Donald Ayer was the number-two official at the Justice Department under George H.W. Bush; and the Chief Justice himself joined the Democratic appointees in dissent in a number of the higher-profile 2021 and 2022 emergency docket rulings (including the SB8 case). Ditto the 11 Republican-appointed judges surveyed by the New York Times last fall who “disagreed” that the Court had made appropriate use of the emergency docket during the second Trump administration.

And it wasn’t even two weeks ago that Eighth Circuit Judge David Stras urged the justices to provide more thoroughgoing explanations respecting their rulings on emergency applications in remarks at an event at William & Mary Law School. As ever, if the complaint were really just about outcomes, it would be very strange for the critics to spend so much energy begging the Court to write more—to give longer, more candid, more binding explanations for results they are said to oppose.

Second, by framing “what’s new” entirely as a function of volume, Alito can analyze reform proposals (including mine) solely through the lens of whether that proposal would help reduce the volume of emergency applications the Court receives. And so when, magically, proposals that aren’t actually about the volume problem won’t actually solve the volume problem, Alito throws up his hands. As the chapter closes, “No modest changes” could “stem the tsunami,” which he attributes to polarization, congressional deadlock, presidential frustration, a litigious culture, and “no small measure of hubris on the part of some district court judges.” (He’s going to love the Foreword.)

It’s hard to reply to such a non-responsive response. So let me close by making two points, neither of which should be new to regular readers of this newsletter. First, the emergency docket is a problem not because it exists, but because of how, too often, the Court behaves on it. The critique is, as succinctly as possible, that in too many high-profile cases, the justices are handing down significant rulings on scant briefing with little internal deliberation and little public explanation, in ways that at least appear to be inconsistent with the relevant standards of review, where the inconsistencies have a remarkable tendency of benefiting Republicans, and all while insisting that what little the Court says after such a truncated process should have precedential effects below.

And second, for a Court whose authority depends on diffuse public acceptance that its rulings are principled (if not of the principles themselves), the proliferation of thinly explained precedential rulings in high-profile cases has made it that much harder for that support to be earned. Yes, there are cases to which the critique does not easily apply. And yes, the Court is writing more—as evidenced by the recent run of grants of emergency relief that were accompanied by majority opinions. But numerators are meaningless without denominators. And especially since September 2021, the denominator of emergency docket rulings remains full of cases illustrating some or all of this charge, even as recently as last week. It’s the forest that matters far more than the trees.

So framed, there is virtually nothing in Chapter 8 of So Ordered that actually responds to the underlying critique, at least largely because Alito never acknowledges anything other than the size of the forest—including his, and the Court’s, deeply inconsistent behavior therein.

Like so much of the Court’s problematic behavior in recent years, Alito’s real defenses are, ultimately, unexplained.

1 “Vladeck” vs. “Vladek.” (The latter is the single most common misspelling of my last name.)

3 Alito’s talk was initially open only to those who could attend in person. After some public criticism (including from the Court’s press corps), the talk was live-streamed over the internet, but no official video- or audio-recording of the event (or transcript) has been publicly available since.

<https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/256-so-unexplained-justice-alitos> <https://www.stevevladeck.com>

One First

256. So Unexplained: Justice Alito’s Non-Responsive Emergency Docket Defense

In the pre-publication galleys to his new book, So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, Justice Alito spelled my last name inconsistently. This is, I suspect, the pettiest possible point on which to open in discussing a Supreme Court justice’s new memoir, and I would never have mentioned it except for the fact …

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11 hours ago · 128 likes · 14 comments · Steve Vladeck

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

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Brad DeLong here: This is far outside my wheelhouse. But I find Steve’s arguments completely convincing. If there is a critique of what he says that has any force at all, I have not heard it. I would like to hear one, if it exists. I do not think that it does.

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Torsten Slok is right: There is no “AI” in the TFP data. But he’s wrong to stop there. “No sign of AI in the productivity data” is a headline that confuses the scoreboard with the game.

He presents an SFFed chart:

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and comments:

Torsten Slok: No Signs of AI in the Productivity Data <https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/No-signs-of-AI-in-the-productivity-data>: ‘Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into data centers, chips and model training, and that capital deepening should mechanically lift output per hour. The harder question is whether AI is also raising TFP, meaning whether it is making the economy fundamentally more efficient. So far, the data says no. The chart below shows utilization-adjusted TFP from the San Francisco Fed, and it is currently sitting slightly below zero with no sign of acceleration since the AI capex cycle began. Output per hour, by contrast, is running near 2.5%, comfortably above its post-2005 average, and that strength is exactly what gets cited as evidence that AI is already working. But strong output per hour alongside flat TFP is the signature of capital deepening, not of a technology shock. The AI boom is clearly visible in investment data and in equity valuations, but it is not yet visible in the productivity statistics, which means the productivity payoff from AI remains a forecast rather than an observation…

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A technology shock can show up in three places:

1. User surplus — enabling better-quality goods and services that statistical agencies never fully capture in measured output (without truly heroic hedonic adjustments).

2. Capital deepening — enabling more investment that clears the hurdle rate but not by much, thus lifting output per hour.

3. TFP — enabling more output from the same inputs, the thing economists actually mean by “total factor productivity.”

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“AI” is certainly doing (1) (and will keep doing so unless it goes horribly wrong the way so much social media did, and our brains are hacked to our detriment by AI-slop). And AI is certainly doing (2): that is growing wedge over the past three years between the “labor productivity growth” and the “TFP growth” line. What “AI” is not (or not yet) doing is (3)—delivering a supernormal increase in measured labor productivity over and above what we would have expected to see given the hurdle rate capital-deepening projects need to earn.

Slok’s chart doesn’t show that AI isn’t working. It shows that AI isn’t yet working in the one way TFP measures. That’s worth knowing. It is not quite the same as “no signs of AI in the productivity data”.

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Much better for the world and, almost surely, for Lenin, had he been a little less quick-witted, a little less a practical man of affairs, and a better Marxist theorist, like. Someone like, say, the Menshevik Yuliy Martov:

Adam Tooze has, I think, picked up the wrong quote about Lenin this morning.

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Tariq Ali wants to give us a highly-cultured Vladimir Lenin, a man of dilemmas and revolutionary possibility tragically overtaken by circumstances—looking past the dissolved parliaments, the secret police terrors, and the shootings of hostages. Like, on a much larger and more terrible scale, the verbal and artistic portraits of Kindly General Lee.

Adam picks this one up from Tariq Ali from nearly a decade ago <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/top-links-1245-jobs-in-health-care>:

Tariq Ali (2017): How Lenin’s love of literature shaped the Russian Revolution: The father of the Soviet Union was also a Latin buff who adored Goethe and liked to compare his enemies to figures in novels <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/25/lenin-love-literature-russian-revolution-soviet-union-goethe>: ‘This, then, was the intellectual atmosphere in which Lenin came of age. His father, a highly cultured conservative, was the chief inspector of schools in his region and much respected as an educationalist. At home, Shakespeare, Goethe and Pushkin, among others, were read aloud on Sunday afternoons. It was impossible for the Ulyanov family—“Lenin” was a pseudonym adopted to outwit the tsarist secret police—to escape high culture. At high school, Lenin fell in love with Latin. His headteacher had high hopes that he might become a philologist and Latin scholar. History willed otherwise, but Lenin’s passion for Latin, and taste for the classics, never left him. He read Virgil, Ovid, Horace and Juvenal in the original, as well as Roman senatorial orations. He devoured Goethe during his two decades in exile, reading and rereading Faust many times.

Lenin put his knowledge of the classics to good use in the time leading up to the October revolution of 1917. In April of that year, he broke with Russian social-democratic orthodoxy and, in a set of radical theses, called for a socialist revolution in Russia. A number of his own close comrades denounced him. In a sharp riposte, Lenin quoted Mephistopheles from Goethe’s masterwork: “Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life”…

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Much better to have picked up this quote from Edmund Wilson:

Edmund Wilson (1940): To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing & Acting of History <https://cdnrepositorios.march.es/sites/default/files/images/node-5451-document.pdf>: ‘[Lenin] and [Maksim] Gorky were listening to Beethoven’s Appassionata: “I know nothing [Lenin said] that is greater than the Appassionata; I’d like to listen to it every day. It is marvelous superhuman music. I always think with pride—perhaps it is naive of me—what marvelous things human beings can do!’

Then screwing up his eyes and smiling, he added, rather sadly: ‘But I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you mustn’t stroke anyone’s head—you might get your hand bitten off. You have to hit them on the head, without any mercy, although our ideal is not to use force against anyone. Hm, hm, our duty is in- fernally hard’”…

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Of course, the most ironic thing Tariq Ali is that he still, writing 100 years after Lenin’s coup, is trying to pretend that Lenin won something of value with that classical allusion to Goethe of his.

We, more than 100 years later, know that the Marxist theory-based condemnations of Lenin by Rosa Luxemburg and others were not 100% accurate. If anything was wrong with them, it was that they did not go nearly far enough. They imagined disaster. They did not imagine the worst régimes in human history.

Marx wanted a revolution in a rich technologically advanced industrial society that would create a temporary dictatorship of the industrial proletariat that would lead to a utopian free society of associated producers.

Rosa Luxemburg (and many others!) pointed out that trying to run that playbook in a poor technologically retarded agricultural society would produce nothing good. And she was right:

(1) Rosa Luxemberg:

The tacit assumption… is… socialist transformation is something for which a ready-made formula lies completed in the pocket of the revolutionary party…. [But] what we possess… is nothing but a few main signposts which indicate the general direction… and the indications are mainly negative in character…. Socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed or introduced by ukase…. The whole mass of the people must take part in it. Otherwise, socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals…. Decree, dictatorial force of the factory overseer, draconian penalties, rule by terror… demoralizes…. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element…. A few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule…. An elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud… and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously… The dictatorship of a handful of politicians… caus[ing] a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc… <https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/luxemburg/The_Russian_Revolution_-_Luxemburg.pdf>

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(2) Also worth noting: Felix Somary on Max Weber & Josef Schumpeter:

On my return journey I stopped briefly in Vienna to report to the Rothschild bank on the Bucharest negotiations. Apart from that, Max Weber had asked me to be present at the discussion he was to have with Schumpeter about the succession to his chair at the University of Vienna, Weber wanted to return to Germany and he was thinking of Schumpeter as his successor, but the two men knew each other only superficially although Schumpeter had written an outstanding history of ideas to accompany Weber’s handbook on social sciences. I was worried about the meeting, because a greater contrast between two personalities was hard to imagine.

Max Weber was a restless, nervous type, full of ‘drive’, a Huguenot with deeply-held convictions, for which he strove with every atom of his energy. He battled on without letting up, even when only minor issues were at stake. He was explosive in temperament, verging on intolerance; those who did not know him well could easily have been put off or even frightened at first meeting him. Hugo von Hofmannsthal tried to explain him by saying: ‘He has the gifts of a Caesar who is unable to find a field large enough for his energies.’ There was much truth in that observation: Weber was never in his life able to give his tremendous intellectual and spiritual powers full expression. He took nothing lightly.

Schumpeter on the other hand took nothing hard. He had been educated at the Vienna Theresianum, where the pupils were taught to stick to subjects, and not get personally involved. The rules of the game in every party and ideology were to be learned thoroughly, but nobody should join a party or subscribe to adogma. And Schumpeter was a virtuoso at playing any political game, from the extreme left to the extreme tight. He had worked briefly on the Socialisation Commission in Berlin, which met under the leadership of our Vienna University colleague Hilferding, who at the time led the German independent socialists, for whom the official Social Democrats were too moderate. Hilferding often told me of his astonishment at Schumpeter’s radicalism; but Schumpeter was not radical at all, he merely followed through to the appropriate conclusions, given the premises. He felt that if socialism were to be introduced at the end of the war, it should be in a consistent way.

We met in the Café Landmann opposite the University. Ludo Hartmann, a historian of the Classical world and son-in-law of Mommsen, accompanied Weber, and I came with Schumpeter. I took no notes of our conversation, but can recall the elements of it that impressed me most strongly. The talk turned to the Russian Revolution, and Schumpeter expressed satisfaction that socialism was no longer an abstract theoretical notion, but would now be tested in the real world. Weber said with some heat that communism at the Russian stage of development was a crime — he knew the language and followed Russian affairs closely. He added that developments in Russia would lead to unheard-of human misery and end in a terrible catastrophe.

‘That may well be,’ said Schumpeter, ‘but it would be a good laboratory to test our theories.”

‘A laboratory heaped with human corpses!’ Weber rejoined.

‘Every anatomy classroom is the same thing,’ Schumpeter shot back.

To change the subject, I commented that the war had altered the direction of social developments that would otherwise have gone quite differently. Weber agreed, but unfortunately chose Great Britain as his example, referring to its swing away from Liberalism. But Schumpeter disputed this view. Weber became more vehement and raised his voice, as Schumpeter for his part became more sarcastic and lowered his. All around us the café customers stopped their card games and listened eagerly, until the point when Weber sprang to his feet and rushed out into the Ringstrasse, crying ‘This is intolerable!’ Hartmann followed with Weber’s hat, and vainly tried to calm him down. Schumpeter, who had remained behind with me, only smiled and said ‘How can someone carry on like that in a coffee house!’

I felt unhappy about the incident. Here were two individuals of rare gifts, who were not far apart in their fundamental views on the economy, and in their deep intellectual seriousness. But it was the curse of the German and Austrian haute bourgeoisie that its all too few original personalities, if they ever met at all, immediately became deadly enemies. They all had too much temperament to compromise on issues… <https://archive.org/details/the-raven-of-zurich/>

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(3) & more from Max Weber:

Take as an extreme example the authoritative power of the State or of the municipality in a monarchical constitution: it is strikingly reminiscent of the ancient kingdom of Egypt, in which the system of the ‘minor official’ prevailed at all levels. To this day there has never existed a bureaucracy which could compare with that of Egypt. This is known to everyone who knows the social history of ancient times; and it is equally apparent that to-day we are proceeding towards an evolution which resembles that system in every detail, except that it is built on other foundations, on technically more perfect, more rationalized, and therefore much more mechanized foundations. It is still more horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards bigger ones—a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever-increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative system… <https://faculty.rsu.edu/users/f/felwell/www/Theorists/Weber/Weber1909.htm>

and:

A progressive elimination of private capitalism is theoreticalIy conceivable, although it is surely not so easy as imagined in the dreamging of some literati who· do not know what it is all about…. Let us assume that some time in the future it will be done away. with. What would be the practical mult? The destruction of the steel frame of modem industrial work? No! The abolition of private capitalism would simply mean that also the top management of the nationalized or socialized enterprises would become bureaucratic.

Are the daily working conditions of the salaried employees and the workers in the state-owned Prussian mines and railroads really perceptibly different from those in big business enterprises? It is true that there is even less freedom, since every power struggle with a state bureaucracy is hopeless and since there is no appeal to an agency which as a matter of principle would be interested in limiting the employer’s power, such as there is in the case of a private enterprise. That would be the whole difference. State bureaucracy would rule alone if private capitalism were eliminated. The private and public bureaucracies, which now work next to, and potentially against, each other and hence check one another to a degree, would be merged into a single hierarchy.

This would be similar to the situation in ancient Egypt, but it would occur in a much more rational—and hence unbreakable—form…. Objectified intelligence is also that animated machine, the bureaucratic organizatlon, with its specialization of trained skills, its division of jurisdiction, its rule and hierarchical relations of authority. Together with the inanimate machine it is busy fabricating the shell of bondage which men will perhaps be forced to inhabit some day, as powerless as the fellahs of ancient Egypt…. It would be made all the more indestructible if in the social sphere a status order were then to be imposed upon the ruled, linked to the bureaucracy and in truth subordinate to it, as in the forced-labor states of the past. An “organic” social stratification, similar to the Oriental-Egyptian type, would then arise, but in contrast to the latter it would be as austerely rational as a machine. Who would want to deny that such a potentiality lies in the womb of the future?…

and:

When one has discussions with present-day socialists… in good faith… it will be found that, except in Russia, they all adhere to this standpoint… the time is as yet nowhere ripe…. When asked for an honest reply, every socialist intellectual will have to give this answer…. In Russia… the so-called Mensheviks… think that the Bolshevik experiment of imposing a socialist order from above, at the present stage of bourgeois society is not only nonsense but also a sin against Marxist dogma. The terrible hatred of these two parties for one another has its roots in this dogmatic accusation of heresy….

It is obviously justifiable to ask[:]… what can a revolution under these circumstances be expected to achieve, expecially during the war? It may well cause a civil war… but it could not bring about a socialist society… <https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/articles/report/Socialism/26481607/1/files/48256639.pdf>

No more time this AM, but I would note that I have always found Tariq Ali to be a really weird and somewhat sinister dude.

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To know who will control the House, forget the national polls and zoom in on the five districts of PA-10, AZ-6, PA-7, NY-17, and WI-3. Nate Silver and co. see those five as having a 12% chance that seat #218 in terms of vote margins will turn out to be one of those five come November:

A Republican vote-share edge of 2.5% in the popular vote for translating that into House of Representative seats, or so Nate Silver and co. guesstimate. And the five most likely House seats to be #218? They are: PA-10 (Janelle Stelson vs. Scott Perry*), AZ-6 (JoAnna Mendoza vs. Juan Ciscomani*), PA-7 (Bob Brooks vs. Ryan Mackenzie*), NY-17 (Cait Conley vs. Mike Lawler*), WI-3 (Rebecca Cooke vs. Derrick Van Orden*):

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Yes, I have done the natural thing, and I have subscribed to Nate Silver and co.’s “Silver Bulletin”:

• <https://www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2026-midterm-election-polls-model>

• <https://www.natesilver.net/>

Silver Bulletin

FLIPR 2026 midterm election forecast

📈 Our latest midterm forecast…

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a day ago · 608 likes · 359 comments · Nate Silver and Eli McKown-Dawson

Silver Bulletin

Essays and analysis about elections, media, sports, poker, and all the other things I care about.

By Nate Silver

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At least for the next month.

Nate Silver cares, above all, about getting the percentages right—of getting 75% of his 75% predictions coming true. Thus he is the only person on the planet who does not succumb to wishful thinking in assessing American electoral politics.

And the House and Senate taken together? The guesstimates:

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Nate is also very good on resisting the incredibly stupid framing of any of this as a “horserace”. Now this candidate is ahead—not that one—now this one again. That is not how it works. Overwhelmingly, the things that will turn out to have mattered and decided the forthcoming election have already happened. We just do not know what they will turn out to have been yet.

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Digital arts are bleeding jobs while live entertainment grows. The pattern is suggestive, not conclusive. Yet it is very suggestive indeed:

200,000 fewer in paid creative-arts employmnet today than at the post-plague peak.

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300,000 fewer than the 2010-2019 level. 100,000 is a fall in employment in movie and TV production. But how much of that 100K is the streaming disruption, how much is “AI”, and how much is something else? And how much of the remaining 200K decline can be traced to “AI”?

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And we have:

Joey Politano: AI & the Fall? of the Creative Class <https://www.apricitas.io/p/ai-and-the-fall-of-the-creative-class>: ‘Media firms are decidedly coy about their AI use…. The effects of AI are also hard to disentangle from other factors currently affecting arts businesses…. Yet perhaps the clearest evidence of AI’s influence is just that all subsectors of the digital arts industry are losing jobs, while in-person entertainment is still growing at a healthy pace…. The worst-hit sector [is] movie & sound recording, which has been bleeding jobs at a nearly unprecedented pace over the last three years.

Hollywood has never seen a stretch as bad as the last four years….The streaming era has proven an extremely difficult transition, with traditional films and TV shows losing watch time to user-generated and increasingly AI-assisted or AI-generated content flows….

it’s difficult to meaningfully predict how new technologies will interact with existing arts businesses. Take the unexpected resurgence in book sales over the last four years…. The unlikely savior of the printed word came from perhaps its polar opposite—TikTok… [with] “BookTok” became a new way to source reviews, analysis, discourse, and community in a way that boosted the reading experience and absolutely turbocharged book sales. It’s possible that AI tools could have those same totally unpredictable spillovers….

Arts jobs might be a microcosm for other “creative-adjacent” work… AI-driven job displacement has been relatively minor…. Some white-collar sectors that looked prime for AI automation have even been on a hiring spree over the last few years…. Yet if the economic impact of AI ends up being anywhere near large enough to validate the trillions of dollars investors are currently betting on it, these economic disruptions will only spread from here…

Brad DeLong here: With marginal-cost pricing, Jevons’s Law’s operation requires a price-elasticity of demand greater than one. The problem with the arts is that demanders pay not just with money but also with attention-time. Creative-arts attention-time is also, already, a very high proportion of non-work non-sleep time. Those two factors make the creative-arts sector perhaps the heaviest of heaviest lifts as far as paid employment and technological change are concerned.

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The core hardware cost collapsed to $0.12/W — so why is a California rooftop still costing $3.00/W, and the market shrinking while Pakistan’s is booming? Soft costs, a dead tax credit, and a net-billing rule rewrote the arithmetic: in the U.S., policy and plumbing now matter more than the price of a panel. Chinese export deflation liberated the Punjab and electrified Perth; in California it ran straight into the Net Billing Tariff and stalled:

Globally, solar’s rise is a supply-side story: Chinese overcapacity, panels at $0.12/W, households and businesses defecting from the grid.

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But here in California the drivers of stagnation are policy shifts: a repealed tax credit, and a backflow compensation rule that turned the battery, not the panel, into the thing worth buying.

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And the context, from the FT:

Rachel Millard, Humza Jilani, Monica Mark, & Krishn Kaushik: ‘Offensively Cheap’: Solar Power Is Looking Up <https://www.ft.com/content/8b704ae0-1fa2-4303-925f-170fa5d935b3?syn-25a6b1a6=1>: ‘In the badlands of Chakwal, in north-central Pakistan, Bestway Cement is transforming plots of dry earth and olive and peach groves into a forest of solar panels. Its efforts will add 6.34 megawatts of generation capacity by the end of the year…. Already, solar generates over a quarter of the electricity powering its cement plant…. The solar revolution made possible by cheap Chinese photovoltaic panels — and the rise of small-scale, individual power generation — is transforming energy…. Cheaper panels enabled a vast rollout in China itself and helped solar generation evolve from a subsidised technology deployed mostly in markets looking to decarbonise to a vital source of electricity in areas where power is scarce, expensive or unreliable. That process started in countries like Pakistan, Brazil and South Africa and has now spread….

The fallout from the US-Iran war has led to more interest in rooftop solar in Britain, where since the end of August households have been able to buy 800-watt solar panels in supermarkets or DIY stores to plug in at home…. Plug-and-play panels are proving popular in the US despite President Trump’s general antipathy to renewables and his decision to eliminate a tax credit for rooftop solar systems….

“Perth, for example, is covered in rooftop solar,” says Pierluigi Mancarella, chair professor of electrical power systems at the University of Melbourne. “If you have a massive cloud formation, the rooftop PV production can drop by so much that it looks like you have lost basically almost a nuclear power station.”… The system operator has very little visibility over the aggregate gigawatt of generation capacity thus created…

Two big questions:

• First, is $0.12/W Chinese solar-panel export price a stable equilibrium price, one that is going to fall further, or a temporary low driven by overcapacity, dumping, and state subsidy?

• Second, what is going on here in the United States, where things seem to have stalled even as they accelerate elsewhere?

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I do not know the answer to the first. I think I understand the second (but I may not). Let me put this under the fold for now because I am not sure I am right here:

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J.D. Vance promised seven million sidelined men would come roaring back into work. A year of data says native-born male employment ran below its 2024 level—and the “women took all the jobs because men replaced deported immigrants” story turns out to be pure invention":

Mike Konczal assesses the false restrictionist “promise” that mass deportation would pay off for native-born workers.

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Ten hypotheses:

• lower native-born unemployment,

• higher prime-age native-born employment,

• a native-born male-employment rebound,

• gains for the native-born least-educated,

• state-level correlations between deportations and native-born labor-side outcomes,

• faster native-born bottom-end wage growth,

• quicker native-born job-finding,

• rising labor share,

• tighter market for native-born,

• a construction-employment boom for the native-born.

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He checks each. Every one fails. The pattern vindicates the “complementarity view” of East & al. 2023, Cox & East 2026, and many, many more: removing immigrant workers tends to lower, not raise, native-born employment and wages. Complementarity beats substitution, exactly as the empirical literature from the Mariel Boatlift to Miami through the Obama-era “Secure Communities” absolute disaster said that it would.

Deportation shrank the pie rather than redistributing it. Surprise! Surprise!—or, rather, not surprise. The verdict is a clean sweep of nulls and negatives: no employment boom, no wage boom, no market-tightening, no construction windfall. The policy wasn’t a transfer to natives; it was a deadweight loss with casualties:

Mike Konczal

Data-driven, theory-informed analysis of economics and public policy.

CROSSPOST: MIKE KONCZAL: Can We Find Literally Any Sign Deportations Are Helping Native-Born Workers?

<https://newsletter.mikekonczal.com> <https://newsletter.mikekonczal.com/p/can-we-find-literally-any-sign-deportation>

Mike Konczal

Can We Find Literally Any Sign Deportations Are Helping Native-Born Workers?

In response to my recent post on women gaining 101% of net payroll jobs under the Trump administration, commentators argued that this was largely about immigration, about native-born male workers taking jobs formerly held by deported immigrants and showing up as no net-new jobs. This turned out to be a total fabrication, it never happened, it’s fiction …

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8 days ago · 45 likes · 1 comment · Mike Konczal

Shoot the moon! Ten hypotheses, ten charts, and no payoff for native-born workers.

Mike Konczal

Sep 23, 2026

In response to my recent post on women gaining 101% of net payroll jobs under the Trump administration, commentators argued that this was largely about immigration, about native-born male workers taking jobs formerly held by deported immigrants and showing up as no net-new jobs. This turned out to be a total fabrication, it never happened, it’s fiction (see Hypothesis 3 below).

But it did make me realize that it’s been a little bit since I took a dive into the immigration debates. I’m nervous doing this because I know the Trump administration are not exactly “preponderance of the evidence” people. If they find one thing, one way to pitch the data favorable to them, they’ll run with it. Indeed, they spent a lot of 2025 arguing off the CPS raw levels, even though Jed Kolko spent a lot of time politely and ultimately correctly explaining why that was not a good idea. What are the chances we shoot the moon and find that all ten of our different hypotheses turn out to go against the restrictionist case?

Pretty good, actually. I crank through ten indicators where we might expect to see that payoff. But there is no employment or wage-growth boom for native-born workers in this data. I can’t find it. This mirrors what others are finding with more careful work than this speedrun, including Cox and East, 2026 (“The number of male U.S.-born workers at work also declines in the face of ICE activity”) and Herbst and Tekinfind, 2025 on decreased child care workers.

We’re going to move pretty fast through this. There’s a GitHub here where you can go ahead and ask your AI to download it and check it yourself. As we go, let’s channel our inner Jonathan Frakes on Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction, telling us none of it ever happened. It’s a fake.

Hypothesis 1: Native-born unemployment would fall.

It never happened. It’s higher instead. (Not seasonally adjusted, published BLS series.)

Hypothesis 2: Prime-age employment would rise for native-born workers.

Not this time. Instead, it is lower. (Not seasonally adjusted, aggregated published BLS categories.)

Hypothesis 3: Prime-age employment would rise for native-born male workers. The native-born prime-age employment rate is lower, but maybe men did better. This was the response to the gender split mentioned at the start. During the 2024 election, in response to a question about deportations, J.D. Vance said, “You would take, let’s say for example, the seven million prime-age men who have dropped out of the labor force” and “re-engage folks into the American labor market.” He later noted, “we have seven million—just men, not even women, just men—who have completely dropped out of the labor force.” Has that translated into an employment boom?

It’s a made-up tale. This employment rate has run roughly around 2024 values, being higher over the last winter but much lower this summer. (Not seasonally adjusted, author’s IPUMS calculation.) Note that Hypotheses 2 and 3 together means that female employment rates have fallen even more, potentially tied to the decreased child care availability mentioned above.

Hypothesis 4: Least-educated native workers would do better. Native-born workers without a college degree should have the most to gain when it comes to unemployment rates.

It’s totally pure fiction. (Not seasonally adjusted, author’s IPUMS calculation.)

Hypothesis 5: States with larger declines in noncitizen employment should see larger native-born employment gains.

Not a chance. States with larger measured declines in noncitizen employment as a share of their prime-age population don’t see larger increases in native-born employment rates. This shouldn’t surprise us, East et al. (2023) found that Secure Communities reduced employment and hourly wages among U.S.-born workers. (Author’s IPUMS calculation.)

Hypothesis 6: Native-born wage growth would pick up for lower-wage workers. Let’s stick with nominal wage growth for native-born workers, since the Iran war caused inflation to skyrocket (and real wages to fall), which is very bad for these workers but separate from what we want to explore here.

It’s a fake. Whether it is the 10th, 20th, or 40th percentile, wage growth slowed. Some rebound for 10th percentile, but still against an overall collapse; the wage compression was earlier during the reopening. (Not seasonally adjusted, author’s IPUMS calculation.)

Hypothesis 7: Unemployed native workers could at least find work faster because immigrants were out of the way.

We made it up. The smoothed job-finding rate for unemployed, native-born, prime-age workers slid through 2024, held roughly flat in 2025, and has fallen again in 2026 to its lowest level since 2021.

Hypothesis 8: Immigration is behind the fall in the labor share, so mass deportations should push it back up. That immigration was driving down the labor share was something I remember Batya Ungar-Sargon bringing up during the 2024 election as a reason to support President Trump. I assume other conservatives think this.

It’s a total fabrication. The labor share actually fell suddenly and dramatically starting at the beginning of Trump’s second term starting in 2025 and continued into 2026, as we discussed in a recent post.

Hypothesis 9: Deportations would tighten the labor market. Job openings per unemployed worker and the quits rate should both rise.

We created it. Both measures are at or below their 2024 levels in 2026. Vacancies per unemployed worker have ticked up this year, but only back to where they were in late 2024.

Hypothesis 10: Native-born workers in construction should particularly benefit. It has a very high foreign-born labor share, and it’s hard to automate with AI.

It’s an urban legend. The measured foreign-born share of construction employment fell. But the overall share of native-born prime-age adults working in construction didn’t rise. It stayed roughly flat.

This doesn’t surprise me, and yet I remain surprised by how hard it is to find a broad payoff for native-born workers here. I bet the Trump administration, whose approval now appears to have a 2 handle, is also surprised by how unpopular it and its handling of the economy have become. If they expected these deportations to have such amazing upsides that they’d balance out $1 trillion in health-care cuts and brand new neocon wars, simple economic theory and a well-developed empirical literature would all have told them otherwise.

<https://newsletter.mikekonczal.com/p/can-we-find-literally-any-sign-deportations?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web&embedding_publication_id=35345> <https://newsletter.mikekonczal.com>

Mike Konczal

Can We Find Literally Any Sign Deportations Are Helping Native-Born Workers?

In response to my recent post on women gaining 101% of net payroll jobs under the Trump administration, commentators argued that this was largely about immigration, about native-born male workers taking jobs formerly held by deported immigrants and showing up as no net-new jobs. This turned out to be a total fabrication, it never happened, it’s fiction …

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8 days ago · 45 likes · 1 comment · Mike Konczal

Mike Konczal

Data-driven, theory-informed analysis of economics and public policy.

Brad DeLong here: The restrictionist case rests on substitutionist logic: remove foreign-born workers, and native-born workers should see lower unemployment, higher employment rates, faster wage growth, and a tighter labor market. But as people who look at evidence out there in the world rather than inside at the nativism in their own heads have known since David Card’s study of the Mariel Boatlift from Cuba to Miami, that does not appear to be the way the modern U.S. labor market works. Deporting immigrants is not just bad for the U.S. land factor of production, and the U.S. capital, entrepreneurship, and risk-bearing factors of production. It is also on-balance bad for the U.S. labor factor of production as well.

Yes, Mike explicitly does a “speedrun”. But surely, at this point, with so much bad-faith bulls*** being thrown at us by the Trumpists, their enablers, those who just want to report “both sides”, and those who will say anything to try to keep their plutocrat tax cuts and benefit from their kleptocrat connections, a speedrun is more than enough?

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Not only are many of our deep relationships increasingly parasocial, but they are also increasingly role-bound and partial: a pleasing shard of the whole personality, which if parts of it were not kept decently draped and thus hidden, would mean that we would fail to maintain the “social interaction… balance between self-expression and the accommodation of others, which means that in the analog world it is a constant struggle to strike a balance between being myself and annoying everyone around me…”

Ben Thompson is very excited about FaceBook’s Muse Agentic System.

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But there is a potential fly in the ointment, and one that should, I think, push him back toward using his own systems and away from his using, or indeed recommending, Muse.

Why? Because of this observation he makes:

Ben Thompson: One More Note on Agents, Meta Connect, Meta Enterprise Platform <https://stratechery.com/2026/one-more-note-on-agents-meta-connect-meta-enterprise-platform/>: ‘How much of ourselves should we show the world?… Do I want you to know that I am a longtime Fortune magazine journalist who covers technology and is now writing a book about Facebook? Or should I tell you I am a fifty-seven-year-old husband of an artist, father of a teenage girl, sometime poet, and former union activist?… On my single Facebook profile, pretty much all is revealed….

Zuckerberg, along with a key group of his colleagues… believes that by openly acknowledging who we are and behaving consistently among all our friends, we will help create a healthier society. In a more “open and transparent” world, people will be held to the consequences of their actions and be more likely to behave responsibly….

I just flat out disagree….

Separating my identities… [is] far superior…. Social interaction… is always a balance between self-expression and the accommodation of others, which means that in the analog world it is a constant struggle to strike a balance between being myself and annoying everyone around me…. [Hence] my enthusiasm for messaging and group chats… I can simultaneously be a Bucks fan with the Fiefdom, be a tech enthusiast with my Slack group, explore ideas with my WhatsApp group, and talk politics with my trusted friends. The fact that I am not my whole self in any of these groups is a feature, not a bug, and one that is uniquely made possible by digital…. I am in private groups with plenty of folks that I disagree with about a whole host of things, but because we share a common interest, and are ok being trusted friends on that vector, I have learned a lot about why they believe what they believe about a bunch of issues…. It helps my analysis, and I think it makes me a better citizen…. What I think is even less debatable is that having separate identities for your private life and work life is not just health[ier], but also a vastly superior product experience…

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That above seems to me to be 100% true.

There is great value in role-bound structured interactions, and in keeping them within the structures, even with close friends.

Of course, there is also value in occasionally breaking out of those role-bound interactions, and giving a hint of the multi-dimensional and multi-faceted deep self.

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But only a hint. And not too often. And mostly as a sign of concern and connection, rather than as a breaking or a widening of the role-structure. Life just works better when one recognizes that there are times and places to be just one of “[1] a longtime… magazine journalist who covers technology… [2] is now writing a book… [3] a fifty-seven-year-old husband of an artist, [4 a] father of a teenage girl, [5 a] sometime poet… [or 6 a] former union activist…”. And yet FaceBook wants very much to stop him from being able to properly shard his self to do that.

Yet Ben Thompson overlooks that when he begins talking about FaceBook’s Muse Agentic System, “provisioning every user in… with a virtual machine with a 2-core processor, 8GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage.., a real-deal computer, which is pretty remarkable, and also the only way to make agents work for most people…” which has gotten him instantly excited, as he had found:

first coding agents, then an overall idea tracker agent… most recently an agent specifically tuned to my company’s needs…. Agents… are an AI that has access to a computer…. AI w[ill] not replace computers, but rather operate them… not that probabilistic LLMs would somehow become deterministic, but rather that LLMs would be able to leverage deterministic computers to do computer things; that’s exactly what an agent does, augmented by its ability to write things down…

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But then he brings himself up short, when he runs into FaceBook’s idea that its Muse Agentic System would be not just for the home but for the office as well:

Having separate identities for your private life and work life is not just health[ier], but also a vastly superior product experience. We just saw Microsoft realize that Copilot for both professional and personal lives was a mistake, and double down on the former; that Meta is risking the possibility of owning the latter to pursue the former, with literally no reason to think they might succeed other than what I believe to be a mistaken understanding of human nature, is crazy to me. Muse is cute and fun; why would you want to associate that with work, and intermingle what you have to do with what you want to do?…

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I am instantly reminded of Erving Goffman. We are no longer in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, where we see and interact with the same 70 people day after day after day. In a typical day I talk and listen in person in interactive exchanges to or move in the same space as step around perhaps 200 people, 180 of whom I have never seen before and will never see again. That works only because almost everybody, almost all the time, stays in their social-role lane.

Goffman’s core argument: that healthy people “segregate the audiences” to whom they perform different roles is how interaction stays coherent, not how it turns dishonest, in the huge amount of human sociality that is simply The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. A self made legible to all roles at once maximizes role strain rather than resolving it. Role theory’s functionalist strand tells us that society coheres because a bank teller, a teacher, a patient each come with a script, and so most encounters need no negotiation. A role-unbound agent reintroduces negotiation into contexts that used to and ought to run on autopilot. That is friction disguised as personalization. And the “constant struggle to strike a balance between being myself and annoying everyone” that your draft quotes is civility.

Plus Mark Zuckerberg assures us now that Muse won’t share VM data with ad systems. But isn’t a complete, cross-context dossier of a whole human is the most valuable advertising asset ever assembled? The odds that Zuckerberg will not only change his mind in the future but knows right now that he will change his mind in the future are very very high.

And there is, of course, the very deep problem with the whole FaceBook enterprise: it is there to harvest your eyeballs and eardrums to make money by selling you ads. Ben Thompson may be the only person on earth who likes FaceBook ads—he sees them as just more amusing and informative content. But even Ben has had it up to here with Amazon and Google ads as things that attack and degrade his quality of life in the interest of making mere billionaires into multi-billionaires. And I think he will, someday, come around to recognizing that FaceBook has an even bigger alignment problem vis-à-vis the flourishing of Ben Thompson.

So: No, I am not going to be spending any time with Muse.

• Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. <https://monoskop.org/images/1/19/Goffman_Erving_The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life.pdf>.

Goffman Presentation Of Self

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Everyone wants to blame the Iran War for 5% yields. But the inflation-breakeven line on my chart that should have jumped if they were right never moved — and that changes the diagnosis. I think we are driven back on (a) the “AI” investment book, and (b) a pronounced expectations-based tail-chasing non-linearity in transformation of the safe-asset shortage into a safe-asset glut:

Why have ten-year US Treasury interest rates jumped to 5.25%? The lazy answer blames the Iran War and the resulting inflation surge. I suspect otherwise. We have the extraordinary “AI”-driven investment boom. We have the erosion of the safe-asset premium that had been the result of the great post-2008 safe-asset shortage. My view: the truth is probably a combination — with the safe-asset piece probably the more worrisome.

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Nominal yield, TIPS yield, and inflation-breakeven: the current ten-year matures in late 2036:

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And we have Paul Krugman writing:

Paul Krugman: Booms, Bombs & Bonds: Interest Rates, Part I <https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/booms-bombs-and-bonds-interest-rates>: ‘My best guess is that [right now] we’re mainly looking at the effects of the immense boom in AI-driven investment, but that the inflationary impact of the Iran War has reinforced those effects by triggering a change in the policy “narrative”…

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He sees four serious possibilities out there in the literature:

Serious economic analysts are currently telling four main stories…

They are:

1. War & inflation. The Iran war disrupted world oil supplies, compounding the Russia-Ukraine war’s earlier constriction of diesel and refined-product markets. The resulting inflationary surge prompted central banks to raise rates. The conjunction of higher short-term inflation and short-term policy has crystalized a shift in expectations about the longer-run.

2. The AI boom. Firms are investing on a vast scale (even though the ultimate economic payoff remains uncertain). Against the backdrop of an investment boom of this magnitude, interest rates at least this elevated are precisely what we would expect to see.

3. The erosion of the safe-asset premium. The United States has long borrowed cheaply because its debt was regarded as uniquely “safe.” That premium presupposes relative scarcity—and the sheer quantity of debt now outstanding has begun to erode it.

4. Debasement. Finally, the fiscal predicament is not America’s alone: France and the United Kingdom are likewise running large deficits while proving politically incapable of decisive correction. In an emerging economy, one would openly entertain the prospect of engineering inflation to erode the real value of the debt. At least some analysts contend that precisely that is already under way.

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If (1) or (4) were the main factor pushing the rise in long-term interest rates, however, we would expect to see the red inflation-breakeven line tilt up when the bond interest-rate line tilted up. It didn’t. Thus we are driven back to (2) and (3). There is an argument that (3) has to be a gradual process, and that what we are seeing now is not a gradual process. I think that argument is wrong. What we are talking about here is an expectational equilibrium in which the safe asset premium on U.S. Treasuries depends on everyone else believing that there is a safe asset premium on U.S. Treasuries. And such equilibria, when they unwind, can unwind suddenly and completely. So I see (2) and (3) as each live possibilities, and the truth probably a combination of the two.

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A Treasury Secretary who controls neither the budget deficit nor the money supply nor international capital flows is never the “House”“ in financial markets, and anyone who claims to be such is, as Paul Krugman says, beclowning himself:

Paul Krugman sees that Scott Bessent—whom we all remember claimed with confidence and authority in the fall of 2024 that Donald Trump was really a free trader, and that his talk of tariffs was “escalating to deëscalate”—as having has destroyed his reputation by becoming a Trump lickspittle. Thus he is another example of the iron law that anyone who serves Trump destroys his own credibility and dignity—gives them to Trump, Trump takes them, usually does not even say “thank you”, and then moves on, offering nothing in return.

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Bessent, after intervening to support the yen, publicly declared “I am the house now” dared traders to bet against him, then did a small QE operation in 30-year Treasuries to try to push long rates down. But:

Trump’s rejection of an Iranian proposal to end the war
→ crude oil prices spiked back up
→ elevated inflation (diesel near record levels)
→ the Fed keeps short rates high
→ that expectation feeds into long-term rates
→ rates hit new records.

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Bessent’s jawboning was steamrolled by the very administration whose sycophancy he participates in. And Bessent then compounds his idiocy by predicting Iran’s economic collapse “within two weeks”:

Paul Krugman

Notes on economics and more

CROSSPOST: PAUL KRUGMAN: The Beclowning of Scott Bessent

<https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-beclowning-of-scott-bessent> <https://paulkrugman.substack.com>

Paul Krugman

The Beclowning of Scott Bessent

One iron law of current politics is that nobody who associates themselves with Donald Trump emerges with a shred of credibility. For some, that’s not a big loss — it’s not as if anyone respected Pete Hegseth even before he decided that the key to military success in an age of drones and AI was more testosterone. For others, however, the costs are real. …

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12 hours ago · 1512 likes · 255 comments · Paul Krugman

Another Trump enabler pays the price

Paul Krugman

2026-09-29 04:20 PDT

One iron law of current politics is that nobody who associates themselves with Donald Trump emerges with a shred of credibility. For some, that’s not a big loss — it’s not as if anyone respected Pete Hegseth even before he decided that the key to military success in an age of drones and AI was more testosterone. For others, however, the costs are real. I’m old enough to remember when Marco Rubio was widely considered a reasonable, thoughtful politician.

Right now, however, my candidate for the biggest loser is Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury. Bessent started out with significant reputation to lose: When Trump selected him, this was the headline in the Financial Times:

Jason Furman, Barack Obama’s chief economist, described him as a “credible Treasury secretary who has a real understanding of the global economy”.

But Bessent has now transformed himself into the Baghdad Bob of bonds.

Three weeks ago, after intervening (for reasons that remain somewhat unclear) to support the Japanese yen, Bessent boasted about his ability to move markets and dared investors to bet against his, declaring “I am the house now.” He then tried to push long-term interest rates down, buying 30-year U.S. Treasuries in a move some have compared to paying down part of your mortgage by running up your credit card balance.

Here’s how that’s going so far:

To get some perspective on how high interest rates have gone, here’s a longer-term perspective:

We haven’t seen interest rates this high since the fading days of the dotcom bubble.

Why are interest rates hitting new records? The backdrop, as I argued in last Sunday’s primer, is the huge AI-driven investment boom; more on that next week. But the immediate cause of the latest interest rate spike was Trump’s rejection of an Iranian proposal to end the war. This rejection sent crude oil prices, which for a while had fallen considerably, shooting back up:

It’s notable, by the way, that oil prices remain high even though a significant amount of oil is now being shuttled through the Strait of Hormuz by night, on smaller vessels. That’s an interesting story, which has a lot to do with the fact that oil from the Hormuz shuttle runs must be transferred to larger vessels before being shipped to markets in Europe and Asia; around 15 percent of the world’s large crude carriers are now parked off the coast of Oman, waiting to be tanked up. This is creating a shipping crunch:

But that’s a topic for another day. For now, the point is that with oil still high and refined products, especially diesel, still close to record levels, inflation will remain elevated. And this in turn means that the Federal Reserve will keep short-term interest rates high, an expectation that is feeding into longer-term rates. Hence Bessent’s bond-market humiliation.

The truth is that Bessent might not have been able to get interest rates down even in the best of circumstances. But he certainly won’t get anywhere as long as Trump keeps believing that he can somehow convert his Iran debacle into a triumphant victory. And Trump will keep believing that as long as he is surrounded by sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear.

Sycophants like, for example, Scott Bessent, who is predicting the imminent collapse of the Iranian economy, possibly within two weeks. Bessent is right to say that the embargo on Iranian oil exports is placing the country under great economic strain. But his implicit prediction that this will quickly produce a deal that Trump can call victory looks no more plausible than his boasts about the bond market.

The big question now is, why would anyone with a reputation to lose work for Donald Trump? As the beclowning of Bessent shows, joining the Trump team won’t just damage your reputation; it will utterly destroy it.

<https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-beclowning-of-scott-bessent> <https://paulkrugman.substack.com>

Paul Krugman

The Beclowning of Scott Bessent

One iron law of current politics is that nobody who associates themselves with Donald Trump emerges with a shred of credibility. For some, that’s not a big loss — it’s not as if anyone respected Pete Hegseth even before he decided that the key to military success in an age of drones and AI was more testosterone. For others, however, the costs are real. …

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12 hours ago · 1515 likes · 255 comments · Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman

Notes on economics and more

Brad DeLong here: Krugman calls it beclowning; the deeper truth is that Bessent torched his reputation long before the bond market got him.

Jason Furman did not have to participate in the sanewashing of the Trump II administration by calling Scott Bessent a “credible Treasury secretary”.

But he did.

Even though at the same time Bessent was setting his credibility on fire by assuring us that a Trump II administration would achieve 3-3-3: 3%/year real GDP growth, 3 million BPD more of oil production, and a 3% federal deficit as a share of GDP. Even though at the same time Bessent was setting his credibility on fire by assuring us that a Trump II administration would truly, surely be a free-trade administration because Trump was, in his heart of hearts, a free-trader, and was only talking about escalating tariffs as a way to strike deals to deëscalate them.

Trump was never a free-trader, and then when the Republican congressional caucus decided to let him play with “emergency” tariff toys, it was very clear from the get-go that Trump was like a pig in shit. And as for “deals”? Well, since Trump never keeps them, they were and are never real.

The days of sanewashing Treasury Secretary Bessent should never have been, and if they had been by now shoud have long been over.

But, still, we do have people overlooking the obvious that:

Bessent has now transformed himself into the Baghdad Bob of bonds.⁠..

Indeed. The not-so-secret secret is that he always was:

• End net immigration—as Trump has—and the possibility of 3%/year real GDP growth goes out the window. And Bessent knew this before he took office. Forecasts of full-year 2026 and 2027 real GDP growth around 2.1%.

• The deficit is twice 3% of GDP and moving the wrong way. Republican congressional caucuses will never vote for Medicare or Social Security or Defense cuts or for tax increases. “Emergency” tariffs by the fiat of the executive are not a serious budget-balancing item, as they are an order of magnitude too small. And even a Republican congressional caucus will only vote for Medicaid cuts if they are immediately passed through to tax cuts. And Bessent knew this before he took office

• Domestic oil production is currently 13.8 million barrels/day, up 0.6 million from the 2024 baseline. Without huge new subsidies, that third “3” was never attainable in the absence of a geopolitical and geoeconomic catastrophe of the sort, well, that it looks like Trump may just be managing to create. And Bessent knew this, too, before he took office.

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In 756 the richest, most advanced polity on Earth nearly dissolved at the hands of one of its own frontier generals. Having survived, its rulers spent the next thousand years making sure no general could ever try again — and may have surrendered the Industrial Revolution in the bargain. Do I let this, one of the hundred things worth thinking about in the firehose-flood of my feed this morning, take over my brain and attention for a while? And what would be the best durable product if I do let this command my attention for a while?

There is an enormous absolute wealth of plausible historical causes for the “Great Divergence” between northwesternmost Europe and northeasternmost Asia. Do we want to explain China’s long post-1200 relative stagnation with clans, cousin marriage, or wet-rice paddies on the one hand.

Or should more causal weight be assigned to a more colorful and more vivid candidate explanation: the shadow cast on a civilization by one fat laughing rebel that led to the decision that the empire’s own army was the biggest enemy to fear?

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I am thinking of this right now because it has shown up in the firehose-flood of my feed from several different directions, springing from a Tang Dynasty poem; the very knotty questions of whether academic anthropology today can be anything useful, or whether the discipline needs to be leveled, and its pieces moved over to other departments; clan lineage vis-à-vis legal-framework associative human societal organization; and much else on which I have strong, albeit unfinished opinions.

But how much time can I spend on this today? And how do I ensure that the time I do spend on it is time well-spent, and will end up in some form potentially useful to future humanity as it thinks through these issues?

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The TangDynasty-era An-Shi rebellion of 756was led, first, by frontier commander An Lushan before he was murdered by his own son An Qingsu, and then led by his lieutenant Shi Siming. It was suppressed after Shi Siming’s murder by his own son Shi Chaoyi.

Phil H. gives us poet Sikong Shu, on the state of China in the aftermath, perhaps in 763 or so:

Sikong Shu: Seeing Off a Friend Back to the North After the Raiders Are Pacified <https://tangpoetry.substack.com/p/no-arcadia-is-left-after-the-war>:
‘When we went south together, you and I, The world was plunged in chaos, overthrown. Today, the times are cleansed, but this goodbye Returns you to our northern lands alone. In unfamiliar territories my hair Has turned already, fading into white. The old country is waiting for you, where The blue hills offer one familiar sight. From broken city walls and ruined keep Encountered by the moonlight in the dawn, You’ll reach that bitter mountain pass to sleep As stars and empty space above you yawn. Each step you take, and every anguished face, The shivering birds and withered grass keep pace.

司空曙 贼平后送人北归
世乱同南去，时清独北还。
他乡生白发，旧国见青山。
晓月过残垒，繁星宿故关。
寒禽与衰草，处处伴愁颜。

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Phil H. tells us:

Phil H.: Tang Poetry <https://tangpoetry.substack.com/p/no-arcadia-is-left-after-the-war>: ‘A classic. All the commentators say so… slightly awkward… because it’s a classic of what is not said, and… so has] to be very good at placing the words you didn’t say in the reader’s mind…. Seven years later… Xuanzong’s sons had reasserted Tang control. [But] Sikong is staying in the southern backwater… refuge…. His friend is returning to… Guangping…. Each of the first three couplets of this poem finds the sweet spot…. The north echoes the south; return echoes went; alone echoes together; etc….

[In] the second couplet… the Chinese just says: in the old country, you’ll see blue hills. The point is that… he will see the blue hills; but… precious little else that he remembers…. A poet self-consciously avoiding the important questions about what might be left after the war…. The third couplet…. Stars at a mountain pass - so what? We have… to realise that there are no more towns or waystations… because… of… battle….

After the… war… [no] spring… autumn is the only feeling…

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The 756-763 An-Shi Rebellion just might be a great hinge on which the history of China turns. It is the moment when the most powerful, populous, and technologically advanced polity on the planet came within an inch of dissolution at the hands of one of its own frontier generals. Having survived, its governing élite and state apparatus spent the next thousand years arranging its institutions so that no imperial general could ever successfully such a thing again. That arrangement kept the emperors and their courts relatively safe. It may also have cost Chinese civilization the ability to lead the Industrial Revolution.

I do teach this in course units on the Great Divergence. I also teach it in course units on High Patriarchy:

My thoughts on this do belong somewhere, in some form in which they can be absorbed and judged by the real ASI that is the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective literate time- and space-binding human mind. I need to work them up properly.

But there is so much else deserving of my attention as well…

However, this is worth thinking about right now: Come November, I am supposed to have a view of and discuss Greif, Mokyr, and Tabellini’s Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture & Institutions in Europe & China, 1000–2000, and the book has just raced by in the firehose-flood that is my feed, quickly followed by the poem.

The book by and large follows the line I assign to Joseph Henrich: lineage clans vs. corporate associations:

• China → the clan. Strong patrilineal kinship loyalty and kin-based morality made kin groups the natural vehicle for cooperation which facilitated the consolidation of autocracy and, in the long run, dampened innovation.

• Europe → the corporation. The Western Church’s prohibitions on cousin marriage eroded kinship ties, so cooperation had to extend to strangers—via guilds, universities, monasteries, and self-governing towns, which required formal rules, legal enforcement, and collective decision-making (majority voting), seeding the rule of law and constraining state power, and thus producing the miracle development institutions of a capitalist order in which market rather than patronage ruled.

In my feed I now have:

• Greif, Avner, Joel Mokyr, & Guido Tabellini. 2025. Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture & Institutions in Europe & China, 1000–2000. Princeton: Princeton University Press. <https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691265940/two-paths-to-prosperity>.

• H, Phil. 2026. “No Arcadia Is Left After the War”. Tang Poetry. September 27. <https://tangpoetry.substack.com/p/no-arcadia-is-left-after-the-war>.

• H, Phil. 2026. “The Song of Eternal Suffering”. Tang Poetry. February 4. <https://tangpoetry.substack.com/p/the-song-of-eternal-suffering>.

• Henrich, Joseph. 2020. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar & Particularly Prosperous. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World>.

• McCants, Anne. 2021. “Who Is He Calling WEIRD?” Journal of Interdisciplinary History. LII:2 (Autumn), pp. 251-61. <https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/6/article/803842/pdf>.

• Sikong Shu. 763. “Seeing Off a Friend Back to the North After the Raiders Are Pacified”. <https://tangpoetry.substack.com/p/no-arcadia-is-left-after-the-war>.

And, of course, I now have to pick up and wonder how much of today I want to spend rereading:

• Kay, Guy Gavriel. 2010. Under Heaven. New York: Roc. <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/304315/under-heaven-by-guy-gavriel-kay/>.

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If we center An Lushan and the extraordinary echo that he and the Tang Emperor Xuanzong left in the collective memory of China’s state élite, we are pushed in very different directions than those taken by Henrich, Greif, Mokyr, and Tabellini.

A thousand years before the nineteenth century—in 800, say—the cutting edges of human civilization were Haroun al-Rashid’s Baghdad and the Tang capital of Chang’an, not London or Bristol or any place in the backward, rain-soaked northwest of the Eurasian landmass. China in this era led the world in the three inventions Francis Bacon later credited with remaking Europe—gunpowder, printing, the compass—and had all three before the year 1000. At its twelfth-century apogee it produced more iron and marketed a greater share of its farm output than Britain would manage in the eighteenth. Chang’an under the high Tang was very possibly the largest city on the planet; the Song capital of Hangzhou later held perhaps half a million souls, larger than Baghdad or Constantinople or Córdoba or Delhi.

Emperor Xuanzong and general An Lushan is an arresting story. As so often in court-centered politics, it is very personal and really weird. By the 750s the Tang emperor Xuanzong had reigned for four decades. The vigor of his early years to curdle into the indulgence of his late ones. He had entrusted the defense of the northeastern frontier to An Lushan, a general of Sogdian and Turkic parentage: a court favorite, a jovial buffoonish man perhaps put through a mock adoption ceremony by the emperor’s beloved consort (and the emperor’s son’s ex-wife) Lady Yang: Yang Guifei. His infatuated love for her was so strong, it was said, that it overturned the natural order of patriarchy: parents preferred baby girls to baby boys.

The court found him amusing. The court found him useful. Chancellor Li Linfu had made it policy to hand frontier commands to non-Han soldiers precisely so that no ambitious mandarin with backing from a Han aristocratic lineage network could use a border army as a ladder to the throne. Since no Sogdian-Turkic general had an aristocratic support network to stabilize him on the throne, no Sogdian-Turkic general would dare try. Moreover, by the mid-750s, An Lushan appears to have been suffering from severe advaned diabetes: substantially obese, non-healing infected ulcers, and growing retinopathy. To the extent that Xuanzong and the court had an An Lushan problem in the mid-750s, it was about to solve itself.

But Li Linfu died. Yang Guifei begged Xuanzong to make her cousin Yang Guozhong Chancellor. Yang Guozhong moved against An Lushan. (It has never been clear to me why.) An Lushan did the standard arithmetic that Overmighty Subjects do. He marched south, claiming a secret imperial commission from Xuanzong to rid the court of Yang Guozhong. His rebels took the eastern capital, Luoyang, at which point An Lushan revealed that he would not be happy with Xuanzong as a puppet and proclaimed himself emperor of a new Yan dynasty.

The Tang defense broke. The road to the western capital Chang’an lay open. The emperor fled. At the post-station of Mawei his bodyguard killed Yang Guozhong, demanded permission to murder Yang Guifei as well, and the emperor Xuanzong—this is the scene that a thousand years of Chinese poetry could not leave alone—agreed. She was strangled. He escaped. He fled to Sichuan. He abdicated. His son Suzong took up the throne and the imperial resistance fight from the northwest with Uyghur cavalry.

An Lushan, paranoid and going blind, was murdered by his own son An Qingxu. An Qingxu was in turn killed by An Lushan’s lieutenant Shi Siming. Shi Siming was then killed by his own son Shi Chaoyi. By 763 the rebellion was over, but the Tang Empire that survived was a different creature from the Tang Empire that had gone in.

The general run of things was that in Europe kings, ministers, and landlords wanted a strong military, because the thing they feared most was the military of the next kingdom over: the next William the Conqueror, the next Napoleon. Local élite survival ran through military effectiveness. Military effectiveness ran through metallurgy, gunnery, shipbuilding, fortification, and finance. That complex did much to drive early modern European technological progress.

After the An-Shi rebellion, China’s emperors and élites saw things differently. As long as the steppe confederations could be kept divided, and diplomacy was very good at keeping them divided, there was little to fear from beyond the frontier. What an emperor, a grand secretary, or a great landlord had to fear was their own generals. An Lushan and Shi Siming are Exhibit A. The 1600s-era Three Feudatories Wu Sangui, Shang Zhixin, and Geng Jingzhong—lineages that had turned their coats, been instrumental in the conquest of China by the Qing, and been rewarded with extraordinary fiefs over Fujian, Guangdong, Guizhou, and Yunnan—are Exhibit B. A state whose deepest fear is its own army does not build a machine for military-technological competition. It builds a machine for keeping generals weak, divided, rotated, watched, and subordinate to civilian scholar-officials who could be trusted precisely because they commanded nothing.

The Song started the pattern around the year 1000. They built a state that systematically distrusted and demoted its own commanders, subordinating the sword to the writing-brush, even when Liao, Western Xia, and Jin armies were pressing on the frontier and a little more martial vigor would have been worth a great deal. That is the An Lushan reflex, institutionalized.

That is just one possible alternative candidate root-cause. It is there in addition to the Latin Church’s war on cousin marriage and the push that gave toward diffuse associative rather than tight lineage sociability. You need to line both of these up whenever you start contemplating the reasons for China’s long post-1200 pre-1975 relative stagnation,

But those are just one possible contributing causes, among many.

Perhaps the deeper problem was that the rice paddies were too fertile and the examination ladder too open, so that entrepreneurial energy was reliably captured, generation after generation, and remolded into orthodox Confucian landlord-scholar-bureaucrats. Perhaps it was the absence of a New World to plunder. Perhaps it was the absence of ungoverned corners, places still in the cultural milieu where heterodoxy could hide and then spread. Perhaps it was the absence of self-governing merchant cities. Perhaps it was that oxen and horses multiply the product of temperate wheat farming but do far less for subtropical wet-rice.

Perhaps there were many root causes.

But of all these, An Lushan is very vivid. You can point to a fat, laughing man at a doting emperor’s court and watch a civilization decide, forever after, that this must never be allowed again.

But that is all the time I have to spend on this today, for November and my presentation are far off, and there are other more urgent things flashing by in the feed.

The most urgent of these other things, however, is this: figuring out how to deal with the firehose-feed-flood of information so that my time is sliced to work productively, rather than scattered so that I start 1000 things, finish none of them, and when I return to any one of the 1000 I have to, effectively, start over from scratch.

In some sense, this is a good problem to have.

I confess: I do not read my feed. I stand in front of it, as one stands in front of a fire hydrant gushing, and I let it hit me in the face, and I try to catch a mouthful as it goes by. This is the info-bio tech-attention economy. It is worth being clear-eyed about it. The binding constraint on the life of the mind is no longer the supply of things worth reading. It is the supply of attention with which to read them.

Consider what a well-read person of, say, 1500 confronted. A gentleman-scholar with a good library and a lifetime of leisure could aspire to have read essentially everything that his culture regarded as worth reading—the classical corpus, the Church Fathers, the handful of moderns. Erasmus could hold the thing in his head. The problem was access: books were dear, manuscripts were rare, and the great intellectual labor was one of acquisition and preservation—of getting the text at all, and of keeping it from rotting or burning.

That world is gone. It is not coming back. On balance we should be very glad. But we have not yet built the habits of mind, or the institutions, appropriate to its successor. We are like the first generation of factory workers who still tried to farm on Sundays: our reflexes were formed for a régime of scarcity, and they misfire badly in a régime of superabundance.

The reflex says: this is worth reading, therefore I should read it.

And in 1500 that syllogism was sound.

Today that syllogism is a formula for madness.

So the first discipline is simply to avoid that madness, and to stop feeling guilty about it. Guilt is a category error. Failing to keep up is not a sin or a flaw. Keeping up is simply not a thing that can be done. There is no “behind.” There is only the flow, and the question of what to catch in the moment.

The second discipline is for me to ask of the firehose-flood: Where is my Value Above Replacement here? The replacement-level activity is not idleness. It is the next-thing streaming past, which is also excellent. So the bar is high, and it should be high, and most things—most genuinely worthwhile things—do not clear it. And I should teach myself to believe that that is fine.

The third discipline is this: follow the collisions. This post is an artifact of exactly that. Greif, Mokyr, and Tabellini’s Two Paths to Prosperity raced by in my feed. Then, hard on its heels, Phil H.’s rendering of Sikong Shu came by too. Together they strike sparks: the grand economic-historical narrative of clans-versus-corporations collided with a 763 lament for a world that battle had emptied of towns and waystations

The medieval scholar’s limited and finite library made for depth and for a certain magnificent thoroughness. Our infinite one makes for connection, for juxtaposition, for the unlicensed cross-pollination of a poem and a price series and a hardcover fantasy novel about Tang China all landing on the same desk in the same hour.

So what am I going to do this AM? I am going to disregard my own Value-Above-Replacement calculus entirely. I am going to pull Guy Gavriel Kay’s Under Heaven down off the shelf. I am going to spend hours I do not have rereading a fantasy novel about the An Lushan rebellion. For one point of standing in the firehose-flood-feed is not to work through it efficiently, but to let one stream carry you somewhere lovely, and quiet, and let the rest roar by.

The best durable product of my attention this AM will be renewing and reinforcing: again going through the pity, misery, and tragedy of Guy Gavriel Kay’s remixing of “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow” in Under Heaven.

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