"We Once Again Need to Raise More Capital than We Had Imagined": Watching OpenAI Say It Needs a New Structure

Attempting to tap risk-lovers and those needing savings vehicles for nine figures. I think somebody should do this, and that that somebody should not be an organization laser-focused on preserving its own particular & peculiar tech-platform money-gusher; but it is not clear how to convince those seeking savings vehicles promising expected returns with calculable risks that they should contribute; rather, the pitch has to be to those who are risk-lovers comfortable with Knightian uncertainty…
Why? because OpenAI’s quest for AGI has turned into as much a financial marathon as a technological race. The stakes? Transforming our world is the agenda. But what about the sub-agenda of making & keeping promises to those seeking a comfortable and not too uncertain return on their investment? What strategy can they devise, up against rivals like DeepMind and Apple all eager to collect the AI platform tax for themselves, and facing other platforms from Facebook to Oracle all desperate to avoid having to pay any substantial permanent AI platform tax?…

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A smart catch from the wise John Gruber:

John Gruber: OpenAI’s Board, Paraphrased: ‘To Succeed, All We Need Is Unimaginable Sums of Money’: ‘Un-bylined post from OpenAI’s board of directors…. “The hundreds of billions of <www.investopedia.com/meta-says… <www.bloomberg.com/news/arti… <https://carboncredits.com/larry-ellisons-100-billion-bet-nuclear-power-to-drive-oracles-ai-revolution/ https://artsmart.ai/blog/how-much-has-microsoft-invested-in-ai/> dollars… major companies are… investing into AI… show… we once again need to raise more capital than we’d imagined. Investors want to back us but, at this scale of capital, need conventional equity and less structural bespokeness…”. My take[:]. OpenAI currently offers, by far, the best product experience of any AI chatbot assistant. There is no technical moat <https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/07/26/zuck-open-source-ai>… and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble…. OpenAI is to this decade’s generative-AI revolution what Netscape was to the 1990s’ internet revolution… <https://daringfireball.net/2024/12/openai_unimaginable>

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Most noteworthy passages in the OpenAI Board’s… I am not sure what to call the document:

OpenAI Board of Directors: Why OpenAI’s Structure Must Evolve To Advance Our Mission: ‘To best support the mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence (AGI)1 benefits all of humanity… choose a non-profit / for-profit structure… best for… the mission[;] make the non-profit sustainable[;] equip each arm to do its part…. We began in 2015 as a research lab…. Eventually, it became clear that the most advanced AI would continuously use more and more compute and that scaling large language models was a promising path to AGI rooted in an understanding of humanity…. In 2022, we launched ChatGPT…. In 2024, we discovered a new research paradigm, with our o-series models demonstrating new reasoning capabilities that scale with “thinking” compute, stacking together with compute for training.

Our impact is not just what we create… but how we influence others… [also undertaking] vigorous innovation… [here at] the start of an AI-charged economy…. OpenAI’s pursuit of leadership in the field can inspire other organizations to advance the mission too. The hundreds⁠ of⁠ billions of⁠ dollars that major companies are now investing into AI development show what it will really take for OpenAI to continue pursuing the mission. We once again need to raise more capital than we’d imagined. Investors want to back us but, at this scale of capital, need conventional equity and less structural bespokeness….

Our plan is to transform our existing for-profit into a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation⁠ (PBC) with ordinary shares of stock and the OpenAI mission as its public benefit interest… to balance shareholder interests, stakeholder interests, and a public benefit interest…. It will enable us to raise the necessary capital with conventional terms….

The mission as a continuous objective…. We seek to evolve in order to take the next step in our mission, helping to build the AGI economy and ensuring it benefits humanity… <https://openai.com/index/why-our-structure-must-evolve-to-advance-our-mission/>

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What do I think? That Gruber is probably right here, and that the Netscape analogy is apposite.

More thoughts below the fold:

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Kayfabe, Cruelty, Sanewashing, Hierarchy, Musk, Bannon, & Trump

Plus the “New York Times” demonstrates once again that money spent on it is wasted. It is going to be a long, sad, and damaging four years, isn’t it?…
Incompetent “sanewashing” journalistic narratives portraying the incoming Trump II administration as even semi-normal hide the ball from their audiences. Trump’s “populism” is a calculated performance overlaying a chaotic mess, with, right now, the chaos-monkey chaos starting with a first-round fight between Original Trumpists and Trump-Aligned TechBros about whether the hierarchies it will try to reinforce will be those of ethnicity or of wealth…

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Right now we are seeing things like this over on Twitter:

Autism Capital: ‘So basically the right split into two factions, tech right and right right, and the tech right is like “hey we need h-1b visa people to do the jobs,” and the right right was like “no you need to hire americans,” and the tech right is like “but you guys are retarded,” and the right right is like “well you don’t train us,” and the tech right is like “you can’t outtrain being retarded,” and while all this was going on we learned some people really don’t like Indians…

Elon Musk: ‘That pretty much sums it up. This was eye-opening…

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And:

Elon Musk: ‘The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B. Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend…

Steve Bannon: ‘Someone please notify “child protective services”—need to do a “wellness check” on this toddler…

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And the New York Times is DEFINITELY NOT ON IT. And so I find myself annoyed at its incompetence again. For we have Nate Cohn, earnestly and misleadingly writing:

Nate Cohn: Trump’s Re-election Defines a New Era of American Politics: ‘The Obama-Romney race in 2012 was the last in a familiar pattern in U.S. politics, which has since become defined by Donald Trump’s conservative populism…. Today, Mr. Trump champions the working class, rails against elites, strives to protect American jobs and criticizes traditional U.S. foreign policy…. Many former Obama supporters, from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Elon Musk, suddenly find themselves near the center of Trump world…. Right-wing parties now embrace the welfare state… argue that elites have used democratic and transnational institutions to advance their own interests and causes…. Their critique has nonetheless been the most potent message in politics…. Trump… seized the mantles of populism, change and the working class, by campaigning on… trade and China, immigration, energy and the excesses of a newly dominant college-educated, liberal, “politically correct” or “woke” left…. Mr. Trump’s conservative populism won the policy debate… <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/25/upshot/trump-era-republicans-democrats.html>

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As if it is not the case that Trump and his people are as eager to cut Medicaid and repeal ObamaCare as they ever were; that Trump’s attachment to Social Security and Medicare is very much a Reaganite fear of touching the “third rail” while Bessent and Musk are as eager as Paul Ryan or George W. Bush ever was to take chunks out of it to finance more tax cuts for the rich; and that Trump’s speeches and remarks do not set out policies, but rather tell lies pleasing to the immediate audience so cans can be kicked down the road until something else—look! Halley’s Comet!—turns up. None of those are mentioned. Instead, the fiction is that this is an incoming president with policy views supported by analysis, rather than a troop of chaos monkeys doing the chaos-monkey thing.

“Sanewashing” is not just a hell of a drug. It’s unprofessional.

So what is really going on with the forthcoming second presidency of Donald Trump? Here is my take this morning.

The best way I find into TrumpWorld this weekend is, I think, to look at Twitter and take it seriously: to note the flame-war verbal fight between two groups: the Original Trumpists and the Trump-Aligned TechBros.

What is the fight about?

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BIWEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-12-28 Sa

My biweekly read-around…

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ONE IMAGE: A Very Good Question:

The ongoing shift of America from a place where the laws are bright lines to one in which some Justice Department can probably find some failure to report that turns out to be a felony… that is a bad trend, as it makes prosecution and control a matter of administrative discretion. The end is a thoroughly corrupt system…

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ANOTHER IMAGE: Can These Horrendous Losses Be at All in the Ballpark?:

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There were only 48 million males 18-65 in Russia when this started back in early 2022…

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YET A THIRD IMAGE: Extend-&-Pretend Still Ruling in US Urban-Core Real Estate:

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ONE VIDEO: Paris 1910 Upscaled:

MAMLMs being useful…

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ANOTHER VIDEO: What ASML Says That It Does:

<https://www.asml.com/en/products/computational-lithography>

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A THIRD VIDEO: William Dafoe in the “Nosferatu” ReMake:

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YET A FOURTH VIDEO: “Magnetic” Forces as Electric Forces Generated by Lorentz Contractions:

Thinking about the fact that no particle ever feels any “magnetic” force in its own frame of reference; seeing a current deflect a magnetic needle as a very visible low-velocity example of relativistic length-contraction.

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Very Briefly Noted:

  1. I appear to have made up a fake quote from 1971 “Shaft”: “When The Man wants you down, you go down…” <delong.typepad.com/sdj/…>

    Anybody have any idea what I might have been thinking of?…<https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-83367010>

  2. Public Reason: It’s not Mark Zuckerburg’s “where are my legs!?” metaverse. It’s not the CyberVerse of “Burning Chrome”. What is it instead?:


    Om Malik
    : Will A.I. Eat the Browser?: ‘I’m addicted to Apple’s Vision Pro…. a nearly perfect entertainment device…. In a world where AR, VR, and voice-controlled systems are becoming more integrated into daily life, the browser’s limitations become glaringly obvious…. Over the next decade the browser will need to adapt or die…. [Hitherto] humans have had to adapt to… a document-centric web experience… rather than technology truly adapting to human needs…. Josh Miller… of <thebrowser.company/?utm…… wants… rather than having applications dictate how we interact with information, our usage patterns and preferences will shape how information and services are presented to us…<crazystupidtech.com/arc…>


    The key problem in creating any information system is how to create and maintain a web of reliability and trust, so that what propagates is useful, important and relevant information rather than deceptive and damaging misinformation. That means that highlighting the answers to the “what are your sources?” and “what are your analytical protocols?” questions are absolutely key to every bundled-up piece of informational content. And that means that to the extent that MAMLMs are placed between you and the real sources and tuned and trained by professionals to tell you what you want to hear, the situation becomes increasingly fraught.

    MOAR:


    Om Malik
    : Musings on Media in the Age of AI: ‘The internet was originally envisioned as a place for connection, collaboration, and discovery. But over time, it has been distorted by business models that prioritize engagement metrics over meaningful interaction. Discovery has long been the open web’s greatest challenge, with search engines turning it into an SEO game and social platforms creating algorithmic echo chambers. AI platforms are making discovery almost irrelevant. You stay still, but your AI agent goes out and fetches, distills, and synthesizes the content and renders it in whatever format you want — audio, video, or text. This is the future. None of the media business models will work in the future — neither advertising nor paywalls. Today’s content deals, like the one The Atlantic signed with OpenAI, are akin to the sugar high you get from soda. The sugar high is followed by the inevitable crash… <om.co/2024/12/21/dark-m…>


    And
    :


    Om Malik
    : Perception Is Reality: ‘I’ve learned the hard way that these days, everything read on the internet must be thoroughly fact-checked to separate reality from engagement bait…. The Greeks used games, theater, assemblies, law courts, and religious festivals to shape attitudes and opinions. During the Spanish Armada era, the Spanish employed pamphlets and letters to spread false or counter-narratives…. The golden age of propaganda dawned in 1914 with World War I, and the term soon became part of everyday language. Since then, propaganda has evolved alongside changing communication technologies. Pamphlets, newsletters, and newspapers were quickly supplemented by radio and television, and later by the internet. We’ve indeed come a long way…. crazystupidtech.com/arc…. It comes as no surprise that we’ve seen propaganda move to AI and chatbots… a battleground for control over historical narratives and information flows… <om.co/2024/12/25/percep…>


    ====


    References:

  3. This Is Fine!: In this enormous dumpster fire, you can take some satisfaction in one thing. No matter how badly you do your job, you still are much more effective and successful and competent than Merrick Garland:


    Duncan Black
    : …The Institutionalists!: ‘I will let people better equipped to interpret such things provide a fuller interpretation, but if you read the Gaetz Report <ethics.house.gov/wp-con…> starting at page 3 (as numbered) at Procedural History, it is the kind of Calvinball shit you would expect from the Trump DOJ.
    But it was Garland:
    “Shortly after DOJ withdrew its deferral request and the Committee reauthorized its review, the Committee sent DOJ a request for information…. Without a response despite repeated follow up, the Committee submitted FOIA requests… which to date have not been adequately processed. The Committee continued to reach out…. On January 12, 2024, the Committee received its first correspondence from DOJ on the matter. At that time, DOJ provided no substantive response or explanation for its delay; instead, DOJ simply stated that it “do[es] not provide non-public information about law enforcement investigations that do not result in charges.” This “policy” is, however, inconsistent with DOJ’s historical conduct with respect to the Committee…. DOJ did not comply with the subpoena by the date required, but suggested it remained “committed to good-faith engagement with the Committee…. To date, DOJ has provided no meaningful evidence or information to the Committee or cited any lawful basis for its responses…. The Committee and DOJ should be partners in their shared mission of upholding the integrity of our government institutions…” <eschatonblog.com/2024/1…><https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-83267636>

  4. War & Rumours of War: Matthew Yglesias is 100% correct here. And I would put it much more strongly. It is not “[un]clear… that Hooker needed to withdraw and abandon the offensive”. It is, rather, clear that Hooker had every reason to continue the offensive. At the very least it would attrit Lee, and it might have led to his defeat in detail:


    Matthew Yglesias
    : : ‘Robert E Lee’s hype as a military genius has… its] foundation in reality… from his success at Chancellorsville…. 60,000 men faced down the 108,000-strong Army of the Potomac… with an additional force of 28,000 more… at Fredericksburg under… Sedgwick. Lee won decisively… with some very unusual tactics — dividing his force twice in the face of a numerically superior opponent…. Admirers call this “Lee’s perfect battle,” and certainly it’s hard to argue with success. But it’s also hard not to look at it as involving a series of significant errors by Union general Joseph Hooker…. Even with all the blunders, it’s not actually clear to me that Hooker needed to withdraw and abandon the offensive. The Union lost more men, but the Confederacy lost a larger proportion of their army… <slowboring.com/p/matts-…>


    The Union army suffered 17,000 casualties at Chancellorsville; the Confederates 13,000—15% of those engaged in total. Compare to 25% at Antietam in 1862, 31% at Gettysburg in 1863, and 28% at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania in 1864. In my view, it is very clear that Hooker did not need to withdraw, and that he did withdraw because he massively overestimated the size of the Confederate army—they had, after all, attacked him from pretty much every possible direction except from due north. Both the Seven Days’ Battles and Chancellorsville were victories won not on the ground, where things were inconclusive, but in the mind of the Union commander.

    And I do think Matt gets one thing wrong here: the real foundation for Lee’s military genius is Second Bull Run, and Longstreet’s flank attack there. That was the battle where Lee won a major victory on the ground, and not in the mind of the Union commander…<https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-83265468>

  5. Live from the Chaos-Monkey Cage: Instead of conquest, the role of foreign-policy statecraft in producing a prosperous polity is in shaping world market conditions so that one’s imports and exports are carried out at attractive terms of trade. The role of foreign-policy economic statecraft in providing for security lies in using threats to adversely change others’ terms of trade to guide their behavior—“sanctions policy”. There is no chance the forthcoming Trump administration will understand that this is the point, or how to do this. Here Paul Krugman recommends Henry Farrell on the foreign-policy configurations we are likely to see under Trump II: Reign of the Neofascist Chaos Monkeys:


    Henry Farrell
    : ‘Internal battles…. Traditional national security hawks will want to double down on sanctions and export controls, without any clear sense of where to stop. Fans of tariffs—a group that currently includes Trump—will apply them to remedy economic insecurity and all else that ails the United States. They will eventually discover the limits and costs of tariffs, but probably not soon enough. Well-connected firms will call for more traditional, business-friendly measures, combined with sweetheart deals and carve-outs…. Fraught alliances, palace politics, knifings in the dark, and Trump’s whims will send economic security policy reeling. The one area in which Trump shows unwavering determination is his enmity toward technical expertise… hinder[ing] the ability of the economic security state to get things done…. Everyone—businesses, allied governments, and adversaries—will be trying to figure out what is happening within a chaotic administration, and, if possible, to shape it…. Once, and not too long ago, it was possible for U.S. elites to believe that technocrats could order the world… making it secure and predictable for them…. The sun is setting on the sanctions technocrats, and indeed on traditional technocracy more generally… <foreignaffairs.com/revi…>… <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-83136262>

  6. Live from the Chaos-Monkey Cage: Donald Trump’s “Merry Christmas” message claimed, falsely, that Chinese soldiers operate the Panama Canal, and that we should conquer it—along with absorbing Canada & Greenland. Because conquering places and extracting resources from them is how you grow rich. But that has been wrong since at least 1776. Since then, it is increasingly cheaper and more efficient to make something & trade for it than to try to conquer some place and then extract resources from it. Paul Krugman Giveth the Lesson:

    Krugman wonks out
    Trump’s Great Illusion
    Most Americans who supported Donald Trump probably thought they were voting for lower grocery prices; now he says never mind, let’s seize Greenland instead. Also the Panama Canal and maybe Canada…
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    Major takeaways from Paul:


    May I say that Trump is still benefiting, maybe more than ever, from media sanewashing? How many Americans, even those who pay attention to the news, know that THIS was the president-elect’s Christmas message?…


    And:


    Norman Angell’s book… made two main points…. In a world economy with substantial trade… affluence… [has been attained by] small European nations…. An advanced nation can’t extract enough tribute from its vassals to make a significant difference to its overall wealth…


    And:


    The Axis powers [of WWII} believed that their nations needed empires to thrive…. [But afterwards] the war’s losers did just fine without… empires…. Germany had its Wirtschaftswunder. Japanese economic growth astonished the world for 40 years. Italy… by 1970… GDP per capita was triple its level in 1938… <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-83135352>

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SubStack Posts:

A nice summary of how Berkeley, CA, is no longer a NIMBY-dominated inner suburb. There are only two things I think it downplays—Darrell Owens, of course, knows these two things well, but has other fish to fry and so weights them as of much less importance than I do. The first is the geographic split: the northeast Berkeley Hills of those who own single-family homes in the Hills now worth multimillions who think everything is fine and that increasing density to their southwest will bring more Oakland Sideshow Chaos closer to them, vs. the southwest Berkeley Flats who by and large want an affordable city. The second is the generational split—people who once were hippies, or wish they once were hippies, and want to return to a laid-back 1970s vibe:

The Discourse Lounge
Berkeley’s Evolution On Housing
The big takeaway in Berkeley’s 2024 election(s), from Substacks to the S.F. Chronicle, has been that the “YIMBYs have won.” Berkeley, once the holy grail of NIMBYism, has elected an unapologetic pr…
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Donald Trump’s “Merry Christmas” message claimed, falsely, that Chinese soldiers operate the Panama Canal, and that we should conquer it—along with absorbing Canada & Greenland. Because conquering places and extracting resources from them is how you grow rich. But that has been wrong since at least 1776. Since then, it is increasingly cheaper and more efficient to make something & trade for it than to try to conquer some place and then extract resources from it. Paul Krugman Giveth the Lesson:

Krugman wonks out
Trump’s Great Illusion
Most Americans who supported Donald Trump probably thought they were voting for lower grocery prices; now he says never mind, let’s seize Greenland instead. Also the Panama Canal and maybe Canada…
Read more

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WEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-12-24 Tu

My weekly read-around…

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ONE IMAGE: The Partisan Consumer Expectations Switch:

University of Michigan Survey, via Adam Tooze, via Axios.

My view, of course, is that the Democratic switch is realistic—that the whispers of the Scott Bessent affinity that it is the stock market and not Donald Trump who will be president are much more likely to be false than true, and that we should judge the likely future of economic policy by looking at the kneejerk impulses of the chaos monkey we Americans have put in the White House, and the chaos monkeys who he is choosing as his subordinates.

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ANOTHER IMAGE: Women’s Empowerment to Write & Be Read:

Yes, the Protestant Reformation was definitely a thing for female agency. But it was only a small thing. The real inflection point comes, and comes suddenly, in 1800.

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TWO MORE IMAGES: How Mediterranean-Centered the Roman Empire Was:

Only luxuries and a few conveniences got from the Mediterranean centers of the empire to Armenia, Dacia, further Spain, northwestern Gaul, and Britain. The flows of staple commodities went to the Mediterranean and to places just upriver from the Mediterranean.

I do not think the concentration in Israel-Palestine is real—I think that is a consequence of their being a lot of Israeli archeologists in the 1900s. And I think much of what was Roman-era settlement in the Nile River Delta is buried in the mud, and we do not see it. But elsewhere it seems to match what I thought I knew of the rough distribution of population and economic activity in the Roman Empire. Note the north shore of the Black Sea.

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ONE VIDEO: Joanna Stern on the AR Dream:

I am now convinced that big worktime screens (especially for those of us whose backs like us to change position and not sit at the same desk all the time throughout the workday) and immersive video experiences are going to be major and valuable use cases. Will they amalgamate—actually have us doing our work in an immersive cyberworld in which our documents and task surround us? I do not know. Will immersive telepresence become a big thing? Substantial numbers of people I trust say it will. And will AR—little cyberobjects populating the world we live in as long as we keep our glasses on? Again, I do not know.

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ANOTHER VIDEO: Up Mount Everest:

Beautiful…

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A THIRD VIDEO: I Confess I Am Looking Forward to This…:

It would be very nice to have a genuinely scary and horrific vampire movie in the canon, rather than our current combination of period pieces and things at or over the edge of parody…

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Very Briefly Noted:

  1. MAMLMs: “Ritual” is probably the wrong word except for those of us who read too much Durkheim when young, and still remember it. “Boilerplate” would be better—documents that need to be created for some purpose, for which there are a great many models in the past text corpus. The document needs to both represent the individual situation and be readily classifiable with respect to what kind of action it is supposed to trigger. In England, it least, so it has been ever since the late 1100s days of Ranulph de Glanvill, who wrote: “CHAP. V.: WHEN any one complains to the King, or his Jus-tices, concerning his Fee, or his Freehold, if the complaint be such as be proper for the determination of the King’s Court, or the King is pleased that it should be decided there, then the party complaining shall have the following Writ of summons. CHAP. VI. ‘THE King to the Sheriff, Health. Command A. that, without delay, he render to B. one Hyde of Land, in such a Vill, of which the said B. complains, that the aforesaid A. hath deforced him; and, unless he does so, summon him by good summoners, that he be there, before me, or my Justices, in crastino post octabus clausi Paschae at such a place, to show wherefore he has failed; and have there the Summoners and this Writ. Witness Ranulph de Glanville, at Clarendon.’”

    Marion Fourcade and Henry Farrell seem to me to have it exactly right when they point out that the creation of these documents (a) currently consumes a lot of human worktime in a way that is not terribly rewarding to the worker, and (b) is ripe for automation via GPT LLMs

    Marion Fourcade & Henry Farrell
    : Large-Language Models Will Upend Human Rituals: ‘People already use [LLMs] to produce boilerplate language, write mandatory statements and end-of-year reports, or craft routine emails.… Because LLMs have no internal mental processes they are aptly suited to answering such ritualised prompts, spinning out the required clichés with slight variations. As Dan Davies… puts it, they… regurgitate “maximally unsurprising outcomes”. For the first time, we have non-human, non-intelligent processes that can generatively enact ritual at high speed and industrial scale, varying it as needed to fit the particular circumstances… <https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/a-new-piece-in-the-economist-theres>

  2. Central Country: I have never been sure how I am supposed to read the now three-year decline in nominal reported imports into China. Three-quarters of China’s imports are made up of machinery, transport equipment, electrical machinery and apparatus, and mineral fuels. The decline thus might be in substantial part a reorientation of China’s domestic demand for automobiles toward domestic producers, but how big could that have been over the past three years? And given the orientation of the Pearl River Delta and the Lower Yangtze toward the globalized value-chain economy, I do not see how they could be flourishing without generating higher real demand for imports—not a 15% fall.

    But are the numbers on imports even real? We are highly confident that other numbers are not. Certainly the bond market’s 1.7% nominal for the ten-year yield suggests current and expected depression and stagnation, even given safe-harbor demand:


    Brad Setser
    : ‘President Xi has lost Ling-Ling Wei … Wow. For what it is worth, I also had the chance to visit China this fall, and was also surprised by how dark the mood was… The collapse in import volumes is another worrying sign… <x.com/Brad_Setser/statu…>


    Lingling Wei
    : China’s Bond Yields Scream the ‘D’ Word: ‘You heard right: “D” as in depression…. China’s 10-year sovereign yield… is around 1.7%, a full percentage-point plunge from a little over a year ago….. The speed of the drop is astonishing. The lower the yield falls, the deeper the market is signaling economic stress. Official statistics show that China’s economy… is expected to reach the 5%-or-so target for the full year. In reality, businesses are struggling to keep their lights on, people are having severe difficulty in finding jobs, and municipalities are drowning in debt. Even government employees aren’t getting paid. “It feels like depression,” a reader in China recently wrote to me. And for all the talk about help coming, the government hasn’t delivered. The power center in Beijing is facing a crisis over policy credibility…. The leadership wsjchina.createsend1.co… by pledging more fiscal and monetary support at a high-level confab…. Except… the bond market is clearly casting a vote of little confidence… <wsjchina.cmail20.com/t/…> <https://substack.com/profile/16879-brad-delong/note/c-82913878>

  3. War & Rumors of War: I do spend a lot of time making fun of American establishment think-tank foreign-policy chin-scratching “strategists” whose recommendations boil down so often and for so many places to searching for a democracy-minded strongman or a “third way”. But I must confess that this about Syria today, from the smart and good-hearted Marc Lynch, is no better:


    Marc Lynch
    : Five Thoughts on Syria’s Unfrozen Conflict: ‘There’s the question of HTS itself. HTS has excellent public public relations, a great communication strategy, charismatic leader, and a keen interest in presenting themselves as a viable, rational, and pragmatic movement. Jolani/Shara’a has been saying many of the “right” things…. I certainly think that HTS should be given the chance to govern, subject to all the sorts of human rights and democratic standards we should look for in any regime (but don’t get in virtually any in the region)…. But HTS is not a[n]… organization… [with] a long history of participating in elections, theorizing, religion, and democracy, and finding ways to work with non-Islamist trends at various junctures. HTS emerges very much out of the universe of jihadism, which spans what used to be Al-Qaeda through the Islamic State and has, shall we say, very strong views about the role of religion in politics and society… <abuaardvark.substack.co…>


    That “subject to… human rights and democratic standards” is an interesting phrase, given that the chances that HTS will not be a major denier of human rights and a breaker of democratic standards are very, very small. What I need to know is how Marc Lynch thinks the international order should set up the gameboard to effectively incentivize HTS to behave less badly both inside and outside Syria. But that is not what I get. I get pious self-contradictory hopes.
    <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-82806602>

  4. History: I take it Festivus has started. I see that Alice Evans has seen one too many goodthink and goodfeel museum exhibitions about mediæval European female agency, subversion, and empowerment. And so she has lost it:


    Alice Evans
    : Why Are We Sugarcoating Medieval Misogyny?”: ‘History books, museum exhibitions and viral podcasts overflow with tales of female influence <bl.uk/whats-on/medieval…>, resistance <amazon.co.uk/Poet-Mysti…>, and agency <bl.uk/whats-on/medieval…>, while economists triumphantly uncover evidence of women’s wealth and wages. Together, these narratives paint medieval Europe as surprisingly progressive. Except this rosy picture conceals a darker truth. In reality, men monopolised ruling prestigious institutions and backed up their bros. Dissidents were shunned, ostracised, or burned alive. Only by confronting medieval Europe’s patriarchal oppression can we diagnose what it took to achieve contemporary equality…. Overturning centuries of male bias, feminist historians tend to highlight women’s agency, subversion and importance. The British Library’s current exhibition proudly declares that “medieval women’s voices evoke a world in which they lived active and varied lives. Their testimonies reveal… female impact and influence <bl.uk/whats-on/medieval…> across private, public and spiritual realms”. Browse the exhibition’s bookshop and behold dozens of books celebrating subversive women. Wow. What a wonderful matriarchy! But was this representative?… The British Library’s celebration of female ‘influence’ is delightfully heart-warming, their collection of artefacts is truly impressive, but closer examination reveals a fundamental contradiction: how could women exercise meaningful influence if subversives were systematically silenced, suppressed, and or even butchered? In truth, Europe was hugely bigoted. Zealous patriarchs dominated institutional power and ideological persuasion. Getting the facts straight helps us fine-tune our analysis of what actually turbo-charged contemporary equality: the revolutionary forces of industrialisation and secularism enabled women writers to rewrite the script… <https://www.ggd.world/p/why-are-we-sugarcoating-medieval>

    I confess I do not understand why patriarchy has been so strong in human history. Yes, the plough. Yes, with mediæval infant and child mortality socio-cultural patterns that did not induce the typical woman to undergo eight-to-ten pregnancies did not reproduce themselves, and so were replaced by those that did. Yes, nursing (and to a lesser degree pregnancy) limit what you (or some other woman) can effectively and actually want to do outside of the immediate surroundings of the household, and creates a very strong complementarity with actions that have stable state that can be left alone for a while—gardening, textiles, slow cooking. Yes, it is a society of domination in which most men are slaves or serfs, and that expectation of hierarchy leaks across and into gender. Yes, coërcive violence as a constant background threat in a society of domination. But why was all that so ably backed up for so long and so completely by patriarchal ideological fraud?

    I need to run some simulations to figure out how large a share of mediæval adult women were without a sub-ten year old hanging on their skirts at any point in time, and think about that… <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-82773623>

  5. Neofascism: I think the smart Gillian Tett gets this wrong, I think:


    Gillian Tett
    : ‘Three key points…. Last month’s clean sweep victory by Trump means that the critical political fight in 2025 will not be across the aisle, Democrats versus Republicans, but inside the Republican party itself…. This Republican-on-Republican battle will be ugly…. Fiscal policy will be an early flashpoint in this fight…. The looming $36tn question is not simply whether the plutocrats or populists will win this fight; it is also whether the bond markets will stay calm while this plays out… <ft.com/content/c088a0c2…>

    I think is wrong because it is not just the bond and stock markets vs. Republicans who want tax cuts for the rich above all vs. Republicans who want to shrink the deficit vs. the Bannonites who want “to raise taxes on the wealthy… the neoliberal neocons are going to have to pay…”

    It is wrong because while Trump’s ability to shape executive-branch policy is constrained only by his own indolence and ignorance (which is great) and the Supreme Court (hah!), legislative-branch policy is much more fraught As of February 1, 2025, Republicans will hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate and a 217-215 majority in the House. I do not know what the odds are that they will be able to pass a Reconciliation bill with those low, majorities, but it is far from dead certain that they can pass one, and it is certain that what it could contain will be greatly constrained by the need to get every single person on board. And after Reconciliation? Nothing will pass without at least 30 Democratic votes in the House, which means that Hakeem Jeffries will have to bless whatever passes in some way.

    Indeed, I am not even sure that Republican will be able to elect a Speaker.

    I would not be surprised if there are ten centrist Republicans who see this next congress as their last in office who might want to control the Rules Committee and would be willing to make Hakeem Jeffries Speaker were he willing to so appoint them.

    In short, Democrats have a role. It is not a two-sided by rather a four-sided cage match inside the Congressional Thunderdome. <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-82437334>

  6. Journamalism: Is NBC News really this incompetent?:


    Scott Wong, Sahil Kapur, Julie Tsirkin, Syedah Asghar & Kyle Stewart
    : House votes down Republican bill to avert shutdown on eve of the deadline: ‘The House rejected a bill Thursday to keep the government funded temporarily after Republican leaders reneged on an earlier bipartisan deal and made modifications to appease President-elect Donald Trump, billionaire Elon Musk and an internal GOP revolt…. The 116-page bill released Thursday would have funded the government through March 14. It also would have extended the country’s debt limit through Jan. 30, 2027, in response to a key, eleventh-hour request from Trump…. Trump praised the deal on Truth Social, calling it a “success,” and urged both Republicans and Democrats to vote yes. “Speaker Mike Johnson and the House have come to a very good Deal for the American People. The newly agreed to American Relief Act of 2024 will keep the Government open, fund our Great Farmers and others, and provide relief for those severely impacted by the devastating hurricanes,” Trump wrote… <nbcnews.com/politics/co…>


    This “Trump praised the deal…” There was no deal: there was a Republican House proposal. What is NBC News doing calling it a “deal”? A deal is something negotiators agree to, which may then have to be ratified by those the negotiators represent. A proposal is not a deal.
    <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-82372155>

  7. Live from the Chaos-Monkey Cage: The politics of government shutdowns are always puzzling to me. The way that the Constitution mandates that the system must work—revenue bills must originate in the House—is that the first step must be that Speaker Mike Johnson has to pass a bill through the House. Only then can Schumer and his Senate majority block action, an only after that can Biden block action via veto. If Johnson had passed something, then Trump and Vance could say “it is Schumer and Biden who are holding up aid to our farmers and disaster relief”. But that is not where we are—where we are is that given his lack of control over his own caucus, Speaker Johnson needs to attract Democratic votes in order to pass anything.

    If I were Mitch McConnell right now, I would get together with Schumer and pass a debt-ceiling increase through the Senate today on the grounds that this is what Trump wants and throw that over to the House, just to demonstrate to Trump that his words may have unexpected consequences. But that depends on how many f***s McConnell (and Thune) still have to give. And if I were Johnson, I would put a funding bill plus debt-ceiling increase up for a vote today as well, for the same reason. But that would require a Mike Johnson much more willing to think backwards and forwards in time—think up and down the strategy and decision tree—than I believe that he is:

    Brian Buetler: ¯_(ツ)_/¯: ‘Donald Trump is trying to shut down the government, and Republicans may not be able to elect a speaker before January 6…. Elon Musk front-ran Donald Trump to torpedo a temporary spending bill the bipartisan congressional leadership wrote together. He seems to have done this based on nonsense he read on X. Vice President-elect Donald Trump and Assistant to the Vice President-elect JD Vance issued a bizarre joint statement <x.com/JDVance/status/18…> falling in line with President-elect Musk. The ad hoc Republican position seems to be that the only acceptable deal is a clean extension of current funding levels combined with an untimely increase in the debt limit, so that the Musk-Trump-Vance administration doesn’t have to deal with it. Government shuts down Friday without a deal… <offmessage.net/p/ama-th…>

    & here is the Trump-Vance statement:


    ”The most foolish and inept thing ever done by Congressional Republicans was allowing our country to hit the debt ceiling in 2025. It was a mistake and is now something that must be addressed. Meanwhile, Congress is considering a spending bill that would give sweetheart provisions for government censors and for Liz Cheney. The bill would make it easier to hide the records of the corrupt January 6 committee—which accomplished nothing for the American people and hid security failures that happened that day. This bill would also give Congress a pay increase while many Americans are struggling this Christmas.

    Increasing the debt ceiling is not great but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch. If Democrats won’t cooperate on the debt ceiling now, what makes anyone think they would do it in June during our administration? Let’s have this debate now. And we should pass a streamlined spending bill that doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want.

    Republicans want to support our farmers, pay for disaster relief, and set our country up for success in 2025. The only way to do that is with a temporary funding bill WITHOUT DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS combined with an increase in the debt ceiling. Anything else is a betrayal of our country. Republicans must GET SMART and TOUGH. If Democrats threaten to shut down the government unless we give them everything they want, then CALL THEIR BLUFF. It is Schumer and Biden who are holding up aid to our farmers and disaster relief. THIS CHAOS WOULD NOT BE HAPPENING IF WE HAD A REAL PRESIDENT. WE WILL IN 32 DAYS!…” <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-82220977>

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PROJECT SYNDICATE: American Idiots

We got a preview of life in the chaos-monkey cage that will be the Second Trump Administration last week: we saw Elon Musk & Donald Trump’s blow-up a government-funding continuing-resolution bill…
In the end, we saw the situation resolved with Speaker Mike Johnson summarily rejecting Trump’s principal demand—for a debt-ceiling increase—and with Musk sounding bewildered as Democrats made up the majority of the coalition that actually passed the final bill through the House…

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The threat of a Christmastime government shutdown sparked by America’s chief Scrooges, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and J.D. Vance, has been narrowly averted. Nonetheless, it is worth reviewing what happened, because the episode perfectly foreshadows the dysfunctional governance that awaits the United States (and the world) when Trump takes office in January….

Musk’s many falsehoods… were plain as day, and yet Musk succeeded in intimidating Republicans…. Instead of pointing out that Musk does not know what he is talking about, Republicans fell into line…. As of the morning of December 18, Trump himself had no problem with the bill. Yet by that afternoon, he and Vance… [were] calling congressional Republicans “foolish and inept” for “allowing our country to hit the debt ceiling in 2025.” Now, they must pass a “temporary funding bill WITHOUT DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS combined with an increase in the debt ceiling. Anything else is a betrayal of our country”….

In the end, Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries cobbled together a last-minute deal… a policy defeat for Trump, Musk, and Vance. But they won’t care, because policy does not concern them. Trump and the incoming Republican congressional majorities know they have the fervent support of predominantly low-information – or downright misinformed – voters. And those voters won’t care (or even know) that more Democrats than Republicans voted for Johnson’s House bill (prompting Musk to ask, “So is this a Republican bill or a Democrat bill?”)….

American politics and governance today…. channels the performative style of professional wrestling. The basic democratic decision loop – in which voters elect officeholders who devise policies with effects that inform the outcome of subsequent elections – is now totally broken…

Read MOAR at Project Syndicate: <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-musk-vance-government-shutdown-by-j-bradford-delong-2024-12>

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CROSSPOST: Josh Marshall: State of Play on Capitol Hill

As of December 20, 2024 14:00 EST: Elon Musk as chief chaos monkey, with Donald Trump & Mike Johnson struggling to play catch-up…
The Republican Party descends even further into surrealism as Elon Musk tells lies to try to shut down the government, rather than tell usk to get with the team Donald Trump adds demands that Speaker Mike Johnson take immediate actions for which he does not have and cannot get the votes. The endgame? The bill that eventually passed got more support from Democrats than Republicans and the endorsement of the Biden administration, while not including Donald Trump’s single “MUST!” demand…

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I admit I’ve been saying mostly the same thing in my last few posts on events on Capitol Hill. I must think that if I keep writing it it will finally be clear. Oh well. I just noticed someone say they were surprised that almost 40 House Republicans defied not only Trump but Elon Musk as well.

I don’t think that’s what happened. Was Musk for this Trump/Johnson clean up effort that went down to defeat last night? That doesn’t seem clear at all. It’s way over-literal, over-determined. He wasn’t really for it or against it. He blew the deal up and then just moved on to something else.

Here’s the chain of events I see.

Trump wanted congressional Republicans to arrange for him a smooth path to January 20th, and actually a bit past January 20th. (He didn’t want high-stakes crisis stuff waiting for him on day one.) And they did that. That was the plan. Then Elon Musk barged in and blew the whole thing up. Precisely why he did this or whether there was a particular reason isn’t even totally clear. Maybe it was just impulse or a desire to show who was calling the shots. Next, Trump and Johnson were forced to cobble together a clean-up plan because the government is about to run out of funds and shut down before Christmas. They did that and Trump demanded House Republicans vote for it. He was more explicit than he normally has to be about the repercussions for anyone who defied him. And then 38 of them defied him. And now the whole thing is dead in the water.

Did those 38 defy Elon Musk? I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem like he stated any real preference one way or another. He just blew things up and left.

In a way it’s very Trumpy. Musk’s the chaos agent. But it’s his chaos. Everyone has to react to him. Including Donald Trump.

Again, why did Musk do this? David Dayen at the Prospect says it’s because he wants to protect his factories in China. Maybe that’s true. I have no idea. But the more salient fact in my mind isn’t so much why Musk did it as that he did it and that he could do it. He’s calling the shots. It’s not clear to me that he’s doing it in a particularly linear way. He may be like Rahad Jackson, the Alfred Molina character walking around with the gun in his underwear in that classic scene from Boogie Nights. But he’s got the gun and he’s calling the shots.

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December 19, 2024 20:49 EST: Musk Shows Trump That He’s the New Chaos in Town: ‘If you haven’t seen the details, the meltdown on Capitol Hill went from bad to worse this evening. Or awesome to awesomer, depending on your perspective. Let’s review. Donald Trump wanted a smooth ride to January 20th. He allowed the leaders of the congressional GOP to negotiate a government funding extension to smooth that ride. That was about to pass before Elon Musk stepped in with a tweet storm and blew up the whole thing. That sent Speaker Johnson and Trump back to the drawing board to come up with a new GOP-only plan to meet Musk’s objections. To get it through today it needed a 2/3rds vote in the House. It didn’t come close to 50%. For the next ten days or so the Senate is controlled by the Democrats. So the House isn’t even the only problem. Trump told House Republicans today they had to vote for this new plan. Then 38 House Republicans voted against. Now they’re barreling toward a government shutdown.

Some in the Beltway press still think that everything is great for Trump. Most see this as a pretty bad development for Trump. He ordered the House GOP to vote for this hastily improvised bill and dozens voted against it. That’s not a good sign for an incoming President in his honeymoon period.

But this misses the real point. This wasn’t Trump’s bill. This was Trump and Johnson’s attempt to clean up the mess Musk created when he tanked their bill. I stick by what I said yesterday: The real story here is that Trump has lost control of the process at what should be his moment of maximum power. As far as I can tell Musk himself didn’t even express an opinion on the vote for the clean up. He’s off to something else. Or he was only there for blowing things up. Putting them back together is someone else’s problem. He left that to Trump and Johnson.

Musk’s superpower here is that he doens’t give a crap. He’s not worried about the midterms or his 2028 reelect. He’s only on hand for the fun.

As I noted yesterday, yes, Trump loves chaos. But his chaos, not someone else’s. His chaos keeps him the center of the action. It forces everyone back on their heels and to be reacting to him. But here Trump is being forced to react to Musk’s chaos. That’s very different.

Trump’s weathered a lot. It’s not like he’s done for. They’ll eventually figure something out. But the new dynamic here is what’s really important. Trump allowed Musk into the center of power and now Musk is the one calling the shots.


December 18, 2024 22:43 EST: Trump’s Trump: ‘As you’ve likely seen, things kind of went off the rails on Capitol Hill. Speaker Mike Johnson had assembled one of those big spending packages to avoid a government shutdown. Then Elon Musk went off on the bill and started a stampede for the exits among House Republicans. Then Trump turned against it too. Then JD Vance. By the end of the day, it was clear not only that the bill was dead, there was a real question about whether Johnson’s speakership will survive the vote for speaker coming up on January 3rd.

But none of those points are the critical ones. This is about Elon Musk.

Trump has brought Musk into the central circle of power. He’s not only de facto vice president. When was the last time you saw JD Vance? He’s practically co-president. Musk is erratic, volatile, impulsive, mercurial. He introduces a huge source of unpredictability and chaos into the presidency that for once Trump doesn’t control. See it clearly: Musk did this. Trump thrives on chaos, but his chaos. Not someone else’s chaos.

Trump is following. He’s trying to pretend otherwise but he’s following. And unlike all of Trump’s other bad hires or hires he gets tired of, he can’t just shitcan Musk. Musk is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. He’s got a bigger megaphone. And he’s got his own brand. I’m pretty sure there will eventually be a really big and really ugly falling out between the two of them. But it will take a while to get there and the costs are potentially quite large for both of them.

Trump has sewn himself into a sack with Elon Musk, a few billion dollars, a cat and a snake, and had the sack tossed into the Tiber. That’s the story here. And it will go on for a while.

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In Spite of All the "Don't Worry" Whispers from Scott Bessent's Affinity, the Rest of Us Are Not Outside But Inside the Chaos-Monkey Cage with Trump

Our chances for anything that could be properly labelled anything as positive as “controlled disorder” over the next four years are very slim; yes, James Bessent & others will try to keep Trump inside his chaos-monkey cage—but the rest of us will not be outside, but rather locked inside with him…
A leader who lives in a world of disinformation & misinformation & operates on the principle of “kayfabe”—that is “professional”-wrestling slang for “be fake”, with the consonants reversed, you see. More: his words empower others to act on delusions. What more could amplify the risk of policy disaster? The uncertainty surrounding Trumponomics is its defining feature. Markets hope for restraint, and for “stock market number go up!” to rule all decisions. History & the experience of Trump I tells us, instead: expect chaos, which is not likely to be good…

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Project Syndicate asked a question:

Will Trumponomics Bring Boom or Bust in 2025? Some argue that Donald Trump’s election heralds robust US economic growth, fueled by tax cuts and deregulation, while others insist that his economic plans, if implemented, will blow up the federal budget, revive inflation, and erode the foundations of long-term US prosperity. In this Big Question, we ask J. Bradford DeLong, Maurice Obstfeld, Tara Pincock, and Michael R. Strain what they will be watching for in the coming year to decide which side is right.. <https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/will-trumponomics-bring-boom-or-bust-in-2025

Michael Strain hopes that Trump’s focus on the stock market may restrain his worst impulses as Trump’s Treasury Secretary pick, Scott Bessent, uses his fear of stock-market declines to deflate chaotic policy balloons. Larry Summers sees that is delusional and expects some unholy genetic-engineering chimera of Richard Milhouse Nixon and Juan Domingo Peron. Maury Obstfeld sees disastrous trade policies producing substantive economic decline likely accompanied by inflation to. Tara Pincock sees another upward leap in income and wealth inequality unaccompanied by any significant overall economic growth. And I think the only honest answer is William Goldman’s: nobody knows anything. In Goldman’s application, nobody knew anything about what would happen after a movie project got the green light. In our case, nobody knows anything about what the policies of the Trump II administration will turn out to be. But to the extent that past performance is a guide to future results—which it often is—the results of chaos are likely to be bad.

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Below the fold, an extended version of what I wrote for Project Syndicate:

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The Republican-Legislator Misinformation Meltdown of December 2024

A draft for Project Syndicate: No longer is it merely that America has “toddler-in-chief” as its Chief Executive: rather, all of Washington DC is a chaos-monkey cage…
Elon Musk tells lots of lies, GOP leaders cower, & Donald Trump & J.D. Vance try to somehow take advantage without having thought things through at all. The consequences of a government this broken so easily freaked out by misinformation are not likely to be good…

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The Scrooge Christmas-Time Government Shutdown sparked on December 18 by Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and J.D. Vance will almost surely be averted, or if not averted be over by Christmas. Almost surely.

But, even if it is, it is still worth running through what is happening right now.

The United States House and Senate leaderships had come, at nearly the last minute—the deadline to avoid a shutdown of non-essential federal government operations was December 20—to a compromise spending bill to cover the U.S. government’s operations over the next three months. None of the leaders of either party was particularly happy with it, but all could live with it, and their were very solid majorities in both the House and Senate willing to vote for it, and President Biden’s staff was willing to put in front of him for signature (I say “staff” because we really do not know what role Biden himself has been playing in administration substantive decisions over the past year and a half, do we?).

Then Elon Musk went berserk. “Elon Musk Fueled Backlash to Spending Plan with False and Misleading Claims: The billionaire stirred Republicans into a frenzy with 100-plus posts…” went the summarizing headline and subhead, accurate for once.

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BIWEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-12-18 Sa

My biweekly read-around…
Machines, automation, bots, teaching assistants, chaos monkeys, forecasts,& much MOAR…

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ONE IMAGE: & at Every Moment since 2000, the Average Forecast Looked Very Reasonable:

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ONE AUDIO: Automation, Management, & the Future of Work:

Erik Hurst, Chrisanthi Avgerou, Professor Noam Yuchtman:

As we move deeper into the 21st century, rapid advancements in automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence continue to reshape industries, raising concerns about the potential impact on workers. Will these innovations lead to widespread job losses? Or, as history suggests, will the labour market adapt?
In this insightful lecture, Erik Hurst will explore how recent developments in automation are influencing the labour market. Drawing parallels from the early 20th-century agricultural revolution, where the adoption of tractors and automated farming equipment drastically reduced agricultural employment but did not destabilize overall employment rates, Professor Hurst will examine how current automation trends may produce different effects.

<https://overcast.fm/+AAm_PepDMJ4>

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ONE VIDEO: Tedeschi-Trucks Band: Layla:

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Very Briefly Noted:

  1. Education & MAMLMs: Josh Gans’s view is that our students already find it much easier to ask questions of ChatGPT than to go to office hours or email and get an answer back a day or two later, and so they will ask ChatGPT the questions. The result is that the average quality of the answers they get back will be low: ChatGPT has been designed and trained to exhibit mammoth amounts of verbal linguistic fluency—it can be quite persuasive—but its level of substantive knowledge and misinformation is that of your average internet sposter.

    Yes, it is possible, through “prompt engineering”, to do something to direct ChatGPT’s attention to that part of its lossy-compressed training data that contains reliable information. But our students do not know how to do that. And even those who claim that they do know admit that it is a black and unreliable art.

    In these days of MAMLMs, we have already added an average internet sposter to our course teaching staff. And that s***poster will have many more contact hours with our students then we professors and our TAs will.

    Thus I believe that, given the evolving information ecology in which our undergraduates are already immersed, we have a very strong moral obligation to do what Josh Gans and Kevin Bryan and company at All Day TA are doing—to attempt to train the MAMLMs that are students are goig to consult over the next semester as the first-line answerers of their questions, and train them to be as high-quality as possible:

    Josh Gans: The Value of AI for Uneven Work: ‘Our launch of All Day TA <alldayta.com… [because] we believed that the ability to serve students well… was fundamentally limited by the scarcity of teacher attention. The aim is to use AI to relax the teacher-attention constraint <alldayta.com>. But teachers (including professors and their teaching assistants) are winners when attention is scarce. So it is not surprising that a product like ours would raise concerns. However, we believe it is important not to exclude students from the equation. They are the ones who suffer when teachers have limited attention…. The first thing to note is the volume of questions… an average of 50 [per student] by the end…. 30 per cent of questions are… [asked] to understand concepts… 30 per cent… students… searching for definitions or places… where they can learn more… 30 per cent are questions that students are otherwise embarrassed to ask…. The final [10%] ones are mostly administrative questions. The point here is that you may have thought your teaching team was serving your students, but they likely have many unanswered questions…. Variability. You can see three “events.”… The course began… a mid-term and a final…. Imagine employing a person whose job it was to wait around all semester doing very little until a couple of days when they have to do more than would be humanly possible…. The data here show just how extreme the [question-answering] work requirements of a teaching assistant are…. Ajay Agrawal… pointed out to me that this is precisely why software is valuable. It is built for tasks that have precisely this sort of unevenness. AI means that software can now step in [and]… during these surge times… triage the low-hanging but important fruit of student queries…. Those who turn up at… assistant office hours or write emails… will be… for tail questions either from struggling students or very advanced ones. Thus, teacher attention will be better allocated to where it is of the most value and away from where it is trivial. This is the promise of the “software eating the world” trend coming into the teaching world…

    <joshuagans.substack.com…> <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-82135732>

  2. Neofascism: Elon Musk thinks… the government should be shut down? …no Democrats should be elected to congress in 2026? …I agree that the absence of permitting reform is outrageous, but blocking that is on he Republicans. Otherwise, what is “outrageous” is the idea that the U.S. government is an effective going concern and that major shifts in what it does and how it does it should be undertaken only with substantial majority support. That is what Musk finds “outrageous”. And that is not where Trump is—Trump wants to punish his existing enemies, not make powerful new ones:

    Laura Rozen: Fwiw, a delegation of visiting European lawmakers who support Ukraine told journalists today [that the] GOP reps they met with suggested Trump had given his tacit support for the supplemental [keep-the-government-open continuing-resolution spending bill]… <x.com/lrozen/status/186…>

    And:

    Ron Filipowski: ‘Republican elected officials are going to rue the day they got into bed with him. I guess this means Musk will back a primary candidate against Mike Johnson now. And the rest of House Republican leadership…

    And:

    Elon Musk: ‘Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years… <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-82125249>

  3. Economics: Monetary Policy: The median FOMC participant’s estimate of the neutral FF rate is now 3.0%/year, up from 2.9%/year. And there is one dissent from the Federal Reserve’s cutting its FF target from 4.5%-4.75%/year to 4.25%-4.5%/year: Beth Hammack, Cleveland Fed Bank President, attending her second FOMC meeting. The only difference in the statement boilerplate is that “in considering additional adjustments to the target range…” has been changed to “in considering the extent and timing of additional adjustments to the target range…” And the FOMC expects the FF rate to average 4.125%/year over 2025.

    Jason Furman is on Hammack’s side here:

    Jason Furman: A year ago the FOMC projected 2024 real GDP growth would be 1.4%, core PCE inflation would be 2.4% and the FFR would end the year at 4.6%.Instead we’re set to have ~2.5% GDP growth, ~2.8% core PCE inflation but end the year with the FFR at 4.4%… <threads.net/@jason.furm…>

    Me? There are lots of shocks to the economy in the future behind the veil of time and ignorance, and the shocks you are thinking about are unlikely to be the shocks that come. Unless you are close to the ZLB—which we are not—or unless inflation or unemployment are away from targets, policy should be near neutral. That is what “neutral” is for. I could see a Fed wanting the FF rate to be at 3.5%/year average for 2025—half a %-point above neutral. But I cannot follow the logic behind the now very slow pace of anticipated rate cuts. <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-82119675>

  4. Live from the Chaos-Monkey Cage: What did you expect? Remember that Larry Hogan has been sold to us by NYT and WaPo for more than a decade as the smart, good Republican:

    PatriotTakes: ‘Republican [Maryland] Governor Larry Hogan posted video of the constellation Orion and claimed the stars were “large drones” above his home. Just a reminder that Republicans want to shut down the Department of Education… <bsky.app/profile/patrio…> <https://substack.com/profile/16879-brad-delong/note/c-81678383>

  5. Live from the Chaos-Monkey Cage: What, I ask you, did you expect?
    Donald Trump: ‘I can’t tell you [whether I have spoken to Vladimir Putin]. I can’t tell you. It’s just inappropriate…. The reason that I don’t like to tell you [about my secret plan to end the war] is that, as a negotiator, when I sit down and talk to some very brilliant young people: young, young, young, young. Compared to me, you’re very young. But when I talk to people—when I start I think I have a very good plan to help, but when I start exposing that plan, it becomes almost a worthless plan…. I would like to see Ukraine—okay, ready? You have to go back a little bit further. It would have never happened if I were president. Would have never happened…. It makes it so bad. And I had a meeting recently with a group of people from the government, where they come in and brief me, and I’m not speaking out of turn, the numbers of dead soldiers that have been killed in the last month are numbers that are staggering, both Russians and Ukrainians, and the amounts are fairly equal. You know, I know they like to say they weren’t, but they’re fairly equal, but the numbers of dead young soldiers lying on fields all over the place are staggering. It’s crazy what’s taking place. It’s crazy. I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia. Why are we doing that? We’re just escalating this war and making it worse. That should not have been allowed to be done. Now they’re doing not only missiles, but they’re doing other types of weapons. And I think that’s a very big mistake, very big mistake. But the level, the number of people dying is number one, not sustainable, and I’m talking on both sides. It’s really an advantage to both sides to get this thing done…. I want to reach an agreement, and the only way you’re going to reach an agreement is not to abandon [Ukraine]. You understand what that means, right?… Well, I just said [what] it [means]. You can’t reach an agreement if you abandon, in my opinion. And I disagree with the whole thing, because it should have never happened. Putin would have never invaded Ukraine if I were president for numerous reasons. Number one, they drove up the oil price. When they drove up the oil price, they made it a profit-making situation for him, the oil price should have been driven down. If it was driven down, you wouldn’t have had it wouldn’t have started just for pure economic reasons. But when it hits $80, $85, and $90 a barrel. I mean, he made, he made a lot of money. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, because he’s also suffered, but they are moving forward. You know, this is a war that’s been—this is a tragedy. This is death that’s far greater than anyone knows. When the real numbers come out, you’re going to see numbers that you’re not going to believe… <phillipspobrien.substac…>
    What Trump actually said:

    1. I won’t tell you anything—not whether I have talked to Putin, not what my plan to end the war is, not what “not abandoning Ukraine” means..

    2. War is horrible. This war is horrible. This war, especially, is more horrible than people realize…

    3. I want to reach an agreement to end this war…

    4. The Ukraine-Muscovy war would never have happened had I still been president…

    5. The Biden Administration really messed up: when the war started it should have provided massive incentives to pump more oil and should have drained the SPR in order to drive oil prices down so that Putin would have lost heavily rather than gained in terms of Russian government finances from his oil exports…


      Now (a) is certainly true—he does not tell us anything. (b) I can endorse as well—it is true. © is a term of art—one can “want” for things to happen without being willing to lift a finger to make them happen; perhaps that is what “want” means in this case—I really do not know, and I do not believe anyone else does, perhaps not even Trump himself. (d) strikes me as a strong sign of clinical mental illness: grandiose narcissism.

      & (e)—I do not know whether it is true or not, whether Putin’s Muscovy has seen the price of the energy it sells rise enough to offset what the sanctions-induced fall in the quantity sold has been. But it is, I think, the only sign of active neural circuitry we have here. <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-81675881

  6. Cognition: A picture is worth either a thousand or less than zero words, depending:
    Alex Sunderji: How to Make Great Charts: ‘Charts are both an efficient way of conveying numerical information and a way of grabbing the eye—a form of art…. The two are in tension…. Charts are hard work for readers. Use them sparingly…. Use the chart title to tell the reader the point the chart is making…. Use a subtitle to describe the data…. Add annotations… sparingly… clarif[ying]… what each series refers to… tell[ing]… the insight they should take away…. Format your charts for mobile and desktop… square… fonts for small-screen legibility. The WSJ uses a proprietary custom font called Retina. Arial and Helvetica are good… <home-economics.us/p/how…> <substack.com/@delongon…>

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What Had I Hoped to Teach This Just-Past Semester?

What Kinds of Questions Did I Hope That People Would Be Able to Answer After Taking Econ 135: The History of Economic Growth?…
On Thoukydides of the Athenai & the Treasure of Time: How a disgraced Athenian general’s insights still shape our understanding of the uses of history, the Greek rhetorical trope of looking not just in front & in back, left & right, up & down, but also looking forwards and backwards in time, the role of narrative in cognition, & thus how and why history helps us reason better about not just the history of economic growth but the present & future of the economy & its growth processes…

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Thrown out of his home city by the twists and turns of politics politics, hanging out in exile in weird barbarian places as an ex-aristocrat, too close to various Spartan sources and liking too many Spartans too much and so making nearly everyone in his home city uncomfortable—Thoukydides of the Athenai was not a guy doing conspicuously well as an aristocrat in the years around -400. And yet the guy was, or at least was presenting himself as, the most self-confident individual alive. He was, he wrote, writing his History of the Peloponnesian War for a discerning audience, for people who were:

such as shall desire to gain a true picture, both of the past and of what is likely hereafter, which in accordance with the course of human nature, to prove either just the same or very like it…

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Thoukydides claims that his book will help the readers whom he wants—those who do not want to be diverted and amused momentarily by fine-sounding words, but actually have deeper and more important goals—to gain a true picture of the human past and the human future. They will gain the power to not just look around and see the world as it appears around them in order to gain situational awareness with respect to the moment, but the power to look backwards and forwards in time. That, Josiah Ober notes, is precisely what, in the Iliad, Akhilleus condemns Agamemnon for definitely not doing. (Yes, it is very rich irony here that Akhilleus condemns Agamemnon for this particular flaw in his mental makeup.)

Thus Thoukydides claims that his book was “not written for a prize composition to please the ear for a moment”, but—in the single most arrogant statement I have ever read from any author, anywhere, anywhen—rather is:

a treasure for all time…

Thoukydides was right.

He was thus right about at least one of the major purposes of history. Our students are human beings who will spend their lives engaging in human affairs. We should try to teach them how to do this well. And so order to gain insight into “human affairs” in general we are led to study history.

I think, at bottom, that it is a question of cognitive load. We reason narratively and analogically: the world is made up of stories with beginnings, middles, and ends that follow; and this story is like that one. This is who we are, and how we think. Thus in this I agree with Dan Davies: our cognition is such that we find it much, much much easier to either dismiss or utilize an analogy than to model a situation from scratch. Our history is great at providing us with a very large library of potential analogies and analogues. We can then run through them quickly, and wind up with insights and ideas and questions to pursue.

That this is an important use of history has, indeed, been known for at least two and a half thousand years. Ober stresses that by the year -700 and the compilation of the Iliad this verbal expression—to look backwards and forwards in time—had become a standard trope for thinking clearly and rationally about a situation. It is, he notes, found five times in Homer’s poem as a quality of thought possessed by:

older men… having to assess a high-stakes situation… and offering advice about the best, although not the most obvious or most popular, course of action… [that] would, in each case, avoid catastrophic outcomes—were it followed…. [But the] “speech was not to their mind”… and disaster follows…

The ultimate lesson the Iliad teaches here is thus rather grim: to look backwards and forwards in time is a very valuable mental quality to possess, but it is not highly valued.

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A final exam is a time to see if students can actually synthesize. So on our final we made them write an essay—a single, three-hour essay.

Here are what were my first drafts of the four essay questions from which we made the students choose one to answer:


Economic Instability & Political Economy: Economic instability is the result of shocks to the economy—famines, plagues, wars elsewhere, collapses in business confidence, and other factors—that are either amplified or reduced by governments’ destructive or constructive attempts to handle them. Political economy is how people with economic interests pressure or control the government in how it deals out the cards people use to play their respective hands as they live their economic life. What, throughout history, are the major ways in which episodes of economic instability typically have had effects on political economy? What, throughout history, are the major ways in which events in political economy typically have had effects on economic instability?

Inequality—International & Intranational: How, today, are people’s lives likely to be different if they are (a) born in a rich family or (b) born in a poor family in a (1) rich country oe a (2) poor country? Analyze these four cases—that is, (a1), (a2), (a3), and (a4). Which of the differences is most striking and most important? And—here is the history part—how are the answers to these questions if we look at not today but at the year 1500, at the end of the Agrarian Age?

What Does Humanity’s Economic Transformation Mean?: Choose a country. How are people’s economic lives in it today different from how they were back in the year 1000 or so? And how much does this matter for them, and for their pursuit of their happiness?

Modern Economic Growth & Its Sources: Back in 1776 Scottish moral philosopher and economist Adam Smith, writing in his Wealth of Nations, was typical of economists then in that he thought that we were only likely to see more than subsistence-level working-class wages in countries that had, relatively recently, undergone substantial positive changes in their laws and institutions. He pointed to: “China [which] has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world.… [and has] acquired that full complement of riches which the nature of its laws and institutions permits it to acquire… [with] low wages of labour, and…. A labourer… if by digging the ground a whole day… can get what will purchase a small quantity of rice in the evening, he is contented. The condition of artificers is, if possible, still worse…” We, by contrast, do not believe that we need constant and substantial improvement in our laws and institutions in order to keep the working-class bulk of the human population away from low subsistence-level wages. Why do we no longer fear this?

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CROSSPOST: ARCHIVES: Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the 1936 New York State Democratic Convention

“Make no mistake about this: the Republican leadership today is not against the way we have done the job. The Republican leadership is against the job’s being done…” 1936-09-29, Syracuse, NY…

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Let me warn you and let me warn the Nation against the smooth evasion which says, “Of course we believe all these things; we believe in social security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present Administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them- we will do more of them we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.”

But, my friends, these evaders are banking too heavily on the shortness of our memories. No one will forget that they had their golden opportunity—twelve long years of it.

Remember, too, that the first essential of doing a job well is to want to see the job done. Make no mistake about this: the Republican leadership today is not against the way we have done the job. The Republican leadership is against the job’s being done.

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<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3RHnKYNvx8>

Ladies and gentlemen:

From force of long habit I almost said, “My fellow delegates.”

Tonight you and I join forces for the 1936 campaign.

We enter it with confidence. Never was there greater need for fidelity to the underlying conception of Americanism than there is today. And once again it is given to our party to carry the message of that Americanism to the people.

The task on our part is twofold: First, as simple patriotism requires, to separate the false from the real issues; and, secondly, with facts and without rancor, to clarify the real problems for the American public.

There will be—there are—many false issues. In that respect, this will be no different from other campaigns. Partisans, not willing to face realities, will drag out red herrings as they have always done—to divert attention from the trail of their own weaknesses.

This practice is as old as our democracy. Avoiding the facts—fearful of the truth—a malicious opposition charged that George Washington planned to make himself king under a British form of government; that Thomas Jefferson planned to set up a guillotine under a French Revolutionary form of government; that Andrew Jackson soaked the rich of the Eastern seaboard and planned to surrender American democracy to the dictatorship of a frontier mob. They called Abraham Lincoln a Roman Emperor; Theodore Roosevelt a Destroyer; Woodrow Wilson a self-constituted Messiah.

In this campaign another herring turns up. In former years it has been British and French- and a variety of other things. This year it is Russian. Desperate in mood, angry at failure, cunning in purpose, individuals and groups are seeking to make Communism an issue in an election where Communism is not a controversy between the two major parties.

Here and now, once and for all, let us bury that red herring, and destroy that false issue. You are familiar with my background; you know my heritage; and you are familiar, especially in the State of New York, with my public service extending back over a quarter of a century. For nearly four years I have been President of the United States. A long record has been written. In that record, both in this State and in the national capital, you will find a simple, clear and consistent adherence not only to the letter, but to the spirit of the American form of government.

To that record, my future and the future of my Administration will conform. I have not sought, I do not seek, I repudiate the support of any advocate of Communism or of any other alien “ism” which would by fair means or foul change our American democracy.

That is my position. It always has been my position. It always will be my position.

There is no difference between the major parties as to what they think about Communism. But there is a very great difference between the two parties in what they do about Communism.

I must tell you why. Communism is a manifestation of the social unrest which always comes with widespread economic maladjustment. We in the Democratic party have not been content merely to denounce this menace. We have been realistic enough to face it. We have been intelligent enough to do something about it. And the world has seen the results of what we have done.

In the spring of 1933 we faced a crisis which was the ugly fruit of twelve years of neglect of the causes of economic and social unrest. It was a crisis made to order for all those who would overthrow our form of government. Do I need to recall to you the fear of those days—the reports of those who piled supplies in their basements, who laid plans to get their fortunes across the border, who got themselves hideaways in the country against the impending upheaval? Do I need to recall the law-abiding heads of peaceful families, who began to wonder, as they saw their children starve, how they would get the bread they saw in the bakery window? Do I need to recall the homeless boys who were traveling in bands through the countryside seeking work, seeking food —desperate because they could find neither? Do I need to recall the farmers who banded together with pitchforks to keep the sheriff from selling the farm home under foreclosure? Do I need to recall the powerful leaders of industry and banking who came to me in Washington in those early days of 1933 pleading to be saved?

Most people in the United States remember today the fact that starvation was averted, that homes and farms were saved, that banks were reopened, that crop prices rose, that industry revived, and that the dangerous forces subversive of our form of government were turned aside.

A few people- a few only—unwilling to remember, seem to have forgotten those days.

In the summer of 1933, a nice old gentleman wearing a silk hat fell off the end of a pier. He was unable to swim. A friend ran down the pier, dived overboard and pulled him out; but the silk hat floated off with the tide. After the old gentleman had been revived, he was effusive in his thanks. He praised his friend for saving his life. Today, three years later, the old gentleman is berating his friend because the silk hat was lost.

Why did that crisis of 1929 to 1933 pass without disaster?

The answer is found in the record of what we did. Early in the campaign of 1932 I said: “To meet by reaction that danger of radicalism is to invite disaster. Reaction is no barrier to the radical, it is a challenge, a provocation. The way to meet that danger is to offer a workable program of reconstruction, and the party to offer it is the party with clean hands.” We met the emergency with emergency action. But far more important than that, we went to the roots of the problem, and attacked the cause of the crisis. We were against revolution. Therefore, we waged war against those conditions which make revolutions—against the inequalities and resentments which breed them. In America in 1933 the people did not attempt to remedy wrongs by overthrowing their institutions. Americans were made to realize that wrongs could and would be set right within their institutions. We proved that democracy can work.

I have said to you that there is a very great difference between the two parties in what they do about Communism. Conditions congenial to Communism were being bred and fostered throughout this Nation up to the very day of March 4, 1933. Hunger was breeding it, loss of homes and farms was breeding it, closing banks were breeding it, a ruinous price level was breeding it. Discontent and fear were spreading through the land. The previous national Administration, bewildered, did nothing.

In their speeches they deplored it, but by their actions they encouraged it. The injustices, the inequalities, the downright suffering out of which revolutions come—what did they do about these things? Lacking courage, they evaded. Being selfish, they neglected. Being short-sighted, they ignored. When the crisis came—as these wrongs made it sure to come—America was unprepared.

Our lack of preparation for it was best proved by the cringing and the fear of the very people whose indifference helped to make the crisis. They came to us pleading that we should do, overnight, what they should have been doing through the years.

And the simple causes of our unpreparedness were two: First, a weak leadership, and, secondly, an inability to see causes, to understand the reasons for social unrest—the tragic plight of 90 percent of the men, women and children who made up the population of the United States.

It has been well said that “The most dreadful failure of which any form of government can be guilty is simply to lose touch with reality, because out of this failure all imaginable forms of evil grow. Every empire that has crashed has come down primarily because its rulers did not know what was going on in the world and were incapable of learning.”

It is for that reason that our American form of government will continue to be safest in. Democratic hands. The real, actual, undercover Republican leadership is the same as it was four years ago. That leadership will never comprehend the need for a program of social justice and of regard for the well-being of the masses of our people.

I have been comparing leadership in Washington. This contrast between Democratic and Republican leadership holds true throughout the length and breadth of the State of New York. As far back as the year 1910, the old Black Horse Cavalry in Albany, which we old people will remember, was failing to meet changing social conditions by appropriate social legislation. Here was a State noted for its industry and noted for its agriculture—a State with the greatest mixture of population- where the poorest and the richest lived, literally, within a stone’s throw of each other—in short a situation made to order for potential unrest. And yet in this situation the best that the Republican leaders of those days could say was: “Let them eat cake.” What would have happened if that reactionary domination had continued through all these hard years?

Starting in 1911, a Democratic leadership came into power, and with it a new philosophy of government. I had the good fortune to come into public office at that time. I found other young men in the Legislature—men who held the same philosophy; one of them was Bob Wagner; another was Al Smith. We were all joined in a common cause. We did not look on government as something apart from the people. We thought of it as something to be used by the people for their own good.

New factory legislation setting up decent standards of safety and sanitation; limitation of the working hours of women in industry; a workmen’s compensation law; a one-day-rest-in-seven law; a full train-crew law; a direct-primary law—these laws and many more were passed which were then called radical and alien to our form of government. Would you or any other Americans call them radical or alien today?

In later years, first under Governor Smith, then during my Governorship, this program of practical intelligence was carried forward over the typical and unswerving opposition of Republican leaders throughout our State.

And today the great tradition of a liberal, progressive Democratic Party has been carried still further by your present Governor, Herbert H. Lehman. He has begun a program of insurance to remove ‘the spectre of unemployment from the working people of the State. He has broadened our labor legislation. He has extended the supervision of public utility companies. He has proved himself an untiring seeker for the public good; a doer of social justice; a wise, conscientious, clear-headed and businesslike administrator of the executive branch of our Government. And be it noted that his opponents are led and backed by the same forces and, in many cases, by the same individuals who, for a quarter of a century, have tried to hamstring progress within our State. The overwhelming majority of our citizens, up-state and down-state, regardless of party, propose to return him and his Administration to Albany for another two years.

His task in Albany, like my task in Washington, has been to maintain contact between statecraft and reality. In New York and in Washington, Government which has rendered more than lip service to our Constitutional Democracy has done a work for the protection and preservation of our institutions that could not have been accomplished by repression and force.

Let me warn you and let me warn the Nation against the smooth evasion which says, “Of course we believe all these things; we believe in social security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present Administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them- we will do more of them we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.”

But, my friends, these evaders are banking too heavily on the shortness of our memories. No one will forget that they had their golden opportunity—twelve long years of it.

Remember, too, that the first essential of doing a job well is to want to see the job done. Make no mistake about this: the Republican leadership today is not against the way we have done the job. The Republican leadership is against the job’s being done.

Look to the source of the promises of the past. Governor Lehman knows and I know how little legislation in the interests of the average citizen would be on the statute books of the State of New York, and of the Federal Government, if we had waited for Republican leaders to pass it.

The same lack of purpose of fulfillment lies behind the promises of today. You cannot be an Old Guard Republican in the East, and a New Deal Republican in the West. You cannot promise to repeal taxes before one audience and promise to spend more of the taxpayers’ money before another audience. You cannot promise tax relief for those who can afford to pay, and, at the same time, promise more of the taxpayers’ money for those who are in need. You simply cannot make good on both promises at the same time.

Who is there in America who believes that we can run the risk of turning back our Government to the old leadership which brought it to the brink of 1933? Out of the strains and stresses of these years we have come to see that the true conservative is the man who has a real concern for injustices and takes thought against the day of reckoning. The true conservative seeks to protect the system of private property and free enterprise by correcting such injustices and inequalities as arise from it. The most serious threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the need for change. Liberalism becomes the protection for the far-sighted conservative.

Never has a Nation made greater strides in the safeguarding of democracy than we have made during the past three years. Wise and prudent men- intelligent conservatives—have long known that in a changing world worthy institutions can be conserved only by adjusting them to the changing time. In the words of the great essayist, “The voice of great events is proclaiming to us. Reform if you would preserve.” I am that kind of conservative because I am that kind of liberal.

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HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: An Ur-Text by George Stigler for Dark Satanic Millian Liberalism, & Related Matters...

From 2021-05-23…
For the rather strange George Stigler of 1949, the rather strange young optimistic David Frum of 2004, and many others, the real point of the market economy is not to create prosperity but rather to build character—the distant faraway green light on the dock of prosperity is there to encourage industry, but woe to those who actually manage to get into their boat and motor to the light! And so, as, or rather more, key to the market economy’s true proper role as a builder of Protestant bourgeois virtue, is that the market economy must create uncertainty and constant risk of poverty in order to play its proper societal role.

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An ur-text for the doctrines of Dark Satanic Millian Liberalism:

Here George Stigler, writing back in 1949, seeks to assimilate the classical economists Smith, Senior, and Mill to his claim that a good economic system does not produce prosperity but rather builds character:

George Stigler (1949): Five Lectures on Economic Problems: ‘Why encourage men to work and save ? The customary answer is to maximize output…. One might defend the goal of maximum output by arguing that the ultimate utilitarian goal was maximum satisfaction, and that greater output will lead to larger increases of satisfaction than will greater equality. This interpretation is plausible, but I believe it is mistaken. Most of the important classical economists explicitly rejected maximum satisfaction as a goal, and none except Bentham explicitly adopted it….

The [Adam] Smith of the Wealth of Nations… propos[ed]… labour disutility as the true measure of value over time…. Utility is independent of income…. Labour disutility appeared to have a more durable and stable significance: an hour’s toil was as irksome in 1400 as in 1776. This view of the utility of income as dependent only on the incomes of other times and other people accounts for much of the neglect of utility in the classical economics.

[Nassau] Senior reached and stated the law of diminishing marginal utility, only to dismiss it: “The desire for distinction… may be pronounced to be the most powerful of human passions. The most obvious source of distinction is the possession of superior wealth…. To seem more rich, or, to use a common expression, to keep up a better appearance, is, with almost all men who are placed beyond the fear of actual want, the ruling principle …. For this… they undergo toil which no pain or pleasure addressed to the senses would lead them to encounter; into which no slave could be lashed or bribed…”

Mill followed the tradition: “I know not why it should be a matter of congratulation that persons who are already richer than any one needs to be, should have doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no pleasure…. It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object…”

Why, then, did the classical economists display such great and persistent concern with policies that maximize output? Their concern was with the maximizing, not with the output. The struggle of men for larger incomes was good because in the process they learned independence, self-reliance, self-discipline—because, in short, they became better men… <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84261>

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As history of economic thought, these observations by Stigler are… quite bad.

John Stuart Mill, unless you work very hard to cherry-pick isolated quotations, had a strong preference for leisure, bildung, and the philosophical life rather than extending the working day, and his attitudes were much complicated by his Malthusianism, but he did not think the marginal utility of consumption was at all close to zero. Smith’s observations about the vanity of acquisition are aimed at the upper classes: for him the marginal utility of consumption for the overwhelming bulk of the population—even in rich England—is very large indeed.

And as for Nassau Senior, well, for the Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford to compare the disutility of his labors scratching out one more article to increase his distinction to those of the slaves in Jamaica under the lash who grew his sugar and had a life expectancy on the plantation of seven years, or to those of the adult males in South Carolina growing his cotton, enslaved, lashed, and fed 4000 calories a day lest they did of overwork otherwise—Nassau Senior was a great ass, and it is transitive: anyone who quotes Nassau Senior without observing that he was a great ass is a great ass.

In the Grand Architecture of Stigler thought, he misuses the classical economists here to gain support for the first of the three grand claims that make up his intellectual edifice:

  1. The actual quantity and distribution of wealth is unimportant—needs to be dismissed from consideration.

  2. It is very important that the rich not be taxed and regulated, because to do so would keep them from exerting their powers to the fullest to become excellent and demonstrate their excellence.

  3. It is very important that the not-rich not be insured by society against want, for to do so would deprive them of the spur that they need to improve their characters and achieve what excellence they might be capable of.

For most people who make this three-part argument, it is, as John Holbo quotes Lionel Trilling as assessing it, not a thought but only an “irritable mental gesture”. At least as I read Stigler, however, he is dead serious.

Cue John Holbo:

John Holbo (2003): Dead Right: ‘[From David Frum]: “The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk…. Risk makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches them self-control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top. Social security, student loans, and other government programs make it far less catastrophic than it used to be for middle-class people to dissolve their families. Without welfare and food stamps, poor people would cling harder to working-class respectability than they do not…”

The thing that makes capitalism good, apparently, is not that it generates wealth more efficiently than other known economic engines. No, the thing that makes capitalism good is that, by forcing people to live precarious lives, it causes them to live in fear of losing everything and therefore to… behave ‘conservatively’…. Let’s call this position (what would be an evocative name?) ‘dark satanic millian liberalism’: the ethico-political theory that says laissez faire capitalism is good if and only if under capitalism the masses are forced to work in environments that break their will to want to ‘jump across the big top’, i.e. behave in a self-assertive, celebratorily individualist manner. Ergo, a dark satanic millian liberal will tend to oppose capitalism to the degree that, say, Virginia Postrel turns out to be right about capitalism ushering in a bright new age of individual liberty, in which people try new things for the sheer joy of realizing themselves, etc., etc….

Would [David Frum] really be willing to go so far…. Why, yes—yes, he would. Because he believes…. “Shrinking government has always been a political means rather than an end in itself. The end was the preservation of the American heritage, and beyond that, the heritage of the classical and Judeo-Christian (or Christian toute court) West. If that heritage could be preserved without fighting an ugly and probably doomed battle to shrink government, most conservatives would drop the size-of-government issue with hardly a pang…”

But is Frum really serious when he says this?… Surely Frum is at most guilty of insufficiently vigorous advocacy of prosperity. He can’t be expressly advocating the lack thereof.

Oddly, there are various strong hints that he is. Example: “Contemporary conservatives still value that old American character. William Bennett in his lectures reads admiringly from an account of the Donner party written by a survivor that tells the story in spare, stoic style. He puts the letter down and asks incredulously, “Where did those people go?”… If you believe that early Americans possessed a fortitude that present-day Americans lack, and if you think the loss is an important one, then you have to think hard about why that fortitude disappeared…. Reorganizing the method by which they select and finance their schools won’t do it… neither will the line-item veto, or discharge petitions, or entrusting Congress with the power to deny individual NEA grants, or court decisions strinking down any and all acts of politically correct tyranny…. worthwhile though each and every one of those things may be…. We must identify in what way our social conditions have changed in order to understand why…. There have been hundreds of such changes—never mind since the Donner party’s day, just since 1945.… But the expansion of government is the only one we can do anything about. All of these changes have had the same effect: the emancipation of the individual appetite from restrictions imposed on it by limited resources, or religious dread, or community disapproval, or the risk of disease or personal catastrophe…”

Words fail me; links not much better. The Donner Party? Where did all these people go?

Into each other, to a dismaying extent.

A passage from one of those moving, stoical diary entries: “Mrs. Murphy said here yesterday that [she] thought she would commence on Milt and eat him. I don’t think she has done so yet, [but] it is distresing. The Donno[r]s told the California folks that they [would] commence to eat the dead people 4 days ago, if they did not succeed in finding their cattle then under ten or twelve feet of snow & did not know the spot or near it, I suppose they have [cannibalized]… ere this time…”

I think we are beginning to see why Frum feels that his philosophy may be a loser come election time….

At this point let me step back and make quite clear:

I don’t actually think Frum is… actually advocating the intentional infliction of dire economic hardship and suffering—let alone cannibalism—on the American people for the sake of hardening them up, stiffening the national spine. I think if there were some Americans caught in the snowy mountains these days, he’d advocating sending in the helicopters and so forth–and he wouldn’t order them to stand off, just filming the poor schmucks eating each other for Frum’s subsequent viewing pleasure and moral edification.

Which is to say: Frum is not thinking about what he’s saying. Because what he is saying more or less instantaneously implies an indefinitely large cloud of things he really–really, really–doesn’t think….

Orwell talks about this in chapter 12 of The Road to Wigan Pier, incidentally: the naturalness of hostility to the softening that results from modern machine civilization. That’s the feeling, he explains. But, of course, next comes the thought: “So long as the machine is there, one is under an obligation to use it…. to use archaic tools, to put silly difficulties in your own way, would be… pretty-pretty arty and craftiness…. Revert to handwork in a machine age, and you are back in Ye Old Tea Shoppe or the Tudor villa with the sham beams tacked to the wall…”

That’s Frum in a nutshell. Had the feeling. Stalled out before he got the thought. What Frum has got, to repeat, is just a feeling that the kids these days are getting a bit soft. Everyone feels this way sometimes, of course–since it’s true. But some people have thoughts as well as feelings about this attendant effect of civilization…. Lionel Trilling… in 1953: anti-liberals do not, by and large, “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Irritable mental gestures… <https://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dead_right.html>

In short, Frum (the young 2004 Frum) does not really mean it. But, I think, Stigler really does: the lower classes really should not be able to afford meat at every meal.

And, of course, there is the classic statement about how success in the modern market economy does not get you to but rather away from where you really want to be—that it is only fear of poverty that builds character, while the accomplishment of financial success brings disaster and corruption and an early death:

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby: ‘Gatsby’s house was still empty when I left—the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine…. I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive…

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past… <https://archive.org/details/the-great-gatsby-1st-ed-1925>

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BIWEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-12-14 Sa

My biweekly read-around…
G-5 growth stumbling in the 1970s and again after the Great Recession; ObamaCare solved the Entitlement-Spending Crisis, a rapid 10% swing in relative wages for non-managers & against managers, & much MOAR…

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ONE IMAGE: Growth since WWII Among the G-5:

When I look at this graph, I see American growth slowed by (a) the 1970s, (b) the Reagan deficits and the consequent starving of private and public investment, © the failure of the Clinton administration to restore public investment, and (d) the Great Recession and following Anæmic Recovery. These do not seem to me to be at all “structural”, but rather policy. And it was policy choices that have led to European and Japanese growth retardation vis-à-vis America.

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ANOTHER IMAGE: ObamaCare Really Worked at Cost Control, Didn’t It?

Yet nobody I can find will say that they are certain as to what the mechanisms are. But one thing is clear: Obama solved the Entitlement-Spending Crisis. Today there is a new Fund Tax Cuts for the Rich Crisis. But it is not the old Entitlement-Spending Crisis.

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YET A THIRD IMAGE: The Anti-Manager Recovery:

Arin Dube points out a big fact. Non-managerial workers gaining 2.5% vis-à-vis all workers, and managerial workers claiming 25% of the wage bill—that tells us that relative to the average non-managerial workers are up +2.5% and managerial workers are down -7.5% for a 10% swing that happened very quckly—much too quickly to be a technological fact—and is thus some kind of social fact. But what kind?

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ONE VIDEO: Biden Warns Trump Not to Screw Up the Economy:

A very nice speech saying what is what about Biden economic stewardship. My view, increasingly, is that inflation was transitory—and thus that Biden and Powell had gotten the balance of risks right—until things were upset by the Muscovite attack on Ukraine. Larry Summers worries that now that we have had one inflation, the start of another one will have a much easier time destabilizing expectations, hence the Fed needs to get us and keep us below 2%/year for a while. And I wish I did not think he has a large enough chance of being right to make an end to the rate cut path the optimal policy.

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ANOTHER VIDEO: Life in the Agrarian Age Nasty, Brutish, & Short:

Pathologists looking at bones as an area in which human history is not speaking to us loudly…

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Very Briefly Noted:

  1. Economics: To say that the 2004 Subaru wagon is long in the tooth is a massive understatement, and while there is joy to be found in the gamification of keeping it on the road, perhaps there are other kinds of more joy to be found in a new car. But the COVID plague, and the auto-company cartel of how if nobody is willing to pay extra for a better place in the chip-supply line they can all massively raise their prices. And it seemed that what may well be our last vehicle should be both (a) large and (b) electric. So is it finally time?:

    Conner Golden: 2025 Volkswagen ID. Buzz Review: This Sparks Joy: ‘The verdict: The all-new Volkswagen ID. Buzz is one of the most characterful, interesting and fun-to-operate new vehicles on the market regardless of its status as an electric minivan. Groovy, baby! Versus the competition: Well, ah, there isn’t any competition. At the time of its release, the ID. Buzz is the sole all-electric minivan on the market, with the closest competitor being the Kia EV9 three-row SUV. Compared with that, the Buzz is comprehensibly better for frequently shuttling a full house, though its modest driving range and power might turn some shoppers off of it. The 2025 Volkswagen ID. Buzz? Oh, that’s a neat vehicle. Drives sweet, looks fantastic, is cleverly packaged. I can see why someone would plunk down the heavy side of $60,000 for one of their own. I’m surprised, to be honest. Prior to driving the ID. Buzz, I was fairly convinced VW’s very expensive electric minivan was set to be D.O.A. in the USA. Its $61,545 base price (including destination) and EPA-rated range <fueleconomy.gov/feg/Pow…> of 231-234 miles looked to be the double tap keeping consumers out of seats, particularly during a period of slowing EV sales… <cars.com/articles/2025-…> <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-81487490>

  2. Economics: Barry here calls for the German Establishment to recognize that the Neoliberal Order has fallen as the globalized value-chain mode of production is replaced by the attention info-bio tech mode of production. He calls for all of the Draghi things. But would they, even if they could be implemented, be sufficient? I do not think we understand the coming attention info-bio tech mode of production societal hardware well enough to understand what software superstructure of political economy and socio-cultural patterns will optimally suit it:

    Barry Eichengreen: The Crisis that Germany Needs: ‘There is a profound mismatch between Germany’s current economy and its institutional inheritance…. If the current crisis prompts a wholesale rethink of that inheritance, the logjam… could finally be broken…. West Germany developed a set of economic and political institutions ideally suited to the conditions of the time…. Quality manufacturing… successful vocational training and apprenticeship…. Growing world trade… production of motor vehicles and capital goods… comparative advantage…. A bank-based financial system to channel funds to dominant firms…. Harmony… and limit[ed] workplace disruptions… [from] management codetermination <en.dgb.de/fields-of……. The happy result of this alignment of institutions and opportunities was the Wirtschaftswunder…. Unfortunately, these same institutions and arrangements proved exceedingly difficult to modify when circumstances changed…. Solutions… are obvious: Invest more in higher education…. Develop a venture capital industry…. Use macroeconomic policies to stimulate spending…. Rethink codetermination and a mixed-member proportional electoral system <aceproject.org/ace-en/to… that has outlived its usefulness…. Release the “debt brake”…. Invest more in research and development and in infrastructure…. Imagining such changes may be easy, but implementing them is not… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/german-economic-crisis-could-break-institutional-logjam-by-barry-eichengreen-2024-12> <https://substack.com/profile/16879-brad-delong/note/c-81486605>

  3. War & Rumors of War: 10,000 (perhaps) of Hamas’s cadres and more than 50,000 civilians killed out of the 2 million Gaza population and the entire population of the strip turned into refugees by now in Israel’s now more than one year old assault on Gaza. From our perspective this is, but frlm the IDF’s perspective, this is not a disproportionate ratio of terrorist to civilian casualties fighting an urban guerrilla movement with little tactical doctrine other than to shield behind civilians. Those IDF habits of mind and that view—combined with the fact that by now 40% of the Israeli Jewish population is descended from people who saw nearly all of their relatives die at the hands of the Nazis because they had no place to run, 60% of the Israeli Jewish population is descended from people who survived when the post-1947 ethnic cleansing of Jews from the rest of the Middle East began because they did have someplace to run, and all think that Palestinians are owed something not by them but by those currently living in the former Jewish Quarters of Damascus and Cairo—is why we are now on a trajectory along which it is more likely than not that some acting in the name of Palestine will destroy Tel Aviv by nuclear fire sometime in the next half-century. They—we—need to stop. And also, along our current trajectory, it is more likely than not that some acting in the name of Israel will Damascus and more by nuclear fire sometime in the next half-century. They—we—need to stop. But the habits of mind and views why that second is so are well-exemplified by Rashid Khalidi here—trumpeting the military “destruction” of Israel’s Gaza Division by Hamas, and how Israel is doomed if it loses the “complete support” of the West. I do think we are damned:

    Rashid Khalidi & Mark O’Connell: Interview: ‘O’Connell: “At what point do we stop talking about America’s ‘complicity’ in this slaughter, and begin to talk of America as an antagonist, of America being at war with Palestine?…” Khalidi: “The United States is actually directly at war [with Palestine]…. O’Connell: “It seems to me to be very difficult to make sense of what [Israel is] doing if you don’t believe… [the] ethnic cleansing [of Gaza]… is underway….” Khalidi: “There is an almost unquenchable desire for revenge for what happened on October 7 of last year: the destruction not just of the Gaza division of the Israeli army… of a large number of settlements.… the killing of the largest number of Israeli civilians since 1948; the abduction of over a hundred civilians and perhaps a hundred soldiers; the destruction of a sense of security…. The thirst for revenge… unquenchable…. The shifts in public opinion we’ve seen in the West…. Israel cannot go on without the complete support of the West. It’s not possible. The project doesn’t work. We’re in a different world than the world we’ve been in for over a century. And that might be a source of optimism…” <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/12/19/israels-revenge-an-interview-with-rashid-khalidi-mark-oconnell/>

  4. Public Reason: Yes, “liberalism” is very much a plural noun: it is large, it contains multitudes. And yet it does have boundaries: Classical Athens does remain pre-liberal, and utopian socialists are non-liberal. I think much becomes clear if you start with Judith Shklar and the Liberalism of Fear and with Alain and Tolerance Is a Treaty, and pick up all of the threads that pass through those two nexuses:

    Amicus: Liberalism is a Plural Noun: ‘Liberalism, like any syncretic faith, has more than one true origin. Liberalism, like any state cult, has but a single lawful present…. Received Liberalism takes an expansive view of its ancestry… Hamilton and Paine, Mill and Bastiat, Voltaire and Montesquieu….[But] consider Rights…. For Bentham… legal constructs with a practical aim…. For… Paine… written into the laws of nature…. And for William Lloyd Garrison…rights… [were] written in the hearts of men. These are not the same concept…. In virtue of what, then, are these thinkers part of a single liberal tradition, while Athens remains pre- and the utopian socialists non-?… Market society… is the distinctly liberal political economy, and yet we find no shortage of liberal giants recoiling from it in well-justified horror…. Pluralism…. Robespierre…? Rousseau? Roosevelt?… There is no pluralism to be found in disposing of reactionaries, and not much more to be found in welcoming their hatred. And yet these are liberals, or else liberalism is… sad and small…. You can call it “liberalism”… [but] it’s just modernity. Marx… as much as Mill… Proudhon, and Owen too…. There is no such thing as liberalism: only liberalisms, or else the Enlightenment, of which the Left is the best and truest heir. But that story, too, will have to wait… <https://homosum.substack.com/p/liberalism-is-a-plural-noun> <https://substack.com/profile/16879-brad-delong/note/c-81485513>

  5. Public Reason: No: to say that the “Vanguardist Gambit” of removing “unacceptable constraints [on freedom]… [via] the imposition of additional constraints” had “mixed effects” in the twentieth century is to descend into self-parody. As is the claim that positive liberty claims are simply “traffic laws writ large”. Amicus would get further, I think, if he would acknowledge two things: First, that the Left-Neoliberal Order bet was that (a) a not too unequal distribution of income plus (b) market coördination of the human division of labor © supported by a properly developmental state would get us as close to utopia as humanly possible. And, second, that that bet has led to bankruptcy: An Invisible Hand playing a losing card. And we do not know what other human organizational instrumentalities besides the market we need for freedom and community plus human coördination at planetary scale:

    Amicus: Too Few Concepts of Liberty: ‘Against Isaiah Berlin…. Freedom is an ancient cluster-concept, carried down through two thousand years…. Its severed brambled branches have been put to use in anger in a hundred different ways. To say what freedom really means is to brandish one again. Presently it’s a certain sort of liberal who… would cut the left out of their family tree, if they could only find a way…. In a tribal-signal sense: the left begins when the applause light of “equality” floods the center stage. More sophisticated accounts employ those same key words, but in a very different way…. Liberal freedom is; it is private and it is personal, outside the public sphere… politics only insofar as the political intrudes: freedom was there first, they would like to say…. Isaiah Berlin… frames those of us who advocate for concrete visions of the good as incipient totalitarians, to be ignored if not repressed…. Berlin, notoriously, found the roots of Stalinism in Rousseau…. [But] Rousseau is… a classical republican: his ideal state is not just a guarantor of natural liberties, but plays an active role in constituting them…. The distinction Berlin draws in Two Concepts of Liberty, between the “negative liberty” of non-interference and the “positive liberty” of being “one’s own master”, is meant, in essence, to cast suspicion on all substantive aims…. Two Concepts is a very clever bit of rhetoric…. Good rhetoric, however, does not imply good faith…. Marx[‘s]… aim is not, as Berlin supposes, to supplant individual irrationality with a collective rational will—it is to do away with the irrational collective will of Capital. Collective reason is the means; the end remains the freedom of the individual, which must be collectively maintained…. Where Berlin sees free choice among alternatives in the liberal present, Marx sees fixed choices handed down from on high—not by human reason, but by the blind inhuman will of all our choices summed…. There are certain laws and institutions which genuinely make us more free… traffic laws writ large. There are others which impose unacceptable constraints, and must be actively removed…. We are particularly unlucky… [that removal is] not… open to us without the imposition of additional constraints…. These claims can stretch further than they ought to; this sort of vanguardist gambit has had mixed effects <homosum.substack.com/p/…> <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-81489706>

  6. Economics & Journamalism: One of the many, many things to damn the editorial management of the New York Times for is their continued inability to figure out that stuffing anybody into 600 words twice a week is a recipe for knee-jerk prejudice and bias mongering, rather than for bringing information, knowledge, and analysis to the table in order to help your readers understand and act in the world. Krugman coped with these hobbles orders of magnitude better than his peers. Looking back from today, what share of Tom Friedman columns have a true and useful insight? True, Paul had an absolute advantage turning out 600-word fishwrap: hence his repeated and successful accomplishments, over and over again, as an intellectual P. Horatius Cocles. But his massive comparative advantage is and he would have been far more useful at the 2000-word sweet spot: some facts, a relevant economic model, and analysis that teaches you something new, important, and true about the world. Now that we have Prometheus Unbound himself on SubStack, I expect great—or, perhaps I should say—greater things”:

    Paul Krugman: The Fraudulence of “Waste, Fraud and Abuse”: ‘History repeats itself, the first time as farce, the second as clown show…. Now that I have written my last column <nytimes.com/2024/12/09/…> for the New York Times, this newsletter is coming out of dormancy. It will be mostly economics-related, and I’ll try to stay away from pure political punditry, although everything — including this post — is political these days. This newsletter will be a lot wonkier than my Times column, and usually wonkier than my old Times newsletter. Definitely snarkier than either…. Short form thoughts will be appearing here <bsky.app/profile/pkrugm…>. And with that, let’s get going… <paulkrugman.substack.co…> (ref.: Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 1842. Lays of Ancient Rome. London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans. <gutenberg.org/files/847…>). <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-81287772>

  7. Sundowning in America: Chaos-monkey economic policy begins! The question is: who will be in charge of cleaning up the mess in the monkey cage, and what cleaning products will they have to work with?

    Brad Setser: ‘Curious how former President elect Trump ever became convinced that the nowhere close to happening BRICs currency was a threat to the dollar… It isn’t a good look, as it indirectly elevates the stature of a non-threat and suggests a lack of confidence in the dollar: “The idea that the BRICS countries are trying to move away from the Dollar while we stand by and watch is OVER…. We require a commitment… that they will neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other… or, they will face 100% Tariffs, and say goodbye to selling into the wonderful U.S. economy…”. It isn’t in my view a credible threat to do 100% tariffs (the impact on the US would be huge) and it is in response to chatter about a BRICs currency that is going nowhere and simply isn’t currently a real risk.… So I really don’t get it…. I certainly hope Mr. Bessant isn’t egging President elect Trump on here… <x.com/Brad_Setser/statu…> <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-81092651>

  8. Tech: If your neck can cope with having an iPad on your face, and if your brain can cope with your binocular vision telling you that things are five feet away while your eye muscles are focusing on two inches—if that does not make your brain conclude that you have been poisoned and need to throw up—then the not-evenly-distributed future is here, as long as you are at your desk doing your desk computer thing. If I were Apple, I would focus on updating the processor to M5Pro and getting the software to run Mac apps so that they are not confined in a big box. And then they would have a product that ought to be a success for high-end customers:

    Wes Davis: The Vision Pro’s ultrawide Mac display is very close to being a killer app: ‘Apple gives the Mac Virtual Display feature an upgrade that’s literally huge…. My normal three-monitor setup lets me see the most important stuff with slight movements, but that just hasn’t been possible [with the VisionPro] before now…. In visionOS 2.2… it seems sharper…. Once your Mac is updated to macOS 15.2… it take[s] over foveated rendering from the Vision Pro…. Extra modes instantly made the virtual display viable for me, giving me the space I’m accustomed to in my three-monitor life. You can crank the resolution in Ultrawide all the way up to 10240 x 2880 if you’d like, but the sweet spot for me has been the Wide display’s maximum 6720 x 2880…. I’d absolutely bring it on a work trip…. My Vision Pro is now more than a personal movie theater. Now, it’s a gigantic, high-res curved display with perfect viewing angles, too. That makes the price feel a little closer to right… <theverge.com/2024/12/11…> <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-81090197>

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WEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-12-11 We

My weekly read-around: from quasar astronomy to our forthcoming chaos-monkey-plus-sadistic-cruelty policy future, & much MOAR…

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ONE IMAGE: Looking at the Unbelievably High-Energy Parts Of Our Universe:

ESA/Hubble Information Centre: Hubble takes closest-ever look at a quasar: ‘An energetic monster black hole powering a quasar… that glows brightly as the black hole consumes material in its immediate surroundings. The new Hubble views… show a lot of “weird things,” according to Bin Ren…. “We’ve got a few blobs of different sizes, and a mysterious L-shaped filamentary structure. This is all within 16,000 light-years of the black hole.” Some of the objects could be small satellite galaxies around the black hole, and so they could offer the materials that will accrete onto the central super massive black hole, powering the bright lighthouse…. The quasar… 3C 273… identified in 1963 by astronomer Maarten Schmidt as the first quasar…. At a distance of 2.5 billion light-years, it was too far away for a star. It must have been more energetic than ever imagined, with a luminosity over 10 times brighter than the brightest giant elliptical galaxies. This opened the door to an unexpected new puzzle in cosmology: What is powering this massive energy production? The likely culprit was material accreting onto a black hole…. At least 1 million quasars are scattered across the sky. They are useful background “spotlights” for a variety of astronomical observations. Quasars were most abundant about 3 billion years after the big bang, when galaxy collisions were more common… <https://phys.org/news/2024-12-hubble-closest-quasar.html>

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A SECOND IMAGE: No, WWIII Has Not Begun, No Matter What General McMaster May Say:

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YET TWO MORE IMAGES: Where the Horse-Archers Come From:

I confess I have always been unhappy with this map above. There are lots of places that horse-lords—people who have been trained to ride and shoot since they were five—besides the labelled steppe belt from Hungary to Manchuria, plus central Anatolia. But this alternative map errs on the other side:

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ONE VIDEO: Joe Biden on His Economic Legacy:

Outcomes: 16 million employment gain; lowest average unemployment rate in 50 years; strong GDP growth averaging 3% annually; record stock market highs. Policy achievements: American Rescue Plan, Infrastructure Law, CHIPS & Science Act, & Inflation Reduction Act. Challenges addressed: managing the economic aftermath of the COVID-19 plague; inflation has now decreased to near 2%.

In my view, policy has been good and Biden has been very lucky. I do not see any better outcomes within the possibility envelope—although probably an earlier Federal Reserve interest-rate liftoff would have been wise. In retrospect. I am still not sure whether it would have been wise ex ante…

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ONE VIDEO: Olivier Blanchard on “Trumponomics”:

Olivier sees “Trumponomics” as consisting of tariffs, especially on imports from China; tax cuts on corporations, Social Security benefits, and tips; financial-sector deregulation, and mass deportations. I am not sure that is the way to bet—but it is hard to analyze policies that are essentially the random actions of chaos monkeys, with Rubio and Bessent trying to clean-up the monkey cage as it happens…

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Very Briefly Noted:

  1. Economics: I really do not think slow growth has to be a big feature of the current era in Europe. The U.S. has grown GDP per capita by 63% since 1991, compared to a big European three average of 37%. The U.S. has managed in spite of truly enormous headwinds. That means that there is a 20% growth gap the big European three really should be able to reap over the next two decades just to get back to where they were, relatively, in 1991:
    Martin Wolf: ‘Is the post-2007 sluggishness the norm for the old high-income economies, except, perhaps, the US? Happily, some new opportunities do exist. One is to catch up on the US, as occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. For the UK, another opportunity is to raise the lagging incomes of the “left behind” regions. Another possibility is a return to the EU’s customs union and single market. But the UK might, instead, seek to be Donald Trump’s favourite country. For the EU, the opportunity is to implement the Draghi report in full. Yet what lies ahead for most of these economies, certainly including the UK, is… the burden of higher public spending… on defence and the aged… need[ed]… reforms… promoting competition, innovation and investment. In the UK… promot[ing]… savings… [and] encouraging immigration by skilled people. We must… hope… AI will raise productivity without destroying… information ecosystems…. Growth has to be sustainable, ecologically and politically. The growth slowdown is a big feature of our era. It has to be a focus for policy… <https://www.ft.com/content/78df4930-f012-4cbb-92a4-38df79a580e9>

  2. Economics: Chaos reduces the value of stock market indices. Falling stock market indices are bad news for the president, whoever the president is. Trump is terribly allergic to bad news. That suggests th at 2025 scenarios fall into two groups: (a) business as usual, in which Trump takes no steps that negatively impact the stock market—which means minimal tariffs and no mass deportation; (b) chaos, in which case the stock market loses confidence in Trump and he decides that it is his enemy—which means that investment in America may well collapse as everyone decides to wait and see how the chaos evolves before they commit to even maintaining their operations. The “small hit to the economy” seems to me to be an unlikely scenario—if it is your forecast, it is an expected loss-minimizing average expected value rather than a high-probability outcome:
    Tom Orlik: Trump Agenda Won’t Hurt Global Economy as Much Next Year as in 2026: ‘Promised overhaul of conventional wisdom on trade, debt and security won’t happen overnight…. Donald Trump won a second term in the White House by promising a bonfire of the verities…. The blaze will take a while to get going, for the simple reason that any administration—even one with a working knowledge of Washington—can only move so quickly to implement its to-do list. For the year ahead, Bloomberg Economics forecasts global growth at an unremarkable 3.1%, unchanged from 2024. Inflation is set to slow to 3.4% from 6%, with readings in the US and other advanced economies drifting back to the 2% central banks have long targeted. Still, the global economy—along with the financial markets—is going to feel some heat…. Trump’s… tariffs are likely to stop short of his campaign-trail pledges… targeted, not across-the-board, and delivered in stages instead of all at once. For 2025 that means a modest impact on the US and China, building to a more significant hit to growth—spilling over to Mexico, Canada and other key trade partners—in 2026… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-10/global-economy-won-t-feel-much-pain-from-trump-agenda-in-2025>

  3. Finance: The only way that active managers can beat the market as a collective is if they collectively take the opposite side of the non-passive trades and passive investors are forced to undertake—the price-insensitive forced trades as money flows into and out of passive, and as portfolio drift requires rebalancing. As a group active investors who do not do this are, collectively, burning money in their analyses and not winning:

    Robin Wigglesworth: The ‘year of the stockpicker’ revisited: ‘You won’t believe how it turned out: How it started: Bank of America, January 4, 2024…. “If the rally continues to broaden, active funds will have greater odds of selecting winners in 2024. We expect more idiosyncratic opportunities next year given elevated valuation dispersion and increased public market inefficiencies, which should create a more supportive environment for stock pickers.” How it went: Bank of America, December 5, 2024…. “Only 23% of large cap active funds cleared their Russell benchmark, the worst monthly hit rate since March 2022. The average fund lagged by over 60bp…. Core and Value funds were the biggest laggards, with only 11% outperforming…. 35% of large cap funds are ahead of their Russell benchmark year-to-date (YTD), just below the annual average of 37% since 2003…” <https://www.ft.com/content/34b1d212-0577-4c24-80dc-18bb4980c6a0>

  4. Economics & Tech: So what do the Board members who gave Gelsinger a four-year runway and then cut it short have to say for themselves these days?:
    M.G. Siegler: Intel’s Destruction: ‘A few more details in digging into the backstory of what happened with Pat Gelsinger during his tenure as CEO of Intel. First and foremost, to a key point I made a couple days ago <https://spyglass.org/intel-outside-gelsinger/?ref=the-outer-ring-newsletter> around the board: Gelsinger was at first in discussions to join said board, before his vision for the future of Intel impressed them so much that they asked him to take over. And he agreed only after ensuring each board member was fully bought into his plan, which would take years and a lot of capital. In the end, they gave him three years, seemingly in part because he was spending too much capital. Beyond that, there’s a bit of history as to why he wasn’t set up for success and some bad luck (the Tower Semiconductor deal which China scuttled <https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/intel-scraps-tower-acquisition-after-china-fails-to-approve-deal-f59dd70f>– the incredible surge of NVIDIA <https://spyglass.org/ai-divine-nvidia/>). And he perhaps tried to burn an old, stagnant company a bit too hot with his “torrid” pace… <https://public.hey.com/p/LSNBAEvXm4QvTJLKnwmmBmeh>

  5. Bubbles: Is there something wrong with me that I see no way MicroStrategy can be a thing except as a highly leveraged bet on BitCoin at very unfavorable odds—that your returns are almost sure to be dominated in the long run by simply buying BitCoin rather than investing in MicroStrategy?:
    Matt Levine: ‘We have talked about MicroStrategy a lot, and I have said that it is roughly in the business of (1) owning a big pot of Bitcoins, (2) selling stock at a large premium to the value of its pot of Bitcoins and (3) reinvesting the money in more Bitcoins. This is a weird enough business model. But to be fair MicroStrategy is also in the business of selling billions of dollars of convertible bonds to buy more Bitcoins, which is in many ways a much nicer trade: 1. Bitcoin is… volatile…. There is a lot of demand for options on Bitcoin…. MicroStrategy convertibles provide, in a very rough way, billions of dollars of Bitcoin volatility bets in a nice institutional-friendly package…. 2. MicroStrategy… also trades at a large premium to the value of its pot of Bitcoins…. There is no reason to think it is stable… so MicroStrategy can sell its volatility at a huge (and deserved) premium to the volatility of Bitcoin…. 3. Convertible bonds… are also a credit bet…. There’s one other really neat aspect…. Ordinarily… [there is] some limit on a company’s ability to sell convertibles: Convertibles are worth more if your stock is more volatile, but… convertible arbitrageurs will smooth out the moves in your stock…. MicroStrategy has, weirdly, found a solution: It sells volatility to convertible arbitrageurs, and buys volatility from retail ETF investors, so there’s always plenty of volatility to go around… <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-12-05/microstrategy-has-volatility-to-sell?>

  6. MAMLMs: I find myself envious of Dan Shipper and company. Taking one’s research materials and drafts and throwing a ChatBot at them as a way of getting more juice out of my writings—basically, an attempt at automatic superfootnotes and appendices accessed via voice interface—seems like a very attractive thing that is within our technological grasp right now:

    Dan Shipper: Introducing Extendable Articles: ‘A new type of media that uses AI to expand your perspective…. A chat bot that lets you talk to the content that you’re reading. But there’s a twist: In an Extendable Article, we make available all of the source material—original interview recordings and transcripts, YouTube videos, news stories, articles, and more—that the writer used to put the piece together. So you don’t just get the writer’s perspective—you can chat with all of the information they used to inform it… <https://every.to/p/introducing-extendable-articles>

  7. MAMLMs: Think: Clever Hans. Clever Hans watched you, and used your reactions to answer the question: Have I stomped my hoof enough times? But it did not know when that was—except by your reaction. “AI” watches you, and uses your (past) actions to answer the question: Is this the next word? And this the word after that? And it does so at frightening speed. But it is still Clever Hans in the form of autocomplete-on-steroids, interpolating an answer point in a high-dimensional vector space in response to a prompt that it not quite the prompts in its training set in order to make a function (prompts → answers) as you extend the domain of the training-data function to include the new prompt point. Now don’t get me wrong: this is heavy magic. For one thing, it has remarkable capabilities arising from Math in the context of high-dimensional vector spaces—such things as nearly all points on a high-dimensional sphere are very near the equator, and nearly all vectors in a high-dimensional space are nearly perpendicular to each other. As Cosma Shalizi says: “You Can Do That with Just Kernel Smoothing!?!…. You Can Do That with Just a Markov Model!?!!?!…” <http://bactra.org/notebooks/nn-attention-and-transformers.html>. But any time you have the center-of-gravity of Ethan Mollick here—that only somebody truly an expert who can recognize that the answer is wrong has any business using these tools—you really are in “Clever Hans” rather than “AGI” territory. (Not, mind you, that Clever Hans working at hypersonic speeds cannot be very useful as recognizing a right-enough answer is less of a cognitive load than coming up with one yourself. And putting to one side, mind you, the rather troubling whisper in the back of my mind wondering if we are not function-interpolating Clever Hanses rather than possessors of “AGI”.) But the idea that “AGI” can be accomplished by a blank-slate neural net with only 2 trillion parameters when our brains have 80 billion neurons x 100 states per neuron x 3000 dendrite-axon connections per neuron = 25 quadrillion parameters—10,000 times as many? And when our neural networks have been pre-trained to be much more than blank slates by 800 million years of evolution? Not remotely plausible:
    Ethan Mollick: 15 Times to use AI, & 5 Not to: ‘Notes on the Practical Wisdom of AI Use…. Here are five subtle but important areas where AI use can be counterproductive: When you need to learn and synthesize new ideas or information. Asking for a summary is not the same as reading for yourself…. When very high accuracy is required…. When you do not understand the failure modes of AI…. When… by shortcutting that struggle… you… lose the ability to reach the vital “aha” moment…. When AI is bad…. Unfortunately, there is no general manual to tell you the shape of the Jagged Frontier of AI abilities, which are constantly evolving…. Knowing when to use AI turns out to be a form of wisdom, not just technical knowledge. Like most wisdom, it’s somewhat paradoxical: AI is often most useful where we’re already expert enough to spot its mistakes, yet least helpful in the deep work that made us experts in the first place. It works best for tasks we could do ourselves but shouldn’t waste time on, yet can actively harm our learning when we use it to skip necessary struggles. And perhaps most importantly, wisdom means knowing that these patterns will keep shifting as AI capabilities evolve… <https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/15-times-to-use-ai-and-5-not-to>

  8. American Exceptionalism: Among the most prominent believers in American Exceptionalism and its importance was—Leon Trotsky:
    Leon Trotsky
    (1930): My Life: ‘Here [on January 13, 1917] I was in New York, city of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automatism, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city in the world, it is the fullest expression of our modern age…. We rented an apartment in a workers’ district, and furnished it on the instalment plan. That apartment, at eighteen dollars a month, was equipped with all sorts of conveniences that we Europeans were quite unused to: electric lights, gas cooking-range, bath, telephone, automatic service-elevator, and even a chute for the garbage. These things completely won the boys over to New York. For a time the telephone was their main interest; we had not had this mysterious instrument either in Vienna or Paris…. It would be a gross exaggeration to say that I learned much about New York. I plunged into the affairs of American Socialism too quickly, and I was straightway up to my neck in work for it. The Russian revolution came so soon that I only managed to catch the general life-rhythm of the monster known as New York. I was leaving for Europe, with the feeling of a man who has had only a peep into the foundry in which the fate of man is to be forged…<https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.175689>: Trotsky, Leon. 1930. My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.175689>.

  9. War & Rumors of War: I can hear Bill Clinton’s heart breaking in his voice as he reflects on how we got from the White House peace meeting of 1993 to our current trajectory, in which both Tel Aviv and Damascus—and in all likelihood other cities as well—will more likely than not burn with nuclear fire sometime in the next half-century:
    Bill Clinton: ‘What has happened there in the last 25 years is one of the great tragedies of the 21st century…. Young people know… that a lot more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis. And I tell them what Arafat walked away from. And they can’t believe it…. He walked away from a Palestinian state, with a capital in East Jerusalem, 96% of the West Bank, 4% of Israel to make up for [what] the settlers occupied.… I go through all the stuff in the deal, and it is not on their radar screen. They cannot even imagine that that happened…. The first and most famous victim of the plans to give the Palestinians a state was Prime Minister Rabin… whom I loved as much as I have ever loved another man…. You walk away from these once-in-a-lifetime peace opportunities, and you cannot complain twenty-five years later… that the doors were not all still open and all the possibilities were not still there… <https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1864786102248177952/>

  10. Sundowning in America: We have no idea whether Trump is (a) joking, or (b) serious—or thinking he is serious. And © if (a) and (b) are jokes, it is not clear what the jokes are supposed to be or why he thinks they are funny. Which strongly militates against the idea that they are jokes. And strongly militates for the idea that he is simply deluded and confused, and claiming he is joking is the only way his staff have found to try to get them and him out of the box:
    Donald Trump: ‘It was a pleasure to have dinner the other night with Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada. I look forward to seeing the Governor again soon so that we may continue our in depth talks on Tariffs and Trade, the results of which will be truly spectacular for all! DJT… <https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-mocks-prime-minister-justin-trudeau-governor-great-state-canada-rcna183570>
    Donald Trump: ‘The Democrats are fighting hard to get rid of the Popular Vote in future Elections. They want all future Presidential Elections to be based exclusively on the Electoral College!… <https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113621278691359489>

The 2018 "Slouching" Draft "Themes" Chapter

An outtake from “Slouching Towards Utopia”. It simply did not fit in an already too long book. But I do like it precisely because it tries to widen the view from a single Grand Narrative of the 20th century, & to state that there are at least six other overwhelmingly important things going on alongside, triggered by, & in addition to the Grand Narrative…

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A DRAFT Syllabus for Econ 113: American Economic History :: Spring 2025 :: UC Berkeley

Late to the party am I, but at least I think I have brought plenty of refreshments…
What I see as the big questions of American economic history: How is America “exceptional”? What about its comparative & historical situation primed it to become “exceptional”? How did the conquest-expansion economy of the 1700s & 1800s work? How did a country that ought to have been a gigantic resource-exporting Australia become a manufacturing powerhouse instead, or as well? & how did it become THE technological leader & the pioneer of the mass-production mode too? & how did it become the most effective civilization at expanding its citizen base since the Romans? & how did it become a feminist-friendly economy—or did it? Was the New Deal Order a design or an accident, & was it a success or a failure, & was its 1970s end a mercy or a mistake? Where and how and what Silicon Valley? What happened to equality of opportunity as an ideal? & why could the Neoliberal Order not apply the standard Bagehot-Minsky-Kindleberger playbook to deal with the 2007-2009 Global Financial Crisis? And Attention Info-Bio Tech economy what?

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Econ 113: American Economic History

Birge 50 :: 09:00 PST MWF

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WEEK 1: Intro: American Exceptionalism? -10000? to 2025:

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WEEK 2: Background: America’s Economy Today in Historical-Comparative Perspective, -10000 to 2025”

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WEEK 3: Settlements, Colonizations, & the Conquest-Expansion Economy, -10000? to 1900:

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WEEK 4: Slavery, Civil War, & After, 1800 to 1900

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WEEK 5: American Exceptionalism, 1789-2025

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WEEK 6: The Second Industrial Revolution, 1850-1910

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WEEK 7: Immigration, 1609 to Present

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WEEK 8: Feminism, 1776 to Present

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WEEK 9: The Mass Production Economy, 1908 to 1980

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WEEK 10: The Social-Democratic New Deal Order

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WEEK 11: The Rise of Silicon Valley, 1950 to 2025

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WEEK 12: Inequality & Economic Mobility, 1945 to 2025

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  • Alvaredo, Facundo, Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, & Emmanuel Saez. 2013. “The Top 1 Percent in International and Historical Perspective.” Journal of Economic Perspectives. 27 (3): 3-20. <https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.27.3.3>.

  • Chetty, Raj, Matthew O. Jackson, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert B. Fluegge, Sara Gong, & al. 2022. “Social Capital I: Measurement and Associations with Economic Mobility.” Nature. 608 (7921): 108–121. <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9352590/>.


WEEK 13: The Global Financial Crisis & After, 2005 to 2015

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WEEK 14: The Attention Info-Bio Tech Economy & The Future, 2000 to ?:

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WEEK 15: Conclusion:

2025-05-05 Mo: PULLING THINGS TOGETHER


2025-05-12 Mo 19:00 PDT: FINAL EXAM

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What the East African Plains Ape Anthology Intelligence Has Managed to Do, with Respect to the Economy

If anybody really wants a 500MB 608-slide deck on the history of economic growth; the review deck is only 12MB and only 29 slides: societies of domination, from stagnation to acceleration, & then our modern polycrisis: All of the lecture slides from yet another semester teaching my version of the course I “borrowed” form Melissa Dell: The History of Economic Growth.
We are an anthology-intelligence species of immense power and profound dysfunction. We escaped millennia of agrarian stagnation through modern economic growth, only to find ourselves floundering as we go through yet another chaotic technology-revolution transition, unable to build institutions and practices that enable us to take our growing prosperity and live wisely and well, feeling safe and secure and being healthy and happy. Can we build institutions to manage our prosperity before it all falls apart?

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Share Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality

Looking back on this, after going through this one more time, my first thought is: this can never be one book. There are, somewhere in here, books on:

  • The vicissitudes of the historical journey of humanity considered as a subject—as an immensely powerful anthology intelligence with a profoundly disordered soul…

  • The workings of the Agrarian-Age societies—an updating of Patricia Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies, with a focus on the workings of societies-of-domination, on the coming-together of things to produce “efflorescences”, and the limitations imposed by Agrarian-Age societal structure on human progress…

  • The book on the breakthrough from Agrarian-Age near stagnation to post-1870 Modern Economic Growth…

  • The stage-theory look at Modern Economic Growth: Steampower, Applied-Science, Mass-Production, Globalized Value-Chain, and Attention Info-Bio Tech Societies…

  • Our modern polycrisis—and how our situation now is profoundly different in a number of ways from the world from 1870 to 2010 and Modern Economic Growth…

The way I set it out at the start still seems to me to be an excellent thumbnail:

How a group of jumped-up monkeys more-or-less accidentally became first a band-wide, then a continent-wide, and then a global-wide anthology intelligence, and then hunted frantically for institutions to make that work…

Along the way, we fell into a Malthusian Trap of dire poverty, in which we turned aside from societies of cooperation to societies of domination…

Then we developed the institutions of modern economic growth, which made us rich at a dizzying rate…

Unfortunately, that rate of progress and transition was much too fast for any process of gradient-descent societal institutional evolution to cope well…

Plus we are still marked by our long history under the harrow of the societies of domination…

Now we face what turns out to be the truly big problem: that of building institutions for managing us as a prosperous species, given that we are a very imperfect anthology intelligence and desperately need a society that will actually enable us to live wisely and well…


Review Deck:

Econ 135 F2024 Review(1)
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BIWEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-12-05 Th

My biweekly read-around…
Clearing-out some tabs I want to write something longer about, but do not have time to do so…

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ONE AUDIO: An Absolutely Glorious Rant by Ben Thompson on the Incompetence of Intel’s Board: “Disgusting for Twenty Years”:

&, I think, 100% correct. Addressed to the appreciative audience of Anderw Sharp. At 50:40:

<https://sharptech.fm/member/episode/gelsinger-out-at-intel-20-years-of-structural-challenges-and-strategic-blindspots-the-board-and-whats-next>:

A closer look at Intel’s fall from grace in the wake of CEO Pat Gelsinger’s sudden retirement and with the company facing a fresh round of questions about its future. Topics include: Ben’s overview of a 20-year run of paradigm shifts and strategic missteps, Gelsinger’s strengths and weaknesses, CHIPS Act funds and a looming inflection point, and the murky path forward for American made chips…

Ben’s basic point is that Intel’s troubles starting in 2021 were the result of decisions and missteps taken in 2011, and will require a timespan of the same order to correct. To hire Gelsinger as CEO, declare that you are 100% behind him, and then can him after 3 ½ years, blaming him for his failure to have done the impossible in a short time period—that is just malpractice. I can see a case for revisiting Gelsinger’s plans at the end of 2025, after Intel 18A is well-launched and we have something of a market verdict on it. But that is fully a year away.

You can argue—and Ben does—that the board should not have hired Gelsinger 3 ½ years ago because the task he thought he could accomplish was in fact impossible. You can argue—and I do—that Gelsinger’s plan was (probably) bad for shareholders, good for stakeholders as a whole, a wonderful thing for the country, and the best thing that could be done with Intel for the world. But in either case—or if you think Gelsinger’s plan was probably good for shareholders as well—once in, you are in. In the (perhaps apocryphal) words of Napoléon Bonaparte: “if you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna!

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ANOTHER AUDIO: Verge Decoder: AI Is a Money Pit!:

…Yet investors do not mind: Alex Heath, Tim Tully, & Nathan Beniach discuss:

The most ambitious and costly gamble the tech industry has arguably ever made… artificial intelligence… the idea that one day soon big companies across all kinds of industries will be spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI products. Today, though, that’s just… not happening…. Actual spending on AI products… is growing fast but hit only $13.8 billion in 2024 — barely covering the year’s two largest AI fundraising rounds from OpenAI and xAI…

<https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/5/24313373/ai-spending-enterprise-profits-investment-menlo-ventures-openai-anthropic-decoder-podcast>

My take is this:

Downstream of everyone are the Applications, and beyond them the non-tech Customers—people actually trying to use MAMLMs to do things that are actually useful to real people: make things for non-tech buyers, provide services to non-tech customers, or at least write code that will be used to do this.

Half a length behind, at their hindquarters are the oligopolists—Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Oracle—who coin money because they have massive lock-in nobody can do what they do cheaply enough to induce customers to pay substantial switching costs and still make a profit. These oligopolists, however, are terrified that “AI” will allow competitors to disrupt them in a Christensenian sense, and so they are spending like water so that their “AI” capabilities will be robust enough to head off that possibility. They do not expect to make money off of “AI”—Microsoft’s hopes of taking search market share from Google aside—but they do think they have to pay the “AI tax”, and pay through the nose, because they believe if they do not jump on this now it could rapidly become an existential threat.

Immediately upstream of the Applications and the Oligopolists are, first, the Cloud-Providers—Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle—right now making money selling computation services and yet spending all that money and more expanding their capacity. Immediately upstream of the Applications and the Oligopolists are, second, the Model-Builders—OpenAI, Anthropic, and so forth—right now lighting money on fire trying to train the best model so that they can someday make money. But that is almost surely a vain hope because Facebook has opensourced LLaMA, and will keep it good enough and interoperable enough that nobody will ever make significant money selling foundation-model services to anybody. So what keeps the Model-Builders working is the gullibility of funders and the hopes of engineers that working on this now will get them in the room when AGI emerges, and they can be in its first tranche of worshippers.

Upstream of the Cloud-Providers and the Model-Builders is NVIDIA, coining huge amounts of money because Jensen Huang has convinced everyone that they dare not wait the two years it would take them to build-out a much cheaper non-NVIDIA stack—everyone except Apple, that is, which seems to be betting a bunch on the currently non-existent M4, M5, and M6 Ultra and Extreme chips. (But do note that Google has and Facebook and Amazon are building their own NVIDIA competitors).

Upstream of NVIDIA is TSMC, which made some substantial mistakes in setting its prices when it negotiated with NVIDIA, and so is simply begging at the table at which NVIDIA dines.

Upstream from TSMC is ASML, licking crumbs off the floor that fall when NVIDIA tosses scraps to TSMC. (Do, however, note that they are “crumbs” only in a very relative sense:

)

Right now the people who are getting huge amounts of value from “AI” are:

  • NVIDIA

People who may get substantial value from “AI” over the next five years are:

  • Oligopolists, who may get some insurance, some protection against Christensenian disruption.

  • Customers, to the extent that “AI” actually assists them—but so far, with the possible exception of Facebook’s ad-targeting, there is still much too much of a “Clever Hans” nature in everything except for programmer-coding assistance.

Everyone else looks to me to be spending lots of money for what looks to be, at best, a low rate of return—at least until ASML and TSMC can redivide the profit pie.

In short: This is nuts! When’s the crash? But at least after the crash we will have lots of Cloud-GPU capacity to draw on and use.

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ONE IMAGE: Global Warming Is Now China-Driven, & a Problem for China to Solve:

U.S. and E,U. cutting their annual CO2 emissions by 35B tons/year since their peak; China raising its by 8B ton/year since 2000.

Refer a friend


Very Briefly Noted:

  1. Economic Development: The loss of “Third World” as a term one is supposed to use in polite society is, to my mind, a damned shame. “Tiers État” has a long and very honorable history, and that echo was useful and evocative—but, alas, only me and perhaps 5000 other people worldwide get the reference these days:
    Oliver Kim: The Rhetoric of Underdevelopment: ‘A potted history of what we call poor countries…. “Underdeveloped…” was… most common… up till the 1960s…. “Developing country” took over in the optimistic 1960s…. This changed in the fat years of the 1990s… [when in] a global commodity markets boom, “emerging market” took off…. What do we call this bloc? The dominant term… was the “Third World”… of the French demographer Alfred Sauvy, in conscious reference to Abbe Sieyés’s revolutionary pamphlet “What is the Third Estate?”…. But, much like being “homeless”, the stigma of poverty soon transformed a neutral term into a pejorative…. Global South… is a 1969 invention of Carl Oglesby… fits neatly into the dependency theory of Prebisch and Singer… [and] reflects the common left-academic hope that terminology can reshape thought, that the right word can shock us back into collective action…. [But] “Global South” will likely assume its place alongside “developing” and “Third World”—as an easy put-down from the mouths of the rich… <https://www.global-developments.org/p/the-rhetoric-of-underdevelopment>

  2. Finance: I am not sure this is best characterized as “a bubble”. The world outside is crazy enough that “wealth in New York or Los Angeles” possesses a good deal of insurance value that wealth anywhere else does not. Of course, this makes it very hard for the U.S. to be a manufacturing powerhouse, which means that the government role in R&D needs to be massively upped, and upped in “development” area where state capacity is not obviously present:
    Ruchir Sharma: The Mother of All Bubbles: ‘The US has never been so overhyped…. The US accounts for nearly 70 per cent of the leading global stock index, up from 30 per cent in the 1980s. And the dollar, by some measures, trades at a higher value than at any time since the developed world abandoned fixed exchange rates 50 years ago…. America’s share of global stock markets is far greater than its 27 per cent share of the global economy…. It’s as if America is the only nation worth investing in…. As with all bubbles, it is hard to know when this one will deflate, or what will trigger its decline… <https://www.ft.com/content/49cca8d7-7b6e-47e3-a50c-9557d7c85fc0>

  3. Tech & Economics: The one piece of good news from Intel over the past month:
    Zaheer Kachwala: Intel’s interim co-CEO Zinsner says new chief executive will have foundry experience: ‘Interim co-CEO David Zinsner…. “I’m not in the process, but I’m guessing that the CEO will have… both some capability around foundry as well as on the product side…”. The company also requires a significant cultural change to become a successful foundry player as well as in the semiconductor business, Intel’s head of foundry manufacturing and supply chain Naga Chandrasekaran said…. Chandrasekaran said Intel’s progress on the 18A advanced node manufacturing process was going as expected and has met several milestones despite facing difficulties and technical problems. “There’s nothing fundamentally challenging on this node now. It is about going through the remaining yield challenges, defect density challenges,” he said. Intel plans to provide samples of chips made with the new node to customers in the first half of next year, and start to ramp the production at its Oregon plant in the second half, Chandrasekaran added… <https://www.reuters.com/technology/intels-interim-co-ceo-zinsner-says-new-chief-executive-will-have-foundry-2024-12-04/>

  4. Tech & Economics: The Verge has a new business model! It is called “a website”! And it seems to be working:
    Nilay Patel: Here we go: The Verge now has a subscription: ‘A lot of our site will remain free, but you can now pay to get fewer ads and unlimited access to all of our work…. We decided to make our own site as valuable to you… as we could…. Quick Posts and the Storystream news feed…. This worked: we’ve maintained a massive loyal audience despite industry-wide declines in Google referrals and big social platforms downranking links…. 55,000 of you have come to the site every single day this year. A lot of you really like The Verge, and we’re eternally grateful for that — we intend to keep making this thing together for a long, long time…<https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24306571/verge-subscription-launch-fewer-ads-unlimited-access-full-text-rss>

  5. Tech & Economics: The very short-course version:
    Sean Hollister: What happened to Intel?: ‘Intel has ejected its CEO. There are many possible reasons why…. Over a decade ago, Intel spent billions investing in Dutch multinational ASML, which is today the most important company in chips. It’s the only firm in the world that manufactures machines capable of pulverizing a ball of tin, using high-power lasers, such that it emits an extremely tight wavelength of ultraviolet light to efficiently carve circuits into silicon wafers, a process known as EUV. Intel initially believed in the tech, even carving out a $4.1 billion stake in the company, then decided not to order the pricey machines. But Taiwan’s TSMC did — and went on to become the undisputed leader in silicon manufacturing, producing an estimated 90-plus percent of the world’s “leading-edge logic chips.” Samsung ordered machines, too. Gelsinger was not shy about calling Intel’s choice “a fundamental mistake” in our 2022 interview. “We were betting against it. How stupid could we be?”… Moorhead and Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin both believe Gelsinger’s departure was so sudden, it can’t simply have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. “There must have been a decision the board made that he was not going to stick around for,” Moorhead tells me…<https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24311594/intel-under-pat-gelsinger>

  6. Neofascism: Elon Musk continues to try to convince the Delaware Chancery that laws protect him, but do not bind him. I suppose his next move is to buy an opinion from the Texas Supreme Court, and then the U.S. Supreme Court, to remove the case from Delaware Chancery jurisdiction:
    Kathaleen McCormick: Opinion Awarding Attorney’s Fees And Denying Motion To Revise The Post-Trial Opinion: ‘The motion to revise is denied. The large and talented group of defense firms got creative… but… there are at least four fatal flaws…. The defendants have no procedural ground… based on evidence they created after trial…. Common-law ratification is an affirmative defense that must be timely raised…. What the defendants call “common law ratification” has no basis in the common law…. [And] even if a stockholder vote could have a ratifying effect, it could not do so here due to multiple, material misstatements in the proxy statement…. The fee petition is granted in part. The plaintiff’s attorneys asked for $5.6 billion in freely tradeable Tesla shares. In a case about excessive compensation, that was a bold ask… <https://courts.delaware.gov/Opinions/Download.aspx?id=372420>

  7. Neofascism: By contrast, here in Berkeley the only thing we neg people for in public is for wearing Dodgers caps:
    Lynn Dean: ‘On a road trip in mostly red states. People are not ok out here. 1) The amount of complete dumbfuckery on display at every turn is DISTURBING. Gas station cashier lost her shit yesterday morning and started screaming at people’s inability to manage pulling in and out of the pumps without blocking each other, and I couldn’t blame her. 2) Someone has been vomiting in the stall next to me at almost every public restroom for 2 days. Opiods? Alcohol? ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Performative angry displays of “god, guns, and country” everywhere - I have been confronted about my blue state plates A LOT. 4) Disturbing numbers of closed storefronts, graffiti, or stores with sparse, old, dusty, or spoiled goods in every town. Except Walmart, which is booming. 5) Sharps containers in all the public bathrooms - I assume for insulin syringes? People are eager to tell me that my blue state is a Zombie apocalypse with poop in the streets, but the zombies are HERE. This feels like it is leading somewhere very bad… <https://www.threads.net/@idle_lynn/post/DDF6B-qyuFt>

  8. Public Reason: This puts something I have been groping towards into words much better than I ever have:

    Jeff Jarvis: ‘How I despise the “culture war” framing. Were anti-miscegenation laws “culture”? Was slavery? Was burning witches? Thus media moral-wash bigotry & GOP-manufactured moral panic. “Supreme Court Returns to a Culture War Battleground: Transgender Rights” <nytimes.com/2024…>. What is a better framing? Civil rights. Human rights. Moral panic. Bigotry. And while we’re at it, banning books is not “culture war.” It is censorship. Journalists: Call these acts what they are, not in the terms set by the instigators… <https://www.threads.net/@jeffjarvis/post/DDHg-JbJOUF?>

  9. Reading: The fact is that every decade I find a new reason to reread this, and it is—nearly—as dead-on as when I first read it in the 1970s, but each decade it is dead-on in a slightly different way:
    Graham Greene: The Quiet American: ‘“York [Harding]”, Pyle said, “wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force”. Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved all of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realized the direction of that indefatigable young brain… <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.462196>

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SubStack NOTES:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/opinion/syrian-rebels-hts-assad-civil-war.html\n\nHopefully Hassan Hassan does not believe what he says. Hopefully he understands that it is not because America is “China-focused” that it is “incapable or unwilling” to undertake “generational nation-building project[s]”. But either way the fact that he feels he needs to write those words at the end of his call to engage with and (hopefully) moderate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham as not “⁠merely… terrorists but… political actors filling the void left by failing states…” even though it rules through “intimidation, assassination of its rivals and the murder of civil society activists… iron-fisted practices…”—the fact that he feels the need bodes ill for the level of public reason.\n\nReference:\n\nGreene, Graham. 1955. The Quiet American. London: William Heinemann. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.462196.","body_json":{"type":"doc","attrs":{"schemaVersion":"v1"},"content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"},{"type":"italic"}],"text":"Journamalism"},{"type":"text","text":": "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"It’s another “New York Times” special. Remember Graham Greene’s 1955 novel “The Quiet American”?: “"},{"type":"text","text":"‘York [Harding]”, Pyle said, ‘wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force’. Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved all of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realized the direction of that indefatigable young brain…” <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"www.colemanm.org/post/a-th… ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"www.colemanm.org/post/a-th…},{"type":"text","text":">."},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":" Yes, it is that the United States will go into some other country and create, out of thin air, a democracy-minded strongman or strongmen who will bring order and prosperity without being too brutal. Didn’t work then. Doesn’t work now 70 years later. But the “New York Times” keeps publishing people who claim that it does and will:"}]},{"type":"blockquote","content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Hassan Hassan"},{"type":"text","text":": The War on Terror Had an Unexpected Outcome: ‘⁠Western nations have a choice: create a moderate alternative that can govern effectively, or acknowledge that… groups [like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham] will continue to rule in a world that is far from perfect. The first choice involves a generational nation-building project that a China-focused America may be incapable or unwilling to do… <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"www.nytimes.com/2024/12/0… ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"www.nytimes.com/2024/12/0…}]}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"Hopefully Hassan Hassan does not believe what he says. Hopefully he understands that it is not because America is “China-focused” that it is “incapable or unwilling” to undertake “generational nation-building project[s]”. But either way the fact that he feels he needs to write those words at the end of his call to engage with and (hopefully) moderate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham as not “⁠merely… terrorists but… political actors filling the void left by failing states…” even though it rules through “intimidation, assassination of its rivals and the murder of civil society activists… iron-fisted practices…”—the fact that he feels the need bodes ill for the level of public reason."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Reference:"}]},{"type":"bulletList","content":[{"type":"listItem","content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Greene, Graham"},{"type":"text","text":". 1955. "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"The Quiet American"},{"type":"text","text":". London: William Heinemann. <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"archive.org/details/i… ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"archive.org/details/i…}]}]}]}]},"restacks":0,"reaction_count":2,"attachments":[{"id":"a0ec7153-8375-4fcf-950c-f9e11590f055","type":"link","linkMetadata":{"url":"archive.org/details/i…,"host":"archive.org","title":"The Quiet American : Greene, Graham : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive","description":"Book Source: Digital Library of India Item 2015.462196dc.contributor.author: Greene, Grahamdc.date.accessioned: 2015-09-22T15:35:15Zdc.date.available:…","image":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/0c61c7c6-8845-41e6-9283-888a6c860e71_180x274.jpeg","original_image":"https://archive.org/services/img/in.ernet.dli.2015.462196"},"explicit":false}],"name":"Brad DeLong","user_id":16879,"photo_url":"bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/im…}}” data-component-name=“CommentPlaceholder”>
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/30/russia-secret-war-invasion-of-europe/. Oh, and the French government just collapsed https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxz934p56qo. And I haven’t even mentioned Ukraine and Israel and Gaza and Lebanon and Sudan. At least our president is sharp as a tack. “If it feels like the world is on fire right now, that’s because it is,” writes Jay Solomon in our lead story today. Things are so bad experts are drawing chilling historical comparisons to 1914 and 1939. They’re asking, could we be on the brink of another world war? Or has World War III already begun?… https://www.thefp.com/p/is-wwiii-already-underway-is-hegseth\n\nSo? Is this just another move by “The Free Press” in the standard playbook of it and its ilk—to scare the shit out of its readers to keep their eyeballs glued to their screens so that their pockets can be picked? Is it an attempt to rally support for Big Daddy Trump, as the guy who will protect us against all these ruthless and vicious enemies? The Wiseman dig at Biden points in that direction pretty strongly, I think.\n\nOr is there some deeper right-wing courtier politics agenda behind these claims that now is, in important ways, like November 17, 1942?","body_json":{"type":"doc","attrs":{"schemaVersion":"v1"},"content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"},{"type":"italic"}],"text":"Journamalism"},{"type":"text","text":": "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"The bullshit quotient of Bari Weiss’s “The Free Press” has always been very high. "}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"But shouldn’t this get some special BQ recognition?:"}]},{"type":"blockquote","content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Jay Solomon"},{"type":"text","text":": Is World War III Already Here?: ‘The ‘Axis of Upheaval’ is on the march—and the U.S. must figure out how to respond….The world is on fire right now…. From Ukraine to Syria to the Korean Peninsula, a widening array of conflicts is raising questions among defense experts: Is it 1914 again? 1939? Has World War III already started and we’re just now figuring it out?… For retired Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, who served as Donald Trump’s second national security adviser from 2017–2018, the answer is clear. “I think we’re on the cusp of a world war,” McMaster told "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"The Free Press"},{"type":"text","text":"…. "}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"These wars, rebellions, and spy tales may appear disconnected. But in reality, they all point to a widening global conflict that is pitting the U.S. and its allies against China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—nations all fixated on toppling the West. Strategists have even come up with catchy nicknames for this anti-American coalition, dubbing the bloc the “Axis of Aggressors” or the “Axis of Upheaval.”… "}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"Philip Zelikow… is among those who think these conflicts are related. “I think there is a serious possibility of what I call worldwide warfare”—meaning a world war that is not as coordinated as past global conflagrations. “It’s not hard to see one of these conflicts crossing over into another”… <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"www.thefp.com/p/world-w… ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"www.thefp.com/p/world-w…},{"type":"text","text":">"}]}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"During WWII, deaths in state-based military conflicts averaged 10,000,000 a year. 2022’s peak was 2.8% of that number. 2022 had 3 ½ times the population of 1940, so war was only 0.8% as much a part of the human experience as in WWII."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"And those 280,000 war and war-related deaths in 2022? 180,000 came in Ethiopia’s Tigray War. "}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"Jay Solomon shows no signs of knowing about its existence. When I search for “‘jay solomon’ AND Tigray” Google tells me: “try using words that might appear on the page you are looking for, For example, ‘cake recipes’ instead of ‘how to make a cake”. "}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"No. World War III is not already here. "}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"The question is whether Jay Solomon knows so little about what world wars are that he is confused and thinks it might be. Or whether Solomon knows it isn’t, but is rather joining McMaster, Zelikow, and company in a rather cynical disinformation and misinformation campaign. A campaign in which the masthead of “The Free Press” is an enthusiastic participant:"}]},{"type":"blockquote","content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Oliver Wiseman"},{"type":"text","text":": Is WWIII Already Underway? Is Hegseth Toast? Plus…: ‘It’s Thursday, December 5. This is "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Front Page"},{"type":"text","text":", your daily window into the world of "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Free Press"},{"type":"text","text":"…. Things are so crazy across the globe…. Syria… South Korea… Georgia… he wave of violence across Europe that, according to "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"The Telegraph"},{"type":"text","text":", means Russia’s “secret war” against the West has already begun <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"www.youtube.com/watch ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"www.youtube.com/watch},{"type":"text","text":". Oh, and the French government just collapsed <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"www.youtube.com/watch ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"www.youtube.com/watch},{"type":"text","text":". And I haven’t even mentioned Ukraine and Israel and Gaza and Lebanon and Sudan. At least our president is sharp as a tack. “If it feels like the world is on fire right now, that’s because it is,” writes "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Jay Solomon "},{"type":"text","text":"in our lead story today. Things are so bad experts are drawing chilling historical comparisons to 1914 and 1939. They’re asking, could we be on the brink of another world war? Or has World War III "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"already begun?… "},{"type":"text","text":"<"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"www.thefp.com/p/is-wwii… ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"www.thefp.com/p/is-wwii…},{"type":"text","text":">"}]}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"So? Is this just another move by “The Free Press” in the standard playbook of it and its ilk—to scare the shit out of its readers to keep their eyeballs glued to their screens so that their pockets can be picked? Is it an attempt to rally support for Big Daddy Trump, as the guy who will protect us against all these ruthless and vicious enemies? The Wiseman dig at Biden points in that direction pretty strongly, I think."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"Or is there some deeper right-wing courtier politics agenda behind these claims that now is, in important ways, like November 17, 1942?"}]}]},"restacks":1,"reaction_count":8,"attachments":[{"id":"fd1dc91d-f5f2-4fa8-a067-d8d2e7eaff97","type":"image","imageUrl":"substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/im…},{"id":"ee023b2b-3f2c-4403-a893-12a78a4b290a","type":"post","publication":{"apple_pay_disabled":false,"apex_domain":null,"author_id":2067309,"byline_images_enabled":true,"bylines_enabled":true,"chartable_token":null,"community_enabled":true,"copyright":"Bari Weiss","cover_photo_url":null,"created_at":"2021-01-12T05:33:41.075Z","custom_domain_optional":false,"custom_domain":"www.thefp.com","custom_publication_theme_id":"f1b36997-bd76-45cf-9ad3-f29bb1b23a0a","default_comment_sort":"most_recent_first","default_coupon":"bbc5eb97","default_group_coupon":null,"default_show_guest_bios":true,"email_banner_url":null,"email_from_name":"The Free Press","email_from":null,"embed_tracking_disabled":false,"explicit":false,"expose_paywall_content_to_search_engines":true,"fb_pixel_id":"256957286513731","fb_site_verification_token":"janmt69mafpiksppxy1p3w4femxaso","flagged_as_spam":false,"founding_subscription_benefits":["Support the mission by sponsoring subscriptions, subsidizing free stories, and keeping the lights on"],"free_subscription_benefits":["The Front Page, plus occasional free articles"],"ga_pixel_id":"UA-208646525-2","google_site_verification_token":"9o6873zExZlaursCatzuzorVbR0EBAAUCRyDvKw39bo","google_tag_manager_token":" GTM-5PT7QDNT","hero_image":null,"hero_text":"A new media company built on the ideals that were once the bedrock of American journalism.","hide_intro_subtitle":null,"hide_intro_title":null,"hide_podcast_feed_link":false,"homepage_type":"magaziney","id":260347,"image_thumbnails_always_enabled":false,"invite_only":false,"language":"en","logo_url_wide":"substackcdn.com/image/fet… Free Press","paid_subscription_benefits":["The Front Page, plus paywalled columns and articles, like TGIF and Things Worth Remembering","Comments section on every piece we publish","Early access to live event tickets and post-event recordings"],"parsely_pixel_id":"thefp.com","payments_state":"enabled","paywall_free_trial_enabled":false,"podcast_art_url":"substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/im… Weiss","podcast_description":"The most interesting conversations in American life happen in private. 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www.hoover.org/research/…>… [that] went viral recently….. ? A little digging by Invictus here https://bsky.app/profile/tbpinvictus.bsky.social (he does amazing work) led to some very obvious analytical errors. Not that these mistakes stopped many politicos and even journalists from blindly repeating the mistake. “Rip & Read” journalism still lives.\n\nMichael Hiltzik of the L.A. Times did a very thorough follow-up https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-12-03/column-the-hoover-institution-says-all-recent-california-job-growth-has-been-in-government-jobs-thats-completely-wrong. Hoover has retracted the published article. Its author, Lee Ohanian, deleted his Twitter account. This is the second such time a basic ECON101 error appeared from this author and this source. (We may have to dive deeper into the archive to see what else was wrong). Journalists are advised to stop parroting hired guns for the Fast Food industry or other partisan players… https://ritholtz.com/2024/12/hoover-withdraws-discredited-article/\n\nAnd:\n\nInvictus: Never Mix Payroll and Household Survey Data: ‘Let’s cut to the chase: A Hoover Institution analysis of California private job creation is off by a factor of 100. Between January 2022 and June 2024, the state created 523,700 private sector jobs — not 5,400 as claimed. MSM uncritically repeated the false number. I spend far too much time debunking economic bullshit. Sigh…. Hoover Institution’s Lee Ohanian wrote a piece last April https://www.hoover.org/research/california-loses-nearly-10000-fast-food-jobs-after-20-minimum-wage-signed-last-fall falsely claiming that California’s new minimum wage law had cost the state almost 10,000 fast food jobs. The story was false. Some sleuthing uncovered the fact Ohanian had inappropriately relied on data that was not seasonally adjusted.… He eventually walked his error back, but only when confronted by Michael Hiltzik https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-06-12/the-fast-food-industry-claims-the-california-minimum-wage-law-is-costing-jobs-its-numbers-are-fake…. Once again, Ohanian is back…. “Between January 2022 and June 2024, employment in US private businesses increased by about 7.32 million jobs. Of these 7.32 million jobs, about 5,400 were jobs created in California businesses…. California has been among the worst-performing states in the country in terms of job growth…. Nearly all jobs that are being created in California are government jobs”…. (De-emphais added; the statements that are untrue or questionable are struck through)…. “Total jobs”… [is] Household Survey. From that, the good professor is subtracting “government jobs… from the Establishment Survey… https://ritholtz.com/2024/11/lee-ohanians-comedy-of-errors/\n\nAnd:\n\nMichael Hiltzik: The Hoover Institution says all recent California job growth has been in government jobs. That’s completely wrong: ‘Ohanian acknowledged in an email that he had erroneously considered the household and establishment figures similar enough to treat them as effectively equivalent. “If I had seen the differences in the two series,” he says, “I would have written the piece differently. Mea Culpa.” In a corrective article posted Tuesday on the Hoover website https://www.hoover.org/research/recent-trends-californias-job-growth, Ohanian makes public his mea culpa, but also reiterates a point he made in the original article, which is that California’s job growth is weakening… https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-12-03/column-the-hoover-institution-says-all-recent-california-job-growth-has-been-in-government-jobs-thats-completely-wrong\n\nAnd put me down as not impressed by the claim that “California’s job growth is weakening”: national job growth is weakening because the Federal Reserve wants job growth to weaken. Relative to the national average, the California unemployment rate today is where it was in 2014, higher than it was in 2019, and lower than it was in 2021. There is no signal here of the effects of recent policy changes here, and it is false to claim that there is.","body_json":{"type":"doc","attrs":{"schemaVersion":"v1"},"content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"},{"type":"italic"}],"text":"This Is Simply Not a Mistake Real Economists Ever Make"},{"type":"text","text":": "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"Put me down as disgusted by Lee Ohanian’s defensive claim that his subtracting an establishment-survey number from a household-survey number was a natural error because “typically, job growth in these two surveys move together very closely…” They do not. "}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"},{"type":"italic"}],"text":"WHEN I WAS ELEVEN "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"economist Joseph Froomkin told me, as I strained to understand his extremely strong Shanghai-Russian accent, that the failure of these two surveys to move together over the business cycle showed how serious the problems of measuring economic statistics were, even in countries with world-class statistical systems. He then handed me his copy of Oskar Morgenstern’s "},{"type":"text","text":"On the Accuracy of Economic Observations. "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"(No: I could not then really read it, or really understand it.) But no competent economist ever mixes and matches data from two different sources without careful, careful consideration. And thus I have grave questions to ask the Economics Department of the University of Rochester:"}]},{"type":"blockquote","content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Barry Ritholtz"},{"type":"text","text":": Hoover Withdraws Discredited Article: ‘You may have missed this little brouhaha over the Thanksgiving weekend. We posted an analysis <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"ritholtz.com/2024/11/l… ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"ritholtz.com/2024/11/l…},{"type":"text","text":" of a deeply flawed (dare I say fabricated?) data analysis from the Hoover Institution <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"ritholtz.com/2024/11/l… ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"ritholtz.com/2024/11/l…},{"type":"text","text":"… [that] went viral recently….. ? A little digging by Invictus here <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"ritholtz.com/2024/11/l… ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"ritholtz.com/2024/11/l…},{"type":"text","text":"> (he does amazing work) led to some very obvious analytical errors. Not that these mistakes stopped many politicos and even journalists from blindly repeating the mistake. “Rip & Read” journalism still lives."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"Michael Hiltzik of the L.A. Times did a very thorough follow-up <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"ritholtz.com/2024/11/l… ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"ritholtz.com/2024/11/l…},{"type":"text","text":". Hoover has retracted the published article. Its author, Lee Ohanian, deleted his Twitter account. This is the second such time a basic ECON101 error appeared from this author and this source. (We may have to dive deeper into the archive to see what else was wrong). Journalists are advised to stop parroting hired guns for the Fast Food industry or other partisan players… <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"ritholtz.com/2024/12/h… ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"ritholtz.com/2024/12/h…},{"type":"text","text":">"}]}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"And"},{"type":"text","text":":"}]},{"type":"blockquote","content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Invictus"},{"type":"text","text":": Never Mix Payroll and Household Survey Data: ‘Let’s cut to the chase: A Hoover Institution analysis of California private job creation is off by a factor of 100. Between January 2022 and June 2024, the state created 523,700 private sector jobs — not 5,400 as claimed. MSM uncritically repeated the false number. I spend far too much time debunking economic bullshit. "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"Sigh…. "},{"type":"text","text":"Hoover Institution’s Lee Ohanian wrote a piece last April <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"www.hoover.org/research/… ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"www.hoover.org/research/…},{"type":"text","text":" falsely claiming that California’s new minimum wage law had cost the state almost 10,000 fast food jobs. The story was false. Some sleuthing uncovered the fact Ohanian had inappropriately relied on data that was not seasonally adjusted.… He eventually walked his error back, but only when confronted by Michael Hiltzik <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"www.hoover.org/research/… ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"www.hoover.org/research/…},{"type":"text","text":"…. Once again, Ohanian is back…. “Between January 2022 and June 2024, employment in US private businesses increased by about 7.32 million jobs. "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"strike"}],"text":"Of these 7.32 million jobs, about 5,400 were jobs created in California businesses…. California has been among the worst-performing states in the country in terms of job growth…. Nearly all jobs that are being created in California are government jobs”"},{"type":"text","text":"…. (De-emphais added; the statements that are untrue or questionable are struck through)…. “Total jobs”… [is] Household Survey. From that, the good professor is subtracting “government jobs… from the Establishment Survey… <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"ritholtz.com/2024/11/l… ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"ritholtz.com/2024/11/l…},{"type":"text","text":">"}]}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"And"},{"type":"text","text":":"}]},{"type":"blockquote","content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Michael Hiltzik"},{"type":"text","text":": The Hoover Institution says all recent California job growth has been in government jobs. That’s completely wrong: ‘Ohanian acknowledged in an email that he had erroneously considered the household and establishment figures similar enough to treat them as effectively equivalent. “If I had seen the differences in the two series,” he says, “I would have written the piece differently. Mea Culpa.” In a corrective article posted Tuesday on the Hoover website <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"www.hoover.org/research/… ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"www.hoover.org/research/…},{"type":"text","text":", Ohanian makes public his mea culpa, but also reiterates a point he made in the original article, which is that California’s job growth is weakening… <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"www.latimes.com/business/… ugc noopener","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"www.latimes.com/business/…},{"type":"text","text":">"}]}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"And put me down as not impressed by the claim that “California’s job growth is weakening”: national job growth is weakening because the Federal Reserve wants job growth to weaken. Relative to the national average, the California unemployment rate today is where it was in 2014, higher than it was in 2019, and lower than it was in 2021. There is no signal here of the effects of recent policy changes here, and it is false to claim that there is."}]}]},"restacks":1,"reaction_count":8,"attachments":[{"id":"52d873c2-e474-4868-be31-99c32dd71186","type":"link","linkMetadata":{"url":"www.latimes.com/business/…,"host":"latimes.com","title":"Column: The Hoover Institution says all recent California job growth has been in government jobs. 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The Fed’s Year-Ago Achieved Soft Landing:—& Why Our Transitory Inflation Was a Feature, Not a Bug.

Time to Update My Inflation-Talk Talking Points. & so, as of October 8, 2024, the sitch. For my fall round of what-is-the-economic situation talks…
The U.S. economy’s rapid post-pandemic recovery defied expectations, with inflation surprising many. Was it a failure of monetary policy or a triumph of strategic patience? Here’s why I think the Fed’s approach was the right one, relying on Friedrich von Hayek’s economic principles to explain why our transitory burst of inflation was a desirable catalyst for successful recovery & growth.
As of mid-2023, inflation had cooled, and the economy achieved a rare soft landing. This success wasn’t just luck; it was the outcome of the Federal Reserve’s calculated patience in navigating unprecedented supply shocks. Had the Fed acted sooner to tighten monetary policy, it would have unduly constrained the market’s ability to dynamically reallocate resources. Conversely, loosening policy earlier might have risked a return of no-longer-desirable inflation. The careful, strategic patience of Jay Powell’s Fed has proved nearly optimal—a matter of skill, plus lots of luck.

The general belief that the short-run Phillips Curve was flat meant that the sheer magnitude of the reopening inflation came as a substantial surprise to many:

And yet the inflation proved transitory—so transitory that, as far as inflation is concerned, the economy touched down on its soft landing by June 2023, with inflation afterwards bouncing up and down above and below target, but with no statistically significant deviations in either direction to ring any kind of alarm.

Moreover, throughout the inflation, medium-term expectations of future inflation in the bond market remained nailed to where they need to be for the Fed to costlessly attain its 2%/year PCE and 2.5%/year CPI target for the annual inflation rate by simply waiting for supply shocks to die away—in fact, expectations have consistently been a hair low:

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And so:

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Two Cheers for Nate Silver & Co.: Polls, Predictions, & the Persistent Problem of Political Noise

A plea for people to subscribe to and read Nate Silver & Eli McKown-Dawson’s Silver Bulletin <https://www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-president-election-polls-model> as a vaccination against all the polling & pundit election bullshit this fall: Why Silver’s election forecasting remains essential amidst the polling-noise election-misinformation tsunami…
Nate Silver’s election forecasts have always revealed an essential truth: the polls don’t change much day-to-day, & almost all breathless stories by reporters, pollsters, & pundits mislead readers into attributing substantive significance to what is overwhelmingly likely to be mere statistical noise. Before we can even start to try to shift away from horse-race political journalism to public-policy and real life-impact political journalism, we need to get many more people reading the Silver Bulletin…

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I find Nate Silver these days to be annoyingly and gullibly tech-bro adjacent, hence misleading once he gets out of his wheelhouse.

But Nate Silver in his wheelhouse!

Pay attention, because this is important: I find him—I still find, as I have long found him—an indispensable guide to keeping a sense of proportion in this election fall. It is true that if you follow Nate Silver, you find yourself obsessing about election polls. But you will only obsess about election polls for about four minutes a day. That is what it will take you, reading Silver and McKown-Dawson’s daily “Silver Bulletin Presidential Election Forecast” <https://www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-president-election-polls-model> to learn that there is, essentially, no news but only olds in the polls: .

Tracking back to when the Silver Bulletin started its model of Harris-Trump at the end of July, so far it has told us:

  • 2024-09-28 to 2024-10-08: Toss-up

  • 2024-09-27: Toss-up (but you would rather be playing KH’s hand in this contest)

  • 2024-09-17 to 2024-09-26: Toss-up

  • 2024-09-15 to 2024-09-16: Toss-up (but you would rather be playing DT’s hand in this contest)

  • 2024-09-05 to 2024-09-14: 3-2 Trump

  • 2024-09-04: Toss-up (but you would rather be playing DT’s hand in this contest)

  • 2024-07-31 to 2024-09-03: Toss-up

  • 2024-07-29 to 2024-07-30: Toss-up (but you would rather be playing DT’s hand in this contest)

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On only seven of seventy-odd days do Silver and McKown-Dawson say that the most recent bunch of polls suggests a little movement in the race—and it is only a little movement. Telling people that almost all of the time the polls are essentially saying very close to the same thing they said yesterday is a valuable service. That “calm down” and “we are ignorant of where the polls are missing the mark” are the most important things for people to get from the polls this year. Silver and McKown-Dawson give them to us. And virtually nobody else does.

Indeed, there is only one thing Silver and Eli McKown-Dawson have said about his average of nation-level and state-level polls that I would take serious exception to.

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BlueSky Is Much Better than Twitter: Ring Lore Edition

I think many more people should come over to BlueSky. I, at least, am having much more fun…

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‪Charlie Jane Anders: My latest newsletter <https://buttondown.com/charliejane/archive/why-are-toxic-superfans-such-a-nightmare-for/> is about the toxic so-called “superfans” who torment Hollywood. Why are they such a problem? Because they have the power to hurt movies and TV shows, but they have zero power to make anything successful. <https://bsky.app/profile/charliejane.bsky.social/post/3l5wsbwqdzd2s>

Brad DeLong: My take on toxic superfans is this:

There is absolutely no reason to believe that the Red Book of Westmarch is at all accurate about the Second Age.

Written in Rivendell under the thumb of Elrond, in the Shire where history scrolls were simply not available, and then edited in Gondor under the watchful eyes of the royal court, it is extremely unlikely that anything even slightly critical of the queen’s father (Elrond) and grandmother (Galadriel) would have ever made it into the book.

Thus The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is likely to have at least as accurate a take on what actually went down in the Second Age of Middle Earth as do the toxic superfans who take The Red Book of Westmarch to be inerrant gospel.

‪Charlie Jane Anders: I love this take so much! Also I’ve been very grateful to mostly escape the haters when it comes to Rings of Power. I’ve been enjoying it just as a fun fantasy show, on its own merits.

‪Annalee Newitz‬: Honestly tired of elf-funded disinformation being reported as news.

‪Tom Doyle‬: The layers of BS had gotten so thick that Gandalf had to play research librarian and find the original documents to figure out for certain which ring was Frodo’s.

Brad DeLong: You win! I mean, wearing one of the nine has pretty clear… effects on your physical and metaphysical form; the three are accounted for; of the seven… how certain is Gandalf that Sauron has three and that four were consumed by dragons?… pretty certain. And there were only twenty Great Rings to start with:

‘How long have you known all this?’ asked Frodo again.

‘Known?’ said Gandalf. ‘I have known much that only the Wise know, Frodo. But if you mean “known about this ring”, well, I still do not know, one might say. There is a last test to make. But I no longer doubt my guess.

‘When did I first begin to guess?’ he mused, searching back in memory. ‘Let me see—it was in the year that the White Council drove the Dark Power from Mirkwood, just before the Battle of Five Armies, that Bilbo found his ring. A shadow fell on my heart then, though I did not know yet what I feared.

I wondered often how Gollum came by a Great Ring, as plainly it was—that at least was clear from the first. Then I heard Bilbo’s strange story of how he had “won” it, and I could not believe it. When I at last got the truth out of him, I saw at once that he had been trying to put his claim to the ring beyond doubt. Much like Gollum with his “birthday-present”. The lies were too much alike for my comfort.

Clearly the ring had an unwholesome power that set to work on its keeper at once. That was the first real warning I had that all was not well. I told Bilbo often that such rings were better left unused; but he resented it, and soon got angry. There was little else that I could do. I could not take it from him without doing greater harm; and I had no right to do so anyway. I could only watch and wait.

I might perhaps have consulted Saruman the White, but something always held me back.’

‘Who is he?’ asked Frodo. ‘I have never heard of him before.’

‘Maybe not,’ answered Gandalf. ‘Hobbits are, or were, no concern of his. Yet he is great among the Wise. He is the chief of my order and the head of the Council. His knowledge is deep, but his pride has grown with it, and he takes ill any meddling. The lore of the Elven-rings, great and small, is his province. He has long studied it, seeking the lost secrets of their making; but when the Rings were debated in the Council, all that he would reveal to us of his ring-lore told against my fears. So my doubt slept—but uneasily. Still I watched and I waited. ‘And all seemed well with Bilbo. And the years passed. Yes, they passed, and they seemed not to touch him. He showed no signs of age…

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Tom Doyle: Yeah, is the implication that Celebrimbor or Sauron might’ve dashed out a few other Great Rings in the chaos that were unaccounted for in the ring poem and Gandalf’s math? The TV series shows the appropriate chaos and destruction of records. And Occam’s razor is a few thousand years in the future.

Brad DeLong: But it is very clear in the Lore—at least the official RBoW Lore—that there were only 20 great rings. There were other rings of lesser power. Instead of Círdan’s ring Narya—the Ring of Flame—you might have the ring Úvanima Ursu—the Ring of Uncomfortable Warmth. Or instead of Galadriel’s ring Nenya—the Ring of Water—you might have Linya Nimpa—The Ring of Slight Dampness.

‪Tom Doyle‬: Ha, I agree—doesn’t seem to be an easy way to retcon Gandalf’s delay in coming to the most likely conclusion. Unless this is part of how the One Ring protected itself—deflecting minds from seeing it for what it is when it didn’t want to be seen. Then Gandalf’s perception becomes extraordinary…


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Sundowning in America: A Series: Part III

Trump on how immigrants have bad genes, and Vance on how state police should keep a menstruation registry…

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Sundowning in America: ChatGPTrump1.0, prompted with a question about a $25,000 first-time homebuyer credit, winds up saying that immigrants have bad genes:

Donald Trump: That [credit] is going to drive the prices up, yeah. Your price is going to be $100,000 dollars more now. No, no, everything they want to do is wrong. First of all, you have to let the private sector do it. You just have to let them do it. She wants to go into government housing. She wants to go into government feeding.

She wants to feed people. She wants to feed people governmentally. She wants to go into a communist party type of a system. When you look at the things that she proposes, they’re so far off. She has no clue.

How about allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers. Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States.

You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here that are criminals. And you know one of the worst stats? 325,000 young children are missing. Can you imagine?…

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Sundowning in America: Remember, JD Vance is on record wanting to criminalize abortion nationwide, and to allow state police to establish state-level menstruation registries:

Matt Christy: Sen. Mike Braun said interracial marriage ruling should be left to states: ‘During the press call, [Indiana Senator Mike] Braun [®] had been explaining how he felt Roe v. Wade, the ruling that legalized abortions, should never have been a federal decision and been left to states to decide. A reporter then asked Braun if he applied the same reasoning to decisions like Loving v. Virginia, which struck down state laws that made interracial marriages illegal. Braun responded:

“When it comes to issues, you can’t have it both ways. When you want that diversity to shine within our federal system, there are going to be rules and proceedings, they’re going to be out of sync with maybe what other states would do. It’s the beauty of the system, and that’s where the differences among points of view in our 50 states ought to express themselves”… <fox59.com/indiana-news/sen-mike-braun-s…>


Sundowning in America: JD Vance, remember, was not just a normal “Never Trump” guy, but had turned it up to 11:

JD Vance: ‘On Donald Trump:

  • [He] just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy)….

  • [He’s] Emperor Trump…. I turned down my appointment from the emperor….

  • I’m a “Never Trump” guy…. I never liked him….

  • I understand where Trump’s voters come from. But I also don’t like Trump himself, and that made me realize that maybe I’m not quite part of either world totally….

  • My god what an idiot….

  • [Trump could be] America’s Hitler… [or he’s a] cynical asshole like Nixon…

  • Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office….

  • I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place….

  • if I [had] fe[lt] like Trump [had had] a really good chance of winning, that I might have [had] to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton….

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Notes ScratchPad: The Presidential Race Is Nearly a Tossup—Meaning That Somebody Has It 80% in the Bag, But Polling Uncertainties Mean We Do Not Know Who

So pay the polls no attention for the next two weeks, and then come back. Plus who really made Biden decide to drop out—it was small & large donors. Plus MOAR. A scratchpad…

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Journamalism: Dan Drezner is very smart and very reliable. He writes:

Dan Drezner: What if October is… Boring?: ‘It’s been a fat-tailed presidential election so far…. An awful lot of Big Events that transformed the 2024 U.S. presidential election…. There has been an awful lot of speculation about which October surprises could tip the election one way or another. This New York Times story by Shane Goldmacher and Reid Epstein <270towin.com/2024-countdown-clock from 48 hours ago represents the perfect distillation of this genre <270towin.com/2024-countdown-clock> of <270towin.com/2024-countdown-clock> story:

“Vice President Kamala Harris has cast herself as a candidate of the future, but she has been yanked back by the problems of the present… war… strike… hurricane… combined to knock Ms. Harris off a message that has been carefully calibrated…”.

You get the idea…. maybe—just maybe—it’s time… to take a breath…. Look at that FiveThirtyEight chart. Even with all of the shocks of August and September, there wasn’t a lot of movement in either direction… <danieldrezner.substack.com/p/what-if-oc…>

Now do not get me wrong. The election is almost certainly not close. If we knew everything about the state of the electorate right now, we would almost surely judge the probabilities as putting it 80% in the bag. But we do not know everything, and in particular we do not know where the systematic polling error lies, and how large it is.

But Dan is right. From our ignorant perspective, it is very close to a tossup, and will probably stay that way down to close to the wire.

Nate Silver and Eli McKown-Dawson right now have it thus:

Nate Silver & Eli McKown-Dawson: Silver Bulletin 2024 Presidential Election Forecast: ‘1:30 p.m., Friday, October 4. Another day… still very little change…. Harris… has a 56 percent chance of winning the election to Trump’s 44 percent chance… [with] a 21 percent chance Harris wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College… <natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-presi…>

That is all the time you need to spend on the polls. Maybe come back and revisit <natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-presi…> for five minutes in two weeks, or one week if you have anxiety disorder. Otherwise go do other, productive things.

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Public Reason: I think this from Seth Masket is wrong. It was not the “party”, not the professional Democratic politicians and staffers, who successfully pressured Biden to step aside. Biden had, after all, successfully resisted such pressures applied sotto voce in 2022, 2023, and the first half of 2024. What did it was the donors. The massive flight downballot of both large and small donors is what done it. And that was an uncoördinated non-party action—just people giving at all levels deciding that they needed to direct their money elsewhere:

Seth Masket: Did the Parties Decide in 2024?: ‘How well does this model of elite coordination describe what we’ve seen from the two parties’ presidential nominations lately? It did a pretty good job describing how Democrats picked, say, Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020, giving their eventual nominee many structural advantages and nudging other candidates out of contention long before anyone started voting in Iowa or New Hampshire. But it falls well short of describing the much more aggressive version of party activity we saw among Democrats this past July. Even U.S. parties at their strongest have rarely had the kind of muscle needed to push an incumbent president out…. Direct pressure from top party elites… the desertion of many Democratic members of Congress, a decline in public approval, and a widespread consensus… that Biden had massively and viscerally bombed at the June debate… convinced the president to step aside… <hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/did-the-…>

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Neofascism: It now seems long, long ago that Noah Smith told me that Elon Musk should buy Twitter—either he would destroy it and new and much better things would grow up in the Tweeting space, or he would find for it a profitable business model that would radically improve it as it found valuable things to its user base and so made it more worthwhile. In retrospect, that was a very bad take. Elon Musk appears to have lit $34 billion of his and his investors’ money on fire in order to create a worse misinformation engine, but while the thing is much less salient and has died as a profit-making entity or as an entity providing value to stakeholders, it still exists as a shitposting, misinformation-spreading entity:

Matt Egan: CNN: Elon Musk’s X is worth nearly 80% less than when he bought it, Fidelity estimates: ‘Fidelity discloses what it believes <cnn.com/2024/01/02/tech/fidelity-again-…> is the value of its shares of X, and those estimates serve as a closely watched barometer for the overall health of the company…. Analysts say Fidelity’s plunging price tag for X likely reflects shrinking ad revenue at the company, which no longer publicly releases quarterly financial metrics…. Musk faced a backlash from brands <cnn.com/2023/11/17/tech/lionsgate-suspe…>, some of which halted spending on X, after the billionaire embraced an antisemitic conspiracy theory <cnn.com/2023/11/17/tech/lionsgate-suspe…> favored by White supremacists.

Musk later apologized for what he called his “dumbest” ever social media posting. However, during that apology <cnn.com/2023/11/17/tech/lionsgate-suspe…>, Musk also told fleeing advertisers: “Go f**k yourself”… <cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-t…>

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Neofascism: Every single news outlet should right now be saying this once a week. Hell, they should be saying this once a day. That they are not shows that they are deeply, deeply broken systems and people:

Heather Cox Richardson : October 6, 2024: ‘This morning began with a CNN headline story by fact checker Daniel Dale, titled “Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response.” Dale noted that Republican nominee for president Donald Trump has been one of the chief sources of the disinformation that has badly hampered recovery efforts. 

Trump has claimed that the federal government is ignoring the storm’s victims, especially ones in Republican areas, and that the government is handing out only $750 in aid (in fact, the initial emergency payment for food and groceries is $750, but there are multiple grants available for home rebuilding up to a total of $42,500, the upper limit set by Congress). He has also claimed—falsely—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is out of money to help because the administration spent all its money on Ukraine and undocumented immigrants.

Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image… <heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/oct…>

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Neofascism: I do think that Brian Buetler has this absolutely nailed as to what the plan is, what the assignment is, and how many people understand it and are enthusiastically onboard. It reminds me of 2002 in some way—the 45th Fighting Keyboarders have a misinformation mission again!:

Brian Buetler: MAGA’s Hurricane Helene Lies Are A Trial Run For The Election: ‘The through-line is sowing chaos and hurting people for personal gain: When Donald Trump started telling conspicuous lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene, all of MAGA understood the assignment.

His supporters understood they should spread rumors or fabricate anecdotes consistent with Trump’s claims. They should portray their own confusion as government malice or incompetence. They should claim to have witnessed FEMA abandoning <x.com/jamessurowiecki/status/1842605704…> Republican-heavy regions and illegal immigrants walking away with relief money first hand. They should even use artificial intelligence technology to fabricate images that reinforce these lies.

Elon Musk and Trump’s other ultra-wealthy supporters understood it as their solemn duty to draw as much attention to these lies as possible.

Anyone who sought information about the recovery on social media has been bombarded with them for over a week now; Musk’s Twitter is a particularly prolific font of disinformation, because he spends all day plucking rumor, lies, and innuendo from the stream and retweeting them to is 200 million followers. He takes special care to algorithmically boost this content of his, even to people who aren’t regular Tiwtter users <x.com/jamessurowiecki/status/1842605704…>, and who don’t follow his account…. <offmessage.net/p/maga-hurricane-helene-…>


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Prosperity since 1900: Democratic Presidencies Rule!

Sam Williamson ex-Miami of Ohio & now <http://measuringWorth.com> gives us the numbers, and I reflect on them. Some presidents were really unlucky. For the others, the question, briefly, is this: Why do Democratic presidencies rule—with the exception of Barack Obama’s?
My view: If the true explanation for Democratic presidencies’ ruling is multivariate, we have no chance of finding it. There is one possible candidate univariate explanation: It is that confidence that economic policy will be competent and directed toward full employment is a major key…

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Sam Williamson has revised his data piece on relative American economic performance as measured by real income growth during the different 20th and 21st century presidencies:

The best performances came under Roosevelt, Johnson, Truman, and Kennedy/Johnson. You can argue that good Johnson performance came at the price of creating inflationary problems for his successor, and that Roosevelt should not receive any substantial credit because his terms started at the nadir of the Great Depression and ended in the forced boom of World War II. Those are points, but I have always seen them as greatly overstressed in most of the literature:

Share Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality

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…

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