My weekly read-around…

Only two moments mattered in the vice-presidential debate, and they were both Walz moments; the plague-induced wheeling of the economy towards goods production that made inflation what the market system wanted and needed; Richard Koo says China’s balance-sheet recession” has already started;

very briefly noted; SubStack Notes;

key moments in the vice-presidential debate; Kimberly Clausing & Maury Obstfeld on “The Atlantic” going fully into the tank to misinform about Trump & his tariffs; reviewing William Taylor’s new horses book; Yastreblyansky on the state of the race; Michale Strain (who knows better) doing Trump’s bidding by both-sidesing policy proposals; & weekly briefly noted for 2024-09-28 Sa…

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ONE IMAGE: One of the Two Moments That Mattered in the US Vice-Presidential Debate, as a Meme:

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A Second Image: The Plague-Induced Wheeling of the American Economy Toward Physical Goods Production:

The major thing that made the market system want and need a burst of inflation in order to rebalance aggregate supply across sectors in the aftermath of the COVID plague:

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ONE Video: China’s “Balance-Sheet Recession” Has Already Started:

Richard Koo & Jack Farley

<https://overcast.fm/+AA1cWwqwdks>

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Very Briefly Noted:

1. War: And so we continue down the path that leads nowhere but the high likelihood of the nuclear destruction of Tel Aviv, Damascus, and quite perhaps more in less than two generations:
   Dan Drezner: The Middle East Earthquakes: ‘The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World would strongly prefer not writing about the…Middle East…. The October 7th assault and the war in Gaza are just littered with violations of the laws of war; Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s leader and if Netanyahu said the sky was blue I would go outside for independent confirmation; Arab allies of the United States behave just as badly as Israel; The Middle East is always the region that brings out the hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy…. Biden… unwilling to jawbone Israel. Iran…on its back foot. The Arab world…content to… let Israel punish Hezbollah and Hamas, two groups that are almost as despised in Riyadh as in Jerusalem. This leaves Bibi in charge, and Bibi’s primary motivation is staying in power. For now, that means extending… conflict…. [Do] tactical successes translate into strategic stability…. [With] Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, strategic stability is not going to happen anytime soon… <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/big-developments-in-the-middle-east>
   

2. Neofascism: And by now our police are so terrified of going out into the world—especially in rural areas:
   Greg Siskind: ‘While everyone is focusing on this [attempted-assassin with an AK-47] whack job’s political beliefs, I’m also pretty concerned that a guy with 8 previous criminal convictions including for barricading himself inside a business with a gun in Greensboro was able to get his hands on an AK-47… <https://x.com/gsiskind/status/1835478991446176076>
   

3. Economics: You won’t find even a hint of this—true—analysis anywhere in the sanewashing press. I talked to three different reporters last week, all of whom who did not know how to write a “comparing the candidates’ economic policies piece”, because the only truthful way to do it would to say “Trump has no economic policy we can identify”, and I got the very strong feeling that their bosses would think that was “unfair”:
   David Dayen: Donald Trump Doesn’t Know What Donald Trump Is Doing: ‘Tariffs are a good example of the fact-free abandon of today’s Republican Party… [and] now comprise [their] entire economic policy… : a cure for every ailment…. Trump’s incoherent-sounding answer at the Economic Club of New York last week about child care was merely Trump seeing tariffs as bringing in enough cash to handle the problem. The way he thinks about this is the way a gangster used to think about protection money: Trump will get rich (oh, and sure, the country will too) by sticking up other countries…. An entire party… [is] in a fact-free zone, [where] words are mashed together to the point of incoherence, and promises can be big and bold without a thought of whether they’re true and correct… <https://prospect.org/economy/2024-09-11-donald-trump-doesnt-know-what-donald-trump-is-doing/>
   

4. Economic History: I would not say “probably arose”, I would say “perhaps arose”. I guess it was equally likely a way to get everyone on the same page with respect to what the tasks of the Roman Republic were going to be in the current year. And it was certainly something that was in the “violate this”—as in the destruction of Hasdrubal’s army—and you will readily receive forgiveness if you had a good reason, which strongly suggests to me that it was for coördination rather than an absolute limitation:
   Fred K. Drogula: Commanders and Command in the Roman Republic & Early Empire: ‘L. Postumius… prosecuted and condemned… for using his imperium to coerce his soldiers into working… on his farm…. Cicero accurately called it “stupid” (ἀβδηριτικόν) that Pompey had asked him to take command of Sicily in 50 BC, since he (Cicero) had no authorization… to exercise the imperium that he had received for his Cilician provincia in Sicily…. The consuls… it was not within their authority to determine where or for what purpose they would use their imperium…. The provinciae were almost always military… [but] other… tasks… investigat[ing] suspicious activities… combat[ting] a locust plague…. The provincia… probably arose in the early republic as one method by which the developing state achieved a monopoly of control over the exercise of military authority by its aristocracy. Rather than weaken the effectiveness of their generals… the Romans instead chose to define and limit the use of that absolute authority…. Drogula, Fred K. 2015. Commanders and Command in the Roman Republic and Early Empire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press…
   <https://archive.org/details/commanderscomman0000drog>
   

5. Central Country: It is interesting how eager financial markets are to believe that the Politburo has moved completely off of this policy:

   Chris Anstey: Why China’s Sluggish Growth Isn’t Rattling Xi Jinping: ‘⁠Xi isn’t particularly unhappy… because… “new productive forces”—[they] are doing well. Housing… isn’t the foundation on which he wants to build China’s economic future. Advanced manufacturing, high-tech goods and green energy and transport are…. And they are powering ahead… <https://read.readwise.io/new/read/01j8av4fbsxjh4teyqmyy3ym5j>
   

6. The recent policy turn seems to me to be much more focused on financial markets and asset than on actually getting people into jobs. The régime’s hope that this will be enough—that it can avoid actually putting people to work building more consumer durables, non-durables, and services for private domestic consumption—seems to me more likely than not to be a vain hope:
   Minxin Pei: The Game Isn’t Over for China, But It Is ‘Garbage Time’: ‘Many Chinese see no hope for an economic recovery as long as the same leaders stick to the same policies that led to the slump…. On the surface, such pessimism is driven by economic woes…. The malaise, however, has deeper political roots. The country has gone through much worse economic times before without despairing…. At the end of the 1990s… ordinary Chinese remained optimistic about the future. The difference is that those citizens believed in the competence of the reformist then-premier Zhu Rongji… <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-09-22/has-china-s-economy-entered-the-garbage-time-of-history>
   

7. Attention-Info-Biotech Economic Mode of Production: I guess I should double my daily weight-lifting routine, shouldn’t I?
   Jo Ellison: Everyone’s on Ozempic. So why will no one talk about it?: ‘It’s stunning to see colleagues suddenly transform into the incredible shrinking woman—or man. What I find curious about this new wave of waifs is how coy they are about talking about the drug. I’ve lost count of the number of newly emaciated editors and stylists extolling their current diet and brand new fitness regimens…. Nathan Curran…. The only downside he had noticed was that, unless patients made significant lifestyle changes in accordance with the rapid weight loss, they would have a lot of wasted muscle or “skinny fat” to deal with.… That so few of them want to discuss their drug use just goes to show how pervasive sizeism remains. Culturally, we are still dismissive of anyone who has simply shrugged off weight without having to “do the work”… <https://www.ft.com/content/498c2c5e-fb9c-461e-8e9c-5429696b56a6>
   

8. Intellectual Grifters: The jobs were “bullshit” from the perspective of not being useful for society, but just neutralizing other jobs that were also not useful for society. It always seemed to me that Graeber had made a big error in claiming that they were “bullshit” for the organization, and it was another nail in the coffin as far as the possibility that I might believe that he cared to try think things through was concerned:

   Byrne Hobart: “Bullshit Jobs” Is a Terrible, Curiosity-Killing Concept: ‘The strongest single argument against [David] Graeber’s [Bullshit Jobs] book is: did anyone at Bain or McKinsey read it? What about KKR and Blackstone? Did any owner of any business of any size read it and say: “What a sec! That’s right! Most jobs really are fake jobs designed to make rich people feel good about themselves. But what makes me feel good about myself is having more money, so I’m going to start  firing people and keeping the money.” The closest you can get is Elon Musk at Twitter, which did reveal that the service could keep running, and ship new features, with a lower headcount. But that happened at a company that was notoriously inefficient, for years, and one where it’s widely-agreed that they unnecessarily blew their lead in short-form many-to-many communications, and took too long to get into messaging. If there’s one large-scale example of the thesis playing out, and the thesis holds that it’s describing a ubiquitous phenomenon, something doesn’t add up… <https://www.thediff.co/archive/bullshit-jobs-is-a-terrible-curiosity-killing-concept/>
   

9. MAMLMs: As far as making money off of MAMLMs is concerned, Ben Stancil is right in noting that it is not write-once run-everywhere with zero marginal costs of serving an additional user. It is, rather, table stakes to keep your other tech oligopoly profits from vanishing at the hands of someone using MAMLMs to breach your market-power moat and take your existing oligopoly profits away. Thus I see MAMLMs as bad news for investors and stock-option holders, but good news for users—if we can keep them from being used by grifters, and figure out what they are genuinel able to do that is useful:
   Ben Stancil: Do AI companies work?: ‘The market needs to be irrational for you to stay solvent…. Even if the industry doesn’t keep building new models, or if we hit a technological asymptote, the value of old models still decays pretty quickly…. [And] open source… Llama and Mistral… are, at worst, a step or two behind…. If you are OpenAI, Anthropic, or another AI vendor, you have two choices. Your first is to spend enormous amounts of money to stay ahead of the market. This seems very risky though: The costs of building those models will likely keep going up; your smartest employees might leave; you probably don’t want to stake your business on always being the first company to find the next breakthrough. Technological expertise is rarely an enduring moat.  Your second choice is…I don’t know?… AI companies seem to be an extreme example of the market misclassifying software development costs as upfront investments rather than necessary ongoing expenses… <https://benn.substack.com/p/do-ai-companies-work>
   

10. Slouching Towarsds Utopia Reviews: Say, rather, that left-neoliberalism would be the least terrible of a set of mostly utterly discredited aging economic philosophies, all past their expiry dates—if left-neoliberalism were stable, but it isn’t: the past generation’s experience has taught us that it has a very strong tendency to slide into right-neoliberalism:

    Venkatesh Rao: Book Review: Slouching Towards Utopia: “‘By untheorized, I mean that DeLong does not offer a theoretical model or historicist-ideological end-of-history type account of “slouching progress.” There is just the history narrated through that lens, serving as an implicit argument for a pragmatic managed economics as the essential work of governance. Though he identifies as a left-neoliberal partisan, this story of slouching cannot be read as the a redemptive narrative of the triumphal ascent of left-neoliberalism. Indeed, one could read the book as arguing that left-neoliberalism is at best the least terrible in a field of mostly utterly discredited aging economic philosophies, all past their expiry dates… <https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/book-review-slouching-towards-utopia>

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State of the Race

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5 days ago · 37 likes · 25 comments · Yastreblyansky

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