2025-03-21: Friday Read-Arounds: Catching Up
Restarting: I need a way to keep track of important things than I have read, plus ideas and reactions that I have had. Trying to do it Friday mornings seems a good thing to try. And by now there is quite a backlog. January 20, just before my start-of-the-semester & Trump-inauguration schedule collapse, when I started the serious dropping of eggs on the floor, was the last time I did a “Weekly Briefly Noted”, after all:
So here are a bunch of catch ups. What have I been writing, and what did I find it important enough as I read it to make a SubStack Note about?
These:
What are the most notable things I managed to say during the last two months of schedule collapse and egg-meet-floor? Some things that stand out are these particular posts:
More-or-less in order:
I think hosts Dylan Riley and myself and guest John Ganz did a bang-up job in the relaunch of Inflection Point, the Berkeley Political Economy Podcast: We discuss the rise of radical right-wing populism in the United States; examine historical shifts within the Republican Party, tracing its transformation from a business-oriented, managerial party to one increasingly driven by cultural anxieties and right-wing populism; highlight key ideological figures like James Burnham and Sam Francis; discuss how economic shifts, cultural anxieties, and new media platforms contribute. Does Trumpism fits within frameworks like fascism, Caesarism, Bonepartism, or other reactionary movements.
Ganz’s book, When the Clock Broke, serves as the anchor for the discussion, examining how the political and cultural ruptures of the early 1990s laid the groundwork for Trumpism.
Letting my arm be twisted by vice-chair Jon Steinsson so that I am this semester teaching American Economic History has gotten me damned close to thinking I really do have a book to write about “American Exceptionalism & Non-Exceptionalism”. My introductory lecture, my “exceptionalism” calculations, my immigration lecture, and the feminist take on American economic history are all—or, at least, if I polished them could be—very good indeed:
Introduction <https://open.substack.com/pub/braddelong/p/american-economic-history-introduction>
Is Data ScienceLearning-by-Watching Possible? <https://open.substack.com/pub/braddelong/p/in-data-science-for-non-stem-majors>
Midterm Review <https://open.substack.com/pub/braddelong/p/american-economic-history-midterm>
Exceptionalism <https://open.substack.com/pub/braddelong/p/slides-for-tomorrows-2025-02-24-mo> <https://open.substack.com/pub/braddelong/p/staging-post-for-2025-02-26-we-econ>
2nd Industrial Revolution <https://open.substack.com/pub/braddelong/p/draft-i-get-to-talk-about-the-2nd>
Immigration <https://open.substack.com/pub/braddelong/p/pre-lecture-notes-immigration-american> <https://open.substack.com/pub/braddelong/p/immigration-and-the-american-psyche>
Feminism <https://open.substack.com/pub/braddelong/p/lecture-notes-a-feminist-angle-on>
Huge Honking Course-Up-to-Spring-Vacation Slide Deck
The long-anticipated death of Kevin Drum, my friend and fellow weblogger pioneer, was truly something to mourn and a bigger psychological blow than I had expected. Ben Dreyfuss had very interesting things to say about the wide application.
The extent to which modern conservatism—all of it—relies on total mendacity is often undergrasped, or actively whitewashed, or sanewashed. People who got their information from those trying to tell them the truth or from simply looking around them are sensible. But that appears to be less than half of America’s voting population right now.
“First Principles of Stabilization Policy” is a damned good talk, if I do say so myself: I still think the Federal Reserve’s 2020s monetary policy stance of moving late but then moving fast proved successful. It was certainly the right choice ex ante. I do think it was the right choice ex post as well. I credit Jay Powell and his committee and staff with much kudos for avoiding a return to secular stagnation while navigating successfully through post-pandemic inflationary pressures. Throughout the experience TIPS (inflation-protected securities) data suggested markets trusted the Fed’s long-term inflation control, and the Fed was wise to rely on that trust to do what appeared best in the moment. The transitory inflation that we facilitated sectoral shifts (e.g., green energy, supply-chain resilience) and prevented stagnation like that of the early 2010s. Voters broadly perceived inflation as a failure of governance, but informed voters did not see it as a huge negative—only misinformed voters broke for Trump and said it was because of inflation.
Also a damned good talk is “The Perils of Deglobalization”: So far the best analogy for what Trump is doing to the American economy is Britain’s Tory BREXIT of last decade. The fear is that Trump, already well into his dotage, may inflict a triple-strength Brexit upon the United States. Although Trump is not the only bad actor here: nations are increasingly "weaponizing interdependence". I thus experience a sense of profound frustration: "globalists like me continue to press our case, but with an increasing sense that we are taking on the role of Sisyphus pushing the anti-globalization boulder up the hill. But do not hearken to the promises of politicians who pledge to restore bygone eras either. Neither the New Deal nor the Neoliberal Order is capable of sound restoration.
Plus, hoisted from my & from other people’s archives: