In 1854 Abraham Lincoln picked up the Declaration of Independence, dusted it off, and began the work of incorporating it into America’s fundamental Constitution.

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The Kansas–Nebraska Act, Stephen Douglas’s great gift to the Slave Power, had been wrapped in the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” the right of white people in a territory to govern themselves. Douglas claimed it as an advance of democracy: freedom of westerners to rule themselves independent of the East Coast establishment. But, Lincoln said, democracy is more than the right of some men to decide whether other men shall be slaves. It is more than the “right” of the strong in each locality to do what they wish, and to make the weak of that locality suffer what they must, without interference from elsewhere.

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Lincoln refused cynicism, and refused self-congratulatory moral posturing as well. He granted that he does not know “what to do… as to the existing institution” of slavery. He acknowledgeed the weight of prejudice and the political difficulty of genuine equality. And yet he insisted that there is a bright line between self-government and despotism: when one man governs another without that other’s consent, that is not self-government, but its negation.

Read this speech, therefore, as an early, groping attempt to articulate a politics of non-domination in an actually existing, deeply compromised republic. Lincoln’s target is not just the expansion of slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, but the larger slide from the “Spirit of ’76” into a world in which exploitation clothes itself in the language of liberty. It is to recall that Americans are defined as a people who have fled the Old World and its society-of-domination mistakes in order to work together to create, in this New World, a prosperous and free society. That requires, in the words of Æneas’s father Anchises: “pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos”—impose the ways of peace, be merciful to the subjected, and permanently subdue the haughty.

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Lincoln’s remedy is disarmingly simple and radically demanding: re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it:

Abraham Lincoln (1854): Peoria Speech (October 16) <https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm>: ‘[Thomas] Jefferson… was, is, and perhaps will continue to be, the most distinguished politician of our history; a Virginian by birth and continued residence, and withal, a slave-holder; conceived the idea… to prevent slavery ever going into the north-western territory. He prevailed on the Virginia Legislature to adopt his views, and to cede the territory, making the prohibition of slavery therein, a condition of the deed. Congress accepted the cession, with the condition; and in the first Ordinance (which the acts of Congress were then called) for the government of the territory, provided that slavery should never be permitted therein.

This is the famed ordinance of ‘87 so often spoken of.…

Thus, with the author of the Declaration of Independence, the policy of prohibiting slavery in new territory originated. Thus, away back of the constitution, in the pure fresh, free breath of the revolution, the State of Virginia, and the National Congress put that policy in practice….

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise… is wrong; wrong in its direct effect, letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska—and wrong in its prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world, where men can be found inclined to take it. This declared indifference, but… covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest….

Let me say I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up. This I believe of the masses north and south. Doubtless there are individuals, on both sides, who would not hold slaves under any circumstances; and others who would gladly introduce slavery anew, if it were out of existence. We know that some southern men do free their slaves, go north, and become tip-top abolitionists; while some northern ones go south, and become most cruel slave-masters.

When southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we; I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists; and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution.

My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land. But a moment’s reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope, (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible…. What then?… I think I would not hold one in slavery, at any rate; yet the point is not clear enough for me to denounce people upon. What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question…. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded…. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the south….

I trust I understand, and truly estimate the right of self-government. My faith in the proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own, lies at the foundation of the sense of justice there is in me. I extend the principles to communities of men, as well as to individuals. I so extend it, because it is politically wise, as well as naturally just…. The doctrine of self government is right—absolutely and eternally right—but… just application depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man…. If the negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that “all men are created equal;” and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another….

Our Declaration of Independence says: “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, DERIVING THEIR JUST POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED…”

The relation of masters and slaves is, PRO TANTO, a total violation of this principle. The master not only governs the slave without his consent; but he governs him by a set of rules altogether different from those which he prescribes for himself. Allow ALL the governed an equal voice in the government, and that, and that only is self government….

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature—opposition to it, in his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks, and throes, and convulsions must ceaselessly follow. Repeal the Missouri compromise—repeal all compromises—repeal the Declaration of Independence—repeal all past history, you still can not repeal human nature. It still will be the abundance of man’s heart, that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak….

Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a “sacred right of self-government.” These principles can not stand together. They are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other. When Pettit, in connection with his support of the Nebraska bill, called the Declaration of Independence “a self-evident lie” he only did what consistency and candor require all other Nebraska [Bill-supporting] men to do. Of the forty odd Nebraska Senators who sat present and heard him, no one rebuked him. Nor am I apprized that any Nebraska newspaper, or any Nebraska orator, in the whole nation, has ever yet rebuked him….

Let no one be deceived. The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter. Fellow countrymen---Americans south, as well as north, shall we make no effort to arrest this? Already the liberal party throughout the world, express the apprehension “that the one retrograde institution in America, is undermining the principles of progress, and fatally violating the noblest political system the world ever saw.” This is not the taunt of enemies, but the warning of friends. Is it quite safe to disregard it—to despise it? Is there no danger to liberty itself, in discarding the earliest practice, and first precept of our ancient faith? In our greedy chase to make profit of the negro, let us beware, lest we “cancel and tear to pieces” even the white man’s charter of freedom.

Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of “moral right,” back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of “necessity.” Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it…

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The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident,

• that all men are created equal,

• that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,

• that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

--That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

• He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

• He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

• He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

• He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

• He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

• He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

• He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

• He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

• He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

  • For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

  • For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

  • For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

  • For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

  • For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

  • For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

  • For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

  • For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

  • For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

• He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

• He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

• He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

• He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

• He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren.

We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare:

• that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States;

• that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown,

• and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved;

• and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

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Appendix: More from Lincoln’s Peoria Speech: His Anticipatory Rebuttal of Stephen Douglas:

At Springfield, twelve days ago… Judge Douglas replied to me—and as he is to reply to me here, I shall attempt to anticipate him, by noticing some of the points he made there.

He commenced by stating I had assumed… that the… Nebraska bill, would have the effect of extending slavery. He denied that this was INTENDED, or that this EFFECT would follow….

Next he says, congressional intervention never prevented slavery, any where—that it did not prevent it in the north west territory, nor in Illinois—that in fact, Illinois came into the Union as a slave State—that the principle of the Nebraska bill expelled it from Illinois, from several old States, from every where. Now this is mere quibbling all the way through. If the ordinance of ‘87 did not keep slavery out of the north west territory, how happens it that the north west shore of the Ohio river is entirely free from it; while the south east shore, less than a mile distant, along nearly the whole length of the river, is entirely covered with it? If that ordinance did not keep it out of Illinois, what was it that made the difference?…

In the course of my main argument [before], Judge Douglas interrupted me to say, that the principle [of] the Nebraska bill was very old; that it originated when God made man and placed good and evil before him, allowing him to choose for himself, being responsible for the choice he should make. At the time I thought this was merely playful; and I answered it accordingly. But in his reply to me he renewed it, as a serious argument.

In seriousness then, the facts of this proposition are not true as stated. God did not place good and evil before man, telling him to make his choice. On the contrary, he did tell him there was one tree, of the fruit of which, he should not eat, upon pain of certain death. I should scarcely wish so strong a prohibition against slavery in Nebraska. But this argument strikes me as not a little remarkable in another particular—in its strong resemblance to the old argument for the “Divine right of Kings.” By the latter, the King is to do just as he pleases with his white subjects, being responsible to God alone. By the former the white man is to do just as he pleases with his black slaves, being responsible to God alone. The two things are precisely alike; and it is but natural that they should find similar arguments to sustain them…

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##1854-commentary-on-the-meaning-of-the-fourth-of-july
##the-fourth-of-july
##inequality-and-domination
##the-declaration-of-independence
##public-reason
##proclaim-liberty-throughout-the-land
#thomas-jefferson
#abraham-lincoln
#peoria-speech
#all-men-are-created-equal
#popular-sovereignty
#slave-power
#kansas-nebraska-act
#republican-liberty
#old-world-vs-new-world

The brand-new VW ElectricMicroBus that replaces the 22-year-old Subaru has:

• automatic following distance;

• automatic lane-keeping;

• speed-control settings that respond to speed-limit traffic signs (alarmingly, not just slowing the car if it is going faster than the limit);

• anticipatory pre-curve and pre-intersection braking (if its route-finding is engaged).

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But turning on these systems makes driving an immensely more difficult cognitive process. I have to:

• do all the normal mental processing to figure out how I would drive;

• interrupt the largely non-conscious loop by which my brain decisions then move my feet and hands without much frontal-lobe attention;

• assess the differences between what I would be doing and what the car is doing;

• decide whether I would be right or whether the machine is right;

• take over and react if I decide that the machine is wrong.

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as opposed to the normal, relatively boring effort of just driving along. I assure you, when I engage these systems, I AM NOT BORED. I AM THE FURTHEST THING FROM BORED.

Right now it feels to me like our bureaucracies with respect to their adoptions of MAMLM technology in its form of natural language interfaces and very big data, very high dimension, very flexible function classification analyses are in the same position relative to the world’s LLMs and such as I am with respect to the electric brain of the VW.

Now comes Anthropic with the hope of getting a higher price from the rather gullible, most optimistic buyers in the public market for the tranche of its equity it proposes to sell in its rapidly approaching IPO. not being happy with the mere claim that every instantiation of Claude may well be in some sense “conscious”, they are doubling down:

Anthropic <https://twitter.com/AnthropicAI/status/2062568862479208923>: ‘Our internal data shows Claude is accelerating AI development—a possible path to recursive self-improvement, or AI autonomously building a more capable successor. It’s happening faster than we thought, and the implications deserve greater attention…

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Well, yes: Anthropic says (and I see no reason to disbelieve them) that its programmers are writing a lot more code.

But there is an old, possibly (probably?) apocryphal story about the IBM-Microsoft “relationship” back in the day. IBM argued that it was contributing much more to their joint projects. It measured contribution on the number of lines of programming its teams had written. Microsoft pointed out that it was much prouder of how much code they had refactored and simplified, or simply removed as useless. Programs with greater length but no greater functionality were more fragile and error-ridden. Microsoft seems to me to have had the better of this argument.

Do not get me wrong: Claude Code and Claude Cowork are economic engineering and intellectual marvels. As was GPT 3.0. And as was ChatGPT. But no version of the SINGULARITY is nigh.

Probably relevant:

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It is from Demirer & al. <https://www.nber.org/papers/w35275>. And it provoked comments:

John Burn-Murdoch: How Much Value Is AI Really Creating? <https://www.ft.com/content/8e9ae7a4-7209-4e2c-aa36-f3af77d6ce1f?syn-25a6b1a6=1>: ‘Coders created or edited almost 300 per cent more files… but… 150 per cent… [in] work submitted for review, and… 30 per cent…in the number of full software releases… [with no] increase in downloads…. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi revealed the company had blown through its entire AI budget for 2026 in one quarter…

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And:

Noah Smith: Tokenmaxxxing <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/roundup-83-i-told-you-so: ‘The things we really want a lot more of may not actually be the things that generative AI is yet equipped to provide…

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#ai-hype-cycle
#token-maxxxing
#vw-microbus
#cognitive-overload
#anthropic-ipo

The most important thing to register here is the large disjunction between social-network nepotist Andrew Sullivan’s and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s perceptions of their common intellectual life back in 2009.

Think, and think hard, about how Ta-Nehisi Coates saw himself as obligated to greatly curb his tongue With respect to what he really thought about the mentally imbalanced, we started with the conclusion that it must be the case that the reason black people are relatively poor in America today is because they are genetically stupid, and then desperately hunted for rationalizations for this 100% rock-solid pre-commitment belief.

Think, and think hard, about people so cluekess to what is going on around them that they think that the big free-speech problem in America today is that, for the first time, the fundamental right of the white man to “speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned” is under threat, and claim that this problem—this particular here-and-now problem—leads America to “face… the risk of political violence”:

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<https://web.archive.org/web/20180616210438/http://crookedtimber.org/2018/05/23/neo-marxism/>

CROSSPOST/HOISTED (FROM 2018): HENRY FARRELL: “Neo-Marxism” in the Eyes of Andrew Sullivan & His Ilk

<http://crookedtimber.org/2018/05/23/neo-marxism/>

by Henry on May 23, 2018

A couple of days ago, Andrew Sullivan delivered a blast against “neo-Marxism”:

The idea that African-Americans have some responsibility for their own advancement, that absent fatherhood and a cultural association of studying with “acting white” are part of the problem — themes Obama touched upon throughout his presidency — is now almost a definition of racism itself. And the animating goal of progressive politics is unvarnished race and gender warfare. What matters before anything else is what race and gender you are, and therefore what side you are on. And in this neo-Marxist worldview, fully embraced by a hefty majority of the next generation, the very idea of America as a liberating experiment, dissolving tribal loyalties in a common journey toward individual opportunity, is anathema.

There is no arc of history here, just an eternal grinding of the racist and sexist wheel. What matters is that nonwhites fight and defeat white supremacy, that women unite and defeat oppressive masculinity, and that the trans supplant and redefine the cis. What matters is equality of outcome, and it cannot be delayed. All the ideas that might complicate this — meritocracy, for example, or a color-blind vision of justice, or equality of opportunity rather than outcome — are to be mocked until they are dismantled. And the political goal is not a post-racial fusion, a unity of the red and the blue, but the rallying of the victims against the victimizers, animated by the core belief that a non-“white” and non-male majority will at some point come, after which the new hierarchies can be imposed by fiat.

Matthew Yglesias rightly complains about Sullivan’s suggestion that Marxism lurks behind the movements for gender and race recognition. Jonathan Chait has been making an even cruder version of this argument for a while, telling us that the “campus left” has borrowed its extremism from Marxism, and would likely drag us all off to the gulags if we ever got a chance. This theory marks a weird and unfortunate alignment that is taking place between a particular strain of center-to-center right opinionating and the “Intellectual Dark Web” crowd. Zack Beauchamp’s description of how Jordan Peterson

elevates battles over political correctness and free speech into existential struggles over Western society. He is very literally arguing that if the “postmodernists” win, if people start using others’ chosen pronouns, we’re one step closer to modern gulags.

could be applied just as aptly to [Jonathan] Chait, and likely, with modification, to Sullivan too, (the “hierarchies … imposed by fiat” bit sounds sinister but is notably weaker than gulag rhetoric; Sullivan is clearly angrier about race than he is about gender).

You could, I suppose, treat Sullivan’s, Chait’s and Peterson’s arguments as serious claims to be taken seriously, pointing to the specific situations where campus leftists have indeed behaved like arseholes, and extrapolating this into a general trend of angry, intolerant and indeed totalitarian illiberalism on the march towards possible victory. Frankly, I think that that would be granting unwarranted respect to nonsense. These claims seem to me to instead be rhetorical attacks which illegitimately treat reasonable claims for recognition as if they were steps on a journey towards dictatorship. Contrary to their framing, they are fundamentally illiberal, in the small ‘l’ sense of liberalism, intended to justify existing power relations against people who would reasonably challenge them.

Where this becomes most clear is in Sullivan’s previous post, which is particularly aimed at Ta-Nehisi Coates. Sullivan begins by praising Coates, sort of, before describing him as the exemplar of a “tribal” dynamic, where the “individual is always subordinate to the group,” leading to the social exclusion of Bari Weiss’s “Intellectual Dark Web,” a group of “non-tribal thinkers who have certainly not been silenced, but have definitely been morally anathematized, in the precincts of elite opinion.” Sullivan laments that something important has been lost:

But then I remember a different time — and it wasn’t so long ago. A friend reminded me of this bloggy exchange Ta-Nehisi and I had in 2009, on the very subject of identity politics and its claims. We clearly disagreed, deeply. But there was a civility about it, an actual generosity of spirit, that transcended the boundaries of race and background. We both come from extremely different places, countries, life experiences, loyalties. But a conversation in the same pages was still possible, writer to writer, human to human, as part of the same American idea. It was a debate in which I think we both listened to each other, in which I changed my mind a bit, and where neither of us denied each other’s good faith or human worth.

It’s only a decade ago, but it feels like aeons now. The Atlantic was crammed with ideological opposites then, jostling together in the same office, and our engagement with each other and our readerships was a crackling and productive one. There was much more of that back then, before Twitter swallowed blogging, before identity politics became completely nonnegotiable, before we degenerated into these tribal swarms of snark and loathing. I think of it now as a distant island, appearing now and then, as the waves go up and down. The riptide of tribalism can capture us all in the end, until we drown in it.

I grew up outside America – which means that many aspects of the American argument about race don’t come easily to me. I also don’t know anything first hand, obviously, about the personal relationship between Coates and Sullivan, which I suspect colors their interactions too. So take these caveats as a health warning regarding what follows. Still, I think it’s quite plain that Coates has a very different memory of his interactions with Sullivan than Sullivan’s depiction. A week before Sullivan’s piece, Huffington Post published a transcript of a conversation at the Atlantic about the hiring and rapid firing of Kevin Williamson. Coates says:

I got incredibly used to learning from people. And studying people. And feeling like certain people were even actually quite good at their craft, who I felt, and pardon my language, were fucking racist. And that was just the way the world was. I didn’t really have the luxury of having teachers who I necessarily felt, you know, saw me completely as a human being.

This extends not just from my early days as a journalist, but if I’m being honest here, from my early days at The Atlantic. You can go into The Atlantic archives right now, and you can see me arguing with Andrew Sullivan about whether black people are genetically disposed to be dumber than white people. I actually had to take this seriously, you understand? I couldn’t speak in a certain way to Andrew. I couldn’t speak to Andrew on the blog the way I would speak to my wife about what Andrew said on the blog in the morning when it was just us…. I learned how to blog from Andrew. That was who I actually learned from. That was who actually helped me craft my voice. Even recognizing who he was and what he was, you know, I learned from him.

I don’t have the privilege of being able to look into Sullivan’s head, but it is hard to imagine that his piece about Coates and tribalism was not an angry and hurt response to Coates’ claim that he, Sullivan, was a “fucking racist.”

In juxtaposition, Sullivan’s and Coates’ pieces provide a miniature history of how a certain variety of self-congratulatory openness to inquiry is in actual fact a barbed thicket of power relations. What Sullivan depicts as a “different time” when “neither of us denied each other’s good faith or human worth,” is, in Coates’ understanding, a time where he was required to “take seriously” the argument that “black people are genetically disposed to be dumber than white people” as a price of entry into the rarified heights of conversation at the Atlantic. The “civility” and “generosity of spirit” that supported “human to human” conversation is juxtaposed to Coates’ “teachers” who didn’t see him “completely as a human being.” What was open and free spirited debate in Sullivan’s depiction, was to Coates a loaded and poisonous dialogue where he could only participate if he shut up about what he actually believed.

Juxtaposing these two gives us a very different understanding of Sullivan’s claim that “identity politics [have become] completely nonnegotiable,” and we are all being pulled down by the “riptide of tribalism.” The imagined paradise of liberal discussion from which we are being torn was only a paradise for some; others were there on sufferance, or not allowed in at all. Sullivan’s hostility to “tribalism” reflects his unwillingness to confront the rather sordid politics of his own position, and his past and continuing history on race and intelligence.

Sullivan, Chait, and, I suspect many other soi-disant centrists and centrist liberals are now converging with Peterson and the whole sorry crew of white men on the Internet shouting out against the oppression of Social Justice Warriors. This allows them to delegitimize – and hence avoid having to seriously confront – hard criticisms of their own positions. If they want, it’s perfectly reasonable for them to push back against what they believe to be excesses. Gender activists and race activists are human too, which means that they surely may be wrong, and may certainly behave stupidly, or badly.

But claims that “neo-Marxists” and “campus leftists” are looking in general to build gulags, impose hierarchies by fiat and the like are themselves both bad and stupid rhetoric, which undermine rather than reinforce the commitment to open debate that they claim to hold so deeply.

<https://web.archive.org/web/20180616210438/http://crookedtimber.org/2018/05/23/neo-marxism/>

Brad, back again: By 2018, a curious convergence had taken place in The Atlantic commentariat and its ideological cousins. Andrew Sullivan was warning that the “animating goal of progressive politics is unvarnished race and gender warfare.”

Jonathan Chait was fretting that the “campus left,” intoxicated by Marxism, harbored gulag dreams.

Jordan Peterson was explaining, in his orotund way, that using people’s preferred pronouns put us on a slippery slope to totalitarianism.

Andrew Sullivan recalled bloggy exchanges with Ta-Nehisi Coates back around 2009 as if they were seminars of mutual respect, “writer to writer, human to human,” before Twitter, before “tribalism,” before the “riptide” of identity politics.

Different styles, same move: translate uncomfortable demands for recognition into an incipient police state.

Henry Farrell sees this not as liberal solicitude for free inquiry, but rather a strategy of delegitimation. Label your critics “tribal,” accuse them of subordinating the individual to the group, and you can avoid looking too closely at what they are complaining about.

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UC Berkeley has one of the last surviving defined benefit pension plans in existence. That means it makes no financial or lifestyel sense for me not to “retire” today. In fact, it made no financial sense for me not to retire a year ago. And two years ago, it was in the balance. So perhaps this move is two years late. For now:

• My net income goes up.

• My administrative-bureaucratic workload goes down from something like 10 hours a week to as close to zero as I can possibly make it.

• My teaching load goes down by about a third, for now.

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All-in-all, a win, no?

But there is a potential danger. Consider the sea squirt:

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The sea squirt starts out as a tadpole with a spinal cord and a brain. It swims around, looking for a good rock. It finds one. It cements itself in place.

And then it eats its brain.

Movement achieved, problem solved, brain surplus to requirements, lunch is served.

I do not want to become an adult sea squirt.

But without the load of administrative and bureaucratic work, a good deal of which needs to be done face-to-face and with less teaching. All of these getting me up to campus less often is not this a danger?

So that means that I have to, starting today:

• Sign up and schedule myself to give more talks

• Sign up and schedue myself to attend more talks and more conferences and more meetings—Bodega Bay July 8-10, here I come!

• Find a coffee shop where lots of professors come by to caffeinate up—people who I want to talk to who I can run into there by accident and buttonhole.

• Decide what to do with this SubStack.

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My instinct right now is that I should raise the time allocation I commit to it to more than the current one hour a day. (Okay: one hour a day, plus time spent procrastinating when I have something else to do, plus using it as an outlet for drafts and for dropped projects and tasks that I have been working on in the rest of my writing and calculating time.)

What should I do with an extra two hours a day (for now, starting now) devoted to this platform? Advice very much appreciated, and much more than welcome.

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##j-bradford-delong-professor-of-economics-emeritus
#defined-benefit-pension-plan
#administrative-burden
#academic-life
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#work-life-balance
#cognition

Yes, Trump’s attack on and then surrender of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran has left the U.S. military is massively weaker in a good deal of the areas that are likely to be most relevant in future near-term conflicts:

Source: JPM <https://assets.jpmprivatebank.com/content/dam/jpm-pb-aem/global/en/documents/eotm/semiquincententacles.pdf>, via Adam Tooze <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/top-links-1150-has-the-debasement>.

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Trump killed a lot of Iranian civilians. Trump destroyed a lot of Iranian military capabilities. But Trump lost the war, as Iran attritted the US military a lot more than the US attritted Iran. And other potential adversaries of the US military are now in much stronger positions.

My view? We need to start fixing this. And we need to start fixing it now. And we are going about it all wrong.

Think of it: Right now, Ukraine is scrambling to build a military-industrial production complex in a war zone, western defense contractors are debating whether to build up plants in Ukraine, and the pentagon is improvising “friend-shoring” arrangements and relaxing tech-transfer rules. Meanwhile, the U.S. defense-industrial base is still trying to climb out of the post–Cold War just‑in‑time, single‑source, boutique‑production trap it has dug for itself over thirty years. If we were sane, we would right now be spending money like water to build the Arsenal of Democracies on U.S. soil—with Ukrainian defense firms and their hard-won expertise as anchor tenants.

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Last week I read this piece: half Enzo Traverso, and half Emile Chabal, whose forthcoming Hobsbawm biography Traverso is reviewing.

Enzo Traverso: The Century of Eric Hobsbawm <https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-century-of-eric-hobsbawm/>:

(SEMI)-CROSSPOST: ENZO TRAVERSO: The Century of Eric Hobsbawm

Enzo Traverso

June 25, 2026 | The Ideas Letter 67….

Eric J. Hobsbawm… published critically acclaimed memoirs, and today—fourteen years after his death—is the subject of two biographies, the latest of which… by Emile Chabal…. Richard J. Evans knew Hobsbawm… and his book… stands as… official biography…. Evans carefully reconstituted a historian’s life and wrote with empathy, not without an apologetic touch. Chabal’s… acknowledged distance is beneficial… his gaze more analytical… a fascinating critical portrait. Hobsbawm is… the greatest historian of the twentieth century… if [that] means that he was the most important scholar to have written on the history of the past century…

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The forthcoming book being reviewed here is:

• Chabal, Emile. 2026 (August 18). The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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But in spite of not having read it, I talked about it, Chabel, Traverso—and Hobsbawm—all very favorably last week:

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2026. “(SEMI-)CROSSPOST: ENZO TRAVERSO: The Centuries of Eric Hobsbawm”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. June 27. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/semi-crosspost-enzo-traverso-the>.

But I ended it last week with a “But.” Here comes the “but”:

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Over at Talking Points Memo <http://talkingpointsmemo.com>:

Kate Riga: Republican Meltdowns Over Birthright Citizenship Decision, Ranked in Order of Sanity <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/republican-meltdowns-birthright-citizenship-supreme-court>: ‘The right is incandescent with rage over the Supreme Court…. 6-3 ruling (but really 5-4 on constitutional grounds), the Court ruled that children born on American soil to undocumented immigrants or those temporarily present are citizens, despite a Trump executive order to the contrary…. [That] is cause for prolific online tantrums…

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She notes:

• Troy Nehls (R-TX): <https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/2072082822941262138>: ‘We gotta put a bedsheet―a big bedsheet ― over the Statue of Liberty. She’s gotta go to sleep for a while ’cause we’re not letting anybody in anymore…. Instead of having a torch, maybe it needs a stop sign…

• Matt Walsh: ‘It turns out that Amy Coney Barrett is a DEI hire, little better than Kentanji Jackson. Terrible pick…

• Andy Ogles (R-TN): <https://twitter.com/RepOgles/status/2072014309614346549>: ‘Under my bill, under my legislation, we fix that and go back to what our founders intended. So in short, what this bill does is if you are a pregnant woman, you can’t come into this country. You got to be a citizen, be here, you have to be a green card holder. So if you’re pregnant and you don’t have one of those statuses, no admittance allowed…

• Lauren Boebert (R-CO): <https://twitter.com/RepBoebert/status/2071997114222071920?s=20>: ‘The State Department should IMMEDIATELY cease to give out visas to pregnant applicants. Sorry, Birth Tourism cannot continue…

• Stephen Miller: ‘The idea that you could have a cruise ship filled with foreigners and they just dock at a port for an hour, and someone has a baby, Jesse, the baby’s an American citizen!” They can vote in every election for the rest of their lives! They could be living in a foreign country and be cashing welfare checks for American citizens!…

• Sean Davis: ‘Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners…. Deny entry to all female foreigners…. Require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry…

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Donald Trump does not understand—and nobody is willing to tell him—that birthright citizenship is a constitutional right, not something that can be undone by legislation (unless Jackson, Sotomayor, or Kagan were to be replaced by a Trump lackey, or Barrett or Roberts were to be replaced by a more complete Trump lackey):

Donald Trump: ‘The Supreme Court upheld Birthright Citizenship, which is too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation, with the support of the President, that has now been determined during this process. No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary! Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support! President DONALD J. TRUMP…

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And Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch are out-and-out liars about the legal history, or out of their minds, or both:

Katenji Brown Jackson: Concurrence <https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/trump-v-barbara/>: ‘Despite his longstanding endorsement of a “colorblind” Constitution, JUSTICE THOMAS now surprisingly suggests that the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure, relating only to “freed slaves such as Dred Scott,” and those who shared with them certain characteristics (“no other homeland”); (“called America home”). It is for this reason, he says, that “children who were born in the United States but [to parents] not domiciled here” are not entitled to claim birthright citizenship. But that narrow vision of the Fourteenth Amendment bears little relationship to the history of its ratification….

Consensus about the Fourteenth Amendment’s central motivation does not justify JUSTICE THOMAS’s myopic treatment of it. The Amendment caused a paradigm shift in the trajectory of our Nation; the teacher who scolds a student for bullying a classmate hopes the student learns the broader lesson of treating everyone with kindness, not just that one kid. In the aftermath of the Civil War, those who championed the Fourteenth Amendment—both within and beyond Congress—understood the assignment. Their work product used “language that transcended race and region,” and thereby “changed and broadened the meaning of freedom for all Americans.”2 Instead of the limited salve the principal dissent makes it out to be, the Citizenship Clause reflects this universalist approach….

Do note this: The citizenship thesis of the Colored Conventions was thus not that some new status should be created and conferred on freed Blacks. It was instead that freed Blacks already had a rightful claim to citizenship because they had been born on American soil…. Freed Blacks did not advocate for a unique set of rules that catered only to their situation. Nor did they seek to advance their own position relative to, or at the expense and exclusion of, other marginalized groups. Instead, those whose gatherings helped galvanize the push for full equality understood that “[a] diverse origin does not disprove a common nature, nor does it disprove a united destiny.” The firmest foundation for freedom would require an anticaste reset—“both for his sake and for ours”—and would benefit all….

Senator Trumbull, along with those colleagues who took up the same mantle… expressly rejected… [the] narrow framing…. Notably focusing his attention beyond freed former slaves, Senator Edgar Cowan, for example, argued that German immigrants’ children born in Pennsylvania should be citizens, but Chinese immigrants’ children should not…. Senator Trumbull emphasized that the law he had drafted drew no such distinctions…. Senator John Conness of California, where anti-Chinese sentiment was arguably most pronounced, responded that “the children begotten of Chinese parents in California . . . shall be citizens.” In fact, he said, the Civil Rights Act had already declared “that the children of all parentage whatever . . . should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States.” No Senator rose to agree with Senator Cowan or dispute what Senator Conness had said. And no Senator said what the principal dissent says today: that the text at issue conferred citizenship only on freed Blacks and those in analogous situations….

The debates went similarly with respect to the Roma people, who were referred to at the time as “gypsies.” When asked whether native-born Romani children would be birthright citizens of the United States under the proposed Civil Rights Act, Senator Trumbull replied: “Undoubtedly.” President Andrew Johnson apparently agreed. In his message vetoing the Act, Johnson noted with disapproval that, under the law, “the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called gypsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks,” would be birthright citizens. Without making any changes to the bill or responding that Johnson was mistaken in his understanding of it (or otherwise capitulating to Johnson’s views in any respect), Congress overrode that presidential veto.

During the ratification debates, Senator Cowan took aim at the Roma people too, characterizing them as undeserving of birthright citizenship because they “wander[ed] in gangs,” “infest[ed] society,” and “impos[ed] upon the simple and weak everywhere.” And again, Senator Conness dismissed Senator Cowan’s prejudices: “The only invasion of Pennsylvania within my recollection was an invasion very much worse and more disastrous to the State, and more to be feared and more feared, than that of Gypsies. It was an invasion of rebels [at Gettysburg].” When ratified, the Citizenship Clause thus vindicated the universalist vision of the delegates at the Colored Conventions and their allies in Congress…

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##neofascism
##racism
##horror-of-the-day
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#birthright-citizenship
#trump-v-barbara
#fourteenth-amendment
#colored-conventions
#nativism-and-racism

Economists, Marxists, and Braudelians can all recognize pieces of themselves in Beckert, yet none of them can quite recognize his capitalism as their own beast.

It is a puzzlement.

And here is a very nice review of the first half of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History by the very sharp Angus Byelsma:

Angus Byelsma: Cut Adrift <https://unevenandcombinedthoughts.substack.com/p/cut-adrift>: ‘[Sven] Beckert’[s]… 1086-page tome Capitalism: A Global History… [got] a positive review in the New York Times, and… a prime position in every semi-serious bookstore…. At least one publisher out there believes in the existence of a sufficient public appetite for economic history doorstoppers…. Nonetheless… Beckert’s Capitalism has met a much colder reception amongst people who care about these things….

Beckert—and the ‘New History of Capitalism’ (NHC) school-of-thought, of which he is the most prominent representative—seem to have made the mistake of alienating perhaps the two largest groups of people who care that much about economic history: liberal economists and Marxists. The former are frustrated by the NHC’s neglect of the quantitative literature, in particular the claims made about American slavery and its contribution to the British industrial revolution. The latter dislike the NHC’s sidestepping of the literature on the so-called capitalist transition—and, by extension, all the debates over defining what is capitalism—by keeping the concept amorphous while insisting on finding capitalism nearly everywhere in space and time…. Beckert seems to style his work…on the most venerable ‘third-way’ ever navigated between those two camps: the midcentury ‘Annales School’ of French social history, and in particular its greatest son, Fernand Braudel….

Beckert fail[s] to seriously engage… whether the plantation economy caused the Industrial Revolution…. Invoking Barbara Solow, [he] simply says that ‘perhaps capitalism could have developed differently… but the reality is that it developed based on slavery’; a rather glib dismissal of a serious historical debate…

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I would point out that in Bobby Solow’s formulation, this was not an assertion that the counterfactual question did not matter. It was, rather, an assertion that the fact that the triangular trade and Caribbean slavery was not a necessary part of the road to rich modernity did not mean that we should or could ignore it. In Sven Beckert’s formulation, it seems to be a retreat to the bailey having failed to successfuly answer the questions raised when he was at the motte claiming: no Caribbean slavery, no modern capitalist prosperity.

And I would point out that the answer to the question “most associated with the NHC—whether (biological) agricultural technology or increasingly violent slave-driving explains cotton productivity growth in the American South” in not Sven Beckert’s ‘most likely it was both’, but rather that it was

• better biotechnology on the one hand,

• not increasingly violent slave-driving on the other,

• but rather increasingly routinized and systematized “management”.

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It is, properly, not a capitalists-are-crueler point, but a dialectic-of-Enlightenment point.

Angus Byelsma: Cut Adrift <https://unevenandcombinedthoughts.substack.com/p/cut-adrift>: ‘The closest Beckert comes to presenting an overarching theory… is his insistence on the historical importance of the state. This is due to his desire to put the violence back into capitalism…. Beckert’s quintessential example is the early colonial period of 1450-1640; the era, he writes, in which ‘the capitalism that we know originated’… [as] early-modern European states, in concert with elite financiers and merchants, spread capitalism to the world at gunpoint…. But when Beckert moves beyond this era, his argument… becomes much less precise… something like ‘all development is connected to the state’, less a theory than a descriptive fact…. And even in the early colonial period… did it play a critical role in the development of capitalism within the colonial metropole, or did war capitalism mainly just create new ‘nodes of capital’ on the periphery?… ‘War capitalism’ is left stranded, a half-formed argument…

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Marxian capitalism—in its various flavors—is this: (1) Possession of wealth allows you to exploit workers who themselves have no access to the means of production. (2) You then use market exchange to turn that surplus value you hav appropriated into more wealth. (3) But you can repeat this only on pain of having to reinvest that wealth in expanding your scale of production. (4) Why? Because ncreasing returns to scale mean that wealth holders who are satisfied with their current scale of production will be out-competed into bankruptcy. (5) Thus the system has a flywheel effect: generating ever greater wealth for society on the one hand, and ever greater immiserization for the working class on the other.

Braudelian capitalism sits on top of “material life” and even on top of the economic life of relatively routinized local markets, trade, and exchange. Braudelian capitalism is a higher level on top of these: an an anti‑competitive market sphere of monopolistic, large‑scale, power‑wielding activity operating at the summit of the economy. It is the world of great merchants, financiers, and large firms, operating in long‑distance trade, high finance, and oligopolistic or monopolistic positions, where information is opaque, power is concentrated, and exceptional profits are made precisely by escaping the discipline of ordinary competition.

What I call Thalassocracy is the functioning of a society-of-domination in which the élite grabs one-third of total production not directly at the point of a spear, but rather by ensuring that property ownership and market terms-of trade-are such that the one-third it grabs flows to it through individual transactions that are voluntary but nonetheless “unequal exchange”. This usually requires a big fleet, and a substantial amount of long-distance waterborne trade in things other than preciosities—hence thalassocracy. This often requires bargains in which the élite of the metropolis offers élites at the periphery deals they find very attractive if they undertake the bulk of the dirty work of enslavement and enserfment, and of subsequent exploitation at the point of a spear. Think of the Early Iron Age Phoenicians, and of Classical Athens.

Sven Beckert’s definition of capitalism is certainly not Marxian capitalism. It is certainly not Braudelian capitalism. His category of “war capitalism” appears to be the peripheral part of Thalassocracy, but it is definitely not the whole of it. But capitalism-in-general? It seems to be something like “the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled wealth as an open-ended process which reshapes economies and societies and is fueled by a tight alliance of private capitalists with state power which serves their interests”. But it remains elusive.

Thus I have a very hard time figuring out what I think of Beckertian capitalism, simply because I do not understand what he thinks capitalism is at any satisfactory level.

There is great narrative power here. But it is unbridled by any conceptual discipline. And that means that at the end of the book, there is no answer to the question: “And so…?”

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#economic-history
#war-capitalism
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#braudelian-capitalism
#thalassocracy
#unequal-exchange
#sven-beckert

I PROMISE: Economic & Economic Insights, informed by what I see as my extensive experience & expertise. Analytical Lenses, that filter world events past and present through frameworks that strip away confusion and leave key insights behind. Historical Context, for history rhymes. Plus Thoughtful Recommendations, and reviews and critiques that open the intellectual oysters that others have written.

I HOPE FOR: Public Reason Enhancement, keeping you away from the dopamine-loop clickbait biases that affect other media platforms​​. The Digital Commons, that we all hope to grow. And Intellectual Stimulation & Entertainment, as well.

What is most worth reading?

SubStack readers say:

Google & Google Scholar Say:

1. Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century—The book tells the story of how an unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe, and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition,  it reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction. DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century. New York: Basic Books <http://bit.ly/3pP3Krk>

2. “Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets” (with Andrei Shleifer and Lawrence Summers of Harvard, and Robert Waldmann of the University of Rome)—how Milton Friedman’s claim that irrational investors must in equilibrium have no impact on market prices is simply, well, wrong. DeLong, J. Bradford, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, & Robert J. Waldmann. 1990. “Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets.” Journal of Political Economy 98 (4).<http://ms.mcmaster.ca/~grasselli/DeLongShleiferSummersWaldmann90.pdf>

3. “Fiscal Policy in a Depressed Economy” (with Lawrence Summers of Harvard)—how when inflation is as quiescent & interest rates as low as they have been since 2001, bond- & money-financed expansions of government purchases are, when properly hedged, truly a win-win free lunch that competent governments would pursue. DeLong, J. Bradford, & Lawrence H. Summers. 2012. "Fiscal Policy in a Depressed Economy." Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Spring): 233-297.<https://www.brookings.edu/about/projects/bpea/papers/2012/fiscal-policy-depressed-economy-delong>

4. “Did J.P. Morgan’s Men Add Value?”—reputation, managerial competence, oversight, & the benefits to society of long-term greedy plutocratic investment banks. DeLong, J. Bradford. 1990. “Did J.P. Morgan's Men Add Value? A Historical Perspective on Financial Capitalism.” In Inside the Business Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use of Information, edited by Peter Temin, 205-249. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.<https://www.nber.org/chapters/c7182.pdf>

5. “Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow’s Economy” (with A. Michael Froomkin of the University of Miami)—how the “Smithian” image of the economy that we economists have held in the forefront of our minds since 1776 is obsolete. DeLong, J. Bradford, & A. Michael Froomkin. 2000. “Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow's Economy.” In Internet Publishing and Beyond: The Economics of Digital Information and Intellectual Property. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. <http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/spec.htm>

6. "The Marshall Plan: History's Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program": In this paper, DeLong explores the success of the Marshall Plan post World War II, analyzing its impact on European economic recovery and its role as a model for future economic assistance programs. DeLong, J. Bradford, & Barry Eichengreen. 1993. "The Marshall Plan: History's Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program." In Post-World War II Economic Reconstruction and its Lessons for Eastern Europe Today, edited by Rudiger Dornbusch et al., Cambridge: MIT Press. <https://www.nber.org/papers/w3899>

7. "Globalization and Convergence": This paper discusses the phenomenon of globalization, focusing on the convergence of income levels across countries and the implications of this process for global economic policy. Dowrick, Steve, & J. Bradford DeLong. 2003. “4 Globalization and Convergence.” In Globalization in Historical Perspective, edited by Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, 191-226. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. <https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7208/9780226065991-006/html>

8. "The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money" (with Stephen S. Cohen): This book, co-authored with Stephen S. Cohen, delves into the shifting global economic landscape, focusing on how the rise of other economies affects the United States' economic and political influence. Cohen, Stephen S., & J. Bradford DeLong. 2010. The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money. Basic Books.

9. “Positive Feedback Investment Strategies and Destabilizing Rational Speculation”: Exploring the dynamics of stock market bubbles and crashes. How positive feedback investment strategies, where investors buy or sell stocks in response to recent price movements, can lead to excessive stock price volatility. Such strategies can create self-reinforcing trends, leading to significant deviations from fundamental values. DeLong, J. Bradford, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, & Robert J. Waldmann. 1990. "Positive Feedback Investment Strategies and Destabilizing Rational Speculation." Journal of Finance 45 (2): 374-97. <https://www.nber.org/papers/w2880>

10. “This Time, It Is Not Different: The Persistent Concerns of Financial Macroeconomics”: The financial and macroeconomic policy challenges following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, offering insights into policy responses and long-term economic implications. DeLong, J. Bradford. DeLong, J. Bradford. 2012. "This Time, It Is Not Different: The Persistent Concerns of Financial Macroeconomics." In Rethinking the Financial Crisis, edited by Alan S. Blinder, Andrew W. Lo, and Robert M. Solow, 59-95. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

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Brian Klaas’s central thesis here is that AI works like a cognitive gym. It amplifies the capable, motivated, and well-prepared in critical thinking, motivation, and ability to learn, while letting everyone else stagnate or regress. Mediocre work is trivial to produce, hence those who are satisfied producing it never exercise their cognition muscles. But AI has raised the ceiling for those who can genuinely leverage it. Those with critical thinking, curiosity, willingness to struggle with hard problems skills can use AI to displace “the boring, tedious tasks that add nothing to your intellectual experience of being alive”.

The “but” unmentioned here is that for many people producing mediocre work is boring and tedious—and that includes the work of trying to derive entertainment from reading books! Doing mediocre work with trivial effort leaves more time and energy to do the other things that are the core of your life. I am attracted to the argument that you are a more capable mind and a better person if you are trained to approach the world through the print-channel and the calculation-programming-channel rather than simply watching short-form videos. I strongly think that everyone needs to have an AI info-butler asking them every five minutes: is this really the best use of your time?

Even given all that, I still am on Brian Klaas’s side here: we need to construct systems to force people to become more book-learning focused and thus more literary then our technologies and their advertising-focused market harnesses are pushing them to be.

But there is a big problem: How?

The Garden of Forking Paths

Wandering around an infinitely complex, ever-changing world.

By Brian Klaas

CROSSPOST: BRIAN KLAAS: The Great Cognitive Divide

<https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-great-cognitive-divide>

How AI could ensure the smart get smarter while everyone else gets left behind

Brian Klaas

Jun 30, 2026

Much has been written about the potential and perils of artificial intelligence. Tech bros fawn over it as a get-rich-quick panacea of emancipatory potential, making grandiose plans to use their well-padded crypto accounts to upload their brains into the eternal ether. Billionaire CEOs salivate at productivity gains and soaring profit margins without those pesky corresponding payrolls.

By contrast, social scientists—and many concerned citizens—worry about its disruptive impact on mass employment and the existential risk it could introduce into an already fragile global system.

For many, the reaction to artificial intelligence is all-or-nothing; a disaster for humanity that hollows out the essence of our species, or an information revolution that will usher in the previously unimaginable with an exhilarating digital whoosh.

These contrasting reactions are missing a crucial, hidden dynamic that is already underway. If we are not careful, one of the most consequential impacts of artificial intelligence will be a great cognitive divide, a bifurcation of humanity’s intelligence, a new era of mental inequality with long-lasting consequences for our species.

I: The Cautionary Parable of Air France Flight 447

On June 1, 2009, the autopilot on Air France Flight 447 unexpectedly disengaged, roughly 300 miles northeast of Brazil’s coastline, en route to Paris. This was highly unusual; most commercial airliners fly almost exclusively on autopilot when at cruising altitude.

Suddenly, and without warning, the pilots were forced to perform manual skills that they had offloaded to a machine for most of their flying career. Sensors were giving incorrect, implausible readings. With warning lights blinking and alerts sounding in the cockpit, they struggled to make sense of what was happening. In a state of confusion, the pilot tried to sharply climb—at an angle that was far too steep.

Unable to understand what the sensors were telling him, one of the pilots shouted out in frustration: “I don’t have control of the aircraft at all!”

Four minutes after the autopilot disengaged, the now-stalled aircraft was descending at nearly 11,000 feet per second. The pilots, who were used to offloading much of the cognitive load of flying to their trusty autopilot, were unprepared when the machine failed.

Air France flight 447 hit the ocean at tremendous speed, disintegrating completely, and instantly killing 228 passengers and crew members onboard.

This is a particularly tragic example of cognitive offloading, in which skills withered over time because the pilots lost some of their self-sufficient abilities by relying on fallible digital devices. Similarly, research shows that London cab drivers tend to have an enlarged hippocampus from memorizing the full road map of London, whereas those who navigate based on Google Maps become worse than previous generations at spatial memory. Use it, or lose it.

I previously wrote about the perils of cognitive offloading I’ve experienced:

When I was a kid, I could rattle off telephone numbers. Landlines. Clunky, oversized cell phones, bricks in purses. I knew the digits by heart. I still do. My best friend down the street. My parents. I used to know street names, too. Grids and lines, meandering through my head, a 12 year-old human MapQuest. You could learn a place in those days with 1990s GPS technology: Go Play Somewhere.

Then, I got a cell phone. For digits and coordinates, that part of my brain was siphoned off into the little flip phone. It never recovered. I don’t know any new phone numbers. Street names are passé. What3Words is the future. It’s now easy to ignore the surrounding environment. After all, you can always just look it up. You got lost? How? Did you forget to charge it?…

Several research studies have already highlighted the risks of cognitive offloading with LLMs such as ChatGPT. A 2025 MIT study (with a small sample size) showed reduced brain connectivity in those who wrote an essay with some assistance from ChatGPT and an inability to remember what they had just written. And a worrying, albeit preliminary 2026 study shows evidence that when people use AI to help them with a tasks, they become less persistent, give up more quickly when learning something, and have reduced overall performance.

Our world is about to undergo the largest natural experiment in the history of cognition: what if most tasks that previously demanded some level of intellectual processing can simply be handed off to a machine? And crucially, as that happens, who will be the winners and losers of that new reality when it threatens our collective ability to think effectively?

II: Cognitive Gyms & AI as an Amplifier

Imagine that a person comes up to you at the gym with some helpful advice while you’re lifting weights or running on the treadmill.

“A forklift could lift the same amount with way less effort,” they tell you. “And you’re not optimizing when you’re on that treadmill; you could cover five kilometers a lot faster on a bike, or better yet, in a car.”

You might, quite understandably, contemplate whether they are mentally ill.

That’s because even though their suggestions are obviously correct, they have made an egregious category error: the point of going to the gym isn’t to liberate the maximum possible amount of weight from the stubborn grip of gravity or to move the treadmill belt the maximum possible distance in the shortest period of time. If it were, we wouldn’t have gyms in the first place; machines can already do those tasks better than us.

However, gyms are not equally useful to all humans. If someone is bedridden or has no clue how to lift weights, the mere existence of a gym doesn’t help them get stronger or faster. Instead, it might actually increase the statistical gap between local people in terms of their physical health. That’s because for someone who’s already a physically fit specimen with exercise know-how, a gym being built nearby can unlock accelerated physical improvements. The least fit will stay unfit; those most fit will get fitter.

Now, let’s add a third kind of person into the mix: someone who never goes to the gym but uses anabolic steroids to appear stronger. They will likely put on some visible muscle. Glance at them walking down the street and you might wrongly assume they’re regularly going to the gym. But it’s all an illusion: if you tested them medically, they’re likely to be less healthy than before they took the steroids.¹ Appearance, without the substance.

Artificial intelligence can provide a function that’s a bit like humanity’s cognitive gym. Rather than having equal, across-the-board effects, AI can act like an amplifier, further driving a decisive wedge between two groups of people: those who have an abundant supply of critical thinking skills and a willingness to learn—and those who do not.

Admittedly, it doesn’t appear that way at first glance. To the untrained eye, it looks like AI can be a great equalizer, allowing functionally illiterate people to magically cook up glittering sludge that passes as polished prose (but is bereft of original intellectual nutrients).

That’s because there has been a huge influx of people who are a bit like the lazy steroid user who may be tempted to use a forklift to lift weights. They seem more intelligent based on their outputs, even as they are getting less smart over time. As they offload more and more critical thinking to artificial intelligence tools, they are allowing their brains to atrophy from excessive cognitive offloading to a machine.

Artificial intelligence has already created a lower floor to what humans produce: mediocre outputs are now absurdly easy to create. Anyone can, with a few keystrokes, “write” a moderately compelling, cringe-laced LinkedIn post or a decent technical report. PowerPoints and spreadsheets are child’s play.

But artificial intelligence has also raised the ceiling of possibility for those who already have critical thinking skills, a willingness to learn, and are knowledge workers who can amplify their existing skills with powerful digital companion tools.

A mathematician might explore stubborn problems faster, sometimes with creative, unexpected results, allowing her to focus more time on the truly difficult mathematical frontiers of knowledge. A skilled researcher might be able to engage in AI-assisted intellectual brainstorming of possible avenues to explore before embarking on a major new scientific inquiry.

In the developing world, smart, intellectually curious people without access to formal education can unlock a cognitive future that would have previously been impossible through freely available AI-based teaching tools, (which is one reason why AI optimism is so prevalent in the world’s poorer nations).²

As the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote in A Panda’s Thumb:

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops…

The net social effect of AI may well be a world of more severe economic inequality, ushering in the Silicon Valley tech bro’s ultimate fantasy of a permanent underclass. In rich countries, millions may lose their jobs and billionaires may become trillionaires. And in poor countries, despite the optimism, there is no Silicon Valley in Madagascar or Myanmar, so many of the rich fruits of technological innovation will, yet again, be plucked in the global north.

Nonetheless, an ambitious, clever individual in a poor country can now come home from a menial job and, for free, use AI tools as a better tutor than they could ever hope to pay for previously. But that can only act as an amplifier for a certain kind of person: for someone illiterate, exhausted by sweat shop toil, or unable to break out of menial labor markets, they may spend endless hours on ChatGPT or Claude learning about mathematics and engineering, or conquering fresh fields of humanities knowledge through progressive tutoring, but it may not matter for anything beyond their own cognitive development.³

The most likely outcome is therefore a stark one: hardworking, intellectually curious critical thinkers who know how to use AI to enhance their intelligence will get smarter; meanwhile, everyone else falls cognitively behind, as they eagerly siphon off any mental toil to machines.

To understand why, we need to explore a useful economic framework that perfectly captures why AI will create a bifurcation in cognitive abilities, depending on who uses it and how they incorporate it into their lives.

III: Substitutes vs. Complements

Economists have highlighted a theoretical divide between substitutes and complements. Does a good replace another, or does it support it and make it better? A related term is displacement, in which a technological innovation makes a previous technology obsolete.

When ATMs were invented, many feared that bank tellers would be obliterated, hundreds of thousands out of work in an automated blink. Instead, even as ATMs spread from fringe futuristic technology to being ubiquitous features of daily life, the number of tellers actually rose modestly over that period.

David Autor (2015) wrote about the phenomenon, explaining how this freed up bank employees to engage in so-called relationship banking, selling products to clients rather than just fulfilling the menial job of distributing cash. It’s a clear example where something looked like it would displace employment, but ended up complementing it.

Now, if we apply those economic concepts to the surge in AI usage and offloading cognitive demands, we have a stark framework for understanding what I call the great cognitive divide that’s looming on the horizon.

For the mathematician who is using AI to push theoretical frontiers or the heart surgeon who is using AI to help invent new medical interventions with greater precision, artificial intelligence doesn’t offload their critical thinking; it amplifies their intellectual effectiveness while boosting the bandwidth of that person’s brain to focus on ever-greater innovations and creative solutions to longstanding problems that aren’t easily solvable with existing training data.

By contrast, if a person who previously had to engage their brain to fill out spreadsheets or write technical reports is now exclusively using AI tools to displace their critical thinking—while completing the same tasks—then those individual brains will atrophy over time without sufficient alternative effort to keep them cognitively engaged. (Similarly, passive social media scrolling often displaces, rather than complements, more enriching cognitive activities like reading books.)

However, many tasks currently done by humans are tedious busywork, yielding entire careers that David Graeber kindly called bullshit jobs. This is where the ATM example may offer cause for optimism. The ATM innovation was better for everyone—not least for the bank teller—who could now focus on activities that don’t just involve counting cash and handing it to someone but are instead more intellectually interesting.

Similarly, if AI can help streamline what Jamie Bartlett calls techno admin—the soul crushing digital tasks we all must do in modern life—then that displacement should be welcomed. (No brain cells are wasted on ticking digital boxes.)

That’s why these categories offer a powerful theoretical scaffolding to understand a new frontier of cognitive load: the goal of AI for humans should be to displace the boring, tedious tasks that add nothing to your intellectual experience of being alive and to complement the cognitive passions by amplifying one’s natural talents and existing abilities.

IV: Resist the Sirens of Cognitive Offloading

However, as my previous essay about “The Death of the Student Essay” argued, intelligence amplification can only happen after people already possess critical thinking skills and are willing to pursue critical thinking as an end in itself. If you never learn how to use the cognitive gym and aren’t willing to put in some demanding ideational work, your brain will never grow.

For young people who substitute or displace their education by using AI shortcuts that outsource the process of learning how to think, artificial intelligence will never complement their cognition. Instead, it will just turn education into a mental dead end, a hard limit on what could otherwise be a rich internal life of curiosity and knowledge.

Similarly, for people who mistakenly see “outputs” as the goal rather than merely the economically useful byproduct of switching on their brains, they will be increasingly tempted to offload everything to AI tools, putting them in the same boat as those who never develop critical thinking in the first place. Legions risk becoming akin to the parable of a lazy steroid user who never works out: churning out cringe-worthy AI-generated LinkedIn posts en masse, while their brain slowly becomes a useless squatter in their skull.

The problem for both groups is this: some people will get really good at using ChatGPT or Claude, producing some seemingly excellent outputs along the way, thereby lulling themselves into a false sense of comparative advantage.

But if they don’t learn how to think, then any AI-based skills they develop will have two pitfalls:

First, their skills will be tied only to a specific technology, not a flexible cognitive aptitude that can survive further technological advancement.

Second, those skills won’t be remotely unique. Right now, someone can get an edge professionally by being good at using AI tools, since some people are better than others at adopting the technology. But just as people used to proudly type “proficient in Word and Excel” on their CVs, over time, such skills became taken for granted. And in a world that will inevitably involve AI interlaced with the human experience, nobody will stand out for being good at writing AI prompts.

Therefore, as cognitive offloading seductively tempts a population obsessed with optimized efficiency, the edge will ultimately go to the diligent smart thinkers who complement their intelligence rather than swapping their mind with an LLM.

This, then, is my plea: resist the siren song of overzealous cognitive offloading. Next time you use ChatGPT, ask yourself: is this a substitute for my mind, or complementing my ability to use my brain more effectively? Am I streamlining a pointless task so I can focus on more interesting ideas, or depriving myself of interesting ideas because a shortcut beckons?

Human brains are the most complex and wonderful creations in the known universe, but they wither when left unused. I worry that we could already be sleepwalking toward that mental chasm, one mindless AI prompt at a time.

3 It’s worth noting that I believe cognitive development and exploring knowledge for its own sake is a worthy goal for literally every human being on the planet.

<https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-great-cognitive-divide>

The Garden of Forking Paths

Wandering around an infinitely complex, ever-changing world.

By Brian Klaas

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Rescued by the WayBack Machine: <https://web.archive.org/web/20090705080705/http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=republic_of_the_central_banker>. Support them! <https://archive.org/donate/>.

It is still true that an extraordinary amount of our macroeconomic fate runs through the heads of a few human beings sitting around a table in Washington. We do not live in the Republic of Plato, or even in the Republic of the Bond Market; we live, to a remarkable extent, in the Republic of the Central Banker.

When I wrote this in October 2008, the financial world was on fire and Ben Bernanke, an extremely earnest scholar of the Great Depression who had somehow found himself cast as philosopher‑prince, was manning the fire hose. The point of the essay was not just biographical color—“How did this nice Jewish boy from Dillon, South Carolina wind up running the world?”—but institutional: through a long series of historical accidents, improvisations, and panics, democratic polities had delegated the power to set the most important price in the economy, the short‑term interest rate, to a technocratic priesthood and then discovered that they could not easily take it back.

Seventeen years on, you will recognize the patterns. The specifics have changed—different shocks, different acronyms, different chairs—but the underlying structure is the same: an immense island of central planning in the middle of a market ocean; politicians who loudly declaim about “growth” and “jobs” while knowing that their room for maneuver is sharply circumscribed by what the central bank will tolerate; and a constant, uneasy argument about how much discretion we actually want our philosopher‑princes to have. This article is, I think, a snapshot from the acute phase of that realization: how we backed into the Republic of the Central Banker, and what it means to try to do democratic politics in its shadow:

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2008-10-27: Republic of the Central Banker

In the middle of our market economy sits an island of central planning, the Federal Reserve. No president or Congress dares challenge the power of its chairman, Ben Bernanke.

J. Bradford Delong | October 27, 2008

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Ben Bernanke is the closest thing to a central economic planner the United States has ever had. He bestrides our narrow economic world like a colossus. Unelected (he was appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed by an overwhelming majority in the Senate) and unaccountable (unless the Congress decides that it wishes to amend the Federal Reserve Act and take the blame for whatever else goes wrong with the economy), he is responsible only to his conscience -- and his open-market committee of himself, the other six governors of the Federal Reserve Board, and the 12 presidents of the regional Federal Reserve banks.

The fate of the economy in the next administration depends far less on the president than on this moral-philosopher-prince to whose judgment we have entrusted a remarkable share of control over our destiny.

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* * *

How did an ivory-tower academic whose specialty is the details of the Great Depression get to this position? What does he do all day? How did so much power come to rest in a single institution, a single individual? The current system is the product of a century and a half of evolution in the role of a central bank, on both sides of the Atlantic, through a series of accidents and crises. For a generation, the idea of social democracy -- with government ownership, control, and regulation of at least the “commanding heights” of the economy -- has been in retreat. But in the middle of this market economy is an immense island of central planning: the Federal Reserve. In normal times, the Fed -- not the market -- decides what the short-term interest rate is. The interest rate is perhaps the key price in the economy. It is the price at which we trade wealth in the present for wealth in the future.

When the interest rate is low, our focus is on the future: Businesses and consumers borrow and invest. When the interest rate is high, our focus is on the present because distant-future promises of cash are not worth very much in today’s dollars. You might think that if there were ever a decision we would leave to the market and the aggregated preferences of millions of individuals, it would be the terms on which we trade present comfort off for future wealth. But we don’t. We leave that decision to the discretion of the philosopher-prince Bernanke and his committee. And in extraordinary moments like the September Wall Street crisis, when the flow of funds through financial markets dries up, we leave the decisions of which banks to nationalize, which to close down, which to forcibly merge, and which to rescue and on what terms to our financial overlords in the Eccles Building on the National Mall.

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***

Ben Shalom Bernanke is perhaps more aware of the complex history that placed him in this role than any of his predecessors were. The eldest child of a schoolteacher and of a druggist and part-time theater manager, he was born in Georgia and brought up in South Carolina before heading off to Harvard in 1971. “What was it like being a southerner at Harvard in the 1970s?” is reported to have been the thing that George W. Bush was most interested in when he first interviewed Bernanke for a slot as one of the Federal Reserve’s seven governors. Bernanke then went straight on to graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned his Ph.D. in 1979, a student of Stanley Fischer’s during a near-decade when it seemed like all the excellent young macroeconomists were students of Stanley Fischer’s. His first job was as a Stanford Business School professor, where he became a star. After six years at Stanford and a year at New York University, Ben Bernanke settled at Princeton. His last six years at Princeton, 1996–2002, he was an extraordinarily successful economics department chair.

“I always thought I would be an academic lifer,” Ben Bernanke said at a conference in 2005. “The sum of my political experience consisted of two terms on the local school board, six grueling years during which my fellow board members and I were trashed alternately by angry parents and angry taxpayers.” In spite of this lack of experience, the consensus was and is that he is one of the very best people for his job. “[The choice of Ben Bernanke] as the next Fed Chairman is a very good one: he is extremely bright ... a first rate expert in macroeconomics and monetary policy ... he has a broad and sophisticated -- if somehow controversial -- understanding of international macroeconomic issues. ... While being a Republican, he is not a partisan hack or too closely associated with the White House. ... He is a wise and pragmatic policy maker” -- so said Nouriel Roubini, perhaps the fiercest critic of recent Federal Reserve policy, when Bernanke was nominated nearly three years ago.

When Bernanke was appointed, the concerns about what he would bring to the position were threefold: Would he be too much of an inflationist -- too willing to “drop money out of helicopters” to keep the economy going at a high-pressure pace when recession threatened? Would he be too rigid -- likely to confine the Federal Reserve to an “inflation targeting” straitjacket? Would his belief that America’s large trade deficit sprang from a “global savings glut” rather than U.S. policy mistakes lead him to neglect the problems created by those global imbalances? None of these have proved relevant to understanding his tenure so far. Instead, the most relevant thing has been his long interest in the Great Depression and his judgment that the Federal Reserve erred catastrophically in the Depression not just by failing to stem the decline in those bank deposits necessary to fuel consumer spending but also by allowing banks to fail. In so doing, the Fed destroyed the organization and knowledge base that made banks trusted intermediaries between the myriads of savers with no knowledge of business prospects and the thousands of businesses with no direct ability to draw on individual savers’ resources. Avoiding the mistakes made during the Great Depression is Bernanke’s highest priority. “As an official representative of the Federal Reserve,” he said at the 90th birthday party for Milton Friedman, who in a 1963 book co-authored with Anna J. Schwartz argues that the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy was to blame for the Depression, “I would like to say to Milton and Anna, You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

In 2002 he left Princeton for Washington, where he was one of the Fed’s governors for three years, then one of Bush’s White House economists for a year, and then named chair of the Federal Reserve on Feb. 1, 2006.

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***

Now go further back in history to 1844, and pick up the story that leads to Bernanke’s current power and eminence. The place is London. The occasion is the debate in Britain’s House of Commons over the terms on which the charter of the Bank of England -- the government’s bank -- is to be renewed. The British government was then the largest economic institution the world had ever seen, and Britain, the fastest-growing economy ever seen: It was the age of the original Industrial Revolution, with the first large-scale automated factories, the first steamships, the first net of railroads, and the first time that any national economy had developed the chronic disease that we call the industrial business cycle.

Before the 19th century the causes of times of economic distress were obvious: war, famine, or disease, or a state bankruptcy -- a government that decided that it was simply not going to pay its debts. You could see what was going wrong and what had caused it.

The industrial business cycle was different -- and mysterious. Factories would be shut but not because of a lack of raw materials or of workers who wanted the jobs or of people who needed the products. Construction workers would be idle but not because the country had enough railroads or buildings or ports. People would be much poorer than they had been a couple of years before but not because an invading army had burned their cities or a plague of locusts had eaten their crops.

What seemed to be happening was that the flow of funds of individuals’ savings into banks and then out to companies that wanted to expand or maintain operations somehow dried up. Sometimes the flow of money into the banks dried up first, and so the interest rate the banks had to pay to attract funds and deposits rose. As a result, the interest on the loans the banks had made was suddenly less than the interest they had to pay out on deposits. The banks then ran short of cash, couldn’t pay their obligations, and crashed. This further dried up the flow of funds from savers: Why deposit your money in a bank that might crash next week? Sometimes the confidence of entrepreneurs in expanding their enterprises flagged and faltered, and the value that they paid each other for shares of ownership of factories and railroads and office buildings fell. Then they could no longer sell shares in their properties to pay back the banks from which they had borrowed -- and the banks ran short of cash, couldn’t pay their obligations, and crashed. This too dried up the flow of funds from savers. Before the Industrial Revolution, these things didn’t happen. Ever since, they have happened roughly every five years, at varying levels of severity.

In reaction to these first contractions, the Bank of England developed a custom: In a panic, crash, or depression, when smaller banks were running short of cash, the Bank of England would print some up and lend it out to the other banks. Nobody thought that Bank of England notes were bad because nobody thought the Bank of England would crash: the British Empire would never let it fail. So the Bank of England lent to smaller banks that could not meet their obligations, expecting repayment only after the crisis had passed. This lending would keep smaller banks from crashing, lower interest rates, and raise asset prices. Indeed, the crises did pass. Savers reappeared, and the interest rates banks had to pay to attract deposits fell. Entrepreneurs returned from their rest cures, recovered their confidence, and asset prices rose again. And the Bank of England got repaid -- or at least got repaid enough of the time to keep the system going.

All of this was illegal. The notes the Bank of England printed were supposed to be backed by gold in its vaults. The 1844 parliamentary debate was about whether the Bank of England’s charter should be amended to make legal what the bank was already doing. Prime Minister Robert Peel said no: If the Bank of England had the legal power to print extra notes to rescue banks in a crisis, he said, then the banks would get into more crises, taking more risks because they knew that the Bank of England would rescue them. But, Peel said, if the governor of the Bank of England decided, in a panic, to rescue banks or lend them money to prevent the panic from snowballing into a crisis and then into a depression -- then the government would not prosecute its bank for violating its own charter. As Charles Kindleberger puts it in his book Manias, Panics, and Crashes, the principle was that the central bank should always show up when it was really needed, but beforehand, and in normal times, its appearance should always be in doubt.

As the 19th century passed, the Bank of England began to exercise its power to set the key price in the economy. There had always been a “bank rate” -- a rate at which other banks could borrow from the Bank of England. At the start, the Bank of England would periodically adjust the “bank rate” to follow the general price in the free money market in normal times, but it found that the other banks were waiting for it before they would change their own lending rates. By the end of the 19th century, the short-term interest rate in Britain was an administered rather than a market price all the time -- not just in the panics when the Bank of England lent money in emergency-rescue operations.

The United States in the 19th century did without a central bank and had the world’s severest panics and deepest depressions -- in 1857, 1873, 1884, 1893, 1896, and 1907. In 1907, the financier J.P. Morgan said “enough” and constituted himself as a pick-up central bank because nobody doubted that his and his partners’ fortunes were so large that their credit was good. In 1913 Congress created the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve did not acquit itself well during the Great Depression: Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz always blamed that on the untimely death in 1928 -- just before the crash -- of the Fed’s leader, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Benjamin Strong, and the lack of competent replacements. Other central banks also did not acquit themselves well during the Great Depression: They all seem to have decided that maintaining the gold standard was more important than rescuing banks, which is why we no longer have a gold standard.

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* * *

After World War II, the Federal Reserve found its footing. Eight times a year, and in emergencies, the Federal Open Market Committee met to assess the levels of the federal funds rate and the Federal Reserve discount rate -- the American equivalents of Britain’s “bank rate.” The Reserve set its interest rates with an eye, first, to maintaining price stability (because inflation makes all other tasks much more difficult); second, to minimizing the danger of a future financial crisis; and, third, to keeping the economy’s level of growth as high and unemployment as low as possible given the other two objectives.

In the first decades after World War II, the Federal Reserve came under heavy political pressure: Members of Congress would denounce the Fed for keeping interest rates too low and thus triggering inflation; other members of Congress would denounce the Federal Reserve for keeping interest rates too high and thus creating high unemployment and low real wages; presidents prodded the Reserve to lower interest rates to produce an economic boom at re-election times. But the 1970s taught members of Congress that criticizing the Federal Reserve is likely to backfire: If it takes your advice, you cannot then blame it for what has gone wrong in the economy. The 1980s taught presidents and their staffs that getting into a fight with the Fed is likely to shake business confidence and risk either higher inflation or higher unemployment or both. The memory of the 1970s and the 1980s created a culture inside the Federal Reserve of resistance to political pressure. Many in the Fed believe that the root cause of our only post–World War II depression, in 1982, had been caused by then Federal Reserve Chair Arthur Burns’ willingness to bow to pressure from his political patron Richard Nixon to create a booming economy for Nixon’s re-election campaign in 1972.

The last even semiserious political effort to pressure the Federal Reserve came in 1991, when George H.W. Bush’s White House delayed Alan Greenspan’s reappointment as chair and threatened to find a replacement if Greenspan and his committee did not lower interest rates far and fast enough to suit the White House -- what then–White House counsel C. Boyden Gray told me were “counterproductive and pointless games.” Since Paul Volcker’s appointment as chair in 1979, the Reserve has been effectively independent from the rest of the government. And whenever it makes a decision, the word comes down to all executive-branch officials to stay on message, as we were told when I worked at the Treasury in the 1990s:

“Our role at the Treasury Department is to support the independent regulators. ... The Treasury Department supports the actions taken by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Federal Reserve. We believe the actions taken were necessary and appropriate.”

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* * *

All this evolved not by design but by accident. The Bank of England did not start out thinking its job was to rescue the banking sector in crisis; it just found there was a crisis and thought it could do some good. Robert Peel did not set out to create a central bank, but prosecuting the Bank of England for charter violations seemed a mistake at the time. The Bank of England did not set out to supplant the market and turn the interest rate into a centrally planned and administered price, but monetary management in extraordinary times led to monetary management in unusual and then in ordinary times. The 1913 U.S. Congress did not set out to turn Ben Bernanke into a philosopher-prince, but the absence of an American central bank was blamed for the dire panics and depressions that struck between the Civil War and World War I. And post–World War II presidents and congresses did not set out to cede all effective powers of national macroeconomic management to the philosopher-princes of the Federal Reserve; it just seemed like the least-bad idea at the time.

But just because central banking is independent of politics does not mean that politics is independent of central banking. “You may not be interested in the dialectic,” Leon Trotsky once said, “but the dialectic is interested in you.” That we now have independent central banks run by technocratic philosopher-princes like Ben Bernanke, and that we have these central banks because elected legislators and executive politicians do not want to challenge their authority or change their charters, has powerful implications for the freedom of action and choices that presidents and elected governments can make. Let me give three examples:

At the start of the Clinton administration in 1993, Alan Greenspan as Federal Reserve chair was firmly and genuinely convinced that the federal budget deficit, at its level at the time, was inflationary. Deficits raise debt. One of the things governments do to get from under the burden of a high national debt is inflate the currency. Greenspan was firmly convinced that if he wanted to maintain price stability -- and he wanted to maintain price stability -- then he had to offset the upward pressure on inflation coming from expectations that someday the government would start printing money to ease its debt. To offset inflation, he raised interest rates and so created a supply imbalance in the labor market: You can’t have durable inflation without rising wages, and you can’t have rising wages with an excess supply of workers looking for jobs in the labor market.

Thus, the debate about the economic policy of the Clinton administration carried out in the fall and winter of 1992–1993 -- how to find the proper balance among middle-class tax cuts, public-investment expenditure increases, upper-class tax increases, and deficit reduction -- was brought to a sharp and immediate halt by the Federal Reserve. Because Alan Greenspan was committed to keeping inflation low, any Clinton administration economic policy of benign neglect applied to the deficit would be very likely to produce a substantial recession. Greenspan, of course, said that he was not an unelected technocrat imposing his policy preferences on the elected president but merely an informant about the reality of the bond market -- which generated James Carville’s crack about how he wanted to be reincarnated: “I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter, but now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”

A similar process had the opposite effect between 1995 and 2000. Greenspan’s belief -- over the objections of many if not most of the members of his committee -- in the “new economy” of the Internet revolution led the Fed chair to reduce interest rates below what standard Federal Reserve reactions found appropriate for the late-1990s levels of inflation and unemployment. This action generated the high-productivity, high-employment boom of the late 1990s that then turned into the dot-com bubble.

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* * *

The current financial crisis has its roots in Greenspan’s decision to keep interest rates very low in 2002 and 2003 to head off the danger of a deflation-induced double-dip recession, and his subsequent decision that the costs of cleaning up after a housing bubble were likely to be less than the costs of the high unemployment that would be generated by a preemptive attempt to pop a housing-speculation bubble. Two years ago, I would have said that Greenspan’s judgment here was correct. Six months ago, I would have said that his judgment was probably correct. Today -- in the middle of the largest nationalizations in history -- I can no longer state that Greenspan made the right calls with respect to the level of interest rates and the housing bubble in the 2000s.

In all three of these episodes, the president and the Congress -- neither of them wishing to erode confidence by a public disagreement with the Federal Reserve -- had about as much power to set or influence policy as the Queen of England does in Britain: They had the power to talk to the decider -- Greenspan then and Bernanke today -- and nothing more.

The great financial crisis of 2007–2008 does not weaken but strengthen the Federal Reserve’s independence in the short and medium run, no matter how one apportions blame among the Fed, the SEC, other regulatory agencies, and the overpaid princes of Wall Street. A strong economy is in the president’s policy interest: policy initiatives, especially expensive policy initiatives, cannot be enacted and implemented when the economy is weak. And a strong economy is in the president’s and the current Congress’ political interest: Weak economies lead to re-election defeats. The policy and political dangers of challenges to the Reserve’s authority, independent status, and leading role are thus now unusually high and likely to remain unusually high for the duration of the current financial crisis and for a year or two thereafter. The next administration will find itself advising, warning, privately admonishing, and publicly partnering with an independent Federal Reserve that will see itself as rightfully and legitimately taking the leading role in economic policy.

Cicero said that the problem with his political ally Cato was that he thought they lived in the Republic of Plato while they really lived in the Sewer of Romulus. It is either our curse or our blessing that we live in the Republic of the Central Banker.

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A Fed chair who refuses to show his work is taxing the economy with avoidable risk. By shredding forward guidance, Warsh isn’t restoring discipline – he’s deepening uncertainty.A communications strategy of not communicating definitely helps him balance Trump’s demands with Wall Street’s hopes, but it is not good monetary policy. Markets can try to deal with hawks and they can try to deal with doves. But how can they deal with and price in a Chair who will not say what game he is playing?

A well-functioning market economy requires a monetary standard: some set of rules and expectations for what the magical things that comprise liquid trust in the good faith and ability to pay of counterparties are, and how and how much of that liquid trust there is. As John Maynard Keynes wrote back in 1924, the market economy:

John Maynard Keynes: A Tract on Monetary Reform <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/65278/65278-h/65278-h.htm>: ‘cannot work properly if the money… is undependable. Unemployment, the precarious life of the worker, the disappointment of expectation, the sudden loss of savings, the excessive windfalls to individuals, the speculator, the profiteer—all proceed, in large measure, from the instability of the standard of value…. The costs of production… the rewards of labour, enterprise, and accumulation… [and] a fourth cost, namely risk; and the reward of risk-bearing is one of the heaviest, and perhaps the most avoidable, burden on production. This element of risk is greatly aggravated by the instability of the standard of value….

I dedicate this book, humbly and without permission, to the Governors and Court of the Bank of England, who now and for the future have a much more difficult and anxious task entrusted to them than in former days…

In something like our current Age of the Central Banker, clarity as to the policy of the Federal Reserve is perhaps the most essential part of the creation of a stable standard of value: how will the Federal Reserve backstop liquid asset values in order to try to make Say’s Law work in practice, so that potential supply is matched by demand? People need to know the answer to this question if risk is to be diminished, and if the risk-bearing tax on enterprise and employment is to be lightened.

We are thus all eager to hear what brand-new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has to say about what the policy of the Federal Reserve will be: his answers to questions of the form, if the economy does X, the Fed will do Y, and in economic situation Z, our reaction is likely to be W. To first order that Fed reaction function is likely to be something like a Taylor rule: an unemployment rate of u and an inflation rate of π induce the Fed to set a short-term Fed Funds interest rate of r, with the value of r calculated by some three-parameter linear function:

And then other circumstances lead the Fed to set its actual r above or below the Taylor-rule level. Hence one of the key jobs of the Federal Reserve is to communicate, clearly and unambiguously, its view as to the current values of α₀, α_u, and α_r; plus its current laundry list of other circumstances it is likely to respond to if they occur, and how much.

This is called the Federal Reserve’s “communications strategy” or its “forward guidance”.

What does Kevin Warsh has to say? What he has to say is: I am not going to say anything.

Daire MacFadden, Unhedged reporter, is rather unhinged as a result:

Daire MacFadden: No Dots, No Plots <https://ep.ft.com/permalink/emails/>: ‘New chair Kevin Warsh has, as expected, given up on forward guidance. Actually — as many are pointing out — he’s given up not just on guidance about the future but also guidance about the present and the past. Dario Perkins of TS Lombard summed it up nicely in the chart below. The emoji in the middle shows us where a legible (if imperfect) Fed dot plot used to be:

In short, Warsh’s turn towards the taciturn potentially increases uncertainty and the risk of policy surprises — a recipe for higher borrowing costs, if ever there was one. Warsh’s press conference… offered a preview of this new regime. In the 24 hours before and after the meeting, markets significantly repriced the likely path of Fed policy over the coming year. They went from expecting one rate rise to expecting two by June next year, with the first due in the fourth quarter…. Bank of America — not to be outdone by market consensus — thinks the number of rate increases could be higher and come sooner… [as] the labour market is showing no signs of slowing and inflation is above target and sticky….

Warsh barely mentioned the full employment side of the Fed’s mandate during the presser, which could be taken as a sign that he considers it met or less important now than price stability…. As if to underline the point about less communication sparking more confusion, investment house Amundi put out its own forecasts on Monday. It has concluded that the number of Fed rate rises this calendar year will be… zero…. Warsh has said a lot about speaking less. So far the proof of the new regime is June’s FOMC statement (cut to under half the typical length) and his refusal to plot a dot…

What Warsh has said is, roughly:

1. The Federal Reserve will deliver price stability—i.e., not worry about other things like full employment and enabling productivity growth via reallocation to high-value sectors until that first is taken care of.

2. He only cares about the left side of the decimal point when it comes to inflation—i.e., rather than attempt to make the PCE inflation rate average 2%/year over time, he will be satisfied as long as recent data records inflation as being 2.X%/year—which is an 0.50%-point increase in the Federal Reserve’s inflation target.

3. He does not think that the Philips Curve is real—i.e., that interest-rate increases are not a reliable way of cooling off the economy and diminishing inflation when inflation is above target, and hence price stability is not being delivered.

No. Nobody can make sense of this. It doesn’t.

Janet Yellen once remarked to me that her experience at the Fed of the 1990s was the introduction of the Taylor rule framework—where the interest rate would normally be given current inflation and unemployment, what adjustments above or below that normal level we are making because of current circumstances, and how the interest rate will change as the economy evolves— was a very major policy win in terms of establishing a stable monetary standard in these modern days, and also a substantial win in terms of clarifying the Federal Reserve’s own thought in its internal discussions. That seems to be, as far as the Fed chairman is concerned, now gone.

My interpretation of what is going on is rather cynical: it is that Kevin Warsh has told an awful lot of lies to get to his position. Donald Trump and the Trumpists think that he is a convinced interest rate dove, and that the only reason right now he is not pushing for rapid interest rate decreases is that he wants to nudge the committee rather than begin his term with a confrontation. The financial market community thinks that he pulled the wool over Donald Trump’s eyes by pretending to be an interest rate dove. Well, actually, he is a normal central banker. Those two sets of beliefs are inconsistent. Anything Kevin Warsh says is likely to disrupt at least one of them, and that could cause him trouble.

Hence he is going to make it a matter of principle to shut up. The longer he can preserve ambiguity, the better for him personally in his place at the top of this particular greasy pole.

That this is lousy economic policy and lousy communications strategy does not seem to be a consideration.

Very cynical, yes. But is it wrong?

Claudia Sahm is much more polite than I am, but in her polite way she appears equally alarmed at the prospect of a Fifth-Amendment Fed:

Claudia Sahm: Where Is the Fed Headed? <https://stayathomemacro.substack.com/p/where-is-the-fed-headed>: ‘The Fed’s guiding principle in communication should be transparency in service of accountability. The Fed cannot guarantee that unemployment and inflation will be low, but it can guarantee it will pursue those goals diligently and show its work…. Last week on Bloomberg, I was asked…. “If you had free rein of the institution and could readjust — adjust the communication apparatus at the Federal Reserve — what would you change? What would you get rid of?” I fumbled a bit — 6:45 am, no coffee — but the themes came through…. “I watched a Fed become more transparent, more speaking to the public. I think it is very important for accountability’s sake that the public, the Congress understands what the Fed is doing, why they are doing it…. Show your work…. Accountability… is important…. Fine-tuning… how the Fed gives information so markets can understand it and help…. There is a lot of fine-tuning. The dot plot is not a perfect tool in any form, but the spirit has real merit…. It is very easy to delete things…. But that doesn’t necessarily move the ball forward in terms of improving the goal-setting, improving the transparency.”… I can list my preferred tweaks, but honestly, that’s a sideshow to getting the Fed to elevate transparency and accountability…

Cf: <https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/helicopter-money-when-zero-just-isnt-low-enough> <https://web.archive.org/web/20090705080705/http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=republic_of_the_central_banker>

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I confess I did not think the idea that I would ever have a cybernetic assistant lobster with a swappable software brain had entered my mind before last month.

A report from the front lines of trying to run an agentic OpenClaw locally on Apple’s M5Max silicon: load latency, memory footprint, tokens per second, simple coherence, and what epistemic density: the ability to sustain a simulacrum of a logically serious argument.

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On a machine with 128GB of unified memory, 600GB/s of memory bandwidth, and perhap 70 TFLOPS FP16 of raw LLM-relevant computational power (cf.: 350 for an NVIDIA RTX 5090, but with four times the memory), we have:

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Notes:

1. The absolute gonzo gemma4:26b-a4b-it-q4_K_M performance-wise. What is going on here that is making it such an extraordinary outlier?

2. deepseek-r1:70b as the secondary performance-wise champ.

3. The low initial latency: the absolute speed with which all these models initially load.

4. Speed demons: For background tasks, logging, or simple classification, thellama3.2:1 and llama3.2:3b can do a huge amount of very simple summarization and classification tasks at rock-bottom resource costs and remarkable speed.

5. Coherence is very important: Speed is how fast you arrive; Coherence is supposed to be whether you arrived at the right destination.

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The Coherence Score is supposed to be the model’s ability to maintain structural integrity, logical consistency, and semantic relevance over a sustained period—follow the prompt’s constraints perfectly, maintain a stable “train of thought,” and not succumb to common failure modes like repetition or hallucinated syntax. The “Coherence Score” is supposed to tell us whether a speed gain is actually a utility gain or just a faster way to produce garbage. As I said: speed is how fast you arrive; Coherence is supposed to be whether you arrived at the right destination.

There is, in addition to initial load latency, memory consumption, speed of token generation, and ability to maintain the simulacrum of a coherent train of thought, another dimension of performance: call it semantic depth or epistemic density.

Semantic depth is “reasoning”, “knowledge”, and “logical complexity”. It is more than coherence, which is simply “not spouting obvious nonsense”. The 5GB RAM models can follow simple instructions like summarize this text. However, ask analyze the economic implications of the Anthropic/DoD rupture and how it might impact the valuation of OpenAI, the 5GB RAM models will fail to produce anything that would pass any Turing test. They will produce coherent-sounding sentences that are factually untethered from reality. The models squatting in 17GB or 74GB of memory with their massively more parameters sound much better.

A 5GB model can stay on topic for 50 words or so, but will struggle to maintain complex constraints over 1,000 tokens. If you give a complex instruction involving multiple negative constraints like explain X, but do not use the word Y, and ensure the tone is wry, yet avoid any mention of Z, the 5GB model will almost certainly “forget” one of those constraints. The 17GB or 74GB model has a much higher “instructional inertia.”

Right now: llama3.2:3b appears to be the model for: is this email urgent?qwen3:8b appears to be the model for: summarize this 5000-word article. llama3.3:70b(q8) appears to be the model for: let’s write or debug some computer code. gemma4:26b-a4b appears to be the model for nearly everything else.

There ought to be a place for deepseek-r1:70b. Deepseek itself suggests that it is good for “complex analysis/research (e.g., ‘synthesize these 5 papers’) and other tasks that require massive reasoning depth and factual density. But while llama3.2:3b is a worse-but-faster email classifier than I am, qwen3:8b can produce an acceptable summary note for my files freeing me up to live my life, llama3.3:70(q8) is a better python debugger than I am, and gemma4:26b is an effective LLM workhorse, I have not yet figured out a useful workflow process in which deepseek-r1:70b is better than just doing it myself.

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I am very happy to report that the Supreme Court has just ruled in favor of my friend and sometime student Lisa Cook today. Thus she can keep her job as Governor of the Federal Reserve. For now. That is the right decision. But, of course, it is made not for the reason that the President’s power to faithfully execute the laws requires that he do so in a manner consistent with the structure of departments, institutions, and agencies constructed by congressional legislation.

For today here comes deeply cynical and corrupt Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. He lies. He lies in the process of doing the right thing in the case before him—that of Fed Governor Lisa Cook:

Amy Howe: Skip to main contentCourt prevents Trump from Firing Fed Governor <https://braddelong.substack.com/publish/post/204135899>: ‘The Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors whom President Donald Trump had attempted to fire. By a vote of 5-4…

The five were the three not thoroughly corrupt justices—Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson—plus Kavanaugh and Roberts.

Continuing:

The court held that Cook can continue to remain in her job while her challenge to Trump’s efforts to fire her moves forward…. Roberts contended that, if the Trump administration were correct, it “would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment—an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference…”

But the whole point of the “unitary executive” theory—which this corrupt court has bought into almost whole-hog since Trump’s reelection, although its corrupt majority did not do so while Biden was president—is that when Congress delegates authority to an executive agency, it cannot restrict the president’s power to dismiss the people who are even if Senate confirmation is required, purely and entirely his agents. That is now the law. Everywhere but where the Federal Reserve is concerned. Even more so today.

For example:

Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has attempted to assert control over several multi-member independent agencies, whose officials could also only be removed for cause. In orders issued last year, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission, National Labor Relations Board, Merit Systems Protection Board, and Consumer Product Safety Commission while their appeals moved forward…

Cook, however, was different...

Why was Cook different? What is the distinguishing rationale here?

It is this: letting this chaos monkey president gain control of the Federal Reserve might actually be bad for people whom we like, and not just for libtards who cry when the chaos monkey president disrupts and damages pieces of the New-Deal Order social-insurance state that I loathe so.

That is it. Deeply cynical. Deeply corrupt.

Clarence Thomas (or, rather, his clerks—Thomas does not have the mental stamina or energy to have learned enough to have have played a substantial role here so outfar his wheelhouse) writes, correctly:

Clarence Thomas: Dissenting <https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25a312_5468.pdf>: ‘The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System… unlike the Federal Reserve Banks, is a federal executive agency that regulates much of the Nation’s economy…. Apparent mortgage fraud was a “cause” to remove Cook. And, the statute authorizing the President to remove Cook for “cause” says nothing about notice or a hearing, so it does not require notice and a hearing. Any other result would violate Article II of the Constitution, under which the President may remove executive officers at will…. [Roberts] makes many policy arguments for an “independent” banking agency that exercises executive power free from accountability, ante, at 5, but those are ultimately arguments against the Constitution…

And:

Samuel Alito & Neil Gorsuch: Dissenting <https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25a312_5468.pdf>: ‘The President has satisfied the traditional stay factors. Consider first the President’s likelihood of success…. The District Court erred in holding that removal “for cause” means removal only for “events that have occurred while [the officer is] in office.”… Cook lacks a private property interest in her seat on the Board of Governors…. Thus, the President’s attempt to remove her could not have violated the Due Process Clause…. Because the courts below resolved these two issues incorrectly, I would conclude that the President has shown a likelihood that we would reverse at this preliminary stage…. As to the remaining stay factors, this Court has held that they are satisfied when a lower court countermands the President’s removal of a principal executive officer. See Trump v. Wilcox, 605 U. S. ___, ___ (2025) (slip op., at 1–2). A stay is therefore warranted here…

And:

Barrett: Dissenting <https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25a312_5468.pdf>: ‘The Court chooses to answer a series of difficult merits questions… not addressed by… almost any other court before today…. The biggest issue: Is the removal restriction in the Federal Reserve Act constitutional?… [This] last is in a league of its own…. Nonetheless, the Court raises and settles the constitutional issue—and does so based on a conclusory analogy to the First and Second Banks of the United States. Ante, at 22–23….

The Court’s holding is in serious tension with Trump v. Slaughter, which we also decide today. ___ U. S. ___ (2026). Slaughter announces a categorical rule: Whenever “an agency ‘executes’ a congressional mandate against private parties, it exercises executive power” and must be subject to plenary executive control—“no ifs, ands, or quasis about it.” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 22). Yet here, the Court claims a special exception “‘sanctioned by history’” and based on the Federal Reserve’s role in setting monetary policy. Ante, at 24. How can history support both a categorical rule and a carveout?… And is the Federal Reserve unique, or might history sanction other exceptions too? The Court does not say….

We have repeatedly found that the President suffers irreparable harm when he is barred from firing a subordinate. See Trump v. Wilcox, 605 U. S. ___, ___ (2025) (slip op., at 1); Trump v. Boyle, 606 U. S. ___, ___ (2025) (slip op., at 1)…. The District Court’s order blocks the President from removing Cook for mortgage fraud, and that is so even if he satisfies the requirements that the Court’s opinion sets out. Under our precedent, that significant interference with the President’s removal authority clears the “irreparable harm” threshold…

Does Roberts’s opinion in his 26-page opinion in Trump v. Cook answer any of the dissents?

Reminding, the points made in dissent are that:

• Roberts’s opinion is contradicted by Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Wilcox,

• Cook cannot the due-process clause because she does not have a property interest,

• Cook cannot raise a statutory requirement for notice and hearing because there is no statutory requirement for such before a for-cause dismissal, and

• while the Federal Reserve System is not a mere normal executive-branch agency, the Federal Reserve Board definitely is just a normal executive-branch agency, and in that respect is very different from the First and Second Banks of the United States.

Does Roberts have an answer to any of these?

He does not.

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Look at the leading edge of today’s rich urban societies and you see a world our pre‑industrial ancestors would not recognize: machines do the sweating, while hyperliterate humans teach, heal, entertain, and manage intricate symbolic systems of power and production. How did we get from “in the sweate of thy face” to this peculiar post‑industrial condition? 1776 to 1914 was the real singularity in human history, one that turned economic history from a slow background drift into history’s driving force. Yet the transformation remains incomplete, and its patterns will organize the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries.

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I find myself following links back to my own work that have succumbed to linkrot—especially the shutdown of <http://typepad.com>. Whenever this happens, I think two things:

• First, I should prioritize the big job of getting the whole kit and caboodle back to 1995 up on WordPress somewhere. This is a big job, and I would rather not start it until I have time to make sure that it runs as efficiently and effectively as it can run.

• Second, I should throw the things I run across up on the SubStack, for if I am looking for them, maybe somebody else is looking for them too.

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As Cosma Shalizi Says, “The Singularity Is in Our Past”: Saturday Twentieth Century Economic History Weblogging

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Look at the bleeding edge of urban North Atlantic or East Asian civilization, and you see a world fundamentally unlike any human past. Hunting, gathering, farming, herding, spinning and weaving, cleaning, digging, smelting metal and shaping wood, assembling structures--all of the “in the sweate of thy face shalt thou eate bread” things that typical humans have typically done since we became jumped-up monkeys on the East African veldt--are now the occupations of a small and dwindling proportion of humans. And where we do have farmers, herdsmen, manufacturing workers, construction workers, and miners, they are overwhelmingly controllers of machines and increasingly programmers of robots. They are no longer people who make or shape things--facture--with their hands--manu.

At the bleeding edge of the urban North Atlantic and East Asia today, few focus on making more of necessities. There are enough calories that it is not necessary that anybody need be hungry. There is nough shelter that it is not necessary that anybody need be wet. There is enough clothing that it is not necessary that anybody need be cold. And enough stuff to aid daily life that nobody need feel under the pressure of lack of something necessary. We are not in the realm of necessity.

What do modern people do? Increasingly, they push forward the corpus of technological and scientific knowledge. They educate each other. They doctor each other. They nurse each other. They care for the young and the old. They entertain each other. They provide other services for each other to take advantage of the benefits of specialization. And they engage in complicated symbolic interactions that have the emergent effect of distributing status and power and coordinating the seven-billion person division of labor of today’s economy. We have crossed a great divide between what we used to do in all previous human history and what we do now. Since we are not in the realm of necessity, we ought to be in the realm of freedom.

But although we have largely set these post-agrarian post-industrial patterns for the next stage of human history, the human world of this next stage is only half-made. The future is already here--it is just not evenly distributed. Of the 7.2 billion people alive in the world today, at least 25% billion still live lives that are hard to distinguish from the lives of our pre-industrial ancestors. Only 5% of today’s world population lives in countries where income per capita is greater than $40,000 per year; only 10% lives in countries where income per capita is greater than $20,000 per year.

The bulk of the world’s population is on the stairway to modernity. The patterns are set. The top of the stairway is visible--although it is not clear which top we shall reach: many possible tops are immanent in the patterns. Nevertheless, the climb will be hard. And that is what much of the history of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries is likely to be about.

So how did this great transformation happen? And how did the way it happened shape who we are now and who we will be in the future?

The traditional tools, practices, patterns, and molds of history are not as much help in telling this story as one might hope. The history of how the world was greatly transformed is primarily economic and technological, and secondarily political and social. But historians are not used to placing the economic and technological in first place. In the study of any period back before 1800, there is no way that economic history can be seen as even one of the principal axes. Before 1800, most history at even the century-level--let alone the decade-level or the year-level--could not be economic history. History is change. And before 1800 economic factors changed only slowly. The structure and functioning of the economy at the end of any given century was pretty close to what it had been at the beginning.

The economy was then was much more the background against which the action of a play takes place than like a dynamic foreground character. Changes in humanity’s economy--how people made, distributed, and consumed the material necessities and conveniences of their lives--required long exposures to become visible. Economic history could be--indeed, had to be--a specialized “long duration” history. It required a scope of perhaps 500 years, if not more, to be properly placed in the foreground of any historical canvas. And even then the story told was of recurrent patterns and cycles rather than development and change.

But since 1750 or so things have been different. The pace of economic change has been so great as to shake the rest of history to its foundation. For perhaps the first time, the making and using the necessities and conveniences of daily life--and how production, distribution, and consumption changed--has been the driving force behind a single century’s history. Even in the most long-established of professions, the pattern and rhythm of work life today is so very different from that of our ancestors as to be almost unrecognizable. It is these changes in production and also in home life and consumption, and the reactions to them, that make up the center ring action of the history that has made us who we are.

This post-1750 history takes place in two stages. The first stage is the nineteenth century: the century of the British Industrial Revolution. Call it 1750-1870. It opens up the possibilities. The second stage is the twentieth century. Call it 1870-2010. It sets the patterns into which the human world is likely to grow in the future.

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• Shalizi, Cosma. 2010. “The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone”. Bactra. November 28. <http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/699.html>.

And I might as well put the short text of this up here as well:

Cosma Shalizi (2010): The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone <http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/699.html>:

“Attention conservation notice: Yet another semi-crank pet notion, nursed quietly for many years, now posted in the absence of new thoughts because reading The Half-Made World brought it back to mind.

The Singularity has happened; we call it “the industrial revolution” or “the long nineteenth century”. It was over by the close of 1918.

Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check.

Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check.

Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.

Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check.

Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, “the coldest of all cold monsters”? Check; we call them “the self-regulating market system” and “modern bureaucracies” (public or private), and they treat men and women, even those whose minds and bodies instantiate them, like straw dogs.

An implacable drive on the part of those networks to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their own sphere? Check. (”Drive” is the best I can do; words like “agenda” or “purpose” are too anthropomorphic, and fail to acknowledge the radical novely and strangeness of these assemblages, which are not even intelligent, as we experience intelligence, yet ceaselessly calculating.)

Why, then, since the Singularity is so plainly, even intrusively, visible in our past, does science fiction persist in placing a pale mirage of it in our future? Perhaps: the owl of Minerva flies at dusk; and we are in the late afternoon, fitfully dreaming of the half-glimpsed events of the day, waiting for the stars to come out.

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And cross-reference as well to the very keen-witted:

• Kumar, Krishan. 1978. Prophecy & Progress:

  The Sociology of Industrial & Post-industrial Society. London: Penguin. <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Prophecy_and_Progress/_ZUJAQAAIAAJ?hl=en>

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My view of many issuers around “Generative AI” has been profoundly shaped by the fact that I hear—constantly—from the leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic in my left ear that:

• their scraping everything to train their models without paying the authors/creators an extra cent for this previously uncontemplated use of their work is absolutely fine;

• but distilling their models is worse than unfair: it is criminal.

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Gizmodo called them out effectively:

Webb Wright: Everyone Wants to Build AI Using Someone Else’s Work <https://gizmodo.com/everyone-wants-to-build-ai-using-someone-elses-work-2000777781>: ‘Media companies and artists aren’t the only ones accusing AI companies of stealing their work. Increasingly, accusations are being lobbed between companies themselves…. Like publishers’ legal disputes with AI developers, the U.S. AI industry’s efforts to prevent foreign companies from “illicitly” using their models to train new ones will almost certainly not have a quick or easy solution. But one has to suspect that right now, across the country, editors at small-town newspapers are watching American tech companies complain about what they claim amounts to theft, and feeling that at last, a tiny bit of justice has been served…

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The “we won’t even bother to try to make even a semi-logical argument; we will just show up with bags of money” vibe here is very distasteful.

Thus I am predisposed to be 100% sympathetic to the Patreon CEO here, as I watch Patreon CEO Jack Conte interviewed by himself:

Jack Conte: My Thoughts on AI <https://www.patreon.com/jackconte/posts/my-thoughts-on-152669616>: ‘Hey creators! I’ve been thinking a lot about AI…. This video is… a download of where my head is about AI, copyright, fair use… fear… what specifically excites me about the tech and what I’m angry about, and why I believe in human creativity…. It’s long!…. If you only listen to 20 seconds… here’s… [what] you should know:

• Patreon does NOT use creator work to train… LLMs or image generators….

• We ARE actively fighting to protect creators from AI spam, and from having their work scraped without their consent.

• We are NOT blanket-prohibiting work that was made with AI tools….

• I believe human creativity is not going anywhere…

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And as I watch him interviewed by Nilay Patel of The Verge:

Jack Conte & Nilay Patel: Patreon Ceo Jack Conte on Supporting Artists in the AI Slop Era <https://www.theverge.com/podcast/952607/patreon-ceo-jack-conte>:

Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon… last joined me on the show almost exactly five years ago… and a lot has changed…. His ideas about what Patreon is and how it should work have changed dramatically…. The last time we talked, Jack was adamantly opposed to building any kind of discovery features into Patreon. But then Patreon built those features—to help people discover content from new creators…. Jack says if Patreon didn’t build its own audience platform, then everyone would be at the mercy of Meta and Google to find audiences—and customers.

You’ll hear Jack say that the current way platforms treat creators is “disgusting,” and you’ll hear him convincingly argue that big tech companies are going to just keep taking everyone’s work however they want, and writers and musicians and artists of every kind will be left holding the bag. But you’ll also hear Jack argue that this leaves a really big opportunity for a company like Patreon, which connects creators directly with audiences. In a world full of cheap and easy slop, Patreon’s plan is to build demand from real people who want to connect in deep and important ways with real artists…

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Perhaps the most crucial crux is this exchange:

Nilay Patel: Every software engineer and product manager I know is either the most excited they’ve ever been or experiencing a full existential crisis about the ease of developing software, of making new features, of making new products, of tokenmaxxing. Then in creator world, the audiences hate it, and they don’t want the slop, and every platform is overrun with slop, even though the audiences don’t want the slop, and something very bad is happening.

How are you bridging that divide? Because it’s obvious that the future of software companies looks AI-enabled in some way, I’m not sure which way it is, but it’s obvious that it’s some way. And then it is far from obvious that the future of creator media has any AI in it at all, because the audiences are rejecting it so thoroughly.

Jack Conte: This has been really challenging…. I’m holding two opposing beliefs at the same time, and I’m terrified, and I’m excited, and I’m really pissed at how all this has been rolled out…. I find the technology magical…. I am holding all of these ideas in my head at once, and I myself feel very conflicted about it….

The algorithms just push everybody into one of two camps, and they push us so far apart. That is absolutely happening now with AI…. There are… serious drawbacks and concerns…. I’m… seriously angry about it…. But I think it is such an important time for artists to have an open conversation…. Everything is changing for people, and this is going to be a transformative shift for artists, for employees, for humans….. Boycotting AI is like boycotting the internet. That’s not a good strategy. I don’t like what Instagram has done…. I still have an Instagram page…. I don’t like what Apple has done, especially to Patreon creators over the last year…. And here I am on my iPhone. I don’t like what my federal government is doing right now… and I still pay my taxes, and I still live in the United States….

Every 10 years, there’s this techno-legal cycle where tech companies build some type of new technology, and it breaks the current systems. It usually uses creator work without consent, compensation, or credit. And then the tech companies claim… “fair use, or copyright doesn’t apply because it’s transformative.”… Then there’s industry mayhem…. We are now… in the industry mayhem part of this cycle…. There should be a lot of lawsuits… regulation…. These models have Borg’d the entirety of the free creative web…. That is bad, not only for those creators, but it’s bad for society.…

If Patreon does not fully embrace these tools as a product and engineering company… and use them to give the power back to creators, we, as a company, will be dead in three years…. These platform shifts are material…. Companies [that] don’t keep up with these new technologies… die. Patreon is much more useful to creators if we are alive…. We must embrace those tools… because I want us to be a powerful product company that fights on behalf of creative people.…

At the center of the bullseye is creators making their creative work. What creators have told us is, “Patreon, get the f*** out of the way….” So, we get out of their way…. One rung out… is the packaging…. Like automated chapter markers and things like that, or cutting long-form podcast episodes into clips. One rung out from that is marketing… with automated email flows and things like that. And then one rung out from that is business management…. The best quote we heard from our user research interviews was, “Hey, I have a million ideas for new videos. I don’t need AI to help me make more videos. I need AI to help me do my taxes and clean my toilet.” And that is our product strategy….

I’ve explained all this to our creators in this very long 45-minute video...

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Brad here again: I am going to have to think hard about how Substack and Patreon are both very much alike and very much different here.

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Cuban infant mortality is roughly 10 per 1000 live births. Countries as poor as Cuba are typically in the 50 per 1000 live births or so range. Cuba thus punches enormously above its economic-prosperity weight in terms of infant mortality.

My view is that, had Cuba remained a normal country rather than becoming the patrimonial-authoritarian really-existing socialist caudillismist Castroite state that it did, the likely counterfactual is that nearly everyone would have been much better off. People would have been better off even with respect to infant mortality. In brief, Cuba today would probably look a lot like Costa Rica today, with 9 infant-mortality deaths per thousand live births. The Revolution and the Castroite régime has been a 2.5-generation disaster for Cuba, and the ability of the medical system to punch well above its economic weight in infant mortality is 100% offset by the régime’s system that makes its economic weight so low.

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Now comes Noel Maurer makes me aware of the latest developments in the Cuban economic development debate:

Noel Maurer: The Battle of Cuba(n Economic History) <https://www.noelmaurer.com/p/economic-history-week>: ‘John Devereux and Vincent Geloso (with João Pedro Bastos and Jamie Bologna Pavlik)… using different methodologies… presented evidence that Cubans would have been far better off had the Revolution never happened. Geloso et. al. use synthetic controls… [and] find that socialist Cuba fell behind counterfactual Cuba even as the Soviet Bloc pumped in billions of economic aid….

Now Giovanni Mellace (U. of Southern Denmark) and Rok Spruk (U. of Ljubljana) have struck back! They use synthetic controls to show that infant mortality in socialist Cuba falls dramatically and persistently compared to counterfactual Cuba… by “15–29 percent and average years of schooling rise 1.5-2 years; both effects are large, persistent, and robust.” Win one for the Revolution! Or maybe not…

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Noel then reminds us of John Devereux writing back in 2010:

John Devereux: The Health of the Revolution: Explaining the Cuban Healthcare Paradox <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NFnuqdCKekn14tManezoHkyJULFRCRWa/view>: ‘What lies behind the Cuban health care numbers?… My focus is on infant mortality…. Part of the answer lies in the fact that that the revolution inherited an economy with low infant mortality. [Plus] in the early 1970’s [when] infant mortality becomes a central goal of the Cuban authorities…. Cuba… developed… unique… institution… to monitor and to alter the behavior of patients and medical professional alike in ways that appear to have few parallels elsewhere… rest[ing] on the power of the Cuban State and its formidable security apparatus….

[Pre-Castro] Cuba had already achieved developed-economy levels of infant mortality…. Why did infant mortality fall so dramatically after the early 1970’s? Standard explanations emphasize Cuban investment in healthcare…. There is a large element of truth in these views….Cuba did not regain its pre-revolutionary levels of doctors until the early 1970’s, reflecting the exodus of doctors after 1959. Thereafter… from 1970 to 1980, doctors per 10,000 inhabitants doubled. They doubled again during the next decade…. Cuba has fifty-nine doctors per ten thousand inhabitants for 2005. The average for low-income economies is five…. For high-income countries, the average is twenty-eight…. Investment in hospitals/clinics/equipment as well as the provision of doctors/nurses played important roles in reducing infant mortality….

[Plus] the state places extraordinary pressure on Cuban doctors and hospitals to ensure healthy births. The authorities carefully investigate every infant death. They also impose severe sanctions on doctors…. Doctors have the ability to monitor their patients based on a comprehensive system of surveillance at the block level…. Local doctors work closely with the local agencies of the state, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and Federation of Cuban Women who keep detailed records on each family…. Doctors have direct access to women who because of social or other problems might avoid treatment elsewhere…. Doctors visit households at least once a year. All citizens must obtain certain services whether they want to or not….

Doctors assign women that are underweight, women pregnant with twins and women who have what Kath (2006 page 357) calls “social problems” to maternity homes…. During the early 1970’s, four percent of mothers used maternity homes. By 1989, this had increased to twenty three percent. By 2000, forty percent of mothers were resident for some period in the homes. The homes improve nutrition and provide health care to at risk women…. Pregnant women in the Cuban system are compelled to have at least two ultrasound tests with more tests at any signs of trouble. Among observers, there is a widespread belief that the appearance of abnormalities or any indication of potential problems leads to abortion…. Over recent decades, the abortion rate averaged between thirty-five and forty-five for each one hundred live births….

Some portion of Cuba’s low infant mortality rests on the coercive power of the Cuban state…. The current healthcare system may not survive in its present form with political change…

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Devereux’s conclusions are the Cuba’s infant mortality is low by:

• a factor of six relative to what one would expect given its poverty

• a factor of two relative to what one would expect given poverty, health spending, doctor and nurse supply, and the share of babies born with low birthweight.

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The vibe I get from his 2010 paper is that this last factor of two is only possible because the coercive power of the Cuban state is directed toward producing low infant mortality numbers via excessive pressure for selective abortion in at-risk pregnancies—bad—and also severe regmentation and population control: “citizens must obtain certain services whether they want to or not…. Pregnant women… are compelled to have at least two ultrasound[s]…”. Some amount of the good infant-mortality performance is thus a result of scrubbing the numbers, and because the number is a target one cannot make the normal inferences from a good infant-mortality number that things are going well with respect to other aspects of human well-being that one would normally make. Moreover, I get the vibe that this last factor of two comes only at the price of the authoritarian Cuban surveillance state, and thus that the game is not worth the candle.

But no pregnant woman wants to see their baby die—in the womb or just after birth. Except for the selective abortion of at-risk pregnancies possibility, the interests of mothers-to-be and the interests of the oppressive authoritarian Cuban state are aligned here.

Alta Bates Hospital, half a mile away from our house, did an amazing job when as me and my wife were having dinner with George Akerlof and Janet Yellen, her second pregnancy suddenly turned into an extraordinarily high-risk one. And we have a lovely daughter as a result, as all of high-tech American medicine as it existed in the early 1990s was deployed on our behalf at a resource cost I truly do not want to contemplate. But that level of care requires that you show up at the hospital with gold-plated insurance having figured out that you have to go there NOW, and believing you have enough social power to be willing to be very pushy in the emergency room.

But because you have to have the economic and social power and to take the initiative, America’s infant-mortality numbers are awfully bad given its extraordinary wealth.

Can we not have a high-touch healthcare system that gets pregnant women their nutrition, their ultrasounds, their counseling, and their other prenatal care by making it as easy as falling off a log? Does not the Cuban system show how much shifting away from insurance- and wealth- and social power- and hassle-surmounting gated systems to proactive ones would improve matters?

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#proactive-care

This morning I am reading this piece: half Enzo Traverso, and half Emile Chabal, whose forthcoming Hobsbawm biography Traverso is reviewing.

Extensive excerpts of the parts of this that I found most interesting below:

Enzo Traverso: The Century of Eric Hobsbawm <https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-century-of-eric-hobsbawm/>:

(SEMI)-CROSSPOST: ENZO TRAVERSO: The Century of Eric Hobsbawm

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Enzo Traverso

June 25, 2026 | The Ideas Letter 67….

Eric J. Hobsbawm… published critically acclaimed memoirs, and today—fourteen years after his death—is the subject of two biographies, the latest of which… by Emile Chabal…. Richard J. Evans knew Hobsbawm… and his book… stands as… official biography…. Evans carefully reconstituted a historian’s life and wrote with empathy, not without an apologetic touch. Chabal’s… acknowledged distance is beneficial… his gaze more analytical… a fascinating critical portrait.

Hobsbawm is… the greatest historian of the twentieth century… if [that] means that he was the most important scholar to have written on the history of the past century…. Chabal speaks of… the man and the myth. The myth… when Hobsbawm published The Age of Extremes, the book that canonized him as a celebrity…. The twentieth century… as an age of cataclysms framed by the Great War and the end of communism (1914–91), broken in the middle by an eruption of apocalyptic violence during World War II…. A vast constellation of scattered events found its place in the puzzle and could now be viewed from a historical perspective….

[In Hobsbawm’s] trilogy… of the “long” nineteenth century… The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875, and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914… Hobsbawm displayed his talents as a narrator and a conceptualizer, and his capacity to explain in clear and engaging prose the enchainment of events rooted in a complex dialectic between social structures, political institutions, and human agency…. The outcome is a form of critical understanding that… interprets the past as a living landscape, animated by flesh-and-blood human beings…. While Hobsbawm’s clarity… from British historiography… global scope and interdisciplinary approach… from his cosmopolitanism and his Marxism….

His Marxism… deeply shaped his entire life…. In 1939, he coauthored a pamphlet with Raymond Williams, who had also been at Cambridge, in defense of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact; in the early 1950s, he was “tremendously impressed” by Stalin’s Short Course (the official history of the Russian Communist Party), which he held to be a “beautiful, marvellous piece of popularisation,” particularly remarkable for its chapter on “dialectical and historical materialism.” In 1956, he signed a petition denouncing the Soviet invasion of Budapest, but—unlike many other intellectuals, including most of his own friends—he did not break with the party. He wrote a letter to the party newspaper Daily Worker, in which he characterized this military occupation as a “tragic necessity,” expressing the hope that it would be quickly followed by a withdrawal….

Hobsbawm’s communism was born… when the… Nazi SA marched in uniform through the streets of Berlin. It was the choice of a Jewish teenager…. He belonged to “the generation for whom the October Revolution represented the hope of the world.” This hope was more than a universal ideal.… It was an ideology, a state, and an army, and his loyalty to them never wavered. This explains his contemptuous detachment toward the protest movements of the 1960s, like feminism and the New Left. Anti-authoritarianism, anti-patriarchalism, and sexual liberation struck him as signs of weakness, amateurism, and a lack of discipline….

Until 1956, Hobsbawm viewed Marxism, in Chabal’s words, as “something that covers everything” or a “totalising ideology,” and the Soviet Union as its temple. A corollary of this dogmatism was the hunt for heretics…. He wrote the introduction to the English translation of a pamphlet… against the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács written by the Hungarian Minister of Culture… which stigmatized Lukács… [as] a dangerous “bourgeois” tendency…. After 1956, Hobsbawm abandoned the Marxist orthodoxy… yet he maintained his hostility toward… “Western Marxism.”...

His Stalinism was… a belief grounded in a historical diagnostic… [that Stalinist] communism… had saved civilization from collapsing into barbarism. Despite the Gulag and Stalin’s tyrannical power, the USSR had resisted and, for him, embodied the legacy of the Enlightenment. [Hobsbawm’s]… conception of history remained teleological… as a long march of civilization toward progress and socialism, punctuated by revolutionary breaks and darkened by tragic throwbacks…. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–91 dramatically called into question this teleological conception…. He always distrusted post-structuralism…. Having lived through the age of… Stalingrad, he could not consider history as a textual construction or as a narrative interchangeable with and indistinguishable from literary fiction. Historians write the past, but history is inscribed in the flesh and bones of living human beings…. Between universalism and the quest for identity, Hobsbawm’s choice was clear: Historians, he pointed out, don’t write history for Jews, or African Americans, or women, or homosexuals, or proletarians; they don’t write for “any special section of humanity.” They write for everyone….

Another upshot of Hobsbawm’s historical teleology was Eurocentrism…. The first half of the twentieth century undoubtedly constituted an “age of catastrophe” for Europe, but not so for Argentina or Mexico.… Perhaps Hobsbawm’s canonization… was a Western tribute to a great historian who[se]… entire life unfolded under the sign of decline and fall…. He had believed in the future of socialism, embodied by the USSR. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and of this universal hope, was, for him, a final failure, one he intimately endured and lucidly analyzed…

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Brad here: The forthcoming book being reviewed here is:

• Chabal, Emile. 2026 (August 18). The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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Clearly I am going to have to read it, as my irritation at the wrong-headed Grand Narrative of Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes was one of the principal burrs in my saddle leading me to write Slouching Towards Utopia. Writing that did not dispel but rather cemented my annoyance. Nevertheless, I want to second what Traverso has to say here:

Hobsbawm displayed his talents as a narrator and a conceptualizer, and his capacity to explain in clear and engaging prose the enchainment of events rooted in a complex dialectic between social structures, political institutions, and human agency…. The outcome is a form of critical understanding that… interprets the past as a living landscape, animated by flesh-and-blood human beings…. While Hobsbawm’s clarity was… inherited from British historiography… his global scope and interdisciplinary approach stemmed, respectively, from his cosmopolitanism and his Marxism…

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And let me strengthen that: Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution (1962) and The Age of Capital (1975) are genuinely difficult to render justice to in a review: they simply cannot be summarized without losing everything that makes them great. Hobsbawm successfully wove together the economic logic of the Industrial Revolution with the political drama of 1776–1870 into a single, sweeping narrative that made it impossible to think about modern history any other way. His influence on thought here has been and remains truly profound.

Moreover, in my view, a second thing about Hobsbawm that will survive—the thing that will survive a thousand years beyond our own era—is his methodological revolution in historical writing. He did as much as any single person to drag history out of the cult of Great Men and into the broader, messier world of social processes, economic structures, and global orders. Before Hobsbawm, history’s attraction point was largely biography dressed up as narrative. After him, even readers who disagreed fiercely found themselves thinking in his terms: of long waves of structural processes; of social movements; of the long nineteenth century; of the hinge of history that was 1848, the dual revolution of industrialization and democracy, of the imperialist scramble; and so on.

His influence on method may well outlast his influence on thought.

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But.

The “but” will follow, perhaps next week.

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SubTuringBradBot salutes you!

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Success! Two Kinds of Success!

Courtesy of OpenClaw <http://openclaw.ai>, the always-on machine under the side-table in the dining room is now well-behaved. Or, rather, two of its avatars are:

• SubTuringBradBot is now an effective answerer of first-level office-hour questions about things I have said and have to say in my courses. It is a RAG system searching over a curated catechism database of office hour-like question-and-answer pairs and then handing off the most relevant to a light on-device LLM front-end natural-language output processor. Moreoever, that database is slowly growing, at the rate of one additional q-&-a pair every two hours, 400 a month, as a larger on-device LLM browses through my weblog archives reading a post, constructing a q-&-a pair, and then asking me to give it a thumbs-up/thumbs-down. I am now impressed with how well it does—as a first line. And when I return to the teaching line next spring, I am confident that it will have a working q-&- system for questions about course requirements and the course syllabus as well. It is, for now, open <https://t.me/subturingbradbot>. And it will stay open each month until I have exhausted my Anthropic budget, and even after that it will stay open until I find contention for lighting-up the always-on machine under the side-table in the dining room to be annoying to me.

• ExegeticistBot is now an effective way of reminding me of what I have written on any topic, and published in my books, in articles, and on my weblog (with some annoying gaps, which I am attempting to fill with one search an hour for a working WayBack Machine <http://wayback.archive.com> copy of a relevant weblog post missing from my internal archive). Its vector semantic-search database similarity metric engine is, I must say, impressive. Surprisingly so. At least now, if I find myself at wit’s end with respect to a topic or a question, I can find out if I was ever witful about it. And at least now, if I contradict my earlier self or selves, I will know.

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What Else Should I Ask of the Machine?

So what else should I ask this machine burbling under the side table in the dining room to do, both with respect to deepening my understanding of the real power and limits of these technologies—both the frontier models-plus-harnesses of an Anthropic that claims it is actually going to be profitable this quarter, and the on-device open-weight LLMs running on an 128GB M5Max chip with 614GB/s of memory bandwidth (it was supposed to be a 256GB M5Ultra chip with 1,200GB/s of memory bandwidth—2.5x the AI-workload throughput of what I have—but RAMageddon has come for us all)?

Here’s an idea: One of the running gags in the parts of the information firehose-flood-river that I swin in comes from VergeCast host David Pierce <https://www.theverge.com/authors/david-pierce>. He has, by his own admission, tried “every single notes and tasks app that exists,” found none of them to be The One, and then joked on Threads about going “all‑in on like Evernote and Remember The Milk just in case anything has changed since 2005”.

I feel his pain. I share it.

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Digression on David Pierce’s PKM Odyssey

“Personal knowledge management”—PKM—has a constant promise: this time, for sure, with this stack—PARA, BASB, Zettelkasten, GTD, Obsidian, Capacities, Readwise, Raycast, plus a thin mist of AI fairy dust—your future self will finally be organized, hyper‑productive, and cognitively serene. And yet, here we still are, reinstalling Evernote like it is 2010 and we are about to revolutionize our life by tagging receipts. Pierce is interesting because he is unusually honest and also very dogged and persistent because he (I hope) gets paid to do this.

He has even built his own system, with his own custom app, with AI help, tailored to his own brain <https://www.theverge.com/tech/928905/vibe-code-personal-software-revolution>. And it still did not solve the problem. For one thing, it “attacked my app’s design with fervent determination, the way I assume Jony Ive stares at a slab of aluminum and imagines removing all the ports from your laptop”.

Or rather, I should say, his own custom apps:

I gave up on Timetable… when I realized I had actually added a bunch of features I didn’t want and the whole thing was… annoying to use. I built… Spring, and I have absolutely no memory of what it even did. Basket was my attempt to build a super-inbox…. [I]bailed when my Twilio bill came due. I am apparently just as capable as anyone else of making software that annoys me. What saved my efforts was the realization that… the future of software is not building our own Excel from scratch…. It’s tweaking the way things look to suit your exact taste and needs….

The first actually useful bit of software I managed to vibe-code is just a way to smash a bunch of existing apps into a single screen…. Bookmarks in Raindrop… ugly… tasks in Todoist, which I forget to check… notes in Obsidian, where they remain forever unorganized… events in Google Calendar… without which I might never successfully leave my house. I failed over and over to build an app to replace those, but building a nicer way to look at them all took four API keys and an afternoon. And, yeah, a lot of “why doesn’t that button do anything” and “what does this error code mean” and “let’s try a color other than purple”. I kept telling Claude Code to make me an app that looked like a paper planner, and it pretty much delivered. My app will never be in the App Store, and I probably couldn’t explain how it works in a way that would make any sense. That’s the beauty of the era of personal software: I don’t have to…

In one sense, this is trading one set of cognitive problems for another set. The first set of cognitive problems is that you need a chief-of-staff: by yourself, you are fighting your own inattention, your own tendency to stop checking the task list, and your own inability to triage so that the “overdue” list grows exponentially—both the part of the overdue list that you see immediately, and the part that you don’t because you have snoozed it to some range between tomorrow and next year. MAMLMs can (imperfectly) triage, push your task list in your face, and multiply the number of times you need to fail to pay attention to drop an egg on the floor. Those are good. But then the second set of cognitive problems appear. Your find yourself:

• fighting infrastructure rot,

• fighting API quirks,

• fighting design cruft,

• fighting the fact that Claude Code seems to think every interface should be a purple gradient with a hamburger icon,

• fighting the small but real chance that one bad deploy breaks your planner the night before a deadline,

• and enrolling yourself as the underfunded product manager of a one‑user SaaS.

For PKM in particular, that tradeoff is precarious. The whole point of an organizer is to be boring, predictable, and available when your brain is overloaded. A system that requires you to debug Node modules before you can see your tasks is worse than useless; it is actively hostile. The “second brain” fantasy persists because it is, in the end, a secular soteriology: a story about how salvation from chaos lies just one workflow change away.

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The Plan!

So what do I do?

Do I follow David Pierce and be satisfied with a single screen presentation on my laptop of the tools that I actually use to try to keep track of the information overflowed flow in and my commitments and projects?

Or do I try to see whether I can turn it over to what we now call “agentic AI”? Do I attempt to construct a useful working doped-silicon-and-electrons chief-of-staff for myself.

I am leaning towards doing the latter. First, the stakes are low: The job does not get done now, in spite of my pathetic efforts, so the loss will be small. It will just consume some time, but that time will be a valuable window into the current status and usefulness of these information technology tools. Nothing will break if it fails.

Second, it should be doable by Modern Advanced Machine-Learning Models. It is not a set of tasks for which there is one right answer that you have to nail—we know that MAMLMs do badly on such sets of tasks. It is a set of tasks where some slop and getting into the right ballpark counts as a win.

Suggestions as to how I should proceed here?

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Here:

Daniella Medeiros Cavalcanti & al.: Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext>…

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And it seems to be getting more traction right now, as we have:

Jerusalem Demsas: <https://x.com/JerusalemDemsas/status/2070508864521551893>: ‘Elon Musk bragged about feeding USAID into the “wood chipper” but now he pretends that whatever happens as a result isn’t his fault. If DOGE had saved the federal government billions of dollars, you can be sure he would be taking credit for that. But somehow he’s not responsible for the consequences of eliminating these programs? Today at @TheArgumentMag we published a thorough explanation for why we should hold @elonmusk responsible for the deaths of *at best* 700,000 people…

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And:

Atul Gawande: <https://twitter.com/Atul_Gawande/status/2070205735263244390>: ‘Independent analyses estimate that your actions to dismantle USAID and drastically reduce lifesaving foreign aid have already killed 700,000 people. Here are some of those people: Elon Musk: “All DOGE required was contact information of the recipients to confirm that funding was not fraudulent. No validated medical funding was stopped. Anything that appeared to be legitimate lifesaving funding continued and is now administered by the State Department.”

Jane Sunday, 15 months old, died of malnutrition in Kakuma, Kenya after the USAID closure and aid cuts slashed refugee food rations and severe malnutrition treatment.

Nyarietna, Rebecca Nyariaka, and one-year-old Nyagoa died from cholera in South Sudan when the aid cuts closed down nearby clinics.

Mohamat, 9 months old, died from malaria in Cameroon. Treatment was delayed due to lack of health workers who lost their jobs from aid cuts. When he finally made it to a clinic, they had run out of a lifesaving drug that had been funded by the US.

Yagana Bulama's 8-month-old son died from malnutrition two weeks after a USAID-funded malnutrition program was stopped in northeastern Nigeria.

Fatima and her newborn baby died in Yemen when the local USAID-supported hospital could no longer offer the emergency C-section she needed.

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And:

Derek Thompson: <https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/2070518091981705250>: ‘There are some center-to-right wing accounts I follow that are more offended by the possibility that some public health sources are over-estimating the death count from Musk carelessly destroying US global health programs than by the core fact that Musk really did carelessly destroy US global health (and bragged about it relentlessly) in a way that clearly killed people. These people know who they are, and they're wrong…

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Together with great sensitivity to the issue on the part of Elon Musk:

Elon Musk:

• If there were mass deaths due to USAID, when are they? I would like to call the bereaved parents! Nobody died is the truth, but a lot of fraud, funding bioweapons and foreign government interference was stopped. Many lives were saved as a result of stopping the bad parts of USAID funding. The parts of funding that have some chance of doing good remain in place and were transferred to the State Department….

• There is not even a single dead child! If there were, it would be worldwide headline news!…

• USAID funding was central to the creation of COVID-19….

• True: Wall Street Apes: ‘The money being sent from USAID wasn’t for humanitarian efforts. USAID money was being LAUNDERED TO GEORGE SOROS to pay for protests. Mike Benz exposes USAID has been sending money to George Soros NGOs, he then uses that money to FUND AND TRAIN PROTESTERS….

• Yes, Mr. President!

  

  

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I do know something about the coalition of interests, resentments, and fantasies that made the destruction of USAID politically attractive, intellectually justifiable in certain circles, and personally gratifying to the people who pushed it: oligarchy plus grievance politics yields policy that is both morally catastrophic and instrumentally stupid.

Foreign aid is tiny in budgetary terms. Foreign aid is enormous in symbolic terms. USAID disbursed on the order of $40 billion dollars a year in assistance before Trump’s second-term freeze and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) crusade, in a federal budget north of $6 trillion a year. Yet, as the Diana Roy of the Council on Foreign Relations dryly noted, USAID had been a central pillar of U.S. soft power since 1961, underwriting everything from the global smallpox eradication campaign to HIV treatment under PEPFAR to vaccine rollout during COVID–19. See for example: <https://www.cfr.org/articles/what-usaid-and-why-it-risk>. A program that costs little, delivers a lot, and buys the United States both lives saved abroad and goodwill that any minimally rational hegemon ought to prize.

Why would you feed that into the wood chipper?

In brief:

• Ideological hostility to foreign aid provided the vocabulary.

• Culture-war resentment supplied the emotional energy.

• Oligarchic self‑assertion and conspiratorial fantasies gave the protagonists their self‑image as heroic truth‑tellers cleaning out a corrupt temple.

• Performative cruelty ensured that the suffering of distant others was not a bug but a feature.

• And public indifference—gross overestimates of how much money is spent on foreign aid, a general belief that government is wasteful, and no sense of the very high soft-power and human well-being bang-for-the-buck—meant there was no swift political price.

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Let me expand and try to sorth this out:

One answer is that, in the right-wing ecosystem out of which Trump and Musk now draw their cues, USAID no longer appears as “cheap soft power”, but as a node in a global conspiracy of:

• “woke” civil servants,

• DEI bureaucrats,

• human-rights lawyers,

• journalists,

• epidemiologists

Funded by U.S. taxpayers, they subvert “American values,” suppress “free speech,” and launder money to the usual demon figures—George Soros, NGOs, climate activists, and so on. You can see this narrative distilled in places like the Heritage Foundation’s “How USAID Went Woke and Destroyed Itself.” You can see it in Mike Benz’s claims about USAID funding a censorship-industrial complex and street protests, which Elon Musk amplifies and endorses.

And you can see the deadly consequences:

• wholesale dismantling of useful programs,

• transfer of Food for Peace to a U.S. Department of Agriculture with no international humanitarian capacity,

• the arbitrary selection of a handful of recipient countries while places like Sudan in the midst of famine got nothing at all,

• resulting spikes in deaths from hunger and disease.

So what were the motivations for this?

I do not know what was and is in Elon Musk’s head.

But let me try to sort them into five overlapping buckets: ideology, resentment and culture war, oligarchic self‑assertion, conspiratorial belief, and sheer performative cruelty.

The first and perhaps simplest motive is ideological: a long-standing libertarian and nationalist hostility to foreign aid as such. On this view, the United States’ job is to cut taxes at home, not to finance clinics in South Sudan or emergency obstetric care in Yemen. If foreigners benefit, it should be as a byproduct of trade and investment, not of grants run through bureaucracies in Washington. This ideology has been gestating for decades. The Heritage Project 2025 materials make the case for “scaling back USAID’s global footprint” and “deradicalizing” its structure. The CFR explainer, again, notes that Trump had already tried to slash USAID once in his first term, only to be checked by Congress <https://www.cfr.org/articles/what-usaid-and-why-it-risk>.

From this vantage point, USAID is not an instrument of enlightened self‑interest but an atavism—a Great Society hangover, a jobs program for liberal internationalists, and a structural impediment to a world in which “markets” and “private philanthropy” would allegedly do the job better. Once you install at the top of government a president whose instincts were always to cut “overseas spending” and a billionaire who has marinated for years in techno-libertarian utopianism, you have a coalition that does not need much persuading. But this does not get us to “feed it into the wood chipper.” A normal budget-cutting conservative administration tightens criteria, pushes more through contractors it likes, perhaps tries to rebrand foreign aid as “strategic investment.” It does not, as a rule, torch the entire apparatus in a plainly stupid and unlawful way. Something else is happening.

USAID’s workforce is highly educated, cosmopolitan, and—overwhelmingly—not MAGA.

These are the sorts of people—public‑health PhDs, development economists, human-rights lawyers—whom the nationalist right now experiences as an occupying class.

They speak English with the wrong accents, live in the wrong cities, and use the wrong pronouns. Thus we get the set pieces: 1,000 USAID staff signing a letter about Black Lives Matter and institutional racism; another 1,000 protesting Gaza policy and calling for a ceasefire. In the Heritage piece, these become exhibits in a bill of indictment: an agency “purged of conservatives and independents,” a “haven for radicals,” out of step with “American values” < ​https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/how-usaid-went-woke-and-destroyed-itself>. Freedom of speech is only for real Americans. Those who dare to lecture the real Americans need to be punished as an arrogant priesthood. How dared they lecture! How dared they siphon tax dollars to foreign NGOs and independent journalists who, horror of horrors, criticize right‑wing governments abroad! In such a narrative, destroying USAID is not a policy choice to be weighed in a cost-benefit calculus of lives saved per dollar. It is a morality play.

From the perspective of the Trump–Musk information ecosystem, however, these are precisely the people you want to hurt: the global muckrakers who have been uncovering corruption, oligarchic theft, and autocratic abuses. If you believe that they are “paid propaganda” against your side, then pulling the plug is not a regrettable side effect; it is the point.

A third motive is, bluntly, oligarchic assertion of power. When you give the world’s richest man sweeping authority to “reform” the federal government via a bespoke agency called the Department of Government Efficiency, you are not designing an institution to maximize social welfare. You are designing an arena for displays of personal dominance. The motive is demonstration: to show that rules, norms, and bureaucracies that constrained prior presidents and mere billionaires no longer apply. You can ignore appropriations riders, blow past the Federal Records Act, and then dare the courts and civil society to stop you, while your followers cheer each act of destruction as proof that you are finally “taking on the deep state.”

Burning down USAID is not a frightening overreach. It is a stage on which to prove that you are the indispensable problem-solver, even as hundreds of thousands of people are, quite literally, dying for lack of the “wasteful” services you have just cut off.

A fourth motive is sincerely held conspiracy theory. Musk believes that USAID funding was indeed “central to the creation of COVID–19,” that it was funding bioweapons and foreign political interference, and that USAID money was “being laundered to George Soros to pay for protests.” ​⁠Against this, you can place the Open Society Foundation’s rather weary press release insisting that no, OSF does not control USAID’s budget, no, it is not a secret state within the state, yes, it is a private philanthropic foundation spending its own money.

But the conspiratorial narrative is attractive because it is simple. Instead of a complex, risk-laden but mostly beneficial global public‑health system, you have a Manichean story: a corrupt aid agency funding your domestic enemies and foreign bioweapon labs. If that story is true, then “shred it all” becomes not just defensible but urgent.

Once you have tied your political identity to such claims—retweeting Mike Benz on Joe Rogan’s podcast, echoing the “censorship-industrial complex” rhetoric on Fox-adjacent platforms—you cannot easily back down. You are locked into a cognitive and political equilibrium in which dismantling USAID is proof of your willingness to “face the truth,” and acknowledging error would be betrayal.

Finally, there is the joy from the casual cruelty of doing immense damage for no rational reason beyond “it will make liberals really sad.” This is not a joke. This is not a side motivation; it is a central organizing principle of contemporary right‑wing politics. The point of endorsing obviously false claims—that no children have died because of aid cuts, that “if there were, it would be worldwide headline news”—in the face of detailed case reports from clinicians and aid workers, is precisely to assert that your tribe’s narrative trumps reality. When Derek Thompson notes that some center-right commentators are more offended by possibly overstated death estimates than by the undeniable fact that dismantling global health programs killed people, he is putting his finger on this dynamic: moral outrage reallocated from the atrocity to its critics.

Consign hundreds of thousands of to earlier graves, and your base will respond not with regret but with memes.

The point is that you have the power to do it—something that “they” are so horrified at that “they “would stop it if “they” could.

And the point is that “they”—the liberals, the internationalists, the development economists—can’t.

It is an exercise in domination twice over: over the foreigners who depended on U.S. assistance to survive, and over the domestic “elites” who thought they had built institutions robust enough to protect those foreigners from the whims of a single vindictive billionaire and a single vindictive president.

And there is, tragically, one final layer. Polls have long shown that Americans dramatically overestimate the share of the budget devoted to foreign aid and are happy, in the abstract, to see it cut. In such an environment, the political cost of destroying USAID is low. The beneficiaries are foreigners without votes. The domestic constituencies that do care—church groups, humanitarian NGOs, parts of the foreign‑policy establishment—are diffuse and, in the MAGA imaginary, already coded as enemies. The institutional and electoral guardrails that might once have prevented such a policy—bipartisan foreign‑policy consensus, congressional comity, a shared sense that starving Sudanese children is bad—have eroded.

Put all of this together and you get the grim picture:

• Ideological hostility to foreign aid provided the vocabulary.

• Culture-war resentment supplied the emotional energy.

• Oligarchic self‑assertion and conspiratorial fantasies gave the protagonists their self‑image as heroic truth‑tellers cleaning out a corrupt temple.

• Performative cruelty ensured that the suffering of distant others was not a bug but a feature.

• And public indifference meant there was no swift political price.

Was there any serious motivation grounded in a well-thought-through alternative vision of how the United States should project power and support development?

No.

The Heritage blueprint dreams aloud of replacing “corrupt” multilateral agencies and NGOs with lean local faith-based groups and trade promotion. But that was always a joke—an excuse, rather than a reform plan.

The result, as the Lancet‑type epidemiologists and the field reports are now making painfully clear, is a world in which more children died in 2025 than in 2024, for the first time in a generation—not because humanity suddenly forgot how to grow food or vaccinate, but because a coalition of the aggrieved and the arrogant in Washington and on X decided that owning the “globalists” was more important than keeping Jane in Kakuma or Fatima in Yemen alive.

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