This one wanders gloriously before it gets to business: Cory Doctorow’s cognitive-psychology theory of why fiction works and why authors rage at fanfic, my Book-of-Genesis account of Babbage begetting IBM begetting FORTRAN, and Noah’s insistence that Gamergate killed nerd culture and that fragmenting platforms lets Nazis permeate fractally. Then the substance — regulatory capture, adversarial interoperability, the cancer previvor group Facebook wouldn’t protect, Tim Cook killing twenty right-to-repair bills, ad tech more concentrated than eyeglasses or professional wrestling.

The key insight: interoperability was a lucky historical accident we can’t repeat.

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PODCAST: Hexapodia XIII: “Mandated Interoperability”: We Can’t Make It Work, or Can We?

With Cory Doctorow; Noah Smith & Brad DeLong’s 30:00 < [Length of Weekly Podcast] < 60:00

May 04, 2021

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Key Insights:

• Cory Doctorow is AWESOME!

• It is depressing. We once, with the creation of the market economy, got interoperability right. But now the political economy blocks us from there being any obvious path to an equivalent lucky historical accident in our future.

• The problems in our society are not diametrically opposed: Addressing the problems of one thing doesn’t necessarily create equal and opposite problems on the other side—but it does change the trade-offs, and so things become very complex and very difficult to solve.

• Always keep a trash bag in your car.

• Hexapodia!

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

References:

Books:

Cory Doctorow: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism <https://www.google.com/books/edition/How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism/W20NzgEACAAJ>

Cory Doctorow: Attack Surface <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Attack_Surface/rFfEDwAAQBAJ>

Cory Doctorow: Walkaway <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Walkaway/MKMsDAAAQBAJ>

Cory Doctorow: Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom/h8DvDwAAQBA>

Cory Doctorow: Little Brother <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Little_Brother/r1zne2mZDW8C>

William Flesch:Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Comeuppance/JSRWPYp1nNUC>

Daniel L. Rubinfeld: A Retrospective on U.S. v. Microsoft: Why Does It Resonate Today? <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003603X20950227>

Louis Galambos & Peter Temin: The Fall of the Bell System: A Study in Prices & Politics <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Fall_of_the_Bell_System/CXNPVjdxfAEC>

Websites:

Electronic Frontier Foundation: <http://www.eff.org>

• Adversarial Interop Case Studies: <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability>

• Privacy without Monopoly: <https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy>

Cory Doctorow: Craphound <http://craphound.net>

Cory Doctorow: Pluralistic <https://pluralistic.net>

&, of course:

Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://books.google.com/books?id=fCCWWgZ7d6UC>

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Grammatized Transcript:

Brad: Noah! What is the key insight?

Noah: Hexapodia is the key insight! Six feet!

Brad: And what is that supposed to mean?

Noah: That there is some nugget of fact that, if you grasp it correctly and place it in the proper context, will transform your view of the situation and allow you to grok it completely.

Brad: And in the context of Vernor Vinge’s amazing and mind-Bending science-fiction space-opera novel A Fire Upon the Deep?

Noah: The importance of “hexapodia” is that those sapient bushes…

Brad: …riding around on six wheeled scooters have been genetically…

Noah: …programmed to be a fifth column of spies and agents for the Great Evil.

Brad: However, here we seek different key insights than “hexapodia”. Today we seek them from the genius science-fiction author and social commentator Cory Doctorow. I think of him as—it was Patrick Nielsen Hayden, I think, who said around 2004: that he felt like he was living in the future of Scottish science fiction author, Ken MacLeod. And he wished Ken would just stop. At times I feel that way about Cory. But we are very happy to have him here. His latest book is How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism IIRC, his latest fiction is Attack Surface. My favorite two books of his are Walkaway and—I think it was your first—Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Cory: That’s right. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for that very effusive introduction. I decry all claims of genius, though.

Brad: Well, we know this is a problem. When one is dealing with an author whose work one has read a lot of—by reading your books.by now I’ve spent forty hours of my life looking at squiggles on a page or on a screen and, through a complicated mental process, downloaded to my wetware and then run on it a program that is my image of a sub-Turing instantiation of your mind, who has then told me many very entertaining and excellent stories. So I feel like I know you very well…

Cory: There’s this infamous and very funny old auto reply that Neal Stephenson used to send to people who emailed him. It basically went: “Ah, I get it. You feel like you were next to me when we were with Hero Protagonist in Alaska fighting off the right-wing militias. But while you were there with me, I wasn’t there with you. And so I understand why you want to, like, sit around and talk about our old military campaigns. But I wasn’t on that campaign with you.

Brad: Yes. It was only my own imago, my created sub-Turing instantiation of your mind that was there…

Cory: Indeed. We are getting off of interoperability, which is what I think we’re mostly going to talk about. But this is my cogpsy theory of why fiction works, and where the fanfic dispute comes from.

Writers have this very precious thing they say. It is: “I’m writing and I’m writing and all of a sudden the characters start telling me what they want to do.” I think that what they actually mean by that is that we all have this completely automatic process by which we try and create models of the people we encounter. Sometimes we never encounter those people. We just encounter second-hand evidence of them. Sometimes those people don’t live at all. Think about the people who feel great empathy for imaginary people that cruel catfishers have invented on the internet to document their imaginary battles with cancer. They then feel deeply hurt and betrayed and confused, when this person they’ve come to empathize with turns out to be a figment of someone else’s imagination.

I think what happens when you write is that you generate this optical link between two parts of your brain that don’t normally talk to each other. There are these words that you are explicitly thinking up that show up on your screen. And then those words are being processed by your eyeballs and being turned into fodder for a model in this very naive way. And then the model gets enough flesh on the bones—so it starts telling you what it wants to do. At this point you are basically breathing your own exhaust fumes here. But it really does take what is at first a somewhat embarrassing process of putting on a puppet show for yourself: “Like, everybody, let’s go on a quest!” “That sounds great!” “Here we go!” It just becomes something where you don’t feel like you’re explicitly telling yourself a story.

Now the corollary of this is that it sort of explains the mystery of why we like stories, right? Why we have these completely involuntary, emotional responses to the imaginary experiences of people who never lived and died and have no consequence. The most tragic death in literature of Romeo and Juliet is as nothing next to the death of the yogurt I digested with breakfast this morning, because that yogurt was alive and now it’s dead and Romeo and Juliet never lived, never died, nothing that happened to them happened. Yet you hear about the Romeo and Juliet…

Noah: …except that a human reads about Romeo and Juliet and cares…

Cory: That is where it matters, yes indeed. But the mechanism by which we care is our build this model which is then subjected to the author’s torments, and then we feel empathy for the model. What that means is that the readers, when they’re done, if the book hit its aesthetic marks, if it did the thing that literature does to make it aesthetically pleasing—then the reader still has a persistent model in the same way that if your granny dies, you still have a model of your granny, right? You are still there.

That is why fanfic exists. The characters continue to have imagined lives. If the characters don’t go on having imagined lives, then the book never landed for you.

And that’s why authors get so pissy about fanfic. They too have this model that they didn’t set out to explicitly create, but it’s there. And it’s important to their writing process. And if someone is putting data in about that modeled person that is not consistent with the author’s own perception of them, that creates enormous dissonance. I think that if we understood this, we would stop arguing about fanfic.

Noah: We argue about fanfic?

Brad: Oh yes, there are people who do. I remember—in some sense, the most precious thing I ever read was Jo Walton saying that she believed that Ursula K. LeGuin did not understand her own dragons at all…

Noah: …Yep, correct…

Cory: Poppy Bright—back when Poppy Bright was using that name and had that gender identity—was kicked out of a fan group for Poppy Bright fans on LiveJournal for not understanding Poppy Bright’s literature. I think that’s completely true. Ray Bradbury to his dying day insisted that Fahrenheit 451 had nothing to do with censorship but was about the dangers of television…

Brad: Fanfic is an old and wonderful tradition. It goes back to Virgil, right? What is the Aeneid but Iliad fanfic?

Cory: And what is Genesis but Babylonian fanfic? It goes a lot further back than that…

Brad: Today, however, we are here to talk not about humans as narrative-loving animals, not about the sheer weirdness of all the things that we run on our wetware, but about “mandated interoperability”, and similar things—how we are actually going to try to get a handle on the information and attention network economy that we are building out in a more bizarre and irrational way than I would have ever thought possible.

Cory: Yes. I don’t know if the audience will see this, but the title that you’ve chosen is: “Mandated Interoperability Is Not Going to Work”. I am more interested in how we make mandated interoperability work. I don’t think it’s a dead letter. I think that to understand what’s what’s happened you have to understand that the main efficiency that large firms bring to the market is regulatory capture. In an industry with only four or five major companies, all of the executives almost by definition must have worked at one or two of the other ones. Think of Sheryl Sandberg, moving from Google to Facebook.

They form an emerging consensus. Sometimes they all sit around the same a boardroom table. Remember that photo of the tech leaders around the table at the top of Trump Tower? They converge on a set of overlapping lobbying priorities. They have a lot of excess rents that they can extract to mobilize lobbying in favor of that. One of the things that these firms have done in the forty years of the tech industry is to move from a posture where they were all upstarts and were foursquare for interoperability with the existing platforms—because they understood that things like network advantages were mostly important in as much as they conferred a penalty for switching, and that if you could switch easily then the network advantage disappeared. If you could read Microsoft Office documents on a Mac, then the fact that there’s a huge network effect of Microsoft Office documents out there is irrelevant. Why? Because you can just run switch ads, and say every document ever created with Microsoft Office is now a reason to own a Mac.

But as they became dominant, and as their industries have become super-concentrated, they have swung against interoperability. I think that we need a couple of remedies for that. I think that we need some orderly structured remedies in the forms of standards. We need to check whether or not those standards are mandated. And we’ve seen how those standards can be subverted. And so I think we need something that stops dominant firms from subverting standards—a penalty that they pay that is market-based, that impacts their bottom line, and that doesn’t rely on a slow-moving or possibly captured regulator but that, instead, can actually just emerge in real time.

That is what I call “adversarial interoperability”: reverse engineering and scraping and bots. Steve Jobs paying some engineers to reverse engineer Microsoft Office file formats and make iWork suite, instead of begging Bill Gates to rescue the Mac…

Brad: …But he did beg Bill Gates to rescue the Mac…

Cory: He did that as well. But that wasn’t the whole story. He had a carrot and a stick. He had: let’s have a managed, structured market. Right. And then he had: what happens if you don’t come up to my standards is that we have alternatives, because we can just reverse-engineer your stuff. Look at, for example, the way that we standardized the formatting of personal finance information. There were standards that no one adopted. Then Mint came along, and they wrote bots, and you would give the bots your login credentials for your bank, and they would go and scrape your account data and put it into a single unified interface.

This was adversarial interoperability. This spurred the banks to actually come into compliance with the standard. Rather than having this guerrilla warfare, they wanted a quantifiable business process that they could understand from year to year that wouldn’t throw a lot of surprises that would disrupt their other other plans.

Brad: Let me back up: In the beginning, the spirit of Charles Babbage moved upon the face of the waters, and Babbage said: “Let there be electromechanical calculating devices”. And there was IBM. And IBM then bred with DARPA in the form of the Sage Air Defense, and begat generation upon generation of programmers. And from them was born FORTRAN and System 360.

And FORTRAN and IBM System 360 bestrode the world like the giants of the Nephilim, and Babbage saw it, and it was good. And there was nibbling around the edges from Digital Equipment and Data General.

Yea, until one day out of Silicon Valley, there emerged crystallized sand doped with germanium atoms, and everything was upset as out of CERN and there emerged the http protocol. All the companies that had been construct their own walled information gardens, and requiring you to sign up with AOL and CompuServe and Genie and four or five others in order to access databases through gopher and whatever—they found themselves overwhelmed by the interoperability tide of the internet.

And for fifteen years there was interoperability and openness and http and rss, and everyone frantically trying to make their things as interoperable as possible so that they could get their share of this absolutely exploding network of human creativity and ideas.

And then it all stopped. People turned on a dime. They began building their own walled gardens again.

Noah: I feel like we did just get Neal Stephenson on this podcast…

Brad: Sub-Turing! It’s a sub-Turing instantiation of a Neal Stephenson imago!

Cory: I think that your point of view or generational outlook or whatever creates a different lens than mine. I think about it like this: In 1979 we got an Apple II+. In 1980, we got a modem card for it. Right. By 1982, there were a lot of BBS’s and that was great. Even though we were in Canada, the BBS software was coming up from the American market. We had local dial-up BBS’s running software that was being mailed around on floppies…

Brad: Whish whish whine… Beep beep… Whish… I am trying to make modem noises…

Cory: that sounded like V.42bis.

And then by 1984 there were the PC clones. Everyone had a computer. This company that no one had ever heard of—Microsoft—suddenly grew very big. They created this dynamism in the industry. You could have a big old giant, like IBM. You could have two guys in a garage, like Microsoft. The one could eclipse the other. IBM couldn’t even keep control of its PCs. They were being cloned left and right. And then Microsoft became the thing that had slain. It became a giant. And the DOJ intervened. Even though Microsoft won the suit ultimately—they weren’t broken up…

Brad: They did back off from destroying Google…

Cory: What’s missing from that account is the specific mechanisms. We got modems because we got cheap, long distance. We got that because 1982 we had the ATT breakup. Leading up to the breakup shifted the microeconomics. People ATT were all: don’t do that. It’s going to piss off the enforcers. We’ve got this breakup to deal with

Brad: Yes. The enforcers, the enforcers are important. Both the Modification of Final Judgment. And ATT’s anticipatory reaction to it. Plus the periodic attempted antitrust kneecappings of IBM. They meant that when people in IBM turned around and said: “Wait a minute. When we started the PC project, John F. Akers told us we needed to find something for Mary Gates’s boy Bill to do, because he sat next to her at United Way board meetings. But this is turning into a monster. We need to squelch them.” And from the C-suite came down: “No, our antitrust position is sufficiently fraught that we can’t move to squash Microsoft.”

Cory: Yes. IBM spent 12 years in antitrust litigation. Hell, they called it. Antitrust as Vietnam. They essentially had been tied by the ankles to the back of DOJ’s bumper and dragged up and down a gravel road for 12 years. They were outspending the entire DOJ legal department every single year for that one case. And one of the things that DOJ really didn’t like about IBM was tying software to hardware.

And so when Phoenix makes the IBM ROM clone, IBM is like: Yeah, whatever. Any costs we pay because of the clone ROM are going to be lower than the costs we will incur if we get back into antitrust hell—and the same goes for Microsoft. They got scared off. What we were seeing, what it felt like, the optimism that I think we felt and of which we were aware was—it looked like we’d have protocols and not products, and we’d have a pluralistic internet, not five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other.

But our misapprehension was not due to technological factors. It was our failing to understand that like Bork and Reagan had shivved antitrust in the guts in 1980, and it was bleeding out. So by the time Google was big enough to do to everyone else what Microsoft had not been able to do to them, there was no one there to stop Google.

Noah: Cory, let me ask a question here. I’m the designated grump of the podcast. Brad is the designated history expounder. I want to know: Why do we care right right now? I’ve written about interoperability with regards to electric cars and other emerging technologies. What things in the software world are people hurt by not having interoperability for? What are the big harms in software to consumers or to other stakeholders from lack of interoperability?

Cory: Let me frame the question before I answer it.

We have market concentration in lots of different sectors for similar reasons, mergers. We should have different remedies for them. We heard about Babbage. I would talk about Turing and the universality of the computer. Interoperability represents a pro-competitive remedy to anti-competitive practices that is distinct and specific to computers.

I don’t know if you folks know about the middle-gauge muddle in Australia. Independent states and would-be rail barons laid their own gauge rail across the country. You can’t get a piece of rolling stock from one edge of the country to the other. For 150 years they have been trying to build designs that can drop one set of wheels where the track needs it. And none of them have worked. And now their solution is to tear up rails and put down new rails.

If that was a software object, we just write a compatibility layer. Where we have these durable anti-competitive effects in the physical world, that sometimes necessitate these very difficult remedies, we can actually facilitate decentralized remedies where people can seize the means of computation to create digital remedies: self-determination, the right to decide how to talk to their friends and under what circumstances, as opposed to being forced to choose between being a social person and being private…

Brad: For me, at least there are lots and lots of frictions that keep me from seeing things that I would like to see, and keep me from cross-referencing things that I would like to cross-references. There are bunches of things I’ve seen on Twitter and Facebook in the past that, because they are inside the walled gardens. I definitely am not able to get them out quickly and easily and cheaply enough to put them into the wider ideas flow. And I feel stupider as a result. And then there are all the people who have been trapped by their own kind of cognitive functioning, so that they are now a bunch of zombies with eyeballs glued to the screen being fed terror so that they can be sold fake diabetes cures and overpriced gold funds…

Noah: That’s a good angle right here. If we look at the real harms that are coming through the internet right now—I worry about Kill Zones, and of course I worry about the next cool thing getting swallowed up by predatory acquisitions. That’s our legitimate worry for sure. When I look at the internet and what bad the internet is causing, I do not see the lack of alternative information sources as the biggest problem. I see the people who are the biggest problem as coming precisely from alternative information sources.

This is not to say we should get rid of those sources. This is not to say we should have mass censorship and ban all the anti-vax sites. I’m not saying that.

But if we look at the issues—there was a mass banning of Trump and many of the Q-Anons from the main social media websites, and yet a vast underground network of alternative right wing media has sprung up.

Cory: It seems like they were able to. Let me redirect from the harms that Brad raised. I think those are perfectly good harms. But I want to go to some broader harms.

In the purely digital online world, we had some people we advised at EFF who were part of a medical cancer previvor group—people who have a gene that indicates a very high likelihood of cancer, women. They had been aggressively courted by Facebook at a time when they were trying to grow up their medical communities. And one of the members of this group who wasn’t a security researcher or anything was just noodling around on Facebook, and found that you could enumerate the membership of every group on Facebook, including hers. She reported that to Facebook. That’s obviously a really significant potential harm to people in the medical communities. She reported it to Facebook. Facebook characterized her report as a feature request and won’t fix it. She made more of a stink. They said: fine, we’re going to do a partial fix because it would have interfered with their ad-tech stack to do a full fix. So you have to be a member of a group to enumerate the group. This was still insufficient.

But they had this big problem with inertia—with the collective action problem of getting everyone who’s now on Facebook to leave Facebook and go somewhere else. They were all holding each other mutually hostage. Now you could imagine that they could have set up a Diaspora instance, and they could have either had a mandated- or standards-defined interface that allowed those people to talk to their friends on Facebook. And they could have a little footer at the bottom of each message: today 22% of the traffic in this group originated on our diaspora, once that tips to 60% were all leaving, and quitting Facebook. They might do this with a bot, without Facebook’s cooperation, in the absence of Facebook’s legal right to prevent those bots.

Facebook has weaponized the computer fraud and abuse act and other laws to prevent people from making these bots to allow them to inter-operate with Facebook—even though, when Facebook started, the way that it dealt with its issues with MySpace was creating MySpace spots, where you could input your login and password, and it would get your waiting MySpace messages and put them in your Facebook inbox and let you reply to them. Facebook has since sued Power Ventures for doing the same thing. They’re engaged in legal activity against other bot producers that are doing beneficial pro-user things.

That’s one harm.

Another harm that I think is really important here is repair. Independent repairs are about 5% of US GDP. The lack of access to repair is of particular harm to people who are already harmed the most: it raises the cost of being poor. The ability to control repair is a source of windfall profits. Tim Cook advised his investors in 2019, the year after he killed twenty right-to-repair bills at these state level, that the biggest threat to Apple’s profits was that people were fixing their devices instead of throwing them away. It’s an environmental problem, and so on. The biggest problem with right-to-repair is not that the companies don’t provide their data or the diagnostic codes or encrypt diagnostic codes. The problem is that you face felony prosecution under the CFAA and DMCA, as well as ancillary stuff like non-compete and non-disclosure, and so on through federal trade secrecy law, if you create tools to repairs without the cooperation of the vendors. This is a real harm that arises out of the rules that have been exploited to block interoperability.

Brad: This goes deep, right? This affects not just tech but the world, or, rather, because tech has eaten the world, hard-right unsympathetic state representatives from rural Missouri are incredibly exercised about right-to-repair, and the fact that John Deere does not have enough internal capacity to repair all the tractors that need to be repaired in the three weeks before the most critical-need part of the year.

Cory: This is an important fracture line. There are people who have a purely instrumental view: me my constituents need tractor repair, so I will do whatever it takes to get them tractor repair. In California we got a terrible compromise on this brokered with John Deere—it was basically a conduct remedy instead of a structural change. Right.

Something I questioned a lot about Klobuchar’s antitrust story is that she keeps saying: I believe that we need to jettison the 40-year consumer-welfare standard and return to a more muscular antitrust that is predicated on social harms that include other stakeholders besides consumers paying higher prices, and I have a bipartisan consensus on this because Josh Hawley agrees with me, but Josh Hawley does not agree with her. Josh Hawley just wants to get Alex Jones back on Twitter, right. And that’s like, it begins and ends there.

She might be able to get the inertia going where Josh Hawley is put in the bind where he either has to brief for a more broad antitrust cause of action that includes social harms, or he has to abandon Alex Jones to not being on Twitter. And maybe he’ll take Alex Jones if that’s the price. But I do think that that’s a huge fracture line, that there are honest brokers who don’t care about the underlying principle and the long run effects of bad policy. And there are people who just want to fix something for a political point or immediate benefit.

Brad: Fixing it to the extent that fixing something scores a political point—that does mean actually doing good things for your constituents, who include not just Alex Jones, but the guys in rural Missouri who want their John Deere tractors repaired cheaply.

Cory: This is how I feel about de platforming. I was angry about deplatforming for 10 years, when it was pipeline activists and sex workers and drag queens who were being forced to use their real name, and trans people were forced to use their dead names, and political dissidents in countries where they could be rounded up and tortured and murdered if they adhere to Facebook’s real names policy, and all of that stuff. First they came for the drag queens, and I said nothing because I wasn’t a drag queen. Then they came for the far right conspiratorialists.

But they’re fair-weather friends.

It’s like the split between open source and free software where, you know, the benefits of technological self-determination were subsumed into the instrumental benefits of having access to the source so you could improve it. What we have is free software for the tech monopolists, for they can see the source and modify the source of everything on their backend. And we have open source for the rest of us. We can inspect the source, we can improve their software for them, but we don’t get to choose how their backends run. And since everything loops through their backends, we no longer have software freedom. That’s the risk if you decouple instrumental from ethical propositions. You can end up with a purely instrumental fix that leaves the ethical things that worry you untouched, and in fact in a declining spiral.

Noah: I want to argue. I don’t think we don’t get enough argument on this podcast. I want to inject a little here.

A turning point for my generation in terms of our use of the internet was Gamergate. That happened in 2014. Gamergate largely morphed after that into the the Trump movement and the alt-right. Gamergate destroyed what I knew as online nerd culture. It was an extinction-level event for the idea that nerd culture existed apart from the rest of society. It was a terrible thing. Maybe nerd culture couldn’t have lasted, but a giant subculture that I enjoyed and partially defined myself by as a young person was gone. And not only that, not only me—I’m centering myself and making all about me here, but a lot of people got harassed. Some good friends of mine got harassed. It was really terrible as an event in and of itself, irrespective of the long-term effects.

Even Moot, a big, huge defender of anonymity and free speech, eventually banned Gamergate topics from 4chan. That was the moment when I realized that the idea of free speech as free speech guarded by individual forums or platforms separately from the government—that that idea was dead. When Moot banned banned Gamergate from 4chan, I said: okay, we’re in a different era. That was the Edward R Murrow moment. That was the moment we started going back toward Dan Rather and Edward R Murrow and the big three television companies in the 1950s—when Moot banned Gamergate.

Maybe this just has to happen. Maybe bad actors are able to always co-opt a fragmented internet. There’s no amount of individual Nazi punching that can get the Nazis out. If you have people whose speech is entirely focused on destroying other people’s right to speak, as Gamergate was, then then free speech means nothing because no one feels free to speak. I wonder whether fragmentation of platforms makes it harder to police things like Gamergate and thus causes Nazis to fractally permeate each little space on the internet and every little pool of the internet. Wherever we have one big pool, we have economies of scale in guarding that pool.

Brad: That is: what you are saying is that an information world of just four monopolistic, highly oligopolistic, walled gardens is bad, but an internet in which you cannot build any wall around your garden is bad as well. Then what we really need is a hundred walled gardens blooming, perhaps. But I want to hear what Cory has to say about this and interoperability.

Cory: I found that so interesting. I had to get out some, no paper and take notes.

First of all, I would trace back before the Gamergate issue. Before it was the Sad Puppies, the disruption of the Hugo awards by far-right authors was before Gamergate. It was the same ringleaders. Gamergate was the second act of sad puppies. So I’m there with you.

I was raised by Trotskyists. I want to say that, listening to you describe how you feel about nerd culture after you discovered that half of your colleagues and friends were violent misogynists—it sounds a lot like how Trotskyists talk about Stalinists, right. You have just recounted the the internet nerd version of Homage to Catalonia. Orwell goes to Spain to fight the fascist and a Stalinist shoots him through the throat.

We in outsider or insurgent or subcultural movements often have within our conception of a group people who share some characteristics and diverge on others. We paper over those divergences until they fracture. Think about the punk Nazi-punk split. This anti-authoritarian movement is united around a common aesthetic and music and a shared cultural identity. And there’s this political authoritarian anti-authoritarian things sitting in the middle. And they just don’t talk about it until they start talking about it—Dead Kennedys record: Nazi punks f-—- off. And here we are, still in the midst of that reckoning. That’s where Stormfront comes from and all the rest of it.

This is not distinct to the internet. It is probably unrealistic, it’s definitely unrealistic for there to be a regime in which conduct that is lawful can find no home. Not that not that it won’t happen in your home, but that it won’t happen in anyone’s home. The normative remedy where we just make some conduct that is lawful so far beyond the pale that everyone ceases to engage in it—that has never really existed. Right. You can see that with conduct that we might welcome today, as you know, socially fine and conduct that we dislike—whether that’s, you know, polyamory. You go back to the future house, where Judy Merrill and, and Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth lived in the thirties, and they had this big, weird polyamorous household of leftist science fiction writers write at a time when it was unmentionably weird to do it. And today it’s pretty mainstream—at least in some parts of California.

In the absence of an actual law against it, it’s probably going to happen. The first question is: is our response to people who have odious ideas that we want there to be nowhere where they can talk about it? If that’s the case, we’ll probably have to make a law against them.

Noah: Right. But hold on. Is it ideas, or is it actions? If you harass someone you’re not expressing an idea, you’re stopping them from expressing theirs.

Cory: Absolutely. So, so the issue is: that there are Nazis talking to other Nazis is okay. It’s just that when Nazis talked to other Nazis and figured out how to go harass someone. Let me give you an example of someone I know who is in the midst of one of these harassment campaigns.

Now there’s a brilliant writer, a librettist, novelist, and comics author named Cecile Castellucci. She also used to be like a pioneering Riot Girl and toured with Sloan. So she’s just this great polymath person. And because she’s a woman who writes comics, men on the internet hate her. And there’s a small and dedicated cadre of these men who figured out a way to mess with women on Twitter. They send you a DM that is really violent and disgusting. They wait until they see the read receipt, and then they delete it. Twitter, to its credit, will not accept screenshotted DMs as evidence of harassment, because it would be very easy for those same men to forge DMs from their targets and get those people kicked off Twitter. Then what they do is they revictimize their targets by making public timeline mentions that comport with Twitter’s rules unless you’ve seen the private message. And they make references to the private message that trigger the emotions from the private message over and over again.

It is a really effective harassment technique.

The women they use it against are stuck on Twitter, because their professional lives require them to be on Twitter, right. Their careers would end to some important degree if they weren’t part of this conversation on Twitter.

Now, imagine if you had Gotham Clock Tower, Barbara Gordon’s secret home, which was a Mastodon instance that was federated with Twitter, either through a standard or through a mandate or through adversarial interoperability. There could be a dozen women there who could agree that among themselves that they’re willing to treat screenshotted DMs as evidence of harassment, so that they could block and silence and erase the all presence of these horrible men. We’d still want Twitter to do something about them, but if some of those men slipped through Twitter’s defenses as they will, not just because they can’t catch everyone when they’re at the scale, but because the range of normal activities at scale is so broad: a hundred million people have a hundred and one million use cases every day. Then those people are that, that those people could still be on Twitter, but not subject to the harassment of Twitter. It’s a way for them.

Maybe, in the way that we talk about states being democracy’s laboratories, maybe these satellite communities could pioneer moderation techniques that range beyond takedowns or account terminations or warning labels. There are so many different ways we could deal with this. You could render some comments automatically in Comic Sans. They could try them and see if they work. And they could be adopted back into main Twitter. That’s what self-determination gets you: it gets you the right to set the rules of your discourse, and it gets you the right to decide who you trust to be within the group of people who make those rules.

Brad: So if we had the real interoperable world, we would have lots that would screen things according to someone’s preferences. And you could sign up to have that bot included in your particular bot list to pre-process and filter, so that you don’t have to wade through the garbage.

Cory: Sure. And there might be some conduct that we consider so far beyond the pale that we actually criminalize it. Then we can take the platforms where that conduct routinely takes place and things like reforms to 230 would cease to be nearly so important. We would be saying that if you are abetting unlawful conduct, when we see a remedy for preventing this unlawful conduct, and you refusing to implement that remedy, we might defenestrate you. We might do something worse.

Think of how the phone network works.It is standardized. There are these standard interchanges. There’s lots of ways it can be abused. Every now and and then, from some Caribbean Island, we get a call that fakes a number from a Caribbean Island, and if you call it back, you’re billed at $20 a minute for a long distance to have someone go: no, it was a wrong number. When that happens, the telco either cleans up its act or all the other telcos break their connection to it. There’s certain conduct that’s unlawful on the phone network, not unlawful because it cheats the phone company—not toll fraud—but unlawful because it’s bad for the rest of the world, like calling bomb threats in. Either the customer gets terminated or the operator is disciplined by law.

All of those things can work without having to be in this in this regime where you have paternalistic control, where you vest all of your hope in a God-King who faces no penalty if he makes a bad call. They say: we’ll defend your privacy when the FBI wants to break the iPhone. But when they threaten to shut down our manufacturing, we’ll let them spy on you even as they’re opening up concentration camps and putting a million people in them.

Brad: Was that the real serpent in all of these walled gardens? Was the advertising-supported model the thing that turns your eyeballs into the commodity to be enserfed. If we had the heaven of micropayments, would we manage to avoid all of this?

Cory: We’ve had advertising for a long time. The toxicity of advertising is pretty new. Mostly what’s toxic about advertising is surveillance, and not because I think the surveillance allows them to do feats of mind control. I think everyone who’s ever claimed to have mind control turned out to be lying to themselves or everyone else. Certainly there is not a lot of evidence for it. You have these Facebook large-scale experiments: 60 million people subjected to a nonconsensual, psychological intervention to see if they can be convinced to vote. And you get 0.38% effect size. Facebook should be disqualified from running a lemonade stand if we catch them performing nonconsensual experiments on 60 million people. But, at the same time, 0.38% effect sizes are not mind control.

They do engage in a lot of surveillance. It’s super-harmful because it leaks, because it allows them to do digital redlining, because it allows them to reliably target fascists with messages that if they were uttered in public, where everyone could see them, might cause the advertiser to be in bad odor. They can take these dog whistles and they can whisper them to the people who won’t spread them around.

Those are real harms.

You have to ask yourself: why don’t we have a privacy law that prohibits the nonconsensual gathering of data and imposes meaningful penalties on people who breach data? I was working in the EU. GDPR was passed. The commissioners I spoke to there said: no one has ever lobbied me as hard as I’ve been lobbied now. Right now we have more concentration in ad tech than in any other industry, I think, except for maybe eyeglasses, glass bottles, and professional wrestling.

Brad: Are we then reduced to: “Help us, Tim Cook! You are our only hope!”?

Cory: I think that that’s wrong, because Tim Cook doesn’t want to give you self-determination. Tim wants you to be subject to his determinations. Among those determinations are some good ones. He doesn’t want Facebook to own your eyeballs. You go, Tim. But he also wants you to drop your iPhone in a shredder every 18 months, rather than getting it fixed.

Brad: Although I must say, looking at the M1 chip, I’m very tempted to take my laptop and throw it in the shredder today to force me to buy a new one.

Noah: It’s interesting how iPhone conquered. And yet very few people still use Macs. Steve Jobs’s dream was never actualized.

Cory: Firms that are highly concentrated distort policy outcomes, and ad tech is highly concentrated. And we have some obviously distorted policy outcomes. We don’t have a federal privacy law with a private right of action. There are no meaningful penalties for breaches. We understand that breaches have compounding effects. A breach that doesn’t contain any data that is harmful to the user can be merged with another breach and together they can be harmful—and that’s cumulative. And data has a long half-life.

Just this week, Ed Felton’s old lab published a paper on how old phone numbers can be used to defeat two-factor authentication. You go through a breach, find all the phone numbers that are associated with the two-factor authentication. Then you can go to Verizon and ask: which of these phone numbers is available? Which of these people has changed their phone number? Then you can request that phone number on a new signup—and then you can break into their bank account and steal all their money. Old breaches are cumulative. Yet we still have this actual-damages regime for breaches instead of statutory damages that take account of the downstream effects and these unquantifiable risks that are imposed on the general public through the nonconsensual collection and retention of data under conditions that inevitably lead to breaches.

Brad: Okay. Well, I’m very down. So are we ready to end? I think we should end on this downer note.

Noah: My favorite Cory Doctorow books also end on a downer note.

Brad: Yes. Basically that the political economy does not allow us to move out of this particular fresh semi-hell in which we’re embedded. But you had something to say?

Cory: Everybody hates monopolies now. So we’ll just team up with the people angry about professional wrestling monopolies and eyeglass monopolies and beer monopolies, and we’ll form a Prairie Fire United Front of people who will break the monopoly because we’re all on the same side—even though we’re fighting our different corners of it—the same way that ecology took people who cared about owls and put them on the side of people who care about ozone layers, even though charismatic, nocturnal birds are not the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere.

Brad: Hey, if you have the charismatic megafauna on your side, you’re golden.

Noah: How did the original Prairie Fire work out? Let’s let’s wrap it up there. This is really great episode. Cory, you’re awesome. Thanks so much for coming on and feel free to come back in time.

Cory: I’d love to. I’ve just turned in a book about money laundering and cryptocurrency—a noir cyberthreat thriller. Maybe when that comes out, I can come on and we can talk about that. That feels like it’s up your guys’ alley.

Brad: That would be great. Okay. So, as we end this: Noah, what is the key insight?

Noah: Hexapodia is the key insight. And what are the other key insights that we got from this day?

Brad: DeLong: I’m just depressed. I had a riff about how we got interoperability right with the creation of the market economy and the end of feudalism—and how that was a very lucky historical accident. But I don’t see possibilities for an equivalent lucky historical accident in our future.

Noah: I have a key insight. It is a little vague, but hopefully it will be good fodder for future episodes. The problems in our society are not diametrically opposed. We have to find optimal interior-solution trade-offs between things that have a non-zero dot product. Sometimes solving the problem with one thing doesn’t necessarily create exactly equal and opposite problems on the other side. Instead, it changes the trade-offs that you face with regard to other problems. These things become very complex. You have things like the antitrust problem and things like the Nazi problem. In your society addressing one doesn’t necessarily worsen the other. More action against Nazis doesn’t necessarily mean less action in antitrust. It’s simply means you have to think about antitrust in a slightly different way, and vice versa. That does make these institutional problems very difficult to solve.

Brad: Cory, do you wish to add a key insight,

Cory: A key insight is: always keep a trash bag in your car.

Brad: This has been Brad DeLong and Noah Smith’s podcast this week with the amazing Cory Doctorow. Thank you all very much for listening.

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Why do authors bristle at fanfic?

And why do readers care so much about people who never lived?

Cory Doctorow probes the neural puppet show behind narrative, empathy, and the centuries-old tradition of reimagining stories. Step into a conversation where the boundaries between author, reader, and character blur—and where the real drama is in the wetware. What happens when your brain’s model of a character refuses to stop talking and acting after the book comes to an end?

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Part of the rough transcript from Hexapodia XIII: Mandated Interoperability Is Not Going to Work <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-xiii-mandated-interoperability>:

Brad: However, here we seek different key insights than “hexapodia”. Today we seek them from the genius science-fiction author and social commentator Cory Doctorow. I think of him as—it was Patrick Nielsen Hayden, I think, who said around 2004: that he felt like he was living in the future of Scottish science fiction author, Ken MacLeod. And he wished Ken would just stop. At times I feel that way about Cory. But we are very happy to have him here. His latest book is How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism IIRC, his latest fiction is Attack Surface. My favorite two books of his are Walkaway and—I think it was your first—Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Cory: That's right. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for that very effusive introduction. I decry all claims of genius, though.

Brad: Well, we know this is a problem. When one is dealing with an author whose work one has read a lot of—by reading your books.by now I've spent forty hours of my life looking at squiggles on a page or on a screen and, through a complicated mental process, downloaded to my wetware and then run on it a program that is my image of a sub-Turing instantiation of your mind, who has then told me many very entertaining and excellent stories. So I feel like I know you very well…

Cory: There’s this infamous and very funny old auto reply that Neal Stephenson used to send to people who emailed him. It basically went: “Ah, I get it. You feel like you were next to me when we were with Hero Protagonist in Alaska fighting off the right-wing militias. But while you were there with me, I wasn't there with you. And so I understand why you want to, like, sit around and talk about our old military campaigns. But I wasn't on that campaign with you.

Brad: Yes. It was only my own imago, my created sub-Turing instantiation of your mind that was there…

Cory: Indeed. We are getting off of interoperability, which is what I think we're mostly going to talk about.

But this is my cogpsy theory of why fiction works, and where the fanfic dispute comes from:

Writers have this very precious thing they say. It is: “I'm writing and I'm writing and all of a sudden the characters start telling me what they want to do.” I think that what they actually mean by that is that we all have this completely automatic process by which we try and create models of the people we encounter. Sometimes we never encounter those people. We just encounter second-hand evidence of them. Sometimes those people don't live at all. Think about the people who feel great empathy for imaginary people that cruel catfishers have invented on the internet to document their imaginary battles with cancer. They then feel deeply hurt and betrayed and confused, when this person they've come to empathize with turns out to be a figment of someone else's imagination.

I think what happens when you write is that you generate this optical link between two parts of your brain that don't normally talk to each other. There are these words that you are explicitly thinking up that show up on your screen. And then those words are being processed by your eyeballs and being turned into fodder for a model in this very naive way. And then the model gets enough flesh on the bones—so it starts telling you what it wants to do. At this point you are basically breathing your own exhaust fumes here. But it really does take what is at first a somewhat embarrassing process of putting on a puppet show for yourself: “Like, everybody, let’s go on a quest!” “That sounds great!” “Here we go!” It just becomes something where you don't feel like you're explicitly telling yourself a story.

Now the corollary of this is that it sort of explains the mystery of why we like stories, right? Why we have these completely involuntary, emotional responses to the imaginary experiences of people who never lived and died and have no consequence. The most tragic death in literature of Romeo and Juliet is as nothing next to the death of the yogurt I digested with breakfast this morning, because that yogurt was alive and now it's dead and Romeo and Juliet never lived, never died, nothing that happened to them happened. Yet you hear about the Romeo and Juliet…

Noah: …except that a human reads about Romeo and Juliet and cares…

Cory: That is where it matters, yes indeed. But the mechanism by which we care is our build this model which is then subjected to the author's torments, and then we feel empathy for the model. What that means is that the readers, when they're done, if the book hit its aesthetic marks, if it did the thing that literature does to make it aesthetically pleasing—then the reader still has a persistent model in the same way that if your granny dies, you still have a model of your granny, right? You are still there.

That is why fanfic exists. The characters continue to have imagined lives. If the characters don't go on having imagined lives, then the book never landed for you.

And that’s why authors get so pissy about fanfic. They too have this model that they didn't set out to explicitly create, but it's there. And it's important to their writing process. And if someone is putting data in about that modeled person that is not consistent with the author's own perception of them, that creates enormous dissonance. I think that if we understood this, we would stop arguing about fanfic.

Noah: We argue about fanfic?

Brad: Oh yes, there are people who do. I remember—in some sense, the most precious thing I ever read was Jo Walton saying that she believed that Ursula K. LeGuin did not understand her own dragons at all…

Noah: …Yep, correct…

Cory: Poppy Bright—back when Poppy Bright was using that name and had that gender identity—was kicked out of a fan group for Poppy Bright fans on LiveJournal for not understanding Poppy Bright’s literature. I think that's completely true. Ray Bradbury to his dying day insisted that Fahrenheit 451 had nothing to do with censorship but was about the dangers of television…

Brad: Fanfic is an old and wonderful tradition. It goes back to Virgil, right? What is the Aeneid but Iliad fanfic?

Cory: And what is Genesis but Babylonian fanfic? It goes a lot further back than that…

Brad: Today, however, we are here to talk not about humans as narrative-loving animals, not about the sheer weirdness of all the things that we run on our wetware, but about “mandated interoperability”, and similar things—how we are actually going to try to get a handle on the information and attention network economy that we are building out in a more bizarre and irrational way than I would have ever thought possible…

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Reference:

• Smith, Noah, Brad DeLong, & Cory Doctorow. 2021. “Mandated Interoperability Is Not Going to Work”. Hexapodia Podcast. XIII, May 4. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-xiii-mandated-interoperability>.

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Sokrates: The people find some protector, whom they nurse into greatness… but then changes, as indicated in the old fable of the Temple of Zeus of the Wolf, of how he who tastes human flesh mixed up with the flesh of other sacrificial victims will turn into a wolf. Even so, the protector, once metaphorically tasting human blood, slaying some and exiling others, within or without the law, hinting at the cancellation of debts and the fair redistribution of lands, must then either perish or become a werewolf—that is, a tyrant…

Key Insights:

1. We are back! After a year-long hiatus.

2. Hexapodia is a metaphor: a small, strange insight (like alien shrubs riding on six-wheeled carts as involuntary agents of the Great Evil) can provide key insight into useful and valuable Truth.

3. The Democratic Party is run by 27-year-old staffers, not geriatric figurehead politicians–this shapes messaging and internal dynamics.

4. The American progressive movement did not possess enough assibayah to keep from fracturing over Gaza War, especially among younger Democratic staffers influenced by social media discourse.

5. The left’s adoption of “indigeneity” rhetoric undermined its ability to be a coalition in the face of tensions generated by the Hamas-Israel terrorism campaigns.

6. Trump’s election with more popular votes than Harris destroyed Democratic belief that they had a right to oppose root-and-branch.

7. The belief that Democrats are the “natural majority” of the U.S. electorate is now false: nonvoters lean Trump, not so much Republican, and definitely not Democratic.

8. Trump’s populism is not economic redistribution, but a claim to provide a redistribution of status and respect to those who feel culturally disrespected.

9. The Supreme Court’s response to Trumpian overreach is likely to be very cautious—Barrett and Roberts are desperately eager to avoid any confrontation with Trump they might wind up losing, and Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Thomas will go the extra mile—they are Republicans who are judges, not judges who are Republicans, except in some extremis that may not even exist.

10. Trump’s administration pursues selective repression through the state, rather than stochastic terrorism.

11. The economic consequence of the second Trump presidency look akin to another Brexit costing the U.S. ~10% of its prosperity, or more.

12. Social media, especially Twitter a status warfare machine–amplifying trolls and extremists, suppressing nuance.

13. People addicted to toxic media diets but lack the tools or education to curate better information environments.

14. SubStack and newsletters may become part of a healthier information ecosystem, a partial antidote to the toxic amplification of the Shouting Class on social media.

15. Human history is marked by information revolutions (e.g., printing press), each producing destructive upheaval before stabilization: destruction, that may or may not be creative.

16. As in the 1930s, we are entering a period where institutions–not mobs–become the threat, even as social unrest diminishes.

17. The dangers are real,and recognizing and adapting to new communication realities is key to preserving democracy.

18. Plato’s Republic warned of democracy decaying into tyranny, especially when mob-like populism finds a strongman champion who then, having (metaphorically) fed on human flesh, becomes a (metaphorical) werewolf.

19. Enlightenment values relied more than we knew on print-based gatekeeping and slow communication; digital communication bypasses these safeguards.

20. The cycle of crisis and recovery is consistent through history: societies fall into holes they later dig out of, usually at great cost—or they don’t.

21. &, as always, HEXAPODIA!

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References:

• Brown, Chad P. 2025. “Trump's trade war timeline 2.0: An up-to-date guide”. PIIE. <https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2025/trumps-trade-war-timeline-20-date-guide>.

• Center for Humane Technology. 2020. “The Social Dilemma”. <https://www.humanetech.com/the-social-dilemma>.

• Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, & John Jay. 1788. The Federalist Papers. <https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text>.

• Nowinski, Wally. 2024. “Democrats benefit from low turnout now”. Noahpinion. July 20. <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/dont-rock-the-vote>.

• Platon of the Athenai. -375 [1871]. Politeia. <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1497>.

• Rorty, Richard. 1998. Achieving Our Country. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. <https://archive.org/details/achievingourcoun0000rort>

• Rothpletz, Peter. 2024. “Economics 101 tells us there’s no going back from Trumpism”. The Hill. September 24. <https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4896391-trumpism-gop-future/>.

• Smith, Noah. 2021. “Wokeness as Respect Redistribution”. Noahpinion.<https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/wokeness-as-respect-redistribution>.

• Smith, Noah. 2016. “How to actually redistribute respect”. Noahpinion. March 23. <https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/03/how-to-actually-redistribute-respect.html>.

• Smith, Noah. 2013. “Redistribute wealth? No, redistribute respect”. Noahpinion. December 27. <https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/redistribute-wealth-no-redistribute.html>.

• SubStack. 2025. “Building a New Economic Engine for Culture”. <https://substack.com/about>.

&

• Vinge, Vernor. 1999. A Deepness in the Sky. New York: Tor Books. <https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355>.

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Key Insights:

1. Brad DeLong says: You say economics and economists in decline—I see bad economists in decline.

2. Brad DeLong says: You see missile defense as remarkably effective—I see it as marginally effective, at best.

3. Brad DeLong says: You say China Shock II—I say China Shock I required the GWB administration as witting and unwitting co-conspirator.

4. Noah Smith says: These are self-refuting prophecies: my defense of missile defense was to say that it can be remarkably effective in a few possible instances, but those plausible ones for the next two decades; my title “the decade of the second China shock” and my subhead “brace yourselves” were intended to spur action to keep there from being a second China shock.

5. Noah Smith says: Economists advising badly had a lot of influence in 2008 and after, and still have a substantial amount today—so the total influence of economists has decreased since 2008, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.

6. The only real way to get nuance is to write a whole book and then have people deeply engage with it, which requires that they be on a trans-oceanic flight with dodgy Wi-Fi, and be otherwise bored.

7. The internet makes us less nuanced than we should be.

8. &, as always, HEXAPODIA!

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References:

• Smith, Noah. 2024. “Why so many of us were wrong about missile defense”. Noahpinion. April 15. <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-so-many-of-us-were-wrong-about>.

• Smith, Noah. 2024. “Twilight of the economists?” Noahpinion. April 12. <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/twilight-of-the-economists>.

• Smith, Noah. 2024. “The decade of the Second China Shock”. March 23. <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-decade-of-the-second-china-shock>.

&

• Vinge, Vernor. 1999. A Deepness in the Sky. New York: Tor Books. <https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355>.

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Key Insights:

1. A number of years ago, Brad DeLong said that it was time to “pass the baton” to “The Left”. How’s that working out for us? #actually, he had said that we had passed the baton—that the absence since January 21, 2009 (or possibly January 21, 1993) of Republican negotiating partners meant that sensible centrism produced nothing—that Barack Obama had proposed John McCain’s climate policy, Mitt Romney’s health care policy, George H.W. Bush’s entitlement-and-budget policy, Ronald Reagan’s tax policy, and Gerald Ford’s foreign policy, and had gotten precisely zero Republican votes for any of those. Therefore the only choice we had was to pass the baton to the Left in the hopes that they could energize the base and the disaffected to win majorities, and then offer strong support where there policies were better than the status quo.

2. But my major initial take was that the major task was to resurrect a sensible center-right, in which I wished the Niskanen Center good luck, but was not optimistic.

3. But everyone heard “Brad DeLong says neoliberals should ‘bend the knee’” to THE LEFT…

4. That is interesting…

5. Should neoliberals bend the knee?

6. How has the left been doing with its baton? Not well at all, for anyone who defines “THE LEFT” to consist of former Bernie staffers who regard Elizabeth Warren as a neoliberal sellout.

7. It has, once again, never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

8. But the conditions that required passing the baton to the left—High Mitch McConnellism, Republican unity saying “NO!” to everything by every Republican to make the Black president look like a weak failure—no longer hold.

9. And the principal adversaries to good governance and a bright American future are reactionary theocrats, neofascist grifters, and true-believer right-neoliberals to the right and cost-disease socialists to the left.

10. But in the middle, made up of ex-left-neoliberals and nearly all other right-thinking Americans, are we supply-side progressives.

11. Instead, there is a governing coalition, in the Senate, composed of 70 senators, 50 Democrats and 20 Republicans, from Bernie Sanders through J.D. Vance—a supply-side progressive or supply-side Americanist coalition.

12. It is therefore time to snatch the baton back, and give it to the supply-side progressivist policy-politics core, and then grab as many people to run alongside that core in the race as we possibly can.

13. The Niskanen Center cannot be at the heart of the supply-side progressivist agenda because they are incrementalists and critics by nature.

14. The principal business of “Leftist” activists over the past five years really has been and continues to be to try to grease the skids for the return of neofascism—just as the principal business of Ralph Nader and Naderites in 2000 was to grease the skids for upper-class tax cuts, catastrophic financial deregulation, and forever wars.

15. &, as always, HEXAPODIA!

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References:

• Beauchamp, Zack. 2019. "A Clinton-Era Centrist Democrat Explains Why It's Time to Give Democratic Socialists a Chance." Vox. March 4, 2019. <https://web.archive.org/web/20190304123456/https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/4/18246381/democrats-clinton-sanders-left-brad-delong>.

• Black, Bill. 2019. "Brad DeLong's Stunning Concession: Neoliberals Should Pass the Baton & Let the Left Lead." Naked Capitalism. March 5. <https://web.archive.org/web/20190305123456/https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/03/bill-black-analyzes-brad-delongs-stunning-concession-neoliberals-should-pass-baton-let-left-lead.html>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2019. “David Walsh went to the Niskanen Center conference. He got hives…” Twitter. February 25. <https://twitter.com/delong/status/1100166150845939712>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2019. "Carville & Hunt: Two Old White Guys Podcast." Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality. March 11. <https://web.archive.org/web/20190305123456/https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/carville-hunt-two-old-white-guys-podcast.html>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2019. "I Said 'Pass the Baton' to Those Further Left Than I, Not 'Bend the Knee.'" Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality. March 27. <https://web.archive.org/web/20190305123456/https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/i-said-pass-the-baton-to-those-further-left-than-i-not-bend-the-knee.html>.

• Elmaazi, Mohamed. 2019. "Famous Neoliberal Economist Says Centrism Has Failed." The Canary. March 15, 2019. <https://web.archive.org/web/20190315123456/https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2019/03/15/famous-neoliberal-economist-says-centrism-has-failed/>.

• O’Reilly, Timothy. 2019. "This Interview with Brad DeLong is Very Compelling." LinkedIn. <https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timo3_this-interview-with-brad-delong-is-very-compelling-activity-6508399270297767936-86Hd/?trk=public_profile_like_view>.

• Douthat, Ross. 2019. "What’s Left of the Center-Left?" New York Times. March 5. <https://web.archive.org/web/20190305123456/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/opinion/democrats-liberals-socialists-cultural-left.html>.

• Drum, Kevin. 2019. "A Neoliberal Says It's Time for Neoliberals to Pack It In." Mother Jones. March 5. <https://web.archive.org/web/20190305123456/https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/03/a-neoliberal-says-its-time-for-neoliberals-to-pack-it-in/>.

• Hundt, Reed, Brad DeLong, & Joshua Cohen. 2019."Neoliberalism and Its Discontents." Commonwealth Club. March 5. <https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/neoliberalism-and-its-discontents>.

• Konczal, Mike. 2019. "The Failures of Neoliberalism Are Bigger Than Politics." Roosevelt Institute. March 5. <https://web.archive.org/web/20190305123456/https://rooseveltinstitute.org/2019/03/05/the-failures-of-neoliberalism-are-bigger-than-politics/>.

&

• Vinge, Vernor. 1999. A Deepness in the Sky. New York: Tor Books. <https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355>.

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Key Insights:

1. Someone is wrong on the internet! Specifically Brad… He needs to shape up and scrub his brain…

2. Back in the 2000s, Brad argued that the U.S. should over the next few generations try to pass the baton of world leadership to a prosperous, democratic, liberal China…

3. Back in the 2000s, Noah thought that Brad was wrong—he looked at the Chinese Communist Party, and he thought: communist parties do not do “coëxistence”…

4. Noah understands people with a limitless authoritarian desire for power—people like Trump, Xi, Putin, and in the reverse Abe—and the systems that nurture and promote them…

5. Why did Brad go wrong? Excessive reliance in the deep structures of his brain on the now 60-year-old Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World.

6. Why did Brad go wrong? A failure to understand Lenin’s party of a new type as a bureaucratic-cultural organization…

7. Suggestions for what Brad DeLong should earn during his forthcoming stint in the reëducation camp are welcome…

8. &, as always, Hexapodia…

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References:

• Bear, Greg. 1985. Blood Music. New York: Arbor House. <https://www.lwcurrey.com/pages/books/103667/greg-bear/blood-music>.

• Brown, Kerry. 2022. Xi: A Study in Power. London: Icon Books.
  <https://www.kerry-brown.co.uk/books/xi-a-study-in-power>.

• Cai, Xia. 2022. "The Weakness of Xi Jinping: How Hubris and Paranoia Threaten China’s Future." Foreign Affairs. September/October. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/xi-jinping-china-weakness-hubris-paranoia-threaten-future.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2019. "What to Do About China?" Project Syndicate, June 5. <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-america-relations-trump-diplomatic-weakness-by-j-bradford-delong-2019-06>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2019. "America’s Superpower Panic". Project Syndicate, August 14. <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/america-china-superpower-rivalry-history-by-j-bradford-delong-2019-08>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2023. "Theses on China, the US, Political-Economic Systems, Global Value Chains, & the Relationship". Grasping Reality. Accessed June 19. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/theses-on-china-e-us-political-economic>.

• Lampton, David M. 2019. Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  <https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520303478/following-the-leader>.

• Moore, Barrington, Jr. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord & Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press. <https://archive.org/details/socialoriginsofd0000unse_v4l0>.

• Pronin, Ivan, & Mikhail Stepichev. 1969. Leninist Standards of Party Life. Moscow: Progress Publishers. <https://archive.org/details/leninist-standardsof-party-life_202307>.

• Sandbu, Martin. 2022. “Brad DeLong: ‘The US is now an anti-globalisation outlier’”. Financial Times. November 23. <https://www.ft.com/content/791fe484-595f-44f9-86e7-55bdbbbd22e8>.

• Sasaki, Norihiko. 2023. "Functions and Significance of the Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reforms and the Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Commission." Chinese Journal of Political Science 28 (3): 1-15. Accessed May 14, 2024. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24761028.2023.2185394.

• Shambaugh, David, ed. 2020. China and the World. New York: Oxford University Press. <https://academic.oup.com/book/32164>.

&

• Vinge, Vernor. 1999. A Deepness in the Sky. New York: Tor Books. <https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355>.

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Key Insights:

1. Vernor Vinge was one of the GOAT scifi authors—and he is also one of the most underrated…

2. That a squishy social-democratic leftie like Brad DeLong can derive so much insight and pleasure from the work of a hard-right libertarian like Vernor Vinge—for whom the New Deal Order is very close to being the Big Bad, and who sees FDR as a cousin of Sauron—creates great hope that there is a deeper layer of thought to which we all can contribute. The fact that Brad DeLong and Vernor Vinge get excited in similar ways is a universal force around which we can unite, and add to them H.G. Wells and Jules Verne…

3. The five things written by Vernor Vinge that Brad and Noah find most interesting are:

   1. “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era”,

   2. A Fire Upon the Deep,

   3. A Deepness in the Sky,

   4. “True Names”, &

   5. Rainbows End…

4. We do not buy the Supermind Singularity: The world is not a game of chess in which the entity that can think 40 moves ahead will always easily trounce the entity that can only think 10 moves ahead, for time and chance happeneth to us all…

5. We do not buy the Supermind Singularity: Almost all human intelligence is not in individual brains, but is in the network. We are very smart as an anthology intelligence. Whatever true A.I.s we create will be much smarter when they are tied into the network as useful and cooperative parts of it—rather than sinister gods out on their own plotting plots…

6. We do not buy the Supermind Singularity: mind and technology amplification is as likely to be logistic as exponential or super-exponential…

7. The ultimate innovation in a society of abundance is the ability to control human personality and desire—and now we are back to the Buddha, and to Zeno, Kleanthes, Khrisippus, and Marcus Aurelius…

8. With the unfortunate asterisk that mind-hacking via messages and chemicals mean that such an ultimate innovation can be used for evil as well as good…

9. Addiction effects from gambling are not, in fact, a good analogy for destructive effects of social media as a malevolent attention-hacker…

10. Cyberspace is not what William Gibson and Neil Stephenson predicted.

    But it rhymed. And mechanized warfare was not what H.G. Wells predicted.

    But it rhymed. A lot of the stuff about AI that we see in science fiction will rhyme with whatever things are going to happen…

11. The Blight of A Fire Upon the Deep is a not-unreasonable metaphor for social media as propaganda intensifier…

12. We want the future of the Whole Earth Catalog and the early Wired, not of crypto grifts and ad-supported social media platforms…

13. Vernor Vinge’s ideas will be remembered—if only as important pieces of a historical discussion about why the Superintelligence Singularity road was not (or was) taken—as long as the Thrones of the Valar endure…

14. Noah Smith continues to spend too much time picking fights on Twitter…

15. &, as always, Hexapodia…

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References:

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century. New York: Basic Books. <http://bit.ly/3pP3Krk>.

• Bursztyn, Leonardo, Benjamin Handel, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, & Christopher Roth. 2023. “When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media”. Becker-Friedman Institute. October 12. <https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/when-product-markets-become-collective-traps-the-case-of-social-media/>.

• Patel, Nilay, Alex Cranz, & David Pierce. 2024. “Rabbit, Humane, & the iPad”. Vergecast. May 3. <https://overcast.fm/+QN1ra_4w8>.

• MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1966. A Short History of Ethics: : A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century. New York: Macmillan. <https://archive.org/details/shorthistoryofet00maci>.

• Ober, Josiah. 2008. Democracy & Knowledge: Innovation & Learning in Classical Athens. Princeton: Princeton University Press. <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BD27WCMK>.

• Petpuls. 2024. “The World's First Dog Emotion Translator”. Accessed May 7, 2024. <https://www.petpuls.net/?lang=en>.

• Rao, Venkatesh. 2022. “Beyond Hyperanthropomorphism”. Ribbonfarm Studio. Auguts 21. <https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/beyond-hyperanthropomorphism>.

• Taintor, Joseph. 1990. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <https://www.amazon.com/dp/052138673X>.

• Vinge, Vernor. 1984. “True Names”. True Names & Other Dangers. New York: Bluejay Books. <https://archive.org/details/truenamesvingevernor>.

• Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: Tor Books. <https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Upon-Deep-Zones-Thought/dp/0812515285>.

• Vinge, Vernor. 1993. "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era". <https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19940022856>.

• Vinge, Vernor. 1999. A Deepness in the Sky. New York: Tor Books. <https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355>.

• Vinge, Vernor. 2006. Rainbows End. New York: Tor Books. <https://www.amazon.com/Rainbows-End-Vernor-Vinge/dp/0812536363>.

• Williams, Walter Jon. 1992. Aristoi. New York: Tor Books. <https://www.lwcurrey.com/pages/books/91732/walter-jon-williams/aristoi>

• Wikipedia. “Vernor Vinge”. Accessed May 7, 2024. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge>.

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Key Insights:

1. Acemoglu & Johnson should have written a very different book—one about how some technologies complement and others substitute for labor, and it is very important to maximize the first.

2. Neither Noah Smith nor Brad DeLong is at all comfortable with “power” as a category in economics other than as the ability to credibly threaten to commit violence or theft.

3. Acemoglu & Robinson’s Why Nations Fail is a truly great book. Power & Progress is not.

4. We should not confuse James Robinson with Simon Johnson

5. Billionaires running oligopolistic tech firms are not trustworthy stewards of the future of our economy.

6. The IBM 701 Defense Calculator of 1953 is rather cool.

7. The lurkers agree with Noah Smith in the DMs.

8. The power loom caused technological unemployment because the rest of the value chain—cotton growing, spinning, and garment-making—was rigid, hence the elasticity of demand for the transformation thread → cloth was low.

9. We need more examples of bad technologies than the cotton gin and the Roman Empire.

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References:

• Acemoglu, Daron, & Simon Johnson. 2023. Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. New York; Hachette Book Group. <https://archive.org/details/daron-acemoglu-simon-johnson-power-and-progress-our-thousand-year-struggle-over->

• Acemoglu, Daron, & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Publishers. <https://archive.org/details/WhyNationsFailTheOriginsODaronAcemoglu>

• Besi. 2023. “Join us Tues. Oct. 10 at 4pm Pacific for a talk by

  @MITSloan’s Simon Johnson…” Twitter. October 9. <https://twitter.com/BESI_Berkeley/status/1711541113738387874>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2024. “What To Do About the Dependence of the Form Progress Takes on Power?: Quick Takes on Acemoglu & Johnson's "Power & Progress”. Grasping Reality. February 29.

• DeLong, J. Bradford; & Noah Smith. 2023. “We Cannot Tell in Advance Which Technologies Are Labor-Augmenting & Which Are Labor-Replacing”. Hexapodia. XLIX, July 7.

• Gruber, Jonathan, & Simon Johnson. 2019. Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream.

  The book is available on the Internet Archive: <https://archive.org/details/e-20190429>.

• Johnson, Simon, & James Kwak. 2011. 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. New York: Vintage Books. <https://archive.org/details/13bankers0000unse>.

• Smith, Noah. 2024. “Book Review: Power & Progress”. Noahpinion. February 21.

  Noahpinion

  Book review: "Power and Progress"

  “Do not be fooled by the monumental technological achievements of humankind.” — Acemoglu and Johnson It’s hardly surprising that Power and Progress made it onto practically every list of the most important business books of 2023. First, there’s the unrivaled pedigree of the authors themselves. To call Daron Acemoglu a powerhouse in the world of economics would be a ludicrous understatement…

  Read more

  3 years ago · 149 likes · 39 comments · Noah Smith

• Walton, Jo. 1998. “The Lurkers Support Me in Email”. May 16. <http://www.jowaltonbooks.com/poetry/whimsy/the-lurkers-support-me-in-email/>.

+, of course:

• Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0>.

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Key Insights:

1. The disjunction between all the economic data having been very good and very strong for the past year and tons of reports and commentary about how people “weren’t feeling it” is mostly the result of the fact that things work with lags.

2. There are other factors: partisan politics, and the insistence of Republicans that they must not only vote but also at least say that they agree with their tribe.

3. There are other factors: the old journalistic adage that “what bleeds, leads”, exponentiated by the effects of our current short attention-span clickbait culture.

4. There are other factors: journalists, commentators, and the rest of the shouting class are depressed as their industries collapse around them, and somewhat of their situation leaks through.

5. There are other factors: while people think they personally are doing well, they do remember stories of others not doing wellm and are concerned.

6. But mostly it was just that things operate with lags: that was the major source of the “vibecession” gloom-and-doom which was at sharp variance with the actual economic dataflow.

7. We are not the modelers: we are, rather, the agents in the model.

8. The metanarrative is always harder than the narrative: trying to answer “why don’t people say they think the economy is good?” is very hard to answer in a non-stupid way, and most of us are much better off just saying: “hey, guys, the economy is really good!”

9. It is good to be long reality—as long as you are not so leveraged that your position gets sold out from under you before the market marks itself to reality,.

10. Lags gotta lag.

11. And, finally, hexapodia!

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References:

• Burn-Murdoch, John. 2023. “Should we believe Americans when they say the economy is bad?” Financial Times, December 1 <https://www.ft.com/content/9c7931aa-4973-475e-9841-d7ebd54b0f47>.

• Cummings, Ryan, & Neale Mahoney. 2023. “Asymmetric amplification and the consumer sentiment gap”. Briefing Book, November 13. <http://briefingbook.info/p/asymmetric-amplification-and-the>.

• El-Erian, Mohamed. 2024. “A warning shot over the last mile in the inflation battle’. Financial Times, January 15. <https://www.ft.com/content/497499b1-0e9f-4215-a536-ecd483ad42b9>.

• Faroohar, Rana. 2024. “Is Bidenomics dead on arrival? The time is ripe for the administration to rethink its messaging”. Financial Times, December 18. <https://www.ft.com/content/816ccbf7-d0d5-47be-9c8d-8a8a0cbd0afe>.

• Fedor, Lauren, & Colby Smith. 2023, “Will US voters believe they are better off with Biden? Under pressure after a string of damning polls, the US president is resting his hopes for re-election on his personal economic blueprint”. Financial Times, November 6. <https://www.ft.com/content/23687b6b-ac6f-46ab-a701-917a5ed64f4f>.

• Financial Times Editorial Board. 2024. “Why Biden gets little credit for a strong US economy: The president’s team needs to show more energy in addressing voters’ concerns”. Financial Times, January 11. <https://www.ft.com/content/a2373c26-87ea-4b77-944f-8a6b28c8675b>.

• Ghosh, Bobby. 2022. “Biden’s a Better Economic Manager Than You Think:

  On more than a dozen measures of relative prosperity, he’s outperformed the last six of his seven predecessors. On reducing the budget deficit, he has no peers”. Bloomberg, November 8. <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-11-08/midterm-elections-joe-biden-led-us-economy-surprisingly-well>

• Greenberg, Stanley. 2024. “The Political Perils of Democrats’ Rose-Colored Glasses: Paul Krugman’s (and many Democrats’) beliefs about the economy and crime miss the reality that Americans still experience”. American Prospect, February 5. <https://prospect.org/politics/2024-02-05-political-perils-democrats-rose-colored-glasses/>.

• Hsu, Joanne. 2024. “Surveys of Consumers: Final Results for January 2024”. February 2. <http://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/>.

• Krugman, Paul. 2024. “Is the Vibecession Finally Coming to an End?” New York Times, January 22. <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/opinion/biden-trump-vibecession-economy.html>.

• Lowenkron, Hadriana. 2023. “Biden’s Approval Rating Hits New Low on Economic Worries, Poll Shows”. Bloomberg, December 18. <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-18/biden-approval-hits-new-low-on-economic-worries-poll-shows>,

• Millard, Blake. 2024. “Consumer confidence highest in 2 years, still below pre-pandemic levels”. Sandbox Daily, February 6. <http://thesandboxdaily.com/p/consumer-confidence-plus-apple-and>.

• Omeokwe, Amara, & Chip Cutter. 2024. “Job Gains Picked Up in December, Capping Year of Healthy Hiring”. Wall Street Journal, January 5. <https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/jobs-report-december-today-unemployment-economy-58801a70>.

• Rubin, Gabriel. 2024. “What Recession? Growth Ended Up Accelerating in 2023”. Wall Street Journal, January 25. <https://www.wsj.com/economy/gdp-us-economy-fourth-quarter-2023-9fc372f0>.

• Scanlon, Kyla. 2022. “The Vibecession: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy”. Kyla’s Newsletter, June 30. <http://kyla.substack.com/p/the-vibecession-the-self-fulfillin>.

• Sen, Conor. 2023. “Unhappy American Consumers Will Welcome a Slower Economy”. Bloomberg, November 29. <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-29/unhappy-american-consumers-will-welcome-a-slower-economy>

• Scanlon, Kyla. 2023. “It’s More than Just Vibes”. Kyla’s Newsletter, December 7. <http://kyla.substack.com/p/its-more-than-just-vibes>.

• Torry, Harriet, & Anthony DeBarros. 2023. “Economists in WSJ Survey Still See Recession This Year Despite Easing Inflation”. Wall Street Journal, January 15. <https://www.wsj.com/articles/despite-easing-price-pressures-economists-in-wsj-survey-still-see-recession-this-year-11673723571>.

• Winkler, Matthew A. 2023. “The Truth About the Biden Economy: As the president launches his reelection campaign, his biggest challenge may be getting voters to ignore perception and focus on reality”. Bloomberg, April 25. <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-25/biden-s-economy-deserves-more-appreciation-from-americans>.

• Wingrove, Josh. 2024. “Biden Refines Economic Pitch for 2024 in Bet Worst Is Behind Him”. Bloomberg, January 13. <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-13/biden-refines-economic-pitch-for-2024-in-bet-worst-is-behind-him>.

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+, of course:

• Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0>.

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Key Insights:

1. Young whippersnappers Oks and Williams are to be commended for being young, and whippersnapperish—but we disagree with them.

2. Contrary to what Brad thought, the fertility transition in Africa really has resumed.

3. The problem of how you provide mass employment for people is different than the problem of how you increase your economy’s productivity by building knowledge capital, infrastructure, and other forms of human capital.

4. It is important to keep those straight and distinguished in your mind.

5. Commodity exporting should be viewed as a distinct development strategy from industrialization, and indeed from everything else.

6. Sometime during the plague, Brad DeLong really did turn into a grumpy old man yelling at clouds. It's time that he should own that.

7. People should take another look at the pace of South and Southeast Asian economic development. It is a very different world than it was 25 years ago.

8. Thus if you are basing your view on memories of or on books written based on memories of how things were 25 years ago, you are going to get it wrong. BIGTIME wrong.

9. Only the Federal Reserve can get away with saying “it’s context dependent”. All the rest of us have to put forward Grand Narratives—false as they all are—if we want to actually be useful.

10. Hexapodia

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References:

• Bongaarts, John. 2020. "Trends in fertility and fertility preferences in sub-Saharan Africa: the roles of education and family planning programs." Genus 76: 32. <https://genus.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41118-020-00098-z>

• Kremer, Michael, Jack Willis, & Yang You. 2021. "Converging to Convergence." National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 29484, November 2021. <https://www.nber.org/papers/w29484>

• Oks, David, & Henry Williams. 2022. "The Long, Slow Death of Global Development." American Affairs 6:4 (November). <https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/11/the-long-slow-death-of-global-development/>.

• Patel, Dev, Justin Sandefur, & Arvind Subramanian. 2021. "The new era of unconditional convergence." Journal of Development Economics 152. <https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/deveco/v152y2021ics030438782100064x.html>.

• Perkins, Dwight. 2021. "Understanding political influences on Southeast Asia's development experience." Fulbright Review of Economics and Policy 1, no. 1: 4-20. <https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/FREP-03-2021-0021/full/html>.

• Rodrik, Dani, & Joseph E. Stiglitz. 2024. "A New Growth Strategy for Developing Nations." <https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/research-papers>.

• World Bank. 2023. "South Asia Development Update October 2023: Economic Outlook." <https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/sar/publication/south-asia-development-update>.

+, of course:

• Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0>.

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Key Insights:

1. Finally, at long last, over the next two generations the tide is likely to be flowing strongly toward near-universal global development...

2. The fear was that dehyperglobalization would rob poorer countries of their ability to develop the export comparative advantages to support the manufacturing engineering clusters they need for learning by doing, establishing a good educational system, and converging to global North standards of living...

3. This fear appears to have been very overblown...

4. Optimism about future income growth and globalization is warranted because India has more people in it than Africa: the Asia Circle from Japan to Pakistan and down to Indonesia and up to Mongolia is and always has been half the human race. And South Asia and Southeast Asia are now in gear...

5. As long as dealing with global warming does not absorb too many of the resources that could otherwise be devoted to income growth...

6. This is true even though the great wave of increasing international trade intensity and integration that began in 1945 came to an end in 2008...

7. Even so, since 2008 there has still been increasing global integration in the flow of ideas and the growing interdependence of value chains...

8. A substantial part of the post-2008 reversal of globalization was partially due to China onshoring its supply chains—the pre-2008 situation in which China's manufacturing knowledge was vastly behind its manufacturing intensity was highly unstable...

9. This, however, hinges sufficient state capacity—which is not just the ability to do infrastructure and reorganize your economy, but also have people's stuff not get stolen from them either by local thieves or by government functionaries...

10. Distributional issues are another potential key blockage—the benefits of technological change flow to the global north, or to a small predatory internal élite, or the market economy's distribution goes spontaneously awry...

11. But there is the question of how much distribution matters in a rich world where few are starving—matters for social power, yes, and for whatever happinesses flow from that, but does distribution matter otherwise?

12. Countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America may be stubborn development problems for generations, however...

13. That beside, the basic mission of industrialization to uplift the human world out of poverty is likely to be complete by 2050 if we are lucky, by 2100 if we are not...

14. There is good reason to think that the next generation will be for the world better and more impressive than the last generation. And the last generation was, on a world scale, you know, better and more impressive than was the post-WWII Thirty Glorious Years in the North Atlantic...

15. Future guests, possibly?: Dietz Vollrath, Arvind Subramanian, Charlie Stross...

16. Hexapodia!

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References:

• Fourastié, Jean. 1979. Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975. Paris: Fayard. <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TAVRU4Y>.

• Subramanian, Arvind, Martin Kessler, & Emanuele Properzi. 2023. "Trade Hyperglobalization is Dead. Long Live...?" Peterson Institute for International Economics Working Paper, No. 23-11. <https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/2023-11/wp23-11.pdf.>.

• Stross, Charles. 2005. Accelerando. New York: Ace Books. <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/294259/accelerando-by-charles-stross/>

• Vollrath, Dietrich. 2020. Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. <https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo44520849.html>.

Refer a friend

+, of course:

• Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0>.

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Key Insights:

1. Bing-AI says “Brian Beutler” is pronounced “Bryan Bootler”—that is, rhymes with “lion shooter”, which shows how far political incorrectness has penetrated Silicon Valley…

2. Noah has figured out a solution to his problem of losing the screws to his microphone stand: duct tape…

3. This started with Brad poking Brian on his belief there was a golden age of comity, common purpose, and energy in the left-of-center political sphere back in 2005 to 2008—saying that this misconceived as all mourning for a lost golden age is misconceived…

4. Noah and Brad today welcome Brian to SubStackLand, he having just created a substack and done 16 substantive posts in two weeks, which is a trult amazing rate of production…

5. Brian’s key insight is that since the start of 2019 Democrats have been amazingly, alarmingly, disappointingly timid in not aggressively going after every corner of TrumpWorld for its corruption, and doing so again and again and again…

6. Brian is, in a sense, the quantum-mechanical antiparticle to some combination of Matt Yglesias and David Schor…

7. Brian believes he coined the term “popularism”…

8. Back in 2005-2008 nobody said that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were sabotaging their own party by encouraging Barack Obama to run in the primaries…

9. Judging by results, the current strategy of the Democratic Establishment is doing rather well: a plus three standard-deviation outcome in the 2022 midterms, for example…

10. That midterm result may be because, by our count no fewer than seven of the nine justices had assured senators that Roe v. Wade was “settled law”. And four of those seven then voted to overturn it in Dobbs…

11. Biden really cares about safeguarding democracy, and his actions should all be viewed with that in mind…

12. Hexapodia!

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References:

• Brian Beutler: Off Message SubStack <https://offmessage.net/>

  Off Message

  Because vigorous internal debate isn't a weakness—it's essential.

  By Brian Beutler

  • Scattered Thoughts On Israel, Hamas, Gaza, And Related Matters: A possibly ill-advised post

  • VIDEO: How Trump Normalization Really Works: Why the political media slept on Trump's call for Mark Milley's death and other baffling decisions

  • Charts To A Gun Fight: How the Fighting Democrats of 2007 became the timid, focus-grouped party of today.

  • Trump Reaches A Fateful Crossroads: We should welcome it, but acknowledge the peril

  • Thursday Thread And AMA: Kind of a lot's happened since the last one

  • "The Most Important Issue In Our Politics": A Q&A with John Harwood on his interview with Joe Biden about threats to democracy

  • Five Thoughts On Karmic McCarthy: For now, we schadenfreude

  • VIDEO: How Profit Motive Distorts The News: And why liberals and Democrats should talk about it

  • The Era Of Hostage Taking And Small Ransoms: Republicans made Ukraine aid the price of avoiding a shutdown. Where does it end?

  • The Democrats' Lost September: You guys awake?

  • Breaking Down The GOP Debate: Reaction chats with Matthew Yglesias and Crooked Media's What A Day podcast

  • Wednesday Debate Thread: Let's watch Republicans be weird and scary together!

  • Baggage Check: Life disclosures, so readers can know me, and where I come from, a little better

  • VIDEO: Why The News Struggles To Say Republicans Are Responsible For The Government Shutdown: And why the public is likely to catch on anyhow

  • Biden Should Work The Media Refs On Impeachment: Everyone knows the impeachment is b.s., so he should say that

  • Welcome to Off Message: Refuge from a world gone mad

• Thomas Babington Macaulay: Horatius at the Bridge <https://englishverse.com/poems/horatius>

• Plutarch: Life of Tiberius Gracchus <https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Tiberius_Gracchus*.html>

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+, of course:

• Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>

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Lost Past Golden Ages:

Thomas Babington Macaulay: Horatius at the Bridge: 

‘[Then] Romans in Rome’s quarrel Spared neither land nor gold, 
Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life, In the brave days of old.
Then none was for a party; Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor, And the poor man loved the great:
Then lands were fairly portioned; Then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers In the brave days of old.

Now Roman is to Roman More hateful than a foe,
And the Tribunes beard the high, And the Fathers grind the low.
As we wax hot in faction, In battle we wax cold:
Wherefore men fight not as they fought In the brave days of old…

Plutarch: Life of Tiberius Gracchus: ‘Formerly the senate itself, out of goodwill, conceded many things to the people, and referred many things to them for deliberation; and the magistrates themselves, even when they had no need of the people, summoned them to assemblies, and communicated with them on public affairs, not wishing them to feel that they were excluded from anything or insulted. But after the people had made the authority of the tribunes too great, and through them had tasted arbitrary power, then indeed there was no longer any room for deference or concession on the part of the senate; but they were forced to fight for everything as for a prize...

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In which we discuss the positions of “Brianna”, Matt”, and “Ezra”—who are SubTuring concepts in our minds with whom we have parasocial relationships, and are not real persons named Brianna Wu, Matt Yglesias, and Ezra Klein—on where the boundary is between the decent, realistic, progress left on the one hand, and people who need to get a clue and stop making own-goals on the other.

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Background:

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Key Insights:

1. No Schmittposting— trying to find and join your tribe by shouting online—Schmittian picking-an-enemy as the core of your identity—is no way to go through life, son.

2. Nor is artfully screenshotting in order to make sure your readers do not see the sentence just below the ones you quote.

3. Don’t pick bad and stupid ends to advocate for—anarcho-pastoralism, the elimination of the United States or America, abolishing police, abolishing prisons, degrowth, destroying statues of Ulysses S. Grant, calling for the cancellation of Abraham Lincoln.

4. Do think, always: will this post advance humanity’s collective smartness as an anthology intelligence?

5. Don’t call for throwing public money at nonprofits in urban America.

6. Advocate for a political focus on social issues only when they are ripe—when the pro-freedom and pro-flourishing position is genuinely popular.

7. But the Democratic Party and the left can and should focus on both economic and social issues—and should be smart about doing so.

8. Blue-state politicians should be willing to press the envelope on social issues—witness Gavin Newsom as mayor of San Francisco on gay marriage.

9. Purple-state politicians should stress that this is a free country for free people, which means:

   1. economic opportunity…

   2. social freedom—you should be able to live your life without the government harassing you, and without neighbors and merchants harassing you by refusing service when their job is to serve the public…

   3. collective wealth…

   4. collective concern—global warming may not be so bad for you in the medium-run, but it is a serious medium-run problem for those SOBs in Florida and Louisiana, and for rural communities at the wildfire edge…

10. Red-state politicians need our thoughts and prayers.

11. Policy analysts and legislative tacticians should design and implement policies that are:

    • successes…

    • visible, perceived successes…

    • that build coalitions by the wide of visible distribution of their benefits…

    • but that do not allow individual coalition partners to become veto point owners: seats at the table, yes; dogs in the manger, no…

12. Left-wing think-tanks should not take money from “leftists” who want to use procedural obstacles to block green investments in their backyards.

13. Hexapodia!

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References:

• Preliminary Food for Thought for Þe “Hexapodia” Taping:

  • Brianna Wu: ‘There’s a huge schism… Policy Leftists and Infinite Leftists…

  • Matt Yglesias: The two kinds of progressives: ‘Moralists vs. pragmatists…

  • Ezra Klein: The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism: ‘Cost, not just productivity, is a core problem for the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing industry…

• Brad DeLong: Pass the Baton…

• Noah Smith: Our climate change debates are out of date…

• Noah Smith: Degrowth: We can't let it happen here!…

• Noah Smith: ‘Once you realize that the animating drive of all NIMBYism on both the left and the right is to be able to live in perpetually-appreciating single-family homes with no poor people nearby, everything they say becomes instantly comprehensible and intensely boring.

• Rocket Podcast

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+, of course:

• Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>

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Key Insights:

1. The Chinese Communist Party is very like an aristocracy—or maybe it isn’t…

2. If it is, it will in the long run have the same strong growth-retarding effects on the economy that aristocracies traditionally have…

3. Or maybe it won’t: China today is not Europe in the 1600s…

4. We probably will not be able to get Noah to read Franklin Ford: Robe & Sword: The Regrouping of the French Nobility After Louis XIV <https://archive.org/details/robesword0000unse_g7d2> to dive more deeply into analogies & contrasts…

5. Southeast Asia’s future is very bright because of friendshoring…

6. India’s future is likely to be rather bright too—it looks like a much better economic partner for the rest of the world over the next two generations than does China…

7. You can get pretty far by just massively forcing your society to build lots and lots and lots of capital…

8. Especially if you have an outside country you can point to and say “give me one—or five—of those!”…

9. But quantity of investment has a quality of its own only so far…

10. We think of technology as the hard stuff…

11. But actually the hard stuff is institutions, property rights, government—people actually doing what they said they would do, rather than exerting their social power to welsh on their commitments…

12. We are surprised and amazed at China's technological excellence in electric vehicles, in battery and solar technology, in high-speed rail, and so forth…

13. But those are relatively small slices of what a truly prosperous economy needs…

14. For everything else, we have reason to fear that the logics of soft budget constraints and authoritarian systems are not things China will be able to evade indefinitely…

15. Is that a middle-income trap? It certainly functions like one…

16. Hexapodia!

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References:

• Brad DeLong: DRAFT: What Is Going on wiþ China’s Economy?:

• Daniel W. Drezner: The End of the Rise of China?

• Daniel W. Drezner: The Rising Dangers of a Falling China

• Daniel W. Drezner: Can U.S. Domestic Politics Cope With a Falling China?

• Arpit Gupta: What's Going on with China's Stagnation?

Arpitrage

What's Going on with China's Stagnation?

The Narratives of Chinese Decline Like you, I’ve been curiously reading headlines about the stagnation in Chinese growth, and wondering what’s going on. There’s an ongoing debate between two schools of thought behind why China is now facing growth hurdles, as Adam Tooze…

Read more

3 years ago · 36 likes · Arpit Gupta

• János Kornai, Eric Maskin, & Gérard Roland: Understanding the Soft Budget Constraint <https://www.jstor.org/stable/3217457>

• Adam S. Posen: The End of China’s Economic Miracle <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/end-china-economic-miracle-beijing-washington>

• Kenneth Rogoff: The Debt Supercycle Comes to China <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/country-garden-shows-debt-supercycle-comes-to-china-by-kenneth-rogoff-2023-08>

• Noah Smith: Real estate is China's economic Achilles heel

Noahpinion

Real estate is China's economic Achilles heel

This is the second in a short series of posts about China’s economy. The first post, from last week, was entitled “Where China is beating the world”. I once joked to a friend that if I were a CIA operative and I wanted to slow down China’s economy, I’d try to get everyone in the country to be obsessed with real estat…

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3 years ago · 252 likes · 89 comments · Noah Smith

• Noah Smith: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

Noahpinion

Why is China smashing its tech industry?

Those who pay attention to business news have probably noted an interesting and curious phenomenon over the past few months: China is smashing its internet companies. It started — or at least, most people in the U.S. started noticing it — when the government effectively…

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5 years ago · 231 likes · 184 comments · Noah Smith

• Adam Tooze: Whither China? Part I - Authoritarian impasse?

Chartbook

Chartbook 232: Whither China? Part I - Authoritarian impasse?

Whither China? With the inflation (or should we say price shock) drama in the West largely played out, there is no story more important in the world economy right now than the question of China’s future. The mood on China has shifted spectacularly in the last 18 months. Whereas once the prevailing impression was one of awe, now what prevails is a negati…

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3 years ago · 174 likes · Adam Tooze

• Adam Tooze: Whither China? Part II - Posen v. Pettis or "authoritarian impasse" v. "structural dead-end”

Chartbook

Chartbook 233: Whither China? Part II - Posen v. Pettis or "authoritarian impasse" v. "structural dead-end"

In interpreting China’s current economic difficulties fundamental issues of analytical approach are at stake, which I have started a Chartbook mini-series to address the issue. What might be called the “authoritarian impasse” (on second thoughts I’ve amended the…

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3 years ago · 127 likes · 2 comments · Adam Tooze

• Adam Tooze: Whither China? Part III: Policy hubris and the end of infallibility

Chartbook

Chartbook 234: Whither China? Part III: Policy hubris and the end of infallibility

China’s economy is in trouble because its authoritarian demons are catching up with it and paralyzing the private sector. China’s economy is in trouble because its growth model exhausted itself and entrenched power structures make it hard to shift gear…

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3 years ago · 158 likes · 38 comments · Adam Tooze

• Lingling Wei & Stella Yifan Xie: China’s 40-Year Boom Is Over. What Comes Next? <https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-economy-debt-slowdown-recession-622a3be4>

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+, of course:

• Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>

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Key Insights:

1. Critics: Cato-style libertarians, including AEI’s Michael Strain. The last die-hard classic Milton Friedman-style economic libertarians—and starting in 1975, Milton Friedman would say, every three years, that the Swedish social democratic model was going to collapse in the next three years.

2. Critics: Progressives—Biden is a tool of the neoliberals, and secretly Robert Rubin in disguise. People like David Dayen. They seem to be going through the motions—half-heartedly making their arguments to try to shift the Overton Window, but knowing deep down that Biden is about as good as they are going to get

3. Critics: Ezra Klein and the other supply-side progressives, worried that Bidenomics in danger of supporting too much procedural obstacles through “community engagement” and “consensus building”, and will wind up pissing its money away without boosting America’s productive capacity.

4. Critics: The Economist magazine and some of the people at the Financial Times, writing about how the Biden administration’s policies are “mismanaging the China relationship” and raising “troubling questions”—that decoupling will never work, that Chinese manufactured products are too good and too cheap to pass up; that you can’t correct for for externalities; & c.

5. Critics: Macro policy was unwise, inflationary, and pissed away on income support resources that ought to have been used to boost industrial development. But Biden may skate through because he was undeservedly lucky.

6. The real critique: Implementation—the U.S. government does not have the state capacity to pick or subsidize “winners” in the sense of companies whose activities have large positive externalities.

7. To deal with (6), supporters of Bidenomics need to (a) figure out what the limits of U.S. state capacity are, and (b) shape CHIPS and IRA spending to stay within them; meanwhile, critics need to (c) come up with evidence of overreach on attempts to use state capacity to do things.

8. What is valid in the criticisms of Bidenomics is part of a more general critique—that we have a society in which there are limited sources of social power, namely, primarily money, secondarily a somewhat threadbare rule of law, tertiarily a somewhat shredded state administrative staff. We need other sources of social power—like unions, civic organizations, and so forth that aren’t just politicians and NGOs that use direct-to-donor advertising to terrorize and guilt-trip their funders, and that take government money and use it to do nothing constructive at all.

9. Friendshoring rather than onshoring.

10. Japan is potentially an enormous productive asset for the U.S. to draw on.

11. And, of course: Hexapodia!

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References:

• Libby Cantrill & al.: CHIPS & Science Act ‘The Closest We’ve Had to Industrial Policy’ in Decades…

• Economist: The lessons from America’s astonishing economic record: ‘The more that Americans think their economy is a problem in need of fixing, the more likely their politicians are to mess up…. Subsidies… risk dulling market incentives to innovate… [and] will also entrench wasteful and distorting lobbying <https://www.economist.com/business/2023/04/10/americas-800bn-climate-splurge-is-feeding-a-new-lobbying-ecosystem>…

• Economist: The world is in the grip of a manufacturing delusion: ‘How to waste trillions of dollars…. Governments… view… factories as a cure for the ills of the age—including climate change, the loss of middle-class jobs, geopolitical strife and weak economic growth—with an enthusiasm and munificence surpassing anything seen in decades…

• Henry Farrell: Industrial policy and the new knowledge problem: ‘Modern industrial policy… [requires] investment and innovation decisions [that] involve tradeoffs that market actors are poorly equipped to resolve…. [Yet] we lack the kinds of expertise that we need…. This lack of knowledge is in large part a perverse by-product of the success of Chicago economists’ rhetoric…. Elite US policy schools… have by and large converged on a framework derived from a watered down version of neoclassical economics…. New skills, including but not limited to network science, material science and engineering, and use of machine learning would be one useful contribution towards solving the new knowledge problem…

• Rana Foroohar: New rules for business in a post-neoliberal world: ‘“Reimagining the Economy”… by economists Dani Rodrik and Gordon Hanson…. The Roosevelt Institute… progressive politicos (many from within the administration) gathered to discuss the details of America’s industrial policy… the opposite of trickle-down…

• Andy Haldane: The global industrial arms race is just what we need: ‘Manufacturing is undergoing a revival around the world…. An arms race to invest in decarbonising technologies is in fact exactly what the world needs to tackle two global externalities—the climate crisis and the investment drought…

• Greg Ip: This Part of Bidenomics Needs More Economics: Massive sums are being spent on industrial policy with little guidance from economic theory or research…

• Réka Juhász & al.: The Who, What, When, and How of Industrial Policy: A Text-Based Approach: ‘We create an automated classification algorithm and categorize policies from a global database…

• Ezra Klein & Robinson Meyer: Biden’s Anti-Global Warming Industrial Policy After One Year…

• Anne O. Krueger: Why Is America Undercutting Japan?: ‘United States… wasteful, inefficient industrial policies…. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the CHIPS and Science Act… directly threaten the Japanese economy (and many other US “friends”)…

• Paul Krugman: ‘I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there's pushback against the observation of a Biden manufacturing boom…. The usual suspects claimed that a green energy transition would require huge economic sacrifice. Seeing this much investment in response to subsidies that are still only a fraction of 1% of GDP suggests otherwise…

• Nathaniel Lane & Rék Juhász: Economics Must Catch Up on Industrial Policy: ‘Industrial policy… is back in a big way…. Governments are trying to improve the performance of key business sectors. Can they manage to do so without subverting competition and subsidizing special interests?…

• Dani Rodrik: An Industrial Policy for Good Jobs: ‘A modern approach to industrial policy must… target “good-jobs externalities,” in addition to the traditional learning, technological, and national security considerations…

• Noah Smith: ‘David Dayen and Marshall Steinbaum completely misrepresented Ezra Klein's "supply-side liberal" position. This is not good faith debate at all…

• Noah Smith: ‘Oh, and notice that this framing [from David Dayen]—“The claim made here is that the dumb U.S. workforce fell behind, and now TSMC has to make up for it with Taiwanese workers…”—treats job skills as a test of inborn IQ, rather than something that has to be learned and taught. Wild…

• Noah Smith: ‘Neoliberalism: a thread…. Markets as the fundamental generators of prosperity, and government as the way to distribute that prosperity more equitably…. Government can't shoulder the entire burden…. We need additional, quasi-independent institutions, like unions…. Industrial policy is underrated, both at the national and the local level. Neoliberalism under-emphasizes science policy, for example. I want a Big Push for science-driven growth…. Can the government "pick winners"? Yes. The government *must* pick winners. Green energy and other zero-carbon technologies being chief among the things we must pick…

• Michael Spence: In Defense of Industrial Policy: ‘The real question is not whether industrial policy is worth pursuing, but how to do it well…

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• Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>

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Key Insights:

1. Brad has a new microphone!

2. Noah has jet lag: he is just back from Japan.

3. Brad has jet lag: he is just back from Australia.

4. Perhaps inflation’s ebbing has not yet made its way into the minds of people when they answer pollsters.

5. We reject the hypothesis that it is because of lagging real incomes.

6. More difficult mortgage borrowing and positive interest payments on car loans are a thing, but really unlikely to be a big thing.

7. It seems likely that 2024 will be, if not “morning in America” from a consumer confidence in America, a crepuscular pre-dawn lightening in America.

8. Noah's theory springing out of Rick Perlstein's take on the 1970s—that we are replaying it:

   1. Even in the 1970s, it was not inflation but “social upheaval”

   2. Half “Blacks and women are forgetting their place”

   3. Half “things are very insecure and unsafe”.

   4. The 1970s saw right-wing revolts

   5. The 1970s saw left-wing disillusionment

   6. And then along came inflation!

   7. Is this cycle repeating itself?

9. Our guess is that “vibecession” has peaked—but we worry that Kyla Scanlon may be right in thinking it has deeper roots. This is a much more unequal society for white guys than we had in the 1970s.

10. Brad DeLong trusts center-left economists, and they say: (4), (5), (6), and (7).

11. Noah Smith summarizes: Normie Libs keep winning…

12. Noah Smith summarizes: Normie Libs keep winning because they mark their beliefs to market and trust empirical data…

13. Hexapodia!

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References:

• Barry Eichengreen: The US Economy Is Up, so Why Is Biden Down? <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/biden-popularity-lagging-strong-us-economy-by-barry-eichengreen-2023-08>: ‘The outcome of the US presidential election next year, like most before it, will almost certainly turn on domestic economic conditions, or, more precisely, on perceptions of economic conditions. And recent polling suggests that the disconnect between perception and reality may be President Joe Biden’s biggest problem…. Now that personal consumption expenditure inflation is back at roughly 3%, down by nearly two-thirds from its peak, will Biden get more credit for his economic achievements? The answer will turn, first, on whether there is widespread public recognition that inflation has receded. Any such realization will not be immediate…. This slowness of beliefs to adapt to actual economic conditions is likely to be even more pronounced in an era of fake news…

• Darren Grant: When it comes to the economy, everything’s great and no one’s happy <https://www.vox.com/money/2023/8/10/23824742/real-wages-economy-inflation-no-money>: ‘Why a supposedly good economy is making so many people miserable…. Pollsters regularly ask Americans how they think the economy is doing, and whether it is getting better or worse. Both measures have drifted downward since late 2020 and cratered this past year. Everything’s amazing, almost—and nobody’s happy. This is new. Public opinion had historically followed the business cycle, declining in recessions and improving in expansions like the one we’re experiencing now. For observers of the economy, this divergence was akin to being lost in the woods. They trotted out all sorts of explanations for our unexpected pessimism…. What’s going on isn’t vibes…. People’s pay hasn’t been keeping pace with inflation…

• Mike Konczal: ‘It’s tough to judge noise <https://twitter.com/mtkonczal/status/1689625642046771200> from signal in monthly analysis…. A way to get around monthly myopia: look at longer periods and past used cars and shelter prices. How does 3/6-month ‘supercore’ measure look? That’s what the Fed is doing, and it looks fantastic. We’ve seen dips since 2021, but not like this. 3-month lower than prepandemic!…

• Paul Krugman: ‘Lots of number-crunching out there <https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1689638373403803648>, but this was another very good inflation report. The debate over whether disinflation requires a large bulge in unemployment is essentially over. No, it doesn’t. But there’s still a debate about how we did this, which matters. One story is that disinflation reflects economic normalization—recombobulation after the disruptions of the pandemic. The other is that we’ve been sliding down a highly nonlinear Phillips curve, which is nearly vertical in a tight labor market. Why this matters: the economy is looking very strong. Atlanta GDPnow at 4.1%! If the Phillips curve is very steep, this could mean reaccelerating inflation. If we’re mostly seeing an end to pandemic disruptions, that risk is lower. Not the risks we thought we’d be facing!…

• Project Syndicate: The Long Life of Inflation <https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/the-long-life-of-inflation>: ‘Michael R. Strain… [says] “underlying inflation is still double the Fed’s target” and “financial conditions aren’t tightening as much as people assume.”… [The Fed] should continue to raise rates until “there is clear evidence that core inflation is on a path to its 2% target,” even if that makes recession more likely. Mario I. Blejer… and Piroska Nagy Mohácsi… also see serious risks… “distorted incentives and massive inherited imbalances”—fueled partly by populist governance and central-bank interventionism—“any celebration of progress in combating inflation must be cautious indeed.”… Jeffrey Frankel… [says] “inflation need not reach 2% immediately.” By “stabilizing inflation at 3–4%, with 2% as a longer-term goal,” the Fed can avoid “the social costs of a serious contraction.”… “There is no way, under any theory or precedent, that rate hikes beginning in January 2022 could have knocked back inflation by July of the same year,” argues James K. Galbraith…. Current macroeconomic conditions warrant the opposite response: not just “cutting interest rates,” but also “strengthening fiscal support for household incomes and well-paying jobs”…

• Kyla Scanlon: Why Do People Think the Economy is Bad?: ‘ 'Genuine answer to a genuine question.... It's all convoluted and loud... and therefore, overwhelming, which creates a sort of mental-checking-out.... I don't want to be all frothy mouth "mainstream media bad" but... there is some stuff to say about coverage.... Lack of safety... stems from general fears over the future that haunt pretty much every generation. The plans are eroding.... Uncertainty around mortgage rates. It's the building blocks of inequality, lack of ownership either of land or a home, lack of community, etc etc.... Soft and hard data has diverged wildly...

kyla’s Newsletter

Why Do People Think the Economy is Bad?

Hello everyone! Again, I offer you an apology - I missed last weeks newsletter because I was finalizing the book (!!!!) It is officially in transmittal, off to the next phase of its journey before it comes back to me so I can whack it down approximately 20,000 words…

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Key Insights:

1. Brad’s microphone is dying, and a new one is on order.

2. However, 75% of the talking on this episode is Noah: he came loaded for bear.

3. Although Noah has not yet read Acemoglu & Johnson’s Power & Progress, he nevertheless has OPINIONS!

4. Friedrich von Hayek was right when he pointed out that we could not know the shape of future technologies

5. Particularly, we cannot know where, as new technologies develop, they will settle in the balance between tacit-local and formal-generalizable-centralizable knowledge with respect to what is needed to make them actually work.

6. Thus the ex ante error rate in figuring out in advance whether a branch of knowledge is labor-augmenting or labor-replacing is high.

7. Better not to try to channel R&D in labor-augmenting directions: we have powerful, well-known, useful, and reliable tools for improving equity: use them rather than trying to guide future technologies in a labor-augmenting equality-promoting direction.

8. Noah will read Power & Progress before mid-August.

9. Brad will try to come up with examples of technologies other than the power loom that we wish had been adopted more slowly.

10. Hexapodia!

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References:

• Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson: Power & Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology & Prosperity <https://www.amazon.com//dp/B0BD4DV59F>

• Daron Acemoglu & Pascual Restrepo: “The Race Between Machine & Man: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares & Employment” <https://www.nber.org/papers/w22252>

• Daisuke Adachi, Daiji Kawaguchi, & Yukiko Saito: Robots and Employment: Evidence from Japan, 1978-2017 <https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/etidpaper/20051.htm>

• Jay Dixon, Bryan Hong, & Lynn Wu: The Robot Revolution: Managerial and Employment Consequences for Firms

• Karen Eggleston, Yong Suk Lee, & Toshiaki Iizuka: Robots and Labor in the Service Sector: Evidence from Nursing Homes

• Katja Mann & Lukas Püttmann: Benign Effects of Automation: New Evidence from Patent Texts <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2959584>

• Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens: The zombie robot argument lurches on: There is no evidence that automation leads to joblessness or inequality

  <https://www.epi.org/publication/the-zombie-robot-argument-lurches-on-there-is-no-evidence-that-automation-leads-to-joblessness-or-inequality/>

• Arjun Ramani & Zhengdong Wang: “Why transformative artificial intelligence is really, really hard to achieve” <https://thegradient.pub/why-transformative-artificial-intelligence-is-really-really-hard-to-achieve/>

• Noah Smith: American workers need lots and lots of robots: With the power of automation, our workers can win. Without it, they're in trouble

• Melline Somers, Angelos Theodorakopoulos, & Kerstin Hötte: The fear of technology-driven unemployment and its empirical base <https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/fear-technology-driven-unemployment-and-its-empirical-base>

• Melline Somers, Angelos Theodorakopoulos, & Kerstin Hötte: Technology and jobs: A systematic literature review <https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/technology-and-jobs-a-systematic-literature-review/>

+, of course:

• Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>

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Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

Key Insights:

1. Rome did fall. It did not merely “transform”.

2. Across Eurasia, from 150 to 800 or so there was a pronounced “Late-Antiquity Pause” in terms of technological progress and even the maintenance of large-scale social organization.

3. There was a proper “Dark Age” only in Britain, Germany, the Low Countries, and France—with Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia being edge cases.

4. There was no Dark Age at all in what had been the Roman East—what became what we call the Byzantine Empire and what called itself the βασιλεία Ῥωμαίων—Basileia Rhōmaiōn—but the Byzantine Empire was definitely caught up in the “Late-Antiquity Pause”.

5. The Roman Empire starts to decline in the 165-180 reign of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Population, levels of production, trade, construction, the sophistication of the division of labor, political order, the ability of the army to protect the people from barbarian and Persian raids and armies—all of these begin a pronounced downward trend.

6. After 450 there was no real thing called the Roman Empire in what had been its western provinces—no Roman tax-collecting bureaucracy, no administrative bureaucracy to try to make decrees of Roman governors facts on the ground at other than sword’s point, no army large enough to keep any barbarian tribe from going wherever it wanted whenever it wanted.

7. After 476, there was nobody even claiming to be Roman Emperor in Italy—not even in the swamp-protected Adriatic coastal fortress of Ravenna, to which Emperor Honorius had fled from the Visigoths in 402.

8. The city of Rome itself was never a capital after 476, and was only garrisoned by Byzantine soldiers from 536 to 774.

9. After the Fall of Rome, in what had been the western provinces of the Roman Empire trade, the division of labor, urbanization, production of conveniences and luxuries, population, and total production were at a much lower level indeed—it truly was a “Dark Age”.

10. But thighbones tell us that the adults who lived in the Dark Age were taller and better-fed than their predecessors under the Roman Empire.

11. Perhaps this was because the end of the Roman Empire had seen the end of a cruel and oppressive aristocracy, and was a liberation of the people—there were many fewer slaves, and many many fewer plantation slaves worked to near-death.

12. But it is more likely that life became nastier and brutish and more dangerous, but that depopulation did increase farm and pasture size and so produce better nutrition even though the collapse of the Roman Empire’s economic network meant lower overall average living standards—the average farmholder was distressed enough by the collapse of the Pax Romana that he was willing to give up his and his family’s free status and become a bound serf of the local landlord,

13. Brad believes that Gregory of Tours was much worse as a prose stylist than Cicero or Tacitus—or great-great uncle Ernest, for that matter. Noah is neutral.

14. King Roger the Scylding at his hall of Heorot in the early 500s had no books, and was really happy whenever a bard would come around.

15. “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” is perhaps the best sentence of English prose ever written.

16. People should not overclaim with respect to the depth and spread of the post-Western Roman “Dark Age”.

17. People should not pretend that the Roman Empire in the west did not fall, and that there was no “Dark Age”.

18. Non-economic historians need to do the reading—to consider what we know and can learn about population levels, and about the productivity levels, trade patterns, and commodity types that were the fabric of the lives of the people who actually lived. People count, so you need to count people.

19. Economic progress is real progress.

20. Literacy is a good thing, not a neutral thing.

21. People who claim that valuing literacy is “frankly, kind of racist” should delete their accounts and go away.

22. Hexapodia!!

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References:

1. Erich Auerbach: Mimesis

2. Cicero: In Catalinam I

3. Brad DeLong: Þe Late-Antiquity Pause, & þe “Bright Ages!”

4. Brad DeLong: Yes. Rome Did Fall

5. Matthew Gabriele & David M. Perry: You Gotta Do the Reading, Man

6. Gregory of Tours: History of the Franks

7. Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms

8. Willem Jongman: Gibbon Was Right

9. Willem Jongman: The new economic history of the Roman Empire

10. Willem Jongman & al..: Health and wealth in the Roman Empire

11. Noah Smith: Was there such a thing as a “Dark Age” in Europe?

12. Noah Smith: Why didn’t they write anything down?

13. Ronald Syme: Tacitus

14. Tacitus: Annals of Imperial Rome

+, of course:

• Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>

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Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

Key Insights:

1. The global trade network is immensely valuable…

2. Friendshoring is not deglobalization, but raher shift-globlization…

3. Brad was stupid in 2005 in thinking “passing the baton of hegemony” constructively and progressively was a possibility…

4. Countries have no gratitude, and only remember what is convenient…

5. William James sought for “the moral equivalent of war” to mobilize civilizational energies for good and progress; and a Cold War certainly counts…

6. As Zhou Enlai said on similar issues: “it is too soon to tell”…

7. We both hope that America and China will soon be friends again—but the balloon freakout makes us pessimistic…

8. Hexapodia!!

Leave a comment

References:

• Sophia Ankel: China flew spy balloons over the US while Trump was president, but nobody realized until after he left office, reports say…

• Steve Clemons: 🟡 The red balloon…

• Damon Linker: America the Unserious…

• Noah Smith: China's industrial policy has mostly been a flop…

• Noah Smith: Three books about the technology wars…

• Noah Smith: Friend-shoring vs. "Buy American"…

• Noah Smith: You are now living through Cold War 2…

+, of course:

• Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>

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Key Insights:

1. Yes, it is possible to talk about everything in an hour…

2. We are not very far apart on what the Fed is doing and should be doing—there is only a 100 basis-point disagreement…

3. Miles would be 100% right about the proper stance of monetary policy if he were in control of the Fed…

4. Miles is not in control of the Fed…

5. Thus Brad thinks that asymmetric risks strongly militate for pausing for six months, and then moving rapidly…

6. Smart people need to think much more about how to increase love…

7. Remember Robot Tarktil!

8. Noah Smith’s mother is a good friend of “Murderbot” author Martha Wells…

9. Hexapodia!!

Leave a comment

References:

• Robert Barsky, Christopher House, & Miles Kimball: Sticky-Price Models and Durable Goods <https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.97.3.984>

• Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson: The Narrow Corridor <https://archive.org/details/TheNarrowCorridor/mode/1up>

• Mancur Olson: The Rise & Decline of Nations <https://archive.org/details/risedeclineofnat00olso/page/209/mode/2up>

• Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan <https://archive.org/details/leviathan00hobb_1>

• John Locke: Second Treatise of Government <https://archive.org/details/criticaleditionw0000unse>

• Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Backward>

• Robin Hanson: The Age of Em <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Em>

• Ruchir Agarwal & Miles Kimball: The Future of Inflation”: in Finance & Development <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2022/4/7/the-future-of-inflationruchir-agarwal-and-miles-kimball>; IMF Podcasts <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2022/4/14/imf-podcast-ruchir-agarwal-and-miles-kimball-on-negative-interest-rates-and-inflation>

• Miles Kimball: Bibliographic Post on Negative Interest Rate Policy: "How and Why to Eliminate the Zero Lower Bound: A Reader’s Guide” <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/emoney>

• Miles Kimball: How a Toolkit Lacking a Full Strength Negative Interest Rate Option Led to the Current Inflationary Surge <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2022/9/5/how-a-toolkit-lacking-a-full-strength-negative-interest-rate-option-led-to-the-current-inflationary-surge>;

• Miles Kimball: How Having Negative Interest Rate Policy in Its Toolkit Would Make the Fed Braver in Confronting Inflation with Needed Rate Hikes—A Tweetstorm” <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2022/12/28/how-having-negative-interest-rate-policy-in-its-toolkit-would-make-the-fed-braver-in-confronting-inflation-with-needed-rate-hikesa-tweetstorm>

• Miles Kimball: Brad DeLong Confirms that Not Having Negative Interest Rate Policy in the Monetary Policy Toolkit Makes People Afraid of Vigorous Rate Hikes to Control Inflation” <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2022/10/1/brad-delong-confirms-that-not-having-negative-interest-rate-policy-in-the-monetary-policy-toolkit-makes-people-afraid-of-vigorous-rate-hikes-to-control-inflation>;

• Miles Kimball: Serious silliness:

• Miles Kimball: On the Fed’s 3/4% hikes:

• Miles Kimball: ”Next Generation Monetary Policy” <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2017/2/1/next-generation-monetary-policy>

• Miles Kimball: Tweetstorm of Favorite Passages from Noah Smith's Review of Brad DeLong's book Slouching Towards Utopia <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2022/12/12/miless-tweetstorm-of-favorite-passages-from-noah-smiths-review-of-brad-delongs-book-slouching-towards-utopia>

• Miles Kimball: On the Age of Em <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2019/8/18/on-being-a-copy-of-someones-mind> <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2019/9/29/will-your-uploaded-mind-still-be-youmichael-graziano> <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2020/7/5/space-travel-and-uploaded-humans> <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2020/8/2/consensual-non-solipsistic-experience-machines> <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2020/9/13/embodiment>

• Miles Kimball: On Consciousness <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/94309255267/the-mystery-of-consciousness> <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2019/8/4/on-the-effability-of-the-ineffable> <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2019/12/22/christof-koch-will-machines-ever-become-conscious> <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/39212472423/cyborgian-immortality> <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2020/2/2/frank-wilczek-are-we-living-in-a-simulated-world> <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2019/10/27/the-virtuality-reality-theory-of-dualism>

• Miles Kimball: The Decline of Drudgery and the Paradox of Hard Work <https://www.nber.org/papers/w29041>

• Miles Kimball: The Potential of a National Well-Being Index <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2021/12/16/podcast-miles-kimball-on-the-potential-of-a-national-well-being-index> <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/47017089094/quartz-8-judging-the-nations-wealth-and> <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2017/7/10/why-gdp-can-grow-forever>

• Miles Kimball: My Experiences with Gary Becker <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/84824118992/my-experiences-with-gary-becker> <https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/the-unhappy-quest-for-a-happiness-index/>

• Miles Kimball: Benjamin Franklin's Strategy to Make the US a Superpower Worked Once, Why Not Try It Again? <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/60999482427/quartz-28-benjamin-franklins-strategy-to-make>

• Miles Kimball: Life Coaching <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2020/9/10/how-economists-can-enhance-their-scientific-creativity-impact-and-engagement> <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2020/10/19/testimonials-for-positive-intelligence-1>

• Miles Kimball: Odious Wealth <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/93469513195/quartz-50-odious-wealth-the-outrage-is-not-so>

• Miles Kimball: Oren Cass on the Value of Work <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2018/12/6/oren-cass-on-the-value-of-work-2>

• Miles Kimball: Janet Yellen is Hardly a Dove—She Knows the US Economy Needs Some Unemployment <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/63725670856/janet-yellen-is-hardly-a-dove-she-knows-the-us>

• Miles Kimball: How and Why to Expand the Nonprofit Sector: A Reader’s Guide <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/133246182760/how-and-why-to-expand-the-nonprofit-sector-as-a>

• Miles Kimball: On John Locke's Second Treatise <https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2019/10/20/miles-kimball-on-john-lockes-second-treatise>

+, of course:

• Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>

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