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This BradBot stuff is wickedly fascinating to me.

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It is, as is obvious, fascinating to me as well. The question is whether this is another siren song. I worry that it is: that we are overly attracted to conversation even though no real information is being transmitted.

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You're creating a version of yourself, giving it your written knowledge as its scaffolding. The implications of your little experiment are boggling. A personal assistant to answer your emails. A TA for your classes. A ancestral totem for your great, great, great, great grandchildren.

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The real problem with the New Deal regime (actually the Great Society regime; the earlier version of the New Deal might have been sustainable) was that the demands on government resources ran ahead of government revenue, leading to the Great Inflation of the 1970s. Subsequent policy, technology, and globalization suppressed the Great Inflation in most areas of the economy, but it continued apace in the areas of housing , health care, child care, and tuition; this is when one income no longer became “enough.”

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Not sure I buy this—the debt/GDP ratio was stable or declining throughout the New Deal Order. Big deficits and rising Debt/GDP ratios are a feature of the Neoliberal Order.,

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After 1965 it was stable? I don’t remember it that way. About 1979, though, the “right” shifted to a position that deficits were fine as long as debt/GDP ratio was stable, and the old deficit hawks came to be called RINOs.

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Also much of the inflation came from the Vietnam War, which wasn't really part of the Great Society.

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"the point is for it to create good jobs at good wages in a key general-purpose technology industry"

Wouldn't loosening "environmental" rules (or rather insisting that the rules pass a C-B analysis) contribute to that objective.

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