Colonial origins, causal claims, the baggage left behind in the overhead bin via the absence of a structural model, settler-colonist mortality, modern pro-prosperity “institutions”, and structural...
1. On IV skepticism: I think the right stance is not “never trust IV” but “never trust IV without a clearly specified first-stage and a story about why the exclusion restriction is even remotely plausible—most papers, alas, punt on both.**
2. On weak instruments: One of the big lessons I took from John Bound, back when we were both younger and thinner, is that the Cauchy distribution is the devil; if your first stage is weak, your second stage is mostly drawing noise from its fat tails and then the file drawer turns that noise into fake “findings.”
3. On “all data is crap”: Yes, economic data are noisy, mismeasured, and partial—but the right response is to use that as a reason to embed estimates in a structural and historical narrative, not to throw up our hands and say “if the slope is negative, it must be demand.”
4. On inequality graphs (top 5% vs bottom 20%): That picture of the top ratcheting up while the bottom resets in each downturn is, I think, a very good visual for the political economy of the past forty years: macro volatility is socialized downward while gains in good times are privatized upward.
5. On teaching texts and rediscovering old influences: One of the quiet tragedies of our discipline is how many genuinely illuminating heterodox or quasi-heterodox texts never made it into the canonical graduate curriculum; when a reader rediscovers one and feels seen, that is a small victory against the collective amnesia of the profession.
6. On Hicks, Marshall, and doubts about formalism: The throughline from Mill to Marshall to Keynes to Knight to Viner is precisely a deep unease with pushing highly stylized, equilibrium-saturated models far beyond their domain of applicability; the postwar profession, intoxicated by the elegance of formal proof, mostly decided to forget that unease.
7. On the Fermi paradox and “Dissolving” it: That paper is good precisely because it reminds us that parameter uncertainty—orders of magnitude of it—dominates any back-of-the-envelope Drake-equation calculation; we do not so much “solve” the paradox as recognize that our ignorance is wide enough that no paradox should surprise us.
8. On temperature and simulated annealing as a metaphor: There is a nice analogy here: a bit of randomness—of willingness to walk downhill—helps you avoid bad local optima, in search and in human conversation both; but for air-traffic control and contract law, you really do want the temperature set near absolute zero.
9. On commenters, Substack, and the digital commons: One of the reasons I keep typing into this box is that the comments routinely make the posts better; the hope is that, together, we are building a small corner of the digital public sphere that is more about understanding than about engagement metrics.
You have to recognize what the LLM was trained on to recognize biases of the time that generated the text.
For example, if you searched the card catalog of pictures in a Southern historical library, and asked to to show you a picture of a "farmer" you would get a picture of a white farmer. You have to search the term "Negro Farmer" to see a black farmer. (Learned this at a Digital Public Library convention.
What I like to do is ask ChatGpt to rewrite a poem in the style of Elizabethan English...so the poem "Mary had a little lamb" comes out as "Mary begot a lamb..." Two meanings of the word "had" Also asked it to rewrite in the style of Ernest Hemingway, with the result: "Mary had a lamb. It was white. It followed her. Even to school."
I was quite prepared to express my agreement with your views about structural models. But then I reflected that America is the world's most prosperous large country and its governing institutions are currently riding the hot rails to hell. Now I am not so confident.
I have never trusted papers using Instrumental Variables unless the instrumenting equation (your overhead compartment) is presented clearly and discussed properly.
Yes indeed. I was lucky enough to have been a short-time roommate of John Bound in my younger days, the Master Knower of the statistical pitfalls of "weak instrument" and downstream "file drawer" problems. The Cauchy Distribution cannot be reasoned with, negotiated with, or banished by incantation.
> **John Quiggin**: I have never trusted papers using Instrumental Variables unless the instrumenting equation (your overhead compartment) is presented clearly and discussed properly.
======
======
**DELONG’S GRASPING REALITY: Trying to make my readers—and myself—smarter. I think I am a go-to source to understand things economic in the past and in the present. Too online since 1995. Subscribe! <https://graspingreality.substack.com/subscribe>. Currently featuring**:
Another Aussie economist told me this in grad school (I'm paraphrasing). "All econ data is basically crap, so your instrument will be too. If you're estimating a demand curve, and it slopes downward, it's a demand curve."
Your friend was probably a science fiction reader. This is known in that realm as Sturgeon's revelation, "90% of science fiction is crap" squeegee the audience recoiled in horror he added, "90% of everything is crap".
I subscribe because I can afford it. I subscribe to lots of different pundits, magazines, newspapers, etc. If I were to cut down, you would be on the final 5 list.
The one thing I would recommend is that you explore using an LLM as a first draft and then your African Plains edit to provide a "this posting is about x" or maybe "this posting is about the question x." and as informative as possible. Please make this a clear as possible. I have the lifelong problem or personality disorder that I make jokes that are too obscure for people to understand, symptoms of which I see in your writing from time to time.
I don't remember any of my math from college (grad 67) and I suspect the kind of economics you teach and talk didn't exist (or was taught) then. (Neither was plate tectonics.) So you might try stepping back from time to time and adding after some particularly wonkish section, a short DeLong for dummies paragraph. (I was once a programming tech writer back when computers had manuals, and an editor once wrote beside a paragraph in a draft of mine. En inglés, por favor. ) Again, I wouldn't mind is you saw what ChatGPT did with that assignment. And then added your secret sauce. Remember, as Don Barnzini might have said, "After all, we are not grad students."
And if none of these suggestions seem reasonable to you, just keep on keeping on. As I said, "Final 5 of close to 50"
Thanks very much. Yes, I agree that If I am not primarily amusing myself here but rather making a serious play for an audience and intellectual influence, titles need to become informative. Subheadings too. Now what I need to do is to make sure I remember this when I write:
> **Marc Sobel**: I subscribe because I can afford it. I subscribe to lots of different pundits, magazines, newspapers, etc. If I were to cut down, you would be on the final 5 list.
> The one thing I would recommend is that you explore using an LLM as a first draft and then your African Plains edit to provide a "this posting is about x" or maybe "this posting is about the question x." and as informative as possible. Please make this a clear as possible. I have the lifelong problem or personality disorder that I make jokes that are too obscure for people to understand, symptoms of which I see in your writing from time to time.
> I don't remember any of my math from college (grad 67) and I suspect the kind of economics you teach and talk didn't exist (or was taught) then. (Neither was plate tectonics.) So you might try stepping back from time to time and adding after some particularly wonkish section, a short DeLong for dummies paragraph. (I was once a programming tech writer back when computers had manuals, and an editor once wrote beside a paragraph in a draft of mine. En inglés, por favor. ) Again, I wouldn't mind is you saw what ChatGPT did with that assignment. And then added your secret sauce. Remember, as Don Barnzini might have said, "After all, we are not grad students."
> And if none of these suggestions seem reasonable to you, just keep on keeping on. As I said, "Final 5 of close to 50"
======
**DELONG’S GRASPING REALITY: Trying to make my readers—and myself—smarter. I think I am a go-to source to understand things economic in the past and in the present. Too online since 1995. Subscribe! <https://graspingreality.substack.com/subscribe> Currently featuring**:
I often think of humanity as a large pool of water, and what floats on the surface of this pool - scum! Very seldom do we encounter individuals who have risen to the top as being supportive of those less fortunate than themselves. We idolize they very wealthy, but many of those who work to make us all better go unrecognized. The scientists who work to extend human knowledge, the teachers who teach our children, and the social workers who try to help the most unfortunate among us get short shrift in the public eye. Genetics can explain many things, but the qualities that define the best in humans- empathy for others, caring for offspring, and an eternal search for knowledge- don't seem to have a genetic component.
Would sure like to disagree with you, but there is a fair amount of truth there on who we celebrate. Still, as long as those very wealthy are not engaged in extractive businesses, it is better than condemning them all as Kulaks.
On Jojosi knappers and the Gesher Benot Yaʿaqov hominins it's interesting ... 'we are different because of our economic function,' Sounds good but... bees have hives, Pukekoes (NZ swamp hen) have tribes and I often observe them having close relations during feeding to paradise ducks.. so lots of smarts and planned behaviour, even in blowflies.
Welcome to the retired life...in your case "sort of retired". Actually, that's a good way to transition, on a long ramp. I ramped for three years before bailing out of a perfectly good ship at 70. First thing, up your hours in the gym: best investment you can make: your health and fitness. I mean mental too. It's great to sit on a stationary bike and just ponder whatever comes to mind while reflexively cranking. Oh yea, join a gym with windows. When you prefer not thinking, just turn on some music and chill or turn it up and sweat. Introduce yourself to your neighbors if you haven't paid them mind for awhile. Hey, maybe now's the time for that book you've been putting off. At least get an old school diary carry it with you, jot down ideas, take the first steps. And lastly, take a long easy vacation, off-season, not one of those rush-rush things. Maybe rent a house on the beach and go for walks. Bring that diary, make some sketches. Good luck.
Having retired many years ago (early because of a successful startup venture), I heartily endorse this advice. Wish I'd taken its advice from the start.
We should be thankful that Trump's surrendered to Iran. No matter what happens in the next two months, he can't start up the war again. He could have dragged this thing out for months in the vague hope that somehow something would turn up. Had LBJ done something like this when he knew the VN war was lost, some 30K GIs & countless Vietnamese, Cambodians, Lao, etc. wouldn't have died & we'd all be better off. None of this excuses his starting the war in the first place--that was a criminal act--but stopping it is the right thing to do.
The wise guys who know how to map the underlying price detail in CPI to the PCE, which is what matters, as you know,, are currently looking at a sequential core inflation rate of about 3% (ar) in May. This will be updated when PPI prints. For now it looks like the 6th month in a row of baddish to outright bad underlying inflation. The problem with the CPI is that the weights are all wrong, which depresses things especially on the goods side.
Re:Stage Theories After Steampower: Meek, Marx, Hicks, the Info‑Bio Tech-Attention Economy, & much much MOAR…
Thank you so much for the above-referenced stimulating essay. If only my Econ 101 class fifty-some years ago was organized and communicated as you do here. Even though my father had a PhD in Economics from MIT, I could not find a way to make Economics interesting to me when I was an undergraduate. So I went into history instead - East Asian history. Only to discover some years later that there were not enough tenure-track jobs in Chinese History,, so I went to law school....If only I could have met you way back then (late 60s and early 70s). Thank you again for confirming my original interest in a characteristically fresh and invigorating manner. I am eternally grateful.
:-) So what did you then do with your law degree? I asked, because I have a lot of friends and family who have law degrees, and while maybe 40% of them have stayed practicing lawyers, the rest have done all kinds of things...
Another way to look at it is by graphing the inflation adjusted median income of the bottom 20% against that of the top 5%. (Here's my graph based on Census H3 data: https://kaleberg.com/public/ProcessH32024.jpg) Starting in the 1980s and up until a few years ago, the pattern was that the top 5% ratcheted up, rising during booms, usually under Democrats, and stagnating during busts, usually under Republicans. The bottom 20% would earn more during booms, but recessions would cause a complete reset. The most recent COVID recession was an exception in that the income of the bottom 20% fell, but only to 2000 levels. This might have been a result of the stimulus which actually put money in the bottom quintile's pockets.
"But Hegseth is standing in Singapore insisting that the United States is “more than capable” of resuming war with Iran and that “our stockpiles are more than suited for that”."
Please be accurate with your verbs.
But Hegseth is standing in Singapore lying that the United States is “more than capable” of resuming war with Iran and that “our stockpiles are more than suited for that”.
Of course there is the argument, that you're only lying if you know what the facts are.
Thank you. I was unaquainted with this literature. Since my own ideology is radically egalitarian, this is wonderful. In other words, the results confirmed my priors.
So I go to comment on an excellent, new article on the Fermi Paradox, but instead I see comments from mid April on a completely different topic. Is there a bug in the comments section?
A few thoughts:
1. On IV skepticism: I think the right stance is not “never trust IV” but “never trust IV without a clearly specified first-stage and a story about why the exclusion restriction is even remotely plausible—most papers, alas, punt on both.**
2. On weak instruments: One of the big lessons I took from John Bound, back when we were both younger and thinner, is that the Cauchy distribution is the devil; if your first stage is weak, your second stage is mostly drawing noise from its fat tails and then the file drawer turns that noise into fake “findings.”
3. On “all data is crap”: Yes, economic data are noisy, mismeasured, and partial—but the right response is to use that as a reason to embed estimates in a structural and historical narrative, not to throw up our hands and say “if the slope is negative, it must be demand.”
4. On inequality graphs (top 5% vs bottom 20%): That picture of the top ratcheting up while the bottom resets in each downturn is, I think, a very good visual for the political economy of the past forty years: macro volatility is socialized downward while gains in good times are privatized upward.
5. On teaching texts and rediscovering old influences: One of the quiet tragedies of our discipline is how many genuinely illuminating heterodox or quasi-heterodox texts never made it into the canonical graduate curriculum; when a reader rediscovers one and feels seen, that is a small victory against the collective amnesia of the profession.
6. On Hicks, Marshall, and doubts about formalism: The throughline from Mill to Marshall to Keynes to Knight to Viner is precisely a deep unease with pushing highly stylized, equilibrium-saturated models far beyond their domain of applicability; the postwar profession, intoxicated by the elegance of formal proof, mostly decided to forget that unease.
7. On the Fermi paradox and “Dissolving” it: That paper is good precisely because it reminds us that parameter uncertainty—orders of magnitude of it—dominates any back-of-the-envelope Drake-equation calculation; we do not so much “solve” the paradox as recognize that our ignorance is wide enough that no paradox should surprise us.
8. On temperature and simulated annealing as a metaphor: There is a nice analogy here: a bit of randomness—of willingness to walk downhill—helps you avoid bad local optima, in search and in human conversation both; but for air-traffic control and contract law, you really do want the temperature set near absolute zero.
9. On commenters, Substack, and the digital commons: One of the reasons I keep typing into this box is that the comments routinely make the posts better; the hope is that, together, we are building a small corner of the digital public sphere that is more about understanding than about engagement metrics.
You have to recognize what the LLM was trained on to recognize biases of the time that generated the text.
For example, if you searched the card catalog of pictures in a Southern historical library, and asked to to show you a picture of a "farmer" you would get a picture of a white farmer. You have to search the term "Negro Farmer" to see a black farmer. (Learned this at a Digital Public Library convention.
What I like to do is ask ChatGpt to rewrite a poem in the style of Elizabethan English...so the poem "Mary had a little lamb" comes out as "Mary begot a lamb..." Two meanings of the word "had" Also asked it to rewrite in the style of Ernest Hemingway, with the result: "Mary had a lamb. It was white. It followed her. Even to school."
I was quite prepared to express my agreement with your views about structural models. But then I reflected that America is the world's most prosperous large country and its governing institutions are currently riding the hot rails to hell. Now I am not so confident.
I have never trusted papers using Instrumental Variables unless the instrumenting equation (your overhead compartment) is presented clearly and discussed properly.
Yes indeed. I was lucky enough to have been a short-time roommate of John Bound in my younger days, the Master Knower of the statistical pitfalls of "weak instrument" and downstream "file drawer" problems. The Cauchy Distribution cannot be reasoned with, negotiated with, or banished by incantation.
> **John Quiggin**: I have never trusted papers using Instrumental Variables unless the instrumenting equation (your overhead compartment) is presented clearly and discussed properly.
======
======
**DELONG’S GRASPING REALITY: Trying to make my readers—and myself—smarter. I think I am a go-to source to understand things economic in the past and in the present. Too online since 1995. Subscribe! <https://graspingreality.substack.com/subscribe>. Currently featuring**:
* The Fourteen-Lion Parade <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/fourteen-lion-parade>
* Lessons for Debt Control from Clinton's Success in the 1990s <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/lessons-for-debt-control-from-clintons>
* "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan" as Franchise Hinge <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/2025-12-24-star-trek-the-wrath-of>
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/donald-trump-is-too-old-to-be-president>
* Time for a "Land Acknowledgement”! <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/time-for-a-land-acknowledgement>
* The Spearpoint Right Now of Human Technological Engineering <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/the-spearpoint-right-now-of-human>
Another Aussie economist told me this in grad school (I'm paraphrasing). "All econ data is basically crap, so your instrument will be too. If you're estimating a demand curve, and it slopes downward, it's a demand curve."
Your friend was probably a science fiction reader. This is known in that realm as Sturgeon's revelation, "90% of science fiction is crap" squeegee the audience recoiled in horror he added, "90% of everything is crap".
90% of my friends are science fiction readers.
:-)
I subscribe because I can afford it. I subscribe to lots of different pundits, magazines, newspapers, etc. If I were to cut down, you would be on the final 5 list.
The one thing I would recommend is that you explore using an LLM as a first draft and then your African Plains edit to provide a "this posting is about x" or maybe "this posting is about the question x." and as informative as possible. Please make this a clear as possible. I have the lifelong problem or personality disorder that I make jokes that are too obscure for people to understand, symptoms of which I see in your writing from time to time.
I don't remember any of my math from college (grad 67) and I suspect the kind of economics you teach and talk didn't exist (or was taught) then. (Neither was plate tectonics.) So you might try stepping back from time to time and adding after some particularly wonkish section, a short DeLong for dummies paragraph. (I was once a programming tech writer back when computers had manuals, and an editor once wrote beside a paragraph in a draft of mine. En inglés, por favor. ) Again, I wouldn't mind is you saw what ChatGPT did with that assignment. And then added your secret sauce. Remember, as Don Barnzini might have said, "After all, we are not grad students."
And if none of these suggestions seem reasonable to you, just keep on keeping on. As I said, "Final 5 of close to 50"
Thanks very much. Yes, I agree that If I am not primarily amusing myself here but rather making a serious play for an audience and intellectual influence, titles need to become informative. Subheadings too. Now what I need to do is to make sure I remember this when I write:
> **Marc Sobel**: I subscribe because I can afford it. I subscribe to lots of different pundits, magazines, newspapers, etc. If I were to cut down, you would be on the final 5 list.
> The one thing I would recommend is that you explore using an LLM as a first draft and then your African Plains edit to provide a "this posting is about x" or maybe "this posting is about the question x." and as informative as possible. Please make this a clear as possible. I have the lifelong problem or personality disorder that I make jokes that are too obscure for people to understand, symptoms of which I see in your writing from time to time.
> I don't remember any of my math from college (grad 67) and I suspect the kind of economics you teach and talk didn't exist (or was taught) then. (Neither was plate tectonics.) So you might try stepping back from time to time and adding after some particularly wonkish section, a short DeLong for dummies paragraph. (I was once a programming tech writer back when computers had manuals, and an editor once wrote beside a paragraph in a draft of mine. En inglés, por favor. ) Again, I wouldn't mind is you saw what ChatGPT did with that assignment. And then added your secret sauce. Remember, as Don Barnzini might have said, "After all, we are not grad students."
> And if none of these suggestions seem reasonable to you, just keep on keeping on. As I said, "Final 5 of close to 50"
======
**DELONG’S GRASPING REALITY: Trying to make my readers—and myself—smarter. I think I am a go-to source to understand things economic in the past and in the present. Too online since 1995. Subscribe! <https://graspingreality.substack.com/subscribe> Currently featuring**:
* The Fourteen-Lion Parade <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/fourteen-lion-parade>
* Lessons for Debt Control from Clinton's Success in the 1990s <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/lessons-for-debt-control-from-clintons>
* "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan" as Franchise Hinge <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/2025-12-24-star-trek-the-wrath-of>
* Five Lies in Scott Bessent's Attacks on the Fed, & Three Delusions in His Failures to Understand All That NATO Has Done for Us <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/five-lies-in-scott-bessents-attacks>
======
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/contemporary-governance-and-contemporary>
I think this matches my sentiments and suggestions very well.
The burn-up of satellites is threatening our biosphere
Financial Times US
1 Jun 2026
SpaceX’s flotation may be the largest in history and make Musk the world’s first trillion-
aire (“SpaceX’s value will hinge on assumptions as IPO looms”, Lex, May 22).
It may also mark the moment we decided to conduct a large-scale chemical experiment on
the ozone layer, risking rendering the planet uninhabitable in exchange for faster broad-
band speeds.
The company has launched more than 11,000 Starlink satellites. Each lasts roughly five
years before it is deorbited to burn up. That incineration is far from clean; it leaves fine
aluminium oxide particles high in the upper atmosphere.
A 2024 study from the University of Southern California, published in Geophysical
Research Letters, found these particles can linger for up to 30 years before drifting into the
stratosphere, where they catalyse chlorine reactions which destroy the ozone. Because they
are not consumed, a single particle keeps depleting the ozone for decades, threatening to
reverse the recovery enabled by the Montreal Protocol, starting an irreversible trend.
SpaceX is authorised for some 12,000 satellites and has filed for tens of thousands more.
Before this constellation doubles and doubles again, has anyone properly counted the cost
to the biosphere we all depend on? Or is the plan simply that we move to Mars?
Howard Radley
London NW6, UK
I often think of humanity as a large pool of water, and what floats on the surface of this pool - scum! Very seldom do we encounter individuals who have risen to the top as being supportive of those less fortunate than themselves. We idolize they very wealthy, but many of those who work to make us all better go unrecognized. The scientists who work to extend human knowledge, the teachers who teach our children, and the social workers who try to help the most unfortunate among us get short shrift in the public eye. Genetics can explain many things, but the qualities that define the best in humans- empathy for others, caring for offspring, and an eternal search for knowledge- don't seem to have a genetic component.
Would sure like to disagree with you, but there is a fair amount of truth there on who we celebrate. Still, as long as those very wealthy are not engaged in extractive businesses, it is better than condemning them all as Kulaks.
Trump is more extractive than I would like.
On Jojosi knappers and the Gesher Benot Yaʿaqov hominins it's interesting ... 'we are different because of our economic function,' Sounds good but... bees have hives, Pukekoes (NZ swamp hen) have tribes and I often observe them having close relations during feeding to paradise ducks.. so lots of smarts and planned behaviour, even in blowflies.
Welcome to the retired life...in your case "sort of retired". Actually, that's a good way to transition, on a long ramp. I ramped for three years before bailing out of a perfectly good ship at 70. First thing, up your hours in the gym: best investment you can make: your health and fitness. I mean mental too. It's great to sit on a stationary bike and just ponder whatever comes to mind while reflexively cranking. Oh yea, join a gym with windows. When you prefer not thinking, just turn on some music and chill or turn it up and sweat. Introduce yourself to your neighbors if you haven't paid them mind for awhile. Hey, maybe now's the time for that book you've been putting off. At least get an old school diary carry it with you, jot down ideas, take the first steps. And lastly, take a long easy vacation, off-season, not one of those rush-rush things. Maybe rent a house on the beach and go for walks. Bring that diary, make some sketches. Good luck.
Having retired many years ago (early because of a successful startup venture), I heartily endorse this advice. Wish I'd taken its advice from the start.
:-)
We should be thankful that Trump's surrendered to Iran. No matter what happens in the next two months, he can't start up the war again. He could have dragged this thing out for months in the vague hope that somehow something would turn up. Had LBJ done something like this when he knew the VN war was lost, some 30K GIs & countless Vietnamese, Cambodians, Lao, etc. wouldn't have died & we'd all be better off. None of this excuses his starting the war in the first place--that was a criminal act--but stopping it is the right thing to do.
The wise guys who know how to map the underlying price detail in CPI to the PCE, which is what matters, as you know,, are currently looking at a sequential core inflation rate of about 3% (ar) in May. This will be updated when PPI prints. For now it looks like the 6th month in a row of baddish to outright bad underlying inflation. The problem with the CPI is that the weights are all wrong, which depresses things especially on the goods side.
Re:Stage Theories After Steampower: Meek, Marx, Hicks, the Info‑Bio Tech-Attention Economy, & much much MOAR…
Thank you so much for the above-referenced stimulating essay. If only my Econ 101 class fifty-some years ago was organized and communicated as you do here. Even though my father had a PhD in Economics from MIT, I could not find a way to make Economics interesting to me when I was an undergraduate. So I went into history instead - East Asian history. Only to discover some years later that there were not enough tenure-track jobs in Chinese History,, so I went to law school....If only I could have met you way back then (late 60s and early 70s). Thank you again for confirming my original interest in a characteristically fresh and invigorating manner. I am eternally grateful.
Jonathan Eddison - jbeddison@mac.com
:-) So what did you then do with your law degree? I asked, because I have a lot of friends and family who have law degrees, and while maybe 40% of them have stayed practicing lawyers, the rest have done all kinds of things...
I considered law school, but then I came across a charming book "29 Reasons Not To Go To Law School". It was pretty funny but also convincing.
:-)
Another way to look at it is by graphing the inflation adjusted median income of the bottom 20% against that of the top 5%. (Here's my graph based on Census H3 data: https://kaleberg.com/public/ProcessH32024.jpg) Starting in the 1980s and up until a few years ago, the pattern was that the top 5% ratcheted up, rising during booms, usually under Democrats, and stagnating during busts, usually under Republicans. The bottom 20% would earn more during booms, but recessions would cause a complete reset. The most recent COVID recession was an exception in that the income of the bottom 20% fell, but only to 2000 levels. This might have been a result of the stimulus which actually put money in the bottom quintile's pockets.
You and I can probably treat $1000 as a nice enough pile of cash to have around, but for someone in the bottom 20% having that much money all at once could be life changing. It's easy to forget distributional effects, though The Onion got it right with: https://theonion.com/minimum-wage-hike-celebrated-with-name-brand-ketchup-1819569254/
"But Hegseth is standing in Singapore insisting that the United States is “more than capable” of resuming war with Iran and that “our stockpiles are more than suited for that”."
Please be accurate with your verbs.
But Hegseth is standing in Singapore lying that the United States is “more than capable” of resuming war with Iran and that “our stockpiles are more than suited for that”.
Of course there is the argument, that you're only lying if you know what the facts are.
Thank you. I was unaquainted with this literature. Since my own ideology is radically egalitarian, this is wonderful. In other words, the results confirmed my priors.
So I go to comment on an excellent, new article on the Fermi Paradox, but instead I see comments from mid April on a completely different topic. Is there a bug in the comments section?