On My Mind...
…very recently...
Kaushik Basu: All the King’s Games: ‘Do Russians want to oust Putin and restore democracy? If you ask people familiar with Russia, they will most likely say that most of the population still supports him. I have my doubts. Tyrants always appear to have more support than they do until they are gone, because feigning support is a survival strategy...
Dave Lee: The ever-expanding job of preserving the internet’s backpages: ‘A quarter of a century after it began collecting web pages, the Internet Archive is adapting to new challenges…
David Smith: ‘Testing an Apple Watch Ultra in the Scottish Highlands’
Michael Hiltzik: Column: How did America get addicted to a policy that fails everyone but the rich?
Frederik Gieschen: Thinking About the Next Warren Buffett”: ‘Munger: “Young lawyers frequently come to me and say, ‘How can I quit practicing law and become a billionaire instead?’… The next Warren Buffett, whoever they are, will not be afraid to ask the question that is on everyone’s mind. But they will also not be sitting in the audience waiting to be handed enlightenment…
Dan Davies: A non-random walk down Lombard Street: ‘Not all market interventions are bailouts and not all bailouts are bad…. The idea that financial crises can be managed by mitigating the consequences ex post rather than preventing the problem ex ante has a bad reputation, mainly as a result of Alan Greenspan’s use of it as an excuse for not doing more during the 2000s. But it’s not intrinsically unorthodox central banking. The optimal frequency of crises, as Professor Richard Portes once told me, is not zero. A central bank can’t anticipate everything and the perfect regulatory system doesn’t exist. Since central banks have the power to expand their balance sheets without limit, and so the ability to unstick frozen markets, why shouldn’t they use it sometimes? As long as people don’t get into the habit of expecting to be rescued simply from falling markets, this is a valid part of the toolkit…
Joe Nye: What Caused the Ukraine War?: ‘Distinguish between deep, intermediate, and immediate causes…. Putin lit the match… on February 24…. The intermediate cause was a refusal to see Ukraine as a legitimate state…. Putin wants to restore what he calls the “Russian world”…. [But] while NATO’s decision in 2008 may have been misguided, Putin’s change of attitude predated it…. Behind all this were the remote or deep causes that followed the end of the Cold War…
Emily Holland: Permanent Rupture: The European-Russian Energy Relationship Has Ended with Nord Stream…
John Ganz: The Matteotti Crisis: ‘Mussolini’s success was not guaranteed…. The King might have withdrawn his mandate, his parliamentary allies could have fled, the opposition might have adopted a more muscular strategy, or the Fascist ultras may have launched a coup that justified governmental suppression of the Fascists in response. Mussolini took advantage of the disorganization of his opponents and the craven opportunism of his allies. It was the sort of tactical victory he had become expert in, riding out the storms while just managing to keep his coalition together. The killing of Giacomo Matteotti may have been reckless in that it created an unstable situation and threatened his rule, but ultimately it proved to be “the right move:” Mussolini removed an opponent of extraordinary courage and moral authority and created the conditions for consolidating control…
Hermione McKenzie: Review of Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy…
Noah Smith: We still haven't solved the Nuclear Age: ‘Maybe Feynman was right after all. Maybe now that humans have nukes, we’ll inevitably use them (again). We’ve used every other weapon we’ve ever created, multiple times. Maybe war obeys the principle that everything possible is mandatory. I hope this is not true, obviously. But if we’re going to make sure it isn’t true, we need to be more purposeful about finding a solution to the Nuclear Age…
Kos: Ukraine Update: Russians in disarray, as Ukraine presses their advantage: ‘Russia is desperate for trucks and other military gear. You’ve seen the WWII era buggies on their way to the front? This is almost guaranteed a wartime requisition, with the side benefit of panicking observers into thinking Russia might go nuclear…
Matt Yglesias: To save downtowns, we need to embrace windowless bedrooms: ‘I’m not telling city officials anything they don’t already know about the merits of office-to-residential conversions as a means to help urban cores address economic pressures…. But for a major downtown redevelopment project, I don’t think that kind of wink-wink strategy would work…
Chris Anstey: A Decisive Turn: ‘It’s not just corporate anecdotes… suggesting a decisive turn in the world’s manufacturing cycle. Macroeconomic data are starting to align that way as well…
The Onion: No. 22-293 <https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/20221003125252896_35295545_1-22.10.03 - Novak-Parma - Onion Amicus Brief.pdf> In The Supreme Court of the United States :: BRIEF OF THE ONION AS AMICUS CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONER…
Lincoln Michel: Understanding the Reader Without Pandering to the Reader: ‘As writers we should try as much as we can to experience the text as another reader would. As just a text. Only the words on the page in the order they appear on the page…
Massimo Livi-Bacci: A concise history of world population… Halpin: The Healthy Parks Theory of Governance”: ‘Politicians often forget that what really matters to most people is a proper sense of place…
Zach Carter: A Dose of Rational Optimism: ‘And though he does at times take excessive detours into dorky cul-de-sacs—the book does not need quite so many pages on the development of alternating current or the transistor—these indulgences can be skimmed easily enough…
Jacob Soll: How Christianity Influenced the Development of Capitalism in Medieval Europe…
Steve Donoghue: ‘Historical asides are so winningly conversational that they very much help to make the book’s 600 pages surprisingly easy reading… [DeLong] has written the most entertaining End Times narrative since The Late Great Planet Earth…
David Chance: ‘At 600-plus pages… not for the faint-hearted, but there’s little in the way of jargon… the booked is laced with interesting anecdotes, although DeLong does get a bit wordy…
Michael Nielsen: Notes on Effective Altruism: ‘I personally often find many new EAs a little self-righteous and overconfident, and sometimes overly evangelical... ("why are you wasting your time doing that, you should be working on AI safety", said by someone who thinks they know about AI, but does not, and has no ideas of any value about AI safety). This varies from amusing to mildly annoying to infuriating...
Alex: Keynes' General Theory Ch.19: ‘It takes institutions to displace institutions, and it takes alternative sources of legitimacy to displace existing sources of legitimacy.
Noah Smith: A concrete vision of the liberal democratic future…
The Economist: A study of lights at night suggests dictators lie about economic growth: ‘“How much should we trust the dictator’s GDP growth estimates?”, by L.R. Martinez, 2022; Freedom House; World Bank...
Doug Jones: The world at 1000 BCE…
Nicole Barbaro: The Cognitive Gap Between Humans and Everything Else…
Felix Martin: Free Market: The History of an Idea by Jacob Soll: Review…
Martin Farrer: A Ponzi scheme by any other name: the bursting of China property bubble: ‘Nearly a third of all property loans are now classed as bad debts…. S&P said at least 800bn yuan would be needed – or even 10 times that much in the worst-case scenario – to rescue a property market...
Jeff Herf: Reactionary modernism: technology, culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich
Stefan J. Link: Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order
Ilya Somin: ‘Ukraine seems likely to bag thousands of prisoners in Lyman, and another pocket could collapse in Kherson, in the next few weeks, yielding many more. In both cases, Putin refused permission to withdraw…
Matthew C. Klein: The Covid Recovery Looks Different Now: ‘The latest revisions… have closed most of the gap between the… value… produced… and the income… generated…. GDP as of 2022Q2 has been revised up by 1.1%… GDI has been revised down by 1.5%…
Dani Rodrik: An Industrial Policy for Good Jobs: ‘A modern approach to industrial policy must respond to new circumstances. It must target “good-jobs externalities,” in addition to the traditional learning, technological, and national security considerations…. Focus on manufacturing and globally competitive industries has to be broadened to service sectors and smaller and medium-sized firms. And the practice of industrial policy will need to rely… more on collaborative, iterative interaction whereby public agencies supply a portfolio of customized public services in exchange for firms undertaking soft commitments on the quantity and quality of employment…
Sara Trimble & Hannah Eliiot: Stunt Driver Sera Trimble on How She Got Her Start (and Her Porsche 911): ‘In the latest “How’d You Get That Car?” column, Trimble talks with Hannah Elliott about getting into car collecting—and showbiz…
John Authers: The UK Cannot Afford to Look This Ridiculous: ‘The Bank of England may have saved gilts, but scorn and political danger for Truss and Kwarteng still have a long way to run—and could cut their careers short. Ridicule is something politicians need to be very, very scared of...
Radley Balko: Welcome to The Watch: ‘“A masterpiece of reporting . . . If the goal of great journalism is to speak truth to power, Balko’s contribution does just that.”—Judges’ statement, 2022 Deadline Club Awards…
The Economist: What to read to understand central banking: ‘Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market. By Walter Bagehot. White Crane Publishing; 232 pages; $8.99. John Wiley & Sons; £15.99…. A book that analyses in simple language the Bank of England’s role in the British monetary system…. Bernanke refers to Bagehot in at least eight chapters of his memoir and kept the book in his office at the Fed...
The Economist: What to read to understand Donald Trump: ‘Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America. John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck.Princeton University Press; 352 pages; $29.95…. Trump…. Were non-college-educated whites—key to his victory in the battleground states—swayed by economic anxieties or by his racism, Islamophobia and anti-immigrant scapegoating? This book, by three political scientists, argues it was the latter…. Racial attitudes shaped their perception of who deserved what from the economy…. Grievance politics prevailed…
Annie Lowrey: Teachers, Nurses, and Child-Care Workers Have Had Enough…
Chris Matthews & Brad DeLong: A History of the 20th Century and the Search for Economic Utopia…
James Altucher & Brad DeLong: The James Altucher Show: ‘What changes occurred in 1870 that changed the course of human history more than the previous three thousand years?…. "This is one of the best economic history books I've ever read”…
Brad DeLong: Has capitalism's economic miracle run out of steam?…
Chris Matthews: Sept. 28: MarketWatch - A History of the 20th Century and the Continuing Search for Economic Utopia: ‘MarketWatch reporter Chris Matthews speaks with economist Brad DeLong about his new book Slouching Towards Utopia, a history of the economically miraculous 20th century and what investors, technologists and policymakers can do to ensure the next hundred years of growing prosperity…
Mitchell Clark: Google will help you find better results without tagging “Reddit” onto every search…
Ian Millhiser: The Supreme Court hands the religious right a big victory by lying about the facts of a case: ‘Gorsuch misrepresents the facts of the case…
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld & Steven Tian: Commentary: The Fed is oversteering on inflation–every signal suggests it's already cooling…
The Economist: How not to run a country: ‘It was meant to usher in an era of economic growth. Instead the 25-minute statement that Kwasi Kwarteng, Britain’s new chancellor of the exchequer, gave on September 23rd kickstarted a crisis…. As investors took fright, gilt yields surged, prompting the Bank of England to say on September 28th that it was ready to buy unlimited quantities of long-dated bonds…
Bret Swanson: The $101,000,000 iPhone: ‘One terabyte of digital storage…which alone would have cost around $45 million in 1991. Add in the A16 processor, the 5G modem… an amazing graphics processor, and four cameras totaling 84 megapixels, and you’ve got a device that would have cost at least $101 million to build in 1991…
Shakezulu: You know who else assumes people of color are waiters
Empty Wheel: Under Seal, Trump Accuses Hand-Picked Special Master of Not Following Orders
Ken White: ‘Okay. College students, like any other group, can be censorial assholes…
Kevin T. Dugan: Elon Musk Caught Deleting Messages About the Twitter Deal
Dambisa Moyo: Why US Inflation Is Headed Down
Ezra Klein & Andrea Kendall-Taylor: Why Russia Is Losing Steam and Ukraine Is Gaining Ground <https://overcast.fm/+oiPVJRHrI>
Dan Wang: ‘Brad @DeLong makes FDR sound like Deng Xiaoping, whose spirit was: “Whatever grows the economy we shall declare to be socialism, and what does not we shall declare to be capitalism”…
Max Chafkin: The Sneaky Genius of Apple’s AirPods Empire: ‘AR/VR headsets are a small market by Apple standards, but Tim Cook’s massive headphones division shows just how big the company can make a niche product…
Duncan Black: Our Donald Problem, and Yours: ‘I get the impediments to publicly betraying The Donald, but that elite conservatives generally—including judges—don't obviously want to quietly push him off stage is a bit of a mystery. Sure they love Trumpism too, but not the guy!…
John Burn-Murdoch: Economics May Take Us to Net Zero: ‘The plummeting cost of low-carbon energy has already allowed many countries to decouple economic growth from emissions…
Sam Seder: ‘We have been speculating why Sean Hannity has repeatedly pressed guests to concede that it’s criminal to transport asylum seekers around the country under knowingly false pretenses… now its clear… the team trump/desantis war is becoming more public..
Erik Loomis: The Long Arms of Trumpism: ‘“This week, Mr. Malpass’s refusal to acknowledge that the burning of fossil fuels is rapidly warming the planet exposed a debate inside and outside of the [World Bank] institution”… Who could have guessed that putting a climate denier at the head of the World Bank would be less than optimalWonder why people are so upset by it…
Scott Lemieux: Our Complacent Insiders: 'Balls & Strikes: “As Scalia himself says in another anecdote, 'I’m a Supreme Court justice. I can do what I want'. Thanks to reporters like Totenberg, whose ideas for rigorous questions for the justices include ‘red wine or white?’, he’s right...
Bill McBride: ‘Merrill: "We now look for a hard(er) landing.... Our baseline outlook for the US economy continues to include a recession in 1H 2023.... We project real GDP to fall 1.0% in the four quarters ending 4Q 2023 and for the unemployment rate to rise to 5.6% in December 2023…
Dan Pfeiffer: All (Elected) Republicans are MAGA Republicans: ‘Every elected Republican is advancing the MAGA agenda… posing an existential threat to our country’s democracy and people’s freedom…
Dr. Frizzle: ‘The first singular use The first use of “they” is so old, it predates the letter combination “th” in favor of the thorn, “Þ” When William and the Werewolf, in 1375 CE, used the singular “they” as a pronoun, it was spelled “Þei”…
Jonathan Korman: ‘Having long had an unwholesome interest in understanding fascism, I had a hard time understanding its radical indifference to policy. I find myself understanding the texture of it now…. Fascism is not a policy ideology deeply concerned with economics like communism or neoliberalism. Fascism is a social & governance ideology like liberal democracy or Dominionism.... It is an oversimplification to say that authoritarianism is gangster logic applied to politics, but it is a useful oversimplification…
Duncan Black: Wait And See: ‘I think the first time I really tried to follow legal arguments was in the… 2000 election…. It was quite clear the Supremos would not rule as they eventually did because of clear precedents. Ah, well, nevertheless. I don't follow legal arguments closely anymore...
Jemima Kelly: Crypto: ‘There is another slightly more sophisticated flavour… finding its way into my inbox… agreement that crypto is immoral, a scam, or some version of a Ponzi scheme… [that] quickly changes course, to explain that none of this applies to bitcoin…
John Ganz: Reading, Watching 09.22: Memoirs of a Revolutionary—Victor Serge—In preparation for an essay on Last Times, Victor Serge’s novel about the fall of France, I’ve been reading his memoirs... [containing] character sketches of Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci as well as scores of now-forgotten comrades, swallowed up by wars, terrors, and purges…
James Marson: The Ragtag Army That Won the Battle of Kyiv and Saved Ukraine: ‘Citizen volunteers teamed up with soldiers to turn the tide in the most consequential European battle since World War II…
Books Inc.: J. BRADFORD DELONG at the West's Oldest Independent Bookseller: ‘Tuesday, September 27, 2022 - 7:00pm :: 1491 Shattuck Ave Berkeley, CA94710…
Tom Watson: A Big Win for the 'Inside Game': 'I kept coming back to the same though… ”This is the opposite of extremism"...
John Gruber: Review of Apple Watch Ultra
Mark Cliffe: The Sting of Climate Risk Is in the Tails: ‘Heatwaves, wildfires, storms, droughts, and floods make it increasingly clear that global warming is causing more extreme weather…. Conventional climate models have chronically overlooked… these risks...
Rafael Guthmann: Ancient scientists and the economic performance of antiquity:
'Ancient economic history can be summarized by: Fast growth from 800 BC to 300 BC, slow growth from 300 BC to around 1 AD, negative growth from 1 AD to the 7-8th centuries AD...
WONDERFUL!! TLS Review of Slouching!: Paul Seabright: Trouble in paradise: Why is economic progress so little cause for celebration? <https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/slouching-towards-utopia-j-bradford-delong-book-review-paul-seabright/>
My First Twitter Mob: objecting to the Hayekian need for inflation right now… <https://twitter.com/FortuneMagazine/status/1572250790827528192> <https://fortune.com/2022/09/17/why-inflation-good-economy-stagflation-recession-brad-delong-larry-summers/>