WEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-12-24 Tu

My weekly read-around...

Dec 24, 2024

My weekly read-around...

University of Michigan Survey, via Adam Tooze, via Axios.

My view, of course, is that the Democratic switch is realistic—that the whispers of the Scott Bessent affinity that it is the stock market and not Donald Trump who will be president are much more likely to be false than true, and that we should judge the likely future of economic policy by looking at the kneejerk impulses of the chaos monkey we Americans have put in the White House, and the chaos monkeys who he is choosing as his subordinates.

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ANOTHER IMAGE: Women’s Empowerment to Write & Be Read:

Yes, the Protestant Reformation was definitely a thing for female agency. But it was only a small thing. The real inflection point comes, and comes suddenly, in 1800.

TWO MORE IMAGES: How Mediterranean-Centered the Roman Empire Was:

Only luxuries and a few conveniences got from the Mediterranean centers of the empire to Armenia, Dacia, further Spain, northwestern Gaul, and Britain. The flows of staple commodities went to the Mediterranean and to places just upriver from the Mediterranean.

I do not think the concentration in Israel-Palestine is real—I think that is a consequence of their being a lot of Israeli archeologists in the 1900s. And I think much of what was Roman-era settlement in the Nile River Delta is buried in the mud, and we do not see it. But elsewhere it seems to match what I thought I knew of the rough distribution of population and economic activity in the Roman Empire. Note the north shore of the Black Sea.

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ONE VIDEO: Joanna Stern on the AR Dream:

I am now convinced that big worktime screens (especially for those of us whose backs like us to change position and not sit at the same desk all the time throughout the workday) and immersive video experiences are going to be major and valuable use cases. Will they amalgamate—actually have us doing our work in an immersive cyberworld in which our documents and task surround us? I do not know. Will immersive telepresence become a big thing? Substantial numbers of people I trust say it will. And will AR—little cyberobjects populating the world we live in as long as we keep our glasses on? Again, I do not know.

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ANOTHER VIDEO: Up Mount Everest:

Beautiful…

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A THIRD VIDEO: I Confess I Am Looking Forward to This…:

It would be very nice to have a genuinely scary and horrific vampire movie in the canon, rather than our current combination of period pieces and things at or over the edge of parody...

MAMLMs: “Ritual” is probably the wrong word except for those of us who read too much Durkheim when young, and still remember it. “Boilerplate” would be better—documents that need to be created for some purpose, for which there are a great many models in the past text corpus. The document needs to both represent the individual situation and be readily classifiable with respect to what kind of action it is supposed to trigger. In England, it least, so it has been ever since the late 1100s days of Ranulph de Glanvill, who wrote: “CHAP. V.: WHEN any one complains to the King, or his Jus-tices, concerning his Fee, or his Freehold, if the complaint be such as be proper for the determination of the King's Court, or the King is pleased that it should be decided there, then the party complaining shall have the following Writ of summons. CHAP. VI. ‘THE King to the Sheriff, Health. Command A. that, without delay, he render to B. one Hyde of Land, in such a Vill, of which the said B. complains, that the aforesaid A. hath deforced him; and, unless he does so, summon him by good summoners, that he be there, before me, or my Justices, in crastino post octabus clausi Paschae at such a place, to show wherefore he has failed; and have there the Summoners and this Writ. Witness Ranulph de Glanville, at Clarendon.’”

Marion Fourcade and Henry Farrell seem to me to have it exactly right when they point out that the creation of these documents (a) currently consumes a lot of human worktime in a way that is not terribly rewarding to the worker, and (b) is ripe for automation via GPT LLMs

Marion Fourcade & Henry Farrell: Large-Language Models Will Upend Human Rituals: ‘People already use [LLMs] to produce boilerplate language, write mandatory statements and end-of-year reports, or craft routine emails.… Because LLMs have no internal mental processes they are aptly suited to answering such ritualised prompts, spinning out the required clichés with slight variations. As Dan Davies… puts it, they… regurgitate “maximally unsurprising outcomes”. For the first time, we have non-human, non-intelligent processes that can generatively enact ritual at high speed and industrial scale, varying it as needed to fit the particular circumstances… <https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/a-new-piece-in-the-economist-theres>
Central Country: I have never been sure how I am supposed to read the now three-year decline in nominal reported imports into China. Three-quarters of China’s imports are made up of machinery, transport equipment, electrical machinery and apparatus, and mineral fuels. The decline thus might be in substantial part a reorientation of China’s domestic demand for automobiles toward domestic producers, but how big could that have been over the past three years? And given the orientation of the Pearl River Delta and the Lower Yangtze toward the globalized value-chain economy, I do not see how they could be flourishing without generating higher real demand for imports—not a 15% fall.
But are the numbers on imports even real? We are highly confident that other numbers are not. Certainly the bond market’s 1.7% nominal for the ten-year yield suggests current and expected depression and stagnation, even given safe-harbor demand:

Brad Setser: ‘President Xi has lost Ling-Ling Wei ... Wow. For what it is worth, I also had the chance to visit China this fall, and was also surprised by how dark the mood was... The collapse in import volumes is another worrying sign… <x.com/Brad_Setser/statu…>

Lingling Wei: China’s Bond Yields Scream the ‘D’ Word: ‘You heard right: “D” as in depression…. China’s 10-year sovereign yield… is around 1.7%, a full percentage-point plunge from a little over a year ago….. The speed of the drop is astonishing. The lower the yield falls, the deeper the market is signaling economic stress. Official statistics show that China’s economy… is expected to reach the 5%-or-so target for the full year. In reality, businesses are struggling to keep their lights on, people are having severe difficulty in finding jobs, and municipalities are drowning in debt. Even government employees aren’t getting paid. “It feels like depression,” a reader in China recently wrote to me. And for all the talk about help coming, the government hasn’t delivered. The power center in Beijing is facing a crisis over policy credibility…. The leadership wsjchina.createsend1.co… by pledging more fiscal and monetary support at a high-level confab…. Except… the bond market is clearly casting a vote of little confidence… <wsjchina.cmail20.com/t/…> <https://substack.com/profile/16879-brad-delong/note/c-82913878>
War & Rumors of War: I do spend a lot of time making fun of American establishment think-tank foreign-policy chin-scratching "strategists" whose recommendations boil down so often and for so many places to searching for a democracy-minded strongman or a “third way”. But I must confess that this about Syria today, from the smart and good-hearted Marc Lynch, is no better:

Marc Lynch: Five Thoughts on Syria's Unfrozen Conflict: ‘There’s the question of HTS itself. HTS has excellent public public relations, a great communication strategy, charismatic leader, and a keen interest in presenting themselves as a viable, rational, and pragmatic movement. Jolani/Shara’a has been saying many of the “right” things…. I certainly think that HTS should be given the chance to govern, subject to all the sorts of human rights and democratic standards we should look for in any regime (but don’t get in virtually any in the region)…. But HTS is not a[n]… organization… [with] a long history of participating in elections, theorizing, religion, and democracy, and finding ways to work with non-Islamist trends at various junctures. HTS emerges very much out of the universe of jihadism, which spans what used to be Al-Qaeda through the Islamic State and has, shall we say, very strong views about the role of religion in politics and society… <abuaardvark.substack.co…>

That “subject to… human rights and democratic standards” is an interesting phrase, given that the chances that HTS will not be a major denier of human rights and a breaker of democratic standards are very, very small. What I need to know is how Marc Lynch thinks the international order should set up the gameboard to effectively incentivize HTS to behave less badly both inside and outside Syria. But that is not what I get. I get pious self-contradictory hopes. <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-82806602>
History: I take it Festivus has started. I see that Alice Evans has seen one too many goodthink and goodfeel museum exhibitions about mediæval European female agency, subversion, and empowerment. And so she has lost it:

Alice Evans: Why Are We Sugarcoating Medieval Misogyny?": ‘History books, museum exhibitions and viral podcasts overflow with tales of female influence <bl.uk/whats-on/medieval…>, resistance <amazon.co.uk/Poet-Mysti…>, and agency <bl.uk/whats-on/medieval…>, while economists triumphantly uncover evidence of women's wealth and wages. Together, these narratives paint medieval Europe as surprisingly progressive. Except this rosy picture conceals a darker truth. In reality, men monopolised ruling prestigious institutions and backed up their bros. Dissidents were shunned, ostracised, or burned alive. Only by confronting medieval Europe’s patriarchal oppression can we diagnose what it took to achieve contemporary equality…. Overturning centuries of male bias, feminist historians tend to highlight women’s agency, subversion and importance. The British Library's current exhibition proudly declares that “medieval women’s voices evoke a world in which they lived active and varied lives. Their testimonies reveal... female impact and influence <bl.uk/whats-on/medieval…> across private, public and spiritual realms”. Browse the exhibition's bookshop and behold dozens of books celebrating subversive women. Wow. What a wonderful matriarchy! But was this representative?… The British Library’s celebration of female ‘influence’ is delightfully heart-warming, their collection of artefacts is truly impressive, but closer examination reveals a fundamental contradiction: how could women exercise meaningful influence if subversives were systematically silenced, suppressed, and or even butchered? In truth, Europe was hugely bigoted. Zealous patriarchs dominated institutional power and ideological persuasion. Getting the facts straight helps us fine-tune our analysis of what actually turbo-charged contemporary equality: the revolutionary forces of industrialisation and secularism enabled women writers to rewrite the script… <https://www.ggd.world/p/why-are-we-sugarcoating-medieval>
I confess I do not understand why patriarchy has been so strong in human history. Yes, the plough. Yes, with mediæval infant and child mortality socio-cultural patterns that did not induce the typical woman to undergo eight-to-ten pregnancies did not reproduce themselves, and so were replaced by those that did. Yes, nursing (and to a lesser degree pregnancy) limit what you (or some other woman) can effectively and actually want to do outside of the immediate surroundings of the household, and creates a very strong complementarity with actions that have stable state that can be left alone for a while—gardening, textiles, slow cooking. Yes, it is a society of domination in which most men are slaves or serfs, and that expectation of hierarchy leaks across and into gender. Yes, coërcive violence as a constant background threat in a society of domination. But why was all that so ably backed up for so long and so completely by patriarchal ideological fraud?
I need to run some simulations to figure out how large a share of mediæval adult women were without a sub-ten year old hanging on their skirts at any point in time, and think about that… <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-82773623>
Neofascism: I think the smart Gillian Tett gets this wrong, I think:

Gillian Tett: ‘Three key points…. Last month’s clean sweep victory by Trump means that the critical political fight in 2025 will not be across the aisle, Democrats versus Republicans, but inside the Republican party itself…. This Republican-on-Republican battle will be ugly…. Fiscal policy will be an early flashpoint in this fight…. The looming $36tn question is not simply whether the plutocrats or populists will win this fight; it is also whether the bond markets will stay calm while this plays out… <ft.com/content/c088a0c2…>
I think is wrong because it is not just the bond and stock markets vs. Republicans who want tax cuts for the rich above all vs. Republicans who want to shrink the deficit vs. the Bannonites who want “to raise taxes on the wealthy… the neoliberal neocons are going to have to pay…”

It is wrong because while Trump’s ability to shape executive-branch policy is constrained only by his own indolence and ignorance (which is great) and the Supreme Court (hah!), legislative-branch policy is much more fraught As of February 1, 2025, Republicans will hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate and a 217-215 majority in the House. I do not know what the odds are that they will be able to pass a Reconciliation bill with those low, majorities, but it is far from dead certain that they can pass one, and it is certain that what it could contain will be greatly constrained by the need to get every single person on board. And after Reconciliation? Nothing will pass without at least 30 Democratic votes in the House, which means that Hakeem Jeffries will have to bless whatever passes in some way.

Indeed, I am not even sure that Republican will be able to elect a Speaker.

I would not be surprised if there are ten centrist Republicans who see this next congress as their last in office who might want to control the Rules Committee and would be willing to make Hakeem Jeffries Speaker were he willing to so appoint them.
In short, Democrats have a role. It is not a two-sided by rather a four-sided cage match inside the Congressional Thunderdome. <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-82437334>
Journamalism: Is NBC News really this incompetent?:

Scott Wong, Sahil Kapur, Julie Tsirkin, Syedah Asghar & Kyle Stewart: House votes down Republican bill to avert shutdown on eve of the deadline: ‘The House rejected a bill Thursday to keep the government funded temporarily after Republican leaders reneged on an earlier bipartisan deal and made modifications to appease President-elect Donald Trump, billionaire Elon Musk and an internal GOP revolt…. The 116-page bill released Thursday would have funded the government through March 14. It also would have extended the country’s debt limit through Jan. 30, 2027, in response to a key, eleventh-hour request from Trump…. Trump praised the deal on Truth Social, calling it a “success,” and urged both Republicans and Democrats to vote yes. “Speaker Mike Johnson and the House have come to a very good Deal for the American People. The newly agreed to American Relief Act of 2024 will keep the Government open, fund our Great Farmers and others, and provide relief for those severely impacted by the devastating hurricanes,” Trump wrote… <nbcnews.com/politics/co…>

This “Trump praised the deal…” There was no deal: there was a Republican House proposal. What is NBC News doing calling it a “deal”? A deal is something negotiators agree to, which may then have to be ratified by those the negotiators represent. A proposal is not a deal. <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-82372155>
Live from the Chaos-Monkey Cage: The politics of government shutdowns are always puzzling to me. The way that the Constitution mandates that the system must work—revenue bills must originate in the House—is that the first step must be that Speaker Mike Johnson has to pass a bill through the House. Only then can Schumer and his Senate majority block action, an only after that can Biden block action via veto. If Johnson had passed something, then Trump and Vance could say “it is Schumer and Biden who are holding up aid to our farmers and disaster relief”. But that is not where we are—where we are is that given his lack of control over his own caucus, Speaker Johnson needs to attract Democratic votes in order to pass anything.
If I were Mitch McConnell right now, I would get together with Schumer and pass a debt-ceiling increase through the Senate today on the grounds that this is what Trump wants and throw that over to the House, just to demonstrate to Trump that his words may have unexpected consequences. But that depends on how many f***s McConnell (and Thune) still have to give. And if I were Johnson, I would put a funding bill plus debt-ceiling increase up for a vote today as well, for the same reason. But that would require a Mike Johnson much more willing to think backwards and forwards in time—think up and down the strategy and decision tree—than I believe that he is:
Brian Buetler: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯: ‘Donald Trump is trying to shut down the government, and Republicans may not be able to elect a speaker before January 6…. Elon Musk front-ran Donald Trump to torpedo a temporary spending bill the bipartisan congressional leadership wrote together. He seems to have done this based on nonsense he read on X. Vice President-elect Donald Trump and Assistant to the Vice President-elect JD Vance issued a bizarre joint statement <x.com/JDVance/status/18…> falling in line with President-elect Musk. The ad hoc Republican position seems to be that the only acceptable deal is a clean extension of current funding levels combined with an untimely increase in the debt limit, so that the Musk-Trump-Vance administration doesn’t have to deal with it. Government shuts down Friday without a deal… <offmessage.net/p/ama-th…>
& here is the Trump-Vance statement:

”The most foolish and inept thing ever done by Congressional Republicans was allowing our country to hit the debt ceiling in 2025. It was a mistake and is now something that must be addressed. Meanwhile, Congress is considering a spending bill that would give sweetheart provisions for government censors and for Liz Cheney. The bill would make it easier to hide the records of the corrupt January 6 committee—which accomplished nothing for the American people and hid security failures that happened that day. This bill would also give Congress a pay increase while many Americans are struggling this Christmas.
Increasing the debt ceiling is not great but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch. If Democrats won’t cooperate on the debt ceiling now, what makes anyone think they would do it in June during our administration? Let’s have this debate now. And we should pass a streamlined spending bill that doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want.
Republicans want to support our farmers, pay for disaster relief, and set our country up for success in 2025. The only way to do that is with a temporary funding bill WITHOUT DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS combined with an increase in the debt ceiling. Anything else is a betrayal of our country. Republicans must GET SMART and TOUGH. If Democrats threaten to shut down the government unless we give them everything they want, then CALL THEIR BLUFF. It is Schumer and Biden who are holding up aid to our farmers and disaster relief. THIS CHAOS WOULD NOT BE HAPPENING IF WE HAD A REAL PRESIDENT. WE WILL IN 32 DAYS!…” <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-82220977>