Episodios
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Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week); Aspirationally an hour...
Key Insights:
* Brad DeLong says: You say economics and economists in declineâI see bad economists in decline.
* Brad DeLong says: You see missile defense as remarkably effectiveâI see it as marginally effective, at best.
* Brad DeLong says: You say China Shock IIâI say China Shock I required the GWB administration as witting and unwitting co-conspirator.
* 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 âthe decade of the second China shockâ and my subhead âbrace yourselvesâ were intended to spur action to keep there from being a second China shock.
* Noah Smith says: Economists advising badly had a lot of influence in 2008 and after, and still have a substantial amount todayâso the total influence of economists has decreased since 2008, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.
* 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.
* The internet makes us less nuanced than we should be.
* &, as always, HEXAPODIA!
References:
* Smith, Noah. 2024. âWhy so many of us were wrong about missile defenseâ. Noahpinion. April 15. .
* Smith, Noah. 2024. âTwilight of the economists?â Noahpinion. April 12. .
* Smith, Noah. 2024. âThe decade of the Second China Shockâ. March 23. .
&
* Vinge, Vernor. 1999. A Deepness in the Sky. New York: Tor Books. .
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Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week); Aspirationally an hour...
Key Insights:
* A number of years ago, Brad DeLong said that it was time to âpass the batonâ to âThe Leftâ. Howâs that working out for us? #actually, he had said that we had passed the batonâthat the absence since January 21, 2009 (or possibly January 21, 1993) of Republican negotiating partners meant that sensible centrism produced nothingâthat Barack Obama had proposed John McCainâs climate policy, Mitt Romneyâs health care policy, George H.W. Bushâs entitlement-and-budget policy, Ronald Reaganâs tax policy, and Gerald Fordâs 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.
* 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.
* But everyone heard âBrad DeLong says neoliberals should âbend the kneeââ to THE LEFTâŠ
* That is interestingâŠ
* Should neoliberals bend the knee?
* How has the left been doing with its baton? Not well at all, for anyone who defines âTHE LEFTâ to consist of former Bernie staffers who regard Elizabeth Warren as a neoliberal sellout.
* It has, once again, never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
* But the conditions that required passing the baton to the leftâHigh Mitch McConnellism, Republican unity saying âNO!â to everything by every Republican to make the Black president look like a weak failureâno longer hold.
* 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.
* But in the middle, made up of ex-left-neoliberals and nearly all other right-thinking Americans, are we supply-side progressives.
* Instead, there is a governing coalition, in the Senate, composed of 70 senators, 50 Democrats and 20 Republicans, from Bernie Sanders through J.D. Vanceâa supply-side progressive or supply-side Americanist coalition.
* 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.
* The Niskanen Center cannot be at the heart of the supply-side progressivist agenda because they are incrementalists and critics by nature.
* The principal business of âLeftistâ activists over the past five years really has been and continues to be to try to grease the skids for the return of neofascismâjust 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.
* &, as always, HEXAPODIA!
References:
* Beauchamp, Zack. 2019. "A Clinton-Era Centrist Democrat Explains Why It's Time to Give Democratic Socialists a Chance." Vox. March 4, 2019. .
* Black, Bill. 2019. "Brad DeLong's Stunning Concession: Neoliberals Should Pass the Baton & Let the Left Lead." Naked Capitalism. March 5. .
* DeLong, J. Bradford. 2019. âDavid Walsh went to the Niskanen Center conference. He got hivesâŠâ Twitter. February 25. .
* DeLong, J. Bradford. 2019. "Carville & Hunt: Two Old White Guys Podcast." Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality. March 11. .
* 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. .
* Elmaazi, Mohamed. 2019. "Famous Neoliberal Economist Says Centrism Has Failed." The Canary. March 15, 2019. .
* OâReilly, Timothy. 2019. "This Interview with Brad DeLong is Very Compelling." LinkedIn. .
* Douthat, Ross. 2019. "Whatâs Left of the Center-Left?" New York Times. March 5. .
* Drum, Kevin. 2019. "A Neoliberal Says It's Time for Neoliberals to Pack It In." Mother Jones. March 5. .
* Hundt, Reed, Brad DeLong, & Joshua Cohen. 2019."Neoliberalism and Its Discontents." Commonwealth Club. March 5. .
* Konczal, Mike. 2019. "The Failures of Neoliberalism Are Bigger Than Politics." Roosevelt Institute. March 5. .
&
* Vinge, Vernor. 1999. A Deepness in the Sky. New York: Tor Books. .
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¿Faltan episodios?
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Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week); Aspirationally an hour...
Key Insights:
* Someone is wrong on the internet! Specifically Brad⊠He needs to shape up and scrub his brainâŠ
* 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 ChinaâŠ
* Back in the 2000s, Noah thought that Brad was wrongâhe looked at the Chinese Communist Party, and he thought: communist parties do not do âcoĂ«xistenceââŠ
* Noah understands people with a limitless authoritarian desire for powerâpeople like Trump, Xi, Putin, and in the reverse Abeâand the systems that nurture and promote themâŠ
* 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.
* Why did Brad go wrong? A failure to understand Leninâs party of a new type as a bureaucratic-cultural organizationâŠ
* Suggestions for what Brad DeLong should earn during his forthcoming stint in the reĂ«ducation camp are welcomeâŠ
* &, as always, HexapodiaâŠ
References:
* Bear, Greg. 1985. Blood Music. New York: Arbor House. .
* Brown, Kerry. 2022. Xi: A Study in Power. London: Icon Books..
* Cai, Xia. 2022. "The Weakness of Xi Jinping: How Hubris and Paranoia Threaten Chinaâs 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. .
* DeLong, J. Bradford. 2019. "Americaâs Superpower Panic". Project Syndicate, August 14. .
* DeLong, J. Bradford. 2023. "Theses on China, the US, Political-Economic Systems, Global Value Chains, & the Relationship". Grasping Reality. Accessed June 19. .
* Lampton, David M. 2019. Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping. Berkeley: University of California Press..
* Moore, Barrington, Jr. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord & Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press. .
* Pronin, Ivan, & Mikhail Stepichev. 1969. Leninist Standards of Party Life. Moscow: Progress Publishers. .
* Sandbu, Martin. 2022. âBrad DeLong: âThe US is now an anti-globalisation outlierââ. Financial Times. November 23. .
* 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. .
&
* Vinge, Vernor. 1999. A Deepness in the Sky. New York: Tor Books. .
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Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week); Aspirationally an hour...
Key Insights:
* Vernor Vinge was one of the GOAT scifi authorsâand he is also one of the most underratedâŠ
* 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 Vingeâfor whom the New Deal Order is very close to being the Big Bad, and who sees FDR as a cousin of Sauronâcreates 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 VerneâŠ
* The five things written by Vernor Vinge that Brad and Noah find most interesting are:
* âThe Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Eraâ,
* A Fire Upon the Deep,
* A Deepness in the Sky,
* âTrue Namesâ, &
* Rainbows EndâŠ
* 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 allâŠ
* 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 itârather than sinister gods out on their own plotting plotsâŠ
* We do not buy the Supermind Singularity: mind and technology amplification is as likely to be logistic as exponential or super-exponentialâŠ
* The ultimate innovation in a society of abundance is the ability to control human personality and desireâand now we are back to the Buddha, and to Zeno, Kleanthes, Khrisippus, and Marcus AureliusâŠ
* 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 goodâŠ
* Addiction effects from gambling are not, in fact, a good analogy for destructive effects of social media as a malevolent attention-hackerâŠ
* 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 happenâŠ
* The Blight of A Fire Upon the Deep is a not-unreasonable metaphor for social media as propaganda intensifierâŠ
* We want the future of the Whole Earth Catalog and the early Wired, not of crypto grifts and ad-supported social media platformsâŠ
* Vernor Vingeâs ideas will be rememberedâif only as important pieces of a historical discussion about why the Superintelligence Singularity road was not (or was) takenâas long as the Thrones of the Valar endureâŠ
* Noah Smith continues to spend too much time picking fights on TwitterâŠ
* &, as always, HexapodiaâŠ
References:
* DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century. New York: Basic Books. .
* Bursztyn, Leonardo, Benjamin Handel, Rafael JimĂ©nez-DurĂĄn, & Christopher Roth. 2023. âWhen Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Mediaâ. Becker-Friedman Institute. October 12. .
* Patel, Nilay, Alex Cranz, & David Pierce. 2024. âRabbit, Humane, & the iPadâ. Vergecast. May 3. .
* MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1966. A Short History of Ethics: : A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century. New York: Macmillan. .
* Ober, Josiah. 2008. Democracy & Knowledge: Innovation & Learning in Classical Athens. Princeton: Princeton University Press. .
* Petpuls. 2024. âThe World's First Dog Emotion Translatorâ. Accessed May 7, 2024. .
* Rao, Venkatesh. 2022. âBeyond Hyperanthropomorphismâ. Ribbonfarm Studio. Auguts 21. .
* Taintor, Joseph. 1990. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .
* Vinge, Vernor. 1984. âTrue Namesâ. True Names & Other Dangers. New York: Bluejay Books. .
* Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: Tor Books. .
* Vinge, Vernor. 1993. "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era". .
* Vinge, Vernor. 1999. A Deepness in the Sky. New York: Tor Books. .
* Vinge, Vernor. 2006. Rainbows End. New York: Tor Books. .
* Williams, Walter Jon. 1992. Aristoi. New York: Tor Books.
* Wikipedia. âVernor Vingeâ. Accessed May 7, 2024. .
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In which Noah Smith & Brad DeLong wish Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson had written a very different book than their "Power & Progress" is...
Key Insights:
* Acemoglu & Johnson should have written a very different bookâone about how some technologies complement and others substitute for labor, and it is very important to maximize the first.
* Neither Noah Smith nor Brad DeLong is at all comfortable with âpowerâ as a category in economics other than as the ability to credibly threaten to commit violence or theft.
* Acemoglu & Robinsonâs Why Nations Fail is a truly great book. Power & Progress is not.
* We should not confuse James Robinson with Simon Johnson
* Billionaires running oligopolistic tech firms are not trustworthy stewards of the future of our economy.
* The IBM 701 Defense Calculator of 1953 is rather cool.
* The lurkers agree with Noah Smith in the DMs.
* The power loom caused technological unemployment because the rest of the value chainâcotton growing, spinning, and garment-makingâwas rigid, hence the elasticity of demand for the transformation thread â cloth was low.
* We need more examples of bad technologies than the cotton gin and the Roman Empire.
References:
* Acemoglu, Daron, & Simon Johnson. 2023. Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. New York; Hachette Book Group.
* Acemoglu, Daron, & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Publishers.
* Besi. 2023. âJoin us Tues. Oct. 10 at 4pm Pacific for a talk by
@MITSloanâs Simon JohnsonâŠâ Twitter. October 9. .
* DeLong, J. Bradford. 2024. âWhat To Do About the Dependence of the Form Progress Takes on Power?: Quick Takes on Acemoglu & Johnson's "Power & Progressâ. Grasping Reality. February 29.
* DeLong, J. Bradford; & Noah Smith. 2023. âWe Cannot Tell in Advance Which Technologies Are Labor-Augmenting & Which Are Labor-Replacingâ. 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: .
* Johnson, Simon, & James Kwak. 2011. 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. New York: Vintage Books. .
* Smith, Noah. 2024. âBook Review: Power & Progressâ. Noahpinion. February 21.
* Walton, Jo. 1998. âThe Lurkers Support Me in Emailâ. May 16. .
+, of course:
* Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. .
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Producer Confidence & Consumer Confidence (in the Economy), & Our Confidence (in Our Analyses): Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week); Aspirationally an hour...
Key Insights:
* 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 âwerenât feeling itâ is mostly the result of the fact that things work with lags.
* 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.
* There are other factors: the old journalistic adage that âwhat bleeds, leadsâ, exponentiated by the effects of our current short attention-span clickbait culture.
* 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.
* There are other factors: while people think they personally are doing well, they do remember stories of others not doing wellm and are concerned.
* But mostly it was just that things operate with lags: that was the major source of the âvibecessionâ gloom-and-doom which was at sharp variance with the actual economic dataflow.
* We are not the modelers: we are, rather, the agents in the model.
* The metanarrative is always harder than the narrative: trying to answer âwhy donât people say they think the economy is good?â is very hard to answer in a non-stupid way, and most of us are much better off just saying: âhey, guys, the economy is really good!â
* It is good to be long realityâas long as you are not so leveraged that your position gets sold out from under you before the market marks itself to reality,.
* Lags gotta lag.
* And, finally, hexapodia!
References:
* Burn-Murdoch, John. 2023. âShould we believe Americans when they say the economy is bad?â Financial Times, December 1 .
* Cummings, Ryan, & Neale Mahoney. 2023. âAsymmetric amplification and the consumer sentiment gapâ. Briefing Book, November 13. .
* El-Erian, Mohamed. 2024. âA warning shot over the last mile in the inflation battleâ. Financial Times, January 15. .
* Faroohar, Rana. 2024. âIs Bidenomics dead on arrival? The time is ripe for the administration to rethink its messagingâ. Financial Times, December 18. .
* Fedor, Lauren, & Colby Smith. 2023, âWill 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 blueprintâ. Financial Times, November 6. .
* Financial Times Editorial Board. 2024. âWhy Biden gets little credit for a strong US economy: The presidentâs team needs to show more energy in addressing votersâ concernsâ. Financial Times, January 11. .
* Ghosh, Bobby. 2022. âBidenâs a Better Economic Manager Than You Think:
On more than a dozen measures of relative prosperity, heâs outperformed the last six of his seven predecessors. On reducing the budget deficit, he has no peersâ. Bloomberg, November 8.
* Greenberg, Stanley. 2024. âThe Political Perils of Democratsâ Rose-Colored Glasses: Paul Krugmanâs (and many Democratsâ) beliefs about the economy and crime miss the reality that Americans still experienceâ. American Prospect, February 5. .
* Hsu, Joanne. 2024. âSurveys of Consumers: Final Results for January 2024â. February 2. .
* Krugman, Paul. 2024. âIs the Vibecession Finally Coming to an End?â New York Times, January 22. .
* Lowenkron, Hadriana. 2023. âBidenâs Approval Rating Hits New Low on Economic Worries, Poll Showsâ. Bloomberg, December 18. ,
* Millard, Blake. 2024. âConsumer confidence highest in 2 years, still below pre-pandemic levelsâ. Sandbox Daily, February 6. .
* Omeokwe, Amara, & Chip Cutter. 2024. âJob Gains Picked Up in December, Capping Year of Healthy Hiringâ. Wall Street Journal, January 5. .
* Rubin, Gabriel. 2024. âWhat Recession? Growth Ended Up Accelerating in 2023â. Wall Street Journal, January 25. .
* Scanlon, Kyla. 2022. âThe Vibecession: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecyâ. Kylaâs Newsletter, June 30. .
* Sen, Conor. 2023. âUnhappy American Consumers Will Welcome a Slower Economyâ. Bloomberg, November 29.
* Scanlon, Kyla. 2023. âItâs More than Just Vibesâ. Kylaâs Newsletter, December 7. .
* Torry, Harriet, & Anthony DeBarros. 2023. âEconomists in WSJ Survey Still See Recession This Year Despite Easing Inflationâ. Wall Street Journal, January 15. .
* Winkler, Matthew A. 2023. âThe 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 realityâ. Bloomberg, April 25. .
* Wingrove, Josh. 2024. âBiden Refines Economic Pitch for 2024 in Bet Worst Is Behind Himâ. Bloomberg, January 13. .
+, of course:
* Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. .
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& a start-of-the-semester academic-email-addresses-only paid-subscription sale:
Key Insights:
* Young whippersnappers Oks and Williams are to be commended for being young, and whippersnapperishâbut we disagree with them.
* Contrary to what Brad thought, the fertility transition in Africa really has resumed.
* The problem of how you provide mass employment for people is different than the problem of how you increase your economyâs productivity by building knowledge capital, infrastructure, and other forms of human capital.
* It is important to keep those straight and distinguished in your mind.
* Commodity exporting should be viewed as a distinct development strategy from industrialization, and indeed from everything else.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Only the Federal Reserve can get away with saying âitâs context dependentâ. All the rest of us have to put forward Grand Narrativesâfalse as they all areâif we want to actually be useful.
* Hexapodia
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.
* Kremer, Michael, Jack Willis, & Yang You. 2021. "Converging to Convergence." National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 29484, November 2021.
* Oks, David, & Henry Williams. 2022. "The Long, Slow Death of Global Development." American Affairs 6:4 (November). .
* Patel, Dev, Justin Sandefur, & Arvind Subramanian. 2021. "The new era of unconditional convergence." Journal of Development Economics 152. .
* Perkins, Dwight. 2021. "Understanding political influences on Southeast Asia's development experience." Fulbright Review of Economics and Policy 1, no. 1: 4-20. .
* Rodrik, Dani, & Joseph E. Stiglitz. 2024. "A New Growth Strategy for Developing Nations." .
* World Bank. 2023. "South Asia Development Update October 2023: Economic Outlook." .
+, of course:
* Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. .
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Key Insights:
* Finally, at long last, over the next two generations the tide is likely to be flowing strongly toward near-universal global development...
* 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...
* This fear appears to have been very overblown...
* 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...
* As long as dealing with global warming does not absorb too many of the resources that could otherwise be devoted to income growth...
* 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...
* Even so, since 2008 there has still been increasing global integration in the flow of ideas and the growing interdependence of value chains...
* A substantial part of the post-2008 reversal of globalization was partially due to China onshoring its supply chainsâthe pre-2008 situation in which China's manufacturing knowledge was vastly behind its manufacturing intensity was highly unstable...
* This, however, hinges sufficient state capacityâwhich 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...
* Distributional issues are another potential key blockageâthe benefits of technological change flow to the global north, or to a small predatory internal Ă©lite, or the market economy's distribution goes spontaneously awry...
* But there is the question of how much distribution matters in a rich world where few are starvingâmatters for social power, yes, and for whatever happinesses flow from that, but does distribution matter otherwise?
* Countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America may be stubborn development problems for generations, however...
* 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...
* 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...
* Future guests, possibly?: Dietz Vollrath, Arvind Subramanian, Charlie Stross...
* Hexapodia!
References:
* Fourastié, Jean. 1979. Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975. Paris: Fayard. .
* Subramanian, Arvind, Martin Kessler, & Emanuele Properzi. 2023. "Trade Hyperglobalization is Dead. Long Live...?" Peterson Institute for International Economics Working Paper, No. 23-11. .
* Stross, Charles. 2005. Accelerando. New York: Ace Books.
* Vollrath, Dietrich. 2020. Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. .
+, of course:
* Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. .
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The SubStackLand community gains another valuable member. We welcome him to the NFL SubStackLand:
Key Insights:
* Bing-AI says âBrian Beutlerâ is pronounced âBryan Bootlerââthat is, rhymes with âlion shooterâ, which shows how far political incorrectness has penetrated Silicon ValleyâŠ
* Noah has figured out a solution to his problem of losing the screws to his microphone stand: duct tapeâŠ
* 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 2008âsaying that this misconceived as all mourning for a lost golden age is misconceivedâŠ
* 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 productionâŠ
* Brianâs 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 againâŠ
* Brian is, in a sense, the quantum-mechanical antiparticle to some combination of Matt Yglesias and David SchorâŠ
* Brian believes he coined the term âpopularismââŠ
* 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 primariesâŠ
* 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 exampleâŠ
* 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 âsettled lawâ. And four of those seven then voted to overturn it in DobbsâŠ
* Biden really cares about safeguarding democracy, and his actions should all be viewed with that in mindâŠ
* Hexapodia!
References:
* Brian Beutler: Off Message SubStack
* 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
* Plutarch: Life of Tiberius Gracchus
+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep
Lost Past Golden Ages:
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Horatius at the Bridge:
â[Then] Romans in Romeâs 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 oldâŠ
Plutarch: Life of Tiberius Gracchus: âFormerly 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...
Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe -
Liberals vs. leftists once again, with the principal conclusion being that trying to find and join your tribe by shouting onlineâSchmittian picking-an-enemy as the core of your identityâis no way to go through life, son. Nor is artfully screenshotting in order to make sure your readers do not see the sentence just below the ones you quote.
In which we discuss the positions of âBriannaâ, Mattâ, and âEzraââwho are SubTuring concepts in our minds with whom we have parasocial relationships, and are not real persons named Brianna Wu, Matt Yglesias, and Ezra Kleinâon 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.
Background:
Key Insights:
* No Schmittpostingâ trying to find and join your tribe by shouting onlineâSchmittian picking-an-enemy as the core of your identityâis no way to go through life, son.
* Nor is artfully screenshotting in order to make sure your readers do not see the sentence just below the ones you quote.
* Donât pick bad and stupid ends to advocate forâanarcho-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.
* Do think, always: will this post advance humanityâs collective smartness as an anthology intelligence?
* Donât call for throwing public money at nonprofits in urban America.
* Advocate for a political focus on social issues only when they are ripeâwhen the pro-freedom and pro-flourishing position is genuinely popular.
* But the Democratic Party and the left can and should focus on both economic and social issuesâand should be smart about doing so.
* Blue-state politicians should be willing to press the envelope on social issuesâwitness Gavin Newsom as mayor of San Francisco on gay marriage.
* Purple-state politicians should stress that this is a free country for free people, which means:
* economic opportunityâŠ
* social freedomâyou 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 publicâŠ
* collective wealthâŠ
* collective concernâglobal 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 edgeâŠ
* Red-state politicians need our thoughts and prayers.
* Policy analysts and legislative tacticians should design and implement policies that are:
* successesâŠ
* visible, perceived successesâŠ
* that build coalitions by the wide of visible distribution of their benefitsâŠ
* but that do not allow individual coalition partners to become veto point owners: seats at the table, yes; dogs in the manger, noâŠ
* Left-wing think-tanks should not take money from âleftistsâ who want to use procedural obstacles to block green investments in their backyards.
* Hexapodia!
References:
* Preliminary Food for Thought for Ăe âHexapodiaâ Taping:
* Brianna Wu: âThereâs a huge schism⊠Policy Leftists and Infinite LeftistsâŠ
* Matt Yglesias: The two kinds of progressives: âMoralists vs. pragmatistsâŠ
* Ezra Klein: The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism: âCost, not just productivity, is a core problem for the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing industryâŠ
* Brad DeLong: Pass the BatonâŠ
* Noah Smith: Our climate change debates are out of dateâŠ
* Noah Smith: Degrowth: We can't let it happen here!âŠ
* Noah Smith: âOnce 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
+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep
Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe -
Key Insights:
* The Chinese Communist Party is very like an aristocracyâor maybe it isnâtâŠ
* If it is, it will in the long run have the same strong growth-retarding effects on the economy that aristocracies traditionally haveâŠ
* Or maybe it wonât: China today is not Europe in the 1600sâŠ
* We probably will not be able to get Noah to read Franklin Ford: Robe & Sword: The Regrouping of the French Nobility After Louis XIV to dive more deeply into analogies & contrastsâŠ
* Southeast Asiaâs future is very bright because of friendshoringâŠ
* Indiaâs future is likely to be rather bright tooâit looks like a much better economic partner for the rest of the world over the next two generations than does ChinaâŠ
* You can get pretty far by just massively forcing your society to build lots and lots and lots of capitalâŠ
* Especially if you have an outside country you can point to and say âgive me oneâor fiveâof those!ââŠ
* But quantity of investment has a quality of its own only so farâŠ
* We think of technology as the hard stuffâŠ
* But actually the hard stuff is institutions, property rights, governmentâpeople actually doing what they said they would do, rather than exerting their social power to welsh on their commitmentsâŠ
* We are surprised and amazed at China's technological excellence in electric vehicles, in battery and solar technology, in high-speed rail, and so forthâŠ
* But those are relatively small slices of what a truly prosperous economy needsâŠ
* 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 indefinitelyâŠ
* Is that a middle-income trap? It certainly functions like oneâŠ
* Hexapodia!
References:
* Brad DeLong: DRAFT: What Is Going on wiĂŸ Chinaâs 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?
* JĂĄnos Kornai, Eric Maskin, & GĂ©rard Roland: Understanding the Soft Budget Constraint
* Adam S. Posen: The End of Chinaâs Economic Miracle
* Kenneth Rogoff: The Debt Supercycle Comes to China
* Noah Smith: Real estate is China's economic Achilles heel
* Noah Smith: Why is China smashing its tech industry?
* Adam Tooze: Whither China? Part I - Authoritarian impasse?
* Adam Tooze: Whither China? Part II - Posen v. Pettis or "authoritarian impasse" v. "structural dead-endâ
* Adam Tooze: Whither China? Part III: Policy hubris and the end of infallibility
* Lingling Wei & Stella Yifan Xie: Chinaâs 40-Year Boom Is Over. What Comes Next?
+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep
Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe -
Key Insights:
* Critics: Cato-style libertarians, including AEIâs Michael Strain. The last die-hard classic Milton Friedman-style economic libertariansâand 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.
* Critics: ProgressivesâBiden is a tool of the neoliberals, and secretly Robert Rubin in disguise. People like David Dayen. They seem to be going through the motionsâhalf-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
* Critics: Ezra Klein and the other supply-side progressives, worried that Bidenomics in danger of supporting too much procedural obstacles through âcommunity engagementâ and âconsensus buildingâ, and will wind up pissing its money away without boosting Americaâs productive capacity.
* Critics: The Economist magazine and some of the people at the Financial Times, writing about how the Biden administrationâs policies are âmismanaging the China relationshipâ and raising âtroubling questionsââthat decoupling will never work, that Chinese manufactured products are too good and too cheap to pass up; that you canât correct for for externalities; & c.
* 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.
* The real critique: Implementationâthe U.S. government does not have the state capacity to pick or subsidize âwinnersâ in the sense of companies whose activities have large positive externalities.
* 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.
* What is valid in the criticisms of Bidenomics is part of a more general critiqueâthat 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 powerâlike unions, civic organizations, and so forth that arenât 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.
* Friendshoring rather than onshoring.
* Japan is potentially an enormous productive asset for the U.S. to draw on.
* And, of course: Hexapodia!
References:
* Libby Cantrill & al.: CHIPS & Science Act âThe Closest Weâve Had to Industrial Policyâ in DecadesâŠ
* Economist: The lessons from Americaâs astonishing economic record: âThe more that Americans think their economy is a problem in need of fixing, the more likely their politicians are to mess upâŠ. Subsidies⊠risk dulling market incentives to innovate⊠[and] will also entrench wasteful and distorting lobbying âŠ
* Economist: The world is in the grip of a manufacturing delusion: âHow to waste trillions of dollarsâŠ. Governments⊠view⊠factories as a cure for the ills of the ageâincluding climate change, the loss of middle-class jobs, geopolitical strife and weak economic growthâwith an enthusiasm and munificence surpassing anything seen in decadesâŠ
* Henry Farrell: Industrial policy and the new knowledge problem: âModern industrial policy⊠[requires] investment and innovation decisions [that] involve tradeoffs that market actors are poorly equipped to resolveâŠ. [Yet] we lack the kinds of expertise that we needâŠ. This lack of knowledge is in large part a perverse by-product of the success of Chicago economistsâ rhetoricâŠ. Elite US policy schools⊠have by and large converged on a framework derived from a watered down version of neoclassical economicsâŠ. 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 problemâŠ
* Rana Foroohar: New rules for business in a post-neoliberal world: ââReimagining the Economyâ⊠by economists Dani Rodrik and Gordon HansonâŠ. The Roosevelt Institute⊠progressive politicos (many from within the administration) gathered to discuss the details of Americaâs industrial policy⊠the opposite of trickle-downâŠ
* Andy Haldane: The global industrial arms race is just what we need: âManufacturing is undergoing a revival around the worldâŠ. An arms race to invest in decarbonising technologies is in fact exactly what the world needs to tackle two global externalitiesâthe climate crisis and the investment droughtâŠ
* Greg Ip: This Part of Bidenomics Needs More Economics: Massive sums are being spent on industrial policy with little guidance from economic theory or researchâŠ
* RĂ©ka JuhĂĄsz & al.: The Who, What, When, and How of Industrial Policy: A Text-Based Approach: âWe create an automated classification algorithm and categorize policies from a global databaseâŠ
* Ezra Klein & Robinson Meyer: Bidenâs Anti-Global Warming Industrial Policy After One YearâŠ
* Anne O. Krueger: Why Is America Undercutting Japan?: âUnited States⊠wasteful, inefficient industrial policiesâŠ. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the CHIPS and Science Act⊠directly threaten the Japanese economy (and many other US âfriendsâ)âŠ
* Paul Krugman: âI guess I shouldn't be surprised that there's pushback against the observation of a Biden manufacturing boomâŠ. 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 otherwiseâŠ
* Nathaniel Lane & RĂ©k JuhĂĄsz: Economics Must Catch Up on Industrial Policy: âIndustrial policy⊠is back in a big wayâŠ. Governments are trying to improve the performance of key business sectors. Can they manage to do so without subverting competition and subsidizing special interests?âŠ
* Dani Rodrik: An Industrial Policy for Good Jobs: âA modern approach to industrial policy must⊠target âgood-jobs externalities,â in addition to the traditional learning, technological, and national security considerationsâŠ
* Noah Smith: âDavid Dayen and Marshall Steinbaum completely misrepresented Ezra Klein's "supply-side liberal" position. This is not good faith debate at allâŠ
* Noah Smith: âOh, and notice that this framing [from David Dayen]ââThe claim made here is that the dumb U.S. workforce fell behind, and now TSMC has to make up for it with Taiwanese workersâŠââtreats job skills as a test of inborn IQ, rather than something that has to be learned and taught. WildâŠ
* Noah Smith: âNeoliberalism: a threadâŠ. Markets as the fundamental generators of prosperity, and government as the way to distribute that prosperity more equitablyâŠ. Government can't shoulder the entire burdenâŠ. We need additional, quasi-independent institutions, like unionsâŠ. 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 growthâŠ. 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 pickâŠ
* Michael Spence: In Defense of Industrial Policy: âThe real question is not whether industrial policy is worth pursuing, but how to do it wellâŠ
+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep
Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe -
Key Insights:
* Brad has a new microphone!
* Noah has jet lag: he is just back from Japan.
* Brad has jet lag: he is just back from Australia.
* Perhaps inflationâs ebbing has not yet made its way into the minds of people when they answer pollsters.
* We reject the hypothesis that it is because of lagging real incomes.
* More difficult mortgage borrowing and positive interest payments on car loans are a thing, but really unlikely to be a big thing.
* It seems likely that 2024 will be, if not âmorning in Americaâ from a consumer confidence in America, a crepuscular pre-dawn lightening in America.
* Noah's theory springing out of Rick Perlstein's take on the 1970sâthat we are replaying it:
* Even in the 1970s, it was not inflation but âsocial upheavalâ
* Half âBlacks and women are forgetting their placeâ
* Half âthings are very insecure and unsafeâ.
* The 1970s saw right-wing revolts
* The 1970s saw left-wing disillusionment
* And then along came inflation!
* Is this cycle repeating itself?
* Our guess is that âvibecessionâ has peakedâbut 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.
* Brad DeLong trusts center-left economists, and they say: (4), (5), (6), and (7).
* Noah Smith summarizes: Normie Libs keep winningâŠ
* Noah Smith summarizes: Normie Libs keep winning because they mark their beliefs to market and trust empirical dataâŠ
* Hexapodia!
References:
* Barry Eichengreen: The US Economy Is Up, so Why Is Biden Down? : âThe 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 Bidenâs biggest problemâŠ. 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 immediateâŠ. This slowness of beliefs to adapt to actual economic conditions is likely to be even more pronounced in an era of fake newsâŠ
* Darren Grant: When it comes to the economy, everythingâs great and no oneâs happy : âWhy a supposedly good economy is making so many people miserableâŠ. 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. Everythingâs amazing, almostâand nobodyâs happy. This is new. Public opinion had historically followed the business cycle, declining in recessions and improving in expansions like the one weâre 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 pessimismâŠ. Whatâs going on isnât vibesâŠ. Peopleâs pay hasnât been keeping pace with inflationâŠ
* Mike Konczal: âItâs tough to judge noise from signal in monthly analysisâŠ. A way to get around monthly myopia: look at longer periods and past used cars and shelter prices. How does 3/6-month âsupercoreâ measure look? Thatâs what the Fed is doing, and it looks fantastic. Weâve seen dips since 2021, but not like this. 3-month lower than prepandemic!âŠ
* Paul Krugman: âLots of number-crunching out there , but this was another very good inflation report. The debate over whether disinflation requires a large bulge in unemployment is essentially over. No, it doesnât. But thereâs still a debate about how we did this, which matters. One story is that disinflation reflects economic normalizationârecombobulation after the disruptions of the pandemic. The other is that weâve 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 weâre mostly seeing an end to pandemic disruptions, that risk is lower. Not the risks we thought weâd be facing!âŠ
* Project Syndicate: The Long Life of Inflation : âMichael R. Strain⊠[says] âunderlying inflation is still double the Fedâs targetâ and âfinancial conditions arenât tightening as much as people assume.â⊠[The Fed] should continue to raise rates until âthere is clear evidence that core inflation is on a path to its 2% target,â even if that makes recession more likely. Mario I. Blejer⊠and Piroska Nagy MohĂĄcsi⊠also see serious risks⊠âdistorted incentives and massive inherited imbalancesââfueled partly by populist governance and central-bank interventionismââany celebration of progress in combating inflation must be cautious indeed.â⊠Jeffrey Frankel⊠[says] âinflation need not reach 2% immediately.â By âstabilizing inflation at 3â4%, with 2% as a longer-term goal,â the Fed can avoid âthe social costs of a serious contraction.â⊠âThere 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,â argues James K. GalbraithâŠ. Current macroeconomic conditions warrant the opposite response: not just âcutting interest rates,â but also âstrengthening fiscal support for household incomes and well-paying jobsââŠ
* Kyla Scanlon: Why Do People Think the Economy is Bad?: â '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...
+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep
Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe -
Key Insights:
* Bradâs microphone is dying, and a new one is on order.
* However, 75% of the talking on this episode is Noah: he came loaded for bear.
* Although Noah has not yet read Acemoglu & Johnsonâs Power & Progress, he nevertheless has OPINIONS!
* Friedrich von Hayek was right when he pointed out that we could not know the shape of future technologies
* 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.
* Thus the ex ante error rate in figuring out in advance whether a branch of knowledge is labor-augmenting or labor-replacing is high.
* 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.
* Noah will read Power & Progress before mid-August.
* Brad will try to come up with examples of technologies other than the power loom that we wish had been adopted more slowly.
* Hexapodia!
References:
* Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson: Power & Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology & Prosperity
* Daron Acemoglu & Pascual Restrepo: âThe Race Between Machine & Man: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares & Employmentâ
* Daisuke Adachi, Daiji Kawaguchi, & Yukiko Saito: Robots and Employment: Evidence from Japan, 1978-2017
* 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 PĂŒttmann: Benign Effects of Automation: New Evidence from Patent Texts
* Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens: The zombie robot argument lurches on: There is no evidence that automation leads to joblessness or inequality
* Arjun Ramani & Zhengdong Wang: âWhy transformative artificial intelligence is really, really hard to achieveâ
* 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
* Melline Somers, Angelos Theodorakopoulos, & Kerstin Hötte: Technology and jobs: A systematic literature review
+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep
Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe -
Key Insights:
* Rome did fall. It did not merely âtransformâ.
* Across Eurasia, from 150 to 800 or so there was a pronounced âLate-Antiquity Pauseâ in terms of technological progress and even the maintenance of large-scale social organization.
* There was a proper âDark Ageâ only in Britain, Germany, the Low Countries, and Franceâwith Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia being edge cases.
* There was no Dark Age at all in what had been the Roman Eastâwhat became what we call the Byzantine Empire and what called itself the ÎČαÏÎčλΔία ῏ÏÎŒÎ±ÎŻÏÎœâBasileia RhĆmaiĆnâbut the Byzantine Empire was definitely caught up in the âLate-Antiquity Pauseâ.
* 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 armiesâall of these begin a pronounced downward trend.
* After 450 there was no real thing called the Roman Empire in what had been its western provincesâno Roman tax-collecting bureaucracy, no administrative bureaucracy to try to make decrees of Roman governors facts on the ground at other than swordâs point, no army large enough to keep any barbarian tribe from going wherever it wanted whenever it wanted.
* After 476, there was nobody even claiming to be Roman Emperor in Italyânot even in the swamp-protected Adriatic coastal fortress of Ravenna, to which Emperor Honorius had fled from the Visigoths in 402.
* The city of Rome itself was never a capital after 476, and was only garrisoned by Byzantine soldiers from 536 to 774.
* 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 indeedâit truly was a âDark Ageâ.
* 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.
* 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 peopleâthere were many fewer slaves, and many many fewer plantation slaves worked to near-death.
* 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 Empireâs economic network meant lower overall average living standardsâthe average farmholder was distressed enough by the collapse of the Pax Romana that he was willing to give up his and his familyâs free status and become a bound serf of the local landlord,
* Brad believes that Gregory of Tours was much worse as a prose stylist than Cicero or Tacitusâor great-great uncle Ernest, for that matter. Noah is neutral.
* 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.
* âAfter a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rainâ is perhaps the best sentence of English prose ever written.
* People should not overclaim with respect to the depth and spread of the post-Western Roman âDark Ageâ.
* People should not pretend that the Roman Empire in the west did not fall, and that there was no âDark Ageâ.
* Non-economic historians need to do the readingâto 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.
* Economic progress is real progress.
* Literacy is a good thing, not a neutral thing.
* People who claim that valuing literacy is âfrankly, kind of racistâ should delete their accounts and go away.
* Hexapodia!!
References:
* Erich Auerbach: Mimesis
* Cicero: In Catalinam I
* Brad DeLong: Ăe Late-Antiquity Pause, & ĂŸe âBright Ages!â
* Brad DeLong: Yes. Rome Did Fall
* Matthew Gabriele & David M. Perry: You Gotta Do the Reading, Man
* Gregory of Tours: History of the Franks
* Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms
* Willem Jongman: Gibbon Was Right
* Willem Jongman: The new economic history of the Roman Empire
* Willem Jongman & al..: Health and wealth in the Roman Empire
* Noah Smith: Was there such a thing as a âDark Ageâ in Europe?
* Noah Smith: Why didnât they write anything down?
* Ronald Syme: Tacitus
* Tacitus: Annals of Imperial Rome
+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep
Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe -
Key Insights:
* The global trade network is immensely valuableâŠ
* Friendshoring is not deglobalization, but raher shift-globlizationâŠ
* Brad was stupid in 2005 in thinking âpassing the baton of hegemonyâ constructively and progressively was a possibilityâŠ
* Countries have no gratitude, and only remember what is convenientâŠ
* William James sought for âthe moral equivalent of warâ to mobilize civilizational energies for good and progress; and a Cold War certainly countsâŠ
* As Zhou Enlai said on similar issues: âit is too soon to tellââŠ
* We both hope that America and China will soon be friends againâbut the balloon freakout makes us pessimisticâŠ
* Hexapodia!!
References:
* Sophia Ankel: China flew spy balloons over the US while Trump was president, but nobody realized until after he left office, reports sayâŠ
* Steve Clemons: đĄ The red balloonâŠ
* Damon Linker: America the UnseriousâŠ
* Noah Smith: China's industrial policy has mostly been a flopâŠ
* Noah Smith: Three books about the technology warsâŠ
* Noah Smith: Friend-shoring vs. "Buy American"âŠ
* Noah Smith: You are now living through Cold War 2âŠ
+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep
Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe -
Key Insights:
* Yes, it is possible to talk about everything in an hourâŠ
* We are not very far apart on what the Fed is doing and should be doingâthere is only a 100 basis-point disagreementâŠ
* Miles would be 100% right about the proper stance of monetary policy if he were in control of the FedâŠ
* Miles is not in control of the FedâŠ
* Thus Brad thinks that asymmetric risks strongly militate for pausing for six months, and then moving rapidlyâŠ
* Smart people need to think much more about how to increase loveâŠ
* Remember Robot Tarktil!
* Noah Smithâs mother is a good friend of âMurderbotâ author Martha WellsâŠ
* Hexapodia!!
References:
* Robert Barsky, Christopher House, & Miles Kimball: Sticky-Price Models and Durable Goods
* Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson: The Narrow Corridor
* Mancur Olson: The Rise & Decline of Nations
* Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
* John Locke: Second Treatise of Government
* Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward
* Robin Hanson: The Age of Em
* Ruchir Agarwal & Miles Kimball: The Future of Inflationâ: in Finance & Development ; IMF Podcasts
* Miles Kimball: Bibliographic Post on Negative Interest Rate Policy: "How and Why to Eliminate the Zero Lower Bound: A Readerâs Guideâ
* Miles Kimball: 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 HikesâA Tweetstormâ
* 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 Inflationâ ;
* Miles Kimball: Serious silliness:
* Miles Kimball: On the Fedâs 3/4% hikes:
* Miles Kimball: âNext Generation Monetary Policyâ
* Miles Kimball: Tweetstorm of Favorite Passages from Noah Smith's Review of Brad DeLong's book Slouching Towards Utopia
* Miles Kimball: On the Age of Em
* Miles Kimball: On Consciousness
* Miles Kimball: The Decline of Drudgery and the Paradox of Hard Work
* Miles Kimball: The Potential of a National Well-Being Index
* Miles Kimball: My Experiences with Gary Becker
* Miles Kimball: Benjamin Franklin's Strategy to Make the US a Superpower Worked Once, Why Not Try It Again?
* Miles Kimball: Life Coaching
* Miles Kimball: Odious Wealth
* Miles Kimball: Oren Cass on the Value of Work
* Miles Kimball: Janet Yellen is Hardly a DoveâShe Knows the US Economy Needs Some Unemployment
* Miles Kimball: How and Why to Expand the Nonprofit Sector: A Readerâs Guide
* Miles Kimball: On John Locke's Second Treatise
+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep
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Key Insights:
* Information really wants to be freeâif it is not free, if it is âcharged forâ by advertising, or otherwise, you will get into a world of hurt.
* In the information age the capitalist mode of production has become a fetter on economic development and human flourishing: Friedrich Engels was right.
* We need free public-funded Mastodon < servers for everyone.
* No! We donât!
* We need John back in the future, to talk about: (a) the euthanasia of the rentier, what is misnamed âsecular stagnationâ and the coming of a capital-slack economy.
* BitCoin, meme stocks, and so forth are a reflection of this capital-slack economy.
* We need John back in the future, to talk about how Elon Musk is a walking, talking, ranting, tweeting meme stock in human form.
* We need multiple measures of economic activity: never draw strong conclusions from only one.
* Xi Jinpingâs plan to shut down social media and have more people building semiconductors to put inside missiles and killer robots does not appear, so far, a great success.
* The ratio of Googleâs user value to its real factor cost is on the order of 20-to-1.
* Googleâs huge market power and profit rate powers the greatest AI-innovation engine in teh world today.
* Hexapodia!
References:
* Ralph Bakshi: WizardsâŠ
* Sean Carroll & John Quiggin: Interest Rates and the Information EconomyâŠ
* Friedrich Engels: Socialism: Utopian & ScientificâŠ
* Google: Sankey Diagram for GoogleâŠ
* John Quiggin: Capitalism without capital doesn't work: The future of the information (non) economyâŠ
* John Quiggin: The NotâSoâStrange Death of Multifactor Productivity GrowthâŠ
* Chad Syverson: Challenges to Mismeasurement Explanations for the US Productivity SlowdownâŠ
* Wall Street Journal: GOOG | Alphabet Inc. Financial StatementsâŠ
* Wikipedia: MastodonâŠ
* Wikipedia: Hermetic Order of the Golden DawnâŠ
+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep
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Pre-Note:
Here in the U.S., at the leading edge of the world economy, measured producivity growth fell off a cliff in the late 1960s, recovreed somewhat in the 1980s, resumed what had been its ânormalâ pre-1970 pace in the 1990s with the dot-com boomâand then fell off a cliff again in the mid-2000s.
Did the neoliberal swing toward âshort-termismâ, viewing corporations as cash-flow engines and nothing elseâplus the great reduction in public R&D and infrastructure spendingâplay a role in this? Perhaps. Maybe even probably.
Could and should we rebuild the corporate industrial research labs that atrophied, at least somewhat, during the neoliberal era? Perhaps. Maybe even probably.
Key Insights:
* Sometimes the best things in history come from accidents and stupidity.
* Collective stupidity enabling individual intelligence enables us to do unexpected thingsâsometimes very good things (and sometimes very bad things).
* Because every institution has its own particular biases and limitations (as well as strengths), you need a diversity of institutions if you are going to achieve big goals.
* The market ain't going to provide enough and the right kind of R&Dâno single institution or set of institutions will.
* The best we can do is to very amply fund as many kinds of R&D institutions as possible.
* Hexapodia!
References:
* Ashish Arora & al.: The Changing Structure of American Innovation: Some Cautionary Remarks for Economic GrowthâŠ
* John Gertner: The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American InnovationâŠ
* Iulia Georgescu: Bringing back the golden days of Bell LabsâŠ
* Ilan Gur: âInterested in bringing back Bell Labs? Some thoughts on why it's not possible, and what we should do insteadâŠ
* Lawrence Lessig: Code 2.0âŠ
* Noah Smith: The dream of bringing back Bell Labs: Was America's most famous corporate lab a product of its time, or something that can be reproduced?âŠ
+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep
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Pre-Note:
One thing we did not get into was the relationship between the claps of FTX and the associated fraud and âEffective AltruismââEffective Altruism not so much as a philosophy, but rather as a doctrine preached by a life-coach.
If you want to have the highest chance of becoming rich, you make your bets as if you had a logarithmic utility function: if the downside to a bet cuts your wealth in half, you will not accept the bet unless the upside more than doubles your wealth. Accepting bets more risky than those that satisfy this Kelly Criterion, even though the gain exceeds the loss, will ultimately make you bankrupt and out of the game with very high probability and absolutely, filthy rich with very low probability.
Effective Altruism tells you not only that you can but that you are under the strongest moral obligation to make such riskier-than-Kelly positive expected-value bets. The question, then, is what you do when the overwhelmingly likely bankruptcy takes place. And then the answer is often: the customers money was just sitting there, so we can borrow it to successfully gamble for resurrection, and then pay it back soon.
Noah, however, is more cynical than I. He thinks there is a moderate chance that SBF, CE, and company are still very rich dudes indeedâŠ
Key Insights:
* Future hypothetical Web3 good, perhaps, if there ever is a use caseâŠ
* Web3 as currently existing not goodâa fraud opportunity and a strongly negative-sum arena for grifters and loosely-wrapped gamblersâŠ
* Being a greater fool and buying cryptoânot goodâŠ
* SBF & CE & company may well still be very rich dudesâŠ
* Trust Vitalik Buterin, probablyâbut perhaps Noah is himself subject to affinity fraudâŠ
* Hexapodia!
References:
(Best to read these in order!)
* Tracy Alloway & al.: Transcript: Sam Bankman-Fried and Matt Levine on How to Make Money in CryptoâŠ
* Sam Trabucco (from April 2021): âTwo years ago, Alameda maintained pretty strict delta neutralityâŠ
* Adam Fisher: Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior ComplexâAnd Maybe You Should Too
* Adam Cochrane: This was a crime plain and simpleâŠ
* Tyler Cowen: A simple point about existential risk
* Matt Levine: FTX's Balance Sheet Was Bad...
* Byrne Hobart: Money, Credit, Trust, and FTXâŠ
* @0xfbifemboy: What Happened at Alameda ResearchâŠ
* Patrick Wyman: The Verge: Renaissance, Reformation, & 40 Years That Shook the WorldâŠ
+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep
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