Brad DeLong on economic history, political economy, and the long arc of growth and policy.
Looking at life, work, & the world here in & from the vantage point of Berkeley, California; today’s burning question: should the People’s House look like a restaurant franchise?
Noah’s subheadline: “ A TV character gave us a glimpse of what humanity might become”;
In which “Wall Street Journal” pretends that a Great Republic really ought to make its public spaces look like the kitsch-glitz of a successful carbmaxxxing chain restaurant...
If your large language model reminds you of a brain, it’s because you’re projecting—not because it’s thinking. It’s not reasoning, it’s interpolation And anthropomorphizing the algorithm doesn’t...
What Is the Difference Between Consulting Jacques Barzun’s ‘House of Intellect” & Being It?...
Is America chained to Netanyahu? Josh Busby of the Duck of Minerva says yes, and that it is costing the US dearly. But, more importantly, Netanyahu has brought long-term disastrous ruin to Israel...
In the aftermath of Anthropic’s Draft S-1 pre-IPO filing, I still have lots of questions, but there are at least a few hints at answers.
Jason Furman attempts to recreate his entire Council of Economic Advisors staff, via python scripts created, glued together, and presented by anthropic/claude...
Who Gets to Think in the Age of MAMLMs?: Parasocial Minds, Deep Reading, & c.; Part I of “The Infinite DoomScroll, The Ancient Courts, & The House of Intellect”...
Too much can be made of Sigmund Freud’s guess that your slips-of-the-tongue—your parapraxes—tell what you are really thinking about; but too little can be made of that as well...
The real text for SpaceX: how fast it can learn relative to its competition. The real test for the AI-bubble: how much money will start flowing in from the non-tech business world outside...
Josh’s thesis: It's not books, it's lazy, boring books that don't work; plus you probably do remember more than you think you do—just because you can’t recite it doesn’t mean you didn’t learn it...
Jonathan’s subheadline says: JD Vance claims that everything is going great, and if it isn’t great, he has absolutely no idea who led us here in the first place. Arsonist rebranded as firefighter...
Torsten’s headline: “No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector”; however caution: measured GDP & non-tech profits are not main events unless you are a focused financebro...
Charles Murray, Noah Carl & Alex Tabarrok praise Greg Clark’s “To Have & Have Not” without engaging with the statistics; those of us who have tried to do so have a very different view...
The underestimated one particular potential threat to our economic future: President Trump’s clearly expressed desire to interfere with and even usurp the midterm elections...
Alice Evans starts: “ Why do so many academic histories, popular books and museum exhibits celebrate exceptional ‘kick ass’ women, while minimizing patriarchy?”; this is an unfair rant...
Dan’s subheadline is: “A modest proposal...”;
Torsten Slok sees a demand curve hitting its limits. I see a three-sided price war: Anthropic, OpenAI, & the open-weight + dark silicon alternative...
There are surly agentic software ‘bots that announce their failures. There cheerful, diligent ones that do the wrong thing without announcing it, and they are much the worse...
The subheadline is: “Probably not. Here is why.” We ae not going to all move into the metaverse and wear sensory suits, which is what would be required for double-digit annual growth rates...
Provoked by Jack Despain Zhou:, who has had it up to here & higher with Freddie deBoer’ since a year of schooling pays off 6–15%, how & what we teach cannot be irrelevant...
Marx wrote for newspapers and went into the market for a quick £400; Engels ran mills and traded cotton and held railways, gas companies and government bonds for the long term...
LLMs as not thinking brains but effective filters to the current firehose of and very fast keys to 5000 years of human thought...
The first time in the memory of living man; before—even in the 1970s—a short-term rate cut was seen as a sign the long-term bond should read and follow, as the Fed probably knew something...
The Fed’s odds of threading the needle and getting inflation back down to target while avoiding a recession get much lower; & Fed Chair Warsh’s oaths of fealty to Trump are not helpful at all...
Seva’s subheadline: “A complaint from across Lake America”; while Muscovy ‘Rus undertakes attempts to coerce neighbors who were trying to decouple to stop the process, Trump is simply a chaos monkey..
They react to Anthropic’s declaration that it will cut off your access to Claude in extreme cases in which you are too mean to it “repeatedly... with no discernible purpose”...
The Woodford framework has real bugs, but it is still far and away the best one to think with; a 1999 Princeton seminar with 1/3 of its students going on to high-status research university tenure...
The “Meditation”’ of Marcus Aurelius is not a Stoic textbook. It is a tired man trying to talk himself out of bed in the morning, and into doing a job he never wanted to have...