Brad DeLong on economic history, political economy, and the long arc of growth and policy.
The subheadline: "The Trump administration is again shifting its stated rationale for placing comprehensive tariffs...". 60-country tariffs in search of a human-rights pretextual costume...
A $50 Billion Company Wearing a $1.2 Trillion Magical Rainbow Unicorn Costume...
From 1995 to 2020, relative convergence was very real—and something completely unprecedented in the economic history of the world since the start of the industrial revolution...
Via Torsten Slok of Apollo, drawing on Bloomberg and MacroBond. If we can trust these numbers, then the situation is truly dire. If we can trust these numbers, and if a lot of oil has not snuck out...
My six reasons why it is very important to study history...
As Bret Devereaux says: a remix, not a cover: As Theo Nash says, fusing the Athenian idea of the Sack of Troy as unholy excess with the historical reality of the Late Bronze Dark Age...
From two Epoch-Capability points a month back in 2023 to one every six months today, with the spread of assessed model capabilities across frontier labs shrinking by half...
Noah' subheadline: "I'd like to know exactly what the actions are"...
From 2018: "The Future of Work: Technology & Policy for a Diverse Human Future". I have always been proud of this, as saying the important things in a very compressed but effective form...
Paolo's own subheadline: "A 10-minute update on what shipped, what broke, and what it costs now". From Autocomplete to loose cannons in this truly New Age of "AI" agentic coding tools...
Isn't this piracy? What could make it not piracy, other than a congressional declaration of a war to conquer & annex the Strait of Hormuz to the USA? And isn't piracy not only a bad thing...
Kelsey's subheadline: "Francesca Gino, Lawrence Lessig, and the threat of a false AI consensus". Larry Lessig uses "AI" to launch a devastating and successful cognitive attack on your own brain...
Claudia Sahm's subheadline: "The June FOMC minutes laid out two scenarios, and the committee is split right down the middle on the outlook for inflation". But it is now split in a different way...
Economy in the 2000s & Before: working, making, apportioning, talking, taking, & more. What I know and can learn about it, & related things.
A very wrong prediction about how things would go down from a quarter-century ago...
The part above the paywall, that is. Their subheading: "Anthropic’s Opportunity is Theirs to Lose..."
Or is it Rikki-Tikki-Tavii?: Chained tasks, stomping hooves: how and where AI automation is likely to actually work...
Markets now see stubborn core inflation—not volatile energy prices—as the binding constraint on Fed rate cuts...
One of the two greatest weblog posts EVAR. Now succumbed to link rot. Hence resurrected here...
Noah's subhead: "Making Americans poorer won't make our society better..." What JD Vance is really trying to do is to make war on prosperity...
When the AI-gold rush has enough GPU shovels, but still needs cyber-picks...
Getting ahead, feeling behind: life in the shadow of the 0.01%...
Why not? It's a telecom company with a marketing department that launches (& catches) rockets...
He is good!
Sunday MAMLMs: when the lobster moves In: gemma4 is teaching me about “ai coherence”...
Trying to make all you readers out there in SubStackLand—and myself—smarter, while keeping all of us entertained as well...
& the Declaration of Independence itself...
Smarter machines—but do they make us dumber drivers and worse coders?...
Huh. I wanted to refer to this. But my machines plural appear to be able to connect to every website on the internet other than Crooked Timber right now...
But Now I Need to Figure Out How Not to Eat My Brain in "Retirement"