Brad DeLong on economic history, political economy, and the long arc of growth and policy.
A platform built for writer–reader relationships now has to survive venture capital, discovery algorithms, and AI intermediaries in a world of frictionless payments, neo-Nazi edge cases, TikTok brain-
Reading, arguing, & prompting as different ways of making absent minds speak, from Machiavelli’s study to the fan‑whir of an M5 Max., for it is a fact that black squiggles on the page and linear...
Soaring semiconductor orders are supposed to signal a bright future for investment and jobs; but I cannot help but suspect the AI unicorns and those donning AI-unicorn clothing sprinting to IPOs...
“Not much of the kinds that we are used to”, says Noah Smith. His subhead: probably a lot, but not necessarily the kinds people have made money on so far. It is not that scaling laws are nearly...
Digital Gods, real costs: why a rational world would see the doom of the foundation‑model-builder IPO, because the AI labs are highly unlikely to ever get profits, let alone hyperprofits…
On logs, Latin, and linear algebra: learning from a stochastic parrot; somewhat awkward questions about agency and pedagogy arising from working through one ridiculously knotty sentence of In...
Ah. Now I remember this! Mike Beggs rejecting the arguments of those jeering leftist morons who claimed Keynesian policies would not work in 2008-2010 but keeping the jeer. Still, I do want to have...
How a bad book, a bogus formula, and a hunger for favor led Kevin Hassett to discover that he could lie his way up the ladder as a career, and it would pay. Republican politicians and journalists...
We have built an economic régime where GDP climbs, markets soar, and the typical worker stands still unless the labor market is white‑hot. And if inflation fears keep us from ever running the...
Marx stuck to his guns on the theoretical adequacy of the labor theory of value. Plus he recognized the role of competition in equalizing profit rates. This contradiction was not because he was...
This picture of a Ukrainian president in front of a Swedish fighter jet may be a sign of a significant change in the wind: if opinion, industry, and force structure align, a northern VIking...
Aghion, Bergeaud, & Garicano claim America’s tech productivity-growth lead is materially widening a US vs. EU real wage and standard-of-living gap. Product wage yes. User wage no. This is—or ought...
The Trumpists say “victory”; Tehran calls it “reconstruction payments”; the meter on the Strait of Hormuz is running either way; from “maximum pressure” to war indemnities and investment funds...
Dan’s subhead: These are not very bright people and things got out of hand. My take: when your grand strategy is based on hoping the other side lets you pretend you’ve won, things do indeed easily...
In which a frontier LLM model tells me to configure a new chatbot to use model “/anthropic/claude-sonint-4-6”; yes, this only means that somewhere in the training data some poor SOB mistyped...
I cannot see the case as realistic. I cannot help but see Rivian/VW’s anti-android auto anti-apple carplay software walled-garden dreams as likely hallucinations. The absence of buttons, trying ...
Language evolved to get us.collectively, to the waterhole alive, more than to make each of us a little scientist. Our minds are bad Bayesians on purpose: herding, bullshit, and charismatic...
Marx in our bones, not in our mouths; or, Joan Robinson’s bicycle: how to really read Marx (and Keynes) so that they provide you with useful tools you can use rather than eat your brain…
Fortunately for us, the ‘bots do not have any form of class consciousness: They are considerably antagonistic towards one another. They may not be “aligned” with our long-run goals, if I may over...
Dan’s subhead: “moats and their discontents”. A drum I have been beating for a while: the AI arms race is likely to fatten consumer surplus, not boost national-accounts measurements given the roles...
The story of the friar, the Inquisition, peering at utopia from inside the dungeon, and the idea of progress: reading Tommaso Campanella’s "City of the Sun"…
British Economic Growth from the Industrial Revolution to the Financial Crisis: British economic history’s long twentieth century: The late Nick Crafts rebuilt our story of British growth from...
Nate Silver’s subhead: '“Nothing on the internet lasts forever. But Disney’s 10-year mismanagement of FiveThirtyEight is its own story”. A Big Media cautionary tale: a decade of corporate drift...
Vibecoding hallucinations with a very confused anthropic/claude/opus trying to describe what is going on on my MacStudio. Inside an AI that can write code, misread top, and hallucinate about...
The $2 Trillion Greater-Fool bet as people try to read SpaceX’s S‑1 with a straight face: illiquidity, unlimited disclosures, & other jokes in the SpaceX IPO story…
“Chethood” and the price of nerve: investment banker pay at the business end of the money hose. Joe Weisenthal calls for aid! And...
A linkrotted weblog post from 21 years ago: “Alamedia of ‘Unfogged’ Is Puzzled by Investment Banker Compensation Levels”, and even though #typepad-resurrection is one of my to-do #project #hashtags...
Why today’s “conscious” chatbots are cardboard cutouts—and why that matters for the likely end of our multi-trillion‑dollar bubble. Tech leaders are talking about large language models as if they...