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 brain…

* 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 China…

* Back in the 2000s, Noah thought that Brad was wrong—he looked at the Chinese Communist Party, and he thought: communist parties do not do “coëxistence”…

* Noah understands people with a limitless authoritarian desire for power—people like Trump, Xi, Putin, and in the reverse Abe—and the systems that nurture and promote them…

* 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 Lenin’s party of a new type as a bureaucratic-cultural organization…

* Suggestions for what Brad DeLong should earn during his forthcoming stint in the reëducation camp are welcome…

* &, as always, Hexapodia…

References:

* Bear, Greg. 1985. Blood Music. New York: Arbor House. <https://www.lwcurrey.com/pages/books/103667/greg-bear/blood-music>.

* Brown, Kerry. 2022. Xi: A Study in Power. London: Icon Books.<https://www.kerry-brown.co.uk/books/xi-a-study-in-power>.

* Cai, Xia. 2022. "The Weakness of Xi Jinping: How Hubris and Paranoia Threaten China’s 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. <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-america-relations-trump-diplomatic-weakness-by-j-bradford-delong-2019-06>.

* DeLong, J. Bradford. 2019. "America’s Superpower Panic". Project Syndicate, August 14. <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/america-china-superpower-rivalry-history-by-j-bradford-delong-2019-08>.

* DeLong, J. Bradford. 2023. "Theses on China, the US, Political-Economic Systems, Global Value Chains, & the Relationship". Grasping Reality. Accessed June 19. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/theses-on-china-e-us-political-economic>.

* Lampton, David M. 2019. Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping. Berkeley: University of California Press.ttps://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520303478/following-the-leader>.

* Moore, Barrington, Jr. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord & Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press. <https://archive.org/details/socialoriginsofd0000unse_v4l0>.

* Pronin, Ivan, & Mikhail Stepichev. 1969. Leninist Standards of Party Life. Moscow: Progress Publishers. <https://archive.org/details/leninist-standardsof-party-life_202307>.

* Sandbu, Martin. 2022. “Brad DeLong: ‘The US is now an anti-globalisation outlier’”. Financial Times. November 23. <https://www.ft.com/content/791fe484-595f-44f9-86e7-55bdbbbd22e8>.

* 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. <https://academic.oup.com/book/32164>.

&

* Vinge, Vernor. 1999. A Deepness in the Sky. New York: Tor Books. <https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355>.

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 authors—and he is also one of the most underrated…

* 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 Vinge—for whom the New Deal Order is very close to being the Big Bad, and who sees FDR as a cousin of Sauron—creates 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 Verne…

* The five things written by Vernor Vinge that Brad and Noah find most interesting are:

* “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era”,

* A Fire Upon the Deep,

* A Deepness in the Sky,

* “True Names”, &

* Rainbows End…

* 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 all…

* 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 it—rather than sinister gods out on their own plotting plots…

* We do not buy the Supermind Singularity: mind and technology amplification is as likely to be logistic as exponential or super-exponential…

* The ultimate innovation in a society of abundance is the ability to control human personality and desire—and now we are back to the Buddha, and to Zeno, Kleanthes, Khrisippus, and Marcus Aurelius…

* 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 good…

* Addiction effects from gambling are not, in fact, a good analogy for destructive effects of social media as a malevolent attention-hacker…

* 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 happen…

* The Blight of A Fire Upon the Deep is a not-unreasonable metaphor for social media as propaganda intensifier…

* We want the future of the Whole Earth Catalog and the early Wired, not of crypto grifts and ad-supported social media platforms…

* Vernor Vinge’s ideas will be remembered—if only as important pieces of a historical discussion about why the Superintelligence Singularity road was not (or was) taken—as long as the Thrones of the Valar endure…

* Noah Smith continues to spend too much time picking fights on Twitter…

* &, as always, Hexapodia…

References:

* DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century. New York: Basic Books. <http://bit.ly/3pP3Krk>.

* Bursztyn, Leonardo, Benjamin Handel, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, & Christopher Roth. 2023. “When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media”. Becker-Friedman Institute. October 12. <https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/when-product-markets-become-collective-traps-the-case-of-social-media/>.

* Patel, Nilay, Alex Cranz, & David Pierce. 2024. “Rabbit, Humane, & the iPad”. Vergecast. May 3. <https://overcast.fm/+QN1ra_4w8>.

* MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1966. A Short History of Ethics: : A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century. New York: Macmillan. <https://archive.org/details/shorthistoryofet00maci>.

* Ober, Josiah. 2008. Democracy & Knowledge: Innovation & Learning in Classical Athens. Princeton: Princeton University Press. <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BD27WCMK>.

* Petpuls. 2024. “The World's First Dog Emotion Translator”. Accessed May 7, 2024. <https://www.petpuls.net/?lang=en>.

* Rao, Venkatesh. 2022. “Beyond Hyperanthropomorphism”. Ribbonfarm Studio. Auguts 21. <https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/beyond-hyperanthropomorphism>.

* Taintor, Joseph. 1990. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <https://www.amazon.com/dp/052138673X>.

* Vinge, Vernor. 1984. “True Names”. True Names & Other Dangers. New York: Bluejay Books. <https://archive.org/details/truenamesvingevernor>.

* Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: Tor Books. <https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Upon-Deep-Zones-Thought/dp/0812515285>.

* Vinge, Vernor. 1993. "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era". <https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19940022856>.

* Vinge, Vernor. 1999. A Deepness in the Sky. New York: Tor Books. <https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355>.

* Vinge, Vernor. 2006. Rainbows End. New York: Tor Books. <https://www.amazon.com/Rainbows-End-Vernor-Vinge/dp/0812536363>.

* Williams, Walter Jon. 1992. Aristoi. New York: Tor Books. <https://www.lwcurrey.com/pages/books/91732/walter-jon-williams/aristoi>

* Wikipedia. “Vernor Vinge”. Accessed May 7, 2024. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge>.

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 book—one 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 “power” as a category in economics other than as the ability to credibly threaten to commit violence or theft.

* Acemoglu & Robinson’s 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 chain—cotton growing, spinning, and garment-making—was rigid, hence the elasticity of demand for the transformation thread → 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. <https://archive.org/details/daron-acemoglu-simon-johnson-power-and-progress-our-thousand-year-struggle-over->

* Acemoglu, Daron, & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Publishers. <https://archive.org/details/WhyNationsFailTheOriginsODaronAcemoglu>

* Besi. 2023. “Join us Tues. Oct. 10 at 4pm Pacific for a talk by

@MITSloan’s Simon Johnson…” Twitter. October 9. <https://twitter.com/BESI_Berkeley/status/1711541113738387874>.

* DeLong, J. Bradford. 2024. “What To Do About the Dependence of the Form Progress Takes on Power?: Quick Takes on Acemoglu & Johnson's "Power & Progress”. Grasping Reality. February 29.

* DeLong, J. Bradford; & Noah Smith. 2023. “We Cannot Tell in Advance Which Technologies Are Labor-Augmenting & Which Are Labor-Replacing”. 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: <https://archive.org/details/e-20190429>.

* Johnson, Simon, & James Kwak. 2011. 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. New York: Vintage Books. <https://archive.org/details/13bankers0000unse>.

* Smith, Noah. 2024. “Book Review: Power & Progress”. Noahpinion. February 21.

* Walton, Jo. 1998. “The Lurkers Support Me in Email”. May 16. <http://www.jowaltonbooks.com/poetry/whimsy/the-lurkers-support-me-in-email/>.

+, of course:

* Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0>.

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 “weren’t feeling it” 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 “what bleeds, leads”, 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 “vibecession” 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 “why don’t people say they think the economy is good?” is very hard to answer in a non-stupid way, and most of us are much better off just saying: “hey, guys, the economy is really good!”

* It is good to be long reality—as 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. “Should we believe Americans when they say the economy is bad?” Financial Times, December 1 <https://www.ft.com/content/9c7931aa-4973-475e-9841-d7ebd54b0f47>.

* Cummings, Ryan, & Neale Mahoney. 2023. “Asymmetric amplification and the consumer sentiment gap”. Briefing Book, November 13. >.

* El-Erian, Mohamed. 2024. “A warning shot over the last mile in the inflation battle’. Financial Times, January 15. <https://www.ft.com/content/497499b1-0e9f-4215-a536-ecd483ad42b9>.

* Faroohar, Rana. 2024. “Is Bidenomics dead on arrival? The time is ripe for the administration to rethink its messaging”. Financial Times, December 18. <https://www.ft.com/content/816ccbf7-d0d5-47be-9c8d-8a8a0cbd0afe>.

* Fedor, Lauren, & Colby Smith. 2023, “Will 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 blueprint”. Financial Times, November 6. <https://www.ft.com/content/23687b6b-ac6f-46ab-a701-917a5ed64f4f>.

* Financial Times Editorial Board. 2024. “Why Biden gets little credit for a strong US economy: The president’s team needs to show more energy in addressing voters’ concerns”. Financial Times, January 11. <https://www.ft.com/content/a2373c26-87ea-4b77-944f-8a6b28c8675b>.

* Ghosh, Bobby. 2022. “Biden’s a Better Economic Manager Than You Think:

On more than a dozen measures of relative prosperity, he’s outperformed the last six of his seven predecessors. On reducing the budget deficit, he has no peers”. Bloomberg, November 8.

* Greenberg, Stanley. 2024. “The Political Perils of Democrats’ Rose-Colored Glasses: Paul Krugman’s (and many Democrats’) beliefs about the economy and crime miss the reality that Americans still experience”. American Prospect, February 5. <https://prospect.org/politics/2024-02-05-political-perils-democrats-rose-colored-glasses/>.

* Hsu, Joanne. 2024. “Surveys of Consumers: Final Results for January 2024”. February 2. <http://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/>.

* Krugman, Paul. 2024. “Is the Vibecession Finally Coming to an End?” New York Times, January 22. <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/opinion/biden-trump-vibecession-economy.html>.

* Lowenkron, Hadriana. 2023. “Biden’s Approval Rating Hits New Low on Economic Worries, Poll Shows”. Bloomberg, December 18. <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-18/biden-approval-hits-new-low-on-economic-worries-poll-shows>,

* Millard, Blake. 2024. “Consumer confidence highest in 2 years, still below pre-pandemic levels”. Sandbox Daily, February 6. <http://thesandboxdaily.com/p/consumer-confidence-plus-apple-and>.

* Omeokwe, Amara, & Chip Cutter. 2024. “Job Gains Picked Up in December, Capping Year of Healthy Hiring”. Wall Street Journal, January 5. <https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/jobs-report-december-today-unemployment-economy-58801a70>.

* Rubin, Gabriel. 2024. “What Recession? Growth Ended Up Accelerating in 2023”. Wall Street Journal, January 25. <https://www.wsj.com/economy/gdp-us-economy-fourth-quarter-2023-9fc372f0>.

* Scanlon, Kyla. 2022. “The Vibecession: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy”. Kyla’s Newsletter, June 30. <http://kyla.substack.com/p/the-vibecession-the-self-fulfillin>.

* Sen, Conor. 2023. “Unhappy American Consumers Will Welcome a Slower Economy”. Bloomberg, November 29. <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-29/unhappy-american-consumers-will-welcome-a-slower-economy>

* Scanlon, Kyla. 2023. “It’s More than Just Vibes”. Kyla’s Newsletter, December 7. <http://kyla.substack.com/p/its-more-than-just-vibes>.

* Torry, Harriet, & Anthony DeBarros. 2023. “Economists in WSJ Survey Still See Recession This Year Despite Easing Inflation”. Wall Street Journal, January 15. <https://www.wsj.com/articles/despite-easing-price-pressures-economists-in-wsj-survey-still-see-recession-this-year-11673723571>.

* Winkler, Matthew A. 2023. “The 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 reality”. Bloomberg, April 25. <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-25/biden-s-economy-deserves-more-appreciation-from-americans>.

* Wingrove, Josh. 2024. “Biden Refines Economic Pitch for 2024 in Bet Worst Is Behind Him”. Bloomberg, January 13. <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-13/biden-refines-economic-pitch-for-2024-in-bet-worst-is-behind-him>.

+, of course:

* Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0>.

& 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 whippersnapperish—but 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 economy’s 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 “it’s context dependent”. All the rest of us have to put forward Grand Narratives—false as they all are—if 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. <https://genus.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41118-020-00098-z>

* Kremer, Michael, Jack Willis, & Yang You. 2021. "Converging to Convergence." National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 29484, November 2021. <https://www.nber.org/papers/w29484>

* Oks, David, & Henry Williams. 2022. "The Long, Slow Death of Global Development." American Affairs 6:4 (November). <https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/11/the-long-slow-death-of-global-development/>.

* Patel, Dev, Justin Sandefur, & Arvind Subramanian. 2021. "The new era of unconditional convergence." Journal of Development Economics 152. <https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/deveco/v152y2021ics030438782100064x.html>.

* Perkins, Dwight. 2021. "Understanding political influences on Southeast Asia's development experience." Fulbright Review of Economics and Policy 1, no. 1: 4-20. <https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/FREP-03-2021-0021/full/html>.

* Rodrik, Dani, & Joseph E. Stiglitz. 2024. "A New Growth Strategy for Developing Nations." <https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/research-papers>.

* World Bank. 2023. "South Asia Development Update October 2023: Economic Outlook." <https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/sar/publication/south-asia-development-update>.

+, of course:

* Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0>.

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 chains—the pre-2008 situation in which China's manufacturing knowledge was vastly behind its manufacturing intensity was highly unstable...

* This, however, hinges sufficient state capacity—which 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 blockage—the benefits of technological change flow to the global north, or to a small predatory internal élite, 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 starving—matters 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. <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TAVRU4Y>.

* Subramanian, Arvind, Martin Kessler, & Emanuele Properzi. 2023. "Trade Hyperglobalization is Dead. Long Live...?" Peterson Institute for International Economics Working Paper, No. 23-11. <https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/2023-11/wp23-11.pdf.>.

* Stross, Charles. 2005. Accelerando. New York: Ace Books. <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/294259/accelerando-by-charles-stross/>

* Vollrath, Dietrich. 2020. Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. <https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo44520849.html>.

+, of course:

* Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0>.

The SubStackLand community gains another valuable member. We welcome him to the NFL SubStackLand:

Key Insights:

* Bing-AI says “Brian Beutler” is pronounced “Bryan Bootler”—that is, rhymes with “lion shooter”, which shows how far political incorrectness has penetrated Silicon Valley…

* Noah has figured out a solution to his problem of losing the screws to his microphone stand: duct tape…

* 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 2008—saying that this misconceived as all mourning for a lost golden age is misconceived…

* 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 production…

* Brian’s 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 again…

* Brian is, in a sense, the quantum-mechanical antiparticle to some combination of Matt Yglesias and David Schor…

* Brian believes he coined the term “popularism”…

* 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 primaries…

* 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 example…

* 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 “settled law”. And four of those seven then voted to overturn it in Dobbs…

* Biden really cares about safeguarding democracy, and his actions should all be viewed with that in mind…

* Hexapodia!

References:

* Brian Beutler: Off Message SubStack <https://offmessage.net/>

* 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 <https://englishverse.com/poems/horatius>

* Plutarch: Life of Tiberius Gracchus <https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Tiberius_Gracchus*.html>

+, of course:

* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>

Lost Past Golden Ages:

Thomas Babington Macaulay: Horatius at the Bridge: 

‘[Then] Romans in Rome’s 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 old…

Plutarch: Life of Tiberius Gracchus: ‘Formerly 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...

Liberals vs. leftists once again, with the principal conclusion being that trying to find and join your tribe by shouting online—Schmittian picking-an-enemy as the core of your identity—is 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 “Brianna”, Matt”, and “Ezra”—who are SubTuring concepts in our minds with whom we have parasocial relationships, and are not real persons named Brianna Wu, Matt Yglesias, and Ezra Klein—on 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 Schmittposting— trying to find and join your tribe by shouting online—Schmittian picking-an-enemy as the core of your identity—is 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.

* Don’t pick bad and stupid ends to advocate for—anarcho-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 humanity’s collective smartness as an anthology intelligence?

* Don’t call for throwing public money at nonprofits in urban America.

* Advocate for a political focus on social issues only when they are ripe—when 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 issues—and should be smart about doing so.

* Blue-state politicians should be willing to press the envelope on social issues—witness 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 opportunity…

* social freedom—you 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 public…

* collective wealth…

* collective concern—global 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 edge…

* Red-state politicians need our thoughts and prayers.

* Policy analysts and legislative tacticians should design and implement policies that are:

* successes…

* visible, perceived successes…

* that build coalitions by the wide of visible distribution of their benefits…

* but that do not allow individual coalition partners to become veto point owners: seats at the table, yes; dogs in the manger, no…

* Left-wing think-tanks should not take money from “leftists” who want to use procedural obstacles to block green investments in their backyards.

* Hexapodia!

References:

* Preliminary Food for Thought for Þe “Hexapodia” Taping:

* Brianna Wu: ‘There’s a huge schism… Policy Leftists and Infinite Leftists…

* Matt Yglesias: The two kinds of progressives: ‘Moralists vs. pragmatists…

* Ezra Klein: The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism: ‘Cost, not just productivity, is a core problem for the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing industry…

* Brad DeLong: Pass the Baton…

* Noah Smith: Our climate change debates are out of date…

* Noah Smith: Degrowth: We can't let it happen here!…

* Noah Smith: ‘Once 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 <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>

Key Insights:

* The Chinese Communist Party is very like an aristocracy—or maybe it isn’t…

* If it is, it will in the long run have the same strong growth-retarding effects on the economy that aristocracies traditionally have…

* Or maybe it won’t: China today is not Europe in the 1600s…

* We probably will not be able to get Noah to read Franklin Ford: Robe & Sword: The Regrouping of the French Nobility After Louis XIV <https://archive.org/details/robesword0000unse_g7d2> to dive more deeply into analogies & contrasts…

* Southeast Asia’s future is very bright because of friendshoring…

* India’s future is likely to be rather bright too—it looks like a much better economic partner for the rest of the world over the next two generations than does China…

* You can get pretty far by just massively forcing your society to build lots and lots and lots of capital…

* Especially if you have an outside country you can point to and say “give me one—or five—of those!”…

* But quantity of investment has a quality of its own only so far…

* We think of technology as the hard stuff…

* But actually the hard stuff is institutions, property rights, government—people actually doing what they said they would do, rather than exerting their social power to welsh on their commitments…

* We are surprised and amazed at China's technological excellence in electric vehicles, in battery and solar technology, in high-speed rail, and so forth…

* But those are relatively small slices of what a truly prosperous economy needs…

* 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 indefinitely…

* Is that a middle-income trap? It certainly functions like one…

* Hexapodia!

References:

* Brad DeLong: DRAFT: What Is Going on wiþ China’s 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?

* János Kornai, Eric Maskin, & Gérard Roland: Understanding the Soft Budget Constraint <https://www.jstor.org/stable/3217457>

* Adam S. Posen: The End of China’s Economic Miracle <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/end-china-economic-miracle-beijing-washington>

* Kenneth Rogoff: The Debt Supercycle Comes to China <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/country-garden-shows-debt-supercycle-comes-to-china-by-kenneth-rogoff-2023-08>

* 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-end”

* Adam Tooze: Whither China? Part III: Policy hubris and the end of infallibility

* Lingling Wei & Stella Yifan Xie: China’s 40-Year Boom Is Over. What Comes Next? <https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-economy-debt-slowdown-recession-622a3be4>

+, of course:

* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>

Key Insights:

* Critics: Cato-style libertarians, including AEI’s Michael Strain. The last die-hard classic Milton Friedman-style economic libertarians—and 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: Progressives—Biden is a tool of the neoliberals, and secretly Robert Rubin in disguise. People like David Dayen. They seem to be going through the motions—half-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 “community engagement” and “consensus building”, and will wind up pissing its money away without boosting America’s productive capacity.

* Critics: The Economist magazine and some of the people at the Financial Times, writing about how the Biden administration’s policies are “mismanaging the China relationship” and raising “troubling questions”—that decoupling will never work, that Chinese manufactured products are too good and too cheap to pass up; that you can’t 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: Implementation—the U.S. government does not have the state capacity to pick or subsidize “winners” 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 critique—that 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 power—like unions, civic organizations, and so forth that aren’t 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 ‘The Closest We’ve Had to Industrial Policy’ in Decades…

* Economist: The lessons from America’s astonishing economic record: ‘The more that Americans think their economy is a problem in need of fixing, the more likely their politicians are to mess up…. Subsidies… risk dulling market incentives to innovate… [and] will also entrench wasteful and distorting lobbying <https://www.economist.com/business/2023/04/10/americas-800bn-climate-splurge-is-feeding-a-new-lobbying-ecosystem>…

* Economist: The world is in the grip of a manufacturing delusion: ‘How to waste trillions of dollars…. Governments… view… factories as a cure for the ills of the age—including climate change, the loss of middle-class jobs, geopolitical strife and weak economic growth—with an enthusiasm and munificence surpassing anything seen in decades…

* Henry Farrell: Industrial policy and the new knowledge problem: ‘Modern industrial policy… [requires] investment and innovation decisions [that] involve tradeoffs that market actors are poorly equipped to resolve…. [Yet] we lack the kinds of expertise that we need…. This lack of knowledge is in large part a perverse by-product of the success of Chicago economists’ rhetoric…. Elite US policy schools… have by and large converged on a framework derived from a watered down version of neoclassical economics…. 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 problem…

* Rana Foroohar: New rules for business in a post-neoliberal world: ‘“Reimagining the Economy”… by economists Dani Rodrik and Gordon Hanson…. The Roosevelt Institute… progressive politicos (many from within the administration) gathered to discuss the details of America’s industrial policy… the opposite of trickle-down…

* Andy Haldane: The global industrial arms race is just what we need: ‘Manufacturing is undergoing a revival around the world…. An arms race to invest in decarbonising technologies is in fact exactly what the world needs to tackle two global externalities—the climate crisis and the investment drought…

* Greg Ip: This Part of Bidenomics Needs More Economics: Massive sums are being spent on industrial policy with little guidance from economic theory or research…

* Réka Juhász & al.: The Who, What, When, and How of Industrial Policy: A Text-Based Approach: ‘We create an automated classification algorithm and categorize policies from a global database…

* Ezra Klein & Robinson Meyer: Biden’s Anti-Global Warming Industrial Policy After One Year…

* Anne O. Krueger: Why Is America Undercutting Japan?: ‘United States… wasteful, inefficient industrial policies…. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the CHIPS and Science Act… directly threaten the Japanese economy (and many other US “friends”)…

* Paul Krugman: ‘I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there's pushback against the observation of a Biden manufacturing boom…. 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 otherwise…

* Nathaniel Lane & Rék Juhász: Economics Must Catch Up on Industrial Policy: ‘Industrial policy… is back in a big way…. Governments are trying to improve the performance of key business sectors. Can they manage to do so without subverting competition and subsidizing special interests?…

* Dani Rodrik: An Industrial Policy for Good Jobs: ‘A modern approach to industrial policy must… target “good-jobs externalities,” in addition to the traditional learning, technological, and national security considerations…

* Noah Smith: ‘David Dayen and Marshall Steinbaum completely misrepresented Ezra Klein's "supply-side liberal" position. This is not good faith debate at all…

* Noah Smith: ‘Oh, and notice that this framing [from David Dayen]—“The claim made here is that the dumb U.S. workforce fell behind, and now TSMC has to make up for it with Taiwanese workers…”—treats job skills as a test of inborn IQ, rather than something that has to be learned and taught. Wild…

* Noah Smith: ‘Neoliberalism: a thread…. Markets as the fundamental generators of prosperity, and government as the way to distribute that prosperity more equitably…. Government can't shoulder the entire burden…. We need additional, quasi-independent institutions, like unions…. 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 growth…. 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 pick…

* Michael Spence: In Defense of Industrial Policy: ‘The real question is not whether industrial policy is worth pursuing, but how to do it well…

+, of course:

* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>

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 inflation’s 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 “morning in America” 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 1970s—that we are replaying it:

* Even in the 1970s, it was not inflation but “social upheaval”

* Half “Blacks and women are forgetting their place”

* Half “things are very insecure and unsafe”.

* 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 “vibecession” has peaked—but 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 winning…

* Noah Smith summarizes: Normie Libs keep winning because they mark their beliefs to market and trust empirical data…

* Hexapodia!

References:

* Barry Eichengreen: The US Economy Is Up, so Why Is Biden Down? <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/biden-popularity-lagging-strong-us-economy-by-barry-eichengreen-2023-08>: ‘The 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 Biden’s biggest problem…. 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 immediate…. This slowness of beliefs to adapt to actual economic conditions is likely to be even more pronounced in an era of fake news…

* Darren Grant: When it comes to the economy, everything’s great and no one’s happy <https://www.vox.com/money/2023/8/10/23824742/real-wages-economy-inflation-no-money>: ‘Why a supposedly good economy is making so many people miserable…. 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. Everything’s amazing, almost—and nobody’s happy. This is new. Public opinion had historically followed the business cycle, declining in recessions and improving in expansions like the one we’re 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 pessimism…. What’s going on isn’t vibes…. People’s pay hasn’t been keeping pace with inflation…

* Mike Konczal: ‘It’s tough to judge noise <https://twitter.com/mtkonczal/status/1689625642046771200> from signal in monthly analysis…. A way to get around monthly myopia: look at longer periods and past used cars and shelter prices. How does 3/6-month ‘supercore’ measure look? That’s what the Fed is doing, and it looks fantastic. We’ve seen dips since 2021, but not like this. 3-month lower than prepandemic!…

* Paul Krugman: ‘Lots of number-crunching out there <https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1689638373403803648>, but this was another very good inflation report. The debate over whether disinflation requires a large bulge in unemployment is essentially over. No, it doesn’t. But there’s still a debate about how we did this, which matters. One story is that disinflation reflects economic normalization—recombobulation after the disruptions of the pandemic. The other is that we’ve 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 we’re mostly seeing an end to pandemic disruptions, that risk is lower. Not the risks we thought we’d be facing!…

* Project Syndicate: The Long Life of Inflation <https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/the-long-life-of-inflation>: ‘Michael R. Strain… [says] “underlying inflation is still double the Fed’s target” and “financial conditions aren’t tightening as much as people assume.”… [The Fed] should continue to raise rates until “there is clear evidence that core inflation is on a path to its 2% target,” even if that makes recession more likely. Mario I. Blejer… and Piroska Nagy Mohácsi… also see serious risks… “distorted incentives and massive inherited imbalances”—fueled partly by populist governance and central-bank interventionism—“any celebration of progress in combating inflation must be cautious indeed.”… Jeffrey Frankel… [says] “inflation need not reach 2% immediately.” By “stabilizing inflation at 3–4%, with 2% as a longer-term goal,” the Fed can avoid “the social costs of a serious contraction.”… “There 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,” argues James K. Galbraith…. Current macroeconomic conditions warrant the opposite response: not just “cutting interest rates,” but also “strengthening fiscal support for household incomes and well-paying jobs”…

* Kyla Scanlon: Why Do People Think the Economy is Bad?: ‘ '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 <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>