Inflection Point

Key Insights: * The most recent round of Tech elephants, rhinoceroses, unicorns, and spiny lizards—Netflix, Shopify, etc.—are very unlikely to payoff for those investors who stay on the ride to the very end. * That said, they were very much worth doing even if they never make their shareholders any money. The growth of communities of engineering, entrepreneurial, and organizational practice is a h...

Key Insights: * Not so much key insights, as key questions: (a) What are the teams? (b) 1920, 1948, 1951, 1974, or 1980? (c) Are there any true members of Team Transitory left? (d) Who is on Team The-Fed-Has-Got-This? (e) Who is on Team Hit-the-Economy-on-the-Head-with-a-Brick? (f) What inflation rate do we want to support economic reopening? (g) What inflation rate do we want to support the secto...

Key Insights: * There is a perspective from which “today” means “post-Ordovician” * Catul-Huyuk as 900 families living cheek-by-jowl, and after 1500 years… people leave… * Angkor’s uniquely vulnerable water reservoirs… and eventually… people leave… * Cahokia’s sophisticated organization of labor… but eventually… people leave… * Pompeii… well, we know why people flee all-of-a-sudden… * Cities are m...

We Truly Did Not Have History Rhyming to the Spanish Civil War on Our 2022 Bingo Card!… Subscribe to get this in your email inbox. Become a paid subscriber if… I will not say that this ‘Stack will cease to exist without paying subscribers. I will say that the frequency of this ‘Stack depends on enough people being paying subscribers for me to feel under a sense of obligation to prioritize this, ra...

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Become a free subscriber to receive this ‘Stack in your email. Do note that this Grasping Reality newsletter is a reader-supported publication—I really would like to collect enough from it to hire an RA. So consider becoming a paid subscriber, please, if you find this project worthwhile and think it worth continuing: Thanks for reading this. And please share it far and wide, if you think it worth...

Key Insights: * We may well face a generation of right-wing culture war-fueled minority rule in this country. * American Progressives have proven bad at making alliances with moderate conservatives—and at giving conservative voters reasons to vote for moderates. * Worry most about American national decline—which is happening anyway. * American exceptionalism and America as a “city upon a hill” for...

Key Insights: * Nearly all successful political movements over the past 150 years have been strongly nationalistic * A successful cosmopolitanism must therefore be a nationalistic cosmopolitanism—one that says your country is great because it learns from and has important things to teach other nations. * We—somewhat surprisingly—find ourselves endorsing and agreeing with Matthew Desmond’s claim th...

Key Insights: * Matt Suandi—forced off of his India RCT development-economics project by the COVID plague—has taken the plague year to write a brilliant paper: Matthew Suandi : Promoting to Opportunity: Evidence and Implications from the U.S. Submarine Service < https://static1.squarespace.com/static/615a18f283700f2629a58019/t/618ace007764e35a1b3f0176/1636486691263/MatthewSuandi_JMP_Nov_21_Berkele...

Key Insights: * Paul Feyerabend was right—science is whatever scientists do: anything goes. But what healthy sciences that survive and flourish and good scientists do is put first and foremost discovering what actually is and making theories to understand reality. So Kuhn and Popper are also right. * Economics has not been much of a science. But this Card, Angrist, Imbens—and Krueger—Nobel Prize m...

Key Insights: * Yes, Americans are now in a selfish defensive crouch, but just wait 8 years—if we get a high-pressure economy for those years… * We are finally getting back to normal politics, in which we slag each other because some claim we can afford to spend $3.5 and others that we can only afford to spend $1.5 trillion. And that is a very good sign… * Hexapodia! References: * Zach Carter : Wh...

Key Insights: * I do not understand how the Chinese economy works. * The Chinese economy is an odd combination of market and party in which the party has enormous reach and control, but somehow that has not triggered the “soft budget constraint” problems of the Soviet model. * Financial constraints are not real—a government that wants to can evade them in its management of the economy. * Real reso...

Key Insights: * Today’s meaning of “neoliberalism” is the result of the collision of two different applications of the term—to Margaret Thatcher, and to the Washington Monthly … * Intermediary institutions are very suspicious to liberalism, at least in its pure form… * Liberalism has a bias toward atomizing solutions to social problems… * YIMBY vs. NIMBY is the fundamental political debate in Amer...

Key Insights: * The Taliban should go to the World Bank and say: “For 42 years now, mechanized, airborne, and infantry armies and air and drone forces have been driving, walking, and flying over our country, killing us. that has done enormous amounts of damage. We are absolutely dirt poor. We will try as hard as we can: please give us money so that we can start call centers, start simple labor-int...

“I have seen the future, and it works”. That was what Lincoln Steffens wrote in a letter to Maria Howe in 1919 with respect to Vladimir Lenin’s Soviet Union. Which societies are thought to “work”, and how does that influence the power and authority such societies have, and the global leadership they can exercise? Key Insights: * We need to have another podcast on emerging great-power competition i...

Key Insights: * There are a great many reasons to fear that the rise of industrial and post-industrial economic concentration is doing serious harm to the market economy’s (limited) ability to function as an efficiency-promoting societal calculating mechanism. * None of these have yet been nailed down. * But the neo-Brandeisians will have their chance because of the striking misbehavior of the tec...

Key Insights!: * Hexapodia! * Drop the embargo now! * There is nothing that enables an authoritarian régime—or, indeed, pretty much any type of régime—hang together other than an implacable external enemy. * For the Cuban military-bureaucratic junta-oligarchy, that implacable external enemy consists of the Cuban exiles in Miami and their descendants References: * Alexa van Sickle (2014): Viva la R...

Key Insights: * “This time, for sure!…” Are the Democrats Bullwinkle Moose or Rocket J. Squirrel “that trick never works!” in hoping that they can get a high-investment high-productivity growth full-employment high-wage growth economy, and then the political life for true equality of opportunity will be doable?… * Milton Friedman is of powerful historical importance as one of the principal creator...

Zach Carter, who was supposed to be our guest this week, has a cold. So we have a grab-bag: vaccination & votes, NIMBYism & California growth, aversion to continuing UI, Google’s quality as a search engine, & Wilhelmine Germany & Contemporary China Key Insights: * Red states will see a lot of COVID-hurt this summer fall and winter for… reasons we still find incomprehensible… * NIMBYism has not kil...

Key Insights: * Hexapodia! * Periodically, America has had “the frontier has closed, now scarcity rules!” panics—& they have been bad, but so far they have all been false alarms. * The “new frontier” to alleviate scarcity in America is intensive growth, right here, but more: economic poldering. References: * John F. Kennedy (1960): “The New Frontier”: Liberal Party Nomination Acceptance Speech < h...

Key Insights: * There is a four-day creative-destruction festschrift for Philippe Aghion & Peter Howitt starting June 9: The Economics of Creative Destruction < https://zoom.us/j/98595732585 > * When industrial policy in America has been successful, it has always had a profound political driving motive: maintaining independence, manifest destiny, Sputnik, and so on. The only such driver today—and...

Key Insights: * Brad cannot, in fact, reliably and accurately multiply two-digit numbers in his head… * When people comment on twitter that we are a nerdy podcast, we respond by going nerdier.. * If we get an relatively egalitarian income distribution, the care-centered service economy will give us at least as many interesting jobs to do in the future as we could possibly want—at least for “future...

Key Insights: * Josef Schumpeter’s “depressions are… forms of something which has to be done, namely, adjustment to previous economic change. Most of what would be effective in remedying a depression would be equally effective in preventing this adjustment…” is perhaps the most zombie of zombie economic ideas. * Schumpeter’s zombie leads to episodes of dorkish zombie economic derp like John Cochra...

Key Insights: * Henry : We need to be critical of other people in the public sphere, but we need to be critical in an extraordinarily humble way—to recognize that we, all of us, are incredibly biased as individuals. We see the moats in our brothers' eyes very well. We do not see the beams and our own. We have a duty to others to try to help them to remove the beams in a polite, quiet, sometimes in...

Brad DeLong :  INTERVIEW: Inflation Concerns in the US Following Secretary Treasury Janet : ‘Apple Podcasts: tbs eFM This Morning: 0514 IN FOCUS… < https://podcasts.apple.com/kr/podcast/0514-in-focus-2-inflation-concerns-in-us-following/id1038822609?i=1000521665790&l=en > Get full access to DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe