Inflection Point

Back after a year on hiatus! Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast They, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week); Aspirationally an hour...Sokrates: The people find some protector, whom they nurse into greatness… but then changes, as indicated in the old fable of the Temple of Zeus of the Wolf, of how he who tastes human flesh mixed up with the flesh of other sacrificial victims will turn into a wolf. Even so, the protector, once metaphorically tasting human blood, slaying some and exiling others, within or without the law, hinting at the cancellation of debts and the fair redistribution of lands, must then either perish or become a werewolf—that is, a tyrant…Key Insights:* We are back! After a year-long hiatus.* Hexapodia is a metaphor: a small, strange insight (like alien shrubs riding on six-wheeled carts as involuntary agents of the Great Evil) can provide key insight into useful and valuable Truth.* The Democratic Party is run by 27-year-old staffers, not geriatric figurehead politicians–this shapes messaging and internal dynamics.* The American progressive movement did not possess enough assibayah to keep from fracturing over Gaza War, especially among younger Democratic staffers influenced by social media discourse.* The left’s adoption of “indigeneity” rhetoric undermined its ability to be a coalition in the face of tensions generated by the Hamas-Israel terrorism campaigns.* Trump’s election with more popular votes than Harris destroyed Democratic belief that they had a right to oppose root-and-branch.* The belief that Democrats are the “natural majority” of the U.S. electorate is now false: nonvoters lean Trump, not so much Republican, and definitely not Democratic.* Trump’s populism is not economic redistribution, but a claim to provide a redistribution of status and respect to those who feel culturally disrespected.* The Supreme Court’s response to Trumpian overreach is likely to be very cautious—Barrett and Roberts are desperately eager to avoid any confrontation with Trump they might wind up losing, and Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Thomas will go the extra mile—they are Republicans who are judges, not judges who are Republicans, except in some extremis that may not even exist.* Trump’s administration pursues selective repression through the state, rather than stochastic terrorism.* The economic consequence of the second Trump presidency look akin to another Brexit costing the U.S. ~10% of its prosperity, or more.* Social media, especially Twitter a status warfare machine–amplifying trolls and extremists, suppressing nuance.* People addicted to toxic media diets but lack the tools or education to curate better information environments.* SubStack and newsletters may become part of a healthier information ecosystem, a partial antidote to the toxic amplification of the Shouting Class on social media.* Human history is marked by information revolutions (e.g., printing press), each producing destructive upheaval before stabilization: destruction, that may or may not be creative.* As in the 1930s, we are entering a period where institutions–not mobs–become the threat, even as social unrest diminishes.* The dangers are real,and recognizing and adapting to new communication realities is key to preserving democracy.* Plato’s Republic warned of democracy decaying into tyranny, especially when mob-like populism finds a strongman champion who then, having (metaphorically) fed on human flesh, becomes a (metaphorical) werewolf.* Enlightenment values relied more than we knew on print-based gatekeeping and slow communication; digital communication bypasses these safeguards.* The cycle of crisis and recovery is consistent through history: societies fall into holes they later dig out of, usually at great cost—or they don’t.* &, as always, HEXAPODIA!References:* Brown, Chad P. 2025. “Trump's trade war timeline 2.0: An up-to-date guide”. PIIE. <https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2025/trumps-trade-war-timeline-20-date-guide>.* Center for Humane Technology. 2020. “The Social Dilemma”. <https://www.humanetech.com/the-social-dilemma>.* Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, & John Jay. 1788. The Federalist Papers. <https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text>.* Nowinski, Wally. 2024. “Democrats benefit from low turnout now”. Noahpinion. July 20. <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/dont-rock-the-vote>.* Platon of the Athenai. -375 [1871]. Politeia. <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1497>.* Rorty, Richard. 1998. Achieving Our Country. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. <https://archive.org/details/achievingourcoun0000rort>* Rothpletz, Peter. 2024. “Economics 101 tells us there’s no going back from Trumpism”. The Hill. September 24. <https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4896391-trumpism-gop-future/>.* Smith, Noah. 2021. “Wokeness as Respect Redistribution”. Noahpinion.<https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/wokeness-as-respect-redistribution>.* Smith, Noah. 2016. “How to actually redistribute respect”. Noahpinion. March 23. <https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/03/how-to-actually-redistribute-respect.html>.* Smith, Noah. 2013. “Redistribute wealth? No, redistribute respect”. Noahpinion. December 27. <https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/redistribute-wealth-no-redistribute.html>.* SubStack. 2025. “Building a New Economic Engine for Culture”. <https://substack.com/about>.&* Vinge, Vernor. 1999. A Deepness in the Sky. New York: Tor Books. <https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355>.If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail… Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe

Economist Noah Smith and Professor Brad DeLong discuss the decline of bad economists, the effectiveness of missile defense, and the impact of Chinese imports. They debate economic policies post-2008, the need for nuance in discussions, and how the internet affects nuanced understanding. Dive into Hexapodia insights and more!

Noah Smith and Brad DeLong discuss the challenges of passing the baton to the left amidst the absence of Republican support. They explore the concept of 'bending the knee' for neoliberals, the struggles of the left, and the emergence of supply-side progressivism in the Democratic Party. The conversation also touches on healthcare reform, climate change initiatives, high inflation rates, and the need for bold policy programs.

Economist Noah Smith and Prof. Brad DeLong debate U.S. passing leadership to China, trolling on social media, power shifts, Abbe's political leanings, US-China relations, Leninism influence, AOC's acumen, and Hexapodia theme in an engaging and thought-provoking podcast episode.

Vernor Vinge, a celebrated science fiction author, discusses his groundbreaking ideas and their impact on technology and society. The conversation delves into the concept of the technological singularity, critiquing the dangerous dominance of major tech companies. Vinge's intriguing works are highlighted, especially 'A Fire Upon the Deep' and 'True Names.' The speakers reflect on the bond between humans and technology while humorously envisioning enhanced communication with pets. Their insightful dialogue reveals timeless themes of individuality, societal structures, and the cyclical nature of authoritarianism.

Economists Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson discuss the importance of technologies complementing labor, critique their book 'Power & Progress', debate tech oligarchies, and analyze historical examples of job disruptions and inequality. They also explore the impact of AI, power dynamics in public debates, and the influence of technologies on human society.

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>. Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe

Young whippersnappers Oks and Williams discuss African fertility transition, mass employment vs. productivity growth, distinct development strategies for commodity exporting, and the evolving pace of South and Southeast Asian economic development. Brad DeLong reflects on aging perspectives, and the importance of updating views based on current realities rather than past memories. The conversation navigates economic development insights, critique of global strategies, and the challenges faced by regions like Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa in finding flexible development paths.

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>. Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe

Political commentator and journalist Brian Beutler joins Noah Smith and Brad DeLong to discuss the timidity of Democrats in going after corruption in TrumpWorld. They explore the concept of a lost golden age in left-of-center politics, the pronunciation of Brian's name, and the importance of key insights. Brian expresses his dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party's approach to investigation and oversight, highlighting the need for more competitiveness and willingness to challenge corruption. They also delve into internal debates and missed opportunities in the pursuit of justice.