Articles: 318
16 Sep 2025, 02:00
Finance
It may simply be that I am in a very unusual position with respect to what I know & what I don't, but I found these three videos from Welch Labs to be incredibly enlightening with respect to the unrea
13 Sep 2025, 22:23
Fill your boots, as they say. An opportunity to make money both on the way up and on the way down is here again, like last December...
12 Sep 2025, 19:26
The gears of modernity: why our institutions are the original "machine minds".
10 Sep 2025, 16:02
In which John Cochrane claims that Walter Bagehot's "Lombard Street" & all subsequent analyses of lenders-of-last-resort are not economics...
08 Sep 2025, 14:26
Constitutional Moments & Constitutional Mischief: The Court, Trump, the Limits of Law, Emergency dockets, partisan rulings, and the peril of a judiciary that never expects to have to answer to the...
05 Sep 2025, 13:08
The Federal Reserve is boxed in—with neither a reduction in rates to fight possible recession nor an increase to fight possible inflation prudent—with sputtering payroll as continued random tariff...
04 Sep 2025, 15:01
I cannot claim that this is in any sense the Director's Cut—the actual "Democracy Journal" review is a very different beast entirely. I was supposed to write a 2000-word review of John Cassidy's...
03 Sep 2025, 16:24
Dining, not philosophers, but economists. We tried to settle the following questions: Was the big risk in early 2009 that excessive monetary and fiscal stimulation would turn the U.S. into...
03 Sep 2025, 14:20
I have a feeling that this is going to be an interesting mere SMoP…
01 Sep 2025, 19:28
I'm going to be giving a guest lecture in Harvard's GenEd 1120 "The Political Economy of Globalization", taught by Robert Lawrence and Lawrence Summers. The topic they gave me was "Globalization...
31 Aug 2025, 17:21
Engineering State vs. Lawyerly Society in a world that needs to build things & networks & also to empower & secure people—& what a smarter hybrid could unlock. Contemporary lived experience meets...
29 Aug 2025, 18:36
Let us start with Dan Davies tormenting ChatGPT5, because as a fly to a wanton boy is it to him:
29 Aug 2025, 17:30
...Glimpse of the Future? Maybe; Useful Niche Product? Only for a Very Small Nice That Does Not Include Me. Spatial Computing, Virtual Disappointments, & the Search for Real Usefulness: A Very Bri...
27 Aug 2025, 20:30
If you want to know what is driving today's China or America, Dan Wang's new book Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future is an indispensable guide. Wang
26 Aug 2025, 20:58
...that I repost here, for reasons...
26 Aug 2025, 11:49
Chaos monkeys chaosing as they caravan down Constitution Avenue from the White House to the Eccles Building. The attack on Fed independence spooked investors, widened yield spreads, & raised the...
25 Aug 2025, 17:33
A Cimmerian strides through my brain between my retina and my frontal lobe, boasting "live, I love, I slay, and am content!" This is not good literature. &, yet, somehow… it is. Why Conan the...
25 Aug 2025, 17:31
Modern Advanced Machine-Learning Models—MAMLMs—are already an off-scale financial-econo tech-sector earthquake as well, and they will become a classification-analysis earthquake as they make...
25 Aug 2025, 13:40
The Sledgehammer & the Gavel at Dawn & Dusk: Synthesis, strife, and the race to shape the twenty-first century; how China & America build—and block—their common future. Dan Wang's brand-new...
21 Aug 2025, 22:56
Rhetorical claims of trade-war victory are entirely hollow. The costs of the new Trumpist Tariff régime fall overwhelmingly on Americans, the benefits of spurring productive reindustrialization are...
20 Aug 2025, 22:59
To win the war on poverty, look beyond cash & toward the levers that truly unlock human potential...
19 Aug 2025, 14:03
& I do not have one. I do have scattered observations on how it might work out for the tech industry. How it is affecting the overall business cycle—that is another equally complicated topic that...
17 Aug 2025, 14:06
A ceasefire-in-place in Ukraine might—might—be a way of stopping the atrocity of the death and destruction in the war Putin's Russia is waging against Ukraine. A ceasefire in return for Ukraine...
16 Aug 2025, 12:10
From a year ago. All this was predictable. & was, in fact, predicted...
14 Aug 2025, 20:13
Enriching and empowering through discoverability, or locking-in to roles as drones in a malevolent attention-hacking and harvesting grift? The unfinished battle for online publishing's soul…
14 Aug 2025, 19:04
Why the next Federal Reserve Chair appointment may well be both the most consequential & the most badly compromised in advance ever. Intelligence, experience, and character: All in short supply...
13 Aug 2025, 14:15
Contexts, copilots, and chatbots: A mid-course report on the AI-augmented web…
12 Aug 2025, 03:01
FanFic, wetware, and the battle for narrative: Cory Doctorow dissects fiction's strange empathy machine from Virgil to LiveJournal, or, who owns the dragons?: the cognitive science of fanfiction...
09 Aug 2025, 13:24
"I think it is finally time to anthropomorphize the heck out of it": some brief field notes on conversing with an unreasonably effective yet clearly massively subTuring software machine…
07 Aug 2025, 16:16
Lying liars who lie and knowingly and deliberately say whatever—whatever—lies they believe are to their immediate advantage are not the kind of people who should chair the Federal Reserve. Any...
05 Aug 2025, 19:37
The way, financially, for a company to win the ChatBot game in a profitability sense is—probably—not to play. Cupertino's AI contrarianism of betting on the device, not the cloud; and on the...
04 Aug 2025, 14:24
The Substack Paradox: community, control, the myth of lock-in, golden handcuffs, platform power, writer agency, exit, & voice…
