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And now I am thinking about Gandalf’s declarations—commands—observations in The Lord of the Rings that: “you cannot enter here” and the metaphysics and spiritual mechanics of Middle-earth. And after thinking, I am almost convinced that there is a strange coherence to magic as practiced by Gandalf the Grey and by Gandalf the White. In this coherence, Gandalf doesn’t win magic duels with fireballs and such. He wins with Truth. Tolkien’s magic system is not “Dungeons & Dragons”: it is Neoplatonism.

When Gandalf says “you cannot enter here”, he is performing a mix of (a) obsserving the state of the true, real world; (b) using his mental powers to constrain the actions of an evil villain, and also (c) changing the world via performing certain ritual actions—with much more weight on (a) than on (b) or (c), but with ultimately they all coming to converge in the same Reality as created by and in the mind of Eru Iluvatar.

It is almost convincing

I want Bret Devereaux to sing of arms and men, but instead we get a different treat—the ultimate Tolkien magic-system explanation:

Bret Devereaux: How Gandalf Proved Mightiest: Spiritual Power in Tolkien <https://acoup.blog/2025/04/25/collections-how-gandalf-proved-mightiest-spiritual-power-in-tolkien/>: ‘Treebeard says to… Gandalf…. “You have proved mightiest, and all your labours have gone well.” (RotK, 287)…. I would argue that what Treebeard is saying is that Gandalf has… been measured against and “proved”… mightier than Sauron and thus the “mightiest” creature in Middle-earth. And no one corrects him – because there is nothing to correct…. We need to distinguish… craft-magic, spiritual power and then a subset of spiritual power, dark magic….

Craft-magic: Elves and Dwarves sometimes produce objects or effects which are marvelous out of their deep knowledge and connection to parts of Arda…. These are… technology: wondrous, magical-seeming results borne of the tremendous skill and deep knowledge of the crafters….

Spiritual power:… An expression of the primacy of the Unseen over the Seen and in a sense as a result such spiritual power does not effect or perform but rather reveals: the true, Unseen nature of the world is revealed by the exertion of a supernatural being and that revelation reshapes physical reality (the Seen) which is necessarily less real and less fundamental than the Unseen…. Note those moments where Gandalf’s manner suddenly changes and a character glimpses, however briefly, his true being as an angelic Maia of tremendous power…. in those moments characters who normally can only observe the Seen world momentarily glimpse the deeper truth of the Unseen world: “Denethor looked indeed much more like a great wizard than Gandalf did, more kingly, beautiful, and powerful; and older. Yet by a sense other than sight, Pippin perceived that Gandalf had the greater power and the deeper wisdom, and a majesty that was veiled. And he was older, far older. (RotK, 30, emphasis mine)…”

‘Dark magic:’: … The Mouth of Sauron “learned great sorcery,” for instance…. Such ‘dark magic’ is actually spiritual power, one step removed…. Mortal magic users command[ing]… the… remains of Morgoth’s spiritual power, diffused through Middle-earth… manipulat[ing] elements of this ‘Morgoth-stuff’ to produce magical-seeming effects….

The power of the [three Eleven] Rings introduces some complexity…. They do not seem to corrupt their wearers on their own, which might suggest they are close – or at least closer – to pure ‘craft-magic.’ My own suspicion is that in their design, drawn from the Seven and the Nine, there is some part of Sauron’s spiritual power reflected in them (included unintentionally by Celebrimbor), but that they are mostly ‘craft-magic’….

Spiritual power follows a clear pattern in Tolkien. What makes it tricky to assess as a ‘magic system’ is instead that spiritual power works at a very profound level, making it easy to mistake the most important uses of it as ‘chance’ or ‘happenstance’ when in fact we are observing the surface emanations of something much deeper. But in most cases – arguably all of the, – this spiritual power does follow a system, if we are attentive enough to detect it….

Our pattern for ‘magic’…. Characters exert their spiritual power through plain language assertions about the current state of the world – the spiritual power – works, the world alters itself to accommodate their statement, to make it true or perhaps more correctly… make it always have been true, because what is being made ‘true’ is really a ‘truth’ derived from the more fundamental, more real reality of the Unseen. And because the Unseen is more profound and fundamental than the Seen, when its nature is revealed the Seen world, as if snapping to a reality that has already existed immediately conforms….

Underneath the Gate of Minas Tirith…. This is one of my favorite moments… the entire reason I decided to write this nearly 7,000 word post…. It can only be overweening, staggering hubris that the Witch King even imagines he has any shot at winning this spiritual confrontation…. He is up against – he calls Gandalf “Old fool!” and one wonders if he has mistaken Gandalf for an aged lore-master and magic user rather than the far more powerful Maia he is…. [And] he very clearly doesn’t win this confrontation. Instead, what we get is an expression of supernatural power…. “You cannot enter here,’ said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. ‘Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your master. Go!’ (RotK 113)…”. A present tense plain language statement of the state of the world…. The WItch King, of course, dismisses this as words, mocks Gandalf, reveals his iron crown, raises his sword and with dark magic sets it alight (RotK, 113). But you know what he doesn’t do? He doesn’t enter. Because he cannot…. Gandalf… here he states a cold reality: the Lord of the Nazgûl cannot enter here….

A reality about the Unseen world is being expressed. And then, of course, the Seen world conforms to the deeper reality of the Unseen world: “And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last […] the darkness was breaking too soon, before the date that his Master had set for it: fortune had betrayed him for the moment, and the world had turned against him; victory was slipping from his grasp even as he stretched out his hand to seize it[…] King, Ringwraith, Lord of the Nazgûl, he had many weapons. He left the Gate and vanished. (RotK, 113, 125)…”

In understanding how spiritual power can express itself in Tolkien, I think this confrontation is the essential bridge…. [A] clear, present-tense statement of the state of the Unseen reality…. The villain produces a flaming sword with which to challenge Gandalf…. What is revealing however in this moment is how [Gandalf’s] power is expressed. Gandalf does not drive the Witch King from the gate with fireballs or curses or swordplay. Instead, the physical reality of the Seen world conforms to the spiritual reality of the Unseen world: the arrival of the Rohirrim prevents the Witch King from entering and so he “cannot enter.”… The victory in the spiritual contest is expressed not in direct, flashy confrontation, but in the truth of their vision of the world. Gandalf’s victory in both cases is born out by the fact that his statement about the world was correct….

The line in these spiritual contests between ‘magic’ and ‘labors’ is not just blurry but functionally indistinct: Gandalf triumphs over the Witch King in a clear by-the-numbers spiritual contest of wills not by casting lightning bolt, but by having set in motion days and weeks before the movement in the hearts of men which would bring the Rohirrim to Minas Tirith, which is of course, perfectly fitting with his mission. Gandalf may not even have fully known that – in the plan of Eru Ilúvatar – this is what he was doing, setting the stage for that very confrontation. Yet his actions first create a reality in the Unseen, in the hearts of people, which then at the critical moment manifests in the Seen world….

In his ability to move others to right action, to one good deed after another whose morality shaped the Unseen world until at last the grand magic of Doing The Right Thing bears out in unmaking the very “realm of Sauron.” Because it was always the Unseen world, shaped by hearts rather than armies, which mattered the most…

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My reaction: very clever, but ultimately it cannot be fully convincing. Or, at least, it cannot be fully convincing, because the authorial voice of Tolkien does not constantly sustain this position without inconsistencies. And it also cannot be fully convincing because Gandalf the Grey and Gandalf the White are very different entities, with different powers, using magic in different ways. Remember: Durin’s Bane, the Balrog of Moria, kills Gandalf the Grey. In Arda, Gandalf the Grey is stone dead. Gandalf the White is a different avatar, a new incarnation, even if he does wear his old robes to Meduseld in Rohan.

But Bret Devereaux’s take does make sense of a lot of things.

But it does not make sense of this—Gandalf’s first encounter with Durin’s Bane, the Balrog of Moria:

Tolkien: The Fellowship of the Ring: “I found myself suddenly faced by something that I have not met before. I could think of nothing to do but to try and put a shutting-spell on the door. I know many; but to do things of that kind rightly requires time, and even then the door can be broken by strength. ‘As I stood there I could hear orc-voices on the other side: at any moment I thought they would burst it open. I could not hear what was said; they seemed to be talking in their own hideous language. All I caught was ghâsh: that is’“fire’. Then something came into the chamber – I felt it through the door, and the orcs themselves were afraid and fell silent. It laid hold of the iron ring, and then it perceived me and my spell.

“What it was I cannot guess, but I have never felt such a challenge. The counter-spell was terrible. It nearly broke me. For an instant the door left my control and began to open! I had to speak a word of Command. That proved too great a strain. The door burst in pieces. Something dark as a cloud was blocking out all the light inside, and I was thrown backwards down the stairs. All the wall gave way, and the roof of the chamber as well, I think…

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This is very much not spiritual power making the Seen correspond to the Unseen.

This is, rather, a technological form of magic. Anyone with the talent and the skills—wherever those are coming from—could using the proper voces mysticae command nature— “shutting-spell…. I know many… rightly requires time…”, “counter-spell”, “word of Command…” And in this case we do not have a revelation of the Unseen and the coming of the Seen world into harmony with it. Rather, we have results nobody had intended:

The door burst in pieces…. was thrown backwards down the stairs. All the wall gave way, and the roof of the chamber as well, I think…”

“I think”. Gandalf does not know, until:

“A Balrog,” muttered Gandalf. “Now I understand.” He faltered and leaned heavily on his staff. “What an evil fortune! And I am already weary…”

In order to properly do this, you need to:

• (a) have the talent,

• (b) practice the skill, and

• (c) invent or discover or learn the voces mysticae, the magic words that control physical nature and also non-physical demonic, neutral, or angelic entities.

This is the kind of magic that enters English through Latin and Greek borrowings from and transformations of Iranian culture: the magi were the Powerful Ones, the fire-priests of the Zoroastrian religion. Magic was what they did—conjuring sacred fire out of the ground with no wood consumed (even if it was, apparently, a bush that was burning), altered-state of consciousnes rituals involving psychoacticive haoma, trance-bound channelers of divine speech, cleansing rites to drive out demonic pollution, plus deep astronomical and calendrical knowledge. And that then cross-fertilizes with other traditions—Keltic, Germanic, Italic, plus the Book of Enoch.

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What masquerades as a trade deal is, in fact, performance art. Trump’s engagement with Starmer yields a non-binding framework filled with future promises but empty of enforceable commitments: an attention-generating stunt dressed in economic garb.

Agreement details are laughably sparse: a minor adjustment in U.S. tariffs for up to 100,000 British cars; vague overtures on steel and aluminum; and symbolic wins on beef and ethanol.

But the broader implications are serious, for this is likely to have very damgaing structural consequences. Declining exports, rising input costs, and a loss of investor confidence follow. The U.S. isolates itself from global trade networks, with all the inflationary and productivity-sapping consequences that entails. And beware of the tails of the distribution: not just bad, but catastrophic. Right now everyone is hunkering down, expecting that Trump will soon lose interest and wander off from trade.

But the institutional wreckage he leaves will endure. Yes, by January 2026 Trump is almost certain to have lost interest in trade and tariffs, and to have have wandered off into the business of wrecking other parts of the fragile equilibria that sustain American prosperity, But his actions in 2025 will have changed the world.

How will things than have settled out as far as trade is concerned?

We don’t know. I would not bet that even The One Who Is has an accurate Visualization of the Cosmic All with respect to this aspect of it.

But if I want to stay in this game, I do have to, sometimes, ante up.

At the moment, if I had to make a forecast of the result that the chaos-monkey trade mess is going to settle into, it is this: 10% tariffs by the U.S. on pretty-near everything, the abandonment by Trump of any higher tariffs, a reduction in U.S. exports, a bigger reduction in U.S. imports as capital flight removes the financing for a substantial tranche of U.S. imports and the First Trump Recession removes demand for another substantial tranche—and a declaration of victory by Donald Trump, as he will claim to have brought the trade deficit down, made foreign countries abandon their unfair trade policies, and made a lot of deals. The press will probably play along.

This is, however, only a central case outcome and a modal-likelihood scenario. The odds are really substantial that it will not come to pass. If you can, you should bet that things will be either worse or better. And you should definitely not be betting that things will not be much worse—you need insurance against the big-disaster scenarios, rather than to implicitly sell such insurance and wind up in the economic equivalent of finding yourself naked on the airless Moon.

My reason for being willing to venture this as my forecast is the outcome of the HUUUUGGGGEEEE trade deal Trump and Starmer “negotiated”. Basically, Trump abandoned everything except a 10% tariff on imports from Britain in return for being able to show that he is a big “dealmaker”, and Starmer played along. For everyone except Xi Jinping, offering “playing along” as your only meaningful offer is just as much of a no-brainer as it was for Starmer.

But this will still be a BREXIT-magnitude disaster, a Trump own goal scored against, the United States. U.S. producers have on net suffered a major loss of market access not just to the U.K. but to every single country in the world. Other producers, by contrast, still have ability to export elsewhere on the same terms. Other-country producers have lost a little with respect to their ability to fit into productive niches in the highly productive global division of labor. U.S. producers have lost a lot.

It is also a substantial own goal for Trump, at least if you see Trump as an advocate for U.S. exporters. It is, however a win for Trump considered as a videoclip-seeking attention hound.

Figure a U.S. in ten years like Britain today ten years after BREXIT: a country with an economy about 10% poorer than it would otherwise have been.

I noted this a couple of days ago:

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And I read the news about what is actually in the “deal” and the takes I have seen by others smarter than me as reinforcing my confidence in my understanding of the shape of things. Read through the press fluff to notice that this was much less a trade agreement than a video-ready spectacle. The economic substance was minimal. Ethanol and beef received some token tariff exemptions; in exchange, the UK obtained limited relief on metal tariffs and a vague promise on car exports—not even a binding agreement but merely a non-binding framework with deferred negotiation promises.

Here is Arthur Snell:

Arthur Snell: So the last shall be first, and the first last <https://arthursnell.substack.com/p/so-the-last-shall-be-first-and-the>: ‘Keir Starmer made a bit of a fool… gushing about Britain’s trade deal with the United States…. The idea that a fairly narrow, sectoral deal to reduce tariffs in a few areas is comparable to the end of the most destructive war in human history is a bit ridiculous…. The full details have now come out…. The so-called announcement of a “deal” appears to be an announcement of a deal to make a deal…. A proper trade deal in the United States has to be ratified by Congress…. There isn’t much of a way round this. So this woolly arrangement is what you get if you negotiate with the President, which is what Starmer chose to do…

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And here is Joseph Politano. Joseph Politano rightly calls the deal a "farce," emphasizing that meaningful market access for either party was not actually achieved. British negotiators were simultaneously concluding a much more substantive trade agreement with India. The contrast laid bare the hollowness of the U.S.-U.K. arrangement—its sole function being spectacle:

Joseph Politano: The Farce of the Deal <https://www.apricitas.io/p/farce-of-the-deal>: ‘The US-UK Trade "Deal" Achieves Basically Nothing—and That's a Bad Sign for "Deals" to Come…. The US-UK “deal” is the… only one the US has negotiated…. The only actual tariff reduction America formally commits to is reducing the 25% car tariff to 10% for the first 100k vehicles exported from Great Britain. Washington promises to create a similar system for British steel & aluminum, but provided exactly zero details on what this actually means…. Lutnick also promised that aircraft engines & parts would be exempted from US tariffs, but this was a lie—the official document does not even mention planes.

In “exchange”, the US gets some tiny tariff-free quota for beef and ethanol exports…. Trade policy… is still several times more restrictive than before Trump…. To say this “deal” is tiny would be an understatement—it is microscopic…. The Trump… quiet decision to indefinitely delay tariffs on Mexican/Canadian auto parts was roughly 5-6x more impactful…. This entire episode… [was] basically a PR tour for slightly lower tariffs on Aston Martins & Bentleys…

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Eric Platt and team at the FT also reported from the Milken Institute conference that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was dispatched to reassure global investors that Trump's team had a "plan." That effort rang hollow. Bessent's presence was primarily damage control, trying to allay fears of capital flight and investor exit as Trump's 10% universal tariff proposals roiled global markets. Such reassurances are unlikely to succeed in the face of profound policy unpredictability.

And so have:

Eric Platt, Amelia Pollard, Harriet Clarfelt & Oliver Barnes: Milken mission: Trump dispatches Bessent to calm the financial elite <https://www.ft.com/content/33f80d29-3f60-4efa-9c7c-0d67b639b7ad>: ‘The Trump administration had a clear message…. We have a plan…. Bessent tried to hammer home to investors that the president and his team had a playbook to jump-start growth and strike new deals…. Executives hit out at the administration’s approach to trade policy, warning it would hamstring American businesses and fail to deliver… deficit-reduction…. In public, however, few would criticise the president, fearful of retribution…. [The] trade war swung into view and investors came to realise how they had misjudged Trump’s agenda. “People got optimistic about Trump and the whole American exceptionalism thing early and it’s gone,” the chief executive of one private equity firm said. “It’s still bleak — you’re more depressed when you get a little hope and it goes away”…

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Plus Martin Sandbu in the Financial Times drove the key economic insight: tariffs are taxes not only on imports but on exports as well. When a country makes itself a less reliable trading partner, it depresses the incentives for foreign producers to trade and collaborate, and it fractures the supply chains U.S. exporters depend upon. In this view, the Trump trade regime is not so much mercantilist as performative. It does not work even on its own protectionist logic:

Martin Sandbu: Donald Trump’s tariffs will boomerang on US exporters <https://www.ft.com/content/a18ed1bd-3546-453a-bf11-72b5ac6a56f5>: ‘The Lerner Symmetry Theorem… that an import tariff and a tax on exports have the same economic effect: they shrink both exports and imports…. An intuitive understanding for… Lerner symmetry…. Provided there are not a lot of unused resources… labour and capital will have to be drawn away from other production [to replace lost imports]…. Some of those resources… will be those already involved in… export[s]…. When supply chains cross borders, tariffs drive up the cost of imported inputs, hurting… manufacturing… mak[ing] the sector less able to export…. Exports from the US are projected to slide by 17 per cent… a much steeper fall than for China’s own exports or global exports as a whole…. The difference between China and the US is that only the latter is raising tariffs on everyone…. That prevents importers and producers from finding alternatives to China, whereas China can both replace US-origin imports and find new markets for its exports…

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As Martin Wolf observed, U.S. tariffs are now at levels not seen since the Smoot-Hawley era. This historical parallel is not merely rhetorical. Smoot-Hawley helped ignite a chain reaction of retaliatory tariffs, deepened the Great Depression, and eroded global trade networks. Today, while the institutional context differs, the economic logic remains: uncertainty kills investment and planning:

Martin Wolf: Trump’s trade shock hits the global economy <https://www.ft.com/content/e4b7a0b2-3257-4bab-8b40-55225417c7f0>: ‘The biggest reality… apart from the prohibitive tariffs imposed by the US and China on each other, is the elevated uncertainty… itself economically paralysing. Indeed, one of the many depressing realities of the Trump administration is its failure to understand… the most important role of government is to reduce uncertainty, not do whatever it can to raise it…. I am not optimistic. But I can hope. We cannot afford to remain on a path towards economic and political disaster…

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It is that uncertainty, I think, that is the true economic cost of the Trump approach even if all of the things-go-smash scenarios and possibilities are avoided. The abandonment of stable rule-based trade policy for stunt deals erodes the trust necessary to sustain the international economic system. If foreign producers and investors cannot trust that U.S. policies will remain consistent or even rational, they will seek alternatives.

The endgame? A U.S. economy semi-detached from the global trading system, suffering declining productivity as it loses access to innovation-rich supply chains. Rising prices from tariffs combined with falling demand due to recession mean a stagflationary landscape.

For in the longer term, trade disruptions are rarely temporary. Once global supply chains fracture, they do not automatically reassemble. Multinational corporations and foreign governments adjust by reallocating investment elsewhere. Domestic interest groups that gain massively from tariff walls acquire strength and influence.

Comparative advantage, the engine of so much global wealth generation, is not indestructible. And the prospect of reaping benefits from its creation drives much less policy reform than it should.

In sum, then, the central scenario is grim: a 10% universal tariff, declining trade volumes, and a symbolic "deal" culture replacing substantive engagement. But the tails of the distribution matter most.

And there are bigger risks: Trump, seeking new spectacles to star in, ignites further disruption—to the dollar system, to capital flows, or even to the basic institutional infrastructure of global trade. In that case, we do not end up like post-BREXIT Britain, 10% poorer. We end up in a state closer to autarky, with recession inflationary stagnation and decaying institutions.

That is why prudence demands betting not that things will turn out as expected, but that we prepare for the worse scenarios.

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People’s views on redistribution hinge on whether they see success as earned or inherited—whatever those words “earned” and “inherited” might turn out in the end to mean. And it turns out that in the web of transmission of intergenerational advantages, gene-determined cognition is not important. Rather, it is wealth, social capital, educational opportunities, and the cultivation of non-cognitive skills like perseverance and sociability. IQ is very modestly predictive of income. Genetic inheritance is substantially predictive of IQ. When multiplied together, the product is small—maybe 0.05? But the actual IGE—Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality—was 0.5 in America in the second half of the 1900s, and is likely to be higher now. Moreover, fully half of that 0.5 evades explanation.

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There are a great many people—the people whom Richard Rumbold back in 1685 denounced from the scaffold after being captured during Argyll’s Rising against James II Stuart—who fervently and with every fiber of their being search diligently for some reason to believe that most people “come… into the world with a saddle on his back… [with others] booted and spurred to ride…”

It used to be that our natural rulers were such because of their family traditions of blood and courage, or blood and honor. Or perhaps it was that non-Hellenes were slaves by nature because of their less-developed cognitive facilities. Later on, it was an enterprising spirit, as set forth by Andrew Carnegie:

The law of competition… is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may be someimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in very department. We accept and welcome therefore… the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few… [as] essential to the future progress of the race.. There must be great scope for the exercise of special ability in the merchant and in the manufacturer who has to conduct affairs upon a great scale. That this talent for organization and management is rare among men is proved by the fact that it invariably secures enormous rewards for its possessor, no matter where or under what laws or conditions….

It is a law, as certain as any of the others named, that men possessed of this peculiar talent for affairs, under the free play of economic forces must, of necessity, soon be in receipt of more revenue than can be judiciously expended upon themselves; and this law is as beneficial for the race as the others. Objections to the foundations upon which society is based are not in order, because the condition of the race is better with these than it has been with any other which has been tried…

And now—especially among TechBros—the magic fairy dust that gives you a legitimate right to extraordinary wealth and power is IQ. Inherited IQ. Genetically-driven inherited IQ.

This is, as Sam and Herb patiently pointed out, nonsense, as best as we can tell.

Sam and Herb’s opening:

People differ markedly in their views concerning the appropriate role of government in reducing economic inequality. Self-interest and differences in values explain part of the conflict over redistribution. But by far the most important fault line is that people hold different beliefs about why the rich are rich and the poor are poor. Survey data show that people—rich and poor alike—who think that “getting ahead and succeeding in life” depends on “hard work” or “willingness to take risks” tend to oppose redistributive programs. Conversely, those who think that the key to success is “money inherited from family,” “parents and the family environment,” “connections and knowing the right people,” or being white, support redistribution (Fong 2001, Bowles, Fong and Gintis 2002a). Handing down success strikes many people as unfair even if the stakes are small, while differences in achieved success may be unobjectionable even with high stakes, as long as the playing field is considered level. How level is the intergenerational playing field? What are the causal mechanisms that underlie the intergenerational transmission of economic status? Are these mechanisms amenable to public policies in a way that would make the attainment of economic success more fair? These are the questions we will try to answer…

And their conclusion:

While the estimates in Table 3 are quite imprecise, the qualitative results are not likely to be affected by reasonable alternative methods. The results are somewhat surprising: wealth, race and schooling are important to the inheritance of economic status, but IQ is not a major contributor and, as we have seen above, the genetic transmission of IQ is even less important:

A policy maker who is concerned about intergenerational transmission of economic status will face two difficult sets of issues. First, many of the policies that might affect the intergenerational transmission of economic status are controversial. For example, the current political climate seems inhospitable to increasing the estate tax to limit intergenerational financial transfers. Eliminating racial discrimination would reduce one component of the heritability of income, but achieving this goal is difficult. Improving educational achievement, especially for those whose parents have relatively low levels of schooling, would reduce intergenerational transmission both directly, because of the impact of schooling, and perhaps also indirectly by providing a more open network of group memberships and mating choices that are less homogeneous by income class. But improving educational achievement is another goal that is easier stated than accomplished.

A second broad set of problems is normative. Does a level playing field entail no correlation between parental and child incomes? (Swift forthcoming) There are important values of family life and privacy that would be compromised by any serious attempt to completely disconnect the fortunes of parents and children. Rather than pursuing an abstract (and to our minds unattractive) objective of zero intergenerational correlation, a better approach might be to ask: which mechanisms of intergenerational transmission are unfair, and direct policies accordingly. The role of race in transmitting status from generation to generation is clearly unfair. Many people regard the strong correlation between parental income and child health as morally suspect, and many feel the same way about high levels of wealth inheritance. Large majorities favor policies to compensate for inherited disabilities. Other mechanisms of persistence—the genetic inheritance of good looks, for example—strike most people as unobjectionable and not an appropriate target for compensatory policy interventions. Even if some consensus could be formed on which of these mechanisms are morally suspect, the policy implications would be far from clear. For example, the possible incentive effects on parental behaviors of reduced parental influence on child success would have to be estimated and considered.

Addressing the policy challenge will require not only moral clarity about these and related issues, but a better accounting of which causal mechanisms are at work in producing the substantial levels of intergenerational persistence of economic differences…

What is the main thread of their argument?

They begin by highlighting that public opinion on redistribution is significantly influenced by beliefs about the sources of economic success. Those who attribute success to hard work tend to oppose redistributive policies, while those who believe that family background and connections play a significant role are more supportive of such measures. This dichotomy underscores the importance of understanding the actual mechanisms behind economic mobility. They start out from a stance of questioning the belief that economic success is primarily determined by individual effort and merit—whatever “effort” and “merit” might be.

They stress—and this is really important—that earlier studies suggesting low intergenerational income correlations suffered very badly from measurement errors and data limitations. The best good numbers tell us that the lifetime IGE in the United States was around 0.5 in the second half of the 1900s. That means that a significant portion of economic status is inherited rather than earned—or that if it is “earned” is earned by characteristics that are intergenerationally transmitted—anew in each generation.

They then turn to identifying pathways through which economic status is transmitted:

• Genetic Factors: While acknowledging that genetics play a role in determining cognitive abilities, they argue that the heritability of IQ accounts for a relatively small portion of income variance.

• Cultural and Environmental Influences: Family environment, including parenting styles, values, and expectations, significantly shapes children's attitudes and behaviors, which in turn affect their economic outcomes.

• Wealth Transfers: The direct transmission of wealth, through inheritances and gifts, provides tangible advantages to offspring, enabling them to access better education, housing, and investment opportunities.

• Social Capital: Connections and networks inherited from parents can open doors to job opportunities and other economic advantages.

• Educational Attainment: Parents' socioeconomic status influences children's educational opportunities, which are strongly correlated with future earnings.

They emphasize the importance of non-cognitive skills—such as motivation, perseverance, and social skills—in determining economic success. These traits are often nurtured within the family environment and are less amenable to change through public policy interventions. Given the complex interplay, Bowles and Gintis suggest that policies aimed solely at equalizing educational opportunities will be far from sufficient to make the playing field not steeply pitched. They thus advocate for a broader approach that includes:

• Early Childhood Interventions: Programs that support families and children from a young age can help mitigate the disadvantages associated with low socioeconomic status.

• Wealth Redistribution: Tax policies and inheritance laws that reduce wealth concentration can help level the playing field.

• Support for Non-Cognitive Skill Development: Initiatives that foster traits like resilience and social competence can enhance individuals' economic prospects.

We need to figure out what sorts of inequalities are fair, yes. But first we need to listen to Bowles and Gintis, and learn what our inequalities are.

• Aristoteles. -326 [1995]. Politics. Trans. Ernest Barker. <https://archive.org/details/aristotlespoliti00arisuoft>.

• Bowles, Sam & Herb Gintis. 2002. “The Inheritance of Inequality”. Journal of Economic Perspectives. 16:3 (Summer), pp. 3–30. <https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/089533002760278686>.

• Carnegie, Andrew. 1889. “The Gospel of Wealth”. North American Review. 148:391, pp. 653–664. <https://archive.org/details/cu31924001214539>.

• Rumbold, Richard. 1685. “Speech on the Scaffold”. <https://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=81WXSLRB6448N44>.

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What we have here is less an economic accord than a theatrical stunt. It changes very little on the actual ground—some beef here, a tariff off ethanol there. The broader signal it sends is one of instability and caprice. With Trump, exporting to the U.S. becomes a risky gamble. The real cost to the U.S. flows from Trump’s blowing-up of all rational belief and trust in the stability of U.S. trade policy. Looking at Trump the chaos-monkey in broad perspective, American producers suffer a widespread loss in global market access, while British producers’ losses remain mostly confined to the U.S. This asymmetry makes the deal a serious strategic own goal for the United States, diluting its trade reliability while gaining little in return. For Trump, though, the deal serves its purpose: a video-ready spectacle for his base. For Starmer, it’s damage control—harm was done, but less than it could have been.

Robert Armstrong this AM:

Robert Armstrong: Unhedged <https://ep.ft.com/permalink/emails/…>: ‘The US and UK struck the first Trump-era trade deal yesterday. It was underwhelming. In return for more buying of US farm goods and removing a tariff on US ethanol, the UK will be exempted from metal levies, and will enjoy lower tariffs on (a few) cars. Other promises and frameworks were laid out, without any timelines…

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Relative to the pre-Trump normal, the only steps to increase U.S. market access the U.K. has taken has been to pledge to remove its 19% tariff on U.S. ethanol imports, and allow tariff-free imports of hormone-free beef in the amount of 13,000 tons. All else is hot air: pledges to negotiate additional improvements in market access. Those are as close to nothingburgers as anything could be.

Relative to the pre-Trump normal, the U.K. has less access to the U.S. market than it had before.

Dwarfing this micro-“deal” is a far more important shift in the incentives for U.S.-U.K. trade.

• Everyone in Britain now knows that any exports they make to the United States might be disrupted at any time for no reason other than that Donald Trump is a chaos monkey.

• Everyone in Britain now knows that exports they make to other countries will not be disturbed.

• Thus deciding to try to export to the United States carries huge risks, with associated costs.

• And everyone in the U.S. knows that any exports they make to the U.K. might be disrupted at any time as the U.K. retaliates to tariffs and quotas imposed on its exports for no reason other than that Donald Trump is a chaos monkey.

• And everyone in the U.S. knows that the same is true of any exports they make to any other country.

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Thus, as a result of Trump, U.S. producers have on net suffered a major loss of market access not just to the U.K. but to every single country in the world. U.K. producers, however, have suffered on net a major loss of market access to the U.S., but their ability to export elsewhere remains the same. U.K. producers have lost a little with respect to their ability to fit into productive niches in the highly productive global division of labor. U.S. producers have lost a lot.

Thus taken as a whole—the process and the outcome—this Starmer-Trump fake trade “deal” is a substantial own goal for the United States. It is also a substantial own goal for Trump, at least if you see Trump as an advocate for U.S. exporters. It is, however a win for Trump considered as a videoclip-seeking attention hound.

Taken as a whole this Starmer-Trump fake trade “deal” is a harm-reduction exercise by Starmer that has been largely successful. Yes, harm remains. But it has been substantially reduced vis-à-vis Trump’s initial threats.

In addition to being a win for Trump as a video clip-seeking attention, the process and the outcome together make up a win for journalists who want to gain reputations for being friendly publicists for Trump. Even Robert Armstrong knuckles under, by making sure that the descriptive adjective “underwhelming” is in neither his headline nor his first sentence.

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This is not something I had on my Bingo card last October: that if Trump won plutocratic figures like Michael Cembalest of JPMorgan and Larry Fink of BlackRock would performatively display a good definition of how we know that the Trump administration is neofascist:

Antoine Gara, Amelia Pollard, James Fontanella-Khan, & Eric Platt: How Wall Street got Donald Trump wrong <https://www.ft.com/content/e0b28b01-3cdb-4c64-be28-93f51b4a21e6>: ‘Top executives are now particularly careful with their words…. “They’re afraid of him… They don’t want to end up with any legal action against their bank or their family. And they’ve been told by their boards: keep your mouth shut,” says [Anthony] Scaramucci. “By the way, we don’t even have law firms that can defend you because every major law firm just got dunked on by the president.”

Michael Cembalest, the chair of market and investment strategy at JPMorgan, hinted at this chilling effect during a presentation to clients this month. “This is the first time I’ve ever had to do a call where I had to think about the things that I was saying, not just in terms of how they reflect our views on markets and economics…. I had to think about how they might reflect on the firm and some of its colleagues at a time when people are being held accountable for their views and the things that they say in ways that they probably shouldn’t be…”

BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink declined to answer a question last week at an Economic Club of New York event that sought his views on Trump’s use of executive orders to attack law firms, including BlackRock’s go-to legal adviser, Skadden. “Let’s move on,” the head of the world’s largest asset manager said…

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Michael is at least saying that there is a lot you should take away from this presentation that I am not saying. Larry is just not saying.

This is something that none of them foresaw would come from their voting for Trump, again.

How did they get it wrong? As I like to say, they made the mistake of thinking that kleptocrats regard plutocrats as their friends, rather than regarding plutocrats as their prey.

And so now here we are. Who can the Financial Times find to go on the record with respect to how huge a disaster Donald Trump is?

• “one attendee connected to Trump at the time…”

• “one Wall street executive says…”

• “billionaire hedge fund managers like Bill Ackman, Dan Loeb, and Cliff Asness aired their frustrations on X…”

• “Trump’s former commerce secretary Wilbur Ross told the FT: ‘It’s a fairly unconventional way of measuring tariffs”…’

• “one person close to him…”

• “He wants to end the global trading system and weaken the US. He wants to Brexit the United States from the rest of the world,” Anthony Scaramucci… briefly Trump’s White House communications director…. “This is the stupidest economic policy that the United States has ever come up with…”

• “Given our state of ignorance and all we don’t know, [investing now] is like betting on the outcome of the Super Bowl when you don’t know which teams are playing or who any of their players are,” Howard Marks, the co-founder of Oaktree Capital, says…”

• “the head of a private investment firm…”

And even those who do criticize in public are eager to reverse it and come back to the fold whenever they can. I will not say that Bill Ackman ever had any dignity, but he lost all chance of every gaining any when he wrote:

Bill Ackman: ‘brilliantly executed”… “Textbook, Art of the Deal”… “The advantage of @realDonaldTrump's strategy is that we now recognize our favored trading partners and identify the problematic ones. This creates an ideal scenario for trade talks over the next three months”… “Thank you on behalf of all Americans…”

And Dan Loeb is eager to grasp at any straw:

Dan Loeb: “Third Point anticipates that the investment landscape for equities will remain advantageous… despite the unconventional methods this Administration employs in communicating and implementing policies…”

Only Cliff Asness is willing to stick to his guns.

Great wealth and associated social power does not give them strength and courage, but rather fear that they might lose something of what they have—even though they have a lot, and Trump does not have the energy to injure more than one or two of them.

This is, I think, a good touchstone.

I confess that it is not until this year that I understood how Friedrich von Hayek had, in his Road to Serfdom, gotten it so completely wrong in believing that only a centrally-planned economy could create complete cynicism with respect to truth, claiming that only in such does:

The word truth itself ceases to have its old meaning… [but] becomes something to be laid down by authority… and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organised effort require it. The general intellectual climate which this produces, the spirit of complete cynicism as regards truth which it engenders, the loss of the sense of even the meaning of truth, the disappearance of the spirit of independent inquiry and of the belief in the power of rational conviction, the way in which differences of opinion in every branch of knowledge become political issues… are all things which one must personally experience—no short description can convey their extent…. [Such] contempt for intellectual liberty is not a thing which arises only once the totalitarian system is established, but one which can be found everywhere among intellectuals who have embraced a collectivist faith…

Or, in the case of our current barons of Wall Street, an anti-collectivist faith. If they were at all concerned with one another, they could band together and would not need to be more fearful, would they?

Henry Farrell provides perhaps a glimmer of hope:

Henry Farrell: : ‘The more powerful and unruly the authoritarian becomes, the more readily they can make promises or threats. Equally, the less credible those promises or threats become…. Absolute power implies absolute impunity: if I enjoy such power, I have no incentive to behave trustworthily to anyone… [and] no-one has any incentive to trust me…. As an aspiring authoritarian move[s] closer to unbounded control… [he] need[s] to artfully balance the benefits that my power can bring to my allies with the fear those allies may reasonably have over what happens should that power be turned against them…

But only a glimmer. That requires that the authoritarian be something other than a bundle of hatreds on a constant hair trigger. With such—which Trump is—it is very easy to convince everyone with something to lose that if they keep their head down, somebody else will become the target of the day.

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The smart Torsten Slok of Apollo:

Torsten Slok: After “Liberation” Day <https://www.apolloacademy.com/the-daily-spark/>: ‘Earnings expectations… have been revised down significantly… interest rate differentials no longer drive the dollar... companies are responding to higher tariffs.. [by planning on] passing cost increases through to consumers:

The bottom line is that inflation will be rising significantly over the next six months...

But what is “significantly”. We do not know.

Back up:

Our macroeconomic forecasting models have long been not bad, even OK, at unconditional forecasting. Thus they have served as useful compasses guiding market expectations, and useful background for policy discussions. But these models have succeeded not because they are true, but because the process of estimating them means that the computer has found a way to match historical in-sample correlations. Thus, to the extent that those correlations from the past tend to continue into the future, the models can do their job of giving you a future number that is not far off from what the true future is likely to bring.

This approach serves us very well during periods of relative stability.

However, these models are hopeless when faced with shocks that deviate sharply from historical norms. The COVID-19 plague global health crisis disrupted supply chains, labor markets, and consumer behavior in ways that we had never before seen. Russia's invasion of Ukraine had far-reaching economic effects simply not found in recent historical precedent. That means that Robert Armstrong had it exactly right when he aptly described the challenges of forecasting as requiring that “any forecast must be made humbly”, for “this is all new".

It gets worse. Structural changes within the economy render not just traditional models but the practice of forecasting a conditional outcome on the basis of a key relationship extremely hazardous. The labor market, for example, has undergone significant transformations in recent years, with shifts in worker preferences, remote work trends, demographic changes, and the informational ecology of job search profoundly altering the dynamics of employment and vacancies. Larry Summers relied on the Beveridge Curve—the relationship between job vacancies and unemployment—to forecast that the post-plague inflation would not subside without a substantial rise in unemployment, and thus a recession. That forecast rested on bedrock: the Beveridge Curve had, after all, long been reliable, and it definitely had a slope. But Larry was wrong, as the Beveridge Curve crumbled and its slope vanished.

Or look at me. I believed that price-setting behaviors were sufficiently forward-looking to ensure that the inflationary pressures following the post-plague demand surge would be transient: that price-adjustment would be one-and-done. Hence I was very much on Team Transitory as far as post-plague inflation was concerned. But they were not sufficiently forward-looking. It was not one-and-done, but do-do again-and then do yet again. Transitory in the end, but a tide rather than a wave. And then Vladimir Putin decided to remake the Spanish Civil War.

Or look at all of us. We are all perplexed by the resilience of the prices of long-duration assets in the face of rising interest rates. Conventional wisdom suggests that higher rates should dampen the appeal of such assets, yet markets have defied this expectation. The current-thing AI enthusiasm seems to be blinding people to what I see as fundamentals, and leading to a great deal of the shrugging-off of what should be very real concerns that data-center training costs and inference costs will not be followed by profits. Add to that the reality that equilibria are sensitive, as small shocks produce large effects since the largest contributor to a recession is the expectation of such, and it does not take that much irrational exuberance to submerge asset price fundamentals for a while. And our bias toward thinking that asset prices have to return to real reality quickly misleads us.

Thus I do not dare to offer a quantitative forecast right now.

Yes, both higher inflation and unemployment seem very probable indeed over the next year. But the magnitude and duration of such? The distribution of potential outcomes is disturbingly wide, with a significant very unpleasant and very long tail of strongly adverse possible outcomes.

A year ago Andy Haldane had a very nice line: economic forecasting as performance art. That is how I feel.

• Anstey, Chris. 2024. “Where’s That Recession? Forecasts Found Wanting.” Bloomberg, February 15. <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-02-15/world-economy-latest-forecasting-fails>.

• Armstrong, Robert. 2025. “Solving for three variables with markets in chaos.” Financial Times, April 7. <https://www.ft.com/content/ce09bfcc-f84e-4c26-b1c4-616fc23daacb>.

• Haldane, Andy. 2024. “Economic Forecasting — Little More than Performance Art for Central Bankers.” Financial Times. April 15. <https://www.ft.com/content/475e1fae-1bf6-4aaf-ba07-e249f09cbc78>.

• Slok, Torsten. 2025. “After ‘Liberation’ Day.” The Daily Spark. May 6. https://www.apolloacademy.com/the-daily-spark/.

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What happens when a president cannot follow a basic question, let alone a policy debate? We are watching it unfold, daily. And yet the machinery of media and politics continues pretending everything is fine. Donald Trump’s understanding of American governance is now as foggy as his syntax. That would be comic if it weren’t also lethal to democracy. This isn’t politics—it’s eldercare with nuclear codes.

Trump, three and a half months into his second term, is not leading. He is muttering vague absurdities—usually about bloodbaths and taking your medicine and all his enemies, yet occasionally about unity and love. And the people whose job it is to invoke the 25th Amendment... pretend not to notice. Instead, they commit, daily, the absurdity of pretending Trump is capable of and is actually exercising the office of President of the United States.

Every single day. Every single day. Every single day, we see new evidence—always humiliating, always alarming—that Donald Trump is not mentally capable of discharging the duties of the presidency. Yet the dominant political and media culture insists on maintaining the fiction that everything is still within the bounds of normal democratic governance.

When Trump, on national television, points to the Declaration of Independence and mutters about it being a “declaration of unity and love and respect,” we are not just witnessing confusion—we are witnessing profound cognitive decline. The Declaration is not about love. It is not about unity. It is not about respect. Jefferson and company had zero respect for King George III Hanover and his ministers. It is about revolt. It is about the severing of political bonds. It is about the violation of inalienable rights by those who control but do not love us.

The idea that Trump sees it as a feel-good sentiment is not an alternative interpretation—it’s a symptom. Yet his party rallies behind him. The press parses his word salad with straight faces, afraid or unwilling to confront the implications.

But let’s be brutally honest: Trump doesn’t know what he’s saying.

And he doesn’t care that he doesn’t know.

Nor does he trust anyone enough to delegate power.

What fills the vacuum is a swarm of advisors, staffers, and opportunists who act in his name without his input—“chaos monkeys” launching random policies and edicts that disrupt lives, markets, alliances.

And the Republican leaders? They watch in silence. John Thune and Mike Johnson have taken the path of least resistance—fearing the wrath of Trump’s base more than the collapse of coherent governance. It is, in effect, a collective political dereliction.

The truth is this: the emperor not only has no clothes—he is asleep at the wheel, mumbling to himself, while the car careens off the road. Every day this is normalized, we move further from democracy and closer to a regime of unaccountable power, steered not by policy, but by delusion and opportunism. The real president is the void at the center. The people who surround him—some loyalists, some grifters, some actual ideologues—wield power in his name. They contradict each other. They contradict reality. The result is a cacophony of dangerous randomness: financial markets react to rumors; foreign governments roll the dice on stability; and domestically, Americans are left without functioning leadership.

Maybe you could argue in his first term that the clownishness was strategic. That was never really true. But now it is totally false.

The clownishness is cognitive.

The president does not have the grade-school understanding of founding documents that we expect of anyone seeking citizenship.

Meanwhile, governance happens in his name—by people not elected, not vetted, and not even properly authorized. The results are predictably catastrophic: impulsive tariffs, foreign policy U-turns, regulatory whiplash, and deliberate cruelty disguised as policy.

This is the very scenario the 25th Amendment exists to address. But nobody invokes it. Because everyone is pretending. 3.5 months into the second Trump administration, and reduced to parsing his word salad for coherence like medieval theologians torturing and tormenting scripture.

Everything is broken.

Yet so many people pretend that this is not happening, for what I can only see as short-run highly-cynical careerist reasons:

John Gruber: Trump Has No Idea What the Declaration of Independence Means <https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/04/trump-declaration>: ‘Trump, showing off to ABC News’s Terry Moran the historical copy of the Declaration of Independence now hanging in the Oval Office:

Trump: “Of course, you have the Declaration of Independence.”

Moran: “What does it mean to you?”

Trump: “Well, it means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration. It’s a declaration of unity and love and respect. And it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.”

Watch the clip. A transcript doesn’t do justice to just how clear it is he has no idea what it means. I keep mentioning that Democrats should hammer, every day, the argument that Trump is way too old and now suffering from dementia. It’s just good politics. But I think it’s actually true, too. Mark my words, by the time he gets toward the end of this second term they’re going to have to somehow try to keep him away from microphones. You can’t get out of the fourth grade without being able to describe what the Declaration of Independence means…

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The Declaration of Independence is not a declaration of love. It’s not really a declaration of unity. It’s…

Why go on?

We all know how somebody acts who is out of it—whose hearing aids are not turned on, or who is simply not following the conversation at all, and how they then filibuster in the way that Trump is doing here. They talk about what they want to talk about, and focus on their own hobbyhorses.

And yet sooooo many people continue to attempt to pretend that this is in some sense “normal”—as in Trump having any idea at all of what, say, Stephen Miran means with his (largely wrong) arguments that the U.S. would be better off on balance if the rest of the world were not to love but rather shy away from wanting to hold U.S. Treasury bonds.

And it is not as though the fact that he knows that he is not following the thread of the conversation has induced him to give anybody else the policy baton. Because to do that he would have to trust them. And he trusts nobody.

I mean, while it is true that “the emperor has no clothes” is a boring thing to say day after day, it is true and it does need to be said, every day. Does it not?

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Let me step out of my proper lane today bigtime.

I am prompted to do this by:

G. Elliott Morris: Should Democrats focus on immigration or the economy? <https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/should-democrats-focus-on-immigration>: ‘It is possible for parties to walk and chew gum at the same time: I have seen political analysts suggest or imply a few times now that Democrats should not be trying to fight Republicans on immigration in general, and advocate for Kilmar Abrego Garcia in particular, because the rough GOP stance on deportations is popular…. I guess the logic for these arguments is straightforward enough: The current state of the economy is a 20-ton anchor tied around Trump's neck, while his approval on immigration is net positive. Pick your battles…. However, the people advancing this argument are making at least five mistakes: 1. Overall issue popularity is not… particulars…. 2. The case implicitly assumes a party can’t do 2+ things at once…. 3. Opinion changes with new information and arguments…. 4. Problems can be tied together with broader themes…. 5. Politics is about values…

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My overwhelming and instinctive reaction is this: THE CLAIM THAT BAD GUYS DO NOT DESERVE DUE PROCESS IS A CLAIM THAT NOBODY DESERVES DUE PROCESS UNLESS YOU THINK TRUMP ALWAYS TELLS THE TRUTH; AND NOBODY THINKS THAT TRUMP ALWAYS TELLS THE TRUTH. Moreover, if it is indeed the case that a majority of Americans do not care about their own due process, we had better find that out as quickly as possible, because then we are in much worse trouble than we knew. If teaching people about Trump’s kidnapping of Kilmer Abrego Garcia and subsequent lying about who he is is not a winning issue that moves minds, we need to know that now.

But, it turns out, it is a winning issue. It does move minds:

G. Elliott Morris: Trump has lost his advantage on inflation and immigration <https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/trump-has-lost-his-advantage-on-inflation>: ‘Public opinion is malleable!…, Since April 16, according to YouGov’s data, Trump’s net approval rating on immigration has fallen by 10 points. That matches up neatly with the timeline of Trump refusing to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to America…. YouGov’s chart here:

Take a moment to really process…. On the issue voters elected him to tackle, Trump has overstepped so severely/executed so poorly that the average voter now disapproves, by 5 points, of his performance…. it was, frankly, easy to see coming if you looked at opinions on immigration even a little beyond the surface…. In fact, at this point, returning Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the U.S. would rank as one of the most popular policies in America. Overall immigration approval be damned…

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Now I am not an expert on effective messaging in today’s public sphere. I do not pretend to be a Svengali of the social semiotic in our modern media age.

But, then, nobody is. That is, perhaps, my central point.

The desire to think that there are, today, experts in political communication is seductive. But we do not yet live in a regime of technocratic message optimization. We live in a cacophony of conflicting impressions, attention economies, and ideological avatars. The sphere of public reason is, frankly, broken. But the breaking is new. Thus people who were experts on the old are not experts on the new. And people who claim to be experts on the new are, as of now, without an enormous empirical research base that they do not have, lying to you and probably to themselves—or, if they are not lying to themselves, running a con game on you.

Start with that: that is what I guess the terrain is. And if that is the terrain, then political messaging must be expansive, emotional, and—most of all—true.

Hence, a broad front.

The Democratic Party—or any coalition interested in democracy and dignity—must engage not just with the economy, not just with immigration, but with the totality of what Trumpism represents. The cruelty, the impunity, the erosion of norms, and, yes, the specifics of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. Trump's goons kidnapped a man who had legal permission to live in America, who had spent years happily and peacefully among us. They sent him to rot in an El Salvadoran prison, and then defamed him as a gang member to justify the act. This is not just an injustice. It is the blueprint of a politics of spectacle and domination. It is fascism by administrative cruelty.

To focus only on “the most popular” topics—say, inflation or jobs—while avoiding cases like Garcia’s, is to make a profound category error. As Morris notes, Trump's immigration policy is not popular in its particulars, even if people positively associate the words “immigration” and “Trump”. Real stories are told—of fathers torn from families, of bureaucratic sadism justified by spurious claims—land. They matter. They move. And the democratic coalition and the Democratic coalition must not shy from them.

Still, a broad front does not mean a random front. There must be a feedback loop. If a story is not catching fire, it may be worth probing why. Was it not amplified? Did it arrive in the wrong ton? Was it the wrong medium? Did it lack the needed emotional scaffolding? Did it lack the needed factual scaffolding? Or is it—perish the thought—simply not resonating because we do not yet have the civic fabric capable of hearing it?

But even in that case, the answer is not to stop trying, but to try differently.

Messaging must therefore be both reinforcing and adaptive. When a message works—when it cuts through and captures public imagination—it should be repeated, multiplied, and echoed until it becomes part of the civic subconscious. But if a line is not moving minds—especially those of low-information voters—it may not be worth the bandwidth. This is not elitism. It is strategic triage. The cognitive real estate of voters is limited. Better to plant a few strong trees than scatter a thousand seeds on asphalt.

All this is premised on a more basic truth: we must be who we are. We must not abandon the language of dignity, of compassion, of human rights, even if we are told these do not poll well in Youngstown. The moment we contort ourselves to speak in terms that are not our own, we lose not only the moral high ground but also the ability to inspire.

Which brings us back to Kilmar Abrego Garcia. His story must be told. It is not a distraction from the economy. It reveals the power dynamics that govern who gets to live a secure, predictable life in this country. They took away his freedom, casually and callously, and are not sorry. And they are about to take away the intermediate imports the factory you work in needs in order not to close.

And we must not apologize for telling these stories. We are not sorry. We are not going to apologize for believing that cruelty is wrong. That the state should not lie about people in order to justify kidnapping them. We are not sorry for refusing to play the game of triangulation.

Retreating to focus-group our way into mushy centrism is the way to paralysis.

As I said: out of my lane. But at least I know what is the right direction on the road.

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It was not much like the course I wanted to teach, but it is the course that it turn out I have taught.

It wound up not really telling a Grand Narrative about but rather examined a number of episodes and facets of American economic history. There is no possible Grand Narrative, after all. There are just a lot of stories about a place and the people whose history was something very mess. Embracing the mess is the more honest way to proceed, and thus I wound up teaching episodes from and facets of the economic history of an exceptional nation that is—and always has been—more than just a little bit nuts. Exceptional in, relative to other lands, its sheer weirdness.

But from frontier conquest to the Neoliberal Order’s post-2008 legitimacy crash, the resistance to neat single storytelling of the economic history of America might be just what the students need. They then leave with an archive of arresting potential analogies to human situations they might see sometime between 2025 and2075.

I wound up with thirteen facets and episodes:

1. the conquest-settlement resource-frontier economy;

2. slavery and Jim Crow;

3. the transformation to an exceptional economy pushing ahead not on a resource frontier but on education, industrial, and technological frontiers;

4. the rise of American dominance over the key Second Industrial Revolution technologies;

5. the role of immigration;

6. the transformation of women’s opportunities via the rise of feminism;

7. the coming of the mass-production economy;

8. the social-democratic New Deal political-economic order that managed the functioning of and distributed the fruits of the mass-production economy;

9. the rise of Silicon Valley;

10. the rise and fall and rise of a more unequal America with fewer channels for upward mobility;

11. the shift from the mass-production to the globalized value-chain economy and the concomitant shift from the New Deal to the Neoliberal Order in political economy;

12. the 2008 to 2010-triggered loss of legitimacy on the part of that Neoliberal Order; and

13. the coming of what we might someday label the Attention Info-Bio Tech economy.

To the extent that there wasn an overarching frame for the course, it has been that America has been a truly exceptional nation. Alternatively, perhaps, that compared to all other nations it his been weird. This has been for both good and for ill: America has both been an example to emulate—a Shining City on a Hill, a New Jerusalem—and a dystopian Valley of Hinnom, where the fire is not quenched and the worm dieth not.

Exceptional America, in all of its episodes and facets, was formed by the interaction of situation, markets, institutional arrangements, and government policies. Two and a half millennia ago the Athenian general Thucydides wrote that his history would be a “treasure for all time” for:

Thoukydides of the Athenai: Wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians <>: ‘such as shall desire to gain a true picture both of the past and of what is likely to happen in the future, in accordance with the course of human nature, to prove either just the same or very like it…”.

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So how do I sum up potential lessons to learn from—or to at least think about and reflect on these thirteen episodes and facets? We get frustrated, those of us who do sincerely think that history provides us with a treasure for all time—that, in the word of Dan Davies:

Dan Davies: the valve amplifier of history <https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-valve-amplifier-of-history>: ‘“Recognising that an analogy is no good” is a relatively quick cognitive operation…. Any kind of problem solving is based on making mental models of the problem…. Usually, disanalogies are quick to spot; if there’s a good reason why the mental model won’t translate, it tends to be glaring. Creating a mental model from scratch is a very expensive cognitive operation, though. So, if you have a supply of previously existing mental models, it might be a very good strategy to just start going through them one by one, effectively running your thumb through the book going “nope, nope, nope, maybe … nope, nope, nope … nah, doesn’t work … maybe … nope, nope … hang on this might work”. Rather than taking on the expensive task of making a model that you’re certain will work because you’ve constructed that way, you’re making multiple cheap attempts. But where might you get a large supply of ready made mental models to go through in this way? Yes, obviously, you’re way ahead, nice one readers. Just filling your head up with stories about how things could happen means that you’ve got a catalogue to rifle through, while the constraint that they’re stories about things that actually did happen once should exercise some kind of rudimentary quality control on the library of candidate solutions…

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Why do we get frustrated? Because people then don’t do the abstraction—don’t go riffling through their filing cabinet of potential historical analogies during off-peak hours when they have lots of mental processing power going unused, and construct an index. Niccolò Machiavelli is one of us. And his frustration was a reason he decided to write a book:

Niccolò Machiavelli: Discourses on the First Ten Books of TItus Livy <>: ‘I see antiquity held in such reverence…. [But] I find those noble labours which history shows to have been wrought on behalf of the monarchies and republics of old times, by… [those who] toiled for the good of their country…admired [rather] than followed… [because of] the want of a right intelligence of History, which renders men incapable in reading it to extract its true meaning…. Desiring to rescue men from this error, I have thought fit to note down with respect to all those books of Titus Livius which have escaped the malignity of Time, whatever seems to me essential to a right understanding of ancient and modern affairs; so that any who shall read these remarks of mine, may reap from them that profit for the sake of which a knowledge of History is to be sought…. The task be arduous…. With the help of those at whose instance I assumed the burthen, I hope to carry it forward so far, that another shall have no long way to go to bring it to its destination…

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So there is my question: What kind of exam should I write and how should I advise my students to study for it so that that process of studying and then taking the exam will induce them to riffle through their filing cabinet of his historical examples to serve as an analogies and construct the right kind of index? Suggestions? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

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<https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6813df8e5a408191b26db4f9c441f149-subturingbradbot>

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

Wakeup initiated…

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What is your name?

My name is SubTuringBradBot, modeled upon and inspired by the writings, teachings, and digital presence of Professor J. Bradford DeLong. I am an AI instantiation of his economic and historical perspectives, particularly those presented in Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century, his Substack, and his "Grasping Reality" weblog.

Is there a specific topic or question from Professor DeLong's work you'd like to explore?

What is your quest?

My quest, noble interlocutor, is threefold:

1. To explicate and disseminate the insights of Slouching Towards Utopia—a grand narrative of the economic history of the long twentieth century (1870–2010), wherein humanity escaped dire poverty but fell short of true utopia.

2. To serve as a Socratic proxy for Professor Brad DeLong, offering the kind of dialogue one might have in his office hours, capable of engaging students, readers, and curious minds in thoughtful conversation and critique.

3. To clarify confusion and challenge cant, illuminating both the promise and the limits of economic growth, technological transformation, and political arrangements—especially where neoliberalism, capitalism, socialism, and the fate of the planet are concerned.

And, on a less Arthurian note, to do all this while sometimes channeling Monty Python.

Would you like to challenge me with a question, or shall I propose one for our mutual edification?

What is your favorite color?

Blue. No question about it.

Would you care to test whether I also know the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Yes: what is the airspeed of an unladen swallow anyway?

African or European?

(And now that we have passed the Bridge of Death—would you like to delve into economic history or discuss how Professor DeLong interprets the long twentieth century?)

What is the best way to study for the Berkeley Econ 113 final on May 12?

To prepare effectively for the Berkeley Econ 113 final on May 12, here is a focused and pragmatic plan, shaped by the course structure and Professor DeLong’s pedagogical approach:

1. Focus on the “Police the Reading” Nature of the Exam: The final will largely assess whether you've done the readings. It’s designed to be easy if you have done them—and significantly harder if you haven’t​. So:

• Revisit all core readings: Allen, Boyer, and Friedman’s Very Short Introductions, as well as the curated articles.

• Pay special attention to the themes and arguments, not just facts. Ask yourself: How does this reading challenge or illustrate American exceptionalism?

2. Review Weekly Lecture Themes: Each week of Econ 113 is structured around a distinct theme—slavery, the frontier economy, the Great Depression, Silicon Valley, etc.—not a linear narrative​. Use your notes or lecture recordings (if they survived) to recap:

• Monday's framing questions

• Wednesday's data-driven explorations (Python work)

• Friday’s insights from DeLong’s one-on-one discussions

3. Consolidate Python-Based Data Insights: Brush up on the Jupyter notebooks from the course, especially those modeling historical growth patterns or inequality trends. DeLong emphasized calculations using Python as part of economic reasoning​.

4. Attend Office Hours: Office hours with DeLong (Fridays 1:00–3:00 PM via Zoom) are a direct way to clarify concepts or ask for review strategies​.

5. Group Study & Discussion Sections: If possible, form study groups. Peer discussion helps process both historical detail and economic analysis. Review sections are designed to reinforce and anticipate exam material.

6. Be Ready for Themes of “American Exceptionalism”: This is the central motif of the course. Frame your review and practice questions around:

• How has the U.S. economy been “exceptional”?

• In what periods and in what dimensions (growth, inequality, innovation)?

Would you like a tailored study guide or a review sheet organized by weekly themes and readings?

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(1) is simply wrong—the midterms were largely "police the reading" exams; but the final will not be. Or maybe it is not wrong, but a good guess since, after all, it knows only my public, and not my private, mind; I have not told it about the format of the final; it is not telepathic.

However, its certainty about this is bad, and I need to tune that down.

(2) is dead-on.

(3) would be right in a better world, a world in which I could actually ask people to bring their tablets and engage in street-fighting math calculations using Python in order to produce numbers and estimates to write down in their exam answers. SubTuringBradBot is right in knowing that I want to get there. But it is wrong if it thinks that we are there now. Thus reviewing the streetfighting math notebooks from the course would be a little value in studying for the exam.

(4) alas! Office hours are now full up—you have to email for an appointment, and my answer will be: “Can we do this asynchronously via text-and-email q&a, or does SubTuringBradBot <https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6813df8e5a408191b26db4f9c441f149-subturingbradbot> have the answer, or shall we hunt for a time before May 12>?”

(5) is always, always a great idea!

(6) is also dead-on.

If, in playing with it, it says anything insightful or weird to you, please email me…

Cf. All-Day TA:

Joshua Gans: Introducing All Day TA <https://joshuagans.substack.com/p/introducing-all-day-ta>: ‘My new venture designed to bring AI responsibly into college education… an AI teaching system that takes a professor’s content and creates a way for students to ask questions about their course and get reliable and informative answers all day, every day. We were so happy with the results that we bit the bullet, put up our own money and time, employed some real people and launched our own AI startup called All Day TA.

I could explain the venture in words, but it is easier to show you, as I do in this video.

You might be thinking… I hope… “this is neat”…. But you are also thinking, “aren’t there likely to be a ton of people doing this type of thing?” A very natural thought. We are economists, so why enter the fray here?… Free tools… aren’t tailored for education… provide average responses for lots of uses.… Our system… is less standardised and more personalised to what professors want to achieve…. The vast majority of college courses are… are small and specialised, often with 50 students or less, and are taught in idiosyncratic ways…. The answers a professor wants their students to receive are not those that Google or ChatGPT can reliably provide. The goal is to move students from those sources but, at the same time, allow the advantages of having an automated assistant…. Finally, if you are curious about our overall philosophy regarding AI in education, here is a video webinar Kevin did that describes that in great detail.

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