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Sent to explain away Florence’s role in the military disaster at Pisa, Machiavelli is sent with no plan, little pay—half the pay of his partner—and instructions both so vague and so micromanaged they bordered on sabotage. The court of French King Louis XII would not take this jumped-up clerk seriously: they offered gave him contempt. But what Machiavelli observed in failure would help shape one of the most original minds in political thought. A glimpse of Renaissance geopolitics and a cold-bath awakening to realpolitik.

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PRO NICOLAO MACHIAVELLO ET FRANCISCO DELLA CASA, AD CHRISTIANISSIMAM REGIAM MAJESTATEM:

17 July 1500:

In sending at the present time, on account of certain important matters of ours, our respectable and most valued citizens Francesco della Casa and Niccolo Machiavelli to the court of the Most Christian King [Louis XII Valois of France], we beg the friends, confederates, and wellwishers of our republic, and command our subjects, that both in going and returning you will receive them with all their servants, goods, and equipage, and treat them in the most friendly manner everywhere within your dominion, without payment of any tolls or taxes. And in case they should require any guides, escorts, or any other favors for their safe conveyance to where they wish to go, we pray you promptly to comply with their requests. Your doing so will be appreciated by us in the highest degree, and in similar or more important occasions we offer you the same service at your good will and pleasure…

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In 1500, the ruling executive—the Signoria—of the city-state Republic of Florence sent one Niccolò Machiavelli and one Francesco della Cas on a Mission to the Court of France, that kingdom being then ruled by Louis XII Valois:

You will proceed with all possible despatch, even to riding post, if your strength permits it, to Lyons, or wherever you learn that his most Christian Majesty is to be found. Upon arrival, you will at once call upon our ambassadors there, Messers Francesco Gualterotti and Lorenzo Lenzi, and communicate to them our present instructions, and confer with them as to whether there is anything to be added or left out; also as to your mode of proceeding in urging one thing more than another.

You will then present yourselves, together with our ambassadors, before his Majesty, the king, and, after the customary formalities of the first audience, you will expose to him in our name the substance of the instructions you will receive from us; although we do not believe that we can give you more clear and positive information than what you already possess touching the events of which you have yourselves been witnesses, and in connection with which you were in great part the agents and executors of all that had to be done on our part…

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These do not seem friendly instructions—the undertone seems to me to be thus: Things went wrong with respect to the siege of Pisa, and someone shit the bed. You were there. In fact, you were more than there: you were our “agents and executors” as the bed-shitting took place. Now go explain to the King Louis XII Valois of France the state of the bed, and why he should not blame Florence for it.

And then the real high-status Ambassador, Lorenzo Lenzi appears to have taken a look at the situation and skipped town—ignoring the instructions of the Signoria that he accompany them to their audiences with Louis XII. For we have:

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Eight years and three months after Donald Trump blew up the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and so unilaterally disarmed the United States in the runup to his launching his trade war against China, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claims (a) he has the baton from Donald Trump to use the threat of tariffs to negotiate trade deals, and (b) his first priority is to renegotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and then have its members negotiate as a group vis-a-vis the Great Central Country that is China. Chris Anstey notices. But there is one big problem:

Chris Anstey: Bessent Has a ‘Grand Encirclement’ Plan for China <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-04-12/bessent-has-a-grand-encirclement-plan-for-china-bloomberg-new-economy>: ‘Trump abandoned the TPP shortly after first taking office in January 2017…. [And now] there’s no indication the 78-year-old Republican aligns with his Treausry secretary’s gang-up-on-China approach. Meantime… Lutnick and… Navarro, are focused on the flood of cash, ostensibly earmarked for domestic manufacturing, a high tariff wall may temporarily provide. They’re not championing grand geo-economic strategy…. Countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia that have been threatened with high tariffs lack the capacity for large-scale investments (unlike Japan and South Korea) that could create American jobs. So it’s not clear what sort of deals could be possible. Trump this week highlighted that deals can go beyond trade. So would Cambodia bar Chinese vessels from the Ream Naval Base that’s seen as a potential China military hub in Southeast Asia? Only time will tell. Washington’s surrender of soft-power influence cannot have helped. As Trump shut down US Agency for International Development assistance in Cambodia, China has ramped up. So Bessent has his work cut out for him. And an early-July deadline, as Trump’s 90-day pause ticks down…

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Not having blown up the TPP would have been the best thing. The Obama team knew what it was redoing in pursuing a strategy to rebalance the U.S.-China trade relationship. But, having blown up the TPP in the past, it would indeed be the best thing to resurrect it.

But that is not possible. First of all, none of the other potential members believe that Trump is a credible negotiating partner. Bessent wants to work with “Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and India”. They will be very happy to say they are working with the U.S. Their leaders will even come to Mar-a-Lago, and say nice words about Trump. But they all know that there is no point in conceding anything to Trump because doing so will get them the exactly zero credit with Trump that Mexico and Canada got from playing ball with Trump and doing him the favor of transforming what he said was the worst into the very best of trade agreements by renegotiating NAFTA into the USMCA agreement.

Second, Bessent is, to put it bluntly, lying.

He does not have a baton.

There is no baton.

Trump makes decisions minute to minute based on “instincts”. If Bessent manages to come up with something and bring it to Trump as a moment when Trump’s instincts say “yes”, Trump will take credit for it. If Bessent comes up with nothing, or if what he brings to Trump is not to Trump’s instinctive liking at that particular moment, Trump will disavow Bessent for freelancing.

Such is life at the court of the chaos-monkey king.

But I said all this last week:

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I see Torsten Slok writing:

Torsten Slok: Probability of VTRR 90% <https://www.apolloacademy.com/probability-of-vtrr-90/>: ‘Tariffs have been implemented in a way that has not been effective, and there is now a 90% chance of what can be called a Voluntary Trade Reset Recession (“VTRR”), see the first chart below. The administration inherited an economy with strong growth, 4% unemployment, positive hiring, and a substantial tailwind from investments. US and international investors are building infrastructure, next-generation factories, and data centers. The Inflation Reduction Act increased capex, and the US was poised for a substantial increase due to energy supply additions, increased defense production, and deregulation. But implementing extremely high tariffs overnight hurts many businesses; particularly small businesses because the tariff must be paid by the business when the imported goods arrive in the US. Small businesses that have for decades relied on a stable US system will have to adjust immediately and do not have the working capital to pay tariffs. Expect ships to sit offshore, orders to be canceled, and well-run generational retailers to file for bankruptcy.

To make exceptions for large businesses that have the flexibility and resources to handle unforeseen expenses but not small businesses does not make sense. The challenges for small- and medium-sized enterprises are now a macro problem for the US economy, where small businesses account for more than 80% of US employment and capex, see the second and third chart below. One way to quantify the coming negative impact on GDP is to compare the current tariff increase with the tariff increase observed during the trade war in 2018…. The US average tariff rate increased from 2% to 3%, and studies… (here and here)…. The negative impact on GDP in 2025 could be almost 4 percentage points, not including additional non-linear effects because of the current increase in uncertainty for consumer spending decisions and business planning…

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While Adam Posen says:

Adam Posen:

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And Karen Dynan:

Karen Dynan:

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Karen is the only one not making a recession call—and she is on the edge: a 40% chance of recession, and a long and dangerous tail should the policy shocks set a self-sustaining feedback downward spiral into operation.

What do I think? I think that there are very few times when market timing—diminishing the global stock-market weight in your portfolio from the 1.5 or so that it ought to be to 0.5 or less—has been worth doing in the past 150 years.

But it really looks like now is one of them.

The disjunction between the political-economic Trump situation and real market values:

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and price/earnings ratios:

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is palpable. There is not much of an equity premium to be harvested even if CAPE returns only to the value of 25, which we then thought was very high, it had back in 2015.

Plus even if price/earnings ratios remain at their current levels, recognize that the U.S. has just inflicted a likely recession on itself in the short-term and a BREXIT-class uncertainty-generated growth slowdown in the long-term. That BREXIT-class disaster looks likely to me to be between 1% and 2% per year over the next two decades. International trade in goods is massive. And people pretending that doesn’t matter because we are overwhelmingly a service economy ignores how much of service-sector productivity is linked to and indeed derivative from the goods economy.

And downward tail risk is very high.

And I cannot see any way out, short of Trump resigning, or appointing a competent regent.

These tariffs—whatever they ultimately turn out to be, and even if they would have been a nothingburger if properly prepared and rolled out—dropped suddenly and with little preparation, are inflicting heavy costs on the backbone of the American economy. Expect canceled imports, idle container ships, and an uptick in bankruptcies. The U.S. economy had momentum. Investments in manufacturing, infrastructure, and data centers were being propelled by the Inflation Reduction Act, energy expansion, and defense production. But a policy move with no possible economic strategy justification is bringing the growth machine to a halt. Right now we have to hope that there is no unknown systemic vulnerability out there that can—like mortgage-backed securities falsely marketed as AAA assets—trigger a true financial explosion.

Paul Krugman thinks it likely that there are such systemic vulnerabilities, although we still do not see where they are:

Paul Krugman: A Primer on Financial Crises, Part II <https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-primer-on-financial-crises-part>: ‘The April storm… [when] Trump shocked the world by announcing that he was imposing very high tariffs on just about every nation America trades with. When Trump took office the average U.S. tariff rate was only about 3 percent. In one fell swoop he pushed it above 20 percent, higher than it was after… Smoot-Hawley…. The specifics of market reaction were peculiar…. [(1)] Interest rates on U.S. government debt rose. This was peculiar because normally the increased likelihood of a recession… will cause interest rates on US government debt to fall. Moreover, U.S. interest rates have historically fallen in uncertain times…. [(2)] Economists normally expect that tariffs… will cause the dollar to rise… [plus] rising U.S. interest rates should also have boosted the dollar. Instead, it fell…. [This is] something we… see in emerging markets that lose… confidence…. It’s unprecedented to see what looks like capital flight from the United States.

But[is] capital flight… the whole story? I don’t think so…. We’ve also seen interest rates on relatively risky or thinly traded assets… shoot up…. Bonds… protected against inflatio… rose so much that the spread between these bonds and regular bonds, often seen as a market forecast of inflation, went down…. [But] tariffs will surely lead to higher, not lower inflation…. That spread plunged during the 2008 crisis and again in 2020, so it suggest[s]… that we may be in the early stages of another financial crisis…. What’s the mechanism? As best I can tell, we’re looking at a potential balance sheet crisis focused on hedge funds… [that] need to reduce their exposure to market volatility by selling assets. This drives the prices of assets on their balance sheet down, which in turn requires that they sell even more assets to further reduce their exposure…

There are moments when politics and markets seem to diverge so sharply that it seems inevitable that something has to give.

This isn't just a short-term policy mistake—it’s a structural own goal. And it comes at a time when the U.S. had all the ingredients for an investment-led growth boom. Instead, we may be facing a downturn driven entirely by policy error.

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If you start from the premise that a language model like ChatGPT is a very flexible, very high dimensional, very big data regression-and-classification engine best seen as a function from the domain of word-strings to the range of continuation words, I think a large number of things become clear.

First, because its training dataset is sparse in its potential domain—nearly all even moderate-length word-sequences that are not boilerplate or cliché are unique—its task is one of interpolation: take word-sequences “close” to the prompt, examine their continuations, and average them. Thus while pouring more and more resources into the engine does get you, potentially, a finer and finer interpolation, it seems highly likely that this process will have limits rather than grow to the sky, and it is better to look at it as an engine summarizing what humans typically say in analogous linguistic situations rather than any form of “thinking”.

I think the post-ChatGPT3 history of LLMs bears this out:

Sebastian Raschka: The State of Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning <https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/the-state-of-llm-reasoning-model-training>: ‘Releases of new flagship models like GPT-4.5 and Llama 4…. Reactions to these releases were relatively muted…. The muted response… suggests we are approaching the limits of what scaling model size and data alone can achieve. However, OpenAI's recent release of the o3 reasoning model demonstrates there is still considerable room for improvement when investing compute strategically, specifically via reinforcement learning methods tailored for reasoning tasks. (According to OpenAI staff during the recent livestream, o3 used 10× more training compute compared to o1)…

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Second, reinforcement learning—prompt engineering—and such are ways of attempting to condition this interpolation process by altering the domain word-sequence in such a way as to carry it into a portion of the training dataset where, when judged by humans, this function (word-strings) → (continuations) does not suck. That is, in some sense, all they are: You have a function trained on internet dreck in which there are some veins of gold—accurate information and useful continuations of word-strings—and you need to transform the word-string you send so that it lands inside one of those veins.

As the wise Cosma Shalizi says:

Cosma Shalizi: On Feral Library Card Catalogs, or, Aware of All Internet Traditions <https://www.programmablemutter.com/cp/161552401>: ‘LLMs are parametric probability models of symbol sequences, fit to large corpora of text by maximum likelihood. By design, their fitting process strives to reproduce the distribution of text in the training corpus…. Prompting is conditioning: the output after a prompt is a sample from the conditional distribution of text coming after the prompt…. All these distributions are estimated with a lot of smoothing… [that tell the probability model when to treat different-looking contexts as similar…. This smoothing… is what lets the models respond with sensible-looking output… to prompts they've never seen in the training corpus. It also, implicitly, tells the model what to ignore, what distinctions make no difference. This is part (though only part) of why these models are lossy…

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And these models are likely to be very good and useful where:

Cosma Shalizi: On Feral Library Card Catalogs, or, Aware of All Internet Traditions <https://www.programmablemutter.com/cp/161552401>: ‘A huge amount of cultural and especially intellectual tradition consists of formulas, templates, conventions, and indeed tropes and stereotypes…. Formulas also reduce the cognitive burden on people receiving communications… boiler-plate and ritual, yes, but it's not just boiler-plate and ritual, or at least not pointless ritual…

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But not so good and not so useful for many other tasks.

And now comes the part in which I note that someday this bashing-of-Artificial-Super-Intelligence-grifters-and-boosters may go wrong. I am, after all, making a version of the Searle Chinese Room argument against the case that MAMLMs are brains. I believe that the argument applies here. But Scott Aaronson’s comments on that kind of argument are apposite here:

Scott Aaronson: PHYS771 Lecture 4: Minds and Machines <https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html>: ‘In the last fifty years, have there been any new insights about the Turing Test?… A non-insight, which is called Searle's Chinese Room…. Let's say you don't speak Chinese…. You sit in a room, and someone passes you paper slips through a hole in the wall with questions written in Chinese, and you're able to answer the questions (again in Chinese) just by consulting a rule book. In this case, you might be carrying out an intelligent Chinese conversation, yet by assumption, you don't understand a word of Chinese!…

Like many other thought experiments, the Chinese Room gets its mileage from a deceptive choice of imagery—and more to the point, from ignoring computational complexity. We're invited to imagine someone pushing around slips of paper with zero understanding or insight—much like the doofus freshmen who write (a+b)2=a2+b2 on their math tests. But how many slips of paper are we talking about?… If each page of the rule book corresponded to one neuron… we'd be talking about a "rule book" at least the size of the Earth, its pages searchable by a swarm of robots traveling at close to the speed of light…. Maybe it's not so hard to imagine that this enormous Chinese-speaking entity—this dian nao—that we've brought into being might have something we'd be prepared to call understanding or insight…

At what point does rote—or nearly rote—manipulation of symbols and interpolation from examples turn into real thinking? We do not know, on the one hand. On the other hand, I see absolutely no signs anywhere in these systems that they are close.

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What, then, is going on with all the people who think that we are close?

My guess: From an evolutionary psychology standpoint, humans are pattern-recognition machines. We are primed to detect agency—even where it doesn’t exist—because assuming intent behind observed behavior was often adaptive. You hear a rustle in the bushes: it’s safer to think “predator” than “wind.”

This cognitive bias leads us to over-ascribe intelligence and intention to things that act in ways that seem purposeful.

In the 20th century, people attributed intelligence to thermostats (“it knows the room is too hot”) and ELIZA-like chatbots <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA>. Now, we do the same with large language models like ChatGPT. The outputs feel coherent, fluent, and often insightful—so we instinctively project mind onto them. And this is a useful thing to do: recall Daniel Dennett’s “intentional stance”—that we have often found it useful to model complex systems (or simple systems: thermostats!) as having beliefs and desires not because they do but because taking that stance is a very quick and useful way to begin predicting their behavior.

Thus as our technologies increase productivity and complexity we find that this over-ascription generate cognitive dissonance: we struggle to grasp how machines can do what they do without being “like us”, and when a machine completes a task that once required a skilled human—like writing a letter, playing chess, or composing music—people start asking not “how does it work?” but “who is it in there?”

What are the consequence of placing MAMLMs in the wrong box? Of thinking of them as rapidly becoming human-level replacement for human beings, rather than as powerful new complements to human minds offloading a great deal of mechanical repetitive tasks, boilerplate generation, formulae application, and ritual enaction?

The first consequence is that it makes it easy to take a huge amount of money from gullible rich AI enthusiasts.

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What follows from that? This:

Fred Clark: Holy Saturday <https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2024/03/30/holy-saturday-13/>: ‘This is my favorite day in Holy Week, this Saturday, this unrestful Sabbath, my favorite day in the whole of the liturgical calendar.

Well, actually, “favorite” is the wrong word. It’s not that I like this day so much as that I understand it. It’s recognizable, familiar, lived-in.

This day, the Saturday that can’t know if there will ever be a Sunday, is the day we live in, you and I, today and every day for the whole of our lives. This is all we are given to know.

Easter Sunday? That’s tomorrow, the day after today. We’ll never get there in time. We can believe in Easter Sunday, but we can’t be sure. We can’t know for sure. We can’t know until we’re out of time.

Here, in time, there’s just this day, this dreadful Saturday of not knowing.

There are some things we can know on this Saturday. Jesus is dead, to begin with, dead and buried. He said the world was upside-down and needed a revolution to turn it right-way-round and so he was executed for disturbing the peace. He came and said love was greater than power, and so power killed him.

And now it’s Saturday and Jesus is dead and we’re all going to die and everything I’ve told you about him turns out to be in vain and everything I’ve staked my life on turns out to be in vain. Our faith is futile and we’re still hopeless in our sins. Jesus is dead and we are of all people most to be pitied.

That last paragraph is a paraphrase from St. Paul. What he actually says there, in his letter to the Christians in Corinth, is “if…” What he says, specifically, is: “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.…

“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead…”

But that’s Sunday language, and Sunday certainty, and it doesn’t make much sense here on Saturday.

Here on Saturday, we can hope it’s true and we may even try to believe it’s true, but we can’t know “in fact” one way or another. Not now. Not on Saturday.

And to be honest, it doesn’t seem terribly likely, because Saturday, this Saturday, is all we’ve ever known. Yesterday was this same Saturday, and so was the day before that, and the day before that, and the day before that.

Why should we expect that tomorrow will be any different?

Seriously, just look around. Does it look like the meek are inheriting the earth? Does it look like those who hunger and thirst for justice are being filled? Does it look like the merciful are being shown mercy?

Jesus was meek and merciful and hungry for justice and look where that got him. They killed him. We killed him. Power won.

That’s what this everyday Saturday shows us — power always wins. “If you want a picture of the future,” George Orwell wrote, “imagine a boot stomping on a human face — forever.”

“But in fact,” St. Paul says, everything changes on Sunday. Come Sunday power loses. Come Sunday, love wins, the meek shall inherit, the merciful will receive mercy and no one will ever go hungry for justice again. Come Sunday, everything changes.

If there ever is a Sunday.

And but so, this is why we hope for Sunday and why we live for the hope of Sunday. Even though we can’t know for sure that Sunday will ever come and even if Saturday is all we ever get to see.

What warrant do we have for any belief or even hope that there is any sort of arc tending the world toward justice? And if they were, shouldn’t that properly terrify us all? And do we not—looking around these days—have even less warrant for any belief or even hope that there is any sort of arc tending towards any sort of mercy?

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In the left-hand ring of the chaos-monkey three ring circus that is the Trump administration, I see this AM that the Bessent Affinity within the Trump administration is trying to make something that might resemble a move of sorts.

The Bessent Affinity is now retconning all the Trumpist chaos-monkey feces-flinging in trade policy. They are going all-in. It all always was, they say, an 11-dimensional chess strategy to resurrect the Obama Trans-Pacific Partnership that Trump blew up on Day 1 of his first presidential term.

And I see four Politico reporters—Megan Messerly, Ari Hawkins, Phelim Kine, and Felicia Schwartz—pretending, unprofessionally, to take it seriously.

They ask no hard questions, but imitate lapdogs begging for treats:

Megan Messerly, Ari Hawkins, Phelim Kine, & Felicia Schwartz: Trump wants to make a deal with China. Here’s how he’s trying to make that happen <https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/16/trump-china-trade-strategy-00291979>: ‘The administration’s theory of the case is that tariff deals with other countries will isolate China — and urge them to come to the table…. [as] the U.S., will isolate China, disrupt the Chinese supply chain and threaten to cut the country off from the rest of the world…. Announcements from companies moving manufacturing operations to the U.S. and its broader sectoral-based tariff strategy… [are] key components in getting Xi to cooperate…. “Once you see a lot of countries — not just in southeast Asia or Asia, but all over — you’ll see that they’re willing to make deals with America, and that exerts pressure on China to hopefully come to the table,” the official said…. “Get all of Asia but China to the table, incentivize them with lower tariffs and U.S. companies will leave China,” said one person close to the White House. “And yes it makes sense. It’s happening already…”

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And this naturally drives Dan Drezner—recently having moved from his job at Tufts in Medford to become Whateley Chair in Thaumatropic Energies and Dimensional Rift Studies at Miskatonic in Arkham—into Shrill Unholy Madness:

Dan Drezner: The Trump Administration Is Just Grasping at Trade Policy Straws Now <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-trump-administration-is-just>: ‘Look who discovered a decade-old trade gambit!… Why… is this such an exasperating read?

Because the context is damning…. This is exactly what the Obama administration was attempting…precisely the argument President Obama made in a Washington Post op-ed that advocated for congressional approval of the TPP…. [And] prior to articulating it, the second Trump administration took about every conceivable action to sabotage this strategy…. As hard as this task would have been under normal circumstances, Trump has made it that much harder for the U.S. to corral any allies…. Trump officials [are] attempt[ing] to sanewash the epic clusterfuck of last week, but I ain’t buying…. China is better prepared to prosecute this trade war…. Trump’s madman gambits have, predictably, fallen flat. Other than that, everything is fine…

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Plus, over in the right-hand ring, Duncan Black watches Bloomberg join in. Bloomberg, too, pretends that chaos-monkey trade policy really was actually always 11-dimensional chess to resurrect Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership strategy:

Duncan Black: Have They Seen a Map? <https://www.eschatonblog.com/2025/04/have-they-seen-map.html>: ‘Just completely dumbasses: “[Gavin Bade & Brian Schwartz:] The Trump administration plans to use ongoing tariff negotiations to pressure U.S. trading partners to limit their dealings with China, according to people with knowledge of the conversations. The idea is to extract commitments from U.S. trading partners to isolate China’s economy in exchange for reductions in trade and tariff barriers imposed by the White House. U.S. officials plan to use negotiations with more than 70 nations to ask them to disallow China to ship goods through their countries, prevent Chinese firms from locating in their territories to avoid U.S. tariffs, and not absorb China’s cheap industrial goods into their economies…”

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While Xi Jinping and company say that that dog won’t hunt.

Or, rather, that if the dog wants to get its nose out of its self-inflicted trap—to not blow up U.S. inflation from trade supply-chain breakdown inside the United States—then what the dog needs to do is to come to heel, lie down, and be quiet:

Duncan Black: Has China Seen Donald Trump? <https://www.eschatonblog.com/2025/04/has-china-seen-donald-trump.html>: ‘[Bloomberg News:] I imagine China gets why this is hilarious, even if the people writing it up don't: “China wants to see a number of steps from President Donald Trump’s administration before it will agree to trade talks, including showing more respect by reining in disparaging remarks by members of his cabinet, according to a person familiar with the Chinese government’s thinking. Other conditions include a more consistent US position and a willingness to address China’s concerns around American sanctions and Taiwan, said the person, who asked not to be identified to discuss internal thinking…”

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And Trump begs Xi Jinping to rescue him from his predicament. If you really think they have to make a deal with you, you don’t say “the ball is in their court” and beg them to reach out:

Duncan Black: CALL ME PLEASE <https://www.eschatonblog.com/2025/04/call-me-please.html>: ‘Humiliating stuff: “President Donald Trump called on China to reach out to him in order to kick off negotiations aimed at resolving the escalating trade fight between the world’s two largest economies. ‘The ball is in China’s court. China needs to make a deal with us. We don’t have to make a deal with them’, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday, reading what she said was a statement Trump dictated…”

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And let me quote MOAR from the “China Open to Talks If Trump Shows Respect” piece. China wants not just Trump to say “never mind” about trade war and come to heel with respect to rhetorical China-bashing, but also to accept China’s position on the (hopefully long-run) ultimate status of Taiwan:

Bloomberg News: China Open to Talks If US Shows Respect, Names Point Person <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-16/china-open-to-talks-if-trump-shows-respect-names-point-person>: ‘Beijing also wants the US to appoint a point person… [to] help prepare a deal that Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping can sign when they meet…. Trump has hit China with tariffs of 145% on most goods since taking office, prompting Beijing to retaliate and threatening to wipe out most trade between the world’s biggest economies….

The rapid onslaught of US tariffs has engendered broad public support in China for retaliation, giving Xi a political incentive to rebuff Trump’s repeated demands for a phone call. The US leader on Tuesday again called on China to reach out to him in order to kick off negotiations to resolve the trade fight…. Trump’s demands remain unclear, and tariff levels on China would need to remain high to achieve his goal of balancing trade and attracting manufacturers to the US….

Michelle Lam… “There is a bit more clarity on what China is looking from: respect, consistency and a point person…. So now the ball is in US court on whether they can meet these demands. But that is still difficult — especially if the aim is to contain China’s rise.”… The most important precondition for any talks is that Chinese officials need to know such engagement will be conducted with respect…. Beijing has recently expressed notable displeasure with comments Vice President JD Vance made about “Chinese peasants”…. Lin Jian… called the remarks “ignorant and disrespectful,” in what was a rare direct rebuke of a senior US leader…. Officials in Beijing also want to know that Washington is ready to address… the prevailing perception… that the US has enacted policies designed to contain and suppress China’s modernization…. China also wants the US to address its national security concerns, particularly over Taiwan…

This may well turn into the greatest foreign-policy defeat for the United States since the end of the Vietnam War, at least.

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But those are just the side rings.

It is very important to recognize how broad the stupidity, the cruelty, and the destructiveness is.

It is not just trade: it is everywhere:

Matt Yglesias: It’s not just trade <https://www.slowboring.com/p/its-not-just-trade>: ‘Trump is addressing scientific research, public health, and other crucial issues with the same lack of care…. Trump’s extremely dubious ideas about trade policy…. But… Trump is a huge liar…. His business community allies [promised] that this was just populist chum…. Then came Liberation Day, on which his business allies learned that he is crazier than they thought. After several days of begging and pleading and stock market losses, he was persuaded to partially reverse course. But what will happen next with Trump and trade? I have no idea….

But I also know something… I wish his business allies would more seriously consider, which is that the slipshod manner in which he makes trade policy is not unique to trade policy….

Laura Loomer…is a nut job every bit as much as Peter Navarro…. During all the tariff drama, she scored an Oval Office meeting with Trump and purged six officials from the National Security Council, as well as the head of the National Security Agency…. There was no official explanation given by the White House for any of it, a true banana republic vibe…. Bill Ackman or the right-of-center members of venture capital Twitter view Trump… [as] doing lots of great stuff but just got it wrong on the reciprocal tariffs…. [But] we looking at Navarro-level personnel and Liberation Day-quality decision-making across a broad swathe of issues, except without… direct financial market feedback….

Killing poor kids in Africa: A recent analysis in The Lancet says that without stable PEPFAR programs, nearly 500,000 children in Africa are likely to die of causes related to HIV/AIDS over the next five years. That’s pretty bad…. I don’t really know why. Maybe they’re assholes. Maybe it got mixed up with abortion. Maybe they’re careless people who break things…. [But] the stock market doesn’t really care if poor kids in Africa die….

Kneecapping education research: Wrecking global trade is the craziest thing Trump has done in terms of touching a hot stove. Wrecking foreign aid is the most morally hideous thing he’s done. Somewhere in between is his administration’s frankly bizarre attack on program evaluation for American education… so crazy that Stuart Buck’s first reaction was that it must be some kind of mistake. But it’s not…. And the same is true for the administration’s broader attack on scientific research.

A parade of problems: Late last Wednesday, the Trump administration unexpectedly retreated from DOGE’s cutbacks to the Social Security Administration that had undermined basic customer service functions…. The point is that I do not think anyone’s takeaway from this should be that Trump is a prudent guy who corrects his errors. The lesson is that Trump is a reckless person who has empowered sloppy people to make sloppy decisions. Sometimes those decisions backfire in a way that is high-profile and obvious, in which case he may back down after days of controversy. Equally sloppy, equally bad decisions… fly under the radar….

Harms accrue over the long term, like the harms of gutting education research or basic science. Who knows what Loomer is doing to the national security apparatus beyond the fact that she’s already gotten a bunch of people canned and is now gunning for the general counsel at the Pentagon…. These guys really will do things that are incredibly crazy and stupid. They are, in fact, doing many such things…. We could be blundering into a war or fatally compromising counterterrorism efforts with amateur hour antics. This feels like eleven controversies ago, but the National Security Advisor did accidentally add a prominent journalist to a private group chat on which he and other principals were discussing detailed military plans….

The anti-Houthi military campaign appears not to be working, which is the kind of thing that happens when sloppy people are making decisions…. Linda McMahon seems to be confusing AI (artificial intelligence) with A1 (steak sauce)…. Yet another indication that the people making decisions in the Trump cabinet are perhaps not very well-informed. And that’s a problem that has broader and deeper implications than Trump’s business allies seem willing to admit…

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This is not an annoyance, but rather a cavil—for I think that the very sharp Scott Cunningham has gone down the wrong track here:

Scott Cunningham: Inside the "Brain" of Claude <https://causalinf.substack.com/p/inside-the-brain-of-claude>": ‘Modern AI models like Claude…. When asked to write a rhyming poem,.. it activates features representing potential rhyming words before beginning the second line… "grab it"… "rabbit" and "habit". It then constructs the second line to lead naturally to the planned rhyme…. Claude doesn't generate text “one token at a time”—it's actively planning future content and working backward to create coherent structures…. LLMs are performing… abstract reasoning, planning, and metacognition…. Two years ago, I would’ve thought that was impossible…. Large language models are complex systems with emergent properties—much like biological organisms…

I think Scott goes awry in word 3 of his title “Brains”. In my view, LLMs are still much too simple for words like “reasoning”, “planning”, and “metacognition” to be useful terms to apply—even purely metaphorically—to their behavior. It leads to much more insight, I think, to start from recognizing that trained neural networks are extremely flexible interpolation functions from a domain (in this case, a string of words) to a range (in this case, the continuation words). They have a training data set that is sparse in the domain—unless a string of words is a quote, a cliché, or boilerplate, by the time the string reaches twenty words long there is less than an 0.1% chance that it has ever been written down before. For prompts in the training dataset your flexible function is obvious: you simply return the continuation.

But for everything else you have to interpolate, somehow. The Deep Magic of the LLMs is in that interpolation process and in the shape of the training data. And thinking “BRAINS!!!” actually, I think, makes it harder to gain insight into why they behave the way they do. All that Scott has to say in his exposition of Lindsey et al. does say interesting things about the “how”. But I want to know the “why”. And even the statements and findings about the “how” are, I think, corrupted into near-uselessness because of the “BRAINS!!!” frame.

Why do I think this?

Well, yesterday I had a University of Chicago citation:

Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1513 [2008]. “Letter to Francesco Vettori, December 10, 1513”. In The Prince. Trans. & ed. Peter Bondanella. Pp. 109–113. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

And so I gave ChatGPT a task:

Q: Please get me the book from archive.org, and spell out the URL please.

My question asks ChatGPT to find a string of symbols, beginning with “https://archive.org/”, such that when these symbols are entered into the address bar of web browser and the “return” key is pressed, the web browser loads a file that is a scanned-and-OCRed digital version of the print book published in 2008 by Oxford University Press that is the version of Machiavelli’s Il Principe translated and edited by Peter Bondanella.

The correct string of symbols to return to accomplish this task is “https://archive.org/details/niccolomachiavel00nicc”.

But this is what ChatGPT gave me when I assigned it the task:

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I must say I do find myself cranky this morning. And so I wonder: am I being unfair here to marxisant Peter Gordon, who seems to have closed off his mind to a lot of what is really going on in the thought of Karl Marx?

Am I? To cut to the chase: No. I really do not think I am.

The Reitter/North new translation of Marx’s Capital <https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190075/capital> vol. I is, as best as I can tell, truly excellent—it made me read it again, cover to cover, with the old Moore-Aveling and Fowkes translations also open on the desk, for fun.

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And Peter Gordon <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/peter-e.-gordon/hair-splitting> does do a nice service by drawing attention to it.

But this from Peter Gordon:

Peter Gordon: Hair-Splitting <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/peter-e.-gordon/hair-splitting>: ‘The analogy to natural science is unfortunate… mischie[vious]… implies that human freedom must yield to naturalistic necessity.…. Marx did not use the term [“laws”] in the sense we have in mind when we say that laws govern… biolog[y]… or the… planets…. Marx… knew that the economy was a human creation and therefore susceptible to historical and social change…. In his later years Marx came to appreciate the diversity of human cultures and economic practices…. Whatever commitment he had to discovering necessary or universal laws in the economic sphere yielded to a far more pluralistic acknowledgment of the many paths from past to future.

This shift is evident when we consider the differences between the [1872] French translation of Capital and the [1867] German original…. German… “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”… French… “The most industrially developed country only shows those that follow it on the industrial ladder the image of their own future.”… This seemingly minor amendment has dramatic consequences… leaves history open to alternative routes that do not all climb the same ladder of Western industrialisation…

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It is simply gonzo wrong. And so Peter Gordon will henceforth serve as one of my poster children on how not to read big, difficult books.

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The Official Federal Reserve System portrait:

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Apropos of her remarks, I must say that Evans Hall continues to be a pit—as Lisa quotes from Berkeley’s own assessment “a dark, closed-in design. . . spoiling the main east-west axis of the campus…”—and that the eating hole between Bechtel Enginering and Evans was worse, only slightly redeemed by the very large cookies it served. Fortunately, the eating hole is now gone, and there had better be a better one in the replacement Grimes Engineering Center building that should open any day now:

But this “architect’s drawing” viewpoint of Grimes when it will be finished is completely fake to the reality of the campus—at least until after Evans Hall comes down, supposedly in 2030.

Here is the real picture, back a year ago, from as close to the POV as I can get in Google Earth <https://earth.google.com/web/search/Bechtel+Engineering+Center,+Berkeley,+CA/@37.87334562,-122.25823927,107.99944776a,111.50299201d,35y,13.0286944h,72.2500981t,0r/data=CiwiJgokCRM25cZvS0RAERQ25cZvS0TAGSREX9_Cr0xAIe-rUQ1sE03AQgIIAToDCgEwQgIIAEoNCP___________wEQAA>:

Back in Lisa’s day, Evans looked even worse: They hadn’t painted it in decades, and pieces of the exterior concrete and windowpanes would occasionally slough off and fall down to the earth from as high as 130 feet. (The windowpanes would be replaced—the exterior concrete, not. “Deferred maintenance” as a revenue source.)

I had not known that Greg Grossman had postponed his retirement to advise Lisa…

Lisa Cook:

No matter when you attended Cal or how long you have been away, I think we can all agree that Berkeley is a special place that stays in your heart. I grew up in the South, and by the time I arrived at Berkeley, I had the good fortune to have spent time living in Africa and Europe.

Even with this experience, what immediately stood out to me was the campus's openness to many different cultures and ideas.

And a clear way this was expressed, as I am sure you will recall, was through the abundance of delicious food. Berkeley was truly like heaven for this former founder of a cooking school. Better coffee and cuisine than anywhere else in the country. Dim sum everywhere, vegan and vegetarian options galore, and that sourdough at Great Harvest Bread. (You cannot blame a hungry grad student for stopping in for samples.) When I was there, Berkeley was at the forefront of the farm-to-table and healthy eating movements. I remember being in awe of the produce at Berkeley Bowl. They had five or six types of yams and sweet potatoes. I am from Georgia, and I had never seen so many yams!

The wonderful food served as a perfect canvas upon which to share ideas.

Sometimes that was having dinner at each other's apartments, and sometimes it was slipping over to the cafeteria between Bechtel and Evans to have lunch with my friends in engineering and computer science. Shockingly, the Cal engineers had nicer facilities than the econ students in Evans Hall. By the way, Evans Hall is described on Cal's own websites as a "dark, closed-in design. . . spoiling the main east-west axis of the campus." Ouch, but I told you, open to ideas!2

From these lunches and many other conversations at Berkeley, I learned the value of exchanging ideas and the free disposal of ideas. The next idea will come; be unafraid to try new things. Do not be wedded to bad ideas. I learned the value of working in teams and acknowledging and leveraging everyone's varied scholarly and lived expertise. I learned the value of sharing and collaboration. This fosters the spirit of innovation that drives the Bay area. You can see why many of the greatest advancements in the past century have come from that region of the country, many directly from Cal alumni.

It was awe-inspiring to be surrounded by so many outstanding students and stellar faculty members from many disciplines. The work of Cal researchers has changed the world. I often wondered what inspired these great minds. Then one day, while traversing the always congested campus, I saw it—the real incentive for great minds: Nobel laureates received reserved parking spaces. All of you who have fought Bay Area traffic and Berkeley campus parking restrictions know that tops any prize you can receive in Sweden!

But seriously, I was extremely lucky to have an amazing group of professors and supporters at Cal.

Barry Eichengreen was my dissertation adviser, and George Akerlof was an informal adviser who was just curious about economies undergoing market transitions. Janet Yellen and Laura Tyson were inspirations. They epitomized the commitment to public service that flows through the Berkley campus. When I arrived, Dr. Tyson had recently left to become chair of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). Of course, Dr. Yellen would soon serve as chair of CEA as well as those of Fed chair and Treasury Secretary, the only person in history to hold all three positions. I had the mentorship and support of a whole bunch of Romers: Christina, David, and Paul. Christina would also serve as CEA Chair as we climbed out of the Global Financial Crisis

I arrived on campus in 1991 the very week the Soviet Union started breaking up and the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic became just Russia. This series of events gave the world an unfiltered view of a Russian economy blinking into the sunlight after decades of central planning and stagnation. I asked, what would happen next, and what could we learn from this historic event? I was desperate to explore those questions and to explore them with Greg Grossman. No one in the world knew more about the Soviet and Russian economies than he did.

However, he had other thoughts—namely, retirement. When I asked him to advise me, he was hesitant. So, he presented me with a challenge. He said the only way to study the Russian banking system and economy was to become fluent in Russian. If I could learn the language, he would delay his retirement to advise me, along with Eichengreen. I could tell he thought his retirement plans were safe with that lofty goal. A year and a half later, I walked into his office and struck up a conversation in Russian. I could see his heart sink. I had won the challenge. (What he did not know then was that I had already learned four other languages and was blessed with the ability to pick up new ones quickly.) Once he agreed to stay on, I was off and running.

I plowed through Tsarist-era statistical tables stashed in the depths of Bancroft Library. Later, I would travel to Moscow and collect data from the Russian Statistical Agency and eventually survey and conduct interviews with Russian bankers and entrepreneurs. I credit my Berkeley professors, particularly Barry, Greg, George, and Paul, for supporting the curiosity that took me to Moscow and many other distant places to do research and push forward the field of economics with new questions, data, and analysis. I especially thank them for asking tough, thoughtful questions that prepared me to approach any situation of heightened uncertainty and in which standard models and the conventional wisdom in economics may not apply.

One aspect that stood out about the Berkeley experience was that we defended our dissertations at the proposal stage rather than upon completion. This arrangement was not common at the time but is now becoming a more frequent practice at other schools. It sets up the dynamic of these experienced, knowledgeable professors looking for constructive ways to allow experimentation to ultimately bring ideas to fruition. It is this sense of collaboration and openness that I have taken from Berkeley and brought with me everywhere I have gone—through universities, banks, the government, and now at the Federal Reserve…

Her biography from winter 2020:

Lisa D. Cook is Professor of Economics and International Relations at Michigan State University. She was the first Marshall Scholar from Spelman College and received a second B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University. She earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley with fields in macroeconomics and international economics. Prior to this appointment, she was on the faculty of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Deputy Director for Africa Research at the Center for International Development at Harvard University, and a National Fellow at Stanford University. Among her current research interests are economic growth and development, innovation, financial institutions and markets, and economic history. Dr. Cook is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and is the author of a number of published articles, book chapters, and working papers. She is on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Economic Literature, and her research has appeared in such journals as the American Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Growth. This research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Bureau for Economic Research, the Smithsonian Institution, Harvard Business School, and the Economic History Association, among others. She is currently Director of the American Economic Association Summer Program and was President of the National Economic Association from 2015 to 2016. In 2019, she was awarded the Impactful Mentor Award (for mentoring graduate students) by the American Economic Association Mentoring Pipeline Program and was elected to the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association. During the 2011-2012 academic year, she was on leave at the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama and has had visiting appointments at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the University of Michigan, and the Federal Reserve Banks of New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia. She serves on the Advisory Boards of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago (Academic Advisory Council), the National Science Foundation (Social and Behavioral Sciences), the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation of the Smithsonian Institution. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Cook has been a Sigma Xi (Scientific Research Society) Distinguished Lecturer and was recently named an Edison Fellow at the US Patent and Trademark Office. She is a guest columnist for the New York Times (Economic View) and for the Detroit Free Press and a regular contributor on CNBC, MSNBC, and NPR. She speaks English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Wolof.

• Cook, Lisa D. 2025. “Cal Distinguished Alumna Award Acceptance Remarks”. April 15. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. <https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/cook20250415a.htm>.

• Cook, Lisa D. 2020. “Biography and Curriculum Vitæ”. h>.

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Apr 15, 2025
J. Bradford DeLong

It should be obvious by now that the second Trump administration has no policies, nor even any policymaking processes. All that matters are the "instincts" of one ignorant man, and the eagerness of those around him to put their own interests ahead of the fate of the country.

BERKELEY – Eight years after US President Donald Trump abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership and unilaterally disarmed the United States in the trade war that he would soon launch against China, his second-term Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, wants to renegotiate the TPP and use it to form a united front against the Chinese.

As Bloomberg’s Chris Anstey explains, Bessent has a “grand encirclement” plan, and if this “sounds familiar, that’s because… [t]he Obama administration’s big trade idea was using the Trans-Pacific Partnership to assemble a coalition of Pacific Rim nations that would increasingly be tied to the US, and not drift into China’s orbit.”

The problem is that resurrecting Obama’s strategy is probably no longer possible. The TPP now exists as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, none of whose members will regard Trump as a credible or trustworthy negotiating partner. Bessent wants to work with “Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and India,” but while these countries will play nice, none would be so foolish as to concede anything meaningful to Trump. Mexico and Canada went down that path during his first term, when they agreed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, and now they find themselves among the first countries Trump targeted for renewed bullying.

Moreover, Bessent is obviously either deluded or lying when he suggests that he is reflecting the administration’s view. No one has a mandate to speak for Trump, whose decision-making changes minute to minute on the basis of “instincts” and whatever happens to be showing on his TV. Trump may instinctively agree to a policy proposal by Bessent, but if the next person he sees tells him no, Bessent may be left to explain why he cannot deliver what he promised. Such is life at the court of the mad king.

Former US Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence H. Summers sees it differently:

The sole preoccupation that I would have if I were in the government would be with what the president was saying. … The president is entitled to have advisors who believe in his policies…. Individuals are entitled to follow their conscience…

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But, Larry, this is “sanewashing.” There are no policies to believe in. How can Trump be entitled to have advisors who believe in something that is nonexistent?

Policies embody clear goals, not to mention staff work, modeling, and analysis of various scenarios that may arise in their pursuit. What we have here is one ignorant man, surrounded by sycophants, wandering around spouting bullshit as the cameras roll.

This is business as usual for Trump, who is just playing the role he filled on the set of The Apprentice. The difference is that The Apprentice had highly capable producers and editors who could render all the messy raw footage into a compelling, clean final product. The current White House has only a live feed.

The contrast between Trump and Ronald Reagan is instructive here. Reagan had a cogent governing philosophy. It reflected his enormous confidence in the American people – in their industriousness and generosity and goodwill – as well as his suspicion of the policies, programs, and bureaucracies that the Democratic Party had built up since 1933. Reagan (a former actor) also had enormous confidence in himself – in his ability to memorize and perform his lines, and to play the part of president.

But while Reagan had a philosophy and knew he was the star, he did not think that he was the boss. He trusted the network of professionals who were there to make him an effective leader. When his confidence was justified – when he had high-quality professionals in their proper places on the White House staff – the results were quite good. When his confidence was not so justified – when Colonel Oliver North was allowed to make a mess of Middle East policy vis-à-vis Iran – scandal ensued.

The Trump White House has no film editors, only spin doctors. Trump will say something, and some adviser will rush to declare, “See! This was always the plan!” But these courtiers are not on the same page themselves. Sometimes, economic adviser Peter Navarro seems to have the upper hand; sometimes, Elon Musk does; and sometimes one detects the influence of Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Stephen Miran of the Council of Economic Advisers, or Kevin Hassett of the National Economic Council.

But these factions agree on very little.

And Trump ultimately trusts none of them anyway.

What should be done?

If the Republican Party had not turned sycophancy into a governing principle, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune would give Trump an ultimatum: Appoint qualified regents to oversee foreign and domestic policy and confine yourself to giving speeches that they write. Otherwise, a few of our members will align with the Democrats, and you will have to deal with a Congress led by Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer. These are the only options, because we have no confidence in your “policy process.”

If they were serious, Trump would knuckle under. He has already stopped casually insulting Canada now that its new prime minister, Mark Carney, has stared him down. My own vote for domestic-policy regent would go to Bessent, not because I think he would do well in the job, but because he might do less harm than anyone else who is actually willing to work for such a man. But none of this is going to happen. And that is why America and the world are in serious trouble.

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