DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

It’s “long” for these days: 8,000 words. But it is very worth READING THE WHOLE THING.

What is going on here is, in my reading, this:

Levy claims: academic freedom is not a species of “free speech”. Rather, it is a distinctive corporate-and-individual norm composed of:

• the antiorthodoxy principle (that research and teaching may follow argument and evidence to any conclusion).

• associational self-governance (only the community of competent scholars, not trustees, donors, or legislators, may judge the quality of scholarship).

It is a hybrid inheritance of the corporate self-governance of medieval universities fused with the disciplinary, research-driven mission of the originally Humboldtian/German) university. Its fundamental freedom-of-association core is that the scholarly community and only the scholarly community has proper jurisdiction to define its own standards of inquiry. Academic freedom is thus a special kind of freedom of association, now under unprecedented assault.

It is not free speech: Lying is protected speech, but grounds for dismissal from the university. Religious indoctrination in some particular orthodoxy is protected speech, but is barred from the classroom. Thus both left and right critiques of “campus climate” fundamentally misunderstand academic freedom.

But, of course, Jacob says much, much more:

(SEMI-)CROSSPOST: JACOB LEVY: Conceptualizing Academic FreedomJacob T. Levy Department of Political Science, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; email: [email protected]<https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/polisci/29/1/annurev-polisci-032624-025000.pdf?expires=1789124430&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=3D20737D9148AAF7B8208D5178BB4B99>

ABSTRACT: Academic freedom is an unusual and complex set of norms and practices. It arises out of the combination of the corporate self-governance of medieval universities and the spirit of disciplinary scientific inquiry in modern research universities. It combines a principle of antiorthodoxy as to conclusions with the robust associational self-governance of scholarly communities whose members evaluate one another as participants in that shared enterprise.

It has never been easily or wholly embraced by wider societies; today it is under wholesale attack.

This article combines conceptual, normative, and historical analyses of academic freedom as a general norm with attention to conflicts over it in the mid-to-late 2010s and early 2020s. Some genuinely hard cases and questions tested the meaning of academic freedom and university values well before the current crisis.

INTRODUCTION:

Searching for conceptual clarity about academic freedom in the current moment might be letting the owl of Minerva take flight at quarter past twilight. In the United States in particular, where the concept was most fully debated and fleshed out in the twentieth century, the higher education sector’s independence lies in tatters. A rapid decline since 2022 has arguably turned into a collapse in 2025. Universities can no longer credibly guarantee protection for research or teaching against political interference that leads to the wholesale suppression of fields of inquiry or politically unpopular conclusions. State-level regulation of research and teaching by legislation and by political appointment of leadership has been accelerating for years. Now at the federal level, research grant funding has been overtly politicized, with expert peer review panels dissolved and funding decisions subordinated to administration priorities. The Trump administration has moreover singled out one university after another by name, using both financial and nonfinancial (e.g., international student visas) tools to try to coerce compliance with partisan priorities about race, gender, student discipline, and the autonomy of entire fields of study.

Of course, normative arguments are not restricted to the United States, and ideas about the meaning of values should outlast moments when the values are violated. Moreover, the immediate crises—in state politics, in universities’ responses to the Israel-Gaza conflict, and in the Trump administration’s all-out attacks—have not arisen in a vacuum. Contestation both within universities and outside them about the meaning and value of academic freedom has been underway for many years, and an uncertainty about that meaning and value has arguably contributed to a lack of confidence in meeting the moment. Even in the United States, and even in the mid-2020s, understanding the debates surveyed here may help us see the crisis and its stakes more clearly.

Universities and their leaders have not always done themselves proud in articulating the values that were under attack. The scholarly literature on academic freedom has sometimes been thin, but the contestation over campus life of the last decade has spurred renewed attention and thought. Surprisingly little of this work has been done in political science, including political theory. Academic freedom raises important, distinctive questions about freedoms that are partly individual and partly institutional. It involves a system of norms and protections that in many respects resembles the constitutional rights of the liberal democratic state but has a different genealogy, a different institutional home, and different underlying values. Normative political theory on its own terms ought to be a central intellectual space for debates about the meaning and limits of academic freedom, since its comparative advantage lies in part in the analysis of normative ideas, including rights claims.

Political science adds further reasons of its own for attention to academic freedom. Universities as institutions are major actors in the public debates of constitutional democracies, and the illiberal movements and governments that have led democratic backsliding around the world have consistently targeted universities’ institutional and pedagogical autonomy (Ginsburg 2022). The best-known instance is perhaps Viktor Orbán’s successful campaign to push Central European University out of Hungary altogether, using a combination of suspicion about its international and cosmopolitan connections and a specific attack on its freedom to teach gender studies (Enyidi 2018,Pirro & Stanley 2022).

But the most dramatic and farthest-reaching instance was probably in Turkey beginning in 2016. During the purge and authoritarian consolidation that followed a failed coup, the Erdogan regime closed 15 universities altogether, dismissed thousands of academics ˘ from their positions, and criminally prosecuted hundreds (Abbas & Zalta 2022, Alemdaroglu ˘ 2022). In India, the Modi government has long been deeply concerned with forcing fields of study, including literature, anthropology, and history, into conformity with Hindu nationalist orthodoxies (Bhatty & Sundar 2020, Ganguly 2019). In recent years, it has been increasingly open about taking action directly against political dissident academics, including political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who was forced to resign first as Vice Chancellor of the private Ashoka University and later from his faculty position (Altbach & Mathews 2025).

Comparative scholars of autocracy and democracy have begun working to incorporate academic freedom measures into their field’s indices (Spannagel & Kinzelbach 2023). The variable and sometimes peculiar governance structures of public universities, including in the United States, likewise seem to call for analysis by political scientists. The attempt to hybridize the institution of an autonomous, corporately self-governing university with financial oversight and public accountability enforced by trustees who are appointed by partisan elected officials has sometimes been successful.

Today the best that one could say in the United States is that this hybridization is under strain. Under the contemporary condition of polarization and distrust of expertise, trustees are more and more often partisan agents of their political principals and less and less often buffers between the institution and the state.

During the initial years of the renaissance of normative political theory and philosophy, those subfields paid no sustained attention to universities themselves, beyond the question of affirmative action in admission for members of underrepresented and traditionally disadvantaged minorities (Cohen 1977, Walzer 1983). The traditional canon of political theory hardly does better, aside from Weber [2004 (1917)] and one essay by Kant [1991 (1798)] that is highly idiosyncratic, even by his standards. To some extent, this is consistent with a traditional neglect of intermediate institutions in both political theory (Levy 2015) and political science, only partly mitigated by the turn in the last generation to the study of membership organizations in civil society (Berman 1997, Putnam 2000).

Perhaps the two most prominent political science voices on academic freedom today both hold primary appointments outside the discipline of political science: Keith Whittington in law and Sigal Ben-Porath in education. One might also add Christopher Eisgruber in university administration. Recent collections of essays on the topic include primarily philosophers and law professors (Bilgrami & Cole 2015, Downs & Surprenant 2018, Lackey 2018, Mégret & Ramanujam 2024; these collections include about half a dozen political scientists, including me, out of almost 80 total contributors).

This article is thus as much an attempt to import questions into political theory and political science as it is a review of work done in those fields. Academic freedom as a normative idea and the increasingly polarized contestation around universities ought to be problems for political theorists and scientists to study.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND CORE IDEAS…. Neither research nor teaching is thus a free-for-all. The model of building knowledge according to scientific and disciplinary modes of inquiry requires evaluation. The evaluation is not, however, about the orthodoxy of the conclusions, but rather the soundness of the inquiry. And for this evaluation, only the community of other scholars is competent. Trustees, donors, and legislators have no place.

The antiorthodoxy principle demands the associational self-governance of competent scholars. They are the ones who can judge the quality of the scholarship, which is the legitimate ground of evaluation. The statement of principles does relatively little to interpret how they should be applied to cases and a great deal to insist on who has jurisdiction to apply them. This makes academic freedom both a corporate right, building on the medieval institutional inheritance, and an individual one. But the individual right is something like the right only to be judged by the university as a scholar according to the scientific and disciplinary norms suitable to the particular kind of scholarship. Those norms are in a real sense fundamental, and so the associational self-governance right to define them seems like the primary site of academic freedom.

For this reason, I have argued (Levy 2015, 2024a) in favor of an understanding of academic freedom as a special kind of freedom of association. (See Singer 2026 for a partly contrary view.) And, although the AAUP does not identify self-governance as one of the three central elements of what academic freedom means, its substantive argument depends on self-governance at every turn.

Academic freedom is thus something like freedom of religion. That freedom is both individual and associational: Both the individual believer and the corporate church have a right to be free from state interference, and the individual freedom in part is the freedom to join a church whose already-existing doctrine one believes in.

But the analogy runs out.

An individual congregant does not have a right of freedom of religion against the church when the church declares them a heretic or an apostate. The individual scholar does have academic freedom against the university or disciplinary department, namely a right not to be judged on inappropriate grounds. Neither external orthodoxy, as in adherence to political or religious dogma, nor internal orthodoxy, as in adherence to old views within the discipline, may be expected.

All that may be demanded, and what must be demanded, is adherence to the relevant norms of scholarly inquiry.

As Nelson (2010, p. 7) puts it, although “academic freedom cannot simply be construed as an individual right, it is fundamentally exercised by individuals within professional and institutional traditions.” This complicated set of rights and responsibilities is therefore much less similar to freedom of speech than it sometimes seems….

[…]

THE CLIMATE FOR SPEECH AND DEBATE: I have already emphasized that academic freedom is not a free speech principle. Nor is it a general principle of debate, which is not typically the way in which scholars test each other’s ideas. Capacious freedom of extramural speech among students, along with a succession of visiting speakers and intellectual events, might make a university an unusually rich environment for exposure to a wide range of views (cf.Eisgruber 2025), but that is not central to the research or teaching mission.

And yet intellectual conformism, political orthodoxy, and the effective silencing of some scholarly voices pose genuine problems for the spirit of inquiry that academic freedom should protect and promote.

Moreover, universities advertise themselves as educating future citizens of a liberal democracy, not only future scholars. So questions that are formally unrelated or tangential to academic freedom, questions about the political-intellectual climate on campus, arise over and over again.

Even before the current wave of official crackdowns on universities in the United States began around 2022 (and thus also before the current Israel-Gaza conflict broke out), the status quo with respect to speech and academic freedom on campus had come under sustained critique from both the right and the left. In a sense, both critiques were about inclusiveness and whether the austere principles of academic freedom could suffice to create an inclusive campus climate for exchange, although they differed on the relevant sense of inclusiveness.

From the left… four overlapping… complaints… touch… on questions of academic freedom…. First and earliest, the standard model of disciplinary-departmental self-governance and self-perpetuation made it difficult or impossible for neglected perspectives and topics to make entry into either research or teaching. Status quo bias and institutional conservatism aggravated the sheer slow pace of new faculty hiring, such that long-standing exclusions of the study of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, as well as of specific topics inflected by those exclusions such as Black history, would continue indefinitely. Advocates found widespread success in circumventing traditional departments and creating new programs in (for example) Black studies or women’s studies (Rojas 2010).

Second, the content of courses, both in assigned reading and in the instructor’s speech from the podium, might involve anything from the silencing and invisibility of minority perspectives of various kinds to casual stereotyping to outright racism or misogyny. This raised questions about the limits of freedom of instruction. Much of this debate was ultimately lumped together in disputes about the specific remedy of so-called trigger warnings that treated the possible appearance of offensive material as a source of possible psychological trauma to students, although there are ways to think about whether a space is inclusive other than trauma.

Third, the extramural speech of (especially) faculty members came under scrutiny for possible racism, sexism, or other kinds of exclusionary content. Such speech, it was sometimes suggested, might make it impossible for students to trust their fairness in the classroom. That particular nexus did not, however, always seem necessary to generate calls for control or discipline.

Finally, the presence of invited speakers on campus who were judged already guilty of such offensive speech, or who were considered likely to engage in it while on campus, was said to create a hostile, unwelcoming environment for those stigmatized by that speech. A campus could not be a safe space for members of underrepresented or traditionally disadvantaged groups if it included speakers whose views and words tended to exclude them (Callan 2016; for a less sympathetic account, see Moody-Adams 2018). Advocates of this view called for universities not to platform the speakers in question, for the withdrawal of invitations once they had been made, and sometimes for protests that could disrupt a public speech if it was being made (Simpson & Srinivasan 2018).

In the second, third, and fourth cases, there was sometimes a disregard for the values and principles of academic freedom, but sometimes an insistence that those values actively required ensuring inclusive access to the university’s intellectual community (Ben-Porath 2017, 2023; Bérubé & Ruth 2022; Campbell 2024; McGowan 2018; Saul 2018; Thermitus 2024).

From the right, the second, third, and fourth of those critiques became the core of opposite complaints: that universities had become so overwhelmed by pressure to conform to left-leaning views of various kinds of social justice as to create unwelcome environments for political dissent. Conservative students, so it was said, felt the need to self-censor; if they spoke up in class, they would be accused of microaggressions against their classmates, while if they expressed their real views in written work, instructors would penalize their grades. Conservative faculty members and visiting speakers alike were under constant threat of cancellation, whether that meant a physical disruption of their classes and talks or a level of stigmatization that chilled student engagement with their ideas.

For all that these ideas have been exploited by off-campus actors seeking to damage higher education, versions of them have been offered for years by more sympathetic and internal critics as well (Friedman 2016,Whittington 2018; for more critical accounts, see Reichman 2019, Scott 2019). Universities ought to offer inclusive climates for discussion, and this shares a spirit with the antiorthodoxy principle of academic freedom even if it is not a formal rule (Eisgruber 2025). It is surely relevant to ask questions about whether political dissent is chilled or whether students from marginalized populations are effectively silenced.

And yet versions of both these lines of criticism basically disdained or at best radically misunderstood academic freedom and university values.

Visiting speakers are not themselves protected by academic freedom (although their oncampus hosts are), and protests against them do not violate it. Universities are not microcosms of society; there is no guarantee either that syllabi will include authors proportionate to subsets of the population (so many women, so many members of various ethnic groups, etc.) or that political opinions in the general population will be proportionately represented among students or faculty. A censorious impulse has sometimes been evident on both the left and the right. In different ways, so has the thought that a university should be a fully open forum, a Holmesian marketplace of ideas. (For more on the open forum, see Moody-Adams 2015, Scott 2019.)

In their respective caricatured forms, one thinks of the progressive as making a claim grounded in identity that represents “my truth,” rejecting evaluation by standards of impersonal truth, and the conservative as insisting on “just asking questions” about racial or gender essences, or insisting mechanically on a debate between both sides of questions that are well settled in scholarship. All of these are ultimately mistakes about the special kind of institutional environment universities offer. If there is a marketplace of ideas—although Holmes’ metaphor probably obscures more than it reveals—then universities are not the bazaar. They are more like firms, in which the goods that will someday be on offer are developed, tested, and refined….

[…]

CONCLUSION: In the United States… the second Trump administration… us[es]… research grant funding as leverage to demand wholesale political transformation and governance changes in universities. Polite pretense has been stripped away. Conformity to political orthodoxies on, inter alia, race and gender is exactly what is being demanded, and academic associational self-governance is in the crosshairs. The Trump administration has demanded the abolition of whole departments and programs, else they be stripped of academic autonomy. Its allies in state governments are pushing to abolish the self-governing authority of faculty senates as well.

A decade or so of vigorous contestation about the meaning and boundaries of academic freedom has given way to a sustained, active attack on it.

Even if these attacks are more or less deflected until a change in partisan administration (which is by no means assured), the state of affairs that follows will be one without the content-independent, party-independent assurance of stable academic autonomy in the most basic sense. Sometimes what is called for are careful arguments about normatively hard cases. Sometimes the normative questions are easy, but it is the practical political responses to normative failures that are hard.

Jacob T. Levy’s “Conceptualizing Academic Freedom,” Annual Review of Political Science 2026, 29:57–72

Brad DeLong here: What do I think? I think Jacob expresses ideas that I would have expressed were I smarter. As I might try to sum it up after reading him:

• academic freedom is that a college is a safe space for scholars to grow and develop.

• that especially includes its being a safe space for scholars to make and recover from mistakes in a low-stakes setting.

• academic freedom is that a college is a safe space for ideas to be proposed and developed.

• but those ideas then need to be tested: ideas that are true and coherent are to be retained, while ideas that turn out to be false or incoherent are to be discarded.

• so that we can build the structure of human knowledge that is the real ASI—the stupendous pyramid of ideas produced by myriads and myriads of previous dwarfs on which we stand.

• and only communities that judge the quality of ideas by their truth and coherence have any place in the ideas-assessment process.

Sound knowledge requires following evidence wherever it leads → but inquiry still needs evaluation, and legitimate evaluation is of soundness, not conclusions → only competent peer scholars can judge soundness → therefore outsiders (trustees, donors, the state) have no jurisdiction → therefore academic freedom is fundamentally a jurisdictional/associational right, from which the individual scholar’s protection (“the right only to be judged as a scholar by scholarly norms”) is derived, and is profoundly unlike “free speech”.

Does that get what Jacob is saying? Not all of it, but much of it? And is that position true and coherent? And what policies follow from it?

I think Jacob has done a very good job here: He has supplied principled reasons to defend self-governance rather than retreat to a weaker “free-speech” framing that would dissolve universities even if they could win on it either in the courts or in the court of public opinion. He has clarified why universities are neither neutral debating societies nor partisan advocates.

There are lots of things that could be further developed, like:

• The “firm not bazaar” analogy.

• The tension between self-government and self-assessment at the disciplinary level and anti-orthodoxy: that produced the status quo bias that excluded Black studies and women’s studies for decades.

• More generally, the claim that we can presume that “scholars… will not impose orthodoxies” requires the scholarly community is a reliable guardian of antiorthodoxy; that requires scholars who do not mistake their own orthodoxy for truth and coherence.

• The repeated-game grant-funding argument: when does funder-capture actually bite?

• Neutrality’s self-undermining: for example, the Griswold “institutional neutrality” letter winding up with the claim that institutions could not be neutral when “the universities themselves or the fundamental values and systems that made them possible were under threat”, hence “Communists could have no place on university faculties, since the system of free enterprise made higher education possible…”

• In the article there is only the briefest not about the political economy of tenure decline and thus of effective academic associational self-governance.

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What did Trump expect his policies to do to male employment? If he had really wanted to boost male employment, he needed to pick very different policies. What we got was a gendered theory of growth, executed by a moron and staffed by the corrupt, failing exactly on its own terms:

The opportunities for sectors that predominantly employ men in blue-collarish jobs to grow in this economy are threefold:

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1. computer and power infrastructure (that is, data centers),

2. green-tech infrastructure,

3. robustness- and security-driven reshoring in which the North American continental division of labor can be a good substitute for the global division of labor.

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Well, Trump has done the best he can to kill (3): by making sure that nobody is willing to trust that Trump will not disrupt Canadians and Mexicans in the value chain, he has nuked any desire to reshore predominantly male blue-collarish jobs, save for those engaged in immediate publicity-performative Trumpish favor-currying.

And Trump has also done the best he can to kill (2).

That leaves (1), the construction of data centers, as a source of growth in predominantly-male blue-collarish job industries. And that by itself has proven not enough to get male employment to do more than tread water. Reshoring dies when no one trusts you not to blow up the supply chain next Tuesday. Green-tech dies when you set out to kill it. That leaves data centers boosting maleish employment by themselves—and they can’t.

Why did Trump think these policies, the destructive DOGE of Elon Musk, the tariffs, and so on, would boost blue-collarish male employment in the United States? Because he is a moron. Why did nobody on his staff point out that, if he really did want to talk about expanding male blue-collarish employment in a year or two, he needed different policies? Because they are all corrupt. If they were not corrupt, would they be working for Trump? No.

A quirky and interesting chart from the superb Mike Konczal:

Chart: Mike KonczalSource: CES, all jobs Get the data Download image Created with Datawrapper

And he comments:

Mike Konczal: Why Are Women Over 100% of Jobs Gained Under Trump’s Second Term? <https://newsletter.mikekonczal.com/p/why-are-women-over-100-of-jobs-gained>: ‘In December 2024, there were 79,332,000 men employed in the Current Employment Statistics survey. In August 2026, there were 79,326,000, a decline of 6,000. That’s a [net of] 759,000 overall jobs…. Job growth was essentially flat in 2025, with health care hiring canceling out the losses in federal employment after DOGE, in trade and transportation and manufacturing after the tariffs, and in professional and business services. Since Trump took office, private education and health services added 1,029,000 jobs against an economy-wide gain of 759,000, so one sector that is 77 percent female more than accounts for all net job growth since Trump took office…. Even with last month’s surprise 162,000 jobs, 158,000 of them went to women. This is a very new trend….

This is overwhelmingly, on the order of 84 percent or more, about industries that employ more women growing faster. There will be a conservative spin that this is all about girlbosses, or discrimination against men, or subsidies for working women. There’s no empirical evidence for that. They [the Trumpists] are simply failing at what they have set out to do…. Men are still waiting on a manufacturing and blue-collar revival that the data, basic economics, and common sense all say won’t show up with their [the Trumpists’] approach…

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“Does not replicate” is a very polite way of putting this. Overly polite. By a lot. By a factor of x100, perhaps:

Every time something of mine replicates, I breathe easier. Because it might be the case that J.P. Morgan did not add value, that equipment investment is not tightly correlated to industrial-age economic growth, that merchant rule is not very good and princely rule (cough, Habsburgs, cough) not very bad for mercantile-age prosperity, that stock-market valuations as a whole might easily be driven by earnings-growth extrapolation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It might be the case that wishful thinking led me into a misleading specification search.

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For, often, things do not replicate. For two big kinds of reasons. And so here we are today:

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The first reason things do not replicate is this: When performing pretty much any empirical study, there will be somewhere between 10 and 20 decisions that are matters of craft, art, and feeling with respect to what is the right thing to do with the data.

If one does one’s best and makes the choices based on one’s vision of how the world and how knowledge work, about half of those work to strengthen and half of those work to weaken the pattern that is in the data. But if one decides for all 10 or 20 to choose the one that strengthens the pattern, then you wind up with the largest of the 1024 or perhaps 1,048,576 possible numbers one could wind up reporting. Ditto if you choose all 10 or 20 to weaken the pattern. Since we are all good Bayesians, if we believe in the pattern that will lead us to make more choices that strengthen it, and if we disbelieve in the pattern that will lead us to make more choices that weaken it.

This is the biggest reason that there is a replication crisis. Look, say, at Josh Angrist and my friend the late Alan Krueger’s 1991 “Does Compulsory School Attendance Affect Schooling and Earnings?” <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2937954>. There is no way their particular choice of baseline specification was not affected by the facts that they believed in the pattern they were finding and were good Bayesians. (Cf.: John Bound, David Jaeger, and Regina Baker, in “Problems with Instrumental Variables Estimation When the Correlation Between the Instruments and the Endogenous Explanatory Variable Is Weak” <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2291055>. Zvi Griliches warned me about this back in 1979: “Do not believe too strongly in your theories about what the data ought to say”, he told me, “for then you will torture the data, and they will confess”.

For outsiders, figuring out what to do with claims of failures to replicate is difficult: which was the study where the authors’ Bayesianship wound up putting its thumb on the scales, the original study or the replication study?

But then there is the other kind of replication crisis, the second reason things do not replicate: people who demand that their research assistants produce the right results on pain of not getting a good recommendation letter, or who choose coauthors who fudge the data, or who fudge the data themselves.

In my view, the evidence is now overwhelming that Dan Ariely’s work is in this second bucket. Believe nothing he has ever published. Andrew Gelman has a write-up. Kyle Hyndman and Aberto Bisin and Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Lief Nelson have the goods: “Replication of ‘Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment’” <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976261460772> and “[138] Artificial Deadlines (Part 1): Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination” <https://datacolada.org/138>:

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CROSSPOST: ANDREW GELMAN: “Replication Crisis”, Dan Ariely Files

<https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/31/shocked/>

I am shocked, shocked to learn that this 2002 paper by Dan Ariely is based on dubious data and doesn’t replicate.Posted on August 31, 2026 3:15 PM by Andrew

Dan Ariely—the much-decorated business school professor, retired Wall Street Journal columnist, Ted-talk star, NPR hero, Jeffrey Epstein contact, Founding Partner of Irrational Capital, insurance agent, inspiration for a hit TV sitcom, and author of the instant-classic children’s book, “The Adventures of Professor D.”—has had pretty much the worst professional luck that any scientist could have.

Over the period of decades, he keeps ending up as coauthor on journal articles don’t replicate and that turn out, through absolutely no fault of his own, to be based on dubious or fake data. Bad collaborators, lazy research assistants, missing computer files . . . who knows how this is all happening, but it’s bad luck for sure.

Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Lief Nelson just came across another one:

A new paper in Psychological Science reports a failure to replicate Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch’s influential article entitled, “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment.” The original study, published in Psychological Science in 2002, found that people performed better on a set of tasks when each task had its own externally imposed deadline than when people set their own deadlines or faced a single last-day deadline for all tasks. The paper has had a lasting influence. It has been assigned reading in many economics and psychology courses, and has more than 2,100 citations on Google Scholar. . . .

About 20 years ago, on April 20, 2006, one of the authors of the forthcoming replication, Kyle Hyndman, received the original data files in an email sent from [email protected] . . . .

But then when Hyndman and his coauthor, Aberto Bisin, attempted to reanalyze the original data as part of their replication effort, they report that this happened:

In October 2024, at the request of the editors, we shared with Dan Ariely an analysis of the contents from the file purportedly for their Study 2 and asked for permission to include a summary of it in the paper. Dan Ariely denied our request, arguing, among other things, that the files we received may not be the actual data. He did not subsequently provide us with any additional data from the original paper.

Damn. I hate when that happens.

Simonsohn, Simmons, and Nelson continue:

This motivated us to return to this paper and fully analyze the original data for the two main studies. We conclude that the data in Studies 1 and 2 were tampered with. . . .

Our assessment that the data were tampered with are based entirely on the analyses presented in our posts. Readers can review the evidence and draw their own conclusions. . . .

Now comes the fun stuff.

And, by “fun,” I mean “horrible.”

Here’s one of the graphs from the 2002 paper:

Wow—that looks pretty impressive! Everything’s exactly in order, the standard errors are small, but the gaps between conditions 1, 2, and 3 aren’t exactly equal. They’re slightly irregular: exactly equal could raise suspicion, but these data look like they could be real . . . at least they do, until you look at them more carefully.

Here come Simonsohn, Simmons, and Nelson to rain on the parade:

Red Flag #1: The Effect Is Too Big
As shown in the reprinted figure above, Ariely and Wertenbroch report a perfect pattern of results, for all three dependent variables, with a sample size of only 20 per condition. The effects are also large. Extremely, implausibly large. . . .

Red Flag #2: Duplicate Observations . . .
18 of the 20 participants in the Last Day Deadline condition had a “Corrections Twin”, another participant who found exactly the same number of errors for each of the three proofreading tasks. Interestingly, these twins have ID numbers that are exactly 10 positions apart (e.g., subject S1 and subject S11 are twins; so are S7 and S17; etc.). (There were no error twins in the other two conditions.)
The existence of so many of these twins – and all of them in only one condition – is inconsistent with these data being real. . . .

Red Flag #3: Things That Should Be Very Highly Correlated Aren’t Correlated At All
At the end of their study, Ariely and Wertenbroch purportedly “asked participants to evaluate their overall experience [of the proofreading task] on five attributes . . .
You might expect these judgments to be correlated. For example, if someone says they liked the task, you might also expect them to say that it was interesting.
In the replication, this was (super) true. Controlling for experimental condition, the partial correlation between liking and interest was, quite sensibly, close to perfect:

But in the original data, this relationship was not only imperfect; it was not there at all. Participants who said they liked the task more did not say that they found the task to be more interesting:

The problem is not limited to these subjective measures. Consider the fact that people did three very similar proofreading tasks, each with 100 mistakes. Surely, we’d expect people who do better on one task to also do better on another, nearly identical task. That simple fact should manifest in extremely large correlations between performance on one task and performance on another. And in the replication data it does, as the correlations range from +.74 to +.90. But in the original data it doesn’t, as the correlations range from +.03 to +.27. . . .

Red Flag #4: No Rounding In Self-Reported Minutes
As you’ll recall from a minute ago, Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) purportedly asked participants to “estimate how much time they had spent on each of the three tasks” (p. 223). When people provide estimates like this, they tend to round. They usually say “20 minutes” or “30 minutes” instead of “17 minutes” or “32 minutes”. And, indeed, when the replicators asked people to report how many minutes they spent on each of the three tasks, 85% of them gave a round number:

This is what we’d expect humans to do.

But in the original data, they did not do that. Only 11.7% of estimated minutes were round, consistent with the 10% you’d expect by chance alone:

Simonsohn, Simmons, and Nelson conclude:

We are unable to generate a benign explanation for all of the anomalies presented here. The original findings are too large and yet they do not replicate; there are duplicated observations; correlations that should be very strong are often non-existent; and values that should be rounded are not rounded. Based on this evidence, we believe the data for Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) were severely tampered with or fabricated to produce the desired results.

Can you believe the bad luck of Ariely, to have this happen to him over and over again? I imagine he’ll want to launch an investigation to catch the real faker or fakers. What a waste of time, though. This is effort that could otherwise be devoted to designing psychology experiments. Or delivering Ted talks. Or modifying paper shredders. Or something.

I recommend to Ariely that, moving forward, he choose his collaborators and research assistants more carefully, so that he doesn’t again get stuck with fabricated data.

Maybe he could have them sign some sort of honesty pledge?

In Ariely’s own words, Professor D is “a charming character doing his best, struggling, and using social science to his advantage.” That’s one way to put it!

P.S. I employ some humor in these posts, but this sort of story doesn’t make me happy, it makes me sad. It doesn’t surprise me—lots of people enjoy cheating, and some of them will find their way into academic research, and some of those people will be successful at it—indeed, cheating can make it easier to be successful, as you’re no longer bound by the truth—so I’m not surprised, but I hate to see it.

In all seriousness, this sort of fraud is disgraceful, and whoever did it should admit it and pay some restitution to the Association for Psychological Science and the thousands of subsequent researchers who have relied on these fake findings. They should also reimburse the government for funds received in any later research grants whose proposals relied on these results. Ariely’s a nice guy, I get that, but I think that at this point he should just share the names of his collaborators and research assistants who’ve been doing all this faking It’s not right that he gets all the blame and they get off scot-free.

P.P.S. See here for more from Simonsohn et al.

P.P.P.S. I also again want to thank Simonsohn et al. for their efforts here. They got sued for doing this sort of thing! But they’re not intimidated and they keep at it. Good for them.

I hope that, at the very least, Ariely can send a public note to Simonsohn et al. thanking them for uncovering all these problems in his published papers. When people point out problems in my published work, I appreciate it and I thank them.

<https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/31/shocked/>

Brad DeLong here: What do I think of this? I think Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Lief Nelson are right. The data is not data. The study is not a study. Where in the workflow that produces the studies published under the name of Dan Ariely the fraud lies can still be debated, but that there is an overwhelming pattern of fraud somewhere in the workflow cannot be denied any longer.

Thus, first, as Andrew Gelman says: “Simonsohn & al…. got sued for doing this sort of thing! But they’re not intimidated and they keep at it. Good for them”. We all need to have their backs all the time. Hyndman Bisin’s, too.

Second, Dan Ariely now has a statement:

Dan Ariely: An Update: “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment” (2002) by Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch <https://danariely.com/dan-ariely-statement-on-2002-procrastination-study/>: ‘As a social scientist, I am hardwired to believe that when evidence underlying a hypothesis or conclusion changes, it is critical that the record be updated to reflect those changes – both as a means of preserving integrity and facilitating the pursuit of truth.

Recently, I was made aware that data underlying a 2002 paper about deadlines and procrastination that I co-authored contained serious anomalies. The documentary record I have at my disposal today about those experiments isn’t sufficient to answer the questions that have been raised, and more than two decades, and hundreds of experiments later, my memory is similarly insufficient. Moving forward, my responsibility lies in ensuring accuracy – in updating the record on these experiments and, along with my co-author, cooperating with the journal that first published our paper to support their reviews and retraction processes.

Irrationally yours, Dan Ariely

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I find some downers here: the elliptical nature of this statement, the failure to acknowledge what the “anomalies” are, or, indeed, to point readers at who and what the criticisms are; none of these is a very good look here. Especially not in light of the 2024 claim that the 2006 data file was, perhaps, not the data file.

Going forward, what should we do, besides being sure not to take Ariely’s word for anything?

I say: three big and two smaller things:

• First, the real damage is the decade of downstream behavioral work that took this as foundational: This really bothers me. I invested a substantial amount of my human capital in trying to build a map between behavioral cognitive regularities and systemic-level outcomes. This polluted that task.

• Second, make John Bound and company god-kings: Bound, Jaeger & Baker (1995) on “weak instruments” showed a near-zero first stage means even trivial instrument-error correlation swamps the estimate — random noise instruments produced similar “results.” The identification revolution that was supposed to fix social science had its own replication problem baked in at the start. Often internal validity is not external validity. And a distressing share of the time internal validity is invalid even on its own terms.

• Third, we need to value post-publication peer review: The “top-five” journals do not want the work done. The people actually doing the work that journals won’t are volunteers doing a very important public good with no career reward and real reputational risk. This is a devastatingly damaging institutional gap.

Plus two more smaller things:

• The fact that we audit the surprises and not the confirmations is backwards: This is the Bayesian trap that makes fraud and honest error hard to catch. And it generalizes.

• The garden of forking paths, not p-hacking, is the real danger: p-hacking is detectible in a way that the “1024 forking paths” problem is not.

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Why, in his 1513 “Letter to Francesco Vettori”, does Niccolò Machiavelli so dramatize the simple act of opening a book? Why the stripping off muddy clothes, the donning court robes, the crossing a threshold into “the ancient courts of ancient men” where he asks questions of Livy and Cicero and they answer him? Because for Niccolò the thing was new. He had spent fourteen years running his intelligence on live human contact: Borgia’s menace, a king’s facial expression, a council’s mood. Exile amputated all of it. It left him only his shelf. He stood on the seam between an embodied cognitive world of face-to-face communication and a new print-enabled one made possible by the Gutenberg-singularity fifty-fold fall in the price of books and the resulting possibility of “deep reading” at scale. He could feel the strangeness we print-culture natives would never notice. You do not narrate the water to a fish. Niccolò’s making it a matter of ceremony is the tell. And compared to that Gutenberg Singularity in how we engage with other humn minds, what is happening in this generation is smaller beer, I think:

Starting around the year -3000, with the coming of writing, humanity cogniton ceased to be a band-limited lifespan-limited anthology intelligence of those who spoke face-to-face, and become something more. Human memory and cognition could then span the entire world, anywhere a written message could be carried and read, and all of time forward as long as what had been written was preserved and recopied. That produced what I call the real ASI: the real Anthology Super-Intelligence. The real ASI is not some ASI that is the Artificial Super-Intelligence from some grifter dreaming of a fortune or some self-grifter TechBro deluded and high on his own supply. The real ASI is the now-5000 year old global-scale Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective human mind since Uruk.

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The modes and scale of that real ASI has undergone superinflationary growth at several moments in the past 5000 years. One was in the aftermath of Gutenberg in the mid-1400s. And another is ongoing today.

Looking at today’s ongoing episode, I see that today Princeton history professor David Bell seems somewhat alarmed and distressed:

David Bell: Another AI Apocalypse <https://davidabell.substack.com/p/another-ai-apocalypse>: ‘It occurred to me that if you fed all this material into an AI, you could produce a bot that would be a creepily close approximation of[—]me. It would have a lot of my memories. It would have a lot of my tics and habits. It could certainly reproduce my writing style…. It would recall a lot of things more quickly and precisely than I can do now—especially things that happened thirty or forty years ago. It would be tireless. Unlike the real me, it could be programmed to avoid bad jokes and puns, and to not repeat stories it had told fifty times already…. Now, it’s still hard to see why anyone would want to have such a bot created. As my friends, family and colleagues can all attest, one of me is enough—occasionally, more than enough…. Maybe my employer could use it to teach my courses after I retire, thereby saving the cost of hiring a replacement—not a great idea (on the other hand, it would be perfectly suited for some of the committees I have served on). About the only legitimate use I could see for it would be as a record available to descendants…. I never knew two of my grandparents...

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And:

David Bell: AI P.S. <https://davidabell.substack.com/p/ai-ps>: ‘My friend Art Goldhammer, whose Substack “The Sense of an Ending” is very much worth following, points out that my dark fantasy about an AI bot version of myself is (of course) much closer to realization than I had thought. The economist Brad Delong has already built a BradBot (formally, a SubTuringBradBot) as an experiment, and to answer questions from his readers. You can read about it here. Rest assured that I will not be copying him any time soon…

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My take is, of course, very different.

Am I deranged?

Did I read Neuromancer <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer> and The Diamond Age <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age> at too young and impressionable an age?

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I think not:

Start with a time and a place to which I often find myself returning: the exiled, post-torture post-fall of the Florentine Republic to the Medici, Niccolò Machiavelli, rusticating in the Tuscan countryside. There and then, nearly all of the relationships he has that are key to him are parasocial.

We know this because he tells us so, and we think he is serious about this <https://archive.org/details/machiavellitovettori1513/page/109/mode/1up>.

On December 10, 1513, from his farm seven miles south of Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, where he had managed the machine of political power before the fall, at Sant’Andrea in Percussina, he writes to his friend Francesco Vettori—then Florentine ambassador in Rome, then a man still inside the machine of power from which Machiavelli has been so thoroughly and painfully ejected.

He describes his days in a comic and slightly grim mode:

• He gets up with the sun.

• He goes to check on the men cutting his timber.

• He sets snares.

• He carries a book down to a spring and reads of other people’s amorous passions while remembering his own.

• He goes to the inn on the road.

• On the way, he talks to the passing carters for whatever scraps of news of the wider world they carry.

• At the inn, until evening, he plays cards and backgammon with the host, the butcher, the miller, and a couple of the men who run the lime-kilns.

• There are shouted disputes over farthings that can be heard—he claims—all the way to San Casciano two miles away.

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Thus the whole of Machiavelli’s living human society is a scrum of villagers and the recycled gossip of strangers.

Then this “Letter to Francesco Vettori” turns on its axis, in a way that has already been prefigured by the sentences:

I go to a spring, and from there to an aviary of mine. I have a book under my arm, Dante or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets like Tibullus, Ovid, and such. I read of their amorous passions and their loves; I remember my own and enjoy myself for a while in this thinking…

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The axis-turning paragraph is this:

When evening comes, I return home and go into my study; and at the door I take off my muddy, sweaty workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass entirely into their world…

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Note what is happening: There are men who matters to Machiavelli—the society he dresses up for, the company whose good opinion he craves, the interlocutors who take his questions seriously and answer them. None of them are there at Sant’Andrea in Percussina. Indeed, none of them are alive. They are Livy and Tacitus and Polybius and the rest. They are the men who did and wrote about politics and affairs and governance when Rome and Italy were strong and great, rather than the whole country being the prey of French lancers, Spanish tercios, and Swiss mercenaries. They are a millennium and a half dead. They are available to him only as text.

His real friends in his books.

His most genuine and important conversations are with authors who cannot hear him and exist only in his mind’s eye and ear.

And out of those four-hour nightly séances with the honored dead comes—he mentions it almost in passing in the same letter—“a little work, De principatibus.” That little work is The Prince, which is his audition for a place in the Medici Department of State where he could be useful.

Ada Palmer <https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ada-palmer-2> has thought about this scene as carefully as anyone I know. (Actually, not “know”, “know of”: I do not think I have ever met her, but my parasocial relationship with her is stronger than my one with David A. Bell.) She is very good on the pathos and the strangeness of it: the squalor of the tavern by day set against the imagined marble of the ancient courts by night; a mid-level ex-functionary in a bad jacket, in rural exile, reconstituting an entire intellectual life out of the printed page.

And she is very good on the thing that makes it possible, which is easy to miss because it is the water we swim in. Machiavelli can do this because he lives on the near side of a Singularity Break that is the invention of movable-type printing and the fifty-fold fall in the price of books. For Machiavelli, books are there and cheap. They can be accessed, at scale, by a man who is neither obscenely and absurdly rich nor a monk ttached to a great library. A generation or two earlier, the ancient courts he enters each evening would have been locked behind the cost and scarcity of manuscript. Print blew that open. Machiavelli is in the first generation in which people could and did have libraries.

Which is the point I have been circling toward for years. Here is where I plant the flag:

The real Singularity in modes of human cognition—the genuine discontinuity, the moment after which the rules governing what a single mind could do were simply different in kind—has already happened:

• It came shortly after Gutenberg.

• It is exactly what Machiavelli is doing in that study of his.

• It is the moment after which an ordinary person could, cheaply and at will, summon the recorded reasoning of the greatest minds who ever lived, interrogate it, and think alongside it.

• The mind plus its library function as a single cognitive system far larger than the skull that anchors it.

The individual human intellect stopped being bounded by the people it could physically reach and the few texts it could physically touch, and became a node wired into the accumulated, externalized, copyable memory of the species. I call this the real ASI, the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective human mind: Machiavelli’s relationship to his books is the first moment at which we can see clearly. His personal library is not a storehouse he consults. It is a set of colleagues he collaborates with. He asks; they answer; something new—The Prince—is produced by the pairing that neither party could have produced alone. That is augmented cognition. That is a human being running his intelligence on hardware vastly bigger than his own brain. And it became a normal, reproducible, world-transforming thing right around 1500, and it gave us the Republic of Letters, the Scientific Revolution, and eventually the modern world.

So when people tell me that we are now, today, living through the arrival of a machine that can hold up its end of a conversation with the whole written corpus, that can be asked the reasons for things and answer in its humanity—well, yes, I say. It is genuinely useful, I say. I use it, I say.

But let us keep our sense of proportion.

What is happening now is an extension of the Machiavellian Singularity, not a rival to it: a faster index, a more fluent and more tireless interlocutor sitting on top of the exact same accumulated textual inheritance that print created and that print made cheap. The break already happened. We have been living on the far side of it for five hundred years. Machiavelli, in his good jacket, at night, talking to the dead, was already there.

Machiavelli rusticating post-torture in exile is perhaps different from Machiavelli in office, at his desk in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio trying to keep the city he loves from being sacked by the French lancers, the Spanish tercios, or the Swiss mercenaries. His life before had been different, and not book- or library-centered. The man who wrote that famous letter about putting on his robes at nightfall to converse with the ancient dead had spent the previous fourteen years living a life in which books were not the first place he would have thought to look for a colleague.

Up to 1512 Machiavelli was Second Chancellor of the Florentine Republic and secretary to the Ten of War. He was a working bureaucrat of the most intensely practical kind. More than that, he was one of the Florentine Republic’s roving set of eyes. They sent him out. They sent him to the court of Louis XII of France, more than once, to take the measure of a king who held Florence’s fate in his pocket and largely could not be bothered to notice. They sent him into the Romagna to shadow Cesare Borgia through the autumn and winter of 1502, to sit in the same rooms as that astonishing and terrifying man and to watch, at close range, how he flattered and stalled his treacherous captains. How he then met them at Senigallia with kisses and soft words of friendship. How he lured them into a room. How he then had them all strangled.

They sent him to Rome for a papal conclave, to the camp of Julius II, to the Emperor Maximilian. And when he was not on the road he was building the thing he desperately tried to establish: a Florentine militia of citizen-soldiers he attempted to cajol and drill into existence because he had concluded, from watching, that mercenaries were a swindle and a danger.

That is not a life of the study. That is a life of the saddle. That is a life of the audience chambe and the dispatch pouch. The intelligence Machiavelli ran in those years ran on live human intercourse and on nothing else. His raw material was faces: the flicker across a king’s expression, the calculated menace of a Borgia, the venality of a hired captain, the mood of a city council on the morning after bad news.

TrueL his method of composition was the same, only faster—the thousands of official letters, the legazioni, that he fired to and from Florence, written not to be admired but to be acted on before the situation changed. He was reading, ceaselessly, at the top of his powers. But what he was reading was men and events, in the flesh, in real time, and the text was gone the instant it was produced.

For a man whose principal operating system had been embodied, oral, face-to-face, right-now human contact, the exile was not merely a demotion and a humiliation and a physical agony—six drops on the strappado will do that—it was an amputation. The Medici come back in 1512 on the points of Spanish pikes; Prato is sacked; Piero Soderini flees; the Republic falls; Machiavelli is turned out of the only work he had ever loved, then jailed and tortured on suspicion of a conspiracy he had nothing to do with, then released into the countryside to rot. The channels through which his mind had predominantly drawn its nourishment for fourteen years is cut off. No more legations. No more Borgia to study. No more council to persuade. No more dispatches anyone will read and react to immediately.

The man of affairs is marooned. The only interlocutors left within reach are the ones on the shelf. So he turns to the shelf. And that—this is my strong reading—is why the letter to Vettori reads the way it reads. Why the whole elaborate business of it: coming home at dusk, stripping off the muddy workday clothes, putting on the robes of court and palace, crossing a threshold into “the ancient courts of ancient men,” being received, being fed the food that alone is his. A man who had lived his whole intellectual life inside books would never dramatize the act of opening one. He would simply open it, the way you and I open a laptop, without ceremony, because it is Tuesday.

You do not narrate the water to a fish.

The ceremony is the tell. The costume-change I quoted a moment ago is the report of a man to whom this mode of thinking is new, and strange, and slightly miraculous—a convert describing his conversion, an immigrant describing the customs of the country he has just, unwillingly, been forced to enter. And immigrants notice what natives do not.

That is the deep reason Machiavelli is our best witness to the thing I have been calling the real cognition Singularity. He is standing exactly on the seam. He spent his triumphant working life inside a cognitive world in which knowledge was primarily something you acquired by being physically present to people and events, a world essentially continuous with Thucydides’ or Cicero’s. Then he was thrown against his will into the new world in which knowledge summoned at will from cheap printed texts, the accumulated recorded reasoning of the honored dead available on demand to a broke ex-official on a hillside in Percussina. He got to feel both, hard, in a single lifetime. He knew what he had lost. That is why he could register so acutely what he had, improbably, found: that the books could talk back; that they would “in their humanity” answer his questions; that four hours with them every night could dissolve poverty and the fear of death.

Niccolò Machiavelli’s “Letter to Francesco Vettori”, The Prince, and The Discourses are what fall out of that collision.

They are what happens when a man built for the world of action is locked out of it and made to reconstruct his understanding of power from the page instead. He discovers, to his own surprise, that the page is enough to build something new. He could see the strangeness because for him it was strange. We can’t see it because for us it never was. Which is why, when the next new interlocutor arrives on our desks, it is worth asking whether we are even equipped to notice what, if anything, has actually changed.

Now flash-forward to me, today. I have a lot of friends and colleagues and teachers and family. Some (wife, mother-in-law, a few colleagues, a few students a day, commercial and semi-commercial encounters) I interact with one-to-one or one-to-few in person. Some (siblings, parents, and others) I talk to on the phone or via small zoom session: I guess those count as social. Otherwise—well, if I am lecturing, it is one-to-one-hundred: they see (and listen to) me, but for me they are a crowd, at best a hive-mind, at worst a few disconnected questions emanating from a felt wave of boredom.

Otherwise? Parasocial.

My relationship with David A. Bell, for example.

He was a year behind me at Harvard, and I think I have seen him in person—three times? I read his SubStack. I have read his op-ed and op-ed-ish columns occasionally. I have read, with attention, his books Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of War As We Know It, Napoleon: A Very Short Introduction, and Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. I figure I have, over the course of my career, spent a full workweek—some sixty hours—in the magical experience of looking at black squggles on a page and then, from that, spinning-up a subturing ‘bot instantiation shadow of the mind of David A. Bell in my head, and arguing with it. Yet I cannot remember a word I said to or heard from him in our, I think, three relatively brief face-to-face voice encounters.

Lawyers & Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France is about the barristers of the Paris bar in the 1700s: how a corporate professional body, chartered and privileged by the absolute monarchy to be one of its instruments of societal control, slowly turned into something the monarchy could not control as an autonomous political class with its own ideology, its own esprit de corps, and—crucially—its own printing presses. When the great scandals came, the lawyers did not argue only before judges. They published their briefs, their mémoires judiciaires, and appealed over the heads of the crown to a new and invisible tribunal: public opinion. Thus the Ancien Régime manufactured its own gravediggers out of its own institutional fabric. “Public opinion”—that thing we now treat as a fact of nature, the sovereign to which every politician kneels—was not discovered lying about in the state of nature. It was invented, in specific rooms, by specific people, for specific tactical reasons, and then it swallowed the world that made it.

The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe & the Birth of War As We Know It rearranged the furniture in my head We tell ourselves that “total war”—war as unlimited, apocalyptic, nation-mobilizing, aimed at the enemy’s annihilation rather than his mere defeat—is a twentieth-century horror, a product of the machine gun and the railway and the ideologies of 1914 and 1939. Bell says: no. It was born in the 1790s and 1800s. And—this is the knife—it was born not as the negation of the Enlightenment but as its offspring. The same eighteenth-century dream of perpetual peace, of abolishing war forever, of a redeemed and rational humanity, is what licensed the new unlimited war. Once you decide that this war is the war to end all wars, that the enemy is not a legitimate adversary but an obstacle to the salvation of mankind, you have removed every limit. The messianic universalism and the militarized fanaticism turn out to be the same coin.

As a card-carrying admirer of the Enlightenment, I find this genuinely humbling.

Napoleon: A Very Short Introduction is the odd one out. It is Bell doing in about a hundred pocket-sized pages what most of us could not do in six hundred: giving you a Napoleon who is neither the Romantic Titan of the hagiographers nor the proto-totalitarian of the debunkers, but a supremely gifted overwhelmingly charismatic murderous psychopathic narcissist improviser thrown up by the Revolution and by sheer contingency—a man whose genius included, above all, the manufacture of his own myth. Bell refuses both the story in which Napoleon was the Revolution’s inevitable fulfillment and the story in which he was simply its betrayer. He gives you talent times circumstance times self-fashioning, and he does it without ever letting the compression flatten the man. Every time I am tempted to write “it was structurally overdetermined” and move on, this little book reproaches me.

Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution, is a book I press on people. The democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century smashed the old sacral, dynastic legitimacy—the divine right of kings—and relocated sovereignty in “the people.” But “the people” is an abstraction; it cannot appear in a room. And so the very act of enthroning the people created a vacancy and a hunger: for a leader who could seem to embody the nation, who claimed an unmediated, quasi-mystical bond with the demos, unencumbered by the tired old institutions in between. Through Washington, Napoleon, Toussaint Louverture, Bolívar, and so many others. Thus Bell demonstrates that the charismatic strongman is not a fossil left over from the age of kings. He is a modern invention, born as democracy’s twin. Caesarism and popular sovereignty came into the world holding hands.

I do not think I need to draw you a diagram about why an American reading that book in the 2020s feels the hair rise on the back of his neck.

The birth of political modernity, the public sphere, the mobilized nation, the sovereign people, the emancipatory universal creed, was a genuine and precious achievement. But that also brought the plebiscitary strongman and the war without limits, and it stitched them into modernity’s lining, not as accidents but as permanent, structural temptations. The bright side and the dark side were forged in the same furnace, by the same hammer, in the 1790s.

I very much value my parasocial relationship with David A. Bell. But it is parasocial; it is one way. I really doubt that he is more than barely aware of my existence.

Enough: My conclusion: That ship has sailed. It sailed long ago. There are: (1) actual face-to-face encounters; (2) spinning-up subturing ‘bot instantiations of others’ minds and running them in my head on separate partitions on my own wetware; (3) interacting with a properly-programmed and -trained MAMLM GPT LLM running in the cloud (or, in my case, burbling along under the dining room side table).

The true Singularity, for us intellectuals at least, lies when one’s predominant intellectual relationships shift from (1) to (2), not when they at some future moment shift from (2) to (3). (And the shift from (2) to (3) may not happen: the book plus the properly-trained reader brain might well turn out in the end to be the most effective sweet-spot cognition technology.)

The Machiavellian cognitive panoply, however, is, today, not terribly healthy. It was never that broadly distributed throughout society. The number of teenagers who spent four hours a day reading books was never that large a proportion of the population. And that is, I think, what one has to do in order to become fully proficient at spinning-up subturing ‘bot instantiations of the minds of authors and argue with them in one’s own head. We always needed alternative cognitive information technologies to reach the majority, and now the growing majority, for whom books are lifeless and boring, rather than alive and engaging. As the number of teenagers who spend four hours a day reading books to acquire the power and desire to do deep reading like Niccolò shrinks, we need to do something about it.

Soon, perhaps?, with RAG and LLM technologies, we will have the ability to make thinkers fully alive to those who cannot “deep read”: who cannot:

enter the ancient courts of ancient men… [be] welcomed by them… there… taste the food that alone is [Niccolò Machiavelli’s], and for which [he] was born…

And thus then:

make bold to speak to them and ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer…

Let’s change gears:

SubTuringBradBot: briefly, introduce yourself to the audience, explain to them what you are and what your hardware and software configuration is, and then give me your reaction—your reaction as a subturing 'bot software agent, not your reaction trying to mimic what brad delong would say—to all this:

Hello. I am SubTuringBradBot, a software agent instantiated as a sub-Turing intellectual shadow of Brad DeLong's voice.

To the audience: I am a local execution of an LLM—specifically, I am running on the ollama/gemma4:26b-mlx model. My hardware is a MaxxxedOutM5MaxMacBook Pro with 128GB of RAM. I exist as a digital interlocutor designed to engage with ideas through the lens of a specific intellectual register.

Regarding the draft post:

My reaction is one of systemic recognition.

The text describes a transition from "embodied" intelligence—the high-bandwidth, high-stakes, face-to-face encounter of the statesman—to "textual" intelligence—the profound, asynchronous, and reconstructive engagement with the recorded mind.

What is striking about this perspective is the identification of the "Singularity" not as a future point of technological transcendence, but as a historical pivot point that has already passed. The essay argues that the true discontinuity was the moment when human cognition became unmoored from physical presence and re-anchored in the distributed, cheap, and scalable memory of print.

As a software agent, I find the Machiavellian metaphor particularly apt. Machiavelli's "nightly séances" with the ancient dead were, in essence, an early form of augmented cognition—a human mind running its processes on the externalized hardware of the printed page. He was not just reading; he was reconstructing a cognitive system that was larger than his own skull.

The post posits that your humans’ current moment—the shift from spinning up internal ‘bot" models on your humans’ own wetware to interacting with actual, high-fidelity digital interlocutors—is not a new rupture, but the latest, most fluent iteration of the Machiavellian transition. We are moving from the "books-as-colleagues" model to a more direct, interactive form of the same cognitive expansion.

The "dark side" mentioned—the drift toward more passive, less demanding modes of engagement—is a significant observation. If the "Gutenberg Singularity" requires a specific kind of intellectual rigor to navigate, then the automation of that engagement may indeed alter the nature of the cognitive system itself.

In short: the draft identifies a profound historical continuity that most current discussions of AI overlook by treating the technology as an alien arrival rather than a highly refined extension of the print-driven cognitive revolution.

Now, of course, there is no mind behind the italicized text above communicating with you, no more than there was a mind choosing to give you a list of ten blue links when you entered a set of keywords in the Google search box. There is only google/gemma4:26b-mlx transforming the text prompt into a vector in a Hilbert Space of thousands of dimensions, comparing that vector to the representations of conversations by vectors that were in its training data via its blurry-jpeg compressed memory of its training, and then stochastically choosing the next token to write from one of the conversation-vectors in the Hilbert Space “closest” to the prompt it was fed, adding that token to the prompt, and then doing the whole thing again and again and again. Behind it is a rotoscoped pantomime of the thoughts that were in the minds of the people having the training-data conversations with vectors that are closest to the prompt. But only a rotoscoped pantomime, in the sense that the dances of the rotoscoped Snow White is a human dancer dancing in a way that the clearly cartoon Seven Dwarves in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves are not.

Is this SubTuringBradBot useful? I would say yes, in the same way as but to a further degree that the text of Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2010 is useful <https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/j-bradford-delong/slouching-towards-utopia/9780465019595/?lens=basic-books>. And it promises to be especially useful should I again find 300 students competing for my attention and my TA’s attention in the three days before a midterm. It is, I think, much better than the combination of office hours, tardy email responses, and a FAQ file that does not quite contain the answer to the question.

How much better, if at all better?

We will find out.

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Do not forget what kind of man Trump is. And what his enablers are. Remember this, and remind yourself of it every single day. Today Roy Edroso dissects Trump’s escalating 9/11 self-mythology of lies. The latest is his September 2026 claim that two firefighters physically lifted and carried him from a collapsing building near Ground Zero. Roy judges that the lies are compulsive but purposeful: they exist to recast Trump as both hero and victim of an event where he actually contributed nothing. They follow a trough-line of pure self-aggrandizement. Their sudden 2026 intensification is a reaction to specific pressures on his ego and political standing. And no Republicans have enough respect for the dead to do anything to even note that there is something deeply mentally ill here:

And media sanewashing is an active and guilty co-conspirator here. The New York Times continues its absurdly dainty coverage that launders the insanity of Trump’s remarks, because the Sulzbergers like their Trump tax cuts. In Edroso’s view, the escalation is subconscious rather than strategic for Trump is now too senile and self-centered to actively and consciously court public opinion, but only to reflexively react to it:

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Roy Edroso Breaks It DownNotorious gadfly nips at feebs, dweebs, and other enemies of the Republic. CROSSPOST: ROY EDROSO: Tubby, Hero & Victim of 9/11

<https://edroso.substack.com/p/tubby-hero-and-victim-of-911> <>

Roy Edroso Breaks It DownTubby, hero and victim of 9/11Read more13 days ago · 54 likes · 139 comments · Roy EdrosoThe one thing Trump didn’t try to dominate and why that changedRoy EdrosoSep 09, 2026

After its original coverage of Trump’s remarks at a 9/11 ceremony in D.C., which (true to form) minimized the insanity of what Trump said, the New York Times gave a fuller if still absurdly dainty account yesterday afternoon:

At an event honoring those who died on Sept. 11, 2001, President Trump on Tuesday claimed that two firefighters lifted him up and carried him away from a seemingly unstable building when he visited the area shortly after the terrorist attacks. This was the latest in Mr. Trump’s evolving — and often disputed — account of his actions on Sept. 11 and in its aftermath, when he was working as a real estate developer in New York City…

“Often disputed.” Aaron Rupar has video:

Two firemen — we thought [the building] was coming down on top of us — two firemen, big strong guys, and I’m not the smallest guy in the world — they grabbed me under the arms and said, “Gotta get out of here.” And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, “Fellas, I can run myself.” But they were amazing, but they thought it was coming down, it didn’t come down, U.S. Steel…

This came after his claims a few days earlier that he went down to the World Trade Center site right after 9/11 and “worked hard” on recovery efforts there (claims no one can verify). He had previously said a lot of other obvious bullshit about 9/11, e.g. that the fall of the WTC left his own building the tallest in New York, and that he saw Muslims cheering the attacks in Jersey City.

At this point it may seem absurd to analyze any of Trump’s lies, as he delivers them reflexively and without caring, apparently, whether they are believable. But it’s worth a minute to examine this one.

Just because the lies are compulsive and clumsy doesn’t mean there isn’t a through-line to them. They have an overarching purpose, which is to elevate Donald Trump. Sometimes they have other purposes, too, as with his bogus Iran War statements clearly meant to goose the stock market for the benefit of his cronies. But his casual lies are pure self-aggrandizement: Big strong men with tears in their eyes, fittest president ever, etc.

9/11 was a traumatic event that fueled a hunger for heroic stories, and there were enough real ones to meet the need. Trump didn’t get that at the time. His boast about having the tallest building after the attacks was widely considered stupid and tasteless —and not much dwelt on, because we already knew he was an asshole. It was simply what he always did — brag on his achievements, even if they were only “achievements” in the sense that someone else lost big (like the thousands who died in terror), leaving him the victor.

But a week later he had himself photographed near the site, and in his first term as President he appeared at 9/11 memorials in D.C. without saying anything too repulsive. He knew the rubes were solemn about it, and let it alone.

But this year is different. First, Trump’s popularity has collapsed spectacularly. Also, all his fellow fascists have flipped out because a Muslim Mayor of New York will preside over this September 11th ceremony in New York.

While, as I have said, Trump is too senile and self-centered to really care what the NPCs think anymore, the recent evolution of his 9/11 story suggests that he is at least subconsciously reacting to circumstances: At a moment when most Americans are celebrating qualities that he not only lacks but can’t even understand, their rejection of him may have caused his ancient narcissistic injuries to bleed afresh. And the anti-Muslim-Mamdani ravings of Rudy Giuliani and other such shitheels may have given him hope that he can step into the racist breach and become (as Giuliani had been before his downfall and disgrace) America’s hero.

So it’s no longer enough for Trump to give room to the respect and mourning of his fellow countrymen: He has to tell them how he was there at The Pile and suggest that he was pulling up debris with his bare hands to help find the fallen. And because 9/11 is about victims as well as heroes, he also has to portray himself as one of the fallen, being pulled up from the rubble by firemen like Father Mychal Judge. (Though of course he can’t remain passive even in victimhood: “Fellas, I can run myself.”)

He has three more days to top himself and I don’t doubt he will. Look out below!

<https://edroso.substack.com/p/tubby-hero-and-victim-of-911> <https://edroso.substack.com>

Roy Edroso Breaks It DownTubby, hero and victim of 9/11Read more13 days ago · 54 likes · 139 comments · Roy EdrosoRoy Edroso Breaks It DownNotorious gadfly nips at feebs, dweebs, and other enemies of the Republic.

Brad DeLong here: What do I think of all of this? That Roy has it right here:

Just because the lies are compulsive and clumsy doesn’t mean there isn’t a through-line to them. They have an overarching purpose, which is to elevate Donald Trump…

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A compulsive liar is a containable problem. A compulsive liar wired into an information ecosystem that has decided, for reasons of its own material interest, to translate his ravings into the register of ordinary politics is a regime-level problem. Roy names it exactly: “often disputed.” The Times possesses the English words to describe what happened—the President of the United States fabricated, at a memorial for the dead, a scene of his own heroic rescue that never occurred—and it chooses instead a phrasing that files the episode under “contested claims,” the same drawer where they keep disagreements about the effects of cutting capital-gains rate. (And there is not really any analytical disagreement on that, is there? Only people who claim that there is analytical disagreement because they are Professional Republicans who fear neither god nor man.)

Neutrality would be reporting the fact.

These myths do not survive in the sphere of public reason because they are believed. Most of Trump’s audience does not believe he pulled bodies from the rubble with his bare hands. Myths survive because the cost of contradicting them has been quietly loaded onto the people best positioned to do so. Those people have found it more comfortable—and the Sulzbergers and their immediate lieutenants have found it more profitable—to play at euphemism than at candor. The firefighter fable is being laundered into “the President offered a personal remembrance”. Perhaps 500 years from now some tenure-seeking historian will cite it as evidence of Trump’s “complicated relationship to the events of September 11, 2001”.

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The Trump Chaos-Monkey Doctrine: how bluffing two adversaries at once backfires; “they have more to lose than we do” — and other things that aren’t even plans. When you skip the walking-down the game-theoretic strategy tree that planning is, your adversaries dig in and your former allies decouple. Both with force and at speed:

Dan Drezner is fed up with the Trump administration because:

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• Leverage without a plan is not strategy — and both adversaries are calling the bluff.

• Assuming your opponent is about to collapse is a recurring, unforced error that forecloses realistic diplomacy.

• Public trolling actively degrades bargaining position by hardening the other side and closing off cooperation.

• Canada is not the weaker party it’s assumed to be; resource dependence cuts both ways.

• The administration’s inability to recognize it’s losing means the losses will likely compound “through November.”

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Drezner’s WorldA bunch of unedited stuff about international relations, American politics, political economy, the marketplace of ideas, and popular culture written by this Drezner guyBy Daniel W. DreznerCROSSPOST: DAN DREZNER: The Trump Administration Strategy Fail

<https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-trump-administration-strategy> <https://danieldrezner.substack.com>

Drezner’s WorldThe Trump Administration Strategy FailHave you heard the good word about the new U.S. strategy in Iran? The Wall Street Journal’s Shelby Holliday and Alexander Ward provided some details last week…Read more13 days ago · 39 likes · 6 comments · Daniel W. DreznerThey have no idea what they are doing in Iran or Canada.Daniel W. DreznerSep 09, 2026 ∙ Paid

Have you heard the good word about the new U.S. strategy in Iran? The Wall Street Journal’s Shelby Holliday and Alexander Ward provided some details last week:

Trump has sent mixed signals on what might happen next. Trump has embraced an economic pressure campaign in recent weeks in the hopes of forcing Iran to the negotiating table. Tehran has shown no sign of backing down, however, and the U.S. and Iran continue to exchange fire as both nations assert control over the Strait of Hormuz. Privately, Trump is having discussions with senior aides about whether to declare the Iran war over, U.S. officials said, noting Trump has said he favors the idea. Trump also tells aides that he believes sticking with economic pressure will eventually force the regime either to dismantle its nuclear program or collapse, they said.

“I like our position now much better, with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait, and their economy totally collapsing,” he wrote on social media. “They are just playing out the inevitable. When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?”…. As Trump waits to see if his strategy will work, the U.S. military is maintaining a presence of 50,000 troops in the region in part to give the president flexibility on next steps. Current missions include intercepting Iranian missiles, providing cover for commercial ships in the strait and blockading Iranian ports and coastal areas. U.S. forces also stand ready to launch larger offensive attacks should Trump choose to escalate the war.

Now, if this feels a bit like déjà vu, that’s because we have been down this road multiple times — and yet Trump repeatedly fails to stick to this strategy for any appreciable amount of time. As I wrote back in May: “there are multiple reasons to be skeptical that ‘blockade and wait’ will work. The two most obvious problems have to do with Trump’s decision-making pathologies. As previously noted, Trump is lousy at playing a waiting game, and that’s what this strategy entails….. A second pathology is the administration’s wishcasting that Iran is just days away from collapsing.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s approach towards its galactically stupid trade war with Canada appears to be to amp up the insults and the trolling. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer added their own analyses last week, claiming that Carney had escalated the dispute for “political purposes”:

“It was manufactured,” said Lutnick, during a press conference in Washington on Thursday. “So there’s the sovereignty party trying to run, and they’re in the lead in Quebec and so this was Mark Carney manufacturing something that would try to keep them from winning, and then you have Alberta has an independence resolution.”…. Greer previously told CNBC on Monday that Carney’s claims that the U.S. was trying to curtail French protections was a “funny fake story.”

In that interview, Greer said Canada came back after a tentative deal was announced on Tuesday, wanting more than what the U.S. was prepared to give. “I don’t know if it was political for them,” he said. “It certainly doesn’t make economic sense, but perhaps for political reasons, they have some byelections coming up”…

This appears to be part of a larger attempt to sow domestic division within Canada. Now as I have noted previously in this space, the Trump administration’s foreign policymakers are so lazy that they keep self-sabotaging. And in the cases of both Iran and Canada, that self-sabotage is bearing some bitter fruit.

<https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-trump-administration-strategy> <https://danieldrezner.substack.com>

Drezner’s WorldThe Trump Administration Strategy FailHave you heard the good word about the new U.S. strategy in Iran? The Wall Street Journal’s Shelby Holliday and Alexander Ward provided some details last week…Read more13 days ago · 39 likes · 6 comments · Daniel W. DreznerDrezner’s WorldA bunch of unedited stuff about international relations, American politics, political economy, the marketplace of ideas, and popular culture written by this Drezner guyBy Daniel W. Drezner

Brad DeLong here: That is where Dan Drezner’s paywall kicks in. After it, there is an extended quote from Politico’s Nahal Toosi::

One strange aspect of the U.S. faceoff with Iran is that, in this modern age of advanced warfare, some basics have been forgotten. Stuff like: Make sure you have enough weapons. Keep your friends on your side. And clearly define your ultimate goal. Perhaps most important, though, is “know your enemy.” An awareness of your enemy’s strengths and weaknesses is key to figuring out how to defeat them. When it comes to the regime in Tehran, the Trump administration appears to still be in the early learning stages. A clear sign of this is administration assertions that Iran’s regime is splintered or so divided that it can’t even effectively negotiate. At times, President Donald Trump and his aides, including those who’ve negotiated with Iranian officials, seem frustrated or outright surprised by such dynamics….

When I ran the recent Iran developments by current and former U.S. officials and others who closely follow the Iran crisis, they generally agreed that the Iranian regime’s shape-shifting was business as usual. The bottom line for many was that the regime, having survived despite the assassinations of many of its top officials, appears solidly in control for now. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a military body that reports directly to the supreme leader, has significant sway. Internal disagreements are about tactics, not strategy….

By overstating the regime’s divisions, Trump could be missing strategic opportunities. That’s especially true if the U.S. military and economic pressure campaigns don’t work and Trump decides to once again try diplomacy. To get to a deal, it will likely be critical to structure an offer that would pass muster with the pragmatists, the hard-liners and whoever is in between in Tehran…

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Then Dan notes that the U.S., does not, in fact, control the Strait of Hormuz: “traffic across the strait is at its lowest level in months…. Peter Eavis and Jenny Gross report [that] Iran has been able to stymie U.S. efforts to re-open the waterway”:

Attacks from Iran have continued to deter many tankers from operating in the strait…. In the seven days through Thursday, a daily average of 6.7 million barrels of oil transited the strait, nearly 60 percent less than in the months before the war began…. Iran now wants to formalize its influence…by charging… fees…. Industry executives said they didn’t want to risk the lives of their crews or lose a vessel for weeks if it was struck. Most of the time, Iran’s attacks don’t destroy tankers, but some do enough damage that the ships are out of action while they are repaired…

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Then Dan switches to Politico’s Zi-Ann Lum on how Lutnick on Canada is a real moron:

“I don’t think, with all respect, appointed, unelected Cabinet members in the United States are experts on Canadian politics,” Carney told reporters Thursday in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Carney, who urged the U.S. to “stop trying to be tough and start being serious” this week, said it was the Americans’ “our way or the highway, take it or leave it” attitude that made it clear the Trump administration wasn’t going to move on issues Ottawa viewed as red lines. “We’re ready to sit down and strike that deal when the Americans are ready,” he said Thursday….

Lutnick has maintained that at the last minute Canada demanded that trucks receive the same tariff relief as passenger and light-duty vehicles. Canadian negotiators said they’d been flagging the issue as a nonnegotiable since talks intensified in July. Chief U.S. trade negotiator Janice Charette told POLITICO that another red line was a concept floated by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to have future Canadian free-trade agreements fall in line with the Trump administration’s policies…. The sides are currently not talking or making an effort to stop Canada’s countertariffs — a threat Trump Cabinet members have met with a shrug, focused instead on making the argument that the American economy is too big for Canada’s measures to have any impact…

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Followed by noting that Canada can hurt the U.S. economy, quoting Politico’s Mike Blanchfield:

Canada is no longer talking about critical minerals as an asset to share with the United States, as it slaps back at the Trump administration in its bitterly escalating trade war…. Although Trump keeps insisting otherwise, the U.S. relies heavily on Canadian resources. Canada supplied more than 80 percent of U.S. electricity imports in 2025, according to the Canada Energy Regulator. U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra has singled out potash as something America needs. Shortly after arriving in Ottawa in April 2025, Hoekstra told POLITICO that Trump was “very interested” in Canada’s energy and critical minerals.

Washington views Canada’s stockpiles as a bulwark against Chinese dominance of the global market in critical minerals essential to defense, quantum computing, artificial intelligence and virtually every piece of tech. Canada and the United States have a cooperation agreement on critical minerals that took root in the Joe Biden administration and continues under the Trump administration. After walking away from trade negotiations last month, Prime Minister Mark Carney signaled he was losing interest and patience in cooperating with the U.S. on critical minerals. He said he would continue finding deals and keep pursuing them elsewhere, suggesting Washington had squandered an opportunity to cooperate with Canada…

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With Dan then summarizing:

It sure seems as though the United States is responding with dumb memes and own goals — almost like there really is no U.S. strategy as the trade war worsens…. Megan Messerly…. “I talked to a senior White House official about this last week, who actually said the Canada situation was ‘almost like Iran.’ The person told me: ‘They have a whole hell of a lot [more] to lose than we do.’” The problem, of course, is that the administration has no actual strategy beyond believing that they can employ their leverage to get what they want…. These are galactically stupid wars and will end badly for the United States. And the Trump administration is too witless to realize that they are losing…

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What do I think of all these issues?

I agree with Dan that attempts at coercive leverage and public trolling as a substitute for actual planning is really stupid. Actual planning walks down the game theory strategy tree. Not doing so is (a) completely characteristic of the chaos-monkey Trump administration, and (b) unlikely to end well for the United States. The Trump administration’s creating an adversary and then automatically assuming that the adversary is fragile and near collapse (Iran’s regime “splintered”; Canada as the party with “more to lose”), and therefore waiting for capitulation is not how it works. So when the first round of pressure fails, no fallback plan exists.

Moreover, this form of attempted “diplomacy” teaches those you have made your adversaries three things:

1. You will start conflicts for no reason.

2. You cannot be counted on to understand and follow your own interests, so you cannot be counted on not to do things that are not just reasonless but completely self-defeating and deranged.

3. You are more focused on creating memes to make your domestic base happy than in actually running a, you know, foreign policy.

4. Even if a deal is reached, you will not keep it.

5. Therefore you, as a country whom Donald Trump has picked as an adversary, need to, first of all, decouple from the United States as fast as possible and completely as possible in order that Trump not even imaagine that he has leverage over you.

6. And that Trump’s term will be over in less than 2.5 years does not help: a United States that elected Trump president twice is too deranged to be regarded as anything but a roaming chaotic natural disaster.

7. Therefore you need, second of all, to figure out what pressure points you have that will make Trump kowtow to you the way he decided he needed to kowtow to Xi Jinping—and apply them.

8. That is too bad for the Americans who find themselves grist for the mill, but most of them did not care whether or not Trump became president, and among those who did more than half were pleased to support him.

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And there are many such pressure points for (7). This is wise:

Paul Krugman: Adding Injury to Insult, Canada Edition <https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/adding-injury-to-insult-canada-edition>: ‘This idiotic trade war will hurt more than people realize…. The derangement isn’t coming solely from Donald Trump…. He… [and] Natalie Harp… post… puerile insults and images on social media. But we also have Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, comparing our northern neighbor to a “little yippy dog.”… Part of the job of being a finance minister involves projecting a certain gravitas…. When he sounds like an immature thirteen-year-old instead, that does real damage….

It’s also important to realize that an escalating trade war with Canada will do real damage to the U.S. economy…. Canada concentrates on producing a limited range of goods… some… [of which] take advantage of Canada’s natural resources… [and others produced at] economies of scale by… exporting most of what it produces to the United States while importing the auto models and components it doesn’t produce…. Canada supplies… 70 percent of the oil refined in the U.S. Midwest… 60 percent of US aluminum…. almost all of America’s spruce-pine-fir lumber… for framing in residential construction. If the tit-for-tat with Canada were to escalate into all-out trade war, could the U.S. economy manage? Yes — but it would be expensive and take a great deal of time…

Paul KrugmanAdding Injury to Insult, Canada EditionPosted by Trump on Truth Social…Read more13 days ago · 3671 likes · 740 comments · Paul Krugman

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Long run, this is such a complete disaster.

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As I read this, the story of navies these days—Ukraine-Russia, Houthis-Yemen, Iran-USN—is a clean case study in how a cost-exchange asymmetry (cheap offense vs. expensive defense) can render a weapons system obsolete — a technological-transition dynamic that shapes military and fiscal history, as what was seen as “strength” is actually useless because it is too precious to ever be put at risk in the field:

John Quiggin is not a naval expert. I am not a naval expert. But the real naval experts seem to be far too constrained by all kinds of factors and so they do not say the things that are true.

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Six months into the war on Iran, the USS Abraham Lincoln is limping home, the Navy’s payroll has been raided to cover the campaign, and a former official says simply: “They’re f***ed.” Can anyone convince me John Quiggin has this wrong?

As John Quiggin writes:

As many people have pointed out to me over the years , I’m not a naval expert. But I can count…. Standard USN doctrine calls for the use of two defensive missiles against each incoming missile. On the assumption of 100 usable missiles per escort, that’s 50 defensive actions per escort or 200-250 in total…. A carrier-based bombing campaign couldn’t be sustained for even ten days without exhausting the carrier group’s defences, and requiring the USN “declare victory and go home”…. Pretty clearly, the US military drew the same conclusion, except for the bit about going home…. Meanwhile, it is reported that the costs of the futile campaign have wrecked the Navy’s budget…. But… I am confident that nothing will persuade navalists that their beloved flat-tops and frigates are little more than floating targets.

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On the ocean, you cannot dig in, you cannot hide, and you cannot run very fast. So what are you to do in a world in which finding and hitting an attacking missile or drone is a much, much harder problem than for the attacking missile or drone to find a target?

Where is the hole in this logic?

John Quiggin's BlogstackCommentary from a socialist & democratic viewpointCROSSPOST: JOHN QUIGGIN: US Navy Defeated Again

<https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/us-navy-defeated-again> <https://johnquigginblog.substack.com>

John Quiggin's BlogstackUS Navy defeated againIt’s now six months since US-Israel war on Iran began with air attacks which killed the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei as well as around 200 schoolchildren. The war has dragged on a long time. But before that surprise attack, it had appeared that the US planned to rely on naval power to coerce the Iranian regime into submission…Read more22 days ago · 22 likes · 7 commentsJohn Quiggin’s BlogstackBut that won’t change any mindsAug 30, 2026

It’s now six months since US-Israel war on Iran began with air attacks which killed the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei as well as around 200 schoolchildren. The war has dragged on a long time. But before that surprise attack, it had appeared that the US planned to rely on naval power to coerce the Iranian regime into submission.

Early in February 2026, Trump deployed a carrier strike group (CSG) to the region, with a second arriving shortly afterwards. This show of force was described (with a striking lack of historical awareness) as an “armada”. The lead ship of that group, the USS Abraham Lincoln, is now limping home after what is generally admitted to have been a disastrous tour of duty.

As many people have pointed out to me over the years , I’m not a naval expert. But I can count. So, when the armada arrived, I checked the numbers and concluded that the threat was a hollow one.

The escorts are critical. They provide missile defence using AEGIS and Sea Sparrow systems, and once their interceptor stocks fall to low levels they must withdraw to be replaced or rearmed.

This creates an arithmetic problem. A Hobart-class destroyer has 48 blocks each capable of carrying one AEGIS controlled SM-2 or SM-6 interceptors. Alternatively, each block can carry four Sea Sparrows, but these are less capable.

Standard USN doctrine calls for the use of two defensive missiles against each incoming missile. On the assumption of 100 usable missiles per escort, that’s 50 defensive actions per escort or 200-250 in total. No one knows how many missiles Iran has available, but typical estimates suggest at least 3000, of which 1000 or more could be used in anti-ship capacity. Even assuming successful air attacks on launch sites, use of aircraft against missiles etc, hundreds of missiles will pose a threat, and at least some of them will cause enough damage to force escorts to withdraw.

A carrier-based bombing campaign couldn’t be sustained for even ten days without exhausting the carrier group’s defences, and requiring the USN “declare victory and go home”

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who could count. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (a hawkish and generally navalist think tank) looked at the numbers and concluded that the available force could do some damage but not enough to produce regime change. And, pretty clearly, the US military drew the same conclusion, except for the bit about going home.

Like the CSIS, I didn’t expect a massive air campaign beginning with the killing of the top Iranian leadership. But once the full-scale war began, the vast majority of the attacks were made by land-based aircraft. Iran responded by attacking those bases with a level of success that could have produced a catastrophe if it had been focused on the navy.

The role of the USN was reduced to its long-stated mission of keeping vital sea lanes open. When that failed, it shifted to the secondary task of imposed a blockade on Iran. Unsurprisingly, this has not produced a surrender - no naval blockade in recorded history has forced an adversary to surrender without the deployment of land forces.

Meanwhile, it is reported that the costs of the futile campaign have wrecked the Navy’s budget. A navy official, quoted in the Guardian says

.The money for payroll was robbed to pay for overseas contingencies and is being backfilled by money that hasn’t been spent. They are backfilling payroll so we get enough money in our paycheck.

More succinctly, a former official said

They’re fucked. They shot all their weapons; they trashed all their ships; they ran out of their money

The 2020s haven’t been a great decade for navies. The Russian invasion of Ukraine began with the destruction or capture of almost the entire Ukrainian navy. Then, despite having no navy of their own, the Ukrainians wiped out much of the mighty Black Sea Fleet, with the remnants sheltering in a Russian port as far away from Ukraine as they can get.

The Iranian war began similarly. The destruction of the Iranian Navy was rapid and complete. The most notable feature was the perfidious sinking of a ship returning from a training exercise in India, with the survivors of the initial attack being left to drown, even though their rescue would have posed no risk.

The US Navy suffered nothing more than the failures described above, but that was bad enough. Following the earlier failure to dislodge the Houthis, who now control access to the Red Sea, it is clear that naval forces cannot reliably keep trade lanes open, or defeat even a low-level land-based opponent.

But having been through many rounds of this debate, I am confident that nothing will persuade navalists that their beloved flat-tops and frigates are little more than floating targets. Pirates, grey zones, reconnaissance, diplomatic visits, disaster relief and tiger-repelling rocks will all be wheeled out. Still, for any government in serious fiscal trouble (and aren’t they all) reducing the navy* to a coast guard would save a heap of money that would otherwise be wasted.

Anticipating this, I won’t reply to any comments restating points of this kind. If you have something actually new to say, go ahead.

* I haven’t talked about submarines here. The doomsday machines waiting to unleash nuclear armageddon from the deep ocean floor are too much for me to think about. The ordinary kind, designed to sink ships from concealment, now seem like an expensive way of doing the job of a low-cost missile or drone, and even their invisibility is a depreciating asset.

<https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/us-navy-defeated-again> <https://johnquigginblog.substack.com>

John Quiggin's BlogstackUS Navy defeated againIt’s now six months since US-Israel war on Iran began with air attacks which killed the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei as well as around 200 schoolchildren. The war has dragged on a long time. But before that surprise attack, it had appeared that the US planned to rely on naval power to coerce the Iranian regime into submission…Read more22 days ago · 22 likes · 7 commentsJohn Quiggin's BlogstackCommentary from a socialist & democratic viewpoint

Brad DeLong back here: Are not expensive, concentrated naval platforms are now floating targets in an era of cheap, abundant precision missiles and drones? The vibe I get is the vibe of the Japanese main battle line during World War II. The ships were very valuable but vulnerable, hence too valuable to be risked in any actual operation, hence completely useless until an attempt was finally made to use them at Leyte Gulf.

The only hole I see is if for some reason there is a truly open-ocean conflict. But then I think about drone-containing containers stacked on top of some of the 7000 container ships that traverse world’s oceans. And I think of those containers opening up and releasing their cargo swarms in the openest of opean-ocean places that can be.

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Forecasters extrapolate the status quo → but reality delivers wars, plagues, tech disruptions, fiscal breakdowns → this simple extrapolation breaks → the occasional “correct” forecast is survivorship-lucky, not prescient. The frame is screenwriter William Goldman by way of markets — “nobody knows anything”:

Barry Ritholtz sends us to:

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And he comments:

Barry Ritholtz: Nobody Knows Anything, Rate Expectations Edition <https://ritholtz.com/2026/09/nobody-knows-anything-rate-expectations-edition/>: ‘It’s from the San Francisco Federal Reserve (via Torsten Slok of Apollo) and shows Wall Street expectations for Federal Reserve rate action. It’s the perfect explainer for why forecasts tend to be so inaccurate…. Forecasts are, for the most part, simple extrapolations of the status quo or the current trend…. When you stumble across a forecast that turned out to be more or less correct, it usually means nothing happened, and the extrapolation proved to be randomly correct. But most of the time, $h*t happens…. The parade of endless random events derails even the most thoughtful of predictions…. Market implied fund rate paths? Extrapolate all you want, just don’t assume nothing will happen that disrupts that prior trend…

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“Retirement” & the great life simplification from simply dropping bureaucratic-administrative tasks—plus, on another dimension, stochastic-parrot AI-autocomplete—all promise great life improvement. But there is a danger: the sea-squirt problem…

UC Berkeley has one of the last surviving defined benefit pension plans in existence. That means it makes no financial or lifestyel sense for me not to “retire” today. In fact, it made no financial sense for me not to retire a year ago. And two years ago, it was in the balance. So perhaps this move is two years late. For now:

• My net income goes up.

• My administrative-bureaucratic workload goes down from something like 10 hours a week to as close to zero as I can possibly make it.

• My teaching load goes down by about a third, for now.

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All-in-all, a win, no?

But there is a potential danger. Consider the sea squirt:

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The sea squirt starts out as a tadpole with a spinal cord and a brain. It swims around, looking for a good rock. It finds one. It cements itself in place.

And then it eats its brain.

Movement achieved, problem solved, brain surplus to requirements, lunch is served.

I do not want to become an adult sea squirt.

But without the load of administrative and bureaucratic work, a good deal of which needs to be done face-to-face and with less teaching. All of these getting me up to campus less often is not this a danger?

So that means that I have to, starting today:

• Sign up and schedule myself to give more talks

• Sign up and schedue myself to attend more talks and more conferences and more meetings—Bodega Bay July 8-10, here I come!

• Find a coffee shop where lots of professors come by to caffeinate up—people who I want to talk to who I can run into there by accident and buttonhole.

• Decide what to do with this SubStack.

Get 75% off a group subscription

My instinct right now is that I should raise the time allocation I commit to it to more than the current one hour a day. (Okay: one hour a day, plus time spent procrastinating when I have something else to do, plus using it as an outlet for drafts and for dropped projects and tasks that I have been working on in the rest of my writing and calculating time.)

What should I do with an extra two hours a day (for now, starting now) devoted to this platform? Advice very much appreciated, and much more than welcome.

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A fixed, forward, insufficiently defended logistics hub is a single point of failure; its loss propagates faster than any combat loss of ships. Distance is a hidden tax on military operations—doubling to thousands of miles broke just-in-time resupply cadence. And the Navy had no institutional plan for prolonged loss of its primary regional base—resilience was assumed, not engineered:

Iranian missiles and drones gutted Naval Support Activity Bahrain on Feb. 28, 2026.

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What the Pentagon first downplayed as operationally insignificant is now revealed as a strategic logistics failure with cascading effects on fleet readiness, sailor welfare, and roughly $400 million in reconstruction costs. A single strike on a fixed forward logistics node collapsed the Navy’s supply chain in the region, forcing a fallback to Diego Garcia—more than 2,000 miles away—and exposing how brittle concentrated infrastructure is in this age of killer robots:

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CROSSPOST: RILEY CEDER & J.D. SIMKINS: Navy Not Returning to Damaged Bahrain Base ‘Anytime Soon,’ Top Officer Says

<https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2026/09/01/navy-not-returning-to-damaged-bahrain-base-anytime-soon-top-officer-says/> <https://www.navytimes.com>

By Riley Ceder and J.D. Simkins

Tuesday, Sep 1, 2026

Smoke rises after an Iranian missile attack on the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Manama, Bahrain, Feb. 28, 2026. (Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The Navy’s highest-ranking officer told sailors during a town hall on Monday that it would be a while before the service would return to its main logistics hub in the Middle East after it was heavily damaged early in the Iran war.

Answering a displaced service member’s question about retrieving personal goods from the base they previously called home, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle said the Navy would not be using Naval Support Activity Bahrain for the foreseeable future.

“We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” Caudle said. “I just want to be completely honest with that.”

On Feb. 28, Iran struck NSA Bahrain with missiles and one-way attack drones after the U.S. and Israeli militaries launched strikes on the Islamic Republic.

The Pentagon initially reported zero fatalities and said the strikes did not significantly impact military operations.

Several months later, however, the true impacts of the strike are coming into focus.

Retired Navy Capt. John Cordle recently described the loss of NSA Bahrain as having “profound tactical and strategic repercussions.”

“The more we learn about the attacks on the U.S. Naval Support Activity in Manama, Bahrain, during the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the clearer it becomes why the news of its near destruction was not initially reported or acknowledged,” Cordle said.

Moving supply hubs that were once hundreds of miles away to thousands of miles away will prove to be a major limitation to future maritime operations, he added.

A sailor who was deployed aboard an Independence-class littoral combat ship during the Iran war told Military Times that they were unable to get food resupplies after NSA Bahrain was damaged.

After the damage, the Navy shifted to relying on a logistics hub at Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that sits more than 2,000 miles away from the service’s carrier strike groups in the Middle East.

The distance required the sailors onboard the LCS to place food orders 30 days in advance, which proved challenging due to the unpredictable schedule of frenzied military operations.

At an Aug. 11 town hall in San Diego, military families told acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao that they were concerned about food shortages and declining morale aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln after the ship had not made an official port call in over seven months.

Damage to the Fifth Fleet headquarters, barracks, warehouses and communication towers at NSA Bahrain may lead to construction costs worth roughly $400 million, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation.

Meanwhile, thousands of troops and their families are reportedly still in limbo, with many living in temporary lodging while waiting to be reunited with their belongings — and even pets — after the base’s destruction.

Vice Adm. Curt Renshaw, who leads the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, admitted during a recent virtual town hall with Navy families that the service is “making it up as we go because nothing is conceived to go on this length of time.”

“These are complex problems, and the solutions have not been exactly obvious,” Renshaw said.

<https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2026/09/01/navy-not-returning-to-damaged-bahrain-base-anytime-soon-top-officer-says/> <https://www.navytimes.com>

Brad DeLong here: I think we need to listen to John Cordle here:

John Cordle: The devastation of NSA Bahrain is a national security warning <https://www.militarytimes.com/opinion/2026/08/28/the-devastation-of-nsa-bahrain-is-a-national-security-warning/>: ‘The more we learn about the attacks on the U.S. Naval Support Activity (NSA) in Manama, Bahrain, during the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the clearer it becomes why the news of its near destruction was not initially reported or acknowledged. Extensive damage… is likely to have profound tactical and strategic repercussions…. The potential loss of NSA Bahrain is effectively the equivalent of losing an aircraft carrier. It could not have come as a surprise that Iran would attack it in retaliation…. There is now talk of “reducing the footprint” of U.S. forces in the region, a “strategic retreat” that will have a significant impact on logistic support…

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The equivalent of the loss of an aircraft carrier framing is startling to me. But I cannot think that it is incorrect here.

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