Another one of the good things Jim Leach did was to push through the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), which did not “ban online poker per se, but it established regulations that choked off payment processors…. [With] the increased friction of getting your money in and out, inexperienced new players avoided the games, making them much tougher to beat…” And that has Nate Silver really mad. To a degree I find surprising. And actually rather shocking. For reasons:

This is over in Notes <https://substack.com/profile/16879-brad-delong/note/c-304750387>.

back, and how the story of the evolution here is rather tragic. Silver understood poll aggregation. But now he writes about things he does not understand. Kaleberg had a nice comment on this:\n\n> **Kaleberg**: 'I don't think Silver understands [real] risk. He has a romanticized view limited to those who have a choice as to whether to accept certain risks or not. Failure for venture capitalists means not making the big score, not losing everything...\n\nAnd let me chime in and add to this:\n\nThere is a very very very very very important distinction between people who are working with their counterparties, and people who are working against them. Or, indeed—going further into the psychopath realm—people who do not think that their counterparties are real people of any concern to them at all.\n\nCase in point: Silver's extraordinary and persistent rage against Congressman Jim Leach.\n\nIMHO Jim Leach did very few good things with his time in the U.S. Congress. But one of those good things was placing roadblocks to try protect people who did not understand the risks they were running from so easily becoming marks grifted by the likes of Nate Silver.\n\nAnd Silver's rage against Jim Leach still persists. It looks as though Jim Leach will live rent-free in Nate Silver's brain until the day Silver dies, if not after:\n\n> **Nate Silver**: On the Edge <>: 'I’d been a professional poker player for three years between 2004 and 2007, during the so-called Poker Boom. The Poker Boom began\n\nbecause of the increasing availability of online poker and because of Chris Moneymaker, an accountant from Nashville who won an online qualifying tournament for a seat at the $10,000 Main Event at the 2003 World Series of Poker and then parlayed that into winning the Main Event for $2.5 million.\n\n> If you’d asked ChatGPT to design a person who would most increase the amount of interest in poker by winning the WSOP, it might have spat out Moneymaker. An affable, pudgy, late twenty-something dude with a boring corporate job, he was exactly the customer the online poker sites were targeting, an archetype for every office drone who wanted to break out of his cubicle and win the big jackpot.\n\n> The number of participants in the World Series of Poker Main Event exploded from 839 in Moneymaker’s 2003 to 8,773 just three years later in 2006, largely fueled by people who had won their seats online. I was one of those people who lived the dream. I soon found myself on a nocturnal schedule. Poker games are usually best late at night, when your opponents are some combination of drunk, sleep-deprived, or delirious from winning or losing a bunch of money. So I’d come home from my cubicle,\n\ntake a nap, and then play poker online, sometimes straight through until the morning, when I’d straggle into work and struggle through the day.\n\n> Needless to say, this wasn’t sustainable, and—making considerably more money as a poker player than as a consultant—I quit my corporate job within about six months to play poker and work for the baseball statistics startup Baseball Prospectus. It was a good living for a couple of years—but like most edges in gambling, it wouldn’t last. Some of this was the natural evolution of the game: the Poker Boom sputtered into more of a poker plateau as losing players either went broke, quit, or got better, removing one sucker from the table at a time.\n\n> But it was also partly the doing of the U.S. Congress. In late 2006, the GOP-led Congress, hungry for a victory with “moral majority” voters ahead of the midterms as Republican congressman Mark Foley resigned from office for having sent sexually explicit messages to underage male pages, passed a bill called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA).\n\n> The UIGEA didn’t ban online poker per se, but it established regulations that choked off payment processors: it’s hard to play poker if you can’t exchange cash for chips. Some sites closed to U.S. players while others remained open, but between the shadow of illegality and the increased friction of getting your money in and out, inexperienced new players avoided the games, making them much tougher to beat.\n\n> There was one silver lining: the UIGEA piqued my interest in politics. The bill had been tucked into an unrelated piece of homeland security legislation and passed during the last session before Congress recessed for the midterms. It was a shifty workaround, and having essentially lost my job, I wanted the people responsible for it to lose their jobs, too. And they did: Republicans lost both the House and the Senate, including the seat of Representative Jim Leach of Iowa, the chief sponsor of the UIGEA, whose thirty-year tenure in office ended partly because of poker players who had contributed money to his opponent.\n\n> Struggling to win money as the games were drying up, I quit poker about six months later. With my newfound interest in politics and the extra time on my hands, I wound up starting FiveThirtyEight in 2008...\n\nAnd I really do not think Silver has any idea what kind of a look he is giving into himself here.\n\n---\n\nThe full Kaleberg comment:\n\n> **Kaleberg**: 'I don't think Silver understands risk. He has a romanticized view limited to those who have a choice as to whether to accept certain risks or not. Failure for venture capitalists means not making the big score, not losing everything. There's a reason venture capitalists tend to come from relatively wealthy families. Compulsive gamblers may risk losing everything, but professional gamblers are more like venture capitalists. It may be a negative sum business, but it's still a business.\n\n> A woman having sex with a guy she met at a bar takes a much bigger risk than any of these. Ditto for a fireman or peace officer responding to a 911 call. Immigrants to the US took on a broad variety of risks, and despite overcoming many of them are now being clobbered by a long shot outcome. These risks are much harder to romanticize. They are definitely not flowing in Silver's river...\n\n======\n\n**DELONG’S GRASPING REALITY: Trying to make my readers—and myself—smarter. I think I am a go-to source to understand things economic in the past and in the present. Too online since 1995. Subscribe! <‎`https://graspingreality.substack.com/subscribe`> Currently featuring**:\n\n* The Fourteen-Lion Parade \n\n* Lessons for Debt Control from Clinton's Success in the 1990s \n\n* Fun, Not Fear: Rebuilding Universities for the Machine-Learning Era \n\n* \"Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan\" as Franchise Hinge \n\n\n\n======\n\n","body_json":{"type":"doc","attrs":{"schemaVersion":"v1","title":null},"content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"One more note on how I wish we had the early-days Nate Silver of <"},{"type":"text","text":"http://fivethirtyeight.com","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"http://fivethirtyeight.com"}}]},{"type":"text","text":"> back, and how the story of the evolution here is rather tragic. Silver understood poll aggregation. But now he writes about things he does not understand. Kaleberg had a nice comment on this:"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"> **Kaleberg**: 'I don't think Silver understands [real] risk. He has a romanticized view limited to those who have a choice as to whether to accept certain risks or not. Failure for venture capitalists means not making the big score, not losing everything..."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"And let me chime in and add to this:"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"There is a very very very very very important distinction between people who are working with their counterparties, and people who are working against them. Or, indeed—going further into the psychopath realm—people who do not think that their counterparties are real people of any concern to them at all."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"Case in point: Silver's extraordinary and persistent rage against Congressman Jim Leach."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"IMHO Jim Leach did very few good things with his time in the U.S. Congress. But one of those good things was placing roadblocks to try protect people who did not understand the risks they were running from so easily becoming marks grifted by the likes of Nate Silver."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"And Silver's rage against Jim Leach still persists. It looks as though Jim Leach will live rent-free in Nate Silver's brain until the day Silver dies, if not after:"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"> **Nate Silver**: On the Edge <>: 'I’d been a professional poker player for three years between 2004 and 2007, during the so-called Poker Boom. The Poker Boom began"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"because of the increasing availability of online poker and because of Chris Moneymaker, an accountant from Nashville who won an online qualifying tournament for a seat at the $10,000 Main Event at the 2003 World Series of Poker and then parlayed that into winning the Main Event for $2.5 million."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"> If you’d asked ChatGPT to design a person who would most increase the amount of interest in poker by winning the WSOP, it might have spat out Moneymaker. An affable, pudgy, late twenty-something dude with a boring corporate job, he was exactly the customer the online poker sites were targeting, an archetype for every office drone who wanted to break out of his cubicle and win the big jackpot."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"> The number of participants in the World Series of Poker Main Event exploded from 839 in Moneymaker’s 2003 to 8,773 just three years later in 2006, largely fueled by people who had won their seats online. I was one of those people who lived the dream. I soon found myself on a nocturnal schedule. Poker games are usually best late at night, when your opponents are some combination of drunk, sleep-deprived, or delirious from winning or losing a bunch of money. So I’d come home from my cubicle,"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"take a nap, and then play poker online, sometimes straight through until the morning, when I’d straggle into work and struggle through the day."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"> Needless to say, this wasn’t sustainable, and—making considerably more money as a poker player than as a consultant—I quit my corporate job within about six months to play poker and work for the baseball statistics startup Baseball Prospectus. It was a good living for a couple of years—but like most edges in gambling, it wouldn’t last. Some of this was the natural evolution of the game: the Poker Boom sputtered into more of a poker plateau as losing players either went broke, quit, or got better, removing one sucker from the table at a time."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"> But it was also partly the doing of the U.S. Congress. In late 2006, the GOP-led Congress, hungry for a victory with “moral majority” voters ahead of the midterms as Republican congressman Mark Foley resigned from office for having sent sexually explicit messages to underage male pages, passed a bill called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA)."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"> The UIGEA didn’t ban online poker per se, but it established regulations that choked off payment processors: it’s hard to play poker if you can’t exchange cash for chips. Some sites closed to U.S. players while others remained open, but between the shadow of illegality and the increased friction of getting your money in and out, inexperienced new players avoided the games, making them much tougher to beat."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"> There was one silver lining: the UIGEA piqued my interest in politics. The bill had been tucked into an unrelated piece of homeland security legislation and passed during the last session before Congress recessed for the midterms. It was a shifty workaround, and having essentially lost my job, I wanted the people responsible for it to lose their jobs, too. And they did: Republicans lost both the House and the Senate, including the seat of Representative Jim Leach of Iowa, the chief sponsor of the UIGEA, whose thirty-year tenure in office ended partly because of poker players who had contributed money to his opponent."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"> Struggling to win money as the games were drying up, I quit poker about six months later. With my newfound interest in politics and the extra time on my hands, I wound up starting FiveThirtyEight in 2008..."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"And I really do not think Silver has any idea what kind of a look he is giving into himself here."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"---"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"The full Kaleberg comment:"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"> **Kaleberg**: 'I don't think Silver understands risk. He has a romanticized view limited to those who have a choice as to whether to accept certain risks or not. Failure for venture capitalists means not making the big score, not losing everything. There's a reason venture capitalists tend to come from relatively wealthy families. Compulsive gamblers may risk losing everything, but professional gamblers are more like venture capitalists. It may be a negative sum business, but it's still a business."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"> A woman having sex with a guy she met at a bar takes a much bigger risk than any of these. Ditto for a fireman or peace officer responding to a 911 call. Immigrants to the US took on a broad variety of risks, and despite overcoming many of them are now being clobbered by a long shot outcome. These risks are much harder to romanticize. They are definitely not flowing in Silver's river..."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"======"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"**DELONG’S GRASPING REALITY: Trying to make my readers—and myself—smarter. I think I am a go-to source to understand things economic in the past and in the present. Too online since 1995. Subscribe! <‎`"},{"type":"text","text":"https://graspingreality.substack.com/subscribe`","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"https://graspingreality.substack.com/subscribe`"}}]},{"type":"text","text":"> Currently featuring**:"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"* The Fourteen-Lion Parade <"},{"type":"text","text":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/fourteen-lion-parade","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/fourteen-lion-parade"}}]},{"type":"text","text":">"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"* Lessons for Debt Control from Clinton's Success in the 1990s <"},{"type":"text","text":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/lessons-for-debt-control-from-clintons","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/lessons-for-debt-control-from-clintons"}}]},{"type":"text","text":">"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"* Fun, Not Fear: Rebuilding Universities for the Machine-Learning Era <"},{"type":"text","text":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/university-assessment-in-the-ai-age","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/university-assessment-in-the-ai-age"}}]},{"type":"text","text":">"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"* \"Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan\" as Franchise Hinge <"},{"type":"text","text":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/2025-12-24-star-trek-the-wrath-of","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/2025-12-24-star-trek-the-wrath-of"}}]},{"type":"text","text":">"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"<"},{"type":"text","text":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/donald-trump-is-too-old-to-be-president","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/donald-trump-is-too-old-to-be-president"}}]},{"type":"text","text":">"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"======"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"<"},{"type":"text","text":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/substackpangram-is-scanning-the-substack","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/substackpangram-is-scanning-the-substack"}}]},{"type":"text","text":">"}]}]},"restacks":0,"reaction_count":0,"children_count":0,"attachments":[{"id":"32e9f1ab-71fb-4c0a-8cd1-cef1d09d84c8","type":"comment","publication":{"apple_pay_disabled":false,"apex_domain":null,"author_id":16879,"byline_images_enabled":true,"bylines_enabled":true,"chartable_token":null,"community_enabled":true,"copyright":"J. Bradford DeLong","cover_photo_url":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/e6d69b7c-6c6f-40de-9b56-7927119e691f_1280x1233.png","created_at":"2020-05-20T03:47:08.731Z","custom_domain_optional":false,"custom_domain":null,"default_comment_sort":"best_first","default_coupon":null,"default_group_coupon":"d518ad48","default_show_guest_bios":true,"email_banner_url":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/90420186-fde4-4883-9e5d-1c68370befe5_2073x599.png","email_from_name":"Brad DeLong, from Grasping Reality Newsletter","email_from":null,"embed_tracking_disabled":false,"explicit":false,"expose_paywall_content_to_search_engines":true,"fb_pixel_id":null,"fb_site_verification_token":null,"flagged_as_spam":false,"founding_subscription_benefits":["Talk to me about signing up, and make me a pitch; I will respond & satisfy your request, if I can, with my undivided attention..."],"free_subscription_benefits":["Many posts are completely free! Many others are free \"above the fold\"! But for some only teasers come before the paywall..."],"ga_pixel_id":null,"google_site_verification_token":null,"google_tag_manager_token":null,"hero_image":null,"hero_text":"Economy in the 2000s & Before: working, making, apportioning, talking, taking, & more. What I know and can learn about it, & related things.","hide_intro_subtitle":null,"hide_intro_title":null,"hide_podcast_feed_link":false,"homepage_type":"newspaper","id":47874,"image_thumbnails_always_enabled":true,"invite_only":false,"hide_podcast_from_pub_listings":false,"language":"en","logo_url_wide":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LuLv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6755917c-52e7-4c81-87e1-e9e191e558a5_1007x540.png","logo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PgPl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffde2453e-9c18-4560-82ca-8b77ae62ef5b_1280x1280.png","minimum_group_size":10,"moderation_enabled":true,"name":"DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog ","paid_subscription_benefits":["Director's Cut extra-content version: subscriber-only posts, & \"below the fold\" musings and drafts...","Comment on posts on this 'Stack; & paid subscribers are my assignment desk for this project...","Trying to figure out if this platform can—unlike the old weblogs—be exothermic, hence sustainable..."],"parsely_pixel_id":null,"chartbeat_domain":null,"payments_state":"enabled","paywall_free_trial_enabled":true,"podcast_art_url":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/d0f35e0d-ec1f-4bbc-affc-cf5559e9e07d_1280x1280.png","paid_podcast_episode_art_url":null,"podcast_byline":"Dylan Riley & Brad DeLong","podcast_description":"Hosts: Dylan Riley & Brad DeLong: The U.C. Berkeley Political Economy Podcast","podcast_enabled":true,"podcast_feed_url":null,"podcast_title":"Inflection Point","post_preview_limit":0,"primary_user_id":16879,"require_clickthrough":false,"show_pub_podcast_tab":false,"show_recs_on_homepage":false,"subdomain":"braddelong","subscriber_invites":0,"support_email":null,"theme_var_background_pop":"#2096ff","theme_var_color_links":false,"theme_var_cover_bg_color":null,"trial_end_override":null,"twitter_pixel_id":null,"type":"newsletter","post_reaction_faces_enabled":true,"is_personal_mode":false,"plans":[{"id":"monthly10usd","object":"plan","active":true,"aggregate_usage":null,"amount":1000,"amount_decimal":"1000","billing_scheme":"per_unit","created":1606445462,"currency":"usd","interval":"month","interval_count":1,"livemode":true,"metadata":{"substack":"yes"},"meter":null,"nickname":"$10 a month","product":"prod_ISsokUeMJTumqm","tiers_mode":null,"transform_usage":null,"trial_period_days":null,"usage_type":"licensed","currency_options":{"aud":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":1500,"unit_amount_decimal":"1500"},"brl":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":5500,"unit_amount_decimal":"5500"},"cad":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":1500,"unit_amount_decimal":"1500"},"chf":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":900,"unit_amount_decimal":"900"},"dkk":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":7000,"unit_amount_decimal":"7000"},"eur":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":900,"unit_amount_decimal":"900"},"gbp":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":800,"unit_amount_decimal":"800"},"mxn":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":17500,"unit_amount_decimal":"17500"},"nok":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":10000,"unit_amount_decimal":"10000"},"nzd":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":1800,"unit_amount_decimal":"1800"},"pln":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":3800,"unit_amount_decimal":"3800"},"sek":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":10000,"unit_amount_decimal":"10000"},"usd":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":1000,"unit_amount_decimal":"1000"}}},{"id":"yearly100usd","object":"plan","active":true,"aggregate_usage":null,"amount":10000,"amount_decimal":"10000","billing_scheme":"per_unit","created":1606445463,"currency":"usd","interval":"year","interval_count":1,"livemode":true,"metadata":{"substack":"yes"},"meter":null,"nickname":"$100 a year","product":"prod_ISsoKxZCAy04ly","tiers_mode":null,"transform_usage":null,"trial_period_days":null,"usage_type":"licensed","currency_options":{"aud":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":14500,"unit_amount_decimal":"14500"},"brl":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":52000,"unit_amount_decimal":"52000"},"cad":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":14500,"unit_amount_decimal":"14500"},"chf":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":8500,"unit_amount_decimal":"8500"},"dkk":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":65500,"unit_amount_decimal":"65500"},"eur":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":9000,"unit_amount_decimal":"9000"},"gbp":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":8000,"unit_amount_decimal":"8000"},"mxn":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":175000,"unit_amount_decimal":"175000"},"nok":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":99000,"unit_amount_decimal":"99000"},"nzd":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":18000,"unit_amount_decimal":"18000"},"pln":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":38000,"unit_amount_decimal":"38000"},"sek":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":97000,"unit_amount_decimal":"97000"},"usd":{"custom_unit_amount":null,"tax_behavior":"unspecified","unit_amount":10000,"unit_amount_decimal":"10000"}}},{"id":"founding200000usd","name":"founding200000usd","nickname":"founding200000usd","active":true,"amount":200000,"currency":"usd","interval":"year","interval_count":1,"metadata":{"substack":"yes","founding":"yes","no_coupons":"yes","short_description":"Sustainers","short_description_english":"Sustainers","minimum":"200000","minimum_local":{"usd":200000,"gbp":150000,"eur":175000,"cad":281500,"mxn":3494000,"aud":288000,"brl":1025000,"sek":1933000,"chf":163500,"dkk":1306500,"nok":1923000,"inr":19146500,"jpy":327500,"nzd":345500,"pln":756000}},"currency_options":{"usd":{"unit_amount":200000,"tax_behavior":"unspecified"},"gbp":{"unit_amount":150000,"tax_behavior":"unspecified"},"eur":{"unit_amount":175000,"tax_behavior":"unspecified"},"cad":{"unit_amount":281500,"tax_behavior":"unspecified"},"mxn":{"unit_amount":3494000,"tax_behavior":"unspecified"},"aud":{"unit_amount":288000,"tax_behavior":"unspecified"},"brl":{"unit_amount":1025000,"tax_behavior":"unspecified"},"sek":{"unit_amount":1933000,"tax_behavior":"unspecified"},"chf":{"unit_amount":163500,"tax_behavior":"unspecified"},"dkk":{"unit_amount":1306500,"tax_behavior":"unspecified"},"nok":{"unit_amount":1923000,"tax_behavior":"unspecified"},"inr":{"unit_amount":19146500,"tax_behavior":"unspecified"},"jpy":{"unit_amount":327500,"tax_behavior":"unspecified"},"nzd":{"unit_amount":345500,"tax_behavior":"unspecified"},"pln":{"unit_amount":756000,"tax_behavior":"unspecified"}}}],"stripe_user_id":"acct_1HrwrXAhGDh2o5Id","stripe_country":"US","stripe_publishable_key":"pk_live_51HrwrXAhGDh2o5Id6YmFx4waSDY08G7TYfVay5yQSmQu8V1gNkc3VUEyAdcSEKqEjYO8UcB8GP4W5Jxaqk6uMlfJ0051bg54Cx","stripe_platform_account":"US","automatic_tax_enabled":false,"author_name":"Brad DeLong","author_handle":"delongonsubstack","author_photo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9wd1!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fea5ae644-9822-4ca5-ac6b-e18c017d8fbc_1189x1208.png","author_bio":"DeLONG'S GRASPING REALITY: . Teaching economy & history. Focusing on growth, distribution, money, & finance. Bringing numbers, facts, & blue-hued optimism of the intellect to understanding...","twitter_screen_name":"delong","has_custom_tos":false,"has_custom_privacy":false,"theme":{"background_pop_color":"#900000","web_bg_color":"#ffFAFA","cover_bg_color":"#ffFAFA","publication_id":47874,"color_links":null,"font_preset_heading":"heavy_sans","font_preset_body":"classic_serif","font_family_headings":null,"font_family_body":null,"font_family_ui":null,"font_size_body_desktop":null,"print_secondary":null,"custom_css_web":null,"custom_css_email":null,"home_hero":"newspaper","home_posts":"custom","home_show_top_posts":false,"hide_images_from_list":false,"home_hero_alignment":"left","home_hero_show_podcast_links":true,"default_post_header_variant":null,"custom_header":{"layout":"logo_center","navStyle":"stacked","wordmarkLogoSize":36},"custom_footer":{"layout":"centered","backgroundColor":null,"publicationNameSize":17,"showPublicationName":true,"publicationNameStyle":"text","publicationNamePosition":"bottom","publicationNameBackgroundColor":null},"social_media_links":null,"font_options":{"body":"fancy_serif","heading":"sans"},"section_template":{"page_hero":"feature-media","page_posts":"list","hero_alignment":"left","show_podcast_links":false},"custom_subscribe":{"imageUrl":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/da80d71e-4494-4214-83a0-2f364e46ed70_1852x1280.png","imageSize":132,"backgroundColor":"#F4F8FB"},"design_template":null,"design_template_options":null},"threads_v2_settings":{"photo_replies_enabled":true,"first_thread_email_sent_at":"2022-12-08T00:50:49.688+00:00","create_thread_minimum_role":"paid","activated_at":"2022-12-08T00:50:12.304+00:00","reader_thread_notifications_enabled":false,"boost_free_subscriber_chat_preview_enabled":false,"push_suppression_enabled":false},"default_group_coupon_percent_off":"75.00","default_group_coupon_include_founding":false,"pause_return_date":null,"has_posts":true,"has_recommendations":true,"first_post_date":"2020-11-27T02:17:57.102Z","has_podcast":true,"has_free_podcast":true,"has_subscriber_only_podcast":false,"has_community_content":true,"rankingDetail":"Thousands of paid subscribers","rankingDetailFreeIncluded":"Tens of thousands of subscribers","rankingDetailOrderOfMagnitude":1000,"rankingDetailFreeIncludedOrderOfMagnitude":10000,"rankingDetailFreeSubscriberCount":"Over 48,000 subscribers","rankingDetailByLanguage":{"ar":{"rankingDetail":"آلاف المشتركين المدفوعين"},"ca":{"rankingDetail":"Milers de subscriptors de pagament"},"da":{"rankingDetail":"Tusindvis af betalte abonnenter"},"de":{"rankingDetail":"Tausende von Paid-Abonnenten"},"es":{"rankingDetail":"Miles de suscriptores de pago"},"fr":{"rankingDetail":"Plusieurs milliers d’abonnés payants"},"ja":{"rankingDetail":"数千人の有料登録者"},"nb":{"rankingDetail":"Tusenvis av betalende abonnenter"},"nl":{"rankingDetail":"Duizenden betalende abonnees"},"pl":{"rankingDetail":"Tysiące płacących subskrybentów"},"pt":{"rankingDetail":"Milhares de subscrições pagas"},"pt-br":{"rankingDetail":"Milhares de assinantes pagas"},"en-gb":{"rankingDetail":"Thousands of paid subscribers"},"it":{"rankingDetail":"Migliaia di abbonati a pagamento"},"tr":{"rankingDetail":"Binlerce ücretli abone"},"sv":{"rankingDetail":"Tusentals betalande prenumeranter"},"fi":{"rankingDetail":"Thousands of paid subscribers"},"is":{"rankingDetail":"Thousands of paid subscribers"},"en":{"rankingDetail":"Thousands of paid subscribers"}},"freeSubscriberCount":"48,000","freeSubscriberCountOrderOfMagnitude":"48K+","author_bestseller_tier":1000,"author_badge":{"type":"bestseller","tier":1000},"disable_monthly_subscriptions":false,"disable_annual_subscriptions":false,"hide_post_restacks":false,"notes_feed_enabled":true,"showIntroModule":false,"isPortraitLayout":false,"last_chat_post_at":"2025-12-29T14:52:58.632Z","primary_profile_name":"Brad DeLong","primary_profile_photo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9wd1!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fea5ae644-9822-4ca5-ac6b-e18c017d8fbc_1189x1208.png","no_follow":false,"sponsorshipCampaigns":{},"paywall_chat":"paid","sections":[{"id":305,"created_at":"2021-05-07T18:44:57.465Z","updated_at":"2025-08-06T17:40:34.072Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Hexapodia Is the Key Insight! By Noah Smith & Brad DeLong","description":"teach the world good economics through every means possible, & some means impossible...","slug":"hexapodia-is-the-key-insight-by-noah","is_podcast":true,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":0,"port_status":"success","logo_url":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/120fad1b-2afb-4295-98ba-11cdc5df4727_1692x1692.png","hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":null,"hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":{"section_id":305,"itunes_podcast_primary_category":"Business","itunes_podcast_primary_subcategory":"","itunes_podcast_secondary_category":"Science","itunes_podcast_secondary_subcategory":"Social Sciences","itunes_email":null,"language":"","itunes_explicit":false,"podcast_art_url":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/120fad1b-2afb-4295-98ba-11cdc5df4727_1692x1692.png","podcast_subtitle":null,"podcast_keywords":null,"hide_podcast_feed_link":false,"podcast_feed_url":null,"podcast_title":"Hexapodia Is the Key Insight!","podcast_description":"teach the world good economics through every means possible, & some means impossible...","podcast_byline":"Noah Smith & Brad DeLong","paid_podcast_episode_art_url":null,"migrated_to_attached_podcast":true},"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"Vibrant":{"rgb":[10,84,164],"population":4},"DarkVibrant":{"rgb":[4,84,130],"population":4},"LightVibrant":{"rgb":[130.02068965517242,186.4137931034482,247.3793103448276],"population":0},"Muted":{"rgb":[8.79310344827585,73.86206896551717,144.20689655172416],"population":0},"DarkMuted":{"rgb":[4,4,4],"population":5182},"LightMuted":{"rgb":[8.793103448275879,73.86206896551715,144.20689655172413],"population":0}},"spotify_podcast_settings":{"id":40614,"publication_id":null,"section_id":305,"spotify_uri":"spotify:show:4VOIQdWCE7lt7m9Ef5WORj","spotify_podcast_title":null,"created_at":"2025-03-14T19:08:01.271Z","updated_at":"2025-03-20T23:19:26.591Z","currently_published_on_spotify":true,"spotify_show_url":"https://open.spotify.com/show/4VOIQdWCE7lt7m9Ef5WORj"},"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":77600,"created_at":"2023-08-09T18:41:25.186Z","updated_at":"2025-08-06T17:40:34.072Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Archives of My Weblog, Items Surfaced from","description":"Starting from the very beginning...","slug":"archives-of-my-weblog-items-surfaced","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":1,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":81138,"created_at":"2023-09-02T03:05:54.650Z","updated_at":"2026-07-06T15:59:02.131Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Public Reason","description":"How can humanity think productively as an anthology intelligence?...","slug":"public-reason","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":2,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":81135,"created_at":"2023-09-02T02:51:03.595Z","updated_at":"2026-07-06T15:58:44.041Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Neofascism, & c.","description":"Threats to democracy, present and past...","slug":"neofascism-and-c","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":3,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":3058,"created_at":"2021-07-17T23:00:30.056Z","updated_at":"2026-02-12T22:58:54.490Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Slouching Towards Utopia?: Long Notes","description":"The \"long notes\" for my grand 20th century economic history ms....","slug":"slouching-towards-utopia-long-notes","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":4,"port_status":"success","logo_url":"","hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":null,"hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":27099,"created_at":"2022-09-12T23:55:47.845Z","updated_at":"2026-02-12T22:59:04.451Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Slouching Towards Utopia Extras","description":"Extras associated with my 2022 book...","slug":"slouching-towards-utopia-extras","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":5,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":null,"hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":27456,"created_at":"2022-09-17T22:09:51.263Z","updated_at":"2026-02-12T23:00:08.555Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Slouching Towards Utopia—Reviews & Interviews","description":"Slouching Towards Utopia—Reviews & Interviews","slug":"slouching-towards-utopiareviews-and","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":6,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":null,"hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":27457,"created_at":"2022-09-17T22:10:25.411Z","updated_at":"2026-02-12T23:00:07.000Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Slouching Towards Utopia—Podcasts","description":"Slouching Towards Utopia—Podcasts","slug":"slouching-towards-utopiapodcasts","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":7,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":null,"hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":27458,"created_at":"2022-09-17T22:10:49.373Z","updated_at":"2026-02-12T22:59:18.297Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Slouching Towards Utopia—Presentations","description":"Slouching Towards Utopia—Presentations","slug":"slouching-towards-utopiapresentations","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":8,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":null,"hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":43757,"created_at":"2022-12-11T15:21:29.980Z","updated_at":"2026-07-06T15:59:11.405Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Lecture Notes","description":"Lecture Notes","slug":"lecture-notes-econ-135-s2023-history","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":9,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":81116,"created_at":"2023-09-02T00:44:58.651Z","updated_at":"2026-07-06T15:59:18.950Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"The Central Country, & Relative Prosperity & Power","description":"China as superpower, the U.S. as hyperpower, and related issues...","slug":"the-central-country-and-relative","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":10,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":81132,"created_at":"2023-09-02T02:32:53.185Z","updated_at":"2026-02-12T23:02:02.856Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Neoliberalism, Ending?","description":"The fall of the New Deal & the rise &... fall[?] of the New Deal Order","slug":"neoliberalism-ending","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":11,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":81136,"created_at":"2023-09-02T03:02:03.845Z","updated_at":"2026-07-06T15:59:26.097Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Inequality & Domination","description":"How some people grab more than \"enough\" for themselves...","slug":"inequality-and-domination","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":12,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":72175,"created_at":"2023-07-02T18:47:44.037Z","updated_at":"2026-07-06T15:59:34.364Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Enlarging the Bounds of Human Empire","description":"A new book project?","slug":"enlarging-the-bounds-of-human-empire","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":13,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":79518,"created_at":"2023-08-22T21:40:41.798Z","updated_at":"2026-07-06T15:59:41.956Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"SubTuringBradBot","description":"Trying to make a ChatBot that can come close to conducting office hours for people with questions about my book, \"Slouching Towards Utopia\"","slug":"subturingbradbot","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":14,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":79558,"created_at":"2023-08-23T00:21:16.715Z","updated_at":"2026-07-06T15:59:51.287Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Macro Outlook","description":"My real-time guesses as to where the U.S.—& the world—economy is going...","slug":"macro-outlook","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":15,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":87779,"created_at":"2023-10-13T22:11:17.809Z","updated_at":"2026-02-12T23:02:25.064Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Egregious Moderation","description":"A Substack Newspaper","slug":"egregious-moderation","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":false,"sibling_rank":16,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"Egregious Moderation","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":true,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":244535,"created_at":"2025-07-03T13:39:11.832Z","updated_at":"2026-02-12T23:02:06.667Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Industrial Policy","description":"Thinking about technology-forcing firms, positive and negative externalities, state capacity, & management cybernetics...","slug":"industrial-policy","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":17,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":138998,"created_at":"2024-07-20T18:10:45.264Z","updated_at":"2026-02-12T23:01:37.147Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Econ 135 Fall 2024","description":"SubStack Posts Associated with the Fall 2024 Instantiation of Econ 135","slug":"econ-135-fall-2024","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":18,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":264891,"created_at":"2025-08-22T20:38:10.249Z","updated_at":"2026-02-12T23:03:29.267Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Live Drafts","description":"Things I am currently working on...","slug":"live-drafts","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":19,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":265076,"created_at":"2025-08-23T15:13:28.060Z","updated_at":"2026-02-12T23:04:27.631Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Scratch","description":"Scratch","slug":"scratch","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":20,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":266719,"created_at":"2025-08-27T21:34:20.571Z","updated_at":"2026-02-12T23:02:59.704Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Revisit...","description":"Revisit...","slug":"revisit","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":21,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":267039,"created_at":"2025-08-28T17:40:51.568Z","updated_at":"2026-02-12T23:04:04.449Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"TypePad Weblog, 2005-2025","description":"TypePad Weblog, 2005-2025","slug":"typepad-weblog-2005-2025","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":22,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":267040,"created_at":"2025-08-28T17:41:29.348Z","updated_at":"2026-02-12T23:03:14.102Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"Antedeluvian Internet Writings: 2005 & Before","description":"Antedeluvian Internet Writings: 2005 & Before","slug":"antedeluvian-internet-writings-2005","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":23,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null},{"id":321024,"created_at":"2026-01-10T14:46:52.290Z","updated_at":"2026-07-06T15:58:08.911Z","publication_id":47874,"name":"The Attention Info-Bio Tech Economy","description":"The mode of production that the leading edge of the human techno-economy is moving into...","slug":"the-attention-info-bio-tech-economy","is_podcast":false,"is_live":true,"is_default_on":true,"sibling_rank":24,"port_status":"success","logo_url":null,"hide_from_navbar":true,"email_from_name":"","hide_posts_from_pub_listings":false,"email_banner_url":null,"cover_photo_url":null,"hide_intro_title":false,"hide_intro_subtitle":false,"ignore_publication_email_settings":false,"custom_config":{},"showLinks":[],"podcastSettings":null,"unifiedPodcastSettings":null,"pageTheme":null,"podcastPalette":{"DarkMuted":{"population":72,"rgb":[73,153,137]},"DarkVibrant":{"population":6013,"rgb":[4,100,84]},"LightMuted":{"population":7,"rgb":[142,198,186]},"LightVibrant":{"population":3,"rgb":[166,214,206]},"Muted":{"population":6,"rgb":[92,164,156]},"Vibrant":{"population":5,"rgb":[76,164,146]}},"spotify_podcast_settings":null,"unified_podcast_settings":null}],"podcastTabInfo":null,"multipub_migration":null,"navigationBarItems":[{"id":"3e010294-4e54-40ff-963e-7dd2ad4f2c9f","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":0,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":305,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":305,"slug":"hexapodia-is-the-key-insight-by-noah","name":"Hexapodia Is the Key Insight! By Noah Smith & Brad DeLong","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":true,"logo_url":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/120fad1b-2afb-4295-98ba-11cdc5df4727_1692x1692.png"}},{"id":"451fc937-68ea-4b79-8ff9-3b340cd32c11","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":1,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":null,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":false,"standard_key":"about","post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":null},{"id":"3552d7e6-e0c8-4405-9ca3-77a51472829b","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":2,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":null,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":false,"standard_key":"archive","post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":null},{"id":"75553811-c9e5-4f40-b3be-f997262e06c9","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":3,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":null,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":false,"standard_key":"newsletters","post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":null},{"id":"166115de-87bc-4f4f-a2e5-823d922a1eb7","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":4,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":null,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":true,"standard_key":"chat","post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":null},{"id":"161157a4-d26c-44cd-937b-491c665b78c0","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":5,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":77600,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":77600,"slug":"archives-of-my-weblog-items-surfaced","name":"Archives of My Weblog, Items Surfaced from","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"365b3f98-c978-4480-8866-eaf45807ab91","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":6,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":81138,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":81138,"slug":"public-reason","name":"Public Reason","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"a068a30e-3c45-466f-9c18-6ed0335a9935","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":7,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":81135,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":81135,"slug":"neofascism-and-c","name":"Neofascism, & c.","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"ede8f940-c400-4e77-b661-7b278270d6f5","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":8,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":3058,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":3058,"slug":"slouching-towards-utopia-long-notes","name":"Slouching Towards Utopia?: Long Notes","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":""}},{"id":"9475da10-513b-4403-968a-54e17b26aca6","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":9,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":27099,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":27099,"slug":"slouching-towards-utopia-extras","name":"Slouching Towards Utopia Extras","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"e5f2c295-d654-4c66-a51d-65a219359917","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":10,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":27456,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":27456,"slug":"slouching-towards-utopiareviews-and","name":"Slouching Towards Utopia—Reviews & Interviews","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"14f7673b-200e-4461-9921-65c22525754c","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":11,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":27457,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":27457,"slug":"slouching-towards-utopiapodcasts","name":"Slouching Towards Utopia—Podcasts","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"8e25e82d-0f98-40e0-84de-b41a06d7088d","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":12,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":27458,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":27458,"slug":"slouching-towards-utopiapresentations","name":"Slouching Towards Utopia—Presentations","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"def7860c-4c34-43bd-8164-937a0127a03b","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":13,"link_title":"Feature","link_url":"","section_id":null,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":"f6c47b5b-6da1-4a3a-9ce8-37295172777a","parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":{"id":"f6c47b5b-6da1-4a3a-9ce8-37295172777a","publication_id":47874,"name":"Feature","slug":"feature","hidden":false},"section":null},{"id":"97b5bda7-7288-483d-ba75-6c23e62bfb4f","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":14,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":43757,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":43757,"slug":"lecture-notes-econ-135-s2023-history","name":"Lecture Notes","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"5a4aec4a-2b87-4b78-b17b-01650d3ee54e","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":15,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":81116,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":81116,"slug":"the-central-country-and-relative","name":"The Central Country, & Relative Prosperity & Power","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"bbf6a346-568d-4114-b083-19fda791c954","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":16,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":81132,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":81132,"slug":"neoliberalism-ending","name":"Neoliberalism, Ending?","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"388904ed-8f78-491a-bb53-f27355425f50","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":17,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":81136,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":81136,"slug":"inequality-and-domination","name":"Inequality & Domination","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"40c98051-aaef-4b64-bc64-697e78ccb423","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":18,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":72175,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":72175,"slug":"enlarging-the-bounds-of-human-empire","name":"Enlarging the Bounds of Human Empire","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"2e717e08-c237-44e0-82e0-4c717fb01ef8","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":19,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":79518,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":79518,"slug":"subturingbradbot","name":"SubTuringBradBot","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"fc599a81-e50c-4ab7-b5a7-132f8678bdd0","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":20,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":79558,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":79558,"slug":"macro-outlook","name":"Macro Outlook","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"434972ce-18df-4be5-92aa-02b805c4aad3","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":21,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":87779,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":87779,"slug":"egregious-moderation","name":"Egregious Moderation","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"018db7c6-d93c-4fbf-9395-7dc6d03457c5","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":22,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":244535,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":244535,"slug":"industrial-policy","name":"Industrial Policy","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"c314cfba-c01b-4ff3-a9db-73b43e8eef96","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":23,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":138998,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":138998,"slug":"econ-135-fall-2024","name":"Econ 135 Fall 2024","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"9824abb6-b717-4bb7-b2ab-8d1efd5f6422","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":9999,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":321024,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":321024,"slug":"the-attention-info-bio-tech-economy","name":"The Attention Info-Bio Tech Economy","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"0ca1f593-fc30-4a87-a4f6-a2404fae390f","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":9999,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":264891,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":264891,"slug":"live-drafts","name":"Live Drafts","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"1fabf3d5-9c08-4c58-851c-253a5f0c9da9","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":9999,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":265076,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":265076,"slug":"scratch","name":"Scratch","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"321b6188-8841-4a06-9566-6d97b28f82de","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":9999,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":267039,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":267039,"slug":"typepad-weblog-2005-2025","name":"TypePad Weblog, 2005-2025","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"57075d14-bca1-457a-ae1d-b3a48a7dd478","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":9999,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":267040,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":267040,"slug":"antedeluvian-internet-writings-2005","name":"Antedeluvian Internet Writings: 2005 & Before","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}},{"id":"36bd20e5-00c6-4fbc-aa5c-de2c4a0a5398","publication_id":47874,"sibling_rank":9999,"link_title":null,"link_url":null,"section_id":266719,"post_id":null,"is_hidden":null,"standard_key":null,"post_tag_id":null,"parent_id":null,"is_group":false,"post":null,"children":[],"postTag":null,"section":{"id":266719,"slug":"revisit","name":"Revisit...","hide_from_navbar":true,"is_podcast":false,"logo_url":null}}],"has_active_perks":false,"contributors":[{"name":"Brad DeLong","handle":"delongonsubstack","role":"admin","owner":true,"user_id":16879,"photo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fea5ae644-9822-4ca5-ac6b-e18c017d8fbc_1189x1208.png","bio":"DeLONG'S GRASPING REALITY: . Teaching economy & history. Focusing on growth, distribution, money, & finance. Bringing numbers, facts, & blue-hued optimism of the intellect to understanding...","status":{"bestsellerTier":1000,"subscriberTier":10,"leaderboard":null,"vip":false,"badge":{"type":"bestseller","tier":1000},"subscriber":null}}],"threads_v2_enabled":true,"viralGiftsConfig":{"id":"2dacc3cd-1a7f-4561-b4ba-87f8738ab244","publication_id":47874,"enabled":true,"gifts_per_user":5,"gift_length_months":1,"send_extra_gifts":true,"message":"Economic history, economics, political economy, finance, & forecasting. Here to try to make you (and me) smarter in a world with many increasingly deep & complicated troubles...","created_at":"2022-09-14T18:38:48.037057+00:00","updated_at":"2022-09-14T18:38:48.037057+00:00","days_til_invite":14,"send_emails":true,"show_link":null},"tier":2,"no_index":false,"can_set_google_site_verification":true,"can_have_sitemap":true,"iap_advanced_plans":[{"sku":"M6Hr41oGLTGsGPEPSW","publication_id":"47874","is_active":true,"price_base_units":1400,"currency_alpha3":"usd","period":"month","created_at":"2026-07-01T16:18:26.619Z","updated_at":"2026-07-01T16:18:26.619Z","id":"1246142","payout_amount_base_units":100,"alternate_currencies":{"aud":2100,"brl":7500,"cad":2000,"chf":1200,"dkk":9500,"eur":1300,"gbp":1100,"mxn":24500,"nok":14000,"nzd":2500,"pln":5500,"sek":14000},"is_founding":false,"display_name":"DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog (Monthly)","display_price":"$14"},{"sku":"gtQOK9J0uMizvt0Hk2","publication_id":"47874","is_active":true,"price_base_units":14000,"currency_alpha3":"usd","period":"year","created_at":"2026-07-01T16:18:26.631Z","updated_at":"2026-07-01T16:18:26.631Z","id":"1246143","payout_amount_base_units":1000,"alternate_currencies":{"aud":20500,"brl":72500,"cad":20000,"chf":11500,"dkk":92000,"eur":12500,"gbp":11000,"mxn":245000,"nok":139000,"nzd":25000,"pln":53000,"sek":136000},"is_founding":false,"display_name":"DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog (Yearly)","display_price":"$140"}],"founding_plan_name_english":"Sustainers","iap_founding_plan":{"base_plan_id":"founding200000usd","name":"Sustainers","minimum_amount":275000,"suggested_amount":275000,"currency_alpha3":"usd","alternate_currencies":{"gbp":{"minimum_amount":206500,"suggested_amount":206500},"eur":{"minimum_amount":240500,"suggested_amount":240500},"cad":{"minimum_amount":387000,"suggested_amount":387000},"mxn":{"minimum_amount":4804000,"suggested_amount":4804000},"aud":{"minimum_amount":396000,"suggested_amount":396000},"brl":{"minimum_amount":1409000,"suggested_amount":1409000},"sek":{"minimum_amount":2657500,"suggested_amount":2657500},"chf":{"minimum_amount":224500,"suggested_amount":224500},"dkk":{"minimum_amount":1796000,"suggested_amount":1796000},"nok":{"minimum_amount":2644000,"suggested_amount":2644000},"inr":{"minimum_amount":26326500,"suggested_amount":26326500},"jpy":{"minimum_amount":450000,"suggested_amount":450000},"nzd":{"minimum_amount":475000,"suggested_amount":475000},"pln":{"minimum_amount":1039500,"suggested_amount":1039500}}},"bundles":[],"base_url":"https://braddelong.substack.com","hostname":"braddelong.substack.com","is_on_substack":false,"spotify_podcast_settings":{"id":5040,"publication_id":47874,"section_id":null,"spotify_uri":"spotify:show:7fiiPGqNaUqEuHkORnoBh8","spotify_podcast_title":null,"created_at":"2024-04-11T23:19:18.223Z","updated_at":"2025-03-14T19:10:02.627Z","currently_published_on_spotify":true,"spotify_show_url":"https://open.spotify.com/show/7fiiPGqNaUqEuHkORnoBh8"},"unified_podcast_settings":null,"podcastPalette":{"Vibrant":{"rgb":[206,135,113],"population":141},"DarkVibrant":{"rgb":[120,55,55],"population":107},"LightVibrant":{"rgb":[248,161,146],"population":275},"Muted":{"rgb":[167,92,85],"population":156},"DarkMuted":{"rgb":[52,68,80],"population":14},"LightMuted":{"rgb":[177,123,112],"population":276}},"pageThemes":{"podcast":null},"supports_ip_content_unlock":false,"appTheme":{"colors":{"accent":{"name":"#900000","primary":{"r":144,"g":0,"b":0,"a":1},"primary_hover":{"r":122,"g":0,"b":0,"a":1},"primary_elevated":{"r":122,"g":0,"b":0,"a":1},"secondary":{"r":144,"g":0,"b":0,"a":0.2},"contrast":{"r":255,"g":255,"b":255,"a":1},"bg":{"r":144,"g":0,"b":0,"a":0.2},"bg_hover":{"r":144,"g":0,"b":0,"a":0.3},"dark":{"primary":{"r":159,"g":25,"b":12,"a":1},"primary_hover":{"r":180,"g":49,"b":28,"a":1},"primary_elevated":{"r":180,"g":49,"b":28,"a":1},"secondary":{"r":159,"g":25,"b":12,"a":0.2},"contrast":{"r":255,"g":255,"b":255,"a":1},"bg":{"r":159,"g":25,"b":12,"a":0.2},"bg_hover":{"r":159,"g":25,"b":12,"a":0.3}}},"fg":{"primary":{"r":0,"g":0,"b":0,"a":0.8},"secondary":{"r":0,"g":0,"b":0,"a":0.6},"tertiary":{"r":0,"g":0,"b":0,"a":0.4},"accent":{"r":144,"g":0,"b":0,"a":1},"dark":{"primary":{"r":255,"g":255,"b":255,"a":0.9},"secondary":{"r":255,"g":255,"b":255,"a":0.6},"tertiary":{"r":255,"g":255,"b":255,"a":0.4},"accent":{"r":227,"g":91,"b":63,"a":1}}},"bg":{"name":"#de3953","hue":{"r":222,"g":57,"b":83,"a":1},"tint":{"r":222,"g":57,"b":83,"a":0.1},"primary":{"r":251.7,"g":235.2,"b":237.79999999999998,"a":1},"primary_hover":{"r":247.2,"g":230.7,"b":233.3,"a":1},"primary_elevated":{"r":247.2,"g":230.7,"b":233.3,"a":1},"secondary":{"r":236.4,"g":219.89999999999998,"b":222.5,"a":1},"secondary_elevated":{"r":206.62499095366707,"g":190.57807653241707,"b":193.12010797260226,"a":1},"tertiary":{"r":219.29999999999998,"g":202.8,"b":205.39999999999998,"a":1},"quaternary":{"r":186.00000000000003,"g":169.5,"b":172.1,"a":1},"dark":{"primary":{"r":42,"g":26.4,"b":29.9,"a":1},"primary_hover":{"r":46.50000000000001,"g":30.900000000000002,"b":34.4,"a":1},"primary_elevated":{"r":46.50000000000001,"g":30.900000000000002,"b":34.4,"a":1},"secondary":{"r":53.70000000000001,"g":39,"b":41.6,"a":1},"secondary_elevated":{"r":61.2977517516862,"g":46.19944190424687,"b":48.828573846891636,"a":1},"tertiary":{"r":70.8,"g":55.2,"b":57.800000000000004,"a":1},"quaternary":{"r":103.2,"g":87.60000000000001,"b":90.2,"a":1}}}}},"portalAppTheme":{"colors":{"accent":{"name":"#900000","primary":{"r":144,"g":0,"b":0,"a":1},"primary_hover":{"r":119,"g":0,"b":0,"a":1},"primary_elevated":{"r":144,"g":0,"b":0,"a":1},"secondary":{"r":144,"g":0,"b":0,"a":1},"contrast":{"r":255,"g":255,"b":255,"a":1},"bg":{"r":255,"g":103,"b":25,"a":0.2},"bg_hover":{"r":255,"g":103,"b":25,"a":0.3},"dark":{"primary":{"r":159,"g":25,"b":12,"a":1},"primary_hover":{"r":180,"g":49,"b":28,"a":1},"primary_elevated":{"r":180,"g":49,"b":28,"a":1},"secondary":{"r":159,"g":25,"b":12,"a":0.2},"contrast":{"r":255,"g":255,"b":255,"a":1},"bg":{"r":159,"g":25,"b":12,"a":0.2},"bg_hover":{"r":159,"g":25,"b":12,"a":0.3}}},"fg":{"primary":{"r":93,"g":55,"b":55,"a":1},"secondary":{"r":134,"g":133,"b":133,"a":1},"tertiary":{"r":146,"g":144,"b":144,"a":1},"accent":{"r":144,"g":0,"b":0,"a":1},"dark":{"primary":{"r":255,"g":255,"b":255,"a":0.9},"secondary":{"r":255,"g":255,"b":255,"a":0.6},"tertiary":{"r":255,"g":255,"b":255,"a":0.4},"accent":{"r":227,"g":91,"b":63,"a":1}}},"bg":{"name":"#ffFAFA","hue":{"r":255,"g":250,"b":250,"a":1},"tint":{"r":255,"g":250,"b":250,"a":1},"primary":{"r":255,"g":250,"b":250,"a":1},"primary_hover":{"r":240,"g":235,"b":235,"a":1},"primary_elevated":{"r":255,"g":250,"b":250,"a":1},"secondary":{"r":240,"g":235,"b":235,"a":1},"secondary_elevated":{"r":240,"g":235,"b":235,"a":1},"tertiary":{"r":221,"g":216,"b":216,"a":1},"quaternary":{"r":183,"g":179,"b":179,"a":1},"dark":{"primary":{"r":42,"g":26.4,"b":29.9,"a":1},"primary_hover":{"r":46.50000000000001,"g":30.900000000000002,"b":34.4,"a":1},"primary_elevated":{"r":46.50000000000001,"g":30.900000000000002,"b":34.4,"a":1},"secondary":{"r":53.70000000000001,"g":39,"b":41.6,"a":1},"secondary_elevated":{"r":61.2977517516862,"g":46.19944190424687,"b":48.828573846891636,"a":1},"tertiary":{"r":70.8,"g":55.2,"b":57.800000000000004,"a":1},"quaternary":{"r":103.2,"g":87.60000000000001,"b":90.2,"a":1}}},"wordmark_bg":{"r":255,"g":250,"b":250,"a":1},"is_dark":false},"fonts":{"heading":"sans","body":"fancy_serif"}},"logoPalette":{"Vibrant":{"rgb":[204,200,30],"population":6},"DarkVibrant":{"rgb":[84,100,4],"population":3},"LightVibrant":{"rgb":[238,215,143],"population":66},"Muted":{"rgb":[157,139,76],"population":362},"DarkMuted":{"rgb":[80,81,38],"population":95},"LightMuted":{"rgb":[178,180,212],"population":35}}},"post":{"id":209014863,"publication_id":47874,"title":"SubStack/Pangram is Scanning the SubStack Corpus for AI-Generated Content, & Labelling It!","social_title":null,"search_engine_title":null,"search_engine_description":null,"type":"newsletter","slug":"substackpangram-is-scanning-the-substack","post_date":"2026-07-29T20:23:49.629Z","audience":"everyone","podcast_duration":null,"video_upload_id":null,"write_comment_permissions":"only_paid","should_send_free_preview":false,"free_unlock_required":false,"default_comment_sort":null,"canonical_url":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/substackpangram-is-scanning-the-substack","section_id":81138,"podcast_art_url":null,"is_published":true,"live_stream_id":null,"restacks":4,"top_exclusions":[],"pins":[],"is_section_pinned":false,"has_shareable_clips":false,"section_slug":"public-reason","section_name":"Public Reason","reactions":{"❤":22},"subtitle":"Public reason. Or, rather, public non-reason here in 2026, with the rising tide of AI-slop, and attempts to channel it...","cover_image":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!UgQg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb949c315-cad6-4ded-99f4-43c4cad0256e_766x542.png","cover_image_is_square":false,"cover_image_is_explicit":false,"podcast_url":null,"videoUpload":null,"podcastFields":{"post_id":209014863,"podcast_episode_number":null,"podcast_season_number":null,"podcast_episode_type":null,"should_syndicate_to_other_feed":null,"syndicate_to_section_id":null,"hide_from_feed":false,"free_podcast_url":null,"free_podcast_duration":null,"preview_contains_ad":false,"was_imported_self_serve_sync":false,"draft_free_podcast_url":null,"draft_free_podcast_duration":null},"podcast_upload_id":null,"podcast_preview_upload_id":null,"podcastUpload":null,"podcastPreviewUpload":null,"voiceover_upload_id":null,"voiceoverUpload":null,"has_voiceover":false,"description":"Public reason. Or, rather, public non-reason here in 2026, with the rising tide of AI-slop, and attempts to channel it...","body_json":null,"body_html":null,"has_dynamic_content":false,"truncated_body_text":null,"wordcount":2476,"post_preview_limit":0,"language":null,"postTags":[{"id":"0aa1f09d-5203-4632-a5ce-202cb52e4b02","publication_id":47874,"name":"##substack","slug":"substack-4df","hidden":false},{"id":"161a67c5-ef8e-4c91-b419-32f7dc16d1f5","publication_id":47874,"name":"#pangram","slug":"pangram","hidden":false},{"id":"233ed91f-90ac-4032-bdc2-4fb39d974fa7","publication_id":47874,"name":"Free","slug":"free","hidden":false},{"id":"31f3b86c-16b3-4377-98a5-9385e88dcdaf","publication_id":47874,"name":"#content-moderation","slug":"content-moderation","hidden":false},{"id":"3480bf0e-d2dd-4f3a-9d84-986dcb6694ca","publication_id":47874,"name":"#ai-slop","slug":"ai-slop","hidden":false},{"id":"41f15c1a-7722-4485-b0e8-8ef12cbba058","publication_id":47874,"name":"#david-pierce","slug":"david-pierce","hidden":false},{"id":"4b036712-19d3-4dbe-acf2-a2fa7708012c","publication_id":47874,"name":"#nilay-patel","slug":"nilay-patel","hidden":false},{"id":"6e0d3054-d03f-4150-9cf7-93a0248902f0","publication_id":47874,"name":"##subturingbradbot","slug":"subturingbradbot-8aa","hidden":false},{"id":"7f416d90-5119-4999-9786-ce7e4012d29b","publication_id":47874,"name":"##public-reason-or-rather-public-non-reason-here-in-2026-with-the-rising-tide-of-ai-slop-and-attempts-to-channel-it","slug":"public-reason-or-rather-public-non","hidden":false},{"id":"806643a5-84e0-4e4e-8923-48ed1e95ef52","publication_id":47874,"name":"##mamlms","slug":"mamlms-f61","hidden":false},{"id":"980d8bf0-5044-4398-a6f9-1ecee126cb53","publication_id":47874,"name":"#claudefishing","slug":"claudefishing","hidden":false},{"id":"b32f3ec9-e273-4508-9177-e7b1d5d81e38","publication_id":47874,"name":"##public-reason","slug":"public-reason-812","hidden":false},{"id":"b6d9c055-a65b-40b1-b760-8c448aabb018","publication_id":47874,"name":"##substack-pangram-is-scanning-the-substack-corpus-for-ai-generated-content-labelling-it","slug":"substack-pangram-is-scanning-the","hidden":false},{"id":"b7e46d02-5475-4ea2-b68e-50a94ef07207","publication_id":47874,"name":"#chris-best","slug":"chris-best","hidden":false},{"id":"e2c596f2-8c59-4192-ba86-70429e1b1d50","publication_id":47874,"name":"#nate-silver","slug":"nate-silver","hidden":false}],"teaser_post_eligible":true,"postCountryBlocks":[],"headlineTest":null,"coverImagePalette":{"Vibrant":{"rgb":[68,160,120],"population":4},"DarkVibrant":{"rgb":[39.547368421052646,93.05263157894736,69.78947368421052],"population":0},"LightVibrant":{"rgb":[252,164,112],"population":2},"Muted":{"rgb":[150,141,141],"population":164},"DarkMuted":{"rgb":[45.631578947368425,107.36842105263158,80.52631578947368],"population":0},"LightMuted":{"rgb":[195,175,173],"population":64}},"publishedBylines":[{"id":16879,"name":"Brad DeLong","handle":"delongonsubstack","previous_name":null,"photo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fea5ae644-9822-4ca5-ac6b-e18c017d8fbc_1189x1208.png","bio":"DeLONG'S GRASPING REALITY: . Teaching economy & history. Focusing on growth, distribution, money, & finance. Bringing numbers, facts, & blue-hued optimism of the intellect to understanding...","profile_set_up_at":"2021-04-22T17:45:51.845Z","reader_installed_at":"2022-01-20T23:10:08.029Z","publicationUsers":[{"id":14551,"user_id":16879,"publication_id":47874,"role":"admin","public":true,"is_primary":true,"publication":{"id":47874,"name":"DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog ","subdomain":"braddelong","custom_domain":null,"custom_domain_optional":false,"hero_text":"Economy in the 2000s & Before: working, making, apportioning, talking, taking, & more. What I know and can learn about it, & related things.","logo_url":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/fde2453e-9c18-4560-82ca-8b77ae62ef5b_1280x1280.png","author_id":16879,"primary_user_id":16879,"theme_var_background_pop":"#2096ff","created_at":"2020-05-20T03:47:08.731Z","email_from_name":"Brad DeLong, from Grasping Reality Newsletter","copyright":"J. Bradford DeLong","founding_plan_name":"Sustainers","community_enabled":true,"invite_only":false,"payments_state":"enabled","language":null,"explicit":false,"homepage_type":"newspaper","is_personal_mode":false,"logo_url_wide":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/6755917c-52e7-4c81-87e1-e9e191e558a5_1007x540.png"}}],"twitter_screen_name":"delong","is_guest":false,"bestseller_tier":1000,"status":{"bestsellerTier":1000,"subscriberTier":10,"leaderboard":null,"vip":false,"badge":{"type":"bestseller","tier":1000},"subscriber":null},"primary_publication":{"id":47874,"subdomain":"braddelong","custom_domain_optional":false,"name":"DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog ","logo_url":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/fde2453e-9c18-4560-82ca-8b77ae62ef5b_1280x1280.png","author_id":16879,"primary_user_id":16879,"user_id":16879,"handles_enabled":false,"explicit":false,"is_personal_mode":false,"payments_state":"enabled","pledges_enabled":false,"ios_app_payments_enabled":true,"has_reply_rules":true}}],"reaction":false,"reaction_count":22,"comment_count":5,"child_comment_count":3,"audio_items":[{"post_id":209014863,"voice_id":"en-US-OnyxTurboMultilingualNeural","audio_url":"https://substack-video.s3.amazonaws.com/video_upload/post/209014863/tts/23b11d96-97b4-48b6-b2b8-be8df57a15eb/en-US-OnyxTurboMultilingualNeural.mp3","type":"tts","status":"completed"}],"is_geoblocked":false,"hasCashtag":false,"inboxItem":{"content_key":"post:209014863","updated_at":"2026-07-30T13:47:54.007Z","content_date":"2026-07-29T20:23:49.629Z","inbox_date":"2026-07-29T20:23:49.629Z","seen_at":"2026-07-30T13:47:54.007Z","saved_at":null,"archived_at":null,"skip_inbox":false,"type":"post","post_id":209014863,"extra_views":["media"],"read_progress":0.4117397174604406,"max_read_progress":0.4117397174604406,"audio_progress":0,"max_audio_progress":0,"video_progress":0,"max_video_progress":0,"postType":"newsletter","title":"SubStack/Pangram is Scanning the SubStack Corpus for AI-Generated Content, & Labelling It!","subtitle":"Public reason. Or, rather, public non-reason here in 2026, with the rising tide of AI-slop, and attempts to channel it...","detail_view_subtitle":"Public reason. Or, rather, public non-reason here in 2026, with the rising tide of AI-slop, and attempts to channel it...","cover_photo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!UgQg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb949c315-cad6-4ded-99f4-43c4cad0256e_766x542.png","audience":"everyone","is_preview":false,"audio_url":"https://substack-video.s3.amazonaws.com/video_upload/post/209014863/tts/23b11d96-97b4-48b6-b2b8-be8df57a15eb/en-US-OnyxTurboMultilingualNeural.mp3","audio_type":"tts","web_url":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/substackpangram-is-scanning-the-substack","duration_metadata":{"word_count":2476},"authors":["Brad DeLong"],"published_bylines":[{"id":16879,"name":"Brad DeLong","photo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fea5ae644-9822-4ca5-ac6b-e18c017d8fbc_1189x1208.png"}],"coverImagePalette":{"Vibrant":{"rgb":[68,160,120],"population":4},"DarkVibrant":{"rgb":[39.547368421052646,93.05263157894736,69.78947368421052],"population":0},"LightVibrant":{"rgb":[252,164,112],"population":2},"Muted":{"rgb":[150,141,141],"population":164},"DarkMuted":{"rgb":[45.631578947368425,107.36842105263158,80.52631578947368],"population":0},"LightMuted":{"rgb":[195,175,173],"population":64}},"publication_id":47874,"publisher_image_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PgPl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffde2453e-9c18-4560-82ca-8b77ae62ef5b_1280x1280.png","publisher_name":"DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog ","is_personal_mode":false,"like_count":22,"comment_count":5,"reaction":false,"tracking_parameters":{"is_saved":false,"is_seen":true,"post_id":209014863,"post_type":"newsletter","publication_id":47874,"tabId":"home","tabType":"base","max_read_progress":0.4117397174604406,"max_audio_progress":0,"max_video_progress":0,"last_seen_at":"2026-07-30T13:47:54.007Z","impression_id":"a74758c3-1e39-4228-b220-795b24137ee8"}},"is_saved":false,"saved_at":null,"is_viewed":true,"read_progress":0.4117397174604406,"max_read_progress":0.4117397174604406,"audio_progress":0,"max_audio_progress":0,"video_progress":0,"max_video_progress":0,"restacked":false,"is_ai_generated_text":false},"comment":{"id":304365413,"body":"I don't think Silver understands risk. He has a romanticized view limited to those who have a choice as to whether to accept certain risks or not. Failure for venture capitalists means not making the big score, not losing everything. There's a reason venture capitalists tend to come from relatively wealthy families. Compulsive gamblers may risk losing everything, but professional gamblers are more like venture capitalists. It may be a negative sum business, but it's still a business.\n\nA woman having sex with a guy she met at a bar takes a much bigger risk than any of these. Ditto for a fireman or peace officer responding to a 911 call. Immigrants to the US took on a broad variety of risks, and despite overcoming many of them are now being clobbered by a long shot outcome. These risks are much harder to romanticize. They are definitely not flowing in Silver's river.","body_json":{"type":"doc","attrs":{"schemaVersion":"v1","title":null},"content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"I don't think Silver understands risk. He has a romanticized view limited to those who have a choice as to whether to accept certain risks or not. Failure for venture capitalists means not making the big score, not losing everything. There's a reason venture capitalists tend to come from relatively wealthy families. Compulsive gamblers may risk losing everything, but professional gamblers are more like venture capitalists. It may be a negative sum business, but it's still a business."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"A woman having sex with a guy she met at a bar takes a much bigger risk than any of these. Ditto for a fireman or peace officer responding to a 911 call. Immigrants to the US took on a broad variety of risks, and despite overcoming many of them are now being clobbered by a long shot outcome. These risks are much harder to romanticize. They are definitely not flowing in Silver's river."}]}]},"publication_id":47874,"post_id":209014863,"user_id":9557634,"type":"comment","date":"2026-07-29T21:35:49.301Z","edited_at":null,"ancestor_path":"","reply_minimum_role":null,"media_clip_id":null,"user":{"id":9557634,"name":"Kaleberg","handle":"kaleberg","previous_name":null,"photo_url":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/78b20097-6290-4f73-86c5-1465f6428f32_144x144.png","bio":"Here I am.","profile_set_up_at":"2021-04-18T16:55:57.334Z","reader_installed_at":null,"bestseller_tier":null,"status":{"bestsellerTier":null,"subscriberTier":1,"leaderboard":null,"vip":false,"badge":{"type":"subscriber","tier":1,"accent_colors":null},"subscriber":null},"primary_publication":{"id":2036337,"subdomain":"writtenstuff","custom_domain_optional":false,"name":"Kaleberg’s Substack","logo_url":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/78b20097-6290-4f73-86c5-1465f6428f32_144x144.png","author_id":9557634,"primary_user_id":9557634,"user_id":9557634,"handles_enabled":false,"explicit":false,"is_personal_mode":false,"payments_state":"disabled","pledges_enabled":true,"ios_app_payments_enabled":false,"has_reply_rules":false}},"reaction_count":0,"reactions":{"❤":0},"restacks":1,"restacked":false,"children_count":1,"user_bestseller_tier":null,"userStatus":{"bestsellerTier":null,"subscriberTier":1,"leaderboard":null,"vip":false,"badge":{"type":"subscriber","tier":1,"accent_colors":null},"subscriber":null},"user_primary_publication":{"id":2036337,"subdomain":"writtenstuff","custom_domain_optional":false,"name":"Kaleberg’s Substack","logo_url":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/78b20097-6290-4f73-86c5-1465f6428f32_144x144.png","author_id":9557634,"primary_user_id":9557634,"user_id":9557634,"handles_enabled":false,"explicit":false,"is_personal_mode":false,"payments_state":"disabled","pledges_enabled":true,"ios_app_payments_enabled":false,"has_reply_rules":false},"language":null,"autotranslate_to":null,"is_ai_generated_text":false,"attachments":[]},"trackingParameters":{"item_primary_entity_key":"c-304365413","item_entity_key":"c-304365413","item_type":"comment","item_publication_id":47874,"item_post_id":209014863,"item_comment_id":304365413,"item_content_user_id":9557634,"item_content_timestamp":"2026-07-29T21:35:49.301Z","item_context_type":"comment","item_context_type_bucket":"","item_context_timestamp":"2026-07-29T21:35:49.301Z","item_context_user_id":9557634,"item_context_user_ids":[],"item_can_reply":false,"item_last_impression_at":null,"impression_id":"a3be8b71-9cf1-4730-bfce-8f39f2d54201","followed_user_count":2296,"subscribed_publication_count":1211,"is_following":true,"is_explicitly_subscribed":true,"note_velocity_factor":1.042052950905,"note_delay_seconds":607,"note_notes_per_hour":10445.175988,"item_current_reaction_count":0,"item_current_restack_count":1,"item_current_reply_count":1}}],"name":"Brad DeLong","user_id":16879,"photo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fea5ae644-9822-4ca5-ac6b-e18c017d8fbc_1189x1208.png","user_bestseller_tier":1000,"userStatus":{"bestsellerTier":1000,"subscriberTier":10,"leaderboard":{"ranking":"trending","rank":12,"publicationName":"DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog ","label":"Finance","categoryId":"153","publicationId":47874},"vip":false,"badge":{"type":"bestseller","tier":1000},"subscriber":null}},"source":null,"forumChannel":null}" data-component-name="CommentPlaceholder">

But it really belongs here, in the main thread, instead of or as well:

Share

Thus: one more remark on how I wish we had the early-days Nate Silver of <http://fivethirtyeight.com> back, and how the story of the evolution here is rather tragic.

Silver understood poll aggregation:

Give a gift subscription

But now he writes about things he does not understand. Kaleberg had a nice comment on this:

Kaleberg: ‘I don’t think Silver understands [real] risk. He has a romanticized view limited to those who have a choice as to whether to accept certain risks or not. Failure for venture capitalists means not making the big score, not losing everything...

Get 75% off a group subscription

So let me chime in and add to this:

There is a very very very very very important distinction between people who are working with their counterparties, and people who are working against them. Or, indeed—going further into the psychopath realm—people who do not think that their counterparties are real people of any concern to them at all.

Case in point: Silver’s extraordinary and persistent rage against Congressman Jim Leach.

IMHO, Jim Leach did very few good things with his time in the U.S. Congress. But one of those good things was placing roadblocks to try protect people who did not understand the risks they were running from so easily becoming marks grifted by the likes of Nate Silver.

And Silver’s rage against Jim Leach still persists. It looks as though Jim Leach will live rent-free in Nate Silver’s brain until the day Silver dies, if not after:

Nate Silver: On the Edge <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/529280/on-the-edge-by-nate-silver/>: ‘I’d been a professional poker player for three years between 2004 and 2007, during the so-called Poker Boom. The Poker Boom began because of the increasing availability of online poker and because of Chris Moneymaker, an accountant from Nashville who won an online qualifying tournament for a seat at the $10,000 Main Event at the 2003 World Series of Poker and then parlayed that into winning the Main Event for $2.5 million.

If you’d asked ChatGPT to design a person who would most increase the amount of interest in poker by winning the WSOP, it might have spat out Moneymaker. An affable, pudgy, late twenty-something dude with a boring corporate job, he was exactly the customer the online poker sites were targeting, an archetype for every office drone who wanted to break out of his cubicle and win the big jackpot.

The number of participants in the World Series of Poker Main Event exploded from 839 in Moneymaker’s 2003 to 8,773 just three years later in 2006, largely fueled by people who had won their seats online. I was one of those people who lived the dream. I soon found myself on a nocturnal schedule. Poker games are usually best late at night, when your opponents are some combination of drunk, sleep-deprived, or delirious from winning or losing a bunch of money. So I’d come home from my cubicle, take a nap, and then play poker online, sometimes straight through until the morning, when I’d straggle into work and struggle through the day.

Needless to say, this wasn’t sustainable, and—making considerably more money as a poker player than as a consultant—I quit my corporate job within about six months to play poker and work for the baseball statistics startup Baseball Prospectus. It was a good living for a couple of years—but like most edges in gambling, it wouldn’t last. Some of this was the natural evolution of the game: the Poker Boom sputtered into more of a poker plateau as losing players either went broke, quit, or got better, removing one sucker from the table at a time.

But it was also partly the doing of the U.S. Congress. In late 2006, the GOP-led Congress, hungry for a victory with “moral majority” voters ahead of the midterms as Republican congressman Mark Foley resigned from office for having sent sexually explicit messages to underage male pages, passed a bill called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA).

The UIGEA didn’t ban online poker per se, but it established regulations that choked off payment processors: it’s hard to play poker if you can’t exchange cash for chips. Some sites closed to U.S. players while others remained open, but between the shadow of illegality and the increased friction of getting your money in and out, inexperienced new players avoided the games, making them much tougher to beat.

There was one silver lining: the UIGEA piqued my interest in politics. The bill had been tucked into an unrelated piece of homeland security legislation and passed during the last session before Congress recessed for the midterms. It was a shifty workaround, and having essentially lost my job, I wanted the people responsible for it to lose their jobs, too. And they did: Republicans lost both the House and the Senate, including the seat of Representative Jim Leach of Iowa, the chief sponsor of the UIGEA, whose thirty-year tenure in office ended partly because of poker players who had contributed money to his opponent.

Struggling to win money as the games were drying up, I quit poker about six months later. With my newfound interest in politics and the extra time on my hands, I wound up starting FiveThirtyEight in 2008...

Leave a comment

And I really do not think Silver has any idea what kind of a look he is giving into himself here.

Refer a friend

The full Kaleberg comment:

Kaleberg: ‘I don’t think Silver understands risk. He has a romanticized view limited to those who have a choice as to whether to accept certain risks or not. Failure for venture capitalists means not making the big score, not losing everything. There’s a reason venture capitalists tend to come from relatively wealthy families. Compulsive gamblers may risk losing everything, but professional gamblers are more like venture capitalists. It may be a negative sum business, but it’s still a business.

A woman having sex with a guy she met at a bar takes a much bigger risk than any of these. Ditto for a fireman or peace officer responding to a 911 call. Immigrants to the US took on a broad variety of risks, and despite overcoming many of them are now being clobbered by a long shot outcome. These risks are much harder to romanticize. They are definitely not flowing in Silver’s river...

There is a very famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

KING: How do you, pretty lady?

OPHELIA: Well, God yield you! They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be[come]...

The underlying story that Ophelia is referring to is a very strange story indeed:

Steph Rae Moran: “The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter”: Unpacking Ophelia’s Folkloric Remark <https://stephraemoran.com/the-owl-was-a-bakers-daughter-unpacking-ophelias-folkloric-remark/>: ‘Thiselton Dyer’s book: “Our Saviour went into a baker’s shop where they were baking, and asked for some bread to eat; the mistress of the shop immediately put a piece of dough into the oven to bake for him; but was reprimanded by her daughter, who, insisting that the piece of dough was too large, reduced it to a very small size; the dough, however, immediately began to swell, and presently became a most enormous size, whereupon the baker’s daughter cried out, ‘Heugh, heugh, heugh!’ which owl-like noise probably induced our Saviour to transform her into that bird for her wickedness…”

This is a profoundly unChristian story to a remarkable degree.

And it is not clear to me what work it is doing in Hamlet—it could be doing any or all of a number of things, depending on who is supposed to be the baker’s daughter here, and what it is supposed to mean to become an owl here.

But the underlying lesson is that of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night: we become who we pretend to be, so we need to be very careful who we pretend to be.

The baker’s daughter is the perfect emblem of it: she had no idea, standing in a warm shop on an ordinary night, that a small, mean act would become the whole and permanent shape of what she was. She went from girl to owl without ever choosing to be an owl. The self she woke up as was not the self she went to sleep as. That is the terror and the wisdom folded into the line. Identity is not something we author and then possess; it is something done to us—by other people, by circumstance, by God or fate or luck. We know what we are right now. We have no access to what we will turn out to have been. And our identity is done to us in substantial part by our own small choices whose weight we cannot see in the moment.

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##how-the-late-former-iowa-republican-congressman-jim-leach-still-lives-rent-free-in-the-head-of-nate-silver
##public-reason
##moral-responsibility
##leach-would-have-been-84-this-year-former-republican-congressman-from-iowa-who-served-in-the-us-house-from-1977-to-2007-he-switched-to-the-democrats-after-16-one-of-few-good-things-he-did
#nate-silver
#jim-leach
#on-the-edge
#understanding-risk
#poll-aggregation
#fivethirtyeight
#counterparties
#kaleberg
#grifting

Silver ought to know better. To say “apart from Iran, most of the Trump-related stories this summer have been boring and dumb… or kinda funny, maybe we’re movin on from him…” is to fly your “I’M ONLY HERE FOR THE LULZ!!!!” flag. It is the very opposite of, you know, being a grown-ups. Grown-ups have positive VAR in the sphere of public reason as the real ASI which is the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the human race cogitates on how to guide itself to a more prosperous, more productive, and brighter future. Assisting in that task seems no longer to be on Nate Silver’s radar screen.

I find this a pity, a shame, and an annoyance. And Josh Marshall concurs.

Over at TPM, that highly and deservedly respected node in the real ASI is annoyed:

Josh Marshall; <https://r.mail.talkingpointsmemo.com/>: ‘Nate Silver yesterday published a banger of a tweet, the kind only made possible by an indefatigable confidence that you know literally everything.

Setting aside his sweeping away a war, I’m over here reading the headlines on TPM. They seem fairly serious and involve the president:

While One Challenge to Trump’s Election Order Reaches SCOTUS, He Notches Early Win in Parallel Case

The Brief: Majority Leader Thune Tries to Dismiss Trump’s Latest SAVE Act Demands

Another Abrego Garcia: Man Unlawfully Deported Twice

I suppose a generous reading of Silver is that he is referring to things Trump is literally, actively doing and saying — his bids to control the news. That’s not the same as the news. Dismissing the WAR HE STARTED IN IRAN does a lot of work. But even setting that aside, there is more tariff nonsense, he’s been trying to steal the midterms for about a year, and his administration continues to break countless laws…

I greatly share Josh’s annoyance. Nate Silver is undergoing a transformation from being one of the best data journalists in the business and an international treasure into a different role: a zero or sub-zero VAR bloviator-pundit of the internet shouting class. I find this very annoying. And disappointing. And—I find myself thinking—really a tragic waste. I date the fall to his writing the second half of his 2024 On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, which is atrocious. (). And he has never recovered. Confer:

• <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/time-to-write-my-negative-review>

• <https://www.the-tls.co.uk/politics-society/social-cultural-studies/on-the-edge-nate-silver-book-review-paul-seabright>

Perhaps the deep problem is that Nate Silver does not understand the difference between negative sum and positive sum games, and so cannot think coherently about either. As I wrote:

I was taken further aback by Silver’s claim that: “Blackjack and slots and horse racing and lotteries and poker and sports betting… are fundamentally not that different from trading stock options or crypto tokens, or investing in new tech startups…” Investing in new tech startups is—or is supposed to be—a positive-sum activity in which people coöperate to make something useful and, hopefully, great. The rest are, when we take account of risk, negative-sum activities: someone loses, and someone wins, and with declining marginal utility of wealth the loser loses more than the winner wins, They are thus, fundamentally, parasitic: the way to win is to find people who do not understand the risks they are running, and fleece them.

There is a common dopamine thrill in doing this well.

But wouldn’t it be wise to focus not on the dopamine thrill but on the usefulness of the underpinning activity—how those getting the dopamine thrills are fitting into the network web that is the coördination of what we want to be a positive sum productive practice of humanity considered as an anthology intelligence?…

And perhaps the deepest problem can be diagnosed by noting Nate Silver’s total cluelessness with respect to Kenny Rogers’s song “The Gambler”. Again, as I wrote:

“And somewhere in the darkness, the Gambler he broke even…” That Nate Silver fundamentally misunderstands Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” as a metaphor for human life—that is, in view of its other problems, relatively small potatoes with respect to his new On the Edge. But it does rankle. No, the song would not be improved by changing the line “Know when to run” to “Know when to raise!”…

I said it was a minor concern, and it is. But it is a sign of something deep and highly problematic.

Josh has a lesson for us:

I would avoid getting news or anything from those who interpret the vibes. Instead, I’d take the novel approach of reading people who actually report on the news and read the news and occasionally find themselves in a newsroom. TPM is not the only place that has people like this (at least not yet), but we are one of the increasingly few doing real reporting and surfacing important stories we think the public needs to be aware of. At TPM, even the “business side” is made up of journalists who put journalism first. When you join TPM, as we hope you will today for nearly 50% off, that is the kind of work you’ll be supporting…

Indeed. He is right. Become a paid subscriber to Josh Marshall’s TPM <https://r.mail.talkingpointsmemo.com/mk/c>.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##‎josh-marshalls-ire-is-activated-by-nate-silver-annoyance-of-the-day
##public-reason
##neofascism
##‎annoyance-of-the-day
##boring-and-dumb-or-kinda-funny-apart-from-iran-that-is-nate-silvers-judgment-on-donald-trumps-actions-this-summer-josh-marshall-is-rightly-annoyed-i-share-that-annoyance
#josh-marshalls-ire-is-activated-by-nate-silver-annoyance-of-the-day
#josh-marshall
#nate-silver
#data-journalism
#zero-value-above-replacement
#journamalism
#the-gambler-by-kenny-rogers
#real-reporting

I fed my own robot’s prose to Pangram/SubStack’s ai detector. it passed the test. Labeling ClaudeFishing to keep AI-slop out of my feed as a higher priority than remembering that toleration is a truce when dealing with NeoNazi misinformation:

People have views

David Pierce & Nilay Patel: Vergecast: You Can’t Ignore Google Zero Anymore <https://podcasts.apple.com/it/podcast/you-cant-ignore-google-zero-anymore/>: ‘David Pierce: Substack added an Al detector to… figure out which of your many, many newsletters have been written by Al… powered by Pangram… the one tool in this space that most people seem to agree actually works…. My immediate reaction to this from Substack is just kind of what a self-own to have to roll this thing out….

Nilay Patel: All the distributors… platforms… are stuck in a trap… flooded with Al slop. Many… are stuck in the middle. If you’re Google and you run YouTube, and YouTube is being overrun with slop, you have the finest of lines to walk. You cannot say the output of Google’s Al tools are bad. But everyone hates the slop…. This is the challenge…. Somehow embrace the fact that Al is coming and people want to use Al in whatever way they want to use it, and people hate the slop….

David Pierce: They keep trying to pretend that… it’s about transparency…. Here’s a quote from Chris Best, the CEO of Substack….

Chris Best: The core problem is not people using Al or the quality of its output…. The problem is when there is a mismatch between a reader’s expectation and reality, especially when they unwillingly invest their attention in something with no human thought on the other end. That’s ClaudeFishing….

David Pierce: Kudos to Chris Best and SubStack…. ClaudeFishing is excellent, and I will use it.… [But] the idea that… people want… separation of two good things is not… reality…. People want… not [to] have Al in their feeds…. All of these things are designed to get Al out, but for all the reasons you just said, they can’t say that, and they’re stuck.

Nilay Patel: Let me ask a question… Chris Best, the CEO of SubStack…. What is an automated system to delete content that people find offensive, if not content moderation, Chris? Would you call that content moderation? Would you say that it’s weird that you are more permissive of outright racism and Nazis on your platform than the output made by Claude?…

David Pierce: The idea that it was actually willing to take a step this drastic, and in a time like this, with technology like this, this is a drastic step to say, we are going to loudly announce that something is Al is a big step. What do you think it means that Substack actually pushed over the line to say, we are going to do this in a way that they have not been willing to before?…

Nilay Patel: More existentially and more depressingly, the market has spoken and it is clear the market will reject Al content more vigorously than it will reject outright racism and outright sexism. I don’t know how to feel about that. Maybe you should just let it all ride. I have a lot of feelings…. SubStack… surfacing Nazis over and over again…. SubStack has built very, very good content moderation systems…. They have them for copyright infringement purposes. They have them because there is some stuff they will not put in their recommendation system. They’ve built it all. It’s all there. Now,they’re using it to filter and moderate Al content. They’ve just added another category to their existing content moderation infrastructure.

The market has not demanded that they use that infrastructure to moderate outright racism. Maybe that’s just the Internet, maybe that’s the world we live in, maybe that’s 2026 and DarkWoke is going to make its comeback…. But this part of the information ecosystem is much more tolerant of one thing than another. I do think it’s very notable…

Share

This is not quite fair. “AI-Generated”, “AI-Assisted”, and “Human” are, at the moment at least, labels. There is some concern among at least some people at SubStack that if you start a labeling system, you enable those who like that kind of thing to self-organize for it just as you enable those who don’t like the thing to self-organize against it. And that, they think, is fine for “AI-Generated” content. That is not so fine for NeoNazi content.

SubStack’s Discovery Engine is tuned to you as an individual—or is trying to get itself tuned to you as an individual—to you might want to pay to subscribe to. The hope is that the Discovery Engine can get people to pay for things they want without getting them addicted to things that make their selves worse. It is a fine line to walk, yes; and I do not think SubStack walks it successfully. But it is mot quite “our business is boosted by surfacing NeoNazi content and retarded by surfacing AI-slop”. Not quite.

On the other hand, if it truly were to be “transparency”, SubStack could make accessible the intellectual embedding semantic vector it assigns to every author, and give us tools to project that onto whatever hyperplane of ideas-discourse we wished. I at lest, would find that useful. And interesting.

But am I running ahead of reality? I should check:

Give a gift subscription

So, first, let me see if SubStack’s Pangram algorithm can in fact detect AI-created work. Here is a piece untouched by human hands, labeled as such back on 2024-10-10.

To jump to the chase, it can and it does—even for the SubTuringBradBot agent taught and prompted to write in my voice, so much so that I am, these days, having a hard time sometimes distinguishing its remix paragraphs from my originals.

Leave a comment

So I find this very interesting:

APPENDIX: Sub-Turing BradBot’s Précis of Silver’s On the Edge:

Silver, Nate. 2024. On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. New York: Penguin Press. <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/706808/on-the-edge-by-nate-silver/>:

• Prologue: Motivation: Nate Silver discusses his background in poker and his feeling of being more at home in the casino world than in political environments. He introduces the concept of the “River,” a community of people who thrive on risk-taking, ranging from poker players to crypto investors and venture capitalists. Silver recounts his journey from professional poker player to founding FiveThirtyEight, explaining how it was influenced by a law that ended his poker career. The prologue sets the stage for the book’s exploration of risk, emphasizing that those who understand algorithms and data hold a significant advantage in today’s world, especially in realms like Silicon Valley and Wall Street, which are continuously accumulating wealth.

• Chapter 0: Introduction: Lays the foundation for the book’s exploration of the Riverian mindset, which emphasizes calculated risk-taking and the strategic use of data. Silver highlights poker as the quintessential example of this mindset, given its reliance on game theory and statistical analysis. He also outlines the key concepts that will be developed throughout the book, encouraging readers to familiarize themselves with these ideas to understand the logic of the River. This chapter sets the tone for the blend of personal narrative, strategic analysis, and in-depth investigation into various domains where the Riverian principles apply.

• Chapter 1: Optimization: This chapter dives into poker as a prime example of the Riverian approach to risk, focusing on how game theory and computer solvers have revolutionized the game. Silver discusses the impact of these tools on poker strategy, emphasizing concepts like expected value and the shift toward a more analytical and data-driven playing style. The chapter also explores the broader implications of this shift, examining how the man-versus-machine dynamic in poker illustrates a fundamental tension between human intuition and computational logic. Silver uses the evolution of poker strategies to highlight the growing influence of algorithms in decision-making, not just in games but across various fields where risk and reward are calculated .

• Chapter 2: Perception: This chapter delves into the complexities and real-world complications of poker, illustrated through a high-stakes cheating scandal that shook the poker community. Nate Silver explores the psychology of poker players, emphasizing how human perception and body language influence gameplay. He discusses the role of deception, both in poker and in broader risk-taking scenarios, examining how skilled players can detect bluffs or identify con artists. The chapter features interviews with top poker players, analyzing what makes them excel under pressure and how their strategies relate to the broader theme of risk management and decision-making​.

• Chapter 3: Consumption: In “Consumption,” Silver shifts focus to the casino industry, charting the rise of Las Vegas from a remote desert town to a global hub of gambling. He discusses the business model of casinos, highlighting how they use psychology and algorithms to maximize profits from customers. The chapter contrasts the rare few gamblers who manage to beat the system with the majority who lose, underlining how the casino industry epitomizes American capitalism. Silver examines the evolution of casinos into sophisticated entities that utilize data to encourage more gambling, demonstrating how the Riverian mindset has permeated the house itself​.

• Chapter 4: Competition: This chapter explores the world of sports betting, focusing on its explosive growth in the United States. Silver examines the strategies employed by both bettors and bookmakers in a game of cat-and-mouse, where statistical analysis and risk assessment are paramount. He shares insights from his own experiences betting nearly $2 million on the NBA, as well as interviews with top bookmakers and bettors. The chapter underscores the challenges bettors face from restrictions imposed by sportsbooks, who use their own algorithms to limit profitable bettors, revealing the competitive dynamics that define the sports betting landscape​.

• Chapter 13: Inspiration: Thirteen Habits of Highly Successful Risk-Takers: This chapter serves as a halftime break, introducing the “Thirteen Habits of Highly Effective Risk-Takers.” Nate Silver presents this segment as a detour from the quantitative risk-takers typical of the River, focusing instead on individuals who take physical risks. Through profiles of an astronaut, an athlete, an explorer, a lieutenant general, and an inventor, Silver highlights common traits shared by these risk-takers, emphasizing their independence, meticulous planning, and resilience. Despite the differences in their fields, these individuals share a deep commitment to their goals, showcasing the idea that risk-taking is not just a mental exercise but also a way of life​.

• Chapter 5: Acceleration: “Acceleration” examines the world of venture capital (VC) and its role in Silicon Valley’s rapid growth. Silver discusses the strategies of top venture capitalists, exploring how they balance risk and reward to maximize returns. He highlights the competitive nature of the VC landscape, explaining why firms like Andreessen-Horowitz and Sequoia Capital often emerge as dominant players. The chapter also touches on the culture of founders like Elon Musk, who embody the Riverian approach of relentless innovation despite high risks. Silver critiques the structural advantages of venture capitalists, pointing out how they often secure profits while limiting their exposure to losses​.

• Chapter 6: Illusion: In “Illusion,” Nate Silver delves into the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX. The chapter is structured as a play in five acts, tracing SBF’s journey from a crypto mogul to a disgraced figure facing legal battles. Silver analyzes how SBF’s actions exemplified the dangers of unregulated financial systems, where illusions of wealth and security masked deeper vulnerabilities. The narrative explores themes of deception, risk, and the inevitable collapse that comes from over-leveraging in the crypto market. Silver uses SBF’s story as a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of Riverian thinking when applied to high-stakes finance​​.

• Chapter 7: Quantification: In this chapter, Nate Silver explores the power of quantification and its impact on decision-making processes in fields such as finance and sports. He highlights how prediction markets and statistical models have transformed betting strategies, allowing bettors to make more informed decisions. Silver also delves into the concepts of expected value and probabilistic thinking, emphasizing their importance in evaluating risks and rewards. The narrative continues to intertwine real-world examples from sports betting with broader discussions on data science and rational decision-making. This chapter lays out how the same principles that govern poker and casino games apply to high-stakes decisions in various domains.

• Chapter 8: Miscalculation: “Miscalculation” narrates the dramatic downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) through a series of events that showcase the risks of poor judgment and overconfidence in the world of crypto finance. Silver structures this chapter like a courtroom drama, detailing SBF’s trial in New York and his confrontation with a tough judge, Lewis Kaplan. The story focuses on how SBF’s risky decisions, combined with his tendency to double down when facing adversity, led to a severe prison sentence. Silver uses this case to illustrate the dangers of hubris and miscalculations when dealing with large-scale financial operations, drawing parallels to broader economic misjudgments

• Chapter ∞: Termination: “Termination” serves as a philosophical reflection on the endgame of technological and societal risks, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence (AI). Silver draws parallels between the Riverian approach to risk-taking and the existential stakes involved in AI development. He discusses the ambitions of Silicon Valley figures like Sam Altman, who are pushing the boundaries of AI, likening their efforts to the creation of transformative technologies such as the atomic bomb. Silver warns of the potential consequences if AI development is not carefully regulated, underscoring the ethical and existential dilemmas that could arise from these advancements. This chapter encapsulates the ultimate risks humanity faces as it continues to innovate without fully understanding the ramifications​.

• Chapter 1776: Foundation: This final chapter draws a direct link between the risk-taking spirit of the American Revolution and the broader Riverian mindset discussed throughout the book. Silver argues that 1776 was not only significant for America’s independence but also marked a turning point in economic history with the simultaneous publication of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations.” He traces how the ideals of liberty, democracy, and free-market principles established then paved the way for the growth and technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution. Silver highlights that these values encouraged calculated risk-taking, fueling economic expansion and innovation. He concludes by outlining three core principles—agency, plurality, and reciprocity—that blend the most robust aspects of Riverian thinking with the foundations of liberal democracy, arguing that these principles are essential to navigating the existential challenges of our modern world​.

What does Pangram/SubStack think? This:

Impressive.

Suppose that Pangram/SubStack can keep ahead, or ahead enough, in this forthcoming cat-and-mouse game.. What gives?

Get 75% off a group subscription

Subscribe now

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##substack-pangram-is-scanning-the-substack-corpus-for-ai-generated-content-labelling-it
##public-reason
##subturingbradbot
##mamlms
##substack
##public-reason-or-rather-public-non-reason-here-in-2026-with-the-rising-tide-of-ai-slop-and-attempts-to-channel-it
#ai-slop
#pangram
#claudefishing
#content-moderation
#chris-best
#nilay-patel
#david-pierce
#nate-silver

The deep truth on JD Vance is spoken by Noah Smith here: “I will never forget the "Haitians eating cats" lie. I will never let it go. It was so deliberate and monstrous and unprovoked and cruel, and no one has ever apologized for it…. JD Vance even admitted that they lied. What a barbarous act…” <https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/1999547802448441817>

Lyz Lenz is reporting from Springfield, Ohio during the final days of Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants.

She sees a town that is on the one hand braced for ICE raids. She sees another town that is morally hollow, scapegoating Haitian immigrants for local economic decline. But when the immigrants who revived the town are gone, their places will not be filled by people of whom they and JD Vance approve. Rather, the underlying poverty of Springfield will remain. The other residents will then simply need to be ginned up to find a new group of people to hate, and blame:

CROSSPOST: Lyz Lenz: Who Will You Blame When They’re Gone?

<https://www.patreon.com/LyzLenz/posts/who-will-you-165124611> <https://www.patreon.com/LyzLenz>

Men Yell at MeWed July 29, 2026

I did not intend to come to Springfield, Ohio, the week that temporary protected status (TPS) ended for Haitian immigrants. Since the Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration could revoke TPS for Syrian and Haitian immigrants, the exact deadline has seemed uncertain. A game of kick the can with thousands of lives and livelihoods at stake, their ripple effects broad and uncertain.

This week just happened to be the week that I had childcare. That’s no small thing when you are a single mom in the summer. On Friday, as I packed to leave, the TPS deadline for Haitians and Syrians in the US was extended again, this time to Monday. But a friend who works as an immigration reporter for a national outlet told me she didn’t think there would be another extension. I had initially planned three research stops for my book during the week. I moved things around to leave earlier, realizing I might get only this one stop.

More than one person in Springfield has told me I picked a terrible week to talk to them. The volunteers who run the food banks, passport services, and legal aid are all on a knife’s edge, waiting for ICE to come. When one woman found out that I had spent a week reporting in Minneapolis after the murder of Renée Good, and that I did a ride-along with a person who followed ICE vehicles, she asked me what to look for, where to go. Have I seen a raid? What did it look like? She wanted to be ready.

Springfield is a small city of 58,000 people. They can tell when someone is new, and I have been clocked as a journalist by more than one waitress. Among the residents are an estimated 12,000 to 20,000 Haitian immigrants. There are also immigrants from other countries, many undocumented. Some immigrants have already self-deported, but certainly not all. Further departures would hollow out this town, which, like so many cities in the Middle West, is trying to bounce back from a faded, rundown past. And Springfield was on its way back because of the economic boom from immigrants.

It’s quiet here. Downtown, there is the occasional camera with a somber-looking journalist talking into it. Most are local; I’ve seen two nationals. One was right outside the restaurant I went to on Monday night. I asked about it when I walked in, and the waitress quipped, “The rest of the big guys will show up when there’s blood.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was a journalist, too.

Everyone I talk to is anxious. One organizer won’t leave her home. Another man, an immigrant, who was giving interviews to the media on Monday, the last day of TPS, got nervous as a guy in a red polo walked around the city block where we stood. Red polo walked around the block four times. “We should leave,” I said. We did.

I don’t know if red polo was a threat. But everything feels like a threat in a town that is waiting to be invaded.

Today, as I spoke with volunteers at a St. Vincent de Paul, they conscripted me into packing boxes of necessities for the people who come to the food pantry. There were a lot of people there on Tuesday, which made everyone nervous, because what if ICE came? And so many other what-ifs. As we talked, I asked about a town hall event that had been held just days before I arrived, where members of the community aired their grievances about what they saw as the “special treatment” the immigrants had received. The handouts and the help. The title of the piece for the Dayton Daily News was, “Why can’t we do for our own, too?”

It’s a fair question. Shouldn’t our country provide a safety net for all people? One that provides affordable healthcare, childcare, and job training to everyone? Or else what are our taxes for? (Ah! Well. Nevertheless,)

The people in that article called themselves “heritage citizens,” which is a euphemism for entitlement. Because who is really a heritage citizen on land that is stolen? Who is a heritage citizen when we are all immigrants here? How far back do you have to trace your ancestors here to be a “heritage” citizen? Or is it just about being white?

The women packing boxes with me told me that the food pantry was, of course, for everyone; they had plenty of white families grateful for their services. They acknowledged that yes, the Haitian immigrant community was a primary target for others in town whom they called “the haters” (not “heritage citizens”) who felt they should be doing better economically.

One woman sighed and said, “But who will they blame when they’re gone?”

Other people of color? Women? Drug addicts? They’ll find someone. Any group of people; never the root cause of the poverty problem.

It’s not just poor white people looking for scapegoats. Everyone scapegoats their problems. Centrist Dems blame leftists. Leftists blame special interest money. Everyone scapegoats trans people. Everyone would rather look for a solution within their control rather than realize that they are the victims of a capitalist system designed to grind our bones down and make it into bread.

Individual communities cannot stop Trump’s cruel mass deportations, no matter how people rally and support their neighbors. This doesn’t mean anyone should stop trying. But in the end, Springfield, which has become a talking point for the administration, will face a reckoning. Once so many homes are empty, jobs are unfilled, there is no one to rent to or sell to, and taxes are unpaid — who will there be to blame?

While I was packing boxes at the St. Vincent de Paul food pantry, they were running out of shampoo and size 4, 5, and 6 diapers. So if you can, they could use some donations because they are in this for the long haul. Here is the donation link.

<https://www.patreon.com/LyzLenz/posts/who-will-you-165124611> <https://www.patreon.com/LyzLenz>

Brad DeLong here: Sringfield, OH, has population of 60,000 of whom 15,000 or so are Haitian immigrants. The six corrupt neofascist Supreme Court justices headed by John Roberts gave the Trump administration go ahead to discriminate on the basis of race, and revoke TPS for Haitian and Syrian immigrants. The TPS-revocation deadline had, as of Lyz Lenz’s writing, slipped to Monday.

The tl;dr of this is this quote from Lyz Lenz: “One woman sighed and said, ‘But who will they blame when they [the Haitian immigrants] are gone?”

The struggling Rust Belt town of Springfield, Ohio, had been economically revived by Haitian immigrant workers. Yet there is a large fraction of the native-born residents who resent both their presence and the fact that they think the Haitians are getting special treatment. They strongly resent the visible support extended to those immigrants and want them gone. And somehow they think that removing the Haitians will “improve” the town.

But everybody else knows that the poverty of Springfield, OH predated the immigrants, and will be deepened by the forthcoming deportations. persists, and residents seek a new scapegoat, since the immigrant was never the actual cause. There is a grievance behind the backlash: an inadequate universal safety net. But that inadequate universal safety net is something that Donald Trump and JD Vance are working to tear further. Grievance is real, but the weaponization of it will become a major own goal, for the “heritage Americans” will be secondary victims here.

This is a vivid ground-level illustration of the racist Trumpist neofascist political sociology of immigration. There is a strong mismatch between the labor-market and fiscal benefits of immigration on the one hand, and the neofascist local political backlash. Scapegoating, “diversity”, redistribution”, and the fiscal geography of Rust Belt decline are all in the mix.

Lyz Lenz links to but does not give a voice to the “heritage citizens”. The ones quoted in the Dayton Daily News say things like:

: ‘Resident Richard Corey said that he and others appreciate immigration when it’s done legally and when immigrants want to assimilate. “We have seen the way they shop in our stores—it’s not assimilating with the people of Springfield. We see the way they drive,” Corey said. “They have wanted to, it seems to be, bring Haiti here into Springfield. They want this to be their community and it’s our community.”… Kevin Bowshier pointed to “skyrocketing” prices, expressing concerns that his nieces and nephews won’t be able to afford to buy homes.

Bruce Clay, who works in homeless outreach, said he feels both “the immigrants and the taxpayers” are being “exploited,” pointing to high rents for subpar conditions. “Our rents (are) better than double. It takes $1,030 to get in plus first and last month’s rent to get in what I call a dump, and I think it’s sad,” Clay said. “You got people working in restaurants, department stores, Walmart, and you’ve got two and three, four people living in a house trying to make a living now.” Clay said he wants more focus on the people who already lived in the city. “if we really are all in this together as our city officials say we are, why can’t we do for our own too? “ Clay said…

Of course, when the Haitian immigrants are gone, the city of Springfield will have not more but less money to “do for our own”, as Bruce Clay wishes.

And, of course, JD Vance is positioning himself to be the leader of the MAGA movement after Trump’s forthcoming exit into complete senility. And he is doing so by demonizing immigrants and their children as not real Americans, and so throwing his own wife Usha and his own children—Ewan, Vivek, Mirabel, and Alec—under the bus.

Noah Smith has been watching JD Vance, and is fed up:

Noah Smith: <https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1999638109852696775>: ‘ will never forget the “Haitians eating cats” lie. I will never let it go. It was so deliberate and monstrous and unprovoked and cruel, and no one has ever apologized for it.,,, So because no one can ever admit mistakes in front of their enemies, they have to say: “The Haitian cat-eating blood libel was technically a lie but it was a metaphor for deeper truths, while Candice Owens’ blood libels are just totally false.” … JD Vance even admitted that they lied. What a barbarous act….

And Noah thinks that this JD Vance, “an unprincipled careerist suit filled with ancient dark spirits of hatred and malice”, will succeed in becoming the leader of the Republican Party

Yes. After Trump's personality cult is gone, ideology will be the only thing holding MAGA together. Vance will be the leader and avatar of this ideology…. Remember that the GOP nominee is decided in closed primaries, and it's first past the post in each one. Great Replacement ideology will be the successor to MAGA, and Vance is the leader of that ideology…. JD Vance has decided he's going to be the Great Replacement President. Even if that's a smart strategy for his personal career, it's terrible for America…

I promised myself back in 2008 that I would not despair until I could say that things were as bad as they had been on November 18, 1942. Things are still vastly better, and they were on November 18, 1942. But I do have to remind myself of that vow to avoid falling into despair.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##crosspost-lyz-lenz-who-will-you-blame-when-they-the-haitian-immigrants-are-gone
##neofascism
##crosspost
##lyz-lenz-did-not-intend-to-come-to-springfield-ohio-the-week-that-temporary-protected-status-tps-ended-for-haitian-immigrants-trump-is-truly-an-evil-racist-monster-and-so-is-jd-vance
#lyz-lenz-who-will-you-blame-when-they-the-haitian-immigrants-are-gone
#lyz-lenz
#who-will-you-blame-when-they-the-haitian-immigrants-are-gone
#springfield-ohio
#haitian-immigrants
#great-replacement-ideology
#jd-vance
#noah-smith

For two generations, a Soviet enemy forced the North Atlantic right to keep its ugliest strands coalition-respectable, and a booming 1990s economy drowned out the rest. Then the enemy vanished, the boom failed unevenly after 2008, the spark that had been lit by Rothbard, Buchanan, Francis, and Perot had burned down the fuse, and in 2016 it finally reached the dynamite…

John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke and Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards.

Share

1. Ganz’s When the Clock Broke argues that the political derangement we call “Trumpism” did not arrive in 2016 but was rehearsed a quarter-century earlier, in the seemingly sleepy interregnum of 1989–1993. Against the reassuring narrative of the era—Fukuyama’s “end of history,” a triumphant post–Cold War liberalism, Clinton’s coming boom—Ganz excavates a moment of recession and the ideological vertigo produced when the Soviet enemy vanished, and into that resulting vacuum stepped a cast of crackpots whose politics, dismissed at the time as marginal, turned out to be a blueprint for what was to gain power in 2016. Ganz’s causal claim is modest and structural: the ingredients existed in embryo in 1992—economic pain, conspiratorial anti-politics, the dawn of talk radio and cable—but needed a larger crisis (the Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession of 2008-2010, and the slow and ænemic recovery that followed) and a media revolution (the internet) to detonate. The 1992 “blip” was prefigurative, not aberrant.

2. Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards covers much the same ground but without the narrow focus on the George H.W. Bush presidency. Slobodian. however, sees today’s neofascist authoritarian right-wing as not a backlash against neoliberalism but a frontlash within it—a mutation grown from contradictions internal to the neoliberal project itself. Its three obsessions, in Slobodian’s formula, are “hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.” He follows a rogue’s gallery of Mont Pelerin descendants and fellow travelers—Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Charles Murray, Peter Brimelow, Richard Lynn, Curtis Yarvin, Javier Milei—who took Mises’s and Hayek’s occasional openings toward race theory and, in his phrase, “drove a metaphorical truck through it”. They became preoccupied with the conditions—culture, heredity, IQ hierarchies—under which a propertied individualism can be protected. That preoccupation slides naturally into inequality, hierarchy, and hostility to democracy.

Give a gift subscription

As Davies writes, both John Ganz and Quinn Slobodian “invite us to reckon with the political legacy of weirdos, losers and cranks, something that few conventional intellectual historians or ‘ideational’ political economists are used to doing…” Davies sets them in a complementary relationship rather than opposition: Ganz supplies the American narrative of the underpinnings of proto-trumpism in the sphere of public reason (or, rather, unreason or disreason). Slobodian supplies the intellectual-genealogical spine of where the ideas came from and how they were a supercharger to neoliberalism, giving it a claimed base of support among those who had something to lose from modern “woke” élites pushing for the equality of others with white male native-born.

Get 75% off a group subscription

The original Hayekian neoliberals had feared democracy and mass society and sought élite capture and depoliticization. Rothbard and company saw “ordinary folk” as capitalism’s allies in that they all liked poverty, race and ethnic hierarchy, and traditional gender roles. The contrast is that Ganz’s story is emphatically American: “shaped by a national story encompassing slavery, residual paranoia towards the federal government and humiliation and rage over Vietnam, not to mention guns…” Slobodian sees America as unexceptional, and Davies uses him in insisting the American story has a British twin, a direct Rothbardian line into European reaction: Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s anarcho-capitalist, anti-immigration critique of the EU, the Centre for the New Europe, and the think-tank ecosystem (Bruges Group, Anti-Federalist League, UKIP, Goldsmith’s Referendum Party) behind Euroscepticism.

Ganz gets the closer reading and the emotional center; Slobodian gets deployed as the theoretical apparatus that lets Davies explain why these cranks matter and how their ideas crossed the Atlantic. The one place — a move Ganz doesn’t make and Slobodian only enables:

Leave a comment

(PARTIAL-)CROSSPOST: WILLIAM DAVIES: Repeal the 20th Century: Review of “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists & the Origins of Trumpism” by John GanzPenguin, 426 pp., £10.99, June, 978 1 4059 8169 9

<https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/william-davies/repeal-the-20th-century> <https://www.lrb.co.uk>

Monika Krause… shows that social scientists… base their… theories on a surprisingly limited range…. Images of the modern metropolis… Chicago and Berlin. Political theories of populism… Argentina. The sociology of work… car manufacturing…. Professions… doctors and lawyers. Political economists, too, have their model cases, in particular the crisis of the 1970s, which involved the end of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, the demise of full employment as an aim of economic policy and the turn towards conservative and neoliberal arguments in favour of tax cuts and financial deregulation…. The idea that there was… a paradigm shift in capitalist regulation has proved seductive….

The crisis of the 1970s [also] appeals to academics… [as it] grants a prominent role to academics themselves. The economic model that was abandoned in the crisis is usually referred to as ‘Keynesian’. Keynes himself could be described as a ‘model case’ member of the liberal elite…. The paradigm that succeeded Keynesianism was scarcely less scholarly in its provenance…. The political economy of Thatcher and Reagan… [forged by] tenured academics, first in Vienna, Freiburg and London, and later in Chicago and Virginia. Its most visible representative, Milton Friedman….

John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke is a study of a moment in American history that isn’t usually considered a crisis: the early 1990s, when the United States was reimagining and repositioning itself in a post-Cold War world…. Wasn’t this a time of naive optimism? Maybe, but only if you limit the story to the second half of the decade. One of Ganz’s achievements is to… examine the … transition from the Reagan era, in which the right was still largely dedicated to defending the establishment, to Clinton’s years in power, when the right began to lose its mind…. Ganz discovers a moment of rupture, in which a new political movement began to cohere. The characters involved weren’t a secretive cabal, or even a Mont Pelerin-style network: they were often shouting their demands on the airwaves and from political platforms. But they were too outrageous, seemingly too divorced from reality, ever to be taken seriously by the political and intellectual classes, who were in any case soon swept up by a new wave of prosperity propelled by globalisation.

When the Clock Broke promises:

a history of the losers: candidates who lost their elections, movements that bubbled up and fizzled out, protests that exploded and dissipated, writers who toiled at the margins of American life, figures who became briefly famous or infamous and then were forgotten…

One thing… which… at the time… looked more pitiful than dangerous, is a sense of grievance towards the establishment. In a world before social media, the grudges and resentments of marginal figures rarely penetrated mainstream political consciousness. But as Ganz shows in a series of biographical portraits, a distinctive set of proto-Trumpian sentiments began to seep into the American public sphere no sooner than the rubble of the Berlin Wall had been tidied away….

Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, Murray Rothbard and Ross Perot.

• Francis… was decisive in introducing to mainstream discourse the racist ideas of figures such as David Duke…. Francis found little to admire in the GOP of the early 1990s, but the political faction led by Pat Buchanan was an exception.

• Buchanan’s ‘paleoconservatism’… [sought] to cut America off… prioritising instead the restoration of national tradition at home…. Buchanan spoke directly to the resentments and anxieties of small businessmen and farmers who suspected they were being screwed by coastal elites, with more racial insinuation….

• Rothbard… began his complicated political evolution as a right-wing activist after the Second World War… combining a belief in natural hierarchies with opposition to the moral relativism of the New Left and a passionate hatred of government…. Rothbard rubbished critics of the paleos for telling them they couldn’t ‘turn the clock back’: “We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal ... We shall repeal the 20th century…” This wasn’t a call merely for a change of direction, but for an insurrection fuelled by rage and resentment against the establishment…. The double helix of libertarianism and authoritarianism that runs through much of Trump’s programme can be traced back to Rothbard….

• Perot’s self-presentation as a blank canvas, onto which various discontents could be projected, was another sign of things to come. ‘We’re not interested in detailed positions,’ he said. ‘Everybody has detailed positions. Nobody implements them.’ Perot didn’t need to resort to violent or counter-revolutionary rhetoric in order to serve as a vessel for political alienation and rage….

By focusing on 1991-92, Ganz casts a[n]… ominous light on anti-politics. ‘People wanted to be pissed off,’ he writes of the national mood in the run-up to the 1992 election, ‘but the specifics were too irritating and difficult: the details of urban policy didn’t get people going, dwelling on the scenes of burned-out Los Angeles was too depressing and hopeless. Reality had to be left behind.’ A centrist policy consensus would crystallise in the 1990s, backed by a (temporarily) successful macroeconomic approach, but the fact that the major ideological conflicts of the 20th century were dissipating did not mean that political discontent was too – far from it.… Rather than reading the 1990s as a decade of ‘posts’, Ganz understands them as prefigurative: pre-alt-right, pre-MAGA, pre-DOGE….

The characters in When the Clock Broke are shaped by a national story encompassing slavery, residual paranoia towards the federal government and humiliation and rage over Vietnam, not to mention guns. But I can’t help spotting some parallels with the less explosive chain of events in Britain…. [How] those awkward four years between the end of Thatcher’s leadership and the birth of New Labour shaped the political forces that came to afflict Britain twenty years later. Ganz and Slobodian both invite us to reckon with the political legacy of weirdos, losers and cranks…. [Slobodian’s] Hayek’s Bastards reveals the extent to which later generations of the Mont Pelerin Society were drawn towards cultural and biological theories of inequality, in common with many of Ganz’s ‘paleos’. Given the wider social, political and economic trends leading towards globalisation and multiculturalism in that period, it is unsurprising that subscribers to these (often racist) views were marginalised by mainstream institutions and liberal elites. But they didn’t disappear; rather, they organised elsewhere.…

These reactionaries may be contemptible, even at times laughable, but they were deadly serious. And perhaps they understood the stakes of politics more clearly than the ‘Third Way’ liberals who for a time would consign them to the margins. Or maybe the stakes were simply more visible before all the talk of ‘globalisation’ and the ‘information superhighway’ changed the subject…. Élites took little interest in the politics of resentment or ‘strong men’. In time, that politics would take an interest in them.

Letters

Vol. 47 No. 18 · 9 October 2025: The 1990s were not, contra William Davies, when ‘the major ideological conflicts of the 20th century were dissipating’, or ‘when the right began to lose its mind’ (LRB, 25 September). Instead, with the collapse of communism, traditions came back into the open which, for generations after the Second World War, were practised privately, drunkenly, away from tender academic ears: the celebration of ‘natural’ inequality; chauvinisms of nation, race and sex; cults of violence and conquest. The right never lost its mind. It is simply that, for a time, it preferred not to speak it. Benjamin Letzler Mödling, Austria

<https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/william-davies/repeal-the-20th-century> <https://www.lrb.co.uk>

Brad DeLong here: What do I think? Davies, reviewing Ganz, wants us to relocate the origin of Trumpism from 2016 back to 1991–92. I think he is right about the timing and wrong, in one important way, about the mechanism—and the Letzler letter to the LRB immediately above puts a finger on exactly the place that I think it is key.

Let me lay out what I take to be true, in the logical order the argument actually runs:

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

The roots run back to 1991–92, not 2016: Ganz’s achievement is to look at a period everyone else coded as sunny—Fukuyama’s “end of history,” the coming Clinton boom, the “information superhighway”—and find the rupture hiding inside it. The conventional model case for political-economic rupture is the 1970s—the end of Bretton Woods, the death of full-employment policy, the Keynesian-to-neoliberal turn—a story academics favor partly because it flatters their own importance, with Keynes, Friedman, and tenured theorists as the protagonists. Ganz relocates the pivot to a moment usually read as post–Cold War optimism, and shows it was when the American right began to detach from reality and organize around resentment.

The cast is a rogues’ gallery of losers: Sam Francis, David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, Ross Perot, and so on, voicing various discontents, real and imagined, coherent and incoherent. None of them won anything at the time—just as Pat Buchanan’s sock puppet Spiro Agnew had lost comprehensively a generation earlier. But the mix of economic pain, conspiratorial anti-politics, talk radio and cable and other anti-media channels of which Ronald Reagan’s early-1960s anti-Medicare vinyl disks were the first sign—all of these were present, but lacking a lit fuse. Prefiguration.

The end of the Cold War let the monster out of its cage: For two generations, the American right had a discipline imposed on it from outside: the existence of the Soviet enemy made it necessary to ally with modern liberals—and even, at the margins, with social democrats—against a common adversary. That Cold-War alliance was a leash that kept the authoritarian, plutocratic, nativist, and racist strands of the right inside a coalition whose respectable face had to be maintained. The Berlin Wall comes down, the organizing enemy vanishes, and then, as Davies writes, “a distinctive set of proto-Trumpian sentiments began to seep into the American public sphere…”

But even though the bars were down, that did not matter as long as the macroeconomy delivered: The potential for grievance politics is always present; whether it wins is a question of conditions. As long as unemployment stayed low and productivity growth stayed fast, the grievance right remained exactly what Ganz calls it—a history of the losers. The 1990s boom simply drowned them out. The material substrate on which they feed—fear of falling, the sense of being screwed, the Polanyian sense that the existing order was not respecting their caste rights and cultural-capital privileges—was in abeyance as nearly everyone felt increasing societal power at their command in the form of rapidly rising real incomes.

Then 2008–2010 lights the match, and the 2010–2016 ænemic recovery sees the fuse burn: That near-decade is what gave the grievance right its opening. Davies gestures at this, but never really weighs it—he is strong on the intellectual genealogy but thin on the material substrate, naming the prosperity that sidelined these movements without asking how its uneven distribution supplied the grievance that later revived them. Prosperity fails, failure’s costs land unevenly, an anti-media revolution hits. Rothbard had promised to “break the clock … repeal the 20th century” in 1992, but the clock kept ticking until 2016.

The Letzler correction: And here I side with Benjamin Letzler against Davies’s own framing. Davies writes of the moment “when the right began to lose its mind…” But:

The right never lost its mind. It is simply that, for a time, it preferred not to speak it. — Benjamin Letzler

The reactionary traditions—“the celebration of ‘natural’ inequality; chauvinisms of nation, race and sex; cults of violence and conquest”—had never gone away. They were spoken privately, drunkenly, away from polite society and tender academic ears, held below the surface by the Cold War alliance. Communism’s collapse returned them to open air. “Rupture” flatters us into thinking the pathology is recent, and therefore reversible. Continuity says otherwise: what we are watching is not a new disease but an old one that was, for a few decades, merely in remission.

Am I retrofitting a fake genealogy? Perhaps. I do worry that this whole enterprise carries a massive real risk of selection and hindsight bias. Reading 1991–92 as “prefigurative” of the alt-right, MAGA, and DOGE means selecting, out of the vast population of early-90s cranks, precisely the four whose obsessions happen to rhyme with what won later—and then narrating the rise of their ideas as a near inevitability. Losers usually lose for reasons that do not presage anything; most fringe movements are fringe because they are going nowhere, and the ones that later look like prophets are visible only because we already know the ending.

But there is a stronger and more testable claim: a specific external constraint (the Cold War alliance) lifted at a specific time; the freed tendencies stayed marginal precisely as long as a specific macroeconomic condition (low unemployment, fast productivity growth) held; and they broke through precisely when that condition failed in 2008.

Add to those Tyler Cowen’s point that, as long as leftist Northern Republicans voted Republican because Lincoln had freed the slaves and rightist Southern Democrats voted Democratic because Lincoln had freed the slaves, the crackpots of America were evenly split between the two parties rather than being concentrated in the Republican Party. In 2016 Tyler thought that the Republican establishment was strong enough to discipline the crackpot right. He was wrong: it was, instead, incredibly eager to surrender to it down to the last Susan Collins. Élites took little interest in the politics of resentment; in time, that politics took an interest in them.

That is a mechanism. That is an argument.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##partial-crosspost-william-davies-review-of-when-the-clock-broke-con-men-conspiracists-the-origins-of-trumpism-by-john-ganz
##neofascism
##public-reason
##crosspost
##daviess-original-title-is-a-quote-from-murray-rothbard-his-goal-was-to-repeal-the-20th-century-how-1992s-losers-became-2016-2028s-winners-or-a-neo-foucauldian-genealogy-of-maga-doge-al
#william-davies-review-of-when-the-clock-broke-con-men-conspiracists-the-origins-of-trumpism-by-john-ganz
#william-davies
#john-ganz
#quinn-slobodian
#sam-francis
#pat-buchanan
#ross-perot
#murray-rothbard
#trumpism
#when-the-clock-broke-con-men-conspiracists-the-origins-of-trumpism
#origins-of-trumpism
#repeal-the-20th-century
#paleoconservatism
#grievance-politics
#cold-war-alliance
#maga-genealogy

My local-agent pipeline burbled along until it announced, confidently, that it had just completed a document it had actually written and emailed to me three weeks earlier. Calling in remote anthropic/claude-opus4:8 with its massive krell-like brain of nvidia chips produced a crisp diagnosis: google/gemma4:26b-mlx occasionally takes a script stdout “No new briefs to send” and free-associates that single terse line into elaborate fictions…

Have I saved any time by going all in on LLMs over the past three months? Have I saved any money by going all in on running models locally? Well, I have saved money in the five figures. I have amused myself. I have acquired some knowledge of the practical hands-on at-the-coalface metis rather than the theoretical description and logical entailment tekhne form, Although I have no idea how representative I am, and thus how useful it is going to be.

Share

And I think that I am learning a lot about these technologies.

For example, I leave as an exercise to the reader what lessons they should draw from this somewhat interesting exchange with anthropic/claude-opus4.8 this AM. Here is how it started:

My IsaacThinker openclaw telegram ‘bot agent channel is burbling away: At 12:13 and at 3:13 it reports that “there are no new briefs to send”. At 6:34 it announces this: “The comprehensive brief on Harness Engineering has been completed and is now available at [Redacted]. The document defines harness engineering as the orchestration layer above commoditized LLMs and provides a specific technical roadmap for [Redacted] the [Redacted] installation on your [Redacted]—specifically focusing on local model residency, Unified Memory optimization, MCP decoupling, and the POLE+O ontology for structured memory. The brief concludes with a Chicago-style bibliography”. But that brief has been sitting there since 2026-07-03 :: so what gives here?

Found it. Nothing new actually happened — this is a hallucination bug in the cron job’s LLM reporting step, not a real event.

What actually occurred:

• harness_engineering_brief.md was created 2026-07-03 06:45 and hasn’t been touched since (confirmed via stat).

• It was genuinely emailed out that same day — the cron job’s internal run log shows 2026-07-03 09:13:26 → “1 brief was sent (harness_engineering_brief.md).” — and it’s the last line in .email-sent-log, so the send script correctly treats it as already-sent.

• Today’s send-new-briefs cron job (runs every 3h at :13 — 12:13, 3:13, 6:13, matching your 12:13/3:13/”6:34” reports) ran fine each time.

• The stored internal summary for the 6:13 run today reads: “No new briefs to send.” — i.e. the script itself reported correctly, exactly like the other two runs.

So what’s the 6:34 message? The cron job’s reporting step isn’t a deterministic echo of the script’s stdout — it’s a local ollama/gemma4:26b-mlx model that’s asked to “report how many briefs were sent, or ‘No new briefs’ if none.” Instead of literally relaying the boring one-liner, it periodically free-associates an elaborate, confident-sounding narrative.

I pulled the full run history for this job (cron_run_logs in openclaw.sqlite) and this is a long-standing, recurring pattern — going back to June, there are dozens of entries where the model’s “summary” ships with invented markdown headers, hashtags, fake dates, and fictional Filed to: paths that don’t correspond to real files, even though the prompt only asks for a terse pass/fail line. Today it apparently pulled the (real, but old) harness_engineering_brief.md from its context and dramatized it as freshly completed.

Bottom line: no new brief was written or sent; the file is unchanged since July 3; the 6:34 Telegram message is a confabulation, not a status report.

Fix: this reporting step needs zero reasoning — the script’s stdout already is the correct message (”No new briefs to send.” or “Sent: X”). Routing it through an LLM turn is what’s introducing the hallucination risk. I’d recommend changing the cron job’s payload to just capture and forward the script’s stdout directly (or via a tiny deterministic wrapper) instead of asking ollama/gemma4 to “report” on it in free text.

Want me to patch the send-new-briefs cron job definition to do that?

Get 75% off a group subscription

On the one hand, we have the problem of not being completely certain whether the model from Anthropic is faithfully reporting the hallucinations of the model from Google or whether the model from Anthropic is also hallucinating and itself reporting things that did not occur—I think the first, but can I be sure? It is turtles all the way down when there is no world-model underneath.

Putting that to one side, this did take me somewhat aback. It is a reminder that ollama/gemma4:26b-mlx (and anthropic/claude-opus4.8) are not reporting ground truth from world model, but rather emitting the next token as an answer to the question “what was the next token the human sent in the conversation in the training data ‘closest’ to this one?”

But the most immediate thing in the context that ollama/gemma4:26b-mlx was digesting was “No new briefs to send” as the stdout of the script just upstream from the LLM in the task chain workflow.

What is going on in the training data and RLHF that leads it to then spin-off into confabulation?

That is puzzling.

I think the lessons are obvious. As people who I think actually know what they are talking about say over in comments on Grasping Reality Substack <https://substack.com/profile/16879-brad-delong/note/c-303003600>, talking about related:

Philip Koop [Re your:] “Writing code is a domain where surface prediction and correct world-modeling are very very close—programs either work or don’t, for there is no underlying reality to which the incantations in their correct form point.”

I am a life-long professional software developer. I am under continuous, albeit gentle (no leaderboards) pressure to make use of LLM coding assistance, both chat-based and agentic. I have the benefit of a wide choice of models and professional training from the vendors of these models. I am trying to reserve judgment on the usefulness of LLMs for programming, but the only reason is the proliferation of Silicon Valley programmers telling me how good it is.

To be clear, I am not just talking about the “hamburger” model of Kapoor and Narayanan (<normaltech.ai/p/why-ai-…>) - although they are right. In my observation, LLMs are only moderately useful at shrinking the “execute” patty, never mind the bun. You have (inadvertently) identified what may be the problem: there absolutely is an underlying reference reality for most of the software that makes a difference in your life, and if you f*** that up, then you, too, will be f***ed. We are not close to having an LLM that you want to have writing your bank’s book-keeping systems, or your hospital’s life support systems, or your railroads scheduling system, or basically any other software system of any real importance.

I can rely on LLMs to manipulate data (”this .csv file represents a volatility surface in the format blah blah blah, this other file represents a volatility surface in format lorum ipsum, please reformat the .csv file to match the lorum ipsum format.”) Using an LLM to write the first cut of a well-known or easily defined algorithm (”please write a function to find the nearest correlation matrix to a given matrix using the algorithm of Higham and Strabic”) and it will usually produce a reasonable first cut that is arguably faster than typing in myself.

Asking an LLM to find a bug in a complex system will generate suggestions; almost all are wrong and usually none are right. It is doubtful that the cases when it finds a right answer pay for the cost of evaluating the rest. Asking an LLM for a meaningful functional change, well you might as well trying flying to the moon by flapping your arms. My point is that LLMs work best, when they work at all, on the kind of software that is written by Silicon Valley software developers, where “move fast and break things” is highly prized and the consequences of an error are not too serious. This is also the sort of software written by “part time” programmers, who just want a nice plot of the latest Fed data. But it doesn’t represent much of the software that makes modern life possible.

Michael Fuchs: All of the above, exactly as you put it. Well done. The only thing I would add is the exponential growth in difficulty later on when it comes time to enhance and maintain the AI-created code. What was done, exactly how and why, is knowledge that becomes increasingly attenuated, like programming that was written over decades by long gone generations of staff who never bothered to document their work. It’s a technical debt that compounds and compounds.

Philip Koop: That is a good point! And I feel that it is also characteristic of the SV community to discount the burden of maintenance…

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

What do I think? I think that programming using LLMs is perhaps OK for scripts, but not for programs proper. And that if you do use them for scripts, you should immediately factor out all of the LLM logic as fast as possible.

I would note that the first reaction of anthropic/claude-opus4.8’s own processing of its training-data-plus-RLHF was precisely to get the LLM out of the loop completely. The benefits of a natural language interface presenting the answers were not, in its “thinking”, worth the possible hallucinations.

But I am not an expert programmer—hence not able to use these things to their full potential. And I also do not have high value use cases to hand.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##the-llm-generating-machine-underneath-the-dining-room-side-table-hallucinates-again-monday-mamlms
##subturingbradbot
##mamlms
##monday-mamlms
##the-most-revealing-move-was-anthropicclaudeopus48s-own-recommended-fix-get-the-llm-out-of-the-loop-entirely
#llm-hallucination
#running-models-locally
#vibe-coding
#metis-vs-tekhne

The Oatmilk Default: A “retired” economist’s field report from the coffeehouse inellectual frontier…

The QualComm Café in the basement of Sutarjda Dai Hall, just a stone’s throw from Evans Hall, has reopened.

Share

This is of some importance to me. The Sutarjda Dai Hall QualComm Café is one of the five coffee shops ringing the Berkeley Economics Department’s Evans Hall—Sutarjda Dai Hall, Cory Hall, Stanley Hall, Hildebrand Hall Breezeway and South Halls. (Yes, Evans Hall is about the only campus building nearby that does not now have a coffee shop in it: O tempora! O mores!) Since I am now “retired”, and since a substantial plus from “retirement” is not to be spending time on the 5th floor of Evans Hall doing administrative things, I need a place to randomly run into economists. I do worry about the sea-squirt problem, after all <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/j-bradford-delong-professor-of-economics>.

It is pretty clear that Caffé Strada at College & Bancroft is not such a place, or not anymore, as the only colleague I have run into there this entire spring/summer has been David Card, once. So outside of the Qualcomm Café until the rains come—that seems to be the next potential watering hole to seek out, as I go to and fro on the campus (mostly to the library, to access things that cannot be accessed ex-library).

Give a gift subscription

But this takes me aback:

Get 75% off a group subscription

Is this a decision by Peets or by Berkeley Dining Services?

There seems to be some calculated ambiguity here, with respect to what kind of operation this newly reopened thing that is the QualComm Café is going to be: Peets Coffee beans, drink recipes, drink menu, and merch—that is clear. But stories say that the food is “made in-house” by UC Berkeley Catering, but with “some items sourced through partnerships”, and “carried over from the old Yali’s [North] menu”—id est, not Peets Coffee food items. But still, that does not elucidate where the oatmilk-default (per ounce, oat/2% cow: 15/15 cal, 0.4/1.0g protein, 2.0/1.5g carbs, 0.6/0.6g fat, 0.004/0.003g calcium, 0.000004/0.000004g vitamin D) decision comes from, and why.

Refer a friend

What kind of balance-of-risks-and-benefits calculation underlies this decision?

Is it a result of the changing genomics of the American, or at least the California, university, in that its student population is no longer drawn overwhelmingly from those segments of the East African Plains Ape population over which genes for lactose tolerance made a sweep through over the past 7500 years?

Lactose-tolerance—lactase enzyme persistence—has, over the past 7500 years been, I am told, under stronger selection pressure for East African Plains Ape populations in Europe than almost any other human gene, driven by the European −13910 T allele spreading alongside our highly valued commensal the dairy cow. Today, lactase persistence runs ~89–96% in northwest Europe, but only ~15% in the Mediterranean terrains of Sardinia and Greece, and is less than 5% in East Asia and among the Amerindian population.

It is not, or it least it should not be, a demonstration of environmental concern: oatmilk generates at least as much in the way of global warming driver gases per gram of protein as does cow’s milk.

Plus there is my brother-in-law Paul Mahoney’s battle cry: “Dairy Fat for Brain Health!” is what he inscribes on his banners.

But for me, the key question is this: awill the oatmilk default make it more or less likely that the likes of David Card pass by?

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

References:

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2026. “Things Have Gone too Far!: LAUGH OF THE DAY”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality Weblog, July 27 (this post).

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2026. “J. Bradford DeLong: Professor of Economics, Emeritus: But Now I Need to Figure Out How Not to Eat My Brain in ‘Retirement’.” DeLong’s Grasping Reality Weblog, July 2.<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/j-bradford-delong-professor-of-economics>.

• Card, David. 1990. “The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 43, no. 2 (Jan.): 245–257. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2523702>.

  Card, David, & Alan B. Krueger. 1994. “Minimum Wages & Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.” American Economic Review 84, no. 4 (Sept.): 772–793. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2118030>.

  Ritchie, Hannah. 2022. “Dairy vs. Plant-Based Milk: What Are the Environmental Impacts?” Our World in Data, January 19. <https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks>.

  Ségurel, Laure, & Céline Bon. 2017. “On the Evolution of Lactase Persistence in Humans.” Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 18 (Aug.): 297–319. <https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-genom-091416-035340>.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##things-have-gone-too-far-laugh-of-the-day
##laugh-of-the-day
##uc-berkeley
##is-it-time-to-start-writing-for-bari-weisss-free-press-substack-and-start-denouncing-the-woke-oatmilk-hegemony-here-at-uc-berkeley
##things-have-gone-too-far
#qualcomm-cafe
#the-oatmilk-default
#milk-tolerance-genomics
#coffeehouse-intellectual-culture

If the goal were really fighting forced labor, why sort 60 countries into just two flat rates? The uniformity gives the game away, and the courts are likely to notice—and, ultimately, sink this rationale for tariffs. But in the two years it takes to happen, the tariffs will be collected. Refunds will be partial and burdensome to obtain, and are not certain: Chief Justice Roberts and his five complicit corrupt colleagues in the Supreme Court majority are playing CalvinBall, after all. And Trump and the Trumpists will, two years from now, find another rationale for the tariffs if they even want to stay the course then:

Alan Wolff does the work of the LORD, or perhaps of Sisyphus.

Share

He says, correctly, that the Trump administration’s newest justification for near-universal tariffs—pressing other countries to fight forced labor—is a pretextual repackaging of a policy the courts have already rejected twice, and it will likely fail on the same grounds, because the Constitution vests tariff-setting power in Congress, not the president. We have now speed-run: national emergency → balance of payments → forced labor), with each legal theory a disposable vehicle. None of the legal theories are remotely plausible. But there is an abundant supply of them.

He believes that the constitutional problem is decisive: courts will likely overturn on major-questions and non-delegation grounds regardless of the economic merits: “To paraphrase Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., times change, the Constitution does not. Setting broad tariffs is the sole prerogative of the Congress, not the president”.

But in the most important ways, Wolff’s analysis here is wrong. That Trump will lose in court is beside the point. The question is what happens in the two years that normal legal process would take to produce a definitive Supreme Court ruling. During those two years—or however long it is before chaos-monkey Trump pivots and decides to do something else with the tariff lever—are the tariffs collected, or not?

The tariffs will be collected. US importers and foreign exporters will ask the Court of International Trade to enjoin the tariffs. The Court will ask them to show both (a) likelihood of ultimate success and (b) irreparable harm if the injunction is not granted. They will clear hurdle (a), but not hurdle (b), as the Court will reason that the money collected can be refunded with interest if the plaintiffs ultimately win. That effectively having to find the financing to deposit additional money in what is effectively an escrow account plus to take on the administrative costs of keeping track and then managing the future refund process—that is a substantial burden on trade. And it will discourage it.

Thus, as the tariffs are collected, people will be further goaded to increasethe speed with which everybody in the world acts to cut the risky and unpredictable United States and its producers out of their value chains.

Plus, of course, with this corrupt six-justice Supreme Court majority—as has been clear of the Roberts court since ObamaCare—you cannot tell what they will do. Chief Justice Roberts does not call balls and strikes. Chief Justice Robert plays CalvinBall, limited only according to some calculus I do not understand of whether he thinks he can “can get away with it”. And Roberts is the most reasonable of the six justice corrupt majority. So Wolff’s hope that major-questions and non-delegation will rule here might turn out to be vain: those doctrines constrain Democratic presidents from doing things the corrupt six-justice majority does not like. They constrain Republican presidents only at their whim.

Give a gift subscription

CROSSPOST: ALAN WOLFF: Trump’s New Tariffs Over Forced Labor Are Unlikely to Survive a Court Challenge

<https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2026/trumps-new-tariffs-over-forced-labor-are-unlikely-survive-court> <https://www.piie.com/>

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Carlos BarriaAlan Wm. Wolff (PIIE)Date: July 23, 2026 12:10 PM

The Trump administration is again shifting its stated rationale for placing comprehensive tariffs on imports of nearly all goods from virtually all countries. After originally presenting such measures as responses to a national emergency and next as remedies for balance-of-payments problems, officials now characterize their latest effort as a tool to press other countries to intensify their efforts against forced labor.

The first two approaches failed to achieve the administration’s objective of lasting world-wide US tariffs, and the third will probably fail as well.

The planned tariffs to combat forced labor, which could start taking effect this week, again raise the question of whether the president has the legal authority to determine and implement US tariff policy—an authority that the Constitution vests in Congress. The answer is no: Congress did not delegate authority of such breadth to the president. It cannot constitutionally do so. These new tariffs would represent another case of presidential overreach. If they were challenged in court, the Supreme Court would likely overturn them.

President Donald Trump first attempted to establish near-global tariffs in April 2025 when he imposed his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs, claiming authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The Supreme Court struck them down in February 2026. He then ordered temporary 10 percent across-the-board tariffs purportedly to address a balance of payments problem under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. The Court of International Trade found that the United States did not have a balance of payment problem as specified under this law, and these tariffs expire on July 24.

Foreseeing their expiration, the administration in June proposed additional tariffs of 10 percent or 12.5 percent on goods from 60 economies under Section 301(b) of the Trade Act of 1974, alleging that their governments failed to prevent imports of goods made with forced labor. US officials have signaled they could start rolling out these measures this week. There are more problems with these proposed tariffs than the lack of legal authority. The chief economic downside of imposing a comprehensive tariff is that Americans, whether businesses or end consumers, bear 90 percent of its cost, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Moreover, there is no reason to believe that the proposed tariffs will be an effective means of reducing forced labor abroad. The world has become accustomed to higher US tariffs. There is no evidence that changing the US rationale for them will materially reduce forced labor in other countries.

The tariffs’ design also raises questions about their purpose. Why are the 60 targeted economies divided into just two categories—those with laws addressing forced labor and those without—and then assigned uniform tariffs of 10 or 12.5 percent? The lack of differentiation suggests that the administration’s primary objective may be maintaining global tariffs, rather than crafting a carefully calibrated response to the problem of forced labor. If the goal were genuinely to induce stronger action against forced labor, one would expect the measures to reflect meaningful differences in countries’ conduct and performance on that issue.

Forced labor is already dealt with under US law

The United States has barred imports of goods made with forced labor since 1930. In addition, Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 identifies the use of forced labor as an actionable foreign practice subject to the president’s retaliatory authority. There is nothing in US law to suggest that the government should respond to forced labor abroad by imposing secondary sanctions, which penalize one country for its dealings with another. Even the US response to apartheid in South Africa did not rely on secondary sanctions.

The United States is not a party to international agreements that condemn the use of forced labor

The International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Forced Labor Convention, agreed to in 1930, requires the 181 ratifying states to suppress its use in all forms. The ILO Protocol of 2014 to the Forced Labor Convention updates the 1930 convention by requiring member states to take effective measures to prevent forced labor, protect victims, and provide access to remedies and compensation. Some 61 countries have ratified it. The United States, however, has not ratified either of these two conventions perhaps in part because the United States often subcontracts the operation of prisons to private companies which may profit from the use of forced labor.

The World Trade Organization (WTO), which administers the rules of the trading system, leaves countries free to act against the products of prison labor. Following the recent WTO ministerial conference in Cameroon, US Trade Representative (USTR) Jamieson Greer criticized the WTO as “not a serious forum” for global trade governance, specifically regarding global seafood commerce and fisheries. It is true that the 166 WTO members rarely find a consensus for adoption of binding rules and the WTO’s dispute settlement system can no longer issue final determinations. With respect to both shortcomings, however, the United States is currently an important source of the WTO’s ineffectiveness. It has taken the lead in preventing enforcement of the rules and has begun siding with those WTO members who resist agreeing to new rules. It could act differently and work to find support of other sympathetic members for an agreed approach.

What should be done?

The United States, the world’s largest economy, has enormous leverage in its dealings with other countries, as Trump has proved during his second term. Were the nations of the world largely to agree with the United States to address the problem of forced labor for reasons of morality or because doing so is deemed of critical importance to America’s and others’ commercial interests, there would be a fairly good opportunity to engage in negotiations to address the issue. But the United States has not called for the negotiation of an international convention on this subject. Of course, international negotiation would not be useful if the administration’s primary goal is restoring global tariffs rather than acting against forced labor.

Will the courts allow retaliatory authority, under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, never used before in this manner, to be used now against multiple countries to impose secondary sanctions? The use is plausible in other circumstances. It is, after all, tariff authority. It is discretionary. Congress specified forced labor as a target of the statute. Clearly the statute could be used against individual countries that are a conduit for forced labor if there is sufficient adverse impact on the US economy. But Congress has not delegated to the president authority of the breadth claimed by the Trump administration. The Supreme Court is not likely to allow this expansion of the president’s retaliatory authority under Section 301 to substitute for the Congress’ role in setting tariffs generally. The Supreme Court held in February that tariffs were not a tool granted by Congress to the president to deal with a national emergency. For a balance of payments crisis, Congress limited presidential tariff action to 150 days and described requirements for its use. To use the retaliatory authority of Section 301, the acts, policies, or practices of a country must be found to burden US commerce. That requirement is not clearly satisfied for the 60 targeted countries, which account for nearly all US imports and 90 percent of world trade. Additionally, nothing in the history or use of the statute implies authority to levy a tariff against all products from all countries in the form of secondary sanctions.

The Supreme Court stipulated in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), that executive agencies cannot interpret for themselves the extent of their authority. It must also find that neither can the president do so when the Constitution provides otherwise. To paraphrase Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., times change, the Constitution does not. Setting broad tariffs is the sole prerogative of the Congress, not the president.

<https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2026/trumps-new-tariffs-over-forced-labor-are-unlikely-survive-court> <https://www.piie.com/>

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##crosspost-alan-wolff-trumps-new-tariffs-over-forced-labor-are-unlikely-to-survive-a-court-challenge
##neofascism
##crosspost
##the-subheadline-the-trump-administration-is-again-shifting-its-stated-rationale-for-placing-comprehensive-tariffs-60-country-tariffs-in-search-of-a-human-rights-pretextual-costume
#alan-wolff-trumps-new-tariffs-over-forced-labor-are-unlikely-to-survive-a-court-challenge
#alan-wolff
#trumps-new-tariffs-over-forced-labor-are-unlikely-to-survive-a-court-challenge
#chaos-monkey
#chaos-monkey-tariffs
#corrupt-supreme-court

A car company by revenue, a rounding error by profit, and a meme by market cap—and with $300,000B of global liquid financial assets, there is an insufficient short-selling kitty to make things consistent…

Three stories can justify Tesla at 24x its fundamental worth: a SpaceX merger put, bottomless fanboy enthusiasm, and the ghost of 2021. None of them should survive contact with the hard cash-on-the-barrelhead logic of a well-functioning market. And yet.

Share

The News

• Tesla revenue for the quarter ending March 31, 2026 was $22.39B. Tesla net income for the quarter ending March 31, 2026 was $0.48B.

  • Tesla annual revenue for 2025 was $94.827B, a 2.93% decline from 2024.

  • Tesla annual revenue for 2024 was $97.69B, a 0.95% increase from 2023.

  • Tesla annual revenue for 2023 was $96.773B, a 18.8% increase from 2022.

• Tesla net income for the quarter ending June 30, 2026 was $28.24B. Tesla net income for the quarter ending March 31, 2026 was $1.11B.

  • Tesla annual net income for 2025 was $3.794B, a 46.5% decline from 2024.

  • Tesla annual net income for 2024 was $7.091B, a 52.72% decline from 2023.

  • Tesla annual net income for 2023 was $14.997B, a 19.18% increase from 2022.

Give a gift subscription

The Record (as of Yesterday Morning)

Get 75% off a group subscription

As a car-making and car-selling company, Tesla Motors is a $100B a year revenue company. As a GAAP profit-making auto company, Tesla Motors is a $5B a year at most or so company burning $6B a year on “AI”, which is generally regarded as either a zero-profit or a winner-take-all industry . As a meme-stock, the equity market capitalization of Tesla Motors is $1200B, down -$200B from where it was yesterday. Auto companies tend to have P/E ratios in the range of 3 (Stellantis, that is Chrysler-Fiat-Peugeot-Opel), to 10 (Toyota, with four times Tesla’s revenue and one-fifth of its equity market capitalization).

To the extent that there are cases for valuing Tesla at $1200B rather than $50B, they are three:

1. Elon Musk really does not want the bad headlines and the reputational hit that would come were Tesla’s equity valuation to collapse, therefore he will merge it into SpaceX, which has a profitable business in the form of StarLink, currently valued at $1500B, and that Tesla-SpaceX merger put has to be incorporated into Tesla’s valuation.

2. Infinite is the potential enthusiasm of MuskFanBoys:

   Refer a friend

   If BitCoin, which is a financial ecosystem for which nobody pretends any more that there will be any real-world use case in which BitCoin holdings can be used to generate profits for a financial intermediary of any kind, is worth $1300B, then Tesla can stay $1300B above its “fundamental” value of $50B indefinitely. Moreover, there is no reason why MuskFanBoys cannot become even more enthusiastic about Musk than they are right now.

3. Elon just might do it again. In 2019 Tesla was a zero-profits company worth $40B on the equity market. By the end of 2021 it was a $1200B equity valuation company that was about to make more than $12B in the next year. Musk will not succeed in all of his ambitions for Full Self-Driving, CyberCabs, Optimus robots, and battery energy storage systems, but he may well succeed in at least one of them. Plus Tesla did deliver nearly 500,000 cars last quarter.

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

But I do confess to being somewhat flummoxed. There are roughly $300,000B in tradeable financial assets in the world. Tesla is 0.4% of them. It would not seem to be a big deal for the average investor holding those $300,000B to be willing to devote, say, 5% of their holdings to obvious shorts. That would give us a $15000B short-selling kitty in the world as a whole, for which Tesla would be a principal target.

But it seems not. Why not?

Do I have anything to add? Not really. The state of intellectual play here on why the limits to arbitrage are so strong does not seem to have advanced much since Shleifer-Vishny (1997) <https://shleifer.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/limits-arbitrage> <https://personal.lse.ac.uk/vayanos/Papers/LOAST_ARFE10.pdf>.

Leave a comment

Well, there is one 90-year-old paper on this that I think is seriously evergreen. You can probably guess what it is :-) :

Read more

An expansion of the world-economic prosperous core countries from 900 million to 1.3 billion and of peripheral as share of core per capita income from 12% to 24% between 1990 and 2023 were absolutely wonderful things to see. But for the past decade, the relative income gap between core and periphery has not shrunk at all. It is not as bad as the 1820 to 1975 Great Divergence. But we ought to be doing much, much better…

Tibor Rutar reads Sandefur and Subramanian (2025) <https://www.chat-gdp.org/p/we-were-wrong-about-convergence>:

Share

Tibor Rutar: Is the Capitalist Core Exploiting the Periphery, or Is It Just Deep Roots? <https://statsandsociety.substack.com/p/is-capitalist-core-exploiting-the>: ‘Between… 1995 and the late 2010s, a wonderful and never before seen thing was happening… substantial economic convergence between the developed and developing world. As is usually the case, most everyone was growing in absolute terms, but [then]… everyone outside the developed world was… closing the relative distance with the developed… because the poor ones’ [growth] rate was so incredibly fast….

[As] the Soviet experiment collapsed, as China and India liberalized, and as more economic openness and market integration swept the world, the poor finally started outpacing the rich, world-systems theory be damned…. WDI data… [show] that the periphery-core ratio rose from 11.5% in 1990 to 23.7% in 2023...

Give a gift subscription

Moreover, there is the enlargement of what is by any real definition the “core” of the world economy: Portugal, Greece, Israel, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Cyprus, Slovenia, Malta, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macao, Chile, Puerto Rico, and Croatia, plus—by any sensible way of dividing up the world—the country-sized Chinese provinces of Jiangsu, Fujian, and Zhejiang plus the megamuncipalities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. That is 400 million people in addition to the 900 million in the countries already in the core as of 1960. (Cf.: a total world population of 8.4 billion today.)

Now there are relative losers since 1995: Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Libya; Yemen, Syria, Haiti, the Central African Republic, Eritrea; Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon. But they are few, and the causes are clear: it was kleptocratic communism for the first group, war and rumors of war and civil war for the second group, and the resource curse for the third.

Why the apparent end of the short summer of relative convergence? Sandefur and Subramanian speculate that it is the result of the end of international neoliberalism and domestic liberalism:

Justin Sandefur & Arvind Subramanian: We were wrong about convergence <https://www.chat-gdp.org/p/we-were-wrong-about-convergence>: ‘Several years ago, we celebrated a new era of unconditional convergence of global incomes. Since then, the trend has reversed…. In a Foreign Affairs piece last year, we argued that “hyperglobalization” was a key driver of convergence…. Trade as a share of GDP has either levelled off or declined in both low- and middle- income countries…. But is there something much bigger going on?… Key driver[s] of convergence… a turn toward markets but more fundamentally that a majority of developing countries began to follow a variant of U.S. President Barack Obama’s famous foreign policy dictum: “Don’t do stupid s***.”… The world has become more illiberal, majoritarian and nationalistic, reflected in perceptible democratic backsliding…. The links between weak political institutions/illiberalism and economic outcomes are tenuous at least over short horizons, but there are connections…. Crackdown[s] on private sector entrepreneurship that produced frontier technologies and services… the weaponization of the state against political opposition has also been directed at domestic and foreign investors… defiance of macro-economic orthodoxy… [as] a handmaiden of political authoritarianism…. Across the Sahel’s “coup belt”, military takeovers in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso have come with economic volatility, withdrawal from regional trading blocs, and fiscal contraction in the face of lost aid revenue…. Seclining trading opportunities externally and deteriorating institutions domestically is a cocktail that is not conducive for long-run economic growth…

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##the-short-summer-of-crossnation-convergence-in-real-gdp-per-capita-levels-chart-of-the-day
##inequality-and-domination
##chart-of-the-day
##from-1995-to-2020-relative-convergence-was-very-real-and-something-completely-unprecedented-in-the-economic-history-of-the-world-since-the-start-of-the-industrial-revolution
#the-short-summer-of-crossnation-convergence-in-real-gdp-per-capita-levels
#cross-nation-convergence
#great-divergence
#neoliberalism
#democratic-backsliding