Brad DeLong
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
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What they believe
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Natural-language interfaces are wonderful ways to interface with information-technology systems much of the time.
Yes: natural-language interfaces are wonderful ways to interface with information-technology systems. Much of the time.
braddelong.substack.comSaid 19 Oct 2026This on korrents
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The Fed's odds of threading the needle and getting inflation back down to target while avoiding a recession get much lower
The Fed’s odds of threading the needle and getting inflation back down to target while avoiding a recession get much lower
braddelong.substack.comSaid 15 Oct 2026This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These 2: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
Feed
As its own page →Hiding
19 October
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korrents.com
Natural-language interfaces are wonderful ways to interface with information-technology systems much of the time.Their words
Yes: natural-language interfaces are wonderful ways to interface with information-technology systems. Much of the time.
When Software ‘Bots Go Feral: MONDAY MAMLMSbraddelong.substack.com
18 October
17 October
15 October
- Mastodon
- NewsletterCROSSPOST: LARRY MacDONALD: How Karl Marx Achieved Financial Independence
- Mastodon
From one piece The First Time a Fed Easing Move Has Triggered a Sharp Jump in Long-Term Nominal Treasury Bond Rates: CHART OF THE DAY 2 beliefs · braddelong.substack.com
From one piece An Inflation Report That Is Disappointingly High: CHART OF THE DAY 2 beliefs · braddelong.substack.com
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korrents.com
LLMs cannot create and transmit meaning through the warping of language into new forms.Their words
That creation and transmission of meaning through the warping of language into new forms is not something an LLM, for which all there is is the text, can do.
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korrents.com
Bond traders now treat the Fed as one voice among several, rather than as the best-informed one.Their words
Breaking that rule tells you bond traders now treat the Fed as one voice among several, not as the best-informed one.
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Their words
That a Fed easing move is immediately followed by a sharp jump in long-term rates strongly suggests that the Federal Reserve has lost control over the narrative governing bond-market expectations.
+ 2 more
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Their words
Thus for the Fed not to hike interest rates at its next meeting later this October is a highly political decision.
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Their words
The Fed’s odds of threading the needle and getting inflation back down to target while avoiding a recession get much lower
14 October
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Their words
But after 1917 the axis of global political economy and strategic polity was that everyone was much better off when the countries that were to become Valery Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Schmidt, and Gerald Ford’s G-7 hung together (even though Germany and Italy required some—persuasion before they would see it that way). Trump has reversed that.
CROSSPOST: SEVA GUNITSKY: Trump’s “Near Abroad”braddelong.substack.com
13 October
From one piece CROSSPOST: JOHN GRUBER & BEN THOMPSON: Meanness & Claude 2 beliefs · braddelong.substack.com
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korrents.com
As LLMs are enmeshed in human cognition, they increasingly do not act as stochastic parrots.Their words
Properly trained, RAGed, and harnessed LLMs may still be stochastic parrot, but as they are enmeshed in the spheres of human cognition and public reason they increasingly do not act as stochastic parrot.
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korrents.com
LLMs will not give rise to a Digital God.Their words
It is not because it will give rise to a Digital God. To think that is still seems to me to be a category error of the same kind as thinking that a steamship is the same order of being as a dragon.
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korrents.com
Monetary policy works by managing expectations.Their words
Monetary policy works by managing expectations: For what moves spending is the market’s expected future path of short rates, which feeds into long rates, equity prices and exchange rates.
12 October
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Their words
The “Meditation”’ of Marcus Aurelius is not a Stoic textbook. It is a tired man trying to talk himself out of bed in the morning, and into doing a job he never wanted to have...
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Their words
Warsh’s press conference and the FOMC committee statements he is letting through are pointlessly opaque.
9 October
- Mastodon
- NewsletterHenry Farrell of Johns Hopkins Agora Comes to Berkeley: FOG & FLATLANDS
- Mastodon
From one piece (SEMI-)CROSSPOST/HOISTED: MATTHEW YGLESIAS (2022): What I Learned Co-Founding Vox 3 beliefs · braddelong.substack.com
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korrents.com
Readers will increasingly pay for domain-knowledge expertise that filters through AI-generated content.Their words
That will be a large part of what readers will increasingly pay for: domain-knowledge expertise visibly hacking through increasing amounts of AI-slop.
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Their words
Google Zero—Google driving zero traffic to anyone else’s website—is coming.
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Their words
Being discoverable is no longer the asset. Being trusted is.
8 October
Nothing matches.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 66 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Natural-language interfaces are wonderful ways to interface with information-technology systems much of the time.
Yes: natural-language interfaces are wonderful ways to interface with information-technology systems. Much of the time.
When Software ‘Bots Go Feral: MONDAY MAMLMS Said 19 Oct 2026
The Fed's odds of threading the needle and getting inflation back down to target while avoiding a recession get much lower
The Fed’s odds of threading the needle and getting inflation back down to target while avoiding a recession get much lower
An Inflation Report That Is Disappointingly High: CHART OF THE DAY Said 15 Oct 2026
Skipping an October interest rate hike would be a highly political decision
Thus for the Fed not to hike interest rates at its next meeting later this October is a highly political decision.
An Inflation Report That Is Disappointingly High: CHART OF THE DAY Said 15 Oct 2026
Show 57 more
A Fed easing move being immediately followed by a sharp jump in long-term rates suggests the Federal Reserve has lost control over the narrative governing bond-market expectations.
That a Fed easing move is immediately followed by a sharp jump in long-term rates strongly suggests that the Federal Reserve has lost control over the narrative governing bond-market expectations.
The First Time a Fed Easing Move Has Triggered a Sharp Jump in Long-Term Nominal Treasury Bond Rates: CHART OF THE DAY Said 15 Oct 2026
Bond traders now treat the Fed as one voice among several, rather than as the best-informed one.
Breaking that rule tells you bond traders now treat the Fed as one voice among several, not as the best-informed one.
The First Time a Fed Easing Move Has Triggered a Sharp Jump in Long-Term Nominal Treasury Bond Rates: CHART OF THE DAY Said 15 Oct 2026
LLMs cannot create and transmit meaning through the warping of language into new forms.
That creation and transmission of meaning through the warping of language into new forms is not something an LLM, for which all there is is the text, can do.
What LLMs Can & Do Do for Me, & What They Cannot & Don’t: THURSDAY THAUMATURGY Said 15 Oct 2026
Trump has reversed the historical trend of the United States acting as a leader within a cohesive North Atlantic alliance.
But after 1917 the axis of global political economy and strategic polity was that everyone was much better off when the countries that were to become Valery Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Schmidt, and Gerald Ford’s G-7 hung together (even though Germany and Italy required some—persuasion before they would see it that way). Trump has reversed that.
CROSSPOST: SEVA GUNITSKY: Trump’s “Near Abroad” Said 14 Oct 2026
Monetary policy works by managing expectations.
Monetary policy works by managing expectations: For what moves spending is the market’s expected future path of short rates, which feeds into long rates, equity prices and exchange rates.
What Jón Steinsson Learned from Mike Woodford in Econ 420: ENCOMIUM OF THE DAY Said 13 Oct 2026
LLMs will not give rise to a Digital God.
It is not because it will give rise to a Digital God. To think that is still seems to me to be a category error of the same kind as thinking that a steamship is the same order of being as a dragon.
CROSSPOST: JOHN GRUBER & BEN THOMPSON: Meanness & Claude Said 13 Oct 2026
As LLMs are enmeshed in human cognition, they increasingly do not act as stochastic parrots.
Properly trained, RAGed, and harnessed LLMs may still be stochastic parrot, but as they are enmeshed in the spheres of human cognition and public reason they increasingly do not act as stochastic parrot.
CROSSPOST: JOHN GRUBER & BEN THOMPSON: Meanness & Claude Said 13 Oct 2026
Warsh's press conference and FOMC committee statements are pointlessly opaque.
Warsh’s press conference and the FOMC committee statements he is letting through are pointlessly opaque.
CROSSPOST: CLAUDIA SAHM: Hand the Pen to the Committee Said 12 Oct 2026
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is not a Stoic textbook.
The “Meditation”’ of Marcus Aurelius is not a Stoic textbook. It is a tired man trying to talk himself out of bed in the morning, and into doing a job he never wanted to have...
A Second-Rate Philosopher I Cannot Read in His Original Greek: REGRET OF THE DAY Said 12 Oct 2026
Being trusted is more valuable than being discoverable.
Being discoverable is no longer the asset. Being trusted is.
(SEMI-)CROSSPOST/HOISTED: MATTHEW YGLESIAS (2022): What I Learned Co-Founding Vox Said 9 Oct 2026
Google is moving toward driving zero traffic to other people's websites.
Google Zero—Google driving zero traffic to anyone else’s website—is coming.
(SEMI-)CROSSPOST/HOISTED: MATTHEW YGLESIAS (2022): What I Learned Co-Founding Vox Said 9 Oct 2026
Readers will increasingly pay for domain-knowledge expertise that filters through AI-generated content.
That will be a large part of what readers will increasingly pay for: domain-knowledge expertise visibly hacking through increasing amounts of AI-slop.
(SEMI-)CROSSPOST/HOISTED: MATTHEW YGLESIAS (2022): What I Learned Co-Founding Vox Said 9 Oct 2026
LLMs are a newer, smaller shoggoth that condense human writing into useful but lossy summaries.
LLMs are a newer, smaller shoggoth. They condense human writing into useful but lossy summaries, no lossier than prices, bureaucratic categories, & opinion polls.
Henry Farrell of Johns Hopkins Agora Comes to Berkeley: FOG & FLATLANDS Said 9 Oct 2026
AI stocks are behaving as if they are insensitive to interest rate changes.
The proportional response of their prices to changes in interest rates should therefore be by far the highest. Interest rates go up. Their prices should go down, proportionately, the most. And yet it hasn’t happened.
Katie Martin & Rob Armstrong: There Is Only One Trade: PODCAST OF THE DAY Said 8 Oct 2026
Journalists who fail to compare policy numbers to their proper magnitudes are accomplices in the disinformation machine.
Journalists who do not count the zeroes and compare them to the proper magnitudes are not bystanders or generalists, but accomplices in the disinformation bullshit machine.
CROSSPOST: JUSTIN WOLFERS: An Agreement to Agree About an Earlier Agreement Said 7 Oct 2026
The political economy of violent commitment suggests that once leaders and publics commit to high-salience conflicts with identity stakes, feasible policies tilt toward prolongation rather than settlement.
Call it the political economy of violent commitment: once leaders, movements, and publics buy into a high-salience conflict with identity stakes, the feasible policies tilt toward prolongation rather than settlement.
CROSSPOST/HIGHLIGHTED: ROBERT FARLEY: Three Years After October 7, 2023: & Now Everything Is Worse Said 7 Oct 2026
Memory weaponized becomes a veto on human prosperity, peace, and life.
Ernest Renan’s grim lesson about the necessity of historical forgetfulness applies not just to nations but to all human communities seeking peace an proserity: memory weaponized becomes a veto on human prosperity, peace, and life.
CROSSPOST/HIGHLIGHTED: ROBERT FARLEY: Three Years After October 7, 2023: & Now Everything Is Worse Said 7 Oct 2026
All Grand Narratives are false, but having one is an essential foundation to being able to think at all.
All Grand Narratives are false; but having a Grand Narrative is an essential foundation to being able to think at all
The Largely-Fruitless Task of Trying to Make Sense of Human History: (LATE) TUESDAY TRENDS & TURMOIL Said 7 Oct 2026
Modern economic growth has doubled technological capabilities every generation since 1870.
how modern economic growth since 1870 has doubled our technological capabilities every generation.
The Largely-Fruitless Task of Trying to Make Sense of Human History: (LATE) TUESDAY TRENDS & TURMOIL Said 7 Oct 2026
Only the American racist right is fearful that immigrants are not assimilating.
Only the American racist right is fearful that immigrants are not assimilating.
CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: There Is No “Indian Question” Said 7 Oct 2026
The American identity is not based on ethnicity or blood-and-soil.
What is this American identity? It is not ethnic, not blood-and-soil.
CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: There Is No “Indian Question” Said 7 Oct 2026
The malevolent impact of the Supreme Court on the state of the law needs to be rolled back by court expansion.
Their malevolent impact on the state of the law needs to be rolled back by court expansion to neutralize their votes in the future and to rollback their illegal and unconstitutional decisions in the past
CROSSPOST: STEVE VLADECK: 256. So Unexplained: Justice Alito’s Non-Responsive Emergency Docket Defense Said 6 Oct 2026
Deep reading and substantial continued engagement builds one's own cognitive knowledge structures in an important way.
There is a great sense in which deep reading and substantial continued engagement builds one own cognitive knowledge structures in an important way.
Not the Interface Between the Machine & the Model But the One Between the Model & the Human: (LATE) MONDAY MAMLMS Said 6 Oct 2026
Rosa Luxemburg was right that trying to run the Marxist revolution playbook in a poor technologically retarded agricultural society would produce nothing good.
Rosa Luxemburg (and many others!) pointed out that trying to run that playbook in a poor technologically retarded agricultural society would produce nothing good. And she was right:
The Highly-Cultured Vladimir Lenin: SANEWASHING OF THE DAY Said 5 Oct 2026
AI is creating user surplus and capital deepening, even if it is not yet showing up in TFP data.
“AI” is certainly doing (1) (and will keep doing so unless it goes horribly wrong the way so much social media did, and our brains are hacked to our detriment by AI-slop). And AI is certainly doing (2): that is growing wedge over the past three years between the “labor productivity growth” and the “TFP growth” line.
Aggregate Total Factor Productivity & “Artificial Intelligence”: CHART OF THE DAY Said 5 Oct 2026
The creative-arts sector is perhaps the hardest case of all for sustaining paid employment through technological change.
Those two factors make the creative-arts sector perhaps the heaviest of heaviest lifts as far as paid employment and technological change are concerned.
Arts Employment in America: CHART OF THE DAY Said 2 Oct 2026
Solar power's global rise is a supply-side story driven by Chinese overcapacity, very cheap panels, and households and businesses defecting from the grid.
Globally, solar's rise is a supply-side story: Chinese overcapacity, panels at $0.12/W, households and businesses defecting from the grid.
Rooftop Solar Rules Elsewhere!: CHART OF THE DAY Said 1 Oct 2026
For U.S. solar, policy and plumbing now matter more than the price of a panel.
in the U.S., policy and plumbing now matter more than the price of a panel
Rooftop Solar Rules Elsewhere!: CHART OF THE DAY Said 1 Oct 2026
Deporting immigrants tends to lower native-born employment and wages
The pattern vindicates the “complementarity view” of East & al. 2023, Cox & East 2026, and many, many more: removing immigrant workers tends to lower, not raise, native-born employment and wages.
CROSSPOST: MIKE KONCZAL: Can We Find Literally Any Sign Deportations Are Helping Native-Born Workers? Said 1 Oct 2026
A self made legible to all roles at once maximizes role strain rather than resolving it
A self made legible to all roles at once maximizes role strain rather than resolving it.
Sharding the Self: Ben Thompson & FaceBook’s Muse Agentic System: THURSDAY THAUMATURGY Said 1 Oct 2026
After the An Lushan rebellion, China's elite spent a thousand years ensuring no general could rebel again, which may have cost China the ability to lead the Industrial Revolution.
Having survived, its governing élite and state apparatus spent the next thousand years arranging its institutions so that no imperial general could ever successfully such a thing again. That arrangement kept the emperors and their courts relatively safe. It may also have cost Chinese civilization the ability to lead the Industrial Revolution.
Did a Fat, Laughing Barbarian General Divert the Industrial Revolution Away from China a Thousand Years After His Death? Said 27 Sept 2026
Habits of mind and institutions suited to an era of superabundance have not yet been built, and reflexes formed under scarcity misfire badly in it.
But we have not yet built the habits of mind, or the institutions, appropriate to its successor. We are like the first generation of factory workers who still tried to farm on Sundays: our reflexes were formed for a régime of scarcity, and they misfire badly in a régime of superabundance.
Did a Fat, Laughing Barbarian General Divert the Industrial Revolution Away from China a Thousand Years After His Death? Said 27 Sept 2026
Each new Trump outrage buys a day of base enthusiasm, then adds to a strong-disapproval pile that never shrinks.
Each new outrage buys a day of base enthusiasm, and then compounds the strong-disapproval pile that never shrinks.
Yes. We Loathe Trump. We Really Loathe Trump. For Very Good Reasons. And We Are Many: CHART OF THE DAY Said 25 Sept 2026
The café is one of the last remaining machines for manufacturing unplanned collisions, meaning chance encounters with people.
The café is one of the last machines we have for manufacturing the unplanned collisions.
Sana’a Café: Dwight & Telegraph: FRIDAY FOG & FLATLANDS Said 25 Sept 2026
The coffeehouse provides stimulation without overwhelming attention.
The café supplies enough stimulation to keep the vigilance system idling, but not so much that it captures you.
Sana’a Café: Dwight & Telegraph: FRIDAY FOG & FLATLANDS Said 25 Sept 2026
Coffeehouses are an efficient bundle of social and cognitive benefits.
Coffeehouses are an efficient bundling of: a legitimate reason to leave the house; a socially sanctioned excuse to be idle in public while your back-brain works; a stimulant delivered in a ritual that paces its consumption; and a nonzero probability of a useful accidental encounter.
Sana’a Café: Dwight & Telegraph: FRIDAY FOG & FLATLANDS Said 25 Sept 2026
Republican foreign policy is systematically bad due to inattention to the risks of hawkishness.
But… Republicans have systematically bad foreign policy that is inattentive to the downside risk of saber-rattling and hawkishness….
Real Price of Diesel: CHART OF THE DAY Said 23 Sept 2026
The 'machine god' metaphor for AI is unhelpful and limits thinking about the technology.
it is difficult to think of a way less helpful for coherent thought to think about “AI” than to think of it as a “Digital God”.
CROSSPOST: HENRY FARRELL: Machine God Metaphors Eat Your Brain Said 22 Sept 2026
The important live questions about AI concern which metaphors, as abstraction layers that discard information, are useful right now.
That means that the important and live questions are about what metaphors—what abstraction layers, throwing away information so that the problems become things we can grasp and think about—are useful right now?
CROSSPOST: HENRY FARRELL: Machine God Metaphors Eat Your Brain Said 22 Sept 2026
Henry Farrell's framing of MAMLMs as a socio-cultural technology is one very useful metaphor for thinking about AI.
Henry Farrell’s “MAMLMs are a socio-cultural technology” is one very useful one.
CROSSPOST: HENRY FARRELL: Machine God Metaphors Eat Your Brain Said 22 Sept 2026
Curation is an inevitable bet on judgment over completeness: accepting that almost everything will be missed, and investing attention in a few trusted curators.
Curation is thus an inevitable bet on judgment over completeness — you accept that you will miss almost everything, and you invest your scarce attention in a few people whose sense of the common thread you trust.
READING: BARRY RITHOLTZ: How I Build My Reading Lists Said 22 Sept 2026
Barry Ritholtz's reading-list curation is quietly self-defeating, since the better it gets, the more it adds to the information flood it aims to tame.
Barry Ritholtz’s guide to building a reading list is generous, disciplined, and quietly self-defeating — because the better his curation, the more it adds to the very flood it’s meant to tame.
READING: BARRY RITHOLTZ: How I Build My Reading Lists Said 22 Sept 2026
Kevin Warsh's communication strategy is intended to limit his exposure to criticism from Donald Trump or the bond market.
But, Claudia, it is necessary confusion given that the point is to triangulate in order to limit the surfaces he leaves open to attack from either a disappointed Trump or a disappointed bond market.
CROSSPOST: CLAUDIA SAHM: Questions for the [Fed] Chair [Kevin Warsh] Said 21 Sept 2026
AI is unlikely to be a hyperprofits engine for research labs whose attached companies make money serving neural-network calculations from datacenters.
This week brought me news increasing my confidence with respect to one thing it is not: it is unlikely to be a hyperprofits engine for research labs with companies attached making money serving up calculations made in datacenters by simulated neural networks.
Real Technology, Phantom Profits: Who Is Likely to Actually Get Paid for the AI Buildout?: MONDAY MAMLMS Said 21 Sept 2026
The sell-side analysts making HyperScaler forecasts may lack detailed understanding of the technology and its deployment.
What bottom-up detailed understandings of the technology and its deployment do the guys with the spreadsheets working for the sell-side actually have here?
HyperScaler Operating Cash Flow “Consensus” Forecast: CHART OF THE DAY Said 21 Sept 2026
Modern PR and corporate values statements are distinctively pathological because they are designed to never face an opposing advocate.
the distinctive modern pathology is unopposed rhetoric: values statements and PR that pre-empt criticism as they are designed to never face an advocate on the other side.
CROSSPOST: NICHOLAS GRUEN: Hobbes on Spin & Bullshit Said 20 Sept 2026
Modern institutional speech does face adversaries, through journalism, litigation, regulators, social media, and whistleblowers.
it is not true that modern institutional speech faces "no adversary": we have journalism, litigation, regulators, social media pile-ons, whistleblowers, and o on.
CROSSPOST: NICHOLAS GRUEN: Hobbes on Spin & Bullshit Said 20 Sept 2026
Much disagreement is genuinely rooted in conflicting values or contested facts, not merely a lack of institutional standing for evidence.
Disagreement is, often, genuinely about values or truly contested facts.
CROSSPOST: NICHOLAS GRUEN: Hobbes on Spin & Bullshit Said 20 Sept 2026
Anthropic prices its Claude subscription plans as loss leaders relative to its own API rates.
The subscription tiers are still enormous loss leaders: $20/month for your first $200/month of tokens at API rates for the "Pro" tier, and $100 or $200/month for your first $1500 or $3000/month of tokens at the "Max 5x" or "Max 20x" tiers.
CROSSPOST: SHELLAC: Suspiciously Precise Floats, or, How I Got Claude’s Real Limits Said 19 Sept 2026
Fear of Satanic symbolism in policymakers predicts poor judgment on Middle East policy.
Such people are unlikely to make good judgments about Middle East issues.
Trump’s State Department’s Obsession with What They Fear Are Satanic Bull-Statues: Laugh of the Day Said 19 Sept 2026
Roughly half of Trump's State Department political appointees hold apocalyptic End Times religious beliefs.
Perhaps half of Trump State Department political appointees are such people.
Trump’s State Department’s Obsession with What They Fear Are Satanic Bull-Statues: Laugh of the Day Said 19 Sept 2026
In ancient Canaanite and Israelite religion, the bull symbolized God Most High rather than the subordinate god Ba'al Haddad.
We won't even get into the fact that in the most ancient religions of Canaan and Israel, the bull is primarily a symbol of God Most High, not of the subordinate Ba'al Haddad
Trump’s State Department’s Obsession with What They Fear Are Satanic Bull-Statues: Laugh of the Day Said 19 Sept 2026
Reagan-era tax cuts for the rich did not deliver the faster economic growth they were promised in return.
The Reagan Revolution promised faster growth in exchange for lower taxes on the rich. The rich won; the growth never showed up.
Passthrough Tax Loopholes & the Rise of the American Gentry: CHART OF THE DAY Said 19 Sept 2026
More than half of the rise in the top 1% income share since 1985 came from pass-through business tax structuring, not tech or finance.
And more than half the rise in the top 1% share since 1985 flowed through the pass-through businesses that was a "tax efficiency innovation" feature of the Reagan Revolution.
Passthrough Tax Loopholes & the Rise of the American Gentry: CHART OF THE DAY Said 19 Sept 2026
The US war on Iran ended up delivering Osama bin Laden's original strategic goal of ending American military presence in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula
Osama bin Laden's one concrete strategic goal was to end the American military presence in the Gulf and on the Arabian Peninsula. A generation later, Donald Trump's war on Iran has apparently delivered it for him
(SEMI-)CROSSPOST: RICK PERLSTEIN: Bush’s War Is Finally Over: Al Qaeda Has Won Said 18 Sept 2026
In a conflict, a coherent weaker actor tends to prevail over an incoherent stronger one.
In a contest between a coherent weak actor and an incoherent strong one, bet on coherence.
CROSSPOST: SPENCER ACKERMAN: Fanute The Houthi Coup Said 18 Sept 2026
Freedom of navigation is a global public good that decays once its guarantor is seen as unwilling to bear its cost.
Freedom of navigation is a global public good, and public goods decay the instant their provider is revealed to be unwilling to pay for them.
CROSSPOST: SPENCER ACKERMAN: Fanute The Houthi Coup Said 18 Sept 2026
Beliefs others hold too
Republican foreign policy is systematically bad due to inattention to the risks of hawkishness. 2 hold this
But… Republicans have systematically bad foreign policy that is inattentive to the downside risk of saber-rattling and hawkishness….
Real Price of Diesel: CHART OF THE DAY Said 23 Sept 2026
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 8 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Disliked On the Edge
And yet I did not like Nate Silver’s latest book, On the Edge, much.
braddelong.substack.com 30 Jul 2026
Loved The Signal and the Noise
And, in addition, Nate Silver’s earlier book The Signal and the Noise was, I thought, brilliant. I am forever deeply in his debt for his making me better-informed and wiser across a whole bunch of different dimensions.
braddelong.substack.com 30 Jul 2026
Liked gemma4:26b-a4b-it-q4_K_M
The absolute gonzo gemma4:26b-a4b-it-q4_K_M performance-wise. What is going on here that is making it such an extraordinary outlier?
braddelong.substack.com 29 Jun 2026
Show 5 more
Recommends llama3.2:3b
Right now: llama3.2:3b appears to be the model for: is this email urgent?qwen3:8b appears to be the model for: summarize this 5000-word article. llama3.3:70b(q8) appears to be the model for: let’s write or debug some computer code.
braddelong.substack.com 29 Jun 2026
Recommends Sean Illing
Sean Illing is presenting his dissertation's vision of Camus trying to figure out how to deal with the world as painted by Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. Very interesting. Very much worth reading...
braddelong.substack.com 15 Oct 2025
Loved Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000
And I love the podcast of the book’s authors Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, “Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000”
braddelong.substack.com 3 Oct 2025
Recommends The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding
Loved Freedom from the Market
Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute has a wonderful new book: Freedom from the Market
braddelong.substack.com 23 Feb 2021
Where they publish
Newsletter Grasping Reality His Substack on economics, economic history and politics.
Recent
- When Software ‘Bots Go Feral: MONDAY MAMLMS 19 Oct 2026 There are surly agentic software ‘bots that announce their failures. There cheerful, diligent ones that do the wrong thing without announcing it, and they are much the worse...
- CROSSPOST: Ben Moll & Alex Imas: Will AI Soon Lead to Double-Digit [Annual Economic] Growth? 18 Oct 2026 The subheadline is: “Probably not. Here is why.” We ae not going to all move into the metaverse and wear sensory suits, which is what would be required for double-digit annual growth rates...
- In Which a Pedagogical Decision to Keep People from Majoring in Economics Has Massive Consequences: CHART/ANNOYANCE OF THE DAY 17 Oct 2026 Provoked by Jack Despain Zhou:, who has had it up to here & higher with Freddie deBoer’ since a year of schooling pays off 6–15%, how & what we teach cannot be irrelevant...
Show 17 more
- CROSSPOST: LARRY MacDONALD: How Karl Marx Achieved Financial Independence 15 Oct 2026 Marx wrote for newspapers and went into the market for a quick £400; Engels ran mills and traded cotton and held railways, gas companies and government bonds for the long term...
- What LLMs Can & Do Do for Me, & What They Cannot & Don’t: THURSDAY THAUMATURGY 15 Oct 2026 LLMs as not thinking brains but effective filters to the current firehose of and very fast keys to 5000 years of human thought...
- The First Time a Fed Easing Move Has Triggered a Sharp Jump in Long-Term Nominal Treasury Bond Rates: CHART OF THE DAY 15 Oct 2026 The first time in the memory of living man; before—even in the 1970s—a short-term rate cut was seen as a sign the long-term bond should read and follow, as the Fed probably knew something...
- An Inflation Report That Is Disappointingly High: CHART OF THE DAY 15 Oct 2026 The Fed’s odds of threading the needle and getting inflation back down to target while avoiding a recession get much lower; & Fed Chair Warsh’s oaths of fealty to Trump are not helpful at all...
- CROSSPOST: SEVA GUNITSKY: Trump’s “Near Abroad” 14 Oct 2026 Seva’s subheadline: “A complaint from across Lake America”; while Muscovy ‘Rus undertakes attempts to coerce neighbors who were trying to decouple to stop the process, Trump is simply a chaos monkey..
- CROSSPOST: JOHN GRUBER & BEN THOMPSON: Meanness & Claude 13 Oct 2026 They react to Anthropic’s declaration that it will cut off your access to Claude in extreme cases in which you are too mean to it “repeatedly... with no discernible purpose”...
- What Jón Steinsson Learned from Mike Woodford in Econ 420: ENCOMIUM OF THE DAY 13 Oct 2026 The Woodford framework has real bugs, but it is still far and away the best one to think with; a 1999 Princeton seminar with 1/3 of its students going on to high-status research university tenure...
- A Second-Rate Philosopher I Cannot Read in His Original Greek: REGRET OF THE DAY 12 Oct 2026 The “Meditation”’ of Marcus Aurelius is not a Stoic textbook. It is a tired man trying to talk himself out of bed in the morning, and into doing a job he never wanted to have...
- CROSSPOST: CLAUDIA SAHM: Hand the Pen to the Committee 12 Oct 2026 Claudia’s subheadline: “The Fed’s main reason for raising rates took three weeks to reach the public. The statement should carry it on decision day...”; Warsh is pointlessly opaque...
- Henry Farrell of Johns Hopkins Agora Comes to Berkeley: FOG & FLATLANDS 9 Oct 2026 Life & Work in Berkeley, CA; Henry Farrell lays out how political scientists should study “AI”...
- (SEMI-)CROSSPOST/HOISTED: MATTHEW YGLESIAS (2022): What I Learned Co-Founding Vox 9 Oct 2026 Matt’s subheadline: “Talent is scarce, training is hard, and the competition is smarter than you want them to be...”
- "You Are Not Taking Up Too Much of My Time": A Note from a Not Asocial but Rather Parasocial Age: CHART OF THE DAY 8 Oct 2026 We follow people who'll never know our names; we trade with thousands who want no connection with us. So a personal email from a friend whose tie to me has also become a parasocial one is precious...
- Katie Martin & Rob Armstrong: There Is Only One Trade: PODCAST OF THE DAY 8 Oct 2026 The “only one trade” is the AI trade, of course; the FT’s “Unhedged” podcast—that is something I am definitely long...
- CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: There Is No “Indian Question” 7 Oct 2026 Noah’s subheadline: “The actual question is what kind of a nation America is going to be...”; I say it should be as a city set upon a hill...
- The Largely-Fruitless Task of Trying to Make Sense of Human History: (LATE) TUESDAY TRENDS & TURMOIL 7 Oct 2026 All Grand Narratives are false; but having a Grand Narrative is an essential foundation to being able to think at all; political economy in the broad sense...
- CROSSPOST/HIGHLIGHTED: ROBERT FARLEY: Three Years After October 7, 2023: & Now Everything Is Worse 7 Oct 2026 October 7, 2023 Was a Day That Rewrote the Script. & the Worst People Have Been Reading & Acting on It & in It Ever Since...
- CROSSPOST: JUSTIN WOLFERS: An Agreement to Agree About an Earlier Agreement 7 Oct 2026 Justin’s subheadline: “Read the G7 communiqué closely and the "new" 100 million barrels [of oil reserves] turns out to be leftovers from March”; not new, not large, not enforceable...
Link verified 4 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Mastodon @delong@mastodon.social Where he says he moved after leaving Twitter.
Recent
- I set up my email ‘bot’ to honor #handcarry, a tag meaning: don't file this, bring it to me NOW! It is my escape hatch from the bureaucracy. But the bot drifted. It typoed the tag as #hancarry, wrote it into its own memory file, and built a new directory. It then spent a week diligently filing urgent emails there, buried deep in the directory tree structure. (1/3) 19 Oct 2026
- Past waves of automation have followed a script. Agriculture mechanized, got cheap, and shrank as a share of GDP, and value moved to manufacturing. Manufacturing automated and shrank, and value moved to services. Ben Moll and Alex Imas argue AI will follow that script rather than break it. Cheap cognition will push spending toward what stays scarce: nurses, teachers, waiters, local knowledge, power plants, Zeiss mirrors: **CROSSPOST: Ben Moll & Alex Imas: Will AI Soon Lead to Double-Digit... 1/ 18 Oct 2026
- Freddie deBoer says everyone ignores high-quality evidence that pedagogy and policy make little difference. Test-score gains fade. And, indeed, I could not come close today to the scores I got long ago on my linear algebra exams without a lot of boning-up on the subject. But look at the labor-market evidence. California’s top-4% from each high school’s admissions rule raised early-career wages of compliers by $20,000 a year or more. Proposition 209’s affirmative-action ban cost complying... 1/ 17 Oct 2026
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- It was Engels who paid both his and Marx’s bills: **CROSSPOST: LARRY MacDONALD: How Karl Marx Achieved Financial Independence** Marx wrote for newspapers and went into the market for a quick £400; Engels ran mills and traded cotton and held railways, gas companies and government bonds for the long term... https://braddelong.substack.com/api/v1/post/pdf?postId=220535183 > 2026-10-15 15 Oct 2026
- Thaumaturgy: from the Hellenic θαυματουργία (thaumatourgía), “wonder-working,” built from: itself built from θαῦμα (thaûma), “wonder, marvel” (the stem is thaumat-, from the genitive thaúmatos, which is where the t comes from); and ἔργον (érgon), “work” (it’s the same root as energy, liturgy and metallurgy). English took the word from the French thaumaturge from the Latin thaumaturgus, a straightforward borrowing. It’s first use in English comes from Queen Elizabeth I Tudor’s mathematician... /1 15 Oct 2026
- That a Fed easing move is immediately followed by a sharp jump in long-term rates strongly suggests that the Federal Reserve has lost control over the narrative governing bond-market expectations. This has not happened before, at least not in the United States since World War II: **The First Time a Fed Easing Move Has Triggered a Sharp Jump in Long-Term Nominal Treasury Bond Rates: CHART OF THE DAY** The first time in the memory of living man; before—even in the 1970s—a short-term rate... 1/ 15 Oct 2026
- Whatever number of rate hikes you wanted this year before this morning, you should now want one more. The Fed had made an 0.3% core CPI report its trigger for a rate hike in September. Now we see another such. Skipping an October hike would now be a very political choice: **An Inflation Report That Is Disappointingly High: CHART OF THE DAY** The Fed’s odds of threading the needle and getting inflation back down to target while avoiding a recession get much lower; & Fed Chair Warsh’s oaths... 1/ 15 Oct 2026
- Muscovy ‘Rus’s coercion and attempted coercion of its “Near Abroad” is legible: it targets neighbors already trying to escape from its control, like Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova. Trump is, however, a chaos monkey. Trump is thus creating resentful neighbors. And that resentment will cause material harm to U.S. citizens and will hobble the U.S. considered as a global strategic actor: **CROSSPOST: SEVA GUNITSKY: Trump’s “Near Abroad”** Seva’s subheadline: “A complaint from across Lake... 1/ 14 Oct 2026
- I am on Ben Thompson’s and John Gruber’s side here: These are stochastic-parrot clever-hans software tools, potentially very useful when properly harnessed, but a source of madness to people who fall into the same trap that the gullible fell into when interacting with Weizenbaum’s ELIZA back in the day: **CROSSPOST: JOHN GRUBER & BEN THOMPSON: Meanness & Claude** They react to Anthropic’s declaration that it will cut off your access to Claude in extreme cases in which you are too mean to... 1/ 13 Oct 2026
- ...think with; a 1999 Princeton seminar with 1/3 of its students going on to high-status research university tenure... https://braddelong.substack.com/p/what-jon-steinsson-learned-from-mike > 2026-10-13 2/END 13 Oct 2026
- The Woodford framework: The interest rate, not the money stock, is the instrument. Expectations are the dominant channel, so credible commitment to a rule is everything. Price stability minimizes relative-price distortions. And rules must move rates more than one-for-one with inflation to rule out self-fulfilling spirals: **What Jón Steinsson Learned from Mike Woodford in Econ 420: ENCOMIUM OF THE DAY** The Woodford framework has real bugs, but it is still far and away the best one to... 1/ 13 Oct 2026
- Epictetus provide a better guide to stoicism. Seneca writes better prose. So Why is it that Marcus Aurelius’s private, repetitive, nagging-himself notebook endures and influences more than all the other stoics put together? “Don’t turn into just another Caesar,” Marcus warned himself. But how could he stop that? He already was the Caesar. Thus the Meditations reads less like a philosophy lesson than like a man arguing with himself, losing, and then picking himself back up off the floor and... 1/ 12 Oct 2026
- Warsh’s press conference and the FOMC committee statements he is letting through are pointlessly opaque. Pointlessly, that is, if the idea is to make good monetary economy and have a stabilized high-growth sustainable-employment low-inflation economy. Warsh’s opaqueness, however, does have a point if you think that Warsh’s principal objective is to delay the day of reckoning when he has to choose between having Trump conclude that he has been betrayed and having the bond market conclude... 1/ 12 Oct 2026
- Farrell treats AI as one more of the information-processing social institutions Herbert Simon described, alongside markets and bureaucracy, rather than as the buliding of a Machine God-Overlord: **Henry Farrell of Johns Hopkins Agora Comes to Berkeley: FOG & FLATLANDS** Life & Work in Berkeley, CA; Henry Farrell lays out how political scientists should study “AI”... https://braddelong.substack.com/p/henry-farrell-of-johns-hopkins-agora > 2026-10-09 9 Oct 2026
- Yglesias's postmortem of Vox shows how distribution economics shapes what journalism can be. Paying salaries required income. Ad-funding required scale. Scale required kowtowing to FaceBook’s and Google’s algorithms. That made for enormous pressures to back off from true data and explainer journalism back toward clickbait—in Vox’s case, a very mild form of clickbait, but still it was what the eyeballs that it could harvest and sell to advertisers wanted to see. It was not what the eyeballs... 1/ 9 Oct 2026
- I have read and heard most of what Charlie Jane Anders has written and podcast over the past 6.5 years since the start of the plague, yet I do not think I have seen or had a two-way voice or video call with her since. Thus America today has, in my estimation, not a problem of asociality but of wrestling with a sociability that is no longer person-to-person network but rather profoundly parasocial, even when the parasociality is a two-way symmetric one: **"You Are Not Taking Up Too Much... 1/ 8 Oct 2026
- The “Honey Badger don’t care” stock market: why and how twenty “AI” stocks and only twenty “AI” stocks shrug off the big shock of rising interest rates in our weird two-speed stock market: **Katie Martin & Rob Armstrong: There Is Only One Trade: PODCAST OF THE DAY** The “only one trade” is the AI trade, of course; the FT’s “Unhedged” podcast—that is something I am definitely long... https://braddelong.substack.com/p/katie-martin-and-rob-armstrong-there > 2026-10-07 8 Oct 2026
- What kind of a nation America is going to be? It will be what it has been: A country composed of all those who escape from the Old World and all of its mistakes and tyrannies to build a god-fearing prosperous utopia here in the New World: that is our errand unto the wilderness, and that has been constant since 1630. Rufo and Lomez’s “question” is part nativist panic and part knife aimed at JD Vance. The answer was given aboard the Arbella: come to the New World to avoid all the mistakes... 1/ 7 Oct 2026
- Berkeley Economics Undergraduate Committee Chair Cecile Gaubert demands a syllabus for next spring. So let me throw it together. What is (are) my Grand Narrative(s) going to be, and will I be able at the end to look back and pull up the ladder?: **The Largely-Fruitless Task of Trying to Make Sense of Human History: (LATE) TUESDAY TRENDS & TURMOIL** All Grand Narratives are false; but having a Grand Narrative is an essential foundation to being able to think at all; political economy in... 1/ 7 Oct 2026
- Journalists who do not count the zeroes and compare them to the proper magnitudes are not bystanders or generalists, but accomplices in the disinformation bullshit machine. The release is one day of world output and one-fifteenth of the total Hormuz-closure gap over the four-month period of the promised release. And it is not new. It is leftovers from the March committee: **CROSSPOST: JUSTIN WOLFERS: An Agreement to Agree About an Earlier Agreement** Justin’s subheadline: “Read the G7... 1/ 7 Oct 2026
Link verified 4 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
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