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CONDITION: Muskker Has Lost All Control of Its a€~Bot Infection:

Conspirador NorteA±o: a€~It's a Sunday, and some chucklehead has decided to bestow ~24,000 
newly-created fake followers on my account. All are accounts created in November 2022 with 0 
tweets, a default profile image, or botha€!
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FOCUS: Another Excellent & Thoughtful Review of Slouching: Adam Gurri:

Another excellent and very thoughtful review of Slouching <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>, this one from the 
extremely wise and accomplished Adam Gurri:

Adam Gurri: Inventing Invention: Brad DeLonga€™ s Slouching Towards Utopia'. a€~In the 19th 
centurya€! as scientific, technical, and productive capabilities expanded beyond anyonea€™ s 
wildest imaginings, some contemporaries did begin to imaginea€! at the end of the tunnel of 
material progressa€! a true utopiaa€!. A century and a half later, we have failed to reach the 
leisure society of Keynes, much less the classless
society of Marx, or any of the other visions of heaven on Eartha€!. DeLonga€™ s book is self-styled 
as a a€oegrand narrativea€D rather than a dry academic analysis. He offers a strong perspective, in 
contrast to a book like Mark Koyama and Jared Rubina€™ s How the World Became Rich^\ performing a 
long survey of the many competing perspectivesa€!. Slouching Towards Utopia is in this way much 
more like Robert
Gordona€™ s The Rise and Fall of American Growth; each book allows both the lay reader and the 
specialist to walk away with a greater grasp of the general economic history of the time period 
covered, and both offer a strong thesis that remains controversial among specialistsa€!.

The rationalization of invention and the routinization of diffusing innovations at scale; that is 
the basic logic behind the role of the research lab and the corporation in DeLonga€™ s grand 
narrative. But the manner in which it was rationalized and routinized is explored in far less 
deptha€!. How exactly didthe research lab and the corporation empower these men to accomplish these 
tremendousfeats? And whydid no one think to
gather a€cecommunities of engineering practice to supercharge economic growtha€D before 1870? It 
seems answers to these questions were left on the cutting room floor.

What DeLong does do, however, is no less valuablea€!. He moves on to what exactly happened, and how 
the world was transformed by this unexpected pivot from millennia of stagnation to a a€oelong 
centurya€n of slouching onward and upwarda€!. He encourages his readers to constantly consider the 
conflicting moral perspectives of Friedrich Hayek on the marvels of the  marketand Karl Polanyi on 
itsdangersin order to
evaluate the flow of events he narrates from a broader perspective than either. It is difficult to 
conceive of a reader who will fail to come away from Slouching Towards Utopia with their knowledge 
and their perspective enlarged; the breadth of what is covered is staggeringa€!.

We oughta€! to take a page from DeLonga€™ s a€oegrand narrativea€n and get to thinking about the 
steps we might take to press aheada€”even if we must do so at a slouch, and even if we never quite 
arrive at utopia in the end.

As I said at the SSHA Slouching panel on Saturday:


In Which I Quibble wiA34 Paul Krugman, &

CONDITION: The Benefits of Central Heating! I went to a Slouching Towards Utopia <bit.ly/3pP3Krk> 
panel at the SSHA Convention at the Palmer House in Chicago. It was 15F outside. I had the best 
possiba€!
Read more

3 months ago A- 14 likes A- 2 comments A- Brad DeLong

Once I had decided to stake my claim on the hill that 1870 is the hinge of historya€”the moment at 
which humanitya€™ s ensorcellment by the Devil of Malthus was brokenaC’’there were then three 
natural directions:

1. Look back from 1870 at how we got to that pointa€”how it was that the Devil of Malthusa€™ s 
spell had been so powerful from -6000 to 1870, and how we then wrought the miracle of breaking it.

2. Look forward from 1870 at the working-out of the logic of unprecedented, revolutionary, economic 
growth generation after generationa€”what I call the David Landes-Joseph Schumpeter-Vaclav Smill 
book.

3. Look forward from 1870 at the political-economy consequences of the magnificent explosion in the 
rate of human technological progress, the sudden jump up in the proportional rate of growth h of 
the value of the stock of human ideas H about manipulating nature and cooperativelhy organizing 
humans deployed-and-diffused in the human world economy:

Global Longest-Run Global Economic Growth


Date

-8000

-6000

-3000

Real     Popula-

Income/ tion P Total Income Y

Capita y   (millions) (billions)

$1,200       2.04           $2.4

$900       5.09           $4.6

$900         15           $14

Ideas

Stock
Level H

0.037

0.043

0.075

Ideas

Growth
Rate h

0.003%

0.009%

0.018%


-1000

150

$900

$900

50

200

$45

$180

0.136

0.272

0.030%

0.060%


800

1500

1770

1870

2020

$900

$900

$1,100

$1,300

$12,000

240

500

750

1299

7566

$216     0.297 0.014%

$450     0.429 0.052%

$825    0.643 0.149%

$1,689    1.000 0.442%

$90,794    27.000 2.342%

I had hoped, back when I started, to go in all three directions: backwards into origins; forwards 
into technology, industry, and society; and forwards into economy, sociology, and polity. And I 
thought I could accomplish it. As Michael Walzer once told me, when one starts a book project one 
is confident that at the end, when one holds the finished copy in onea€™ s hands and opens it, one 
will see letters of fire that will by the logic of iron necessity
inscribe their truth directly on the minds and souls of readers, and that the book will be        
a1/^, i±d,/4°IjA,aI/2^, a treasure for all time. But when the actual book appeareda€”no letters of 
fire, no direct truth, just chicken-scratchings that were not even the shadows on the wall of the 
cave, but rather vague gestures in the direction of shadows from which a good-hearted and 
hard-working reader might learn something.

Basic is not in the business of publishing thousand-page books.

And I very much doubt that I could have successfully executed a thousand-page book: the difficulty 
of the dive goes with the square of the number of pages. I wound up writing a book looking forward 
from 1870 that is overwhelmingly about the political-economy consequences of the magnificent 
explosion in the rate of technology-driven growth, with occasional side-glances at the parts of the 
original project that I was unable to execute.

I wish I had answers to give Adam to the questions he asks: How exactly did the research lab and 
the corporation empower these men to accomplish these tremendous feats? And why did no one think to 
gather a€oecommunities of engineering practice to supercharge economic growtha€D before 1870? But, 
alas, they are not even on the cutting-room floor. They are very hard and deep questions indeed. 
Was the explosion of wealth and productivity of
1870 causally-thin, in the sense that institutions had to evolve then in a way that was unlikely to 
get the explosion? Or was the growth acceleration of the Second industrial Revolution, the one big 
wave of Robert Gordon, causally-thicka€’’largely baked in the cake, while the causally-thin nexus 
or nexuses came earlier?:

• Earlier this fall at Berkeley the extremely learned Robert Brenner lectured me for 45 minutes 
about how the true causally-thin nexus came much earlier: with the emergence, in the two centuries 
after the Black Death, in the 300 mile-radius circle around Dover, of market-bourgeois class 
relations, and thus the transformation of (a) a society of peasants, knights, lords, and the 
occasional merchant into (b) a society of laborers, craftsman,
merchants, farmers, landlords, mercenaries, and plutocrat-politicians.

• Had we managed to set Joel Mokvr as a discussant at the SSHA. he would surelv have said that the 
causallv-thin counterfactual nexus word was the founding of the Roval Societv and nullius in verba. 
a€oenothing bv worda€D. This shift from (a) ideas soreading Drimarilv because thev are useful to an 
unoer class A©lite running a force-and-fraud domination-and-exoloitation scheme on the rest of 
societv. to (b) ideas spreading because thev



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Climate Trace: Tracking Emissions

November 20, 2022 11:00am by Barry Ritholtz


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MUST READ: David Bell on a€oePresentisma€d:

David Bell: Opinion I Two Cheers for Presentism: a€~The fraught question of how present-day 
concerns should guide historical researcha€!. Historiansa€! inescapablya€! write from a present-day 
perspective^!. a€cePresentisma€D is not something that can simply be a€oecorrected for,a€D like 
measurement error in a scientific experiment. Beyond this, history written with an eye to the 
present serves the common good. It illuminates how elements of
our                                                                                                 
                                                                                                    
      own world came into being, exposing the development of key political, social, and economic 
structures, tracing the effects of past choices, and offering insight into how change can take 
placea€!. What Sweet called a€cepresentisma€D is to be accepted and even applauded, not 
denounceda€”at least to a certain extent. But at the same we need to be aware of the ways that it 
can also impoverish our understanding and appreciation of history.

The pasta€! is a foreign country: weird, wonderful, and strange. Great historians give a visceral 
sense of this foreignnessa€!. It took a very long time for historians to develop this sense of the 
strangeness of the past. Very few of the great historians of Western antiquity and the Middle Ages 
considered the societies they were writing about to be qualitatively different from their owna€!. 
This does not mean embracing moral relativisma€!. Understanding
why slave owners or Nazis behaved as they did does not mean excusing them. But we do have to 
understand whya€! if we hope to understand why events played out as they dida€! a delicate balance 
between, on the one hand, trying to convey the sheer strangeness of the past, and, on the other, 
revealing its connections to the present and to our own concernsa€!.

There is nothing more potentially liberatory than the sense of endless possibility that great 
history can open up a€” the sense that categories of thought and practice are not fixed, that the 
world can be made to change in all sorts of strange and unexpected ways. We may be driven, 
inescapably, by present-day concerns, but if we make the past look too much like the present, how 
can we envision a future that looks different from where we are now?a€!
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OA34er Things A34t Went Whizzing bya€!

Very Briefly Noted:

• Alan Blinder: A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961-2021a€!

• Adam Ozimek: a€~My dissertation has now been discussed in Slate, WaPo, Calculated Risk, but has 
only 7 academic citationsa€!

•  Matthew Zeitlin: a€~Salame also supported Tom Emmer, newly elected GOP whip and a longtime 
crypto booster. While Emmer has attacked Gary Gensler for being too close to FTX, in happier times 
he was pointing to FTX as a reason the SEC was too harsha€!

•  Todd Tucker: a€~It takes much stronger labor movements than the ones we see around the world to 
get to sustained wage-price spiralsa€!

• Adam Roberts: Pindara€™ s 3rd Pythian: Horses, Horses, Horses, Horsesa€!

•  Christina Warren: a€~I think using analogies like nativism and gentrification for open source 
and open protocols is pretty gross tbh. Look, I feel for anyone who sees their communities change, 
but a platform or instance is either open or it isna€™ta€!

•  David Pierce: a€~Disneya€™ s new-old CEO Bob Iger had some big ideasa€! at the Code 
conferencea€! betting on distribution vs. content, not giving a crap about the metaverse, and a€oea 
world where technology was going to expand the purview of the storyteller.a€D He also said he was 
happy being retired...

• Shane Goldmacher: a€~The NRSC sent a fundraising email today signed by Herschel Walker in which 
it is actually keeping 99% of whata€™ s raised, per fine print. Walker gets a dime for every ten 
dollar donation...
Donate Subscriptions

AJs:

Aziz Sunderji: Feda€™ s Aggressive Rate Hikes Are a Game Changer: a€~a€oeMonetary actions affect 
economic conditions only after a lag that is both long and variable .a€Ua€! It can take years 
before the full effects of tightening become apparent, [and so] the Fed tends to move 
incrementallya€!. In the current state of the economy, the Fed has decided it doesna€™ t have the 
luxury to act slowly. Inflation has risen rapidly to a level not seen in
decades. The central bank has chosen to slam on the brakes. This less-incremental approach raises 
the risk that Fed officials overdo rate increases, plunging the economy into a deeper recession 
than is needed to tame inflationa€!

Michael Tomasky: The Vindication of Joe Biden: a€~Therea€™ s no indication that the midterms have 
given the GOPa€™ s leadership the nerve to finally cast out the extremists who populate their base. 
a€oeMAGA has repeatedly shown it cannot win national elections,a€D said Simon Rosenberg, president 
of the liberal think tank NDN, who was one of the few voices in Washington to predict non-disaster 
for Democrats ahead of November.
a€oeUnless Republicans can somehow walk away from MAGA, Democrats have to be considered 
favoritesa€Da€!. A guy who passed several pieces of major legislation, held his factionalized party 
together, and defied history in the midterms. The subset of Democratic presidents in the past 
century who can make all three of those boasts is exactly two: Bidena€”and Franklin Roosevelta€!

Ed Zitron: The Fraudulent King: a€~As an expert on the subject, I believe that Elon Musk is 
currently in the process of ruining his lifea€!. A few days later, Musk entered into a public spat 
with Twitter engineer Eric Frohnhoefer over the speed of the Twitter Android app, responding to 
Frohnhoefera€™ s patient technical explanations by firing him. He then proceeded to fire several 
more people for being rude about him publicly on Twitter.com and
privately on their internal Slacka€!. Musk has paid $44 billion to purchase a website that has all 
told him to go fa€”- himself. The userbase, the staff, the advertisers, and even the websitea€™ s 
code have united around a bipartisan agendaa€”that Elon Musk is a big, stupid dumbass, a terrible 
manager, a terrible coder, and someone who lacks the basic empathy and emotional intelligence to 
run a companya€!. He is not done ruining things yetd€\.
Fundamentally, this situation has also proven Elon Musk to be deeply, painfully uncoola€!

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