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ONE IMAGE: Deepest Winter:


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Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

Very Briefly Noted:

• Stephen Roach: A China Optimista€™ s Lament: a€~Xi Jinpinga€™ s increased emphasis on security, 
power, and control comes at the worst possible timea€l I confess I did not think that China would 
fall into so deep a Maoist-Leninist middle-income trap so quicklya€\

• John Burn-Murdoch: Britaina€™ s winter of discontent is the inevitable result of austerity: a€~A 
decade of Tory spending cuts left the country vulnerable to the external shocks of the past two 
yearsa€! The Conservatives are, as John Stuart Mill said, the stupid party. But I am surprised at 
how much damage they have been able to doa€\

• Paul Krugman: a€'Tm not going to try picking over the entrails of the latest inflation report. 
Just noting the role reversal. A year ago inflation optimists kept trying to explain away the bad 
newsa€! Remember that nothing the Fed has done since March has yet had a chance to affect demand, 
production, and employment; and nothing the Fed has done since September of2021 has yet had a 
chance to affect reported inflation numbersa€\

• Janos Kornai (1979): Resource-Constrained versus Demand-Constrained Systemsa€! Perhaps the second 
most brilliant a€oecomparative systemsa€£2 economics articlea€\

• Bryan Mena (April 20,2022): U.S. Economy Grows Moderately Amid High Inflation, Ukraine Invasion: 
a€~Higher costs and difficulty hiring remain a challenge for business, latest Fed Beige Book report 
on economic conditions saysa€! News from the day the bond market was most pessimistic about the 
long-term inflation outlooka€\

• Nick Timiraos (April 20,2022): Feda€™ s Powell Seals Expectations of Half-Point Rate Rise in May: 
a€~Federal Reserve officials have broadly signaled a desire to raise interest rates to levels that 
dona€™ t provide stimulusa€! News from the day the bond market was most pessimistic about the 
long-term inflation outlooka€\

• EricTopol: A new variant alert: a€~Therea€™ s a swarm of new subvariants. One of these is XBB, 
which is a recombinant (fusion) of 2 different BA.2 variants, BJ.l (BA.2.10.1.1) and BA.2.75 
(BA.2.75.3.1.1.1)a€! And this variant is how deadly, exactly?a€\

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AJs:


Noah Smith: Why the U.S, middle class is feeling squeezeda€D a€~My response to people like Jacob 
Shell isna€™ t just a€oeSee? A ton of people still have 3 bedrooms and 2 cars and a college 
education !a€D.  When health care and child care and college cost an arm and a leg, when middle 
income people have to choose between cheap decaying Rust Belt cities and unaffordable superstar 
metros, when people get fewer vacation days per year, when lots of

middle class people dona€™ t get started in their careers til their 30s, when the 1% have pulled 
away, and when the smoothly rising trends of past decades have trailed off into stagnation, there 
are plenty of damn good reasons for the American middle class to feel squeezed in the early 2020s. 
The next question, of course, is what we do about all this. a€oeHow to restore the American middle 
classa€D will be the subject of a series of posts, I think. But the
important take-away here is that yes, there is something that needs to be restored...

John Gruber: Quora Is Beta Testing an AI Chatbot: a€~Quora CEO Adam Da€™ Angelo: a€oeToday we are 
starting a beta test for a new product called Poe. Short for 'Platform for Open Exploration', it 
lets people ask questions, get instant answers, and have back-and-forth dialogue with AI. Poe will 
initially be available on iOS, and it will be invite only until we work out scalability, get 
feedback from beta testers, and address any other issues that come up.
After we get through this phase, we will open up to everyone and add support for all platforms ,a€D 
Way of the future...

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson: Best of Further Reading 2022: a€~There was just one, standout article 
for me this year: [Adam Fishera€™ s] paean to Sam Bankman-Fried, penned by a a€oeprivate 
historiana€D who channelled F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway to bring us not just a profile 
of the founder of FTX and his a€oesmall team dedicated to fixing the worlda€Da€l but, perhaps 
unwittingly, the yeara€™ s most revealing insight into the VC
industry. Sequoia Capital not only invested $214mn with a€oeSBFa€D after its partners were awed by 
his ability to pitch cryptobabble while playing League of Legends, but published the portrayal of 
him as a latter day John Pierpont Morgan on its own website. Archived for posterity after 
Bankman-Frieda€™ s fall gave Sequoia second thoughts and a gigantic writedown, the profile may yet 
spawn a new genre of financial fan fiction. Which founder would not
now want such a portrait from the Hans Holbein of Silicon Valley? And which journalist would not 
like to get paid by the word for so, so many words? a€ceLove is the currency,a€D the ode to SBF 
tells us. But I suspect that Sequoia shelled out something more concrete than love a€” or cryptoa€!

Paul Campos: Study finds Holocaust-related deaths much higher in Nazi-controlled countries: a€~That 
is a terribly tasteless headline, and LGM apologizes to everyone in the world for it, but look at 
this long hand-wringing piece from the Atlantic [by Yasmin Tayag].... Hundreds of thousands of 
Republicans have died from COVID who would be alive today if not for the Republican partya€™ s 
COVID policies.  Therea€™ s scientific value in trying to pin

down the precise answer to the question of the exact dimensions of the Republican partya€™ s mass 
murder of its own constituents, but that what has in fact since happened was what was going to 
happen was as predictable at the time as water flowing downhill.  Leave aside the classic 
both-siding, where the Bidena€™ s administration less than perfect COVID policy is compared to a 
national anti-vaccination campaign led by mass murderer Ron DeSantis et.

al. for the sake of a€cebalance.a€D The really infuriating part is blaming this carnage on partisan 
politics. Hundreds of thousands of easily preventable COVID deaths in the USA over the last two 
years were caused and continue to be caused by THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. Not by a€oepartisan 
politics,a€D which have existed for the nationa€™ s entire history, unlike one of the nationa€™ s 
two major parties being opposed to vaccination, which is something
that just happened for the first time two years ago...

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