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CONDITION: BLS Employment Report:

A Goldilocks economy:

BLS: Household Survey Data: The unemployment rate edged down to 3.5 percent in December and has 
remained in a narrow range of 3.5 percent to 3.7 percent since March. The number of unemployed 
persons edged down to 5.7 million in Decembera€!. Whitesa€! 3.0 percentaCI teenagers (10.4 
percent), Blacks (5.7 percent), Asians (2.4 percent),
and Hispanics (4.1 percent)a€!. Long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) declined 
by 146,000 to 1.1 million in DecemberaCI down from 2.0 million a year earliera€!. The 
employment-population ratio increased by 0.2 percentage point over the month to 60.1 percent. The 
labor force participation rate was little changed at 62.3
percent. Both measures have shown little net change since early 2022.

Establishment Survey Data: Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 223,000 in December. 
Notable job gains occurred in leisure and hospitality, health care, construction, and social 
assistance^!.

In December, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 9 cents, 
or 0.3 percent, to $32.82. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 4.6 
percentaCI
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MUST-READ: Lauren Boebert!:

To whom was this speech addressed? Why was it delivered? What advantage was it supposed to gain 
her?

Clerk: For what purpose does the gentlewoman from Colorado rise?

Lauren Boebert: Madam clerk, I rise to nominate Mr. Hern as Speaker of the House.

Clerk: The gentlewoman is recognized.

Lauren Boebert: Thank you, madam clerk.

We have been accused of not having a plan, well, we presented many, many plans and are even 
presenting two plans simultaneously right now for Speaker of the people's Housea€”of the people's 
House.

I sat in my chair anticipating to vote for Byron Donalds, who whom I respect, whom I see as a 
leader, and there was a gut check that said: we need someone that is going to convince my 
colleagues on this side of the aisle that it's time to get thata€”it's time to get going, It's time 
to build momentum. Many of you have said it.

You see that Kevin McCarthy does not have the votes. You are understanding that he is not going to 
get there. We have the votes for him. I cannot produce those anymore. The colleagues that i brought 
with me to offer those 218 votes on the first ballot aren't there anymore. It is not happening. 
And, as has been said, we need to get to a point where we
start evaluating what life after Kevin McCarthy looks like.

America doesn't want more talk, and I am going to keep my speech a little short. They want action. 
I'll take that. I want to get to work, too. America's tired of rhetoric and they want results. This 
isn't chaos. This is a constitutional republic at work. I am a mom of four boys. I know what chaos 
and dysfunction looks like. This is actually really a beautiful
thing to be here with all of my colleagues debating, just as the gentleman from Montana said, we 
have not experienced this in the two years that we have served here in Washington, D.C. This is the 
most debate that has taken place, and I love it. I love the conversations that are going on the 
floor, in the cloakroom, in the halls. There's nothing extreme.
There's nothing unreasonable. We are trying to get this right. As my conservative colleagues and I 
have stated time and time again, congress is broken and fundamentally needs change. I'm here to get 
this right. We need a leader that is not of the broken system, someone who is not beholdened to the 
lobbyists but to the people who sent us here, someone
who can unite our party and, most importantly, someone who can deliver on the promises that we have 
all made to the American people.

I believe that there are many people on the floor today that can do just that. I voted for my 
friend, Jim Jordan. I voted for my friend, Byron Donalds. I'm voting for Kevin Hern, the gentleman 
from Oklahoma. Mr. Hern went from rags to riches. Like myself and many other members, he is a small 
business owner. He's lived the American dream. He's a
father, a family man. and, as Kevin likes to say, he's a conservative, but he's not mad about it. 
We can have a happy warrior leading us.

I understand that threats have been made about committee assignments, that you won't receive 
committee assignments if you do not vote for Kevin McCarthy. That is true. It happened in 
conference and that is exactly what we were told. But we don't govern in fear. We govern for the 
people, on principle. Son't be afraid to do the right thing. I believe that
Kevin Hern is a unifier. He iust received the Chairman of the Renublican Studv Committee bv 
unanimous consent. This is the larsest caucus in our conference. Look how manv neonle have alreadv 
nut their trust in Kevin Hern to lead them. I set asked bv mv constituents: Where does this so? Who 
can unifv the unifv the nartv? Who can deliver results?


Representative Kevin Hern can do just that, and I am proud to enter his name into the nomination. 
And I hope that some of you join me.
Thank you and I yield back.

I am allergic to a€ceboth-sidisma€D in the extreme. But it seems to me that she has her 
counterparts on the Left:

Anton J Anger: The American experiment has just begun: As Baudrillard warned, US politics is coming 
for Europe'. a€~Putina€™ s wara€! a full-blown a€oereturn of the kinga€Da€! European industry and 
security policy [now] subordinate to American geopolitical imperativesa€! EUa€! effectively run 
from Langleya€!.
Energy costs are destabilising the German export model. Dollar supremacy is stronger than ever. The 
biggest army in human history is now trying to reshore its industry. Liquid gas supplies find their 
way to Stuttgarta€!.

Late imperial Rome with a stock exchange and nuclear weapons, and the same spectacle of public 
acclamations that accompanied the crepuscules of the pagan worlda€! a vertiginously unbalanced form 
of hegemonya€!.

The politics of other developed nations are also Americanising, witha€! regular BLM rallies and 
trans controversies a recurrent featurea€!. The hollow universality of American culture induces 
both despair and comforta€!. From Silicon Valley to evangelicalism to Trump to polyamory to the 
military-industrial complexa€!.
Anti-Americanism might be a moral imperative for Europeans. It certainly is satisfying. But a 
disinterest in the US is hard to justify politically, let alone strategically expedienta€!

Again: WTF?!?!

This, for example: the a€oeAmerican geopolitical imperativesa€n to which a€oeEuropean industry and 
security policy [is now] subordinatea€D is that a cruel and authoritarian Muscovite rA©gime not 
conquer and once again dominate Eastern Europe. This is an American goal, yes. But Europeans who do 
not share it are either deranged or puppets of todaya€™ s
kleptocratic Kremlin.

I suppose that, perhaps this is the rhetorical mood of the "politics of enemies" of Karl Schmidt: a 
bag of words, attempting to push affective buttons, without any theory of change, analysis of the 
situation, grounded in reality, or plan for constructive action.
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ONE IMAGE: The Schumpeterian Shifts since 1969: From Industry to ???:

165 to 70 a€oelndustrialsa€n; 70 to 33 a€oeConsumer Staplesa€D; 20 to 0 a€ceDiversified Mining and 
Metalsa€D; 30 to 67 a€oeFinancialsa€n; 19 to 62 a€oeHealth Carea€D; 18 to 68 a€oeInfotecha€D; 5 to 
32 a€oeReal Estatea€D:

V

160

140

120

100


* Made with Flourish

How Industry Has Changed Over the Last 50 Years

<https://www.qad.com/blog/2019/10/sp-50Q-companies-over-time>


ONE AUDIO: Understanding U.S. Inflation:

Can we explain what happened to inflation in the US in 2022, and what will happen next? Larry Ball 
and Daniel Leigh tell Tim Phillips why it stayed high and when it may fall:

<https://overcast.fm/+OIASYKII4>

Start writing today. Use the button below to create your Substack and connect your publication with 
Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality
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Very Briefly Noted:

•  Open AI: Stable Diffusion Prompt Booka€! Figuring out how to quickly use these two is an 
interesting skilla€\

•  Elaine Moore: Whatever happened to Google Search?: Once a wonder of the online world, it is hard 
to escape the adverts nowa€! a€oeHarda€^? Nearly impossible. It is just not useful to me anymorea€\

•  Dave Karpf: What comes after the tech crash?: a€~Generative AI seem[s] so magical is that it is 
a black box that even Google cana€™ t open up^\ particularly troublesome if the company ends up 
deploying these new systems as a cost-cutting measure in the midst of a tech crash. Generative 
AIa€! willa€! create new problems. And we should worry that Google
will cut the staff charged with looking inside the black boxesa€! And, yes, with high probability 
Google is about to get a bunch worstd€\

•  Wikipedia: Hodricka€ “Prescott filter: a€~Drawbacksa€!. The Hodricka€“Prescott filter will only 
be optimal when data exists in a 1(2) trend. If one-time permanent shocks or split growth rates 
occur, the filter will generate shifts in the trend that do not actually exist. Noise in data is 
approximately normally distributed. Analysis is purely historical and static (closed
domain). The filter causes misleading predictions when used dynamicallya€! Mushing away the signal 
and adding a huge amount of bizarre serial correlation, annoys that the model estimation, then 
recovers, never seemed to me to be a good way to go through life. I never understood its attraction 
for those of us, interested in understanding the worlda€\

•  Tina Nguyen: McCarthy a€™ s Chronicle of a Death Foretold: a€~What the so-called Taliban Twenty 
really want. Hint: it largely starts and ends with McCarthy rapturing out of the SpeakeraC™ s 
office. From conversations with allies of the 19 initial a€cenoa€D votes, their opposition to Kevin 
McCarthy is about more than just wrangling concessionsa€! So is this
all really Scalised€™s doing underneath? d€\

•  Matt Yglesias: a€~ Solar output in 2021 exceeded the IPCCa€™ s most optimistic forecast for 
2030. DC is set to close the year with murders and carjackings both down about ten percent. After 
declining during the worst of the pandemic, the American population is growing again. There are 
large positive health effects of closing coal-fired power plants, even if the
replacement is natural gasa€! Things not getting worse, or things, not getting worse as fast as 
they werea€”that is not things being gooda€\

•  Substack: Product Lab: a€~Substack only makes money when you doa€”we only test features we think 
will grow your list and revenue, and we monitor results and feedback closely for unanticipated 
effectsa€! A very interesting menagerie of different stuff that they are trying to doa€\

•  K&L Wine Merchant: 2005 Pavilion Rouge, Margaux: a€oeThe 2005 Pavilion Rouge is in a beautiful 
spota€! just beginning to show signs of aromatic complexity and nuance. At fifteen years of age, 
the DNA of the vintage remains a€’’Pavilion Rouge is a potent, hulking winea€!. I imagine the 2005 
will drink beautifully for another decade or more. Today it is
positively stellar. The more it opens in the glass, the more classic it becomesa€! seriously: let 
it breathe for six hoursa€\

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AJs:

I want to boil this down to one question: does it do the most possible to build effective 
communities of engineering practice?:

Laura Tyson & Lenny Mendonca: Americaa€™ s New Era of Industrial Policy: a€~Infrastructure 
Investment and Jobs Act ($550 billion), the CHIPS and Science Act ($280 billion), and the Inflation 
Reduction Act ($394 billion)a€! are not traditional spending measuresa€!. They are supply-side 
investments to boost US economic capacity, both
overall and in key sectors such as semiconductors and renewable energya€!. All three programs are 
based on the public-private modela€! designed to crowd-in and accelerate private investment^!. All 
three bills include place-based programs designed to promote inclusive growtha€I. Getting an 
industrial policy right is never easy, and getting a place­
based one right will prove even more challenginga€!

No, this is a a€cecoursea€D I really would like to take this spring:

Elle Griffin: Let's study all the utopian novels this year: a€~And how modern thinkers are taking 
utopian ideals into the future. If I were creating my dream curriculum, which of these classes 
would I actually want to take? I wrote them all down.  I read through that list in order. Thata€™ s 
why I finally read Les Miserables, The Count of Monte Cristo,

Madame Bovary, Candide, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, Manon Lescaut, The Nun, Dracula, The 
Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as a compendium of instructional literature about them. I learned 
so much reading a€oethe classicsa€D and they ultimately inspired my gothic novel and my decision to 
serialize it via this newsletter. Now Ia€™m
craving something similar.... Here is my personal curriculum for the year. Ita€™ s a... thorough 
mapping of utopian thought. Ia€™m calling it the Utopian Collectivea€!

The best and most pellucid encapsulation of what's going on in bubbles that I have seen:

The Last Bear Standing: The Inside Game: Insiders, Outsiders, and the Great Pandemic Bubble'. a€~In 
a bubble, there are two games being played.... The outside game is the sermon of the true 
believer.... Disruption. Innovation. A new paradigm. Everything is changing.  The cardinal rule is 
simple: Never sell. Diamond Hands. HODL. The inside

game is a bit more complicated. The inside game recognizes and exploits a zero-sum game of social 
contagion.... What matters is how much hype you can generate and how many new outsiders you can 
lure.  The inside game is almost singularly focused on timing. And unlike the outside game, where 
selling is the cardinal sin, the entire goal of the

inside game is to sell.... The outside player feels rich because of the mark-to-market (MTM) value 
of their assetsa€”the implied value of their portfolio, if they were to sell. The insider gets rich 
by selling. Ironically, MTM wealth is merely the outside player transitively and superficially 
experiencing the true profits of the insider...

Yes: there is finally an unambiguous, horrible, and disgraceful example of non-right wing cancel 
culture out there:

Ken White: Hamline University & Cancel Culture: What Useful "Cancel Culture" Dialogue Could 
Involve'. a€~Hamline Officially Punishing the Lecturer Is a€oeCancel Culturea€Da€!. Hamlinea€™ s 
Communications About The Incident Are a€oeCancel Culturea€Da€!. Hamlinea€™ s Student Newspaper 
Engaged In a€oeCancel Culturea€Ua€!.
Hamlinea€™ s Students Engaged In a€oeCancel Cuiturea€□«€"!. There were ways for students to respond 
to this lecture that would not be a€oecancel culturea€D and I would not think deserve 
condemnation^!. They engage with the issues and offer the speakera€™ s views on them. They just 
dona€™ t treat the first speaker as sacrosanct. Demanding
that    the lecturer be fired, not renewed, or disciplined is wildly disproportionate, in my view, 
and ita€™ s fair to call it a€oecancel culture.a€D Demanding that a non-sectarian university 
discipline teachers if they violate religious sectarian taboos and norms a€” whether ita€™ s not 
depicting a subject-relevant image of Muhammad, not spelling out the
full name of G-d, or not studying blasphemous discussions or depictions of Mary a€” is extremely 
disproportionate and censoriala€!. If you want to impose religious sectarianism on people, go to a 
sectarian school, or be thought of as a censor. The Hamline students seem completely unashamed of 
this wildly inappropriate stancea€!. What About
Speech Decency?a€! I think the criticism of the lecturer is indecent, actually. The lecturer showed 
sensitivity, gave a content warning, explained the pedagogical context, and then taught famous, 
historically and artistically significant art in a f***ing art class. The people piling on him a€” 
the entitled students, the leta€™ s-not-call-them-student-
journalists, and the woefully philosophically unsuited administrators were indecent about it. 
Tucker Carlson couldna€™ t have invented a better set of facts to push a 
college-students-are-fascists, colleges-are-ineffectual-and-censorial, Sharia-law-is-coming culture 
war studya€!. This is a huge culture war victory for the anti-progressive Right. A lot of
dumping                                                                                             
                                                                 on colleges and college students 
is culture war nonsense. But sometimes people deserve to be dumped on, because theya€™ ve done 
contemptible things...


Do note, as Noah does, that Ehrlich is right on wildlife loss, and how we should be trying to 
prevent it.

But the sheer idiocy of Ehrlich in the past, and the disgraceful unwillingness to wrestle with his 
past errors is truly contemptible:

Noah Smith: Biologist Paul Ehrlich is one of the most discredited popular intellectuals in America. 
Hea€™ s so discredited that his Wikipedia page starts the second paragraph with a€oeEhrlich became 
well known for the discredited 1968 book The Population Bomba€m In that book he predicted that 
hundreds of millions of people would starve to
death in the decade to come; when no such thing happened (in the 70s or ever so far), Ehrlicha€™ s 
name became sort of a household joke among the news-reading set. And yet despite all this, in the 
year 2022,60 Minutes still had Ehrlich on to offer his thoughts on wildlife lossa€!. Ita€™ s useful 
to review why Ehrlich got things so wrong, and why the
people who make similar claims todaya€”i.e., the a€oedegro wtha€□ movementa€”are also wrong. But 
ita€™ s also important to realize that just because Ehrlich was wrong about overpopulation and some 
other stuff doesna€™t mean that he, or the degrowth people, are wrong about the threat of habitat 
destruction and wildlife lossa€!. The scientific
a€oemodelsa€D that Ehrlicha€! relied on werea€! just drawing exponential curves and then saying 
a€oeSee, line go up!a€Da€! A bunch of new agricultural technologiesa€!. Population growth hasa€! 
sloweda€! thanks to lower fertility ratesa€!

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