"Hexapodia" Is the Key Insight: by Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Brad DeLong

In which Noah Smith & Brad DeLong wish Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson had written a very different book than their "Power & Progress" is...
Key Insights:
* Acemoglu & Johnson should have written a very different book—one about how some technologies complement and others substitute for labor, and it is very important to maximize the first.
* Neither Noah Smith nor Brad DeLong is at all comfortable with “power” as a category in economics other than as the ability to credibly threaten to commit violence or theft.
* Acemoglu & Robinson’s Why Nations Fail is a truly great book. Power & Progress is not.
* We should not confuse James Robinson with Simon Johnson
* Billionaires running oligopolistic tech firms are not trustworthy stewards of the future of our economy.
* The IBM 701 Defense Calculator of 1953 is rather cool.
* The lurkers agree with Noah Smith in the DMs.
* The power loom caused technological unemployment because the rest of the value chain—cotton growing, spinning, and garment-making—was rigid, hence the elasticity of demand for the transformation thread → cloth was low.
* We need more examples of bad technologies than the cotton gin and the Roman Empire.
References:
* Acemoglu, Daron, & Simon Johnson. 2023. Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. New York; Hachette Book Group. https://archive.org/details/daron-acemoglu-simon-johnson-power-and-progress-our-thousand-year-struggle-over->
* Acemoglu, Daron, & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Publishers. https://archive.org/details/WhyNationsFailTheOriginsODaronAcemoglu>
* Besi. 2023. “Join us Tues. Oct. 10 at 4pm Pacific for a talk by
@MITSloan’s Simon Johnson…” Twitter. October 9. https://twitter.com/BESI_Berkeley/status/1711541113738387874>.
* DeLong, J. Bradford. 2024. “What To Do About the Dependence of the Form Progress Takes on Power?: Quick Takes on Acemoglu & Johnson's "Power & Progress”. Grasping Reality. February 29.
* DeLong, J. Bradford; & Noah Smith. 2023. “We Cannot Tell in Advance Which Technologies Are Labor-Augmenting & Which Are Labor-Replacing”. Hexapodia. XLIX, July 7.
* Gruber, Jonathan, & Simon Johnson. 2019. Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream.
The book is available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/e-20190429>.
* Johnson, Simon, & James Kwak. 2011. 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. New York: Vintage Books. https://archive.org/details/13bankers0000unse>.
* Smith, Noah. 2024. “Book Review: Power & Progress”. Noahpinion. February 21.
* Walton, Jo. 1998. “The Lurkers Support Me in Email”. May 16. http://www.jowaltonbooks.com/poetry/whimsy/the-lurkers-support-me-in-email/>.

+, of course:
* Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0>.



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Producer Confidence & Consumer Confidence (in the Economy), & Our Confidence (in Our Analyses): Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week); Aspirationally an hour...
Key Insights:
* The disjunction between all the economic data having been very good and very strong for the past year and tons of reports and commentary about how people “weren’t feeling it” is mostly the result of the fact that things work with lags.
* There are other factors: partisan politics, and the insistence of Republicans that they must not only vote but also at least say that they agree with their tribe.
* There are other factors: the old journalistic adage that “what bleeds, leads”, exponentiated by the effects of our current short attention-span clickbait culture.
* There are other factors: journalists, commentators, and the rest of the shouting class are depressed as their industries collapse around them, and somewhat of their situation leaks through.
* There are other factors: while people think they personally are doing well, they do remember stories of others not doing wellm and are concerned.
* But mostly it was just that things operate with lags: that was the major source of the “vibecession” gloom-and-doom which was at sharp variance with the actual economic dataflow.
* We are not the modelers: we are, rather, the agents in the model.
* The metanarrative is always harder than the narrative: trying to answer “why don’t people say they think the economy is good?” is very hard to answer in a non-stupid way, and most of us are much better off just saying: “hey, guys, the economy is really good!”
* It is good to be long reality—as long as you are not so leveraged that your position gets sold out from under you before the market marks itself to reality,.
* Lags gotta lag.
* And, finally, hexapodia!
References:
* Burn-Murdoch, John. 2023. “Should we believe Americans when they say the economy is bad?” Financial Times, December 1 https://www.ft.com/content/9c7931aa-4973-475e-9841-d7ebd54b0f47>.
* Cummings, Ryan, & Neale Mahoney. 2023. “Asymmetric amplification and the consumer sentiment gap”. Briefing Book, November 13. >.
* El-Erian, Mohamed. 2024. “A warning shot over the last mile in the inflation battle’. Financial Times, January 15. https://www.ft.com/content/497499b1-0e9f-4215-a536-ecd483ad42b9>.
* Faroohar, Rana. 2024. “Is Bidenomics dead on arrival? The time is ripe for the administration to rethink its messaging”. Financial Times, December 18. https://www.ft.com/content/816ccbf7-d0d5-47be-9c8d-8a8a0cbd0afe>.
* Fedor, Lauren, & Colby Smith. 2023, “Will US voters believe they are better off with Biden? Under pressure after a string of damning polls, the US president is resting his hopes for re-election on his personal economic blueprint”. Financial Times, November 6. https://www.ft.com/content/23687b6b-ac6f-46ab-a701-917a5ed64f4f>.
* Financial Times Editorial Board. 2024. “Why Biden gets little credit for a strong US economy: The president’s team needs to show more energy in addressing voters’ concerns”. Financial Times, January 11. https://www.ft.com/content/a2373c26-87ea-4b77-944f-8a6b28c8675b>.
* Ghosh, Bobby. 2022. “Biden’s a Better Economic Manager Than You Think:
On more than a dozen measures of relative prosperity, he’s outperformed the last six of his seven predecessors. On reducing the budget deficit, he has no peers”. Bloomberg, November 8.
* Greenberg, Stanley. 2024. “The Political Perils of Democrats’ Rose-Colored Glasses: Paul Krugman’s (and many Democrats’) beliefs about the economy and crime miss the reality that Americans still experience”. American Prospect, February 5. https://prospect.org/politics/2024-02-05-political-perils-democrats-rose-colored-glasses/>.
* Hsu, Joanne. 2024. “Surveys of Consumers: Final Results for January 2024”. February 2. http://www.

& a start-of-the-semester academic-email-addresses-only paid-subscription sale:
Key Insights:
* Young whippersnappers Oks and Williams are to be commended for being young, and whippersnapperish—but we disagree with them.
* Contrary to what Brad thought, the fertility transition in Africa really has resumed.
* The problem of how you provide mass employment for people is different than the problem of how you increase your economy’s productivity by building knowledge capital, infrastructure, and other forms of human capital.
* It is important to keep those straight and distinguished in your mind.
* Commodity exporting should be viewed as a distinct development strategy from industrialization, and indeed from everything else.
* Sometime during the plague, Brad DeLong really did turn into a grumpy old man yelling at clouds. It's time that he should own that.
* People should take another look at the pace of South and Southeast Asian economic development. It is a very different world than it was 25 years ago.
* Thus if you are basing your view on memories of or on books written based on memories of how things were 25 years ago, you are going to get it wrong. BIGTIME wrong.
* Only the Federal Reserve can get away with saying “it’s context dependent”. All the rest of us have to put forward Grand Narratives—false as they all are—if we want to actually be useful.
* Hexapodia
References:
* Bongaarts, John. 2020. "Trends in fertility and fertility preferences in sub-Saharan Africa: the roles of education and family planning programs." Genus 76: 32. https://genus.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41118-020-00098-z>
* Kremer, Michael, Jack Willis, & Yang You. 2021. "Converging to Convergence." National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 29484, November 2021. https://www.nber.org/papers/w29484>
* Oks, David, & Henry Williams. 2022. "The Long, Slow Death of Global Development." American Affairs 6:4 (November). https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/11/the-long-slow-death-of-global-development/>.
* Patel, Dev, Justin Sandefur, & Arvind Subramanian. 2021. "The new era of unconditional convergence." Journal of Development Economics 152. https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/deveco/v152y2021ics030438782100064x.html>.
* Perkins, Dwight. 2021. "Understanding political influences on Southeast Asia's development experience." Fulbright Review of Economics and Policy 1, no. 1: 4-20. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/FREP-03-2021-0021/full/html>.
* Rodrik, Dani, & Joseph E. Stiglitz. 2024. "A New Growth Strategy for Developing Nations." https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/research-papers>.
* World Bank. 2023. "South Asia Development Update October 2023: Economic Outlook." https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/sar/publication/south-asia-development-update>.

+, of course:
* Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0>.


Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe

Key Insights:
* Finally, at long last, over the next two generations the tide is likely to be flowing strongly toward near-universal global development...
* The fear was that dehyperglobalization would rob poorer countries of their ability to develop the export comparative advantages to support the manufacturing engineering clusters they need for learning by doing, establishing a good educational system, and converging to global North standards of living...
* This fear appears to have been very overblown...
* Optimism about future income growth and globalization is warranted because India has more people in it than Africa: the Asia Circle from Japan to Pakistan and down to Indonesia and up to Mongolia is and always has been half the human race. And South Asia and Southeast Asia are now in gear...
* As long as dealing with global warming does not absorb too many of the resources that could otherwise be devoted to income growth...
* This is true even though the great wave of increasing international trade intensity and integration that began in 1945 came to an end in 2008...
* Even so, since 2008 there has still been increasing global integration in the flow of ideas and the growing interdependence of value chains...
* A substantial part of the post-2008 reversal of globalization was partially due to China onshoring its supply chains—the pre-2008 situation in which China's manufacturing knowledge was vastly behind its manufacturing intensity was highly unstable...
* This, however, hinges sufficient state capacity—which is not just the ability to do infrastructure and reorganize your economy, but also have people's stuff not get stolen from them either by local thieves or by government functionaries...
* Distributional issues are another potential key blockage—the benefits of technological change flow to the global north, or to a small predatory internal élite, or the market economy's distribution goes spontaneously awry...
* But there is the question of how much distribution matters in a rich world where few are starving—matters for social power, yes, and for whatever happinesses flow from that, but does distribution matter otherwise?
* Countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America may be stubborn development problems for generations, however...
* That beside, the basic mission of industrialization to uplift the human world out of poverty is likely to be complete by 2050 if we are lucky, by 2100 if we are not...
* There is good reason to think that the next generation will be for the world better and more impressive than the last generation. And the last generation was, on a world scale, you know, better and more impressive than was the post-WWII Thirty Glorious Years in the North Atlantic...
* Future guests, possibly?: Dietz Vollrath, Arvind Subramanian, Charlie Stross...
* Hexapodia!
References:
* Fourastié, Jean. 1979. Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975. Paris: Fayard. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TAVRU4Y>.
* Subramanian, Arvind, Martin Kessler, & Emanuele Properzi. 2023. "Trade Hyperglobalization is Dead. Long Live...?" Peterson Institute for International Economics Working Paper, No. 23-11. https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/2023-11/wp23-11.pdf.>.
* Stross, Charles. 2005. Accelerando. New York: Ace Books. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/294259/accelerando-by-charles-stross/>
* Vollrath, Dietrich. 2020. Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo44520849.html>.
+, of course:
* Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0>.


Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe

The SubStackLand community gains another valuable member. We welcome him to the NFL SubStackLand:
Key Insights:
* Bing-AI says “Brian Beutler” is pronounced “Bryan Bootler”—that is, rhymes with “lion shooter”, which shows how far political incorrectness has penetrated Silicon Valley…
* Noah has figured out a solution to his problem of losing the screws to his microphone stand: duct tape…
* This started with Brad poking Brian on his belief there was a golden age of comity, common purpose, and energy in the left-of-center political sphere back in 2005 to 2008—saying that this misconceived as all mourning for a lost golden age is misconceived…
* Noah and Brad today welcome Brian to SubStackLand, he having just created a substack and done 16 substantive posts in two weeks, which is a trult amazing rate of production…
* Brian’s key insight is that since the start of 2019 Democrats have been amazingly, alarmingly, disappointingly timid in not aggressively going after every corner of TrumpWorld for its corruption, and doing so again and again and again…
* Brian is, in a sense, the quantum-mechanical antiparticle to some combination of Matt Yglesias and David Schor…
* Brian believes he coined the term “popularism”…
* Back in 2005-2008 nobody said that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were sabotaging their own party by encouraging Barack Obama to run in the primaries…
* Judging by results, the current strategy of the Democratic Establishment is doing rather well: a plus three standard-deviation outcome in the 2022 midterms, for example…
* That midterm result may be because, by our count no fewer than seven of the nine justices had assured senators that Roe v. Wade was “settled law”. And four of those seven then voted to overturn it in Dobbs…
* Biden really cares about safeguarding democracy, and his actions should all be viewed with that in mind…
* Hexapodia!
References:
* Brian Beutler: Off Message SubStack https://offmessage.net/>
* Scattered Thoughts On Israel, Hamas, Gaza, And Related Matters: A possibly ill-advised post
* VIDEO: How Trump Normalization Really Works: Why the political media slept on Trump's call for Mark Milley's death and other baffling decisions
* Charts To A Gun Fight: How the Fighting Democrats of 2007 became the timid, focus-grouped party of today.
* Trump Reaches A Fateful Crossroads: We should welcome it, but acknowledge the peril
* Thursday Thread And AMA: Kind of a lot's happened since the last one
* "The Most Important Issue In Our Politics": A Q&A with John Harwood on his interview with Joe Biden about threats to democracy
* Five Thoughts On Karmic McCarthy: For now, we schadenfreude
* VIDEO: How Profit Motive Distorts The News: And why liberals and Democrats should talk about it
* The Era Of Hostage Taking And Small Ransoms: Republicans made Ukraine aid the price of avoiding a shutdown. Where does it end?
* The Democrats' Lost September: You guys awake?
* Breaking Down The GOP Debate: Reaction chats with Matthew Yglesias and Crooked Media's What A Day podcast
* Wednesday Debate Thread: Let's watch Republicans be weird and scary together!
* Baggage Check: Life disclosures, so readers can know me, and where I come from, a little better
* VIDEO: Why The News Struggles To Say Republicans Are Responsible For The Government Shutdown: And why the public is likely to catch on anyhow
* Biden Should Work The Media Refs On Impeachment: Everyone knows the impeachment is b.s., so he should say that
* Welcome to Off Message: Refuge from a world gone mad
* Thomas Babington Macaulay: Horatius at the Bridge https://englishverse.com/poems/horatius>
* Plutarch: Life of Tiberius Gracchus https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Tiberius_Gracchus*.html>
+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>
Lost Past Golden Ages:
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Horatius at the Bridge: 
‘[Then] Roman

Liberals vs. leftists once again, with the principal conclusion being that trying to find and join your tribe by shouting online—Schmittian picking-an-enemy as the core of your identity—is no way to go through life, son. Nor is artfully screenshotting in order to make sure your readers do not see the sentence just below the ones you quote.
In which we discuss the positions of “Brianna”, Matt”, and “Ezra”—who are SubTuring concepts in our minds with whom we have parasocial relationships, and are not real persons named Brianna Wu, Matt Yglesias, and Ezra Klein—on where the boundary is between the decent, realistic, progress left on the one hand, and people who need to get a clue and stop making own-goals on the other.
Background:
Key Insights:
* No Schmittposting— trying to find and join your tribe by shouting online—Schmittian picking-an-enemy as the core of your identity—is no way to go through life, son.
* Nor is artfully screenshotting in order to make sure your readers do not see the sentence just below the ones you quote.
* Don’t pick bad and stupid ends to advocate for—anarcho-pastoralism, the elimination of the United States or America, abolishing police, abolishing prisons, degrowth, destroying statues of Ulysses S. Grant, calling for the cancellation of Abraham Lincoln.
* Do think, always: will this post advance humanity’s collective smartness as an anthology intelligence?
* Don’t call for throwing public money at nonprofits in urban America.
* Advocate for a political focus on social issues only when they are ripe—when the pro-freedom and pro-flourishing position is genuinely popular.
* But the Democratic Party and the left can and should focus on both economic and social issues—and should be smart about doing so.
* Blue-state politicians should be willing to press the envelope on social issues—witness Gavin Newsom as mayor of San Francisco on gay marriage.
* Purple-state politicians should stress that this is a free country for free people, which means:
* economic opportunity…
* social freedom—you should be able to live your life without the government harassing you, and without neighbors and merchants harassing you by refusing service when their job is to serve the public…
* collective wealth…
* collective concern—global warming may not be so bad for you in the medium-run, but it is a serious medium-run problem for those SOBs in Florida and Louisiana, and for rural communities at the wildfire edge…
* Red-state politicians need our thoughts and prayers.
* Policy analysts and legislative tacticians should design and implement policies that are:
* successes…
* visible, perceived successes…
* that build coalitions by the wide of visible distribution of their benefits…
* but that do not allow individual coalition partners to become veto point owners: seats at the table, yes; dogs in the manger, no…
* Left-wing think-tanks should not take money from “leftists” who want to use procedural obstacles to block green investments in their backyards.
* Hexapodia!
References:
* Preliminary Food for Thought for Þe “Hexapodia” Taping:
* Brianna Wu: ‘There’s a huge schism… Policy Leftists and Infinite Leftists…
* Matt Yglesias: The two kinds of progressives: ‘Moralists vs. pragmatists…
* Ezra Klein: The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism: ‘Cost, not just productivity, is a core problem for the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing industry…
* Brad DeLong: Pass the Baton…
* Noah Smith: Our climate change debates are out of date…
* Noah Smith: Degrowth: We can't let it happen here!…
* Noah Smith: ‘Once you realize that the animating drive of all NIMBYism on both the left and the right is to be able to live in perpetually-appreciating single-family homes with no poor people nearby, everything they say becomes instantly comprehensible and intensely boring.
* Rocket Podcast
+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep https://archive.o