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

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:* A number of years ago, Brad DeLong said that it was time to “pass the baton” to “The Left”. How’s that working out for us? #actually, he had said that we had passed the baton—that the absence sin

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:* Someone is wrong on the internet! Specifically Brad… He needs to shape up and scrub his brain… * Back in the 2000s, Brad argued that the U.S. should over the next few generations try to pass the baton of

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:* Vernor Vinge was one of the GOAT scifi authors—and he is also one of the most underrated…* That a squishy social-democratic leftie like Brad DeLong can derive so much insight and pleasure from the work

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 a

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

& 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

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 goo

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 microphon

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 �

Key Insights:* The Chinese Communist Party is very like an aristocracy—or maybe it isn’t…* If it is, it will in the long run have the same strong growth-retarding effects on the economy that aristocracies traditionally have…* Or maybe it won’t: China today is not Europe in the 1600s…* We probably will not be able to get Noah to read Franklin Ford: Robe & Sword: The Regr