Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
the mighty fuck around, the meek find out.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
funny how the people who claim it’s “the groups” that make it so democrats don’t win somehow seem less exercised by the people who make it possible for them to do all the good and ill they do. drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/07/26/i...
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
even while he is standing for reelection, he is still the sitting president.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
Lina would’ve won.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
(I think "underconsumption" is a strategic choice. They want a hungry, directable population, not a secure, entitled one. That might be defensible on national capability grounds, but there are real tensions with social welfare that can result in political / legitimacy crises.)
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
i think part of how they’ve succeeded is they don’t look for fine-grained, precise control. they blunder into industries by declaring them strategic. 1/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
ambitious, conformist local government officials and state-owned banks stand-up funds and firms. then they’re at risk of having their conformity second-guessed and getting demoted or defenestrated, so they compete like hell to not be the hindmost. 2/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
it’s not “technocracy”. it’s course, kind of dumb, inefficient. but it gets the most important things right, that industry and production are strategic assets that states can’t just concede to markets, and that absent competition business grows fat, foolish, and malevolent. /fin
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
similar place maybe, but likely dumb implementation. i don’t dispute (indeed it was the subject of the “skeet” that provoked us) that there are political economy traps that often lead to failure and worse of industrial policy. 1/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
industrial policy, the “China model”, are all hard to do right. but just because a thing is hard doesn’t mean you can just not, just abstain, in a competitive world where rivals are doing hard things well. /fin
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
much of my project is how to reconcile what seems to me a plainly successful economic model with implementation in a liberal democracy.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
In about 20 years of this, that’s always been the claim. Look, they’ve gotten this far, it’s impressive, but it only works because they’re catching up from an extraordinary hole. The crisis is coming, any minute. 1/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
I’m very fond of both Michael Pettis and Brad Setser. I got my start in the economic blogosphere in Brad’s comment section, in ~2003, when he and Nouriel Roubini were predicting China faced an imminent crisis in the RMB write-downs they would have to take on their Treasury reserves. /fin
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
well, Made in China 2025. but China is the emperor of brutal competition. have you read my six-part series? drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/09/04/i...
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
i definitely can’t handle the terms and conditions.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
the more you protect from foreign competition on strategic grounds, the more essential it is you ensure a brutally competitive industry domestically. we're usually better at the first half of that than the second, unfortunately.
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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
“you say you are an honest person, but *have* you read the terms and conditions?”
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
they ignored us but finally we matter. bwahahaha! we are the villains of the comic books we grew up with and transformed into world dominating, endlessly derivative mass media products. whatever.
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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
one way to think of it is we have huge effective tariffs on pharma products *first sold elsewhere* regardless of where they are produced. it seems to me people in the US don’t love this. we maybe feel a little ripped off by comparison to our neighbors.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
Grover Cleveland: “the communism of combined wealth + capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice + integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty + toil.“ via chrispeel.net/2024/11/15/t...
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
years from now, where you least expect it, there will be sightings of dark brandon.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
politicians draw the lesson being dickish is the superpower but it only works for a very special kind of dick.
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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
they call it x because it’s all of our ex.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
the murderer is scandalized. “do you see? do you see? do you see what i am up against? *they mean to hang me!*” “it is i, it is me, who is the true victim here.”