if you aren’t willing to burn the world down to give your own family a bit of temporary safety and prosperity, you’re just revealing yourself to be a loser, the kind arsonists made of sterner stuff will burn early.
when i was a kid, i had a friend who used to get very self-righteously mad when his mom didn’t believe him. even when he was lying. it doesn’t matter, he’s her son, she should trust him. i feel like he’d be a great advocate before this supreme court.
kind of colin powell, second time as farce.
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driving home from thanksgiving, this past Sunday, i saw this. i was a bit taken aback.
Image of an Enron truck, taken Nov 30, 2026.
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yes. that's a wonderful comparison. RCTs are good, but we'd be more blinded by our fetish with them than enriched by their "gold-standard-ness" if we disdained every other form of knowledge creation as unrigorous and useless.
I think it's impeded important progress in the same way as biology and ethology would be impaired if they insisted upon methodological cellulism. 1/
The convention of methodological individualism, very strong in angloamerican social science, has made it difficult to properly conjecture and model, and therefore to hypothesize, detect, and observe, differences in quality of collectivities that can't be modeled from "microfoundations". 2/
So it's easy to argue Garrett-Jones-style for IQ among constituent individuals as explanations for social outcomes and instruments of social improvement than for plausible institutional interventions, unless the interventions attach to very crude "incentives-matter"-style mechanisms. /fin
This is a better piece than the tweet below suggests. 1/
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It's true, as Matt says, that the fact that a "successful middle-class life" has grown expensive is a consequence of growth and affluence altering norms and material expectations, of macroeconomic success from a certain perspective rather than poverty or failure. 2/
It's also true that you can't afford to live a "successful middle-class life" on terms that you could in the 1950s or 60s. 2/
No number or chart can resolve the question of whether the new set of trade-offs — richer in certain material senses, but less free to opt out of market-remunerated activity and still live a "successful middle-class life" — is better or worse. 3/
A separate question is whether achieving and maintaining a "successful middle-class life" had grown more or less exclusive than it used to be. 4/
I think that it has grown profoundly more exclusive, because the norms that define a "successful middle-class life" are defined by an upper-middle-class that has grown more numerous, but also increased a wealth and income gap, from the median household. They set a higher standard. 5/
(Of course, a "successful middle-class life" has grown profoundly *less* exclusive across dimensions like race or being openly queer. To say the achievement has grown "more exclusive" involves collapsing these different dimensions, and arguing the class dimension overwhelms these dimensions.) 6/
Nevertheless, I think much of our catastrophe — and we are living a social catastrophe that threatens everything once good about our country — derives from an *accurately perceived* decline, especially by people not of formerly disfavored groups… 7/
both in the likelihood of achieving what we contemporaneously understand to be a "successful middle-class life", and with respect to the sacrifices one typically has to make, both in time, and in accepting amoral, often immoral, market discipline. 8/
The cost of being a "successful middle-class person" is to be less free along certain dimensions, and (on average, not always) less virtuous with respect to ones source of remuneration, than a "successful middle-class person" would have been sixty years ago. 9/
And it's harder to achieve. /fin
i think i place methodological individualism among the most destructive ideas in human history.
it’s really disheartening to hear electeds basically argue, “hey, this is the sort of corruption the Supreme Court has decriminalized, so our man is clean as a whistle.” 1/
the problem is that the Supreme Court has decriminalized corruption. it’s not exonerating, or shouldn’t be, morally or before voters to argue there would be no conviction if a prosecution were pursued. /fin
so much dystopia-as-aspirational in our culture. apparently the liberating aspects of the torment nexus overwhelm the, well, torment. ht @jlappen1.bsky.social
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You’d think an editor would have saved this poor author embarrassment by pointing out that *the Roberts Court have been absolutely gutting the authority of the administrative state.* 1/
Text: At the same time, new conservative jurisprudence appears poised to enhance the power of the executive branch. A series of cases at the court suggest that the court's conservative majority is prepared to give the executive branch more deference. Progressives have railed against this jurisprudence, but if the long-term effect of these rulings is to give the administrative state more discretion to act with greater alacrity, then progressives, once elected, should be able to use it to much the same effect.
They’ve enacted a rotation of power, not just to the executive branch, but within the executive branch, from administrative agencies to the person of the President, their “unified executive” in whom “The executive Power shall be vested” 2/
To say progressives might repurpose this for their own ends (i) ignores the Court’s obvious double standard, it offered Biden no such deference; and (ii) defies the core of the progressive project, which was to build an administrative state somewhat insulated from presidential politics + whim. /fin
oh poop. i forgot the link. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/o...
Opinion | What the Left Could Learn From Trump’s Brutal Efficiency
Link Preview: Opinion | What the Left Could Learn From Trump’s Brutal Efficiency
My recommendation is that we strike the appropriate balance. I am very insightful.
getting a lot of calls from “the digital activation department” lately.
skynet.
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a successful country seduces. an unsuccessful country coerces.
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one way to think about is that *the distribution* of price change outcomes is much wider when prices are on average increasing quickly rather than slowly. so many more people end up in a low tail of wage increases and a high tail of price increases than in more tranquil times.
am i the only one nostalgic for Vietnam Syndrome?
i kind of want to look into official rodents now!
there are assholes. small assholes cause small problems. big assholes—the more powerful sociopaths—cause big problems, while calling your attention to small assholes, and blaming them for everything.