George Batta

…in the progressive policy world about the efficacy or desirability of big fiscal, given these political economy considerations. (2/2)

So ultimately no damage to median real wages. But in your estimation, was the (likely) electoral backlash due to the timing of wage catchup, the distribution of real wage changes, or else just some kind of aggregate money illusion? Just genuinely curious whether the backlash changed priors… (1/2)

Meta also doing an in-substance debt deal via a $30B leasing transaction in October.

Whenever she was in the news, back in pre-Musk Twitter, Isaac Chotiner usually would tweet about her role as the architect of Trump I's child separation policy. Dude loathes her with the white hot intensity of a thousand burning suns.

Yeah, I like this synthesis. I mean, I think even in a pre-social media world, there still would have been a strong backlash, but the effect was def amplified via social media.

Totally reasonable explanations too; I suppose I lean harder towards inflation as the story given voter survey evidence and some other empirical work I’ve seen. Hopefully, we’re all people of good faith trying to work with what limited data and flawed models we have 🙂.

Yeah, I view it more as likely having had an important causal effect on incumbent vote share, though certainly not the only explanation for vote share. I suppose the experiment would be: how much higher would the ruling party’s vote share have been, absent the inflation spike?

…controlling for observables in a multivariate setting, etc.

OK, the large N version: If we regressed incumbent vote share change on an inflation spike dummy, over a long period and for many countries, we’d see a negative coeff. estimate, ceteris paribus. ofc, the ceteris paribus is load-bearing, but now we’re both arguing post hoc narratives on unobservables

Oh I agree, I don’t like the implications of it at all; I’d rather we aim for policies that aimed to boost, say, median real earnings. But I think there’s a greater degree of money illusion operating here, which should give us all pause.

Went overboard with *all*, but there was def a broad anti-incumbency backlash. Hence, the chart:

Incumbent parties, the world over, who were in power during a price level jump without precedent in recent memory all took a shellacking at the polls. No one is arguing for some tight linear relationship between popularity and moderate inflation, just that incumbents were blamed for the sharp spike

Government's entire case falls apart when jury learns ranged subs attack with disadvantage within 5 feat.

Yeah this is similar to take-or-pay or throughput arrangements in the energy industry, which can help finance construction off balance sheet. But leases are basically all on-BS nowadays, so not sure how this helps hide debt (eg, rating agencies regularly treat all lease commitments as debt capital).

I like how the NYT tried to do a “some experts say” framing, and the expert was like, you do not need an expert opinion to see this is bad.

I didn't take pics but the feeling of being in a group of people with no visible beginning or end was so thrilling. The opposite of online anomie, and a living counterpoint to the wary, isolated, compartmentalized world the shitheads want to make. It's simple and obvious I guess but it means a lot.

114-Year-Old Attributes Longevity to Sheer Random Chance MILFORD, WY—Mayor Hammond Forsythe officially declared Monday “Hazel McCreeley Day,” and why not? After all, if you’d lived through over 41,500 of them, wouldn’t you deserve one too?

theonion.com/114-year-old...

Sincerely appreciate the work you’re doing as a public intellectual, Justin.

announcing my new think tank, the "people hate inflation, that's like 90% of why harris lost" institute

Haven’t kept up with it, but there was a mini-boom in corp fin years ago for papers about family firms:

wgfa.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/u...

At first, I felt like I had freaking super powers. Like a PI with a nearly infinite supply of talented lab members, who worked at 1000x speed. It was exhilarating.

But then, the cracks started to show. TL;DR: If Claude were my grad student, I'd kick them out of my lab.

calling in the NIMBYs for one last job

Make your time.

Man, this or Fight Club would make for great UAPD eps. I don’t think you guys have entered the Fincherverse yet?

"...for Just One Day."

Read the transcript. This was a great interview! Learned a lot.

Right? Is there a 2025 Fight Club? Though I suppose fans of anarchist left-coded pop culture can easily horseshoe into MAGA extremism.

Thanks much for the summary Carl, very helpful.

What do you think these results might tell us about the likely effectiveness of Agentic AI?

I mean, to the extent all insurance involves selling put options, then LL is just another flavor of insurance.

"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -Carl Sagan