Sam Thorpe

Do you have a link to the report? Can't find it online yet.

Rebuilding State Authority In A Post-Trump America In the ruins of the administrative state after Trump, many on the left see an opportunity to design a New Deal-type reconstruction agenda. But building state capacity requires a government that is…

This piece by @beaubaumann.bsky.social is really good and focusing on all the right questions. lpeproject.org/blog/rebuild...

Have you written (or are you working on) anything on these questions? Or is there anyone you've been reading, contemporary or historical, that you think gets close to identifying some of the experiments we need to foster in our attempts to move forward?

But I haven't seen nearly enough emphasis elsewhere on the idea that our "language of... fire-alarm emergencies looks at our increasingly brittle existing modes of political organization and cannot see beyond them", that we need to rethink our law and politics rather than merely preserving them.

Really appreciated this article. Obviously '20s don't map onto the present perfectly, particularly r:e shape of authoritarian violence (state-perpetrated versus tacitly state-condoned), how media and opinion formation operates, and the targets of the state (primarily racial vs. primarily political).

The IMF too long assumed imbalances would recede.

The Fund is now - thankfully - marching back into the global imbalance part of its mandate.

IMF staff just released an interesting new paper.

“Do trade imbalances boost incomes in surplus economies at the expense of deficit economies?

1/

This is a really gorgeous collage. Loved reading it - thank you for sharing.

You Love America A covenant with death, and an agreement with hell; Yale, Du Bois, Bagehot, Pynchon, Fitzgerald

Alright here we go: You Love America.

I started writing this last year; it had this same title last year; depressingly little had to be changed for it to fit in to this moment.

open.substack.com/pub/rottenan...

Sorry for the long chain of comments - this article really hit a fun sweet spot for me of music + Frankfurt School + empirical research. Enjoyed reading it a lot, and I'm really curious to hear your thoughts.

No Bells Independent music journalism.

If you listen to some of the weirder corners of rap on the internet (think stuff that gets highlighted in places like my college radio friend's blog No Bells, linked here), you're getting an incredibly bizarre panorama of sounds, deliveries, lyrics, etc. that didn't exist in the aughts.

Also, any thoughts on the flip side of homogenization - the sheer variety of weird stuff that pops up with the ease of releasing music on streaming? I suspect if you look at the top thousand songs in 2022 vs. 2002, there would be MUCH more diversity in 2022 once you get outside of the top hundred.

I think in particular, the drum sample heterogeneity in the 2002 top hits vs. Rap Caviar might be because the latter is designed *explicitly* to "create a seamless listening experience", as you note, in a way that top charts can't be. (That said, totally with you on the dominance of the 808.)

I guess my concern here is that Rap Caviar is platforming a particular subgenre of pop-rap, since if you want to get more left-field recommendations, you'd just listen to an alternative rap playlist. (I.e. I assume lots of the weirder Kendrick stuff is not on Rap Caviar despite being popular.)

Really fun article! Two quick Qs: do you think Rap Caviar is really a fair analogue to the top charts? You say "both playlists represent the most-played and revenue-generating hip-hop music in a given year" - but would your findings still hold when using the 2024 top 50 instead?

Oh wow anti-trust, wealth taxation...you are telling me these can be tools to promote democratic stability and there were a whole boatload of centrist economists who couldn't think beyond deadweight loss and consumer welfare?

So many immediate horrors right now, but I appreciated the invitation from @donmoyn.bsky.social to reflect on the future and how social scientists could help with the eventual federal government rebuilding.

As @sbagen.bsky.social has argued persuasively, we need to start now with that effort! 1/

this from my piece on charlie kirk is probably the most important takeaway if you want to know why bad faith, right-wing voices in media are treated as just another set of peers

Seriously, the last paragraph here sounds like something straight out of the Roosevelt Institute! Possible that this is something the economic populist side of the admin is winning on, but would love thoughts on the (more likely) ulterior motives at play.

This is fascinating. Who in the admin is pushing to end corporate short-termism? Is this just intended to hide reporting on the current economic slowdown, or will it mark a genuine shift in policy?

www.ft.com/content/d5d4...

I highlighted this issue back in August, and it's fantastic to see it getting more mainstream media coverage; previously it was mostly living in the financial press.

Opinion | Here’s How Trump Takes Over the Fed

Aaron Klein with a really clear summary of why the Lisa Cook firing is so important: in Februrary, the regional Fed presidents are up for reapproval. If Cook is successfully fired before then, Trump appointees would have the majority necessary to reject them and completely take control of the FOMC.

“Mr. Van Hollen saw a different lesson [from his role in the Abrego Garcia case]. ‘This finger in the wind stuff has got to end. We also need to stop deluding ourselves that the problem is all about messaging, or about volume, or style. We don’t just need to fight. We need to fight for something.’”

Always wild to see a new illustration of just how corrosive the mismanagement of 2008 was to American economic, political, and social life.

Part of this story is that Germany and Japan each experienced steady increases in employment over this period, but the US series falls off a cliff in 2008 and remains ~3 p.p. (~4%) lower than its pre-period levels relative to UK and Canada.

Today in 'stylized facts I'd never really internalized': the drop in the US employment + LFP rates during and after 2008 was so severe that we went from among the highest employment rate in the G7 to one of the lowest; just two points above France. (Chart is G7 ex Italy, with US series highlighted.)

Pluralistic democracy depends on people feeling safe enough in the public square to express themselves and participate in the political process.

If they don’t, because the public square is dominated by intimidation and violent threat, democracy must perish.

The message should not be that political violence is bad because it targeted a good guy who was “practicing politics the right way” (which Kirk definitely was not). Political violence is bad because it inherently corrodes the democratic polity, because it makes democracy impossible.

Seems like a really interesting project - the first essays are already worth a read.

2: Perhaps harder to model, but if tariffs are taken as a sign of policy instability and issuing them simultaneously raises risk premium of government debt, how does this picture change? Is it possible to end up in a situation with simultaneously lower productivity growth + static or higher r*?

Really interesting paper - and incredibly clearly written! Two quick questions. 1: you mention that services->goods reallocation "may attenuate or reverse the productivity effect of tariffs" and raise r*, but that there's little research on importance. Do you have any priors on magnitude of effect?