Filipe Campante

Authoritarian crackdowns always randomly ensnare people who are supposedly not targets, so that the circle of fear becomes larger.

‘The System Is Meant to Break You’: What ICE Is Doing to People Here Legally www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/o...

“Opposition politicians are seated with no incident” has got to be one of the lowest bars for democracy one could come up with…

There could hardly be a clearer description of authoritarian populism than this DHS tweet.

If we survive the ongoing authoritarian attempt — and I’m more optimistic that we might — we will have to hand it to the federal courts. (SCOTUS *emphatically* excluded.)

Every other supposed bulwark of democracy wobbled — Congress, Democrats, media, business, universities, etc. They haven’t.

Last night’s lavish White House dinner showed us the global oligarchy coming together in plain sight.

By cozying up to MBS, Trump has signaled to the world that the United States is now on the side of authoritarianism, not democracy.

It’s based on anecdotal observation of teenage boys, but I get the distinct impression that Cristiano Ronaldo fandom is highly predictive of support for Trump. Somehow it fits together…

Italy’s failure to qualify will be an astonishing feat.

Hard to beat this discussant slide by force-of-nature @mushfiq-econ.bsky.social after I spoke at the IMF last Friday

Opinion | Economists Hate This Idea. It Could Be a Way Out of the Affordability Crisis.

The title is pure clickbait, but the analysis is sharp and persuasive. @nealemahoney.bsky.social

Economists Hate This Idea. It Could Be a Way Out of the Affordability Crisis. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/o...

For Women in Economics, the Hostility Is Out in the Open (Published 2021)

1/ Egalitarianism should begin at home. I link to this article by @bencasselman.bsky.social in light of the communications between Larry Summers and Jeffrey Epstein that have just been released. The released emails and the fact of friendship are vile.

www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/b...

Humans demand humans to hold accountable, for fairness and incentive reasons.

This right here is a reason why I think humans will be kept around even in sectors where AI is demonstrably better from a performance standpoint.

Waymo Was on a Roll in San Francisco. Then One of Its Driverless Cars Killed a Cat. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/15/u...

Plus his shot is impossible to contest, and if that weren’t enough, he can break people’s ankles off the dribble. It’s unfathomable where this guy will be when he’s, like, 25 — I honestly think there’s a scenario where people are seriously talking about him as the GOAT within the next five years.

Wemby is the most incredible athlete I have ever seen. Not the best (though he could be when it’s all said and done), but the most incredible, by a distance.

I agree.

The upside is that this may simply fail to consolidate. The downside is the potential for instability and volatility…

I’ve said this before: we’re seeing the unique figure of the lame-duck authoritarian. I think it helps account for the speed and sheer recklessness of the authoritarian attempt — he doesn’t have to care about the voters — but consolidation becomes a big question mark…

Academics who have advised a graduate student from China over the past years would be banned from federal funding. This would give the federal government one more lever to attack scientists. And how long before they expand the list of "hostile foreign" countries?

The Compassion Trap: How the Shutdown Weaponized Democratic Values Against Democracy Itself When Opposition Parties Stop Fighting Because the Cruelty Becomes Unbearable. And Why They Shouldn't.

What’s the difference between compromise and capitulation? Compromise trades concessions. Capitulation pays ransom to stop deliberate suffering, and teaches your opponent that coercion works. There are effective responses to coercive bargaining. What we saw was not one of them.

The incentives now will be even more geared towards corruption, bc of the greater precariousness.

It’s way worse than the patronage system, bc you may go long periods without getting paid while you’re doing it. It’s a crazy achievement: patronage, but worse.

Who wants to go into civil service under these terms? The consequences over time will be depleted services and corruption. It’s an unprecedented wanton destruction of state capacity.

The consequences for state capacity will be dire, and echo through generations: you are creating a system of negative selection into the public sector.

America has invented something truly unique in the context of the modern state: civil service as a precarious job.

The Shutdown Is Over. But for Federal Workers, the Anxiety Persists. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/u...

I think an underrated function of conspiracy theories is that they prevent us from noticing the actual collusion of forces that harms and collectively assails us; noticing this would be more painful than believing in even the most evil and outlandish conspiracy, because it is actually true

I do think the biggest way in which Donald Trump has broken journalism is his lack of shame. It used to be that exposing a public figure's secret appalling sins would cause them shame, humiliation and a loss of job. This made journalism consequential. But Trump just shrugs and nothing happens

The most depressing/revolting thing is that this can't possibly accomplish any meaningful policy goal, it's simply making people's lives worse for no discernible purpose.

This project was fueled by RAGE

RAGE whenever I read or heard about (another) abuse of power by faculty

RAGE whenever I was asked to discuss a paper about gender wage differentials that attributed gaps to "preferences" with no consideration of how "preferences" are formed

It really looks like he's playing against little kids, except that they are enormous, and the very best players in the world. Absurd.

A dude who's this tall, and still able to shake his defender out of his boots like that, it's the pinnacle of unfairness. Barring injury, we're talking very high GOAT possibilities here...