Sam Levey

Fragility Is Getting Scary The opposite of risk management.

This, from @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social , highlights a consistent aspect of the second Trump Administration that should scare us all -- across a variety of areas (economy, health, climate, etc.), Trump is weakening our protections against the greatest risks. open.substack.com/pub/howthing...

The problem is that neither inventive design nor enforcement can cover every conceivable scenario, and so peoples’ hearts matter too. The heart makes you do the pro-social thing even if no one is looking.

"[A]ll universities have to do now is do nothing—no accepting the compact, no counter-offers, nothing—and the government will be left with no more power to coerce and control the First Amendment-protected activities of major American universities than it has today."

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”

Diary of Anne Frank
January 13, 1943

On a productive day I can write about 400 lines of Manim code... which will be like 1.5 minutes of video😅

I still hate LaTeX with the passion of a thousand suns and believe strongly that it deserves to die a painful death..... but, in the AI era, it is a lot more manageable.

Working on an empirical paper sure is forcing me to dig deep into the NIPA manual....

The lesson of history is that tyrants cannot be appeased.

Appeasement only feeds their insatiable hunger for power.

Tyrants prey on people who feel unsafe and vulnerable.

But without mass submission, a tyrant is powerless.

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?

Yes we actually do need a Project 2029 for liberals

Figure showing that 30% of manufacturers report passing on all the tariffs, about 25% report passing on none of the tariffs, and the rest report passing on some of the tariffs.

As a rough heuristic, it seems like, so far, about half the cost of tariffs have been passed on to consumers, and about half have been absorbed by lower profit margins for import-using American firms. libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/06/are-...

Like the old quote goes, anyone who would give up their liberty in exchange for security will live happily ever after, both free and safe

"Donald Trump is a monster and we desperately want to work with him" is a batshit position to take, it makes you sound like an insincere and feckless empty suit

One thing I think is cool is [some] economists saying "we shouldn't do anything that seems helpful until we have studied it empirically" but also "we should continue to use these foundational, somewhat radical postulates about how firms function in markets w/o subjecting them to empirical scrutiny"

I’m really sick of the courts finding this administration broke the law in some unprecedented way, but they get to keep doing illegal things for a few months as a little treat. They’re defaulting to rewarding lawbreaking.

I think we are in a quantum superposition between democracy and competitive authoritarianism. The 2026 midterms will collapse the wave function: we'll look into the box and see whether the cat is dead or alive.

Washington, DC under military occupation in last August 2025, with banners proclaiming the absolute power of the primus inter pares

This is a real photograph of Washington, DC this week, where the United States president has ordered military occupation in peacetime, and ordered the display of colossal portraits of himself.

www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

"The political culture of our youths, of tame and tamed discourse, of liberalism as a gentlemanly referee, no longer exists. It was a flower of a different climate."

Liberalism is not neutral & must speak to - and FROM - its values. It is impossible to divorce from race & gender

Such a good essay

Superb and sad piece by @adamposen.bsky.social www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

The idea that “real interest rates” matter is an affirmative statement that the change in behavior resulting from interest rates decreasing 1pp is the same as that resulting from expected inflation increasing 1pp. I find this very hard to believe!

Ganz killing it here, combining a critical methodological perspective on how polling is done with fundamental political theory about what politics is & what it involves:

There is no adult in the room, no one in charge. Turns out a semi-rationalistic elite was, maximum, a 50 year conscious project that was abandoned and can't be taken as an "ideal type" for a ruling class under capitalism.

1/Kevin Hassett had long ago discredited himself as a scholar by parroting claims about the economy he knew to be false. Even so, parroting the lie about rigged statistics, is a new low. The academy should ostracize him the same way a fabricator of research should be ostracized.

Remember: Almost all of us are the descendants of immigrants who fled persecution, or were brought to America under duress, or sought better lives for themselves and their descendants.

Politicians who stoke fear and hatred over immigration want you to forget this.

Do not.

Things That Sound Like Hyperbole But Aren't: the world's dominant communications systems now principally reward the production and sharing of information that is directly harmful not only to democracy but to life on Earth.

The Trump Administration's war on the academy is leaving the entire nation poorer. Colleges and universities have the right to choose their faculty, determine what is to be taught, and admit students as they please. This independence is what makes institutions of higher education worth having.

the thing about competition is that it only produces losers. people wonder why everyone seems like a loser now and it’s because so many things are competitions.

plus, whenever you see someone who has apparently won something, you can tell that spiritually, they have lost

Daily Planet reports new plot by Lex…Back on earth one.

www.wired.com/story/enshit...

Probably democracy unavoidably requires periodic “touch the stove” moments. If people start to think nothing matters (which they will if things go too well for too long), then they’re going to take actions which cause them to re-learn why we have the institutions that we do.