Martijn Konings

People referring to Claude Code in fifty years.

Once nostalgia starts, it's unstoppable..

Like 99% of people on here, I now have a stake in the financial future of Anthropic - so I feel deeply conflicted about their surprisingly ethical stance. Will have to learn to live with this unresolvable tension.

The Abundance Gang Has a Big AI Problem The faddish political movement’s ties to industry figures may help attract funding, but it comes with a political cost.

So good - "In a bit of profound irony, data-center construction has broken free of the choke points decried by abundance to the point that it is now bidding up land value and resulting in further constraints on the supply of housing"

newrepublic.com/article/2064...

@dylangyauchl.bsky.social could you follow me so I can message you? (Can't seem to find an email address).

Go read my latest in the monthly about affordability politics and why it's deeper than just price levels!

The Abundance Gang Has a Big AI Problem The faddish political movement’s ties to industry figures may help attract funding, but it comes with a political cost.

The abundance clique has an AI problem. Beyond being funded by Silicon Valley, the ecosystem features an array of tech libertarians, a smattering of technofascism, and no answers for our anti-AI moment. Read @dylangyauchl.bsky.social in @newrepublic.com!

newrepublic.com/article/2064...

Finance in the Dark | Lenore Palladino | Finance in the Dark An opaque sector is reshaping the US. Only ambitious regulatory reform can check its power.

"what the politics of private finance teaches is the inadequacy of considering only what we can achieve in the short term, given the political constraints"
www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/fin...

Thousands of CEOs just admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity—and it has economists resurrecting a paradox from 40 years ago | Fortune In the 1980s, economist Robert Solow made an observation that reminded economists of today’s AI boom: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

nil impact no use case fortune.com/2026/02/17/a...

It wasn’t just the child tax credit.

And it’s not just the Republicans.

After the Rent Freeze | JW Mason The cost of affordable housing in New York City

“Any discussion of rent regulation has to grapple with the fact that owners of residential buildings pay most of their rent earnings not on maintenance or operations, but to service their debts to their creditors.”

NEW by @jwmason.bsky.social

www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/aft...

The Oxford Handbook of Constituent Power is out today! Peter Niesen (based @politikuhh.bsky.social), Lucia Rubinelli (@luxirubsi.bsky.social) and I consider ourselves incredibly fortunate to be able to publish the contributions of so many wonderful colleagues. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Oren Cass or David Harvey?

What Jeffrey Epstein knew about money Epstein's emails show how the financial elite consolidated their wealth in global turmoil

What Jeffrey Epstein knew about money

Epstein’s emails show how the financial elite consolidated their wealth amid global turmoil

🖊️ @willdunn.bsky.social

Macroeconomics is the driver, not median voters. Thomas Ferguson responds in a forum on “How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism.”

Democratic elites chose donors over workers. Without an aggressive economic agenda they risk becoming the permanent minority party, warns Thomas Ferguson. @bostonreview.bsky.social  www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...

I often wonder if the tendency to mistake basic emotions (whether cruelty or despair) for deep insight is a distinctive feature of our era or something of all times. It seems to require both a definite capacity for critical thinking and a willingness to abuse it.

Australians are bracing for another interest rate rise because Labor has turbo-charged the housing crisis & refused to tackle corporate price gouging. If you're a mortgage holder or a renter, you face being hit by the RBA to “fix” the government’s "inflation problem".

👉 "You know you've got "research culture" right when people stop talking about research culture and just talk about their research."👈

ONE DAY LATER Larry Summers fleshed out his complaints in a Washington Post column

Hard to imagine how Larry Summers’s humiliation could be any more complete tbh

“Pantomime of thinking” is a great phrase

I've spent way too much time trying to understand Kevin Warsh's thinking, but there's not much there in the end. This is the upshot, I think:

Education of a Grandmaster Kenneth Rogoff, Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead. Yale 2025.

This is subtly savage.
www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives...

An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought Over the past three decades, Italian thought has emerged as a major field within continental philosophy. But what are the latest developments since Italian theo…

New book officially out 🚨

If you ever wanted to know what Italian philosophy has been up to in the last 10-20 years, look no further. “An introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought” is out today with chapters on cyberfascism, technology & work, pandemic biopolitics, and posthumanism.

New paper out - on why there won't be a return to the golden age of inflation targeting. Empirical material focused on the Reserve Bank of Australia, but the argument applies broadly, I feel.

www.ppesydney.net/content/uplo...

Adorno: On Propaganda (ca. 1942/43) Translation of an unpublished fragment from the materials for ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism.’

Recently stumbled on a more or less complete, unpublished Adorno fragment on fascist propaganda & mimesis while looking thru archival materials from the early phases (ca. 42/43) of writing Dialectic of Enlightenment. Just finished a translation—you can read it here! open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

Instead of retreating into facile cynicism about the safety net and regulatory state, people on the left should be trying to occupy the bureaucracy at the state, local, and, after the MAGA putschists are finally expelled from power, federal level—not simply because we need good people in those jobs, but because enough good people in any given department can change its internal culture for the better. A lot depends, for example, on whether state and local transportation departments are staffed by car-brained traffic engineers or planners who are genuinely invested in walkability and developing viable mass transit networks. Just as much hinges on whether state health agencies are staffed by people with a genuine commitment to the cause of universal healthcare, even in the face of brutal federal Medicaid cuts. There’s another reason for occupying the bureaucracy, too. For a movement that wants to transform the state, there is tremendous value in understanding how policy implementation and institutional change happens on a granular level. If you spend some time working inside the bureaucracy and you keep your eyes open, you can learn a lot about the points of leverage that leftist politicians and outside advocacy groups can press to their advantage. On the flipside, you can also learn a great deal about the tradeoffs associated with certain approaches and how well-intentioned but undercooked policy initiatives can produce unintended consequences. These are all important lessons for anyone trying to push any level of government in a more humane direction. But they’re especially important lessons for leftist officials who have ambitious agendas, a finite amount of time in which to implement them, and little room for error.

The case against Graeberism and for Mamdanism dissentmagazine.org/article/the-...

Perhaps "the markets" are just telling us that their concern with central bank independence was never that principled to begin with.

The Market Met Jerome Powell’s Warning With Deep Denial What’s a Fed chair got to do to get people interested in the criminalization of monetary policy?

Dear Stock Market:

Trump is trying to throw the Federal Reserve chair in jail on charges even his fellow Republicans recognize as phony.

Why aren’t you alarmed? Have you gone COMPLETELY deaf, dumb and blind?

Love, Tim

newrepublic.com/article/2052...

Bipartisanship is what's needed right now.