JW Mason

I wonder if that could even be *why* the CEO-VC class is so against it - because they see it as part of the same pattern of insubordination by professional employees as demands for diversity and so on.

Sri Lanka's Interest Rate Trap by Arjun Jayadev, Ahilan Kardirgamar and J. W. Mason

Necessary piece on the insanity of pursuing ‘price stability’ through sky high rates during a massive deflation in a developing country that depends on heavily on volatile food and energy imports. (by @jwmason.bsky.social et al). open.substack.com/pub/jwmason/...

Could be part of it.

It does seem that way. The question is whether this is just the herd chasing after the next thing. Or is there a deeper hostility in tech world towards the sort of collective reorganization of economic life that a serious response to climate change would require?

It does seem like that, doesn’t it?

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.

Personally, I doubt it is possible to really oppose the MAGA-Orban-Le Pen-AFD view of the world, and still think that "the West" is a useful category.

Perhaps at one point one could brush past any deeper meaning of the term and say it's just a convenient shorthand. But with the return of an overt clash of civilizations, Camp of the Saints vision of "Western Civilization" we might want to be more careful with our language.

What kind of worldview sees humanity as divided into two fundamentally different groups, on the one hand the US, Western Europe and people like us? and on the other, the Chinese and people like them? Is "the West" so different from what used to be called "the white races" or "Christendom"?

Via @himself.bsky.social, here's an interesting post on the incoherence of export controls. But I was struck by its uncritical use of "the West". Is it perhaps time to think about the worldview implicit in this term, and whether we still want to use it? mileskellerman.substack.com/p/economic-s...

The affordability crisis is an inequality crisis. When prices spike in key sectors, it's not just inflation—it's a massive redistribution shock that hits poor households hardest.
In our **new working paper**, we identify the sectors that matter most. A thread 🧵
scholarworks.umass.edu/entities/pub...

The thing about adopting the Crusades as an image of civilisational war is that the Crusaders were unequivocally the bad guys if you possess even a shred of morality. Of course, we are dealing with people who don't, but it has to be said, right

In that context giving the President the ability to fire regulatory agency heads doesn’t make the President all powerful, it makes the President the master of a toy boat. As long as Trump is President this logic will remain hidden—but it will emerge suddenly if there is a Democratic victory in 2028.

Speaking as a private citizen on a matter of public concern, yes leadership is apparently planning to cut 50% of the faculty at the New School for Social Research in order to eliminate social research and replace scholarship with a trendy MA degree mill For the 21st Century 1/

Gavin out there trying to get more young people to vote, and vote for Democrats, by appealing to what they are really clamoring for…cultural uniformity.

YouTube video by The New York Times Gavin Newsom Urges Democrats to Be ‘More Culturally Normal’

It seems to me that what’s culturally normal in the United States is not getting into other people’s private business. It’s only weird obsessives like Gavin Newsom who want to poke around in people’s pants before letting them play sports or use the bathroom. www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8-d...

I think this is getting at something important.

I think it's better to keep these questions separate. There may be a balance of payments problem, which requires some strategy to manage foreign exchange. But that is not why the central bank is keeping rates so high on domestic-currency debt.

the reason its bad to run universities like businesses is that almost all businesses fail on any reasonable timeline of evaluation.

hudson's bay made it the longest and even they only got to about half an oxford of longevity

"Sure Europe has Muslims but you would too if you had our geography" is a lot of things but certainly not a defense of open societies

There are many people who know things but few who could make other people understand the things they know. Below is a very good example of the latter.

Painfully reminded me of Ceausescu's self-imposed debt-paydown trap in 80s and even more so IMF's shock therapy 1997-2000.

Triggering, as they say

Sri Lanka is currently undergoing its worst economic crisis since Independence. The austerity measures imposed as a part of the ongoing IMF program – following the island nation’s first ever default on its external debt in 2022 – have led to poverty doubling to over 25 percent; according to the World Bank, poverty will not return to pre-crises levels until 2034. The economy is only just beginning to recover from a deep depression – in per capita terms, real GDP levels will not recover to 2018 levels until 2026, if then. A generation is being lost to malnutrition, school dropouts and youth unemployment. A country that a few decades ago was considered a model development state with enviable human development indicators is now being forced to dismantle its social welfare system. Yet in the midst of this crisis, Sri Lanka is living with one of the strangest paradoxes in global monetary policy: extraordinarily high interest rates in an economy grappling with deflation. For much of the last three years, the country has had some of the highest real interest rates in the world despite being in a serious macroeconomic crisis, struggling with debt distress, and facing strong disinflationary forces.

Arjun Jayadev, Ahilan Kardirgamar and I wrote a piece on the insanity of Sri Lanka's high interest rates in the face of deflation and a deeply depressed economy. It was published at Project Syndicate and in the Sri Lankan paper FT Daily. I've just put it on my blog. jwmason.org/slackwire/sr...

well, not from AI, but hypothetically let's say from the power transmission infrastructure that can be used for other things.

on the internet nobody knows if you're being sarcastic

The question isn't should we prohibit people from making LLMs. The question is, if we are going to channel huge amounts of money to activities that aren't profitable because we think there are long-term social benefits to them, why are we picking these particular activities?

Yeah but it's not just they are free to. It's that we have set up systems to channel immense resources to a few individuals to make those choices.

DeLong did not cover himself in glory back then, either.

Reminds me of this bit from Brecht's Galileo:

Right. UBI would go a lot farther than VC in unceasing the kind of creativity you are talking about.

Again, I'm very sympathetic to this general view. Will have to think more about how it applies to the AI business specifically.