. . . called The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, and he was interviewed by Rob Johnson on the Economics & Beyond podcast. Here’s a quote from 50:20 in the pod (my transcription, done before I saw the official transcript at the link): Now a core thesis of my book . . . is that If […]
President Biden has so far insisted he will not negotiate over the debt ceiling. This makes sense on one level. The Republicans are threatening to blow up the economy to get the Democrats to agree to – and share the blame for – unpopular budget cuts. It is easy to see why Democrats want to […]
Ordinarily you would not drive a motorcycle without a headlight down a narrow, winding mountain road at high speed on a dark, rainy night. But you would do this if your child is dying and you need to fetch a doctor immediately. Even sensible people take great risks to avoid an imminent catastrophe. Kevin Hassett, […]
Can ChatGPT run a business? Color me very skeptical. This is a shockingly easy question, but I would not have predicted that ChatGPT would get it right, given its limited ability to do math and think logically. So, I am updating my assessment of ChatGPT (slightly) in a favorable direction. Still, before we get too […]
According to Politico, Trump is against cutting Social Security and Medicare: Former President Donald Trump issued a warning to Republican lawmakers on Friday: Don’t lay a finger on entitlement programs as part of the debt ceiling showdown with the White House. “Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or […]
One reason politics is so hard is that our words are often heard by different audiences, and a message that is well-calibrated for one type of listener may work poorly for listeners with different roles, values, or interests. To illustrate: Phillips O’Brien has a piece in the Atlantic with the headline “Time is on Ukraine’s […]
Ukraine is getting much more advanced offensive weapons . . . This seems to mark a major shift, a commitment to helping Ukraine go on offense and win. Open questions . . . How far will Ukraine’s partners go? Infantry fighting vehicles today, maybe tanks, ATACMs, planes, etc. tomorrow? How big a threat is the […]
The Republicans have no good options as they cast around for a solution to their speakership problem. McCarthy can try to make concessions to secure the support of the Freedom Caucus. These concessions will empower the obstructionists in the FC and will make the House ungovernable. The result will be interminable gridlock and recriminations at […]
Tyler Cowen points us to YouChat, a new AI chatbot, that as far as I can see after studying this carefully for 15 seconds is supposed to be more up to date than the OpenAI bot and integrated with a search engine which naturally makes it the next new thing and presumably worth billions of […]
The new OpenAI chatbot is fun to mess around with. (You can sign up for a free account here.) But is it smart? I asked it an easy math question, based on Euler’s polyhedron formula. Euler discovered that the number of edges of a polyhedron is equal to the number of faces plus the number […]