don phillips

"I think we are misunderstanding efficiency. Efficiency is not about making people's capacity to generate text faster. Efficiency in complex social systems is having really high trust interactions so that we're not slowed down at every interaction by all these questions...

She looks nice.

I posted this elsewhere. Some of you might appreciate it.

The fact that you've tried to hijack this thread and distract attention from the important economic analysis in the first post proves the point I'm about to make. The linked book explains the destructive 'cultural turn' in detail. Not only are you wrong, you're catastrophically wrong. Important civil rights movements were effortlessly hijacked and incorporated by the right to energise 'progressive neoliberalism'. The belief that inclusion, fairness and equality can be achieved in the neoliberal economic system as it stands became dominant - as the fraud Foucault averred, "let's give the market a chance". Corporate DEI policies systematically promoted individuals representing formerly marginalised groups, making any commitment they had to the left at best tenuous and at worst irrational. It was a clever political move. In neoliberalism's divisive context, the focus on culture and identity created a weak, fragmented and economically illiterate left dominated by middle-class liberals whose contempt for the traditional working class was palpable. The right and the faux-left 'Spiked' crew didn't need to construct a divisive 'woke' identity politics narrative - it was handed to them by the stupid liberalised left. In 2008 the left had no solution to the financial crisis. Even Corbynomics fell significantly short. The traditional left founded on socieconomic concerns shared by the multiethnic working class as a whole despite cultural prejudices and tensions died. National populism thrived in the vacuum - it was too easy for the fake 'far right' and assorted racists to convince an electorally significant number of working-class whites that the liberalised left was at best useless and at worst their mortal enemy. Polanski is doing his best to refocus the left on economic concerns and promote economic literacy without abandoning civil rights. Good luck to him. But the chasm opened by 'progressive neoliberalism' is deep and wide. I hope it isn't too late.

Zelensky's new state hero, Andrii Melnyk, in July 1941: "We collaborate closely with Germany and invest everything in this collaboration...we believe that Adolf Hitler’s new order in Europe is the real order, and that Ukraine is one of the avant-gardes" x.com/KyivIndependen…

Trying to have a conversation about glyphosate, and someone falsely brings up the IARC classifying it as a carcinogen? I am here to the rescue, with exactly the ammunition you need to fight back and stand up for science: open.substack.com/pub/briandunni…

Must read.

The article linked is excellent and needs to be read more widely.

@MarksLarks Question is. How do you practise that? Until you get good at it?

OMFG

@kmflett Sort of disagree, but in an amiable way.

Going electric: 60 years (17th May 1966) since Dylan played Manchester Free Trade Hall kmflett.wordpress.com/2016/05/16/50-… via @kmflett

First, “the markets” do not care whether the budget is “in balance” in the abstract. Bond pricing is not a moral referendum on fiscal tidiness. It reflects expected Bank Rate, expected inflation, term premia, liquidity conditions, regulatory demand, pension-fund behaviour, global portfolio preferences, collateral demand, and the expected path of nominal income. A government can run deficits for decades and still have low yields; it can also run a balanced budget and suffer a currency or banking crisis. The relevant question is not “is spending in balance?” but “what is the macroeconomic and institutional setting?” Second, you import a household-creditor model into a monetary-sovereign state. The UK government does not “borrow money” in the same sense that a firm or household does. It issues sterling liabilities: bank notes, reserves, NS&I savings bonds, Treasury bills, gilts within a sterling monetary system whose unit of account it defines. Gilt issuance is not the state rummaging around for money it lacks; it is a liability-management operation: exchanging one form of state liability for another. The risk on sterling gilts is therefore not ordinary insolvency risk, but interest-rate risk, inflation risk, duration risk, and political/institutional risk. Third, “creditors will assess whether they will get it back” is misleading in the UK case. Holders of gilts are not concerned that the UK will be technically unable to credit sterling to their accounts at maturity. They are worried about the real value of what they receive, future interest-rate paths, inflation, and whether they can sell the gilt at a reasonable price before maturity. A different argument. Fourth, the “markets punish imbalance” claim is selective history. The Liz Truss episode was not simply “the deficit was too large”; it was Bank Rate expectations, sterling weakness, and a forced-selling crisis in leveraged LDI pension strategies. It was not an eternal bond-market law saying “Left spending bad” or “Right tax cuts bad”; it was a specific market-structure and credibility shock. Fifth, the debt interest is also an income flow to the private sector: pension funds, insurers, banks, overseas holders, and households indirectly. It is not money fired into the sun. The distributional question matters: who receives it, and what else could have been done with the fiscal space? But describing it merely as the cost of “past debt” hides the fact that it is also current income for gilt holders and that the gilts etc will be inherited by future generations as a financial asset. Sixth, your comparison with education and defence needs care. It is a significant fiscal transfer, but your framing is designed to make the state appear like a maxed-out household credit card. A fallacy. In sum, the bond market is not a Victorian bank manager checking whether the household books are balanced. In a sterling system, gilts etc are state liabilities issued as part of monetary and reserve management. The real constraint is inflation and productive capacity, not whether the spreadsheet performs moral virtue.

This is so funny

@DiscussingFilm Natasha Lyonne.

Amazon has officially begun auditions to cast the next James Bond. Who do you want to be the next James Bond?

RT @ProfHall1955: Who precisely are the 'bond vigilantes', the true enemies of democracy who sell off and manipulate government bonds to ja…

Yes. I was around at the time and heard rumours that Denis Healey was compromised - he has also served on the committee of the Bildeberg Group since the early 1950s. His credit swaps and IMF loan in 1976 were totally unnecessary, and so were the wage freezes that caused the strikes - all this gave the Tory media the ammunition to crucify Labour. Stuart Holland and others had suggested ways of combating stagflation and Labour's manifesto in 1978 was the best I had ever read - Peter Shore had worked out ways of refurbishing British industry. This terrifed the City. 1979 was virtually a neoliberal coup.

Whereas 1945-73 was the golden age: an era that raised working class people and gave them welfare, health care and education and enabled working class people like me to go from single-parent dole underclass to University lecturer. This wasn;t 'serfdom' this was real freedom

“A person afflicted with nationalism believes that his own country is the most civilised and humane country in the world while its enemies are guilty of every imaginable atrocity and vileness. Since they are so vile and atrocious, while we are so civilised and humane, there is no degree of vileness and atrocity which we may not legitimately practise towards them. This is the underlying creed of nationalism.” ― Bertrand Russell

What a book! One of the best I’ve read in a while. End Times by @Peter_Turchin uses mathematical models and historical data to explain why societies become unstable: rising inequality, too many elites competing for power, weaker institutions, and public anger. It makes social collapse feel less random and more understandable 👌 goodreads.com/book/show/6292…

Six years. The Beatles changed the world in six years. Like band from 2020 now overwhelming everything in culture, fashion, thinking, living.