Good essay but the instinct to blame capitalism alone is strange given the disastrous communist famines of the Holodomor and Great Leap Forward. The problem is more general than capitalism. In any case, food inflation is bad but famine is less likely today than 50 or 100 years ago.

Phenomenal World@phenomenalworld.bsky.social · 6d ago

“Food inflation has spurred states into action: in Mexico, the Morena admin negotiated a fixed-price basket of basic food items; in Brazil, Lula manipulated tax rates on select products. And in New York, Mamdani is beginning to roll out public grocery stores.” phenomenalworld.org/analysis/a-f...

Had to make myself a flow chart of how the Union financed Civil War procurement with a hierarchy of intermediate and final forms of payment.

Very confused by these pages from an 1867 chemistry book that seem to suggest that a water molecule contains only one hydrogen atom? What am I missing? digital.sciencehistory.org/works/ld8bujg

How do you read this name? Andrew Zane?

Nicolas Barreyre has a short and very constructive essay on the "new history of capitalism." I think he makes an especially valuable point that we've reached a point where we can begin to re-engage with some of the economic historians who trained as economists. usabroad.unibo.it/article/view...

My book Against Money, coauthored with Arjun Jayadev, is coming out from University of Chicago Press on May 5. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Against Money

A powerful deconstruction of humanity’s most influential invention, from the acclaimed economists J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev.Money is everywhere in our daily lives. It lurks in the swipe of a card ...

press.uchicago.edu

Man I hate it when social scientific papers use parenthetical citations and forget to include the full citation in the bibliography. Go try to google (Smith 2011) with no additional publication details. One advantage of footnotes is that this kind of thing happens much less often.

Terrifying

Put yourself in shoes of someone in a oil & gas importing country Its triage: which hospitals get fuel, which industries shut, which crops get fertilizers? Those who don't have deep pockets in a bidding war pay in increased hunger, lost wages and shrinking economies. tinyurl.com/PolycrisisWesleyan

Fiona Katauskas@fionakatauskas.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Been listening to a lot of left-leaning US podcasts this week & it's amazing how little they care abt the impact this is having on the world. Lots of discussion about gas prices in the US & how it'll affect the midterms but zero reflection on the global economy or how poor countries will be crushed.

If your government is half blob, half swamp… you might be in imperial decline. Could write a whole Jeff Foxworthy-style standup routine around this format

NEW: The first evidence of a solar take-off in Africa☀️✈️ x33 rise in Algeria solar panel imports in the 12 mths to June 2025, compared to previous 12 mths. x8 in Zambia x7 in Botswana x6 in Sudan x3 in each of Liberia, DRC, Benin, Angola, Ethiopia 🧵

A toll on the Strait of Hormuz isn’t technically a carbon tax, but ... it still kind of is? @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social does the math of what Trump’s latest astounding act of climate policy means: heatmap.news/energy/trump...

Trump Finally Found a Carbon Tax He Can Love

A toll on oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz isn’t technically a carbon tax ... but it also isn’t not.

heatmap.news

@provenwinner.bsky.social

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Civil War Era Article Workshop Sponsored by the Richards Center at Penn State and The Journal of the Civil War Era

I am slowly working on a thesis for why the US is dogshit at scaling up cleantech and, frankly, I think it's going to make nobody happy??

Has anyone written a piece comparing resistance to the Embargo to our current tariff politics? @gauthamrao.bsky.social this is your beat, no? source: Mashaw, The Administrative Constitution

lpeproject.org/blog/the-pol...

The Politics of Capitalist Legitimacy

At the core of Jason Jackson's Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry is a longstanding conversation among Indian modernizers about how to identify and nurture the ‘right’ kind of capitalists.

lpeproject.org

endnotes are an abomination

WSJ editorial board is lagging behind its news room

When people say AI can't think or understand, I guess they mean this. I asked ChatGPT to convert an old article chart into a vector image file. It's visually similar(ish), but it misses the chart's point and so fails to reproduce it in a way that's even remotely correct or useful.

"Feed the People!: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better," by @jandutkiewicz.bsky.social & @gnrosenberg.bsky.social, is now available!

There’s a larger point here, I know, but it’s hard not to laugh at this as terminal business brain

Quite enjoying the WSJ hit piece on Noem

Impossible to divine the true meaning of recommendation letters through the writer's relentless enthusiasm and goodwill--no doubt genuine--toward the applicant.

This is PRECISELY why @gruberte.bsky.social and I say it's so important to be loud abt the consequences of fossil decline. These risks sound outlandish to many right up until they become reality. Who gets blamed then will depend a lot on whether govt has already warned and tried to take action.

Dan Gearino@dangearino.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Reactions to this week's newsletter have ranged from, "This is an absurd premise," to, "This is happening already in my city." So, pretty much what I've come to expect from writing about the energy economy. insideclimatenews.org/news/0502202...