Some years ago I thought about using Charles Jones's macroeconomics textbook. A distinctive thing about it is it starts with long-run growth; topics like business cycles, unemployment, etc, which not so long ago *were* macroeconomics, are relegated to a few chapters in the end.

I don't know much about Michigan politics but this feels right to me. yastreblyansky.substack.com/p/michigan

Jo White is seriously bad news for anyone who cares about justice in migration. Her views are very right-wing communitarian, makes Mahmood look liberal. Pretty clear now that the Burnham government will be significantly worse than Starmer for immigrants.

Colin Yeo@colinyeo.bsky.social · 2w ago

Sounds like it is Anna Turley as Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum and Jo White as Minister for Migration and Citizenship. Turley was formerly chair of the Labour Party. White was chair of the Red Wall group of Labour MPs.

Here's a detail I hadn't heard before. www.ft.com/content/620b...

An interesting thing about this is: If we are serious about the principle that "some things are too important to sell", what else might it apply to? www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews...

Incredible synecdoche for his entire project. “I’m a serious materialist, I don’t play stupid ID pol games about the real working class. This is about rigorous social science not feelings. But sometime the ‘culture’ just isn’t a fit you know? You gotta make sure you are being sensitive to that.”

If you actually were to say that political culture was a constraint on immigration, this would surely imply that anti-immigrant rhetoric and politics were economically harmful and ought to be quite severely punished.

JW Mason@jwmason.bsky.social · 5d ago

Compare and contrast with “socialist” Vivek Chibber’s principles on immigration.

Compare and contrast with “socialist” Vivek Chibber’s principles on immigration.

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani@mayor.nyc.gov · last wk.

The promise of New York City is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: this place would welcome anyone seeking refuge or a better life.

ironically the main mistake people make about ai *is treating it as a pure software endeavor* when basically all of the main risks come from it needing a gigantic amoung of physical infrastructure

JW Mason@jwmason.bsky.social · 5d ago

It is certainly true that the tech sector enjoys increasing returns. But it is *not* true that this is a difference from "traditional production industries" - increasing returns are ubiquitous in manufacturing. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

So many diaries of anne frank versions will be wriiten by immigrant children about the Nazi Trump era

David Dayen@ddayen.bsky.social · 5d ago

A comprehensive survey of farmworkers includes harrowing details of people in fear to do anything outside the home. 61% of those surveyes have shopped less, and almost a third said they have not sought medical care when they needed it. The report from @whitneycwimbish.bsky.social.

Indeed, and while tech usually scales, AI itself does not. Those same hyperscalers carry >$1.2 trillion in off-balance-sheet debt for data centers precisely because AI unit costs don't go down with scale (much less reach "near-zero"). AI requires hefty compute costs every single time it's run.

JW Mason@jwmason.bsky.social · 5d ago

It is certainly true that the tech sector enjoys increasing returns. But it is *not* true that this is a difference from "traditional production industries" - increasing returns are ubiquitous in manufacturing. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

You know that somebody in 2058 will note the "ever-larger geysers of cash" comment to describe how everyone was insane in 2026. They will (I pray not) also note the similarity to 1926 insanities.

The author of this article has apparently never ever heard of open source, where terribly underfunded competitors can over time displace the biggest monopolists, often because the monopolists are dumbasses in search of ever imcreasing number go up results.

JW Mason@jwmason.bsky.social · 5d ago

It is certainly true that the tech sector enjoys increasing returns. But it is *not* true that this is a difference from "traditional production industries" - increasing returns are ubiquitous in manufacturing. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

It is certainly true that the tech sector enjoys increasing returns. But it is *not* true that this is a difference from "traditional production industries" - increasing returns are ubiquitous in manufacturing. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

"The deep purpose of finance is to replace the founder-owners of successful small businesses with skilled professional managers." www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news...

I guess the sort of obvious point to make about today's GDP numbers is that despite the slowdown in headline growth, both private investment spending and consumption spending grew more rapidly in the most recent quarter than in 2024-2025.

If I could give one piece of advice to my younger self, it would be to try to find a way to live closer to family. I get out to California about three weeks a year. But I feel like half my life is there.

What is taught in today’s graduate programs as macroeconomics is entirely useless for the kinds of questions we are interested in. Read more by @jwmason.bsky.social: evonomics.com/5-ways-to-re...

<Simpsons meme> There is the bailout so far.

Here's a fun Matt Levine piece about big investment banks buying insurance against a big fall in SpaceX stock. But here is the funny thing about this that Levine doesn't spell out: "buying insurance against X" is in practice the same thing as "betting on X." www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news...

If public groceries turn out to be a much more attractive option than their private competitors, that seems like it would be ... good?

Peter@notalawyer.bsky.social · last wk.

i think the biggest political risk is that a grocery store that’s considerably cheaper than its peers becomes a logistical shitshow. how are they going to avoid massive lines and every news channel scrambling to interview irritated customers?

the tex comparison breaks in one place: a bad tex file just fails to compile, it doesn't quietly typeset the wrong equation and ship. code from an agent runs fine and is often wrong in ways that never throw. that gap is the real ceiling on the labor-of-love version of this.

“‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

Sacrifice! At the Harvest Festival@theharvestmaid.bsky.social · last wk.

futurism.com/artificial-i...

There is lots of stuff these tools can do that that is genuinely useful and cool ... and not remotely proportionate to the resources that are being devoted to them or the extent that society is expected to rearrange itself around them.

Tom Adshead@tomadshead.bsky.social · last wk.

There are projects like Hermes Agent and OpenClaw where you use LLMs to craft little programs on your computer - I got it to do a drop down menu on my Mac for Pomodoro timing because none of the commercial apps did what I wanted.

Show me an AI that successfully places figures in latex documents according to my plain English instructions, and I will be willing to reconsider my AI scepticism

the tex parallel cuts another way too: tex won because the output is checkable, it either typesets or it does not. claude code is strongest exactly where the result is verifiable like that.

Was just thinking of the day 20 years ago when I saw a fellow grad student turning in a beautifully formatted assignment, like something from a journal. I was amazed, I had no idea that was something you could do. "How on earth did you make that?" I asked. "So I use this software called latex..."

From @attackerman.bsky.social: The end of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians may be the moment at which Mayor Mamdani’s hands-off approach to policing is no longer sustainable. www.forever-wars.com/the-end-of-t...

Here is a new poem by @ltanenbaum.bsky.social for you to read, called “A Poem with Cops in It.” therumpus.net/2026/07/21/a...

Well, hasn't @positivemoneyeu.bsky.social just gone and put the book 'Against Money' by @jwmason.bsky.social and Arjun Jayadev at the top of their 2026 summer recommendations list positivemoney.org/eu/update/20...

2026 summer recommendations list

Positive Money Europe's 2026 summer list: books, films and podcasts on money, energy politics, and climate change.

positivemoney.org