...constitute a set of UVA trustees who will be effective as the exact opposite of transmission belts. Will she?…

**Is Abigail Spanberger Seeking to Escalate or to De-Escalate Youngkin & Trump's Culture War?**
< braddelong.substack.com/p/is-abigail... > 2/END

...AI” to deepen our connection to humanity’s knowledge stack—or let it quietly hollow us out:

**Query to Self: Is It, This Semester Worth Incorporating in My Classes My Introductory Digression on: "The Liberal Arts, Education, & ‘AI’"?**
< braddelong.substack.com/p/query-to-s... > 2/END

...could keep a knowledge‑ & care‑intensive economy from reproducing Bronze‑Age inequality levels with digital means:

**CROSSPOST: SAM BOWLES: The Origin & Future of Economic Inequality**
< braddelong.substack.com/p/crosspost-... > 6/END

...material‑capital‑intensive regime. & doubling down on enclosure via intellectual property is the slavery move all over again: trying to transform a non‑excludable human capacity into tradable, dynastic material wealth. Democracy, social insurance, unions, & redistributive fiscal policy... 5/

...conscript, and reliably back property claims, stabilizing elite positions; & slavery, which turns labor itself into heritable material capital & allows even labor‑intensive technologies to behave like capital‑limited regimes.
In this very long run view, modern capitalism is just another... 4/

...lived “aggrandizer” episodes, not as durable structure.
Then about the year -3000 come the technological shifts to land‑limited production (ox‑drawn plow, etc.) that makes land the binding factor and raises the payoff to holding material capital; the rise of an archaic protostate to tax... 3/

...but egalitarian norms & institutions (“aggressive egalitarianism”) actively sit on them for millennia: public eating, communal storage, burial practices that block dynastic display, even deliberate destruction of productive capital to prevent bequests. Inequality shows up, but as short‑... 2/

Well, Alan Wolff is the real wise man here. I am simply piggybacking... Be well, Brad

...something contrary to its plain text, original intention, original public meaning, or pattern as a living document nevertheless ruled:

**CROSSPOST: Alan Wolff: Bamboozled: What made anyone think the Trump tariffs were legal?**
< braddelong.substack.com/p/crosspost-... > 4/END

...guardrails. The only way to pretend it was legal was to lean on a botched folk memory of Nixon’s 1971 surcharge and to assume that neither Congress nor the courts would seriously push back. They didn’t. What failed here was the non-Democrats in office sworn to uphold the Constitution, as... 3/

...late—to the party: but the six neofascist justices have rendered decisions with none of statutory, constitutional, logical, or philosophic underpinnings before, whenever they wanted to, or were scared not to. It was bad history and cowardly politics that broke this particular set of... 2/

No! I should! What should I read first?

Thanks much. Be as well as one can be in a world in which while one may well be, personally, quite comfortable, we live in a world in which no man is an island. Yours,

J. Bradford DeLong

thx much... -B

...Organism with a Single Heart, Mind, & Will Makes You Stupid**
< braddelong.substack.com/p/thinking-o... > 4/END

...the difference between Democratic professional economists who are economists first, and Republican professional economists who are Republicans first. But right now we see it at work all across the entire American spectrum of American governance:

**Thinking of a Very Loose Coalition as an... 3/

...you’ve already lost the plot. The story that matters is about specific legislators, specific incentives, and a Republican Party that (largely) has a Party Line and punishes Line Wobbles far more effectively than its Democratic rival. This is of broad applicability—I see this most often in... 2/

...true elements & discard the millenarian theological stagecraft in Marx:

**Contra Marx, the Record Since 1870 Is Rotating Upheavals in Leading Sectors, Not Synchronized Economy-Wide Revolutions**
< braddelong.substack.com/p/contra-mar... > 2/END

...**CROSSPOST: MARCY WHEELER: Annals of Sanewashing: NYT Labels Trump’s Confession of Psychological Unfitness as Leadership**
< braddelong.substack.com/p/crosspost-... > 3/END

...unhinged. Access journalism keeps translating blatant narcissism into respectable foreign policy, NSD as Trump confesses his psyche comes first; the paper of record dutifully calls it “protecting the West.”, and “real estate mogul’s eye” stands in for “has no business near nuclear codes... 2/