There are very real economic costs here, especially to federal employees and businesses in areas with many federal employees (the recent VA election results may in part reflect this). But they're not generally as big as naive reporting on the daily or weekly costs would suggest.

Hey Ben, these estimates are slightly misleading since the vast majority of shutdown costs are typically recouped after reopening. The nonpartisan CBO's most recent analysis suggests the lasting costs will be between $7 bn and $14 bn *total*, not per week (see linked).

Gonna be blasting Voodoo for the foreseeable future. If you haven't listened to D'Angelo before, start here and don't stop:

Can't believe this is how I found out D'Angelo died. Just fucked up. Surely Voodoo will go down in history as one of the greatest albums of all time, but everything he touched was gold. Unreal.

PS - great work on this, it's incredibly refreshing to see the logic behind these assumptions laid out so clearly!!

Ernie, have you or the team read @davidkamin.bsky.social's new paper on a very related topic? Don't see it mentioned in the references, but it's relevant to the same set of questions - highly recommend taking a look.

From the piece: "Labour market entrants without a degree have seen a 2.4 point rise [in unemployment]. This is very different to the much more modest 0.7 point rise among... non-grads in their mid-twenties who are sheltered from today’s harsh hiring conditions." (For degreed workers, it's 1.3%).

It turns out that once you correct for this error, unemployment is actually rising faster for NON-degree workers - meaning that explanations in terms of AI replacing the college-educated workforce don't make much sense, and this looks a lot more like an across-the-board labor market slowdown.

Do you have a link to the report? Can't find it online yet.

Have you written (or are you working on) anything on these questions? Or is there anyone you've been reading, contemporary or historical, that you think gets close to identifying some of the experiments we need to foster in our attempts to move forward?

But I haven't seen nearly enough emphasis elsewhere on the idea that our "language of... fire-alarm emergencies looks at our increasingly brittle existing modes of political organization and cannot see beyond them", that we need to rethink our law and politics rather than merely preserving them.

Really appreciated this article. Obviously '20s don't map onto the present perfectly, particularly r:e shape of authoritarian violence (state-perpetrated versus tacitly state-condoned), how media and opinion formation operates, and the targets of the state (primarily racial vs. primarily political).

This is a really gorgeous collage. Loved reading it - thank you for sharing.

Sorry for the long chain of comments - this article really hit a fun sweet spot for me of music + Frankfurt School + empirical research. Enjoyed reading it a lot, and I'm really curious to hear your thoughts.