Steve Randy Waldman

"Markets often need active public direction, especially during emergencies. The government can…assume risks and support innovation that private developers will not… And yes, in some places, government can build housing directly." [@serkinc](https://mastodon.lawprofs.org/@serkinc ) #DanielSharfstein https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/opinion/housing-crisis-world-war-ii-shortage.html

2026-08-19 20:21:19 CEST

Why do politicians who once touted “modernization” now try to sell us the 1950s? #ChrisDillow https://chrisdillow.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-cher ht [@markreckons](https://home.social/@markreckons )

2026-08-18 11:55:43 CEST

every AI company that destroys a book to ingest should be required to to send a copy of the scan to the library of congress, to ensure every book, every edition, is permanently archived.

2026-08-14 04:10:52 CEST

“A better world is easy enough to imagine. And that’s the first step to change: find a pole star and navigate by it. We chose ‘let’s organize our society around greed’ as a polestar and it changed the world. Now it’s running us off a cliff.
Perhaps there are other polestars which would work better?”
by @npub149r…7zya
https://www.ianwelsh.net/yes-there-is-reason-to-believe-humans-can-do-better/

2026-08-13 00:55:47 CEST

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so, you're saying there's value in commercial competition in the user-interface sector of banking. i agree! that's very different than, say, things invisible to the consumer expect perhaps in price like whether deposits are, say, narrow-banked at the Fed or are used to finance risk-investment. there can be competition in that too, but it tends to lead to exploiting the state’s guarantee option, splitting the rents between savvy depositors, bank employees, and bank shareholders.

2026-08-12 22:19:42 CEST

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it is similar to banks, whose risk also is born publicly! i think it’s very fruitful to think about what for functions of banks we want private sector incentives (eg credit allocation) and for what functions we don’t (management of payments and moderate-dollar “ordinary savings” in ways that effectively convert those sources into investments riskier than “ordinary savers” or payments-systems users mean to bear).

2026-08-12 13:48:11 CEST

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regulation of insurance conpany investment is the standard answer here. but besides the aint-gonna-happen part, the question is what role is served by private business, if regulators are largely going to define the portfolios behind life insurance policies and the state is ultimately going to bear the risk? what is their role? more innovative marketing? new product definition? (do we want that? we’d surr want to regulate it i think!)

2026-08-12 12:50:38 CEST

i'd like some of my erstwhile neoliberal colleagues to explain why, if in 44 states shortfalls are ultimately paid for by tax payers, life insurance should remain a private for-profit industry rather than a service administered by the state? cf @npub178m…w32e https://prospect.org/2026/08/03/ai-bailout-could-be-baked-into-bubble-private-equity-life-insurers-loans/

2026-08-11 19:49:19 CEST

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it definitely is in a market-ing ish style, but it’s careful about some things that most similar pieces are not (e.g. about who it blames for what), and fundamentally i think does a good job of expressing the core economic story of our time, that asset wealth means most people’s labor can’t support contemporary norms of a decent life. a thousand different catastrophes flow from that.

2026-08-11 12:04:41 CEST

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i don’t know about the rest of his stuff, but however it’s produced i think this one is a good essay.

2026-08-10 23:27:30 CEST

“You cannot save your way to the life your parents had, because the life your parents had is now priced in a currency (asset wealth) that wages do not convert into.”
// this by #HenryFudge is wonderful. ht @npub1clv…szjr
https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/degeneracy-is-a-symptom

2026-08-09 17:45:04 CEST

we are living through the cautionary tale.

2026-08-08 19:46:44 CEST

"The trade regime that began in the early 1990s was designed for (and often by) large retailers, low-wage-seeking manufacturers, and the world’s largest pharmaceutical, financial, and agribusiness companies… [It] also required countries to adopt pro-monopoly policies." #LoriWallach https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/right-way-balance-trade

2026-08-08 19:33:03 CEST

the audience for a piece of music is not an individual but a community and music makes very little sense as a commodity for a single individual to "experience" or "enjoy" absent some community that gives it social meaning and effect. this is a large part of why in our society we become less musically engaged as we are isolated from broader communities by work and family life.

2026-08-08 07:25:18 CEST

From #KevinErdmann: This century, household sizes, home sizes, and housing sq ft per capita have been roughly flat even while prices relative to income soared. The reduction of household sizes and increase of sq ft-age happened last century, while incomes mostly kept pace with prices. https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/no-homes-arent-more-expensive-because

2026-08-07 18:52:59 CEST

we’re toast anyway but our kids shouldn’t have to grow up into anything like this.

2026-08-07 17:23:28 CEST

is alignment consistent with direct marketing roles for agents?

2026-08-07 17:11:37 CEST

every life is an unfinished masterpiece, especially after it is finished.

2026-08-06 22:44:40 CEST

“the one i’m using now it’s covered up with fear and filth and cowardice and shame” https://youtu.be/nirEM4vBR2I

2026-08-06 05:18:49 CEST

Your session has expired. No further information is available.

2026-08-05 12:49:16 CEST

“Whether you believe that you can change the future or not, you are certain to be correct.” #HamiltonNolan https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/against-self-fulfilling-prophecy

2026-08-05 01:07:43 CEST

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although the actual banyon tree is amazing, the new mascot “tree” is ugly as f.
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/117/039/750/321/579/866/original/3605a4e195dd9350.jpeg

2026-08-04 19:01:20 CEST

“Democratic Socialism Gets Serious” by #MattMcManus https://www.liberalcurrents.com/democratic-socialism-gets-serious/

2026-08-04 18:17:16 CEST

“Western Europe Is Richer Than the US” by #MattBruenig https://peoplespolicyproject.org/2026/08/04/western-europe-better-off-us/
// Bruenig’s ability to cut through a noisy argument with the most straightforward possible case is unmatched.

2026-08-04 17:51:02 CEST

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aye.

2026-08-04 05:38:05 CEST

"The best writing is inevitable, but not predictable" @npub109f…3mc6 https://brennan.day/the-itch/

2026-08-04 05:36:31 CEST

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kind of an intellectual’s corollary of Minsky's insight that financiers who want to remain in the business can’t just sit out the madness. prudence is punished long before it is rewarded, and harshly enough that practitioners are unlikely to survive.

2026-08-04 05:04:33 CEST

hypothesis: there's an important cohort whom not only did the financial crisis fail to chasten, but instead emboldened. all you need is the levers of power, was the lesson. now they are extravagantly putting that to the test. we are along for the ride.

2026-08-03 13:08:49 CEST

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https://zirk.us/@interfluidity/117031251228518463

2026-08-03 13:08:08 CEST

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here is a link to the original, sometimes insightful but also problematic post. https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/young-adults-are-poor-despite-every

2026-08-03 13:06:50 CEST

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here is the reply i was trying to append. https://zirk.us/@interfluidity/117029243750069328

2026-08-03 13:06:16 CEST

i accidentally deleted this one, because i thought i had mistakenly repeated it, while i was trying to hedge my too-eager endorsement of it by appending a reply. i am an experienced user of the cyber networks.
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/117/031/251/133/600/109/original/22f3f7a4ccd493ed.jpeg

2026-08-03 04:35:44 CEST

lots of controversy surrounding this one. i think the core point in the paragraphs i excerpted is right on, but i agree there's a lot in terms of how the author describes the social commons and its decline that is a bit off. i think there has been such a commons, and its enclosure or extraction is the obverse of our measured wealth. but particulars of the account i ought not have endorsed so fulsomely. https://zirk.us/@interfluidity/117027161791298205

2026-08-03 01:36:34 CEST

“Working with these tools is like swimming in a pond where the ground drops off sharply. One minute you’re wading comfortably and there’s support under your feet. Then suddenly you cross a specific line, and you’re back to swimming on your own. This analogy is my best way to explain what it feels like when the model goes from helpful to clueless.” [@matthew_d_green](https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green ) ht @npub13w4…2jsf https://defcon.social/@jianmin/117027353249950094

2026-08-03 00:26:41 CEST

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thanks for the suggestions!

2026-08-03 00:24:15 CEST

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because it’s long and i didn’t want to split it into multiple posts.

2026-08-03 00:21:32 CEST

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try the alt text.

2026-08-02 19:48:11 CEST

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via #NicholasGruen whose discussion should not be missed. https://nicholasgruen.substack.com/p/social-fabric-the-price-of-what-survives

2026-08-02 19:46:16 CEST

This is excellent, by #JohannKurtz https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/young-adults-are-poor-despite-every
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/117/027/161/722/676/698/original/871e25e14f5f6577.png

2026-08-02 19:06:22 CEST

"very often, legacy software is simply software that solved a problem so well nobody felt the need to replace it." @npub1hx4…lchq https://perlhacks.com/2026/08/the-future-isnt-evenly-distributed/

2026-08-01 17:06:39 CEST

Lars Christensen’s “implied inflation” framework is admirably straightforward. https://marketmonetarist.com/2026/08/01/warsh-you-are-way-behind-the-curve/

2026-08-01 16:29:41 CEST

“If Elon Musk ran the GPS system, you’d hear about it nonstop, valorizing this great man who built something so remarkable and valuable. But since it’s government invented, owned, and operated, it just works, quietly and without fanfare. And that’s a function of ideology, not so much what you hear about, but what you don’t.” @npub175z…9fdh https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/google-maps-uber-and-wall-street

2026-08-01 07:40:58 CEST

i find it tiresome when people are mean to people.

2026-08-01 07:18:02 CEST

civil society is the name we give to how the demos constitutes itself. its development and formation is the essential prerequisite of democracy.

2026-07-26 09:59:41 CEST

"Debt is steeply regressive: the less money you have, the more you're expected to pay." @npub1fdr…lvhs https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/25/cruel-cruelty-oh-cruelty/#digital-arm-breakers

2026-07-26 00:09:16 CEST

among house pets, if we posit they have religion, i think that dogs and cats would belong to very different sects.

2026-07-25 06:32:18 CEST

when we remember are we haunting the past?

2026-07-23 23:09:19 CEST

when you are young you are seeking novelty when you are old you are staving off uncertainty.

2026-07-21 02:28:10 CEST

we really need devices that write standardized descriptions of the technical process between sensor and image and sign hashes of those combined with the image data. https://scicomm.xyz/@dantheclamman/116954518144682511

2026-07-21 02:25:55 CEST

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once upon a time, before tech became so prominant and lucrative, software was a bit of a refuge for people looking to be able to make a living with fewer of the stresses that human interaction can sometimes bring. i think that group has felt ill-served for the last two decades (and has sometimes reacted very, very badly to their loss of habitat). maybe llms create space for a kind of restoration.

2026-07-21 00:27:39 CEST

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indirectly you are talking to lots of other humans!

2026-07-20 14:25:55 CEST

“In an ideal world, all public transport would be free and plentiful. In our less-than-ideal reality, it seems obvious to me that public transport should above all be simple.” @npub1x59…gect https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/public-transport-dont-make-me-think/

2026-07-20 14:06:14 CEST

software is a practice not a product. nothing about contemporary AI changes that.

2026-07-20 12:54:05 CEST

only the young die good.

2026-07-20 01:35:20 CEST

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the great thing about business investment is you can spend all the money on it and the spending doesn’t reduce the profit you report to shareholders. the same money that is nvidia’s profit can be oracle’s. oracle may be taking more risk (to the extent it’s reinvesting more than nvidia), but ROI realizations are next year’s and perhaps somebody else’s problem.

2026-07-19 23:50:47 CEST

the current iteration of AI begins with a faltering cloud computing industry's need for a growth driver. so high compute burden and improvement via brute-force scaling begin as features rather than bugs.
but brute-force scaling was always going to become a China comparative advantage.

2026-07-19 22:39:01 CEST

what if any of us could write with the production values as a major studio?

2026-07-19 12:19:57 CEST

a good response to Open AI’s Dean Ball and his shockingly brazen demand for protection from competition. by #WillManidis https://xcancel.com/willmanidis/status/2078500818127315290

2026-07-18 16:40:41 CEST

We are holding the Table Leg responsible for the Pain Inflicted when it aggressively encountered our Pinky Toe.

2026-07-18 16:37:07 CEST

“The characterization of young men as invaders and sexual threats when they are overwhelmingly victims is, in a sense, a kind of admission by the far right of what they consider the essential nature of men to be.” @npub1xdz…ltdt https://crookedtimber.org/2026/07/18/on-refugees-being-cast-as-invaders-and-fighting-age-males/

2026-07-18 15:05:14 CEST

China is able to keep pace with the AI frontier while maintaining a wide and diversified portfolio of industrial activities. The US is betting the farm not only on AI, but also its consolidation into companies with Google/Facebook/Microsoft style margins.
cf https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/china-ai-moonshot-kimi.html ht Dean Baker

2026-07-18 14:07:01 CEST

sentience. sapience. subjectivity.

2026-07-17 09:59:43 CEST

we really need to roll back the normalization of murder. however hypocritical and based on ignorance it may have been, we were much better off when the culture was scandalized by official killing than now, when we shrug it off.

2026-07-16 21:37:29 CEST

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are 401ks / iras treated as pensions or just assets held by households?

2026-07-16 17:57:13 CEST

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using equity as “liabilities” at market value is a pretty good approach! although it brings in the issue of foreign holdings.

2026-07-16 17:55:05 CEST

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if wr could break out the equities portion of defined benefits pensions, then i’d think it should be included. i don’t think it’s likely to change the picture that much, but if it can be it should be included.

2026-07-16 17:52:10 CEST

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it’s a question of the price of what we get. consumption is what we get. balance sheet equities represent the price we attach to the things that deliver it. i’m not trying to suggest consumption spending alone causes equity value (although indirectly sure), i’m pointing out that for the same consumption, the price of equity (that must be supported by cashflows!) is much higher than before.

2026-07-16 14:25:39 CEST

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i prefer consumption, because consumption is the base, investment spending is derivative, it happens to support consumption.

2026-07-16 01:58:05 CEST

substack converted some people who used to be interesting writers into car dealerships.

2026-07-15 23:33:11 CEST

social media has made us hate social media at the same time as it’s given us sufficient perspective to be really, really aware of the shortcomings of traditional media.

2026-07-15 19:15:55 CEST

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Of course nothing says profit margins and valuation multiples *have to* revert. We could, to coin a phrase (it's really Irving Fischer’s phrase) have just reached a “permanently high plateau”. It's fair to say I am skeptical. /fin

2026-07-15 19:14:31 CEST

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It also might suggest financial fragility, that the prices at which we value equities relative to the value of what the firms produce are unusually high, and could mean revert (either because profit margins revert, get competed down to traditional norms, or because "multiples”, how much investors pay for each dollar of profits or dividends or other payouts returns to smaller, more historically normal values. 4/

2026-07-15 19:12:15 CEST

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adjusted, relative to what those firms produce. That suggests we value equities at much higher prices than we used to, relative to what the firms who issue those equities produce. Which might be due to much higher profit margins (they are much higher!), which is good or bad news depending on whether your household holds a lot of equity or not. It's a distributional question. 3/

2026-07-15 19:08:57 CEST

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What this is saying — roughly, there are potential quirks to look at like share of consumption due to imports (would make things look worse as that's increased), share of equity value attributed to overseas sales (would make things look better, as that too has increased), share of businesses financed via equity rather than debt (i don’t know where this would land) — but roughly what this is saying is we know value the business that provide our consumption at 5 times what we used 1/

2026-07-15 19:06:27 CEST

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Households don’t hold "more”. They always, in aggregate, effectively hold ownership of the businesses that serve the economy. What this ratio is telling you is the *price* at which they are valuing those businesses. If we used raw numbers, all kind of inflations would make comparisons very difficult. But if we describe that price as a share or multiple of the total amount households spend on consumption — from which business values derive — we try to get apples to apples. 1/

2026-07-15 11:55:43 CEST

“Even if the AI companies themselves are not particularly (or at all) profitable, AI-related investment spending is probably an important factor in raising aggregate profits. Just like the California gold rush generated plenty of profits for somebody, even if the vast majority of prospectors themselves went broke.” @npub1afx…dru7 https://jwmason.substack.com/p/profits-payouts-and-equity-prices

2026-07-15 01:12:31 CEST

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yes. the bad bank now would be the US dollar system, rather than just the private financial system.

2026-07-14 16:24:26 CEST

one way to understand contemporary politics is we are collectively playing an ultimatum game, capital has made its proposal and this is what it looks like when the rest of society struggles to say no.

2026-07-14 16:18:24 CEST

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i hope it doesn’t go beyond that.

2026-07-14 16:15:37 CEST

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we all mostly live or die on accidents. i'm glad you tripped into a good spot.

2026-07-14 16:12:19 CEST

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yes. though in theory it is possible to stabilize an economy through a financial crisis, and it has arguably happened occasionally (remember the 1987 stock market crash?), usually financial crises do result in economic crises.

2026-07-14 16:10:47 CEST

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in a financial crisis under current conditions, that might not be the case. /fin

2026-07-14 16:10:29 CEST

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a financial crisis under current conditions might be much more disruptive, because it is foreign enthusiasm for US financial assets that currently sustains the value of the US dollar. that was not really the case in 2008, when official reserve flows (e.g. from China) supported the dollar. treasuries and the dollar were a “safe haven" post-2008, empowering the US government to cut checks to bail out influential parties, and have those checks be valuable and effective. 7/

2026-07-14 16:08:07 CEST

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assetholders grow rich, and intervene ever more aggressively in politics to ensure there are flows to validate asset prices and the wealth they have come to rely upon. those who hold relatively small asset nest eggs are net payers, and eventually object or refuse or just throw over the table in some form or other. ultimate outcomes are not very predictable, especially over longer timeframes. our politics remain mostly just aftermath of the great financial crisis now. 6/

2026-07-14 16:06:01 CEST

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but the cash flows that support financial asset values must come from others. your income, even if it takes the form of dividends or interest or capital gains, is ultimately someone else's expense. 5/

2026-07-14 16:05:13 CEST

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financial assetholders come to "bank on” the value of their financial assets, which they understand in theory are at risk of losing value, but which in practice they've made plans against they'd not be willing to concede with assertive political intervention to prevent or undo the losses. 4/

2026-07-14 16:04:00 CEST

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the financial crisis we are on the verge of has simply to do with the huge share of wealth and income embedded in financial assets and returns, wealth levels sustained by prices only justifiable if those returns continue indefinitely at rates much faster than the growth of the economy as a whole. a financial crisis is ultimately a form of social conflict. 3/

2026-07-14 16:01:41 CEST

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a financial crisis is not the same thing as an economic crisis. there are many economic crises that don’t provoke financial crises, and there can at least in theory be financial crises without serious economic crises (though in practice that is rare). 2/

2026-07-14 16:00:44 CEST

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if AI puts everyone out of a job, that's an economic crisis. if it puts everyone out of a job by doing the work just as well but more cheaply, the state can address that by redistribution, sending cash flows back to the people who lost jobs, and the extra purchasing power for the more cheaply could be devoted to care work, yoga classes, whatever things humans still prefer humans for, reemploying many. 1/

2026-07-14 14:51:20 CEST

the thing about the past is though it was not then, it is now, a safe place.

2026-07-14 14:49:35 CEST

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so, to a first approximation, households are the "roots" of the economy. firms may hold shares of other firms, but those firms are ultimately held by households, so indirectly the households hold approximately all the firms. there is still that "approximately" there, because the state owns things, and in the accounting households are not taken as indirectly owning the state. and the foreign sector can hold equities as well, not just domestic households.

2026-07-14 14:31:34 CEST

in orthodox economics, the value of firms is entirely derivative of the value of consumption by final purchasers. providers of intermediate "capital" goods are valuable because they contribute to production of consumables. with that in mind…. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1X3BM
https://cdn.masto.host/zirkus/media_attachments/files/116/918/332/205/804/510/original/2d31013b46552c9c.png

2026-07-14 13:41:28 CEST

two things can simultaneously be true: (1) contemporary AI is real and revolutionary technology; and (2) we are courting the greatest financial crisis in the history of humankind.

2026-07-14 13:40:20 CEST

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our job to make sure there is.

2026-07-14 13:39:31 CEST

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yes. sleepless nights have their compensations.

2026-07-14 13:38:39 CEST

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ask my wife how pleasant i am to be around…

2026-07-14 02:45:10 CEST

who knew piracy could be this lame?