delong

& was the “European Miracle” 800-1914, 1492-1914, 1689-1914, or 1776-1914?:

**NOTE TO SELF: All of the Currently Live Theories of the Causes of the "European Miracle”**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/note-to-self-all-of-the-currently>
2026-03-13 Fr

Dan’s subhead: “Gulf War Three is not going well for the United States”.
I believe Dan Drezner knows more than I do about what is currently going on with the Epstein-Netanyahu-Trump War on Iran, so I turn the microphone over to him.
Briefly: In the Persian/Arabian Gulf, Tehran has escalation dominance over the Strait of Hormuz, Trump has talking points on Fox, the global economy has a bill to pay, the decapitation strike was botched—replaced an elderly shy-of-nukes Supreme Leader with a... 1/

We cannot successfully outsource the solutions to the problem of how to live wisely and agreeably well to markets, bureaucracies, & parasocial algorithm-driven media feeds. We need, rather, societies of abundance in the service of human-scale connection and purpose to have what is in any sense a good society:

**”The Permanent Problem of the Human Race": Yglesias, Keynes, Lindsey; the Quest for Valued Identities & Societal Roles; & How to Move from "Abundance" to “Flourishing”**... 1/

Less than one third of the topics I wanted to, and all at much less depth than they deserve. But ars longa, vita brevis:

**MEMO TO SELF: What It Looks Like I Will Actually Have Managed to Cover in My Half of Econ 210a This Semester…**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/memo-to-self-what-it-looks-like-i>
2026-03-05 Th

But Trump insisted he already destroyed the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program! A sudden U.S.–Israeli decapitation campaign against Iran and the killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei shatters nuclear diplomacy, destabilizes energy markets, and teaches every medium power the same lesson: get an operational deterrent—nuclear-threat or leader-family threat, by bomb, missile, drone, or assassin—fast. This war is less a precision strike than a stress test of a wobbling world order... 1/

Legal Realism in CrazyTown facing the chaos-monkey president: Far out of my wheelhouse, but a legal-realist assessment of the Roberts Court as a Trump‑era partisan-ideological power machine, as Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Barrett turn Trumpist chaos-monkey impulses into what they call “law”. The robes donned are “textualism” and “originalism”. The reality is emergency stays, shattered agencies, and a presidency unchained as hollow promises are made of rule of law and... 1/

Twelve different video formats, $1.5 million a minute in world-class expert filmmaking craftsmanship, & I got to see where some of that $1.5 million a minute went by watching a small slice of the post-production fussing-over:

**My Cousin Phil Lord, His Co-Director Chris Miller, & the Entire "Project Hail Mary" Movie Team REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY Want You to Go See Their Movie in a Movie Theater**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/my-cousin-phil-lord-his-co-director>
2026-02-25 We

...<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/mamlms-still-epic-fail-openbook-closedworld>
2026-02-24 Tu

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I count this as a failure nine different successive times. There really is a unique, well‑defined answer, and where the machine has every chance to uncover it: the Hedge Knight Ashford Meadow line‑up. This avoids the usual escape hatches about “the data might be ambiguous” or “this is a hard open question.” We get not one isolated “hallucination” but rather a hallucination cascade:

**MAMLMs Still Epic Fail Open‑Book, Closed‑World, Finite‑List, Obvious Ground Truth Tasks** 1/

Emergency power, Republican president: Learning Resources v. Trump as a year of lawless tariffs, then a 6-3 clawback—that record does not diminish but underlines the corruption problem of the Roberts right-wing majority on today’s Supreme Court:

**The Corrupt & Craven Supreme Court Has a Tariff Opinion This AM!**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/the-corrupt-and-craven-supreme-court>
2026-02-20 Fr

Mike Konczal has joined the MAMLM-enabled white-collar workforce. As a scout, he reports on the successes—so far—of this Errand Unto the Wildnerness of his. He is now equipped not just with spreadsheets and Stata do-files alone, but with a terminal window, a microphone, and a large language model that now lives in his working directory. What he brings back is not a story of instant superintelligence or a world in which economists and policy analysts are swept away by robo-oracles. It is... 1/

Matt’s subhead: “It’s hard to write good articles when you have no idea if everything is about to change”. In short, Matt has half-drunk the AI-psychoactive koolaid. My view: Matt should talk to Ezra Klein, and have Ezra Klein recount to him Ezra’s days in San Francisco, when it seemed every day made him stupider as he found himself rubbing elbows with yet another bunch of crypto-enthusiast grifters and self-grifters. while BitCoin is still a thing today, nobody sees it as anything... 1/