One of the clearer cause and effect economic graphs you’re ever gonna see

New newsletter: Trump’s attacks on facts are broader than one firing at the BLS. The WH’s war on numbers they don’t like now touches everything from vaccines to climate change to education data to economic growth. In his first seven months, the admin has now: - Dismissed the scientists in charge of vaccine evaluations at the CDC, bc RFK is skeptical of vaccines - Dismissed experts who put together the national climate assessment that insurance companies rely on to gauge risk - Fired the head of the BLS, bc Trump doesn’t want to see any statistical representation of the fact that his tariff and immigration policies are weakening the economy

Bravo Sports Fandom theory having a moment

New paper: Since the rise of large language models, there's been a huge shift in academic writing. In 2024, the word "delves" appeared 2,700% more than its historical average, by one account. The analysis suggests that 13.5% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs.

You could just read the article and find out that Stoller lied about what @DKThomp said. Thompson says twice that Texas, specifically Dallas, IS building housing. He was "exquisely clear" about it. But I guess that wasn't clear enough!

So GDP is only growing because of AI capex. The labor market is only growing because of health care spending and social assistance—the latter being a lot of home aides and administrators economic growth right now is basically a Friday church service: just old people + trying to summon god

I think this week provided a clearer answer to the question “if the tariffs are so bad, why does the economic data look fine?” “Not fine” just took a while. Consumer spending in the GDP report is weakening fast. The labor market is sputtering. Basically, whole economy is being propped up by AI database spending and health care jobs rn.

This is genuinely unbelievable. These antitrust goobers don't seem to realize that I have a telephone. This whole pathetic, pissy thread is about how I'm lying about my conversation with the real estate analyst Lance Lambert and misrepresenting him in my article. So, guess what I just did? Called Lance, of course! He told me again that he agrees with all of my major points and reiterated over and over that he's "pushing back" on the strongest claims of the antitrust left. Some notes from our call: 1. I read him the quotes from my article again in their full context. He signed off on everything. We went over it three times. He agrees with my language. He agrees with my position. "I stand by what I told you." That's a direct quote. 2. I asked him again, for clarification: Do you think homebuilders are a “cartel,” as Matt Stoller has claimed? He said no. 3. I asked again: Do you believe, as Basel Musharbash has claimed, that homebuilders are an “oligopoly"? He said no. 4. I asked him if he thinks that the biggest homebuilders are withholding supply or playing a key role in driving up prices. He said absolutely not. 5. This is a direct quote: "I hope you both communicate my view that I don't think the big builders are bad actors, or even that they have the power to be the bad actors." We're done here.

I think that if people didn't know who said this, most would agree that this reflects exactly the right kind of attitude for a mayor to have.

The fact that declarative parallelisms suddenly register to folks as AI writing isn’t just inconvenient for me—it’s tragic.