"Donald Trump" by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0“Now Watergate does not bother me/ Does your conscience bother you?” — Lynyrd SkynyrdYesterday, as you may have heard, Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in New York. All of the charges relate to falsifying business records. Basically, Trump slept with a porn star, had his lawyer pay the porn star...

Photo by Justin Lim on UnsplashInterfering with markets in a rich country requires a justification. Markets, if they’re properly regulated, are a very efficient way to maximize a nation’s overall income. Problems of inequality and poverty can be solved through redistribution and measures to improve worker bargaining power; the occasional recession can...

OK fine, I lied. This Cold War 2 update is neither happy nor fun. But it is necessary and important. Half a year ago, when I wrote that a lot of what we see in the news can be explained by the existence of a cold war between a China/Russia bloc and a democratic bloc, it was a controversial thesis. Now it’s becoming conventional wisdom, and attention...

Art by GPT-4. Prompt: "an angry mob of history postdocs battering at the gates of an ivory tower"I wasn’t planning to write a post about today’s Twitter contretemps…but, a friend asked me to. And I guess it is kind of an interesting window into social and economic trends among the American elite. So here goes.Today’s Twitter contretemps involved one...

I had a list of about 10 things to write about in this roundup, but I gave up halfway through and turned half of them into ideas for longer posts, because I realized that short summaries didn’t do them justice. So here are the five that remained, which are no less interesting but which can be summarized more succinctly.First, podcasts. This week’s Econ...

Source: USMCI’ve been writing a lot about the threat of a major war in Asia, but I haven’t written much about Japan’s role in that equation. And yet Japan would be at the very center of such a war. A Chinese seizure of Taiwan would put Japan’s security in grave danger. Here’s a translated quote from a Chinese PLA officer training manual:As soon as Taiwan...