Steve Randy Waldman

@interfluidity.com

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a black sea sunrise.
Text: If cumulative NIPA saving did represent households' total wealth accumulation (and their resulting stock of "savings" 3), households' 2023 net worth would be $29T - the blue area in Figure 1 - versus the observed measure of $155T (the black line). Over 24 years, 91% of Total saving has redounded to the top quintile (which includes more asset holders receiving property income, so it has accumulated assets at a much higher rate than the bottom 80% (more workers and transfer recipients).
A FRED graph of the corporate profit share of GDP and the federal receipts share of GDP. Federal receipts have been relatively constant over the postwar era, while profits fell to roughly a third of that in the 1980s but now approach the level of Federal receipts.
Screenshot of a notification from Netflix: “Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen was picked just for you”
View of the sea, some palm trees through the all glass wall of a McDonalds in Montevideo.
Text: If judicial review is not to be abolished entirely, as is the case in most other democracies, I’ve come to favor a reform idea recently proposed by Justin Briley in Liberal Currents. He would double the number of circuits and district courts—thus alleviating the severe backlog of cases at those levels—and have the Supreme Court drawn from the entire federal judiciary at random for each individual case. This would solve the problem of a self-sealed system of power, and it would greatly reduce the temptation for justices to enact their partisan preferences through faux-legal argle-bargle. With the knowledge that a judge will only get a chance to make Supreme Court rulings occasionally, there will be a strong incentive to rule in a way that fits with law and precedent, so it will stand up to scrutiny. And rather than responding to Republican cheating with Democratic counter-cheating—which naturally invites counter-counter-cheating—it would make the system facially fair for everyone, thereby increasing the reform’s chances of persisting over time.
Graph, U Mich Consumer Sentiment and US Labor Share, FRED data, full series, rendered in Excel to overcome some graphing quirks.
FRED graph of consumer sentiment and labor share, 1985-present.
A graph of Biden's approval rating juxtaposed with Michigan consumer sentiment over his term. They line up not perfectly, but maybe surprisingly well.
Text: Insofar as fiscal rules serve a purpose, it is because they prevent the government from borrowing and spending so much as to increase inflation and therefore interest rates. But, but, but. If workers are being hired to build new towns, this is potentially inflationary anyway insofar as it adds to demand for workers and building materials thereby pushing up wages and prices. This is true whether the building is financed public or privately. Reeves can bypass the fiscal rule by using private finance, but she cannot bypass the inflation constraint. And it is this that really matters.
Text: There's research showing that, for example, financial compensation in a job is more likely a demotivator than a motivator (ie. if you pay me too little, I'll work less hard or quit, but if you double my pay, it won't double my output). If you tie cash compensation to specific metrics, people will game the metrics and usually do an overall worse job. If you pay someone for doing you a favour, they are less likely to repeat the favour. Gifts are inherently socially and emotionally meaningful. Ruin the giftiness, and you ruin the intangible rewards.
personal consumption expenditures per household over median household income.
a sunrise over the black sea.
A nighttime photo of the statue of Ovid in Piața Ovidiu, Constanța, Romania, May 2026. The Grand Mosque and submarine steampunk bar Hypso25 are lit up in the background.
A screenshot of an e-mail: Kraken, a crypto exchange, sends out a very stereotyped, conventional “economic brief” about Fed minutes.
A graph of all-transaction-home-prices-for-the-US divided median-household-income-in-the-US, showing a sharp rise from 2019 to 2022.
A radio app on a dashboard touchscreen, set to AM 930 KHz.
A map showing the location of Tristan de Cunha, in the middle of the South Atlantic ocean about equally nowhere near South America, Africa, and Antarctica.
baby bird.
Photo of Pizzeria Podesta on Av Rivera in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Text: In my view, a more reasonable corporate tax structure would be to apply corporate taxes to gross value added (revenues less intermediate inputs) minus a generous normal return allowance (r x Capital Base) on the company’s stock of real investment and R&D, minus an allowance for labor compensation (up to some fixed amount like $150,000 per employee). It’s simple math, but in this way, you incentivize real investment, R&D, and employment, but you tax the surplus “dominance rents.”
Hillary Clinton and Sergei Lavrov laughing raucously as they press a red “reset” button (of US-Russia relations during the Obama administration) via CNN https://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/02/world/sergey-kislyak-russian-ambassador-us-profile/
Text: If we take the view that for at least a generation to come Germany cannot be trusted with even a modicum of prosperity, that while all our recent Allies are angels of light, all our recent enemies, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, and the rest, are children of the devil, that year by year Germany must be kept impoverished and her children starved and crippled, and that she must be ringed round by enemies; then we shall reject all the proposals of this chapter, and particularly those which may assist Germany to regain a part of her former material prosperity and find a means of livelihood for the industrial population of her towns. But if this view of nations and of their relation to one another is adopted by the democracies of Western Europe, and is financed by the United States, heaven help us all. If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation.
Text: The American plan requires the member States to provide so-called security against their overdrafts, a requirement which could certainly be met if it is thought useful; but the security in question only to a very small extent consists in an outside security in the shape of gold. It consists mainly of an I.O.U. engraved on superior notepaper, better than would be the case, perhaps, under our own scheme. I have said that, if that is thought useful and worth while, it does not involve any particular problem. The American scheme, again, sets a maximum to the liability of a creditor member to hold a credit balance, and there again that is a provision which is equally possible, if it is helpful, on either plan. But what happens when a creditor reaches his maximum is, in the American paper, somewhat obscure. I have not the slightest doubt in my own mind that a synthesis of the two schemes should be possible; but it does not seem advisable to attempt it until there has been time and opportunity to discover what the expert opinion of other nations and of all the world finds difficult or unacceptable in either scheme, and what it finds sensible and good. In the light of that opinion, the synthesis in due course should and must be attempted. I trust that your Lordships will wish the two Treasuries God-speed in their high enterprise. So ill did we fare in the years between the two wars for lack of such an instrument of international government as this that the resulting waste and dissipation of wealth was scarcely less than the economic cost of the wars themselves; whilst the frustration of men's efforts and the distortion of their life pattern have played no small part in preparing the soiled atmosphere in which the Nazis could thrive.
photo of an above ground, crypt-like grave, with an open arched entry and a white marble sculpture of a young woman in repose beneath a black cross.
Text: The Shajareh Tayyebeh school was holding its first of multiple rotating school shifts when the strike hit, according to Hengaw, a Norway-based group that focuses on human rights violations in Iran. It said in a statement that it was investigating the killings, and estimated that about 170 children were in class at the time. Videos verified by The Times show that the school is adjacent to a naval base belonging to the country's most powerful military force, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, or IRGC. Another video verified by The Times on Saturday showed a strike hitting the same IRGC base.
photo of a bag of Smartfood Brown Butter and Sea Salt Kettle Corn.
a photo of spikes and netting intended to discourage pigeons.
Text: Because we can't bring ourselves to call a dollar of increased purchasing power "income," it escapes income taxes, payroll taxes, and even taxes on capital gains - which can be deferred without limit. Changing this would require a system that taxes some fraction of accrued unrealized gains annually, raising the basis accordingly - with a very large exemption so it doesn't apply to ordinary investors. One might tax stock buybacks at the corporate level as a "deemed dividend." Alternatively, an "imputed return" might be applied to asset holdings above some very large threshold. One wouldn't pay any imputed tax if the securities lose value in a given year, and would receive credit against capital gains taxes on whatever amounts were previously paid on the imputed returns. Approaches like these would have two objectives - the most important being to eliminate the striking bias that taxes a dollar of wage and salary income at far higher combined rates than the same dollar obtained as investment income (particularly at extremely high wealth tiers), and it would address one of the largest forms of tax escape - the ability of multi-billionaires to defer taxes forever, financing their consumption simply by borrowing against their asset holdings. For now, none of this is anywhere on the political menu.
Image of “Re-Animator” movie poster, man holding a syringe loaded with fluorescent green fluid.
Text: The deal purportedly involves "retraining the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation," but given you can't trust any of the companies involved, the Trump administration, or what's left of U.S. regulators, that means absolutely nothing. Oracle will be "overseeing data protection," but that means nothing as well given Oracle is run by an authoritarian-enabling billionaire with a long history of his own privacy abuses.
Text: It is worth remembering that the explosion of suburban growth in the postwar era was not about detached houses or yards or conservative morality, really; it was about building a lot of housing quickly and at scale. The postwar suburban project was the YIMBY movement of its day and context. In those days, with cities in rough shape after 20 years of neglect, intense housing demand among young people, and a great deal of cheap and easily buildable land adjacent to the old cities, the easiest way to solve the housing crisis and build homes for young families was to build suburbia. The fact that this was the physical context of the postwar baby boom probably says very little about the relation between childbearing and the kind of housing in which it took place.
e-mail from/subject line: I AM DONALD J. TRUMP Are you seriously ignoring me?
Both of these pictures show how carless families would buy groceries. Figure 1 [Image of a 1920s-ish vibrant pedestrians streetscape (left) next to an empty, contemporary bus stop on a suburban artery (right)] By any reasonable statistical measure, the people on the left were poorer than a person who might be sitting at that bus stop surfing the internet on their smartphone. Are the statistics that say the right picture is better wrong or are the vibes that say it may not be better wrong?
"Two button meme", with one button labeled "Price Vector" the other "Market free from state interference", captioned "Hayekians in an age of surveillance pricing"
Image of an Enron truck, taken Nov 30, 2026.
Text: At the same time, new conservative jurisprudence appears poised to enhance the power of the executive branch. A series of cases at the court suggest that the court's conservative majority is prepared to give the executive branch more deference. Progressives have railed against this jurisprudence, but if the long-term effect of these rulings is to give the administrative state more discretion to act with greater alacrity, then progressives, once elected, should be able to use it to much the same effect.
Screenshot of e-mail inbox entry, e-mail from "Official Kristi Noem Birthday Card", subject "Your signature is pending."
Text: What if a sufficiently affluent country with a lot of land simply will not tolerate this sort of tight-knit communitarian living when it has the option not to? What if banging on about "living in community" is, to most people, like talking about going without air conditioning? I don't think that is true, but sometimes it feels like it is. I think a better analogy is that suburban living (and this isolated way of living which can take place in any setting) is like junk food; something that is not good for us, but which hacks our short-term pleasure centers. Something which is almost impossible to choose to refuse when we can also choose to have it.
Screenshot from the New York Times homepage showing headlines "The Interview; Tina Brown on Epstein, the Über-Rich and Her Most Burning Resentments" and "Like Goop, but for Dogs".
Cover to Leonard Cohen "I'm Your Man", showing the man (Leonard Cohen) eating a banana.
Screenshot of email newsletter from Jonah Goldberg, subject “Thank God the Constitution Is Liberal”
Text: I have good news for you, though: assholes are a minority. People of conscience, people with good will and good intentions have always outnumbered psychopaths and sycophants. It might not feel that way but that's because psychopaths have a structural advantage: normal people aren't obsessed with climbing hierarchies and dominating others. Look around you. The world runs on kindness and empathy. Hardly anything in our daily life would function at all if complete assholes were anything more than a tiny minority of the population. It actually takes a vast machinery to suppress this fact, and to reward evil behaviour.
hockey stick graph of ZCash, a coin that enables untraceable, cryptographically shrouded, transactions.
Screenshot of Washington Post story headlined, "Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests"
image of the “peacekeeper missile”
Image of the Grim Reader, via https://encyclopedia-of-monsters.fandom.com/wiki/Grim_Reaper
Text: Ultimately, I don’t think Lazardi and I even diverge in our understanding of how to deal with inequality. When you look at the basic math involved in these questions, it’s clear what you have to do: 1. Compress the wage scale, such as through unionization and collective bargaining. 2. Redistribute capital’s share, either socially (as in Alaska) or through a higher labor share. 3.Provide income to nonworkers via the welfare state. What often happens in this debate is just that some people have various ideological hang-ups that make them think that (1) and (2) are real hardcore anti-capitalism and (3) is not. And downstream of that, they go about trying to prove that (1) and (2) matter more than (3). But, at least when it comes to overall inequality, this just isn’t true.
Cover art to Rolling Stones’ “Tattoo You”
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," script from the Declaration of Independence, overlaid on an American flag.
image of swiss guard in very colorful attire defending the pope.
Photo of a sign advertising “medbeds” and “stem cell activation” in Pinellas County.
Text: The single most important problem for pro-democracy forces is that too many people — especially in position of power — seem unable to truly believe that we are living in a consolidating competitive authoritarian regime. Perhaps they are too habituated to the "rules" of the system that no longer exists. Perhaps they still cling to the drug of American exceptionalism, which makes it difficult for them to accept that "it can happen here." Perhaps they understand it intellectually, but find it too difficult to make the necessary paradigm shift.
Text: Let me say all this again: Coase developed a world-changing idea in 1937, simply by trying to think through gaps between the idealizations of economic theory and the realities of business practice; he did not publish an articulation of that idea that ‘took’ until he was 50 years old; the articulation that brought his ideas to fame was only published because a group of well-resourced academics were so convinced he was wrong; for another 30 years, his ideas were put to uses almost completely contrary to those he had intended. It is only now, 15 years after his death, over 50 years since Social Cost, and 80 years after he first developed his original insight, that we can fairly say that his ideas are being put to use in earnest.