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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 2h

You all SAID you wanted more information about key economic policymakers' macroeconomic monetary models.

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 7h

I found this deeply ✨ inspiring ✨

🚨URGENT APPEAL

Sorry to bother you, Chris, but we're just ten donors short of our goal of having you make [redacted]'s lunch tonight. I have been reviewing our records which show that you didn't consider adding a little treat for her, maybe some chocolate chips. I'm reaching out to you personally, Chris, to ask whether you added a few chocolate chips to her lunch.

- Team [redacted]'s Lunch

Text STOP to unsubscribe

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

But the "free" part of that "get out of jail free" card is a lie, as we are increasingly discovering across a broad swath of policy domains. And what look like impossible or tragic (in the ancient Greek sense) choices can be dis-solved if we reject the premise that we must take AI growth as given.

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

AI-led investment is basically operating like a "get out of jail free" card for the U.S. economy right now, papering over our need to seriously reckon with the costs of geopolitical aggression, massive cuts to the administrative and regulatory state, and the gutting of research and higher ed.

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Yes, there would absolutely be costs! But there are manifold costs to "continued astronomical rates of AI investment" as well, one of which may well be less effective monetary policy and rates that disproportionately impact the least well off.

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

... but there actually is a secret third option: we could agree to no longer treat "continued astronomical rates of AI investment" as an unimpeachable good, and implement regulatory -- as opposed to monetary -- policy that slows AI investment rates.

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Yeah, the Fed is in an impossible position here because it has basically one tool that is of fairly limited utility against two of the major macroeconomic forces at work in our current economy (tariff- and oil-price drive price shocks + rate-insensitive AI investment) ...

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"AI-led growth" is not a moral imperative. It's not an inevitable exogenous force backing us into corners of least-bad choices. It's an outcome that we have chosen to organize our entire political economy around, and it's an outcome we could collectively agree is not worth the costs.

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

This is exactly the same grotesque moral logic as Sam Altman's "the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology." We have choices. We don't have to accept punishing interest rates (or anything else) in exchange for AI-led growth.

“The problem for the Fed is that there is usually a built-in correction mechanism in the U.S. economy in which interest rates rise and at some point, the rate-sensitive parts of the economy, led by housing, slow down hard, and that then propagates to the rest of the economy,” said Ajay Rajadhyaksha, global chairman of research at Barclays.

“But if a large part of the economy is just less rate sensitive and that is what is pushing the economy to grow faster, then the Fed, unfortunately, has to hurt the part of the economy that is more rate sensitive.”

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

A look at the books we're reading this quarter for Global Inequality. (Not pictured: articles)

a stack of the following books:
Frankfurt, On Inequality
Chan, Postcolonial Global Justice
Rawls, A Theory of Justice
Ciplet et al., Power in a Warming World
Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
Shachar, The Birthright Lottery
Zuman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations
Acemoglu and Johnson, Power and Progress
Sharman, Havens in a Storm: The Struggle for Global Tax Regulation
Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Boushey et al., (eds), After Piketty

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

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Gillian Brockell @gillianbrockell.com · 06/10/2026

I LOVE how @propublica.org dealt with official comment here, editorially and stylistically.

The Trump administration says none of this is happening.

"DHS is NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake." "There are no 'indiscriminate' stops." Allegations of "racial profiling are disgusting, reckless and categorically FALSE." "The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force." "ICE does not zip tie or restrain children."

But that is precisely what is happening, and at a far larger scale than previously reported.

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

- “Mommy, do you know all the names of the Babysitters Club members?” -“Do you mean the original members or after Jessie and Mallory joined? We talking pre- or post-Dawn? Before or after Stacey moved to New York?”

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I can tell you the next word of any sentence in Ramona Quimby, Age 8. Can tell you the exact pattern and color of bolts of calico purchased for Laura and Mary in each book. I feel like the world's most uselessly powerful sleeper agent. I was born for this moment.

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Six-year-old is entering Babysitters’ Club/American Girl/Laura Ingalls Wilder/Beverly Cleary age. I am discovering I have a near-word-perfect recollection of most of these books stored deep within my brain.

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Paired with Selig as the sole CFTC commissioner, these are dark days indeed for financial regulation, at a moment of opaque circular exposures in AI financing, prediction markets creating entirely new categories of risk, the fusion of crypto and conventional finance in legalized stablecoins ...

ft.com

One person is now a quorum at the SEC

The Ankh-Morpork approach to US financial regulation

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

ft.com

One person is now a quorum at the SEC

The Ankh-Morpork approach to US financial regulation

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

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Adam Isacson @adamisacson.com · 05/10/2026

Here's what's replacing four 200-year-old cottonwood trees, the last of which went down today after a 71-day tree-sit protest ended with aggressive arrests. So bleak. Mason Kumet photo from azluminaria.org/2026/10/05/f...

Double border wall running off to the horizon

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"Democrats surge," "GOP falls behind" ... These framings make a certain amount of sense insofar as people are actively changing their minds and poll numbers are shifting, but an election outcome is a stock not a flow variable, and treating them as the latter -- esp. on election night -- is Bad.

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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 05/10/2026

To the person noting there is not enough money in the world to license every piece of intellectual property stolen for "AI" training: you're sooooo close to the point, friend, keep going, you'll get there if you try

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 12/03/2026

every quantitative measure is actually a stack of qualitative assumptions in a trenchcoat

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Hell of a week for our a/c to go out 🥵

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Tim Carmody @tcarmody.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This is the funniest thing I've seen today, possibly ever

A tweet by SarahStarberry that says "oh god read the vertical axis" on top of a chart measuring AI models' release dates and model numbers rather than any real capabilities

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

We're all so freaked out about AI crushing students' cognitive skills (and rightly so) so it's nice to be reminded that at least some of them are just out there reading and learning and thinking much as they've ever been.

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Huge props to the student for a) doing scholarly research on a topic they were interested in and wanted to understand further, and b) coming to talk to their professor instead of asking Claude or w/e

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

1) The kids are All Right 2) Just a lovely moment of research and teaching synergy

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Student came to office hours today to tell me they'd been reading up on the Paramount-WB merger and that had led them down a rabbit hole about corporate power and they'd found the article I contributed to on corporate oligarchy and could we please talk about this because they were really freaked out

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

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Elizabeth (Bit) Meehan, PhD @elizabethbitmeehan.com · 01/10/2026

y'all i'm working on this data collection project looking at dissertations & sometimes I get reminders that we are not all playing the same game (1999 edition)

not the least, I would like to thank my family: my parents, for buying me a lovely condominium at Harvard Street so that I could concentrate on my research with out worrying about paying rents,

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maura quint @mauraquint.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Yes every woman has been harassed, many assaulted. But every woman has also experienced invisible loss from moments she avoided harassment. She felt a space becoming unsafe, so she left, while men stayed on. And in leaving, she lost: opportunities, experiences, learning, promotions, even simply fun.

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Memento Mori Kira @kmaustinyoung.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

God have mercy on all of our souls.

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Fellow college instructors, are you talking about the Cornell rape case with your students? If so, how so?

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David Woodruff @dmwoodruff.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The post-1932 Keynes running on my headspace neural network calls AI boom 'a by-product of the activities of a casino' and says determination of pace&scale 'is likely to be ill-done'. He also argues that if AI lays waste to middle class and concentrates incomes, economic stagnation will follow.

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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Pretty clear to me there’s a very good case against this man for mass murder, and I’m saying that in as measured a fashion as I can. He’s order the killing of 234 people under no plausible war or legal justification. I am skeptical he will ever face legal accountability for til his but he should.

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

New frontiers in our collective epistemic crisis.

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JW Mason @jwmason.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

This is nicely put. The machine that subordinates all life to its own algorithm of self-expansion is already operating: It’s called capital. www.newyorker.com/science/anna...

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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Men, it’s never too late to leave your fraternity. Membership is lifelong. And these segregationist institutions use your name to uphold the power they abuse. This is what your fellow alums are doing. Do you really want to be associated with that?

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Cubs pretty much writing off Game 1 at this point, I guess 😬

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Updating my lecture notes from two years ago on tariffs and the prisoner's dilemma by replacing "China" with "Canada" while slowly losing my mind ...

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The analytical starting point for this class is that contemporary levels of global income and wealth inequality are deeply political in cause and consequence. We start with macroeconomic analysis, but then quickly dig into global justice and the entanglement of capitalism, colonialism, and slavery.

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I'm teaching a new graduate seminar on Global Economic Inequality. Check out the syllabus here, if you're interested!

dropbox.com

Dropbox

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I added my published poetry to my faculty webpage to keep it together with my other writing. Take a look, if you're interested!

faculty.sites.uci.edu

Poetry – Erin Lockwood

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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 27/09/2026

Google finally updated some of its satellite images of Gaza and my god, it's horrific. The entirety of Rafah has been demolished. The majority of Khan Younis is in ruins. Entire towns completely leveled and erased of the map.

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Watching a 1997 Magic School Bus episode about computers with my kids and weeping.

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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I added my published poetry to my faculty webpage to keep it together with my other writing. Take a look, if you're interested!

faculty.sites.uci.edu

Poetry – Erin Lockwood

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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

one thing that i have realized is basically the vast majority of people don't understand how insurance works

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