iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 31/08/2026

“transformative repolarization” seems like a term worth remembering. from @aaronregunberg.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i... ht @chrisdillow.bsky.social @greenhombre.bsky.social

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The political science term for this strategy, coined by Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, is "transformative repolarization" McCoy and Somer argue that authoritarians and oligarchs often stoke what they call "pernicious polarization" - extreme toxic polarization that uses "us versus them" rhetoric, often on social and culture war issues, to divide the public in ways that harm democracy. In the face of such intense suspicion and distrust, depolarizing a society - trying to get people to stop viewing their fellow citizens as an existential danger - may not work on its own, in the absence of a unifying struggle to address underlying grievances. Instead, McCoy and Somer argue that opponents of authoritarianism need to redraw the lines of' contestation that define their politics - to shift the "us versus them" struggle from, for example, a left-to-right polarization, to a different axis of conflict that can bring a large majority of the public together against real structural threats.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 30/08/2026

google maps / apple maps for me. not in the US (or Canada) now, but i’m probably coded as a US customer.

Google Map showing Lake Ontario as “Lake America”

Apple Maps showing Lake Ontario as “Lake Ontario”

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 04/08/2026

( photo via www.etsy.com/listing/5299... )

A photo of the World Book encyclopedia, 1970 edition.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 02/08/2026

This is excellent, by Johann Kurtz becomingnoble.substack.com/p/young-adul...

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My argument is that previous generations received an enormous stock of social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon. That stock, once given for free, has now been substantially liquidated.

Instead, the young must now buy back, item by item and at retail prices, what their grandparents received as a bounty of prior civilizational investments. The young must do so out of incomes that rose modestly while the prices of the essential elements of life rose radically. Price indexes measure the individual cost of discrete goods, but they are not intended to convey the total cost of personally repurchasing a destroyed commons.

This type of failure is well understood as a threat in economics. The old joke is that when a man marries his cleaner, the GDP of both households collapses even while the actual labor being done remains the same and everyone is better off. In our case, we’re seeing the opposite: a thousand small divorces and social fragmentations which boost the appearance of GDP but leave everyone poorer in reality.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14/07/2026

in orthodox economics, the value of firms is entirely derivative of the value of consumption by final purchasers. providers of intermediate "capital" goods are valuable because they contribute to production of consumables. with that in mind…. fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1X3BM

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 07/07/2026

Americans now pay about as much in profits to disproportionately wealthy shareholders as they do to the Federal government, up from as low as a third in the 1980s. fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1X1WA

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.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 25/06/2026

Cumulative transactions in US equity (EXCLUDING revaluation effects) by non-US purchasers. Just a cumulation of this series: fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FORLT... see www.federalreserve.gov/econres/note... the era beginning May 2024 has been quite extraordinary.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 14/06/2026

the United States invented McDonaldses. why are they palaces every else but inside the United States. yes, those are electrical outlets at almost every seat and table. bestill my geeky heart.

View of the sea, some palm trees through the all glass wall of a McDonalds in Montevideo.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 04/06/2026

Here's both full serieses, just drawing lines across data gaps, via Excel. 2/

Graph, U Mich Consumer Sentiment and US Labor Share, FRED data, full series, rendered in Excel to overcome some graphing quirks.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 04/06/2026

@besttrousers.bsky.social here's another interesting mashup. I've cherry-picked by beginning at 1985, the picture is less compelling from 1978-1985, and the gappy consumer sentiment data doesn't render on FRED well before that. I'll include the full range available on FRED next tweet. 1/

FRED graph of consumer sentiment and labor share, 1985-present.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 02/06/2026

If we're doing graphical mashups, here's one that works maybe surprisingly well. The green line is Biden's Gallup approval rating, taken from news.gallup.com/poll/329384/..., just stretched (horizontally and vertical) to match a FRED graph of consumer sentiment 1/21/2021-1/21/2025. 1/

A graph of Biden's approval rating juxtaposed with Michigan consumer sentiment over his term. They line up not perfectly, but maybe surprisingly well.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 02/06/2026

Wisdom (of course!) from @chrisdillow.bsky.social chrisdillow.substack.com/p/fetishisin...

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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.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 31/05/2026

Here's a very simple graph that vindicates both our stories a bit. In levels terms, yeah, you are right, we are only back to immediately post-crisis, suddenly awful then, 2014. 2/

personal consumption expenditures per household over median household income.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 20/05/2026

crypto was going to be something different.

A screenshot of an e-mail: Kraken, a crypto exchange, sends out a very stereotyped, conventional “economic brief” about Fed minutes.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 16/05/2026

can't imagine why the period from 2019 to 2022 might have left people who had hoped to buy a home a bit bitter. (and then, of course, there is the effect of rising interest rates on mortgage costs, ht @steveroth.bsky.social)

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.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 27/04/2026

@hussmanjp.bsky.social suggests essentially an excess margins tax. www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc26...

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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.”

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 30/03/2026

extraordinarily Keynes predicted the calamities, not as an outgrowth of economic liberalism per se, but as an outgrowth of unsupportable indebtedness. ICU is fundamentally about preventing dangerous indebtedness that emerges under liberalism absent regulation. www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1...

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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.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 30/03/2026

my approach to literature is much too casual and eclectic to give great answers. this week i’ve been reading Keynes on his ICU proposal, where he is quite explicit about failures of economic governance yielding fascism. api.parliament.uk/historic-han...

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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.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 23/03/2026

from Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires.

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.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 28/02/2026

from www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/w...

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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.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 25/01/2026

from @hussmanjp.bsky.social www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc26...

$Text: Because we can't bring ourselves to call a dollar of increased purchasing power "income," it escapes income taxes, payroll taxes, and even taxes on capital gains - which can be deferred without limit. Changing this would require a system that taxes some fraction of accrued unrealized gains annually, raising the basis accordingly - with a very large exemption so it doesn't apply to ordinary investors. One might tax stock buybacks at the corporate level as a "deemed dividend." Alternatively, an "imputed return" might be applied to asset holdings above some very large threshold. One wouldn't pay any imputed tax if the securities lose value in a given year, and would receive credit against capital gains taxes on whatever amounts were previously paid on the imputed returns. Approaches like these would have two objectives - the most important being to eliminate the striking bias that taxes a dollar of wage and salary income at far higher combined rates than the same dollar obtained as investment income (particularly at extremely high wealth tiers), and it would address one of the largest forms of tax escape - the ability of multi-billionaires to defer taxes forever, financing their consumption simply by borrowing against their asset holdings. For now, none of this is anywhere on the political menu.$

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 22/12/2025

(most of those are visible in the official stats, if arguably understated. a more current version of the chart below would show a sharp increase in housing since 2018, and that would from most people’s perspective be understated, given how housing quality along social dimensions has stratified.)

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 13/12/2025

from a really excellent piece by @kevinerdmann.bsky.social kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/are-we-und...

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?

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 04/12/2025

driving home from thanksgiving, this past Sunday, i saw this. i was a bit taken aback.

Image of an Enron truck, taken Nov 30, 2026.

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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 03/12/2025

You’d think an editor would have saved this poor author embarrassment by pointing out that *the Roberts Court have been absolutely gutting the authority of the administrative state.* 1/

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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.

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