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Peter Dorman

@pdorman.bsky.social
357 followers 268 following 604 posts

I'm a political economist and writer on economics, politics, climate change, statistics, and lots more. I've written four books, stacks of articles and reports, blogs and am working on book #5. Watch out for really bad puns.

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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
For me, the takehome is that a large majority of Republicans appear to be OK with democracy-ending interventions in November. The point is that, if you prevent Democrats from taking office, all you have to do is keep your base aligned.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Trump's $5K offer for voting R comes to just over $1.1 trillion for the whole country (21 or over). He can get the money by taking over Greenland and then renting it out.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
These Kenyans made far less than the US students whose papers they wrote so they could get through college. Hold that thought for a while. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/t...
nytimes.com
Kenyans Made a Living Writing College Essays. Then A.I. Arrived. (Gift Article)
Thousands of Kenyans made a living writing essays for overseas students. With A.I., the work has dried up, a warning for online gig work that has been a global lifeline.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Alienation, from epithet to toolkit. Unpacking the amorphous concept to devise strategies for making work better. jacobin.com/2026/09/work...
jacobin.com
An Agenda for De-Alienating Work
Work becomes less alienating when workers are given more autonomy, voice in workplace decisions, and jobs that develop skills. The Left needs a practical strategy for making jobs better now and transf...
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Finally got to this. You should read it. Very convincing (to me), but one cavil: yes, this is a bubble. A bubble arises when my demand for an asset derives from your demand, etc. In a bubble, I look at these charts and think..... www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser...
groundbrkr.com
The Teaser Period: Why the AI Boom Is Hitting a Reset Wall
Trillions in compute commitments come due in 2027–2028. The Reset Wall reveals how the AI boom breaks, and when.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
This is an amazing story, very well told. Amazon's scam auctions, squeezing extra money out of vendors, constitute a sub-basement moral low. pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/c...
pluralistic.net
Pluralistic: Amazon achieves enshittification inception (04 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
This is an important observation, but it points to something broader and more challenging: there really is a sort of Jewish money and media cabal pushing an agenda on America. It resembles the antisemitic stereotype, but it's not quite the same. statmodeling.substack.com/p/again-its-...
statmodeling.substack.com
Again, it’s not about the Jewish vote
The following headline appeared on today’s front page:
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
New piece up in Jacobin on social ownership for AI. In case you're keeping track, this is the same approach I used in the article in the Int. Rev. of Applied Econ. on social ownership of social media. jacobin.com/2026/08/tech...
jacobin.com
Put AI Under Social Ownership for Social Purposes
Public ownership may seem like the most obvious solution to the problems posed by AI. But purpose trusts could offer a more pluralistic form of social ownership — one that subordinates profit to a var...
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
You can tell who's a data analyst at the farmers market. It's the one who asks if they can sample the strawberries, then tastes 80 or so, being careful not to take more than one from the same carton.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Jubilee is a great idea, but it has to be a surprise, otherwise no one will lend in the period leading up to it. The solution? A stochastic jubilee. If you put 50 envelopes in a drum with one marked J, draw once a year, interests rates go up 2% and that's it. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | An Ancient Sumerian Solution to Our $40 Trillion Deficit (Gift Article)
In the ancient world, debt forgiveness was a regular tool to control the economy. Why have we forgotten it?
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
So we were having a discussion the other night about whether Moses was anything special, and I mentioned he had strong outdoor leadership skills....
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
My feelings exactly. I especially like the part about the students, who have a right to have a professor qualified to be in front of the classroom. statmodeling.substack.com/p/university...
statmodeling.substack.com
University professor is a job. Not an award.
Don Rubin said once that a problem with university hiring committees is that they think that they’re giving an award rather than finding someone to do a job.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
The part they don't tell you is that after Trump was whisked off the catering truck there wasn't anything left. A total wipeout on pretzels and peanuts. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/u...
nytimes.com
Trump Said to Have Secretly Used Military Jet to Leave Turkey Amid Threats From Iran (Gift Article)
President Trump hid in an airport catering container and was taken to a military jet for a secret flight out of country after the NATO summit last month.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
As it happens, I discussed this in my book on climate change. I made similar points to Enns, but said something else: the biggest superpower of the rich is to limit the agenda. A proposal without some capitalist support is off the radar. No polls about it. open.substack.com/pub/gelliott...
open.substack.com
Deep Dive episode: What if our leaders are actually more responsive to public opinion than we think?
Watch now (59 mins) | I sit down with Peter Enns, a political scientist at Cornell University, whose new research offers an optimistic view of democracy and representation
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Misguided advance, and basically the same bad advice we've been given for years. Why? (1) To hold warming to a likely 2º C (an outer limit target), the US has to cut CO2 emissions by at least 7% per year *indefinitely*. Building renewables etc. helps only indirectly. jacobin.com/2026/08/clim...
jacobin.com
The Class Divide Haunting Climate Politics
New research confirms that policy messages on climate favored by college-educated liberals often fall flat with working-class Americans. The good news? Workers are favorable to pro-climate policies th...
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Another Substack, this one lamenting the loss a useful phrase. Circular logic gets a pass. open.substack.com/pub/peterdor...
open.substack.com
Begging the Question
Only a curmudgeon would complain about the changing meaning of words, demanding that the rules of language as they learned them should remain fixed forever.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Wow, is this a weird op-ed. Like, learn how to walk and chew gum at the same time. Yes, the environmental cost of data centers is a big issue. Yes, what we should and shouldn't do with AI is a big issue. One doesn't invalidate the other. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | The Flawed Environmental Case Against Data Centers
Our animosity toward data centers is really more about our anxieties about A.I.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
A Trump cancellation of the November midterms is more complicated than you might think, since it has to take into account the effects on the numbers of congressmen and senators who would likely continue in office. open.substack.com/pub/peterdor...
open.substack.com
Gaming a November Declaration of a State of Emergency
It would be catastrophic for Trump and his circle if the Democrats took both houses of congress in the November midterms.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
I have an extra reason to be disgusted by this ploy. I was the academic who first pushed to tie trade to labor standards back in the late 80s, before it got traction. The incentive effect depends on the difference between tariffs on violators and adherers. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
theguardian.com
‘Forced labour’ rationale for Trump tariffs met with bewilderment
Measures effectively replace blanket 10% tariffs Trump imposed in February that were struck down by US supreme court
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Wildfire smoke *is* important, but the economic calculation of its impact should be taken with a grain of salt. It's based on valuing each life lost at $11M, using the misguided methodology of the EPA. It would be cheaper if the same people were dying in Mexico, BTW. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/22/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Nothing Can Prevent the New Wildfires. We Have to Adapt. (Gift Article)
Suppression is not enough.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
A new Substack drawing the weird parallels between left- and right-wing calls to cultural warfare. open.substack.com/pub/peterdor...
open.substack.com
The Two Armies of the Culture War
There have always been culture wars.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
Newly available. This paper explains why current approaches to measuring the adequacy of climate policies come up short, and how to do it better. Somewhat more technical than my "Sidetracked by Scenarios" Substacks but also more detailed.
papers.ssrn.com
Benchmarking Carbon Emissions: Integrated Assessment Model Scenarios versus Stock-Flow Consistency
To hold governments accountable to their ostensible commitments, civil society groups need to be able to identify and quantify discrepancies between current mit
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Even in the context of Trump's blustering incompetence in this war and the negotiations to end it, the revelations in this piece are astonishing. (And if Vance is your official grownup, you have a really big problem.) open.substack.com/pub/dropsite...
open.substack.com
Iran Sent Message to JD Vance Warning that Kushner and Witkoff Were “Abusing” Their Inside Access to Negotiations
A senior Iranian official said Tehran privately told Vance the pair were exploiting the negotiations for financial gain. The Trump administration says it never happened.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
This was just posted by SSRN. The paper is a bit dated, but the main point is still relevant: most estimates miss trillions of dollars of potential stranded assets from stringent climate policy because they ignore the demand effects of rising energy prices. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
Carbon and Capital: Stranded Assets Beyond the Energy Sector
Stranded assets may arise due to either the impacts of climate change or the measures taken to mitigate it. Fossil fuel reserves are a likely candidate for poli
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
The moral of this story is: don't take the window seat. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/w...
nytimes.com
Passenger Is Partly Sucked Through Window on Ryanair Subsidiary Flight, Reports Say (Gift Article)
A 61-year-old man was being treated for friction burns after a window was damaged during a flight from Greece to Germany. The flight was operated by the Ryanair subsidiary Malta Air.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
This brings back a vivid memory. In the fall of 1968 I was an intern at the NY Times. I started at the bottom, as a copy boy. One day I saw some copy from Agence France Press saying that the US had begun bombing the dikes of N. Vietnam. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/w...
nytimes.com
Yves Lacoste, Who Exposed U.S. Bombing of Vietnam’s Waterways, Dies at 96
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
The conclusion of a short series on benchmarking carbon policy. After going over the problems with modeled scenarios and net zero targets, I demonstrate a much better approach, the rate of annual emission reduction that keeps us within our carbon budget. open.substack.com/pub/peterdor...
open.substack.com
Sidetracked by Scenarios IV
Toward a better benchmark
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
The technological revolution of cheap drones and missiles has disrupted global hierarchies as much as the diffusion of firearms ended the age of armored warriors and the aristocracies that depended on them in 16th c. Europe. Ukraine vs Russia. Iran vs the US. The Dutch vs Spain.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
My article on the social ownership of social media is out. It's a small piece of a much larger case I'm making in a new book on post-capitalist economics. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
tandfonline.com
Governance of social media: a social ownership approach
Social media (SM), while beneficial in many ways, also harms users and society at large. This paper concurs with the view that the key drivers of these harms, algorithmic and design choices to maxi...
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Part 3 of this series is up. This one gets right to the politics: how dodgy assumptions and methods play a key role in convincing us that anemic climate policies are somehow sufficient to avoid disaster. open.substack.com/pub/peterdor...
open.substack.com
Sidetracked by Scenarios III
Toxic optimism in climate policy
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
I definitely want to see this. The particular "left" ideological strain that would call for a boycott is standpoint theory. It is illogical and ultimately reactionary, substituting ethnicity (identity) for reason and empathy. Not my left. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Some Leftists Are Boycotting This Film. Everyone Should Watch It.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
I have to weigh in on this one. About 2/3 of the way through they get into a discussion of what a pro-working class foreign policy would look like, and we hear about Bernie Sanders' global minimum wage. I've been here before! www.nytimes.com/2026/06/09/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | The Left’s Reckoning on Gaza, Elites and American Power
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Part II of the Substack series on the problem with climate scenarios. This one looks at problems with the economics part of the models used to generate them. The output, as depicted in the pair of figures below, is a lot more arbitrary than claimed. open.substack.com/pub/peterdor...
open.substack.com
Sidetracked by Scenarios II
Not a model model
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
Seen on a t-shirt (hearsay): "Anyone who supports Trump is either a billionaire or stupid. Check your bank account to find out which one you are."
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
Using the removal of RCP8.5 as a pretext, here's the start of a series of posts on what's wrong with the current framework for talking about climate policy. Along the way I'll look at climate modeling, hidden assumptions and that slippery target "net zero". open.substack.com/pub/peterdor...
open.substack.com
Sidetracked by Scenarios I
Reflections on the removal of RCP8.5
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Coops, worker and consumer, are great, but could they be the building blocks of a better, post-capitalist economy? This piece argues they work best in a smaller scale competitive environment but aren't a great model for governing large, powerful corporations. open.substack.com/pub/peterdor...
open.substack.com
Coops: Small Is Beautiful, Big Not So Much
First a disclaimer: I have always supported coops.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
Another college (Swarthmore) has offered free tuition to students whose families earn less than $200k. This is the cutoff for the top fifth of the distribution. It's worth considering that this is also the apparent affordability cutoff.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
What this leaves out is that Trump has access to individual social media and cell phone data, which reveal political attitudes and can be merged with proof-of-citizenship filters like moves, name changes, same name as a flagged voter, etc. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/u...
nytimes.com
What to Know About the Citizenship Lists Trump Wants to Create
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Bertov's analysis is important even if you think the root problem is Zionism itself. I'd add that the racist core of Zionism was assuming all Arabs were interchangeable, so the category of "Palestinian" didn't exist. "Arab countries should have taken them." prospect.org/2026/05/22/h...
prospect.org
How Israel Got This Way - The American Prospect
A new book by a genocide scholar traces the roots of the nation’s descent.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
8.5 has been dubious for some time as a direct outcome of GHG emissions. But positive feedbacks are difficult to attach a probability to and remain underincorporated. We could indeed have a worst case scenario like the one that was crossed out, but not directly. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/c...
nytimes.com
Scientists Tweaked the Global Warming Outlook. So Trump Weighed In.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
This misses the key point about B-G and Zionists of a similar outlook: they did not think there was a people called "Palestinians", only Arabs. Driven out, the Arabs of ex-Palestine would melt in with those of neighboring countries. Arabs were indistinguishable to them. aje.news/w7b8vj
aje.news
How David Ben-Gurion got the Palestinians wrong in 1948
The Palestinian question never disappeared despite Israel’s best efforts and worst brutality.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Remarkable that Jacobin, in an interview with their leading ideological light, Vivek Chibber, has him saying that socialism "has to meet the moral worries and advance the goals that socialists have for what a humane society should be." This assumption is why socialism as system change died.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Social media is a disaster zone, even though it has incredible untapped potential. What to do? In a just-published article, I describe how social ownership in the form of purpose-based trusts could make this technology work for us. It’s all spelled out here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...
tandfonline.com
Governance of social media: a social ownership approach
Social media (SM), while beneficial in many ways, also harms users and society at large. This paper concurs with the view that the key drivers of these harms, algorithmic and design choices to maxi...
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
OK, this is not just nasty but also weird. Why isn't a women-only college intrinsically discriminatory according to right wing standards? What's the diff between women-only Smith and, say, a women's center on another campus? www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/u...
nytimes.com
Trump Administration Investigating Smith College Over Transgender Admissions
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 03/05/2026
The thing that scares me the most is that the Trump people act as though public opinion doesn't matter. No reaction to the polling numbers. No real attempt to sell the Iran War. It's as if they are already planning an end run around November. prospect.org/2026/04/30/r...
prospect.org
The Real Reason to Worry About the Midterm Elections - The American Prospect
Some worry about a November Trump coup. That’s far-fetched, but the ordinary forms of voter suppression are the greater concern.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
Trying to keep up with the Portland literary scene. Currently reading a novel about an idealistic, gender fluid Gen Z-er who works as a server for a regional restaurant chain, *Tess of the Burgerville*. A little slow but you might like it.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
Several people I know have seen the current Netflix doc on the dispute between Magnus Carlson and Hans Niemann. I haven't replayed that game in a while and have no opinion on whether it was an honest win by Niemann. But I do have a couple of thoughts.
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
If you ever wanted an example of the difference between Judaism and Zionism, here it is. It's worth thinking about what the motive might have been. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...
theguardian.com
Tehran’s embattled Jewish community endures despite Israeli bombing of synagogue
Members of Rafi’ Nia synagogue braved airstrikes to celebrate Passover hours before it was destroyed
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
Why did Trump's inner circle discount the effect of the closing of the Strait of Hormuz? Will the billionaires who bankroll him have second thoughts when global supply chains buckle? Maybe it has something to do with the illusion of a dematerialized economy.... open.substack.com/pub/peterdor...
open.substack.com
The Strait of Hormuz and the Revenge of the Material World
Question: When the supply chain effects of the Iran War start to bite the tech, finance and other sectors that have lined up behind Trump, will this swath of the plutocracy turn on him?
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Peter Dorman @pdorman.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
Here's the thing about the sort of ceasefire. Trump, Vance and the rest have found it's OK to just make up stuff, deny what they just said, etc. in US politics. They get away with it. So now they do the same thing with a ceasefire agreement. "No, it doesn't say that." How will this turn out?
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