Hexapodia Is the Key Insight!
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
PODCAST: Hexapodia LXIII: Plato's WereWolf, & Other Trumpist Topics
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Back after a year on hiatus! Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast They, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning E...
PODCAST: Hexapodia LXII: Noah Needs Nuance!
25 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week); Aspirationall...
PODCAST: Hexapodia LXI: DeLong Smackdown Watch: Snatching Back the Baton for Supply-Side Progressivism Edition
22 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week); Aspirationall...
PODCAST: Hexapodia LX: DeLong Smackdown Watch: China Edition
14 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week); Aspirationall...
PODCAST: Hexapodia LIX: Mourning the Death of Vernor Vinge
08 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week); Aspirationall...
PODCAST: Hexapodia LVIII: Acemoglu & Johnson Should Have Written About Technologies as Labor-Complementing or Labor-Substituting
19 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In which Noah Smith & Brad DeLong wish Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson had written a very different book than their "Power & Progress" is...Key Insight...
PODCAST: Hexapodia LVII: The "Vibecession" Is Losing Its Vibe
08 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Producer Confidence & Consumer Confidence (in the Economy), & Our Confidence (in Our Analyses): Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Lea...
PODCAST: Hexapodia LVI: Economic Development: Oks & Williams, Rodrik & Stiglitz
20 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
& a start-of-the-semester academic-email-addresses-only paid-subscription sale:Key Insights:* Young whippersnappers Oks and Williams are to be commend...
PODCAST: Hexapodia LV: The Forthcoming Successful Development of the Asia Circle, & Dehyperglobalization
04 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Finally, at long last, over the next two generations the tide is likely to be flowing strongly toward near-universal global development...
PODCAST: Hexapodia LIV: We Go Off Message with Special Guest Brian Beutler
11 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The SubStackLand community gains another valuable member. We welcome him to the NFL SubStackLand:Key Insights:* Bing-AI says “Brian Beutler” is pr...
PODCAST: Hexapodia LIII: Rule #1: No Schmittposting!
15 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Liberals vs. leftists once again, with the principal conclusion being that trying to find and join your tribe by shouting online—Schmittian picking-...
PODCAST: Hexapodia LII: Growth, Development, China, the Solow Model, & the Future of South & Southeast Asia
05 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* The Chinese Communist Party is very like an aristocracy—or maybe it isn’t…* If it is, it will in the long run have the same stron...
PODCAST: Hexapodia LI: Begun, Þe Attack on Biden Industrial Policy Has!
15 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Critics: Cato-style libertarians, including AEI’s Michael Strain. The last die-hard classic Milton Friedman-style economic libertaria...
Hexapodia L: Why Is Such a Good Economy Seen as Bad?
11 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Brad has a new microphone!* Noah has jet lag: he is just back from Japan.* Brad has jet lag: he is just back from Australia.* Perhaps i...
Hexapodia XLIX: We Cannot Tell in Advance Which Technologies Are Labor-Augmenting & Which Are Labor-Replacing
07 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Brad’s microphone is dying, and a new one is on order.* However, 75% of the talking on this episode is Noah: he came loaded for bear....
PODCAST: “Hexapodia” is þe Key Insight! XLVIII: The "Late-Antiquity Pause"
22 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Rome did fall. It did not merely “transform”.* Across Eurasia, from 150 to 800 or so there was a pronounced “Late-Antiquity Pause...
PODCAST: “Hexapodia” is þe Key Insight! XLVII: “Polycrisis” Was Just the New Cold War All the Time!
06 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* The global trade network is immensely valuable…* Friendshoring is not deglobalization, but raher shift-globlization…* Brad was stup...
PODCAST: “Hexapodia” is þe Key Insight! XLVI: Þe One Where We Talk About Everything, wiþ Special Guest Miles Kimball
10 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Yes, it is possible to talk about everything in an hour…* We are not very far apart on what the Fed is doing and should be doing—th...
PODCAST: “Hexapodia” is þe Key Insight! XLV: Information Goods & þe Measurement of Economic Growth, wiþ Special Guest John Quiggin
20 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Information really wants to be free—if it is not free, if it is “charged for” by advertising, or otherwise, you will get into a w...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XLIV: R&D & Industrial Resarch Labs
09 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Pre-Note:Here in the U.S., at the leading edge of the world economy, measured producivity growth fell off a cliff in the late 1960s, recovreed somewha...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XLIII: Crypto Fraud! Edition
17 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Pre-Note:One thing we did not get into was the relationship between the claps of FTX and the associated fraud and “Effective Altruism”—Effective...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XLII: "Slouching Towards Utopia"—Brad's New Book Edition
20 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Since 1870, we humans have done amazingly astonishingly uniquely and unprecedentedly well at baking a sufficiently large economic pie.*...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XLI: Inflation & Its Vicissitudes
29 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* The only way to buy insurance against the fiscal theory of the price level’s becoming relevant for the inflation outlook is to keep T...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XL: Coming to America Immigration Edition
08 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* We should avoid the tendency to paint the past, nostalgically, as a golden age.* If we take the long view there is an overwhelming cont...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XXXIX: Bidenomics Industrial Policy Edition: CHIPS & IRA
29 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Be pragmatic! Do what works! Reinforce success! Abandon failure!* CHIPS & IRA are only, at most, 1/4 of what we should be doing.* These...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XXXVIII: Crypto & "Web3"
25 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* The most recent round of Tech elephants, rhinoceroses, unicorns, and spiny lizards—Netflix, Shopify, etc.—are very unlikely to payo...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XXXVII: A Meta-Podcast on the Ezra Klein Show, Larry Summers Edition; or, The Inflation Outlook Again
30 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Not so much key insights, as key questions: (a) What are the teams? (b) 1920, 1948, 1951, 1974, or 1980? (c) Are there any true members...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XXXVI: Four Lost Cities, by Annalee Newitz
15 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* There is a perspective from which “today” means “post-Ordovician”* Catul-Huyuk as 900 families living cheek-by-jowl, and after ...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XXXV: Putin's Surprise Attack on Ukraine, wiþ Special Guest Kamil Galeev
09 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We Truly Did Not Have History Rhyming to the Spanish Civil War on Our 2022 Bingo Card!…Subscribe to get this in your email inbox. Become a paid subs...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight XXXIV!: Federal Reserve Nominee Lisa Cook, without Special Guest Lisa Cook
06 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Become a free subscriber to receive this ‘Stack in your email. Do note that this Grasping Reality newsletter is a reader-supported publication—I r...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight XXXIII: Inflation!
14 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Become a free subscriber to receive this ‘Stack in your email. Do note that this Grasping Reality newsletter is a reader-supported publication—I r...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight XXXII: Þe “Rule & Ruin” of America’s Republican Party, & Other Topics
14 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* We may well face a generation of right-wing culture war-fueled minority rule in this country.* American Progressives have proven bad at...
PODCAST: “Hexapodia” Is þe Key Insight XXXI: History, Slavery, & National Narratives
29 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Nearly all successful political movements over the past 150 years have been strongly nationalistic* A successful cosmopolitanism must t...
PODCAST: “Hexapodia” Is þe Key Insight XXX: Faulty Torpedoes, WWII Submarines, Promotions, & Our Hideous Waste of Human Potential
17 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Matt Suandi—forced off of his India RCT development-economics project by the COVID plague—has taken the plague year to write a bril...
PODCAST: “Hexapodia” Is þe Key Insight XXIX: Þe Swedish Central Bank Prize in Honor of Alfred Nobel Podcast
20 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Paul Feyerabend was right—science is whatever scientists do: anything goes. But what healthy sciences that survive and flourish and g...
PODCAST: “Hexapodia” Is þe Key Insight XXVIII: Build Back Better!
07 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Yes, Americans are now in a selfish defensive crouch, but just wait 8 years—if we get a high-pressure economy for those years…* We ...
PODCAST: “Hexapodia” Is þe Key Insight XXVII: Evergrande
22 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* I do not understand how the Chinese economy works.* The Chinese economy is an odd combination of market and party in which the party ha...
PODCAST: “Hexapodia” Is þe Key Insight XXVI: True, Neo-, and Illiberalism
18 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Today’s meaning of “neoliberalism” is the result of the collision of two different applications of the term—to Margaret Thatche...
PODCAST: “Hexapodia” Is þe Key Insight XXV: Afghanistan
25 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* The Taliban should go to the World Bank and say: “For 42 years now, mechanized, airborne, and infantry armies and air and drone force...
PODCAST: “Hexapodia” Is þe Key Insight XXIV: Which Great Powers Held the Baton of the Future, When?
06 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“I have seen the future, and it works”. That was what Lincoln Steffens wrote in a letter to Maria Howe in 1919 with respect to Vladimir Lenin’s ...
PODCAST: “Hexapodia” Is þe Key Insight XXIII: Antitrust
25 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* There are a great many reasons to fear that the rise of industrial and post-industrial economic concentration is doing serious harm to ...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" Is þe Key Insight XXII: Cuba!
14 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights!:* Hexapodia!* Drop the embargo now!* There is nothing that enables an authoritarian régime—or, indeed, pretty much any type of régim...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" Is þe Key Insight XXI: Last Exit Off þe Highway to Serfdom?
06 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights: * “This time, for sure!…” Are the Democrats Bullwinkle Moose or Rocket J. Squirrel “that trick never works!” in hoping that th...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" Is þe Key Insight XX: Five-Item Grab-Bag: Vaccination & Votes; NIMBYism & California Growth, Aversion to UI, Google’s Quality, & Wilhelmine Germany & Contemporary China
01 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Zach Carter, who was supposed to be our guest this week, has a cold. So we have a grab-bag: vaccination & votes, NIMBYism & California growth, aversio...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" Is þe Key Insight XIX: America Today: A Zero-Sum Society?
16 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Hexapodia!* Periodically, America has had “the frontier has closed, now scarcity rules!” panics—& they have been bad, but so far ...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" Is þe Key Insight XVIII: Þe Ecology of Innovation
09 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* There is a four-day creative-destruction festschrift for Philippe Aghion & Peter Howitt starting June 9: The Economics of Creative Dest...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" Is þe Key Insight XVII: What Will the Jobs of the Future Be Like?
02 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Brad cannot, in fact, reliably and accurately multiply two-digit numbers in his head…* When people comment on twitter that we are a n...
PODCAST: Hexapodia XVI: Zombie Economic Ideas
26 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Josef Schumpeter’s “depressions are… forms of something which has to be done, namely, adjustment to previous economic change. Mos...
PODCAST: Hexapodia XV: No-B******t Democracy, Starring Henry Farrell
19 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Henry: We need to be critical of other people in the public sphere, but we need to be critical in an extraordinarily humble way—to re...
PODCAST: Hexapodia XIV: Þe Capital Gains Tax
12 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Economic arguments against higher taxes that may have been somewhat plausible back in the days of 70% or so maximum individual and 40% ...
PODCAST: Hexapodia XIII: "Mandated Interoperability": We Can't Make It Work, or Can We?
04 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:* Cory Doctorow is AWESOME!* It is depressing. We once, with the creation of the market economy, got interoperability right. But now the ...
PODCAST: Hexapodia XII: Þe Cambridge Capital Controversy
28 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights: * Getting the rate of profit—the sums that are charged businesses for renting machines and renting space, and for access to the genera...
PODCAST: Hexapodia XI: China: Its Industrial Policy, & Its Striving for Deweaponized Autarchy
21 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Key Insights:Brad DeLong: “I have one key insight: everyone should subscribe to Foreign Affairs and read Dan Wang’s forthcoming piece…”Noah Sm...
PODCAST: Hexapodia X: Global Warming
14 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
…have to come from the arc of Asia facing the bullets, because the American century is over… It's possible to be increasingly optimistic about cli...
PODCAST: Hexapodia IX: Banishing Extreme Poverty from þe World
07 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
…as Leninist, Noah Smith as Burkean. We neoliberals and neoliberal-adjacents need to come up with five significant discrete policies to make the wor...
PODCAST: Hexapodia VIII: Þe China Syndrome!
31 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
…from the rest of coastal East Asia when looked at in comparative context:Today Noah Smith & Brad DeLong talk about China, the Taiwan Semiconductor ...
PODCAST: Hexapodia VII: Forecasting þe Economy, Now Þt Biden-Rescue Has Been Enacted
24 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the last resort, the the way the government budget constraint balances itself is through the fiscal theory of the price level: levying this inflati...
PODCAST: Hexapodia VI: Þe Global South Begins to Converge to þe Global North!; Wiþ Noah Smith & Brad DeLong
17 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For 200 years—from 1800 to 2000—first the Industrial Revolution Age and next the Modern Economic Growth Age rolled forward, bringing previously un...
PODCAST: Hexapodia V: Freeing Us from þe Market; Wiþ Mike Konczal, Noah Smith & Brad DeLong
10 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Mike Konczal: Freedom From the Market: America’s FIght to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand https://books.google.com/books?id=0aD...
PODCAST: Hexapodia IV: Checks for (Almost) Everyone! Wiþ Noah Smith & Brad DeLong
03 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The classical British social insurance state took large chunks of human activity out of the marketplace and attempted to distribute them to each accor...
PODCAST: Hexapodia III: þe Minimum Wage, wiþ Arin Dube, Noah Smith, & Brad DeLong: Should We Be Fighting for $15?
24 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
If moderate raises in the minimum wage do not cause unemployment, who can object to them—but why do they not cause higher unemployment, if they in f...
PODCAST: Hexapodia II: Industrial Policy? Do We Need It?, wiþ Brad DeLong & Noah Smith
17 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Is there a mysterious Factor X that can speed growth, enhance opportunity, raise wages, & convince others that no, China does not have a superior syst...
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" Is þe Key Insight I: "Relief, Support, Stimulus" or "Stimulus, Inflation, Catastrophe"?: þe Biden $1.9T Reconciliation Plan: Noah Smith & Brad DeLong
10 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Noah Smith & Brad DeLong now have a podcast:Works Referenced:Twirlip of the Mists: Hexapodia as the Key Insighthttp://web.hexapodia.org/Vernor Vinge:...