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pdorman.bsky.social
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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Mostly agree, but Trump isn't so purposive. He craves domination and the humiliation of others, and his invocation of force reflects this. Whether it will prove to help or hurt him remains to be seen. (And it's partly up to us.) www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/o...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Deport Elon? Sounds like a good idea, but where? I vote for Mars.

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

Has anyone kept track of the percentage of court orders that Trump has obeyed rather than ignored? (Including obeying vs ignoring pending appeal.) A spreadsheet would be nice.

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

Here's the comment I posted at the Times in thread-form. *Of course*, this was the result of using an AI agent to write some or all of the report. The limitations of AI for this purpose are well known, especially in legal briefs. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/w...

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

The media, including the NY Times, screams antisemitism, but there's no evidence the DC shooter was antisemitic. The article doesn't point out, however, that it's the Israeli govt's claim to represent all Jews that promotes conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. fair.org/home/nyt-ass...

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

Just had an AI-generated "review" of a paper I coauthored sent to my inbox by Academia-dot-edu. Has this happened to anyone else? What's going on here? Was the paper selected at random? FWIW, the review was very positive; maybe it was tailored to me.

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

Spring in the PNW: salad from our garden, chicken in morel cream sauce à la Jacques Pépin, finished off by strawberry shortcake. Hoods are in, and they taste like they're macerated right out the box.

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

Just up: #4 in the series on the building blocks of economics, from a somewhat unconventional perspective. This one offers a metaphor for thinking about what markets do and don't. open.substack.com/pub/peterdor...

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

This replicates for the US the results found by Stutzer and Frey in "Commuting and life satisfaction in Germany" (2007).

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

It's one thing to be a sociopath, another to bring it to this level. Trump has a world audience, knows he's lying, knows Ramaphosa knows he's lying, and doesn't care. I guess if you're shameless in a small context, it's not that big a leap to this. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/u...

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

Not a conspiracist, but just wondering.....

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

This misses a crucial point: urban form and transportation systems interact, a classic multiple equilibrium problem. More Europeans live/work/shop near rail stations. How do we switch this? www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/o...

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

Portland, my adopted home, is the City of Roses. Every spring it gets new roses. (Sorry.)

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

A new Substack, inspired by last month's piece in Semafor on "The group chats that changed America". open.substack.com/pub/peterdor...

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

This debate was annoying in the way it skipped over so many crucial issues. The comments section was closed by the time I got around to responding, so I'm putting it into this thread. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/o...

submitted 28 days ago • 4 comments

Search for "AI" and "tulip mania" on Google search, and you'll get about 277,000 hits. Scrolling through a few pages, most of them compare the current AI bubble to this: www.history.com/articles/tul...

submitted 29 days ago • 1 comment

Musk isn't very bright. A smarter owner of an AI program can tweak it to bias responses toward pre-set claims or positions. Such a bias could be invisible to most users. In fact, maybe this is already happening. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

This stuff is so weird to me to read. Isn't it obvious that the core issue is the political economy of the problem? And this can be analyzed with theory and evidence! I tried to do that in my book, but instead we get simplistic assumptions. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/b...

submitted 34 days ago • 1 comment

There seems to an idea (conspiracy?) going around that some masked ICE cops are actually paramilitaries, like the Proud Boys. This seems like it could be researchable, since it would be enough to identify just one, if true. Plausible or not?

submitted 34 days ago • 0 comments

Wittgenstein and AI: Isn't the core problem, and source of hallucination, that LLMs can't identify human purpose in the use of language -- and this was precisely the basis for LW's language games. Proximity of words to each other doesn't provide a *purposive* context.

submitted 35 days ago • 0 comments