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Eulogy for the École nationale d'administration: Or, How the West Forgot That Leaders Need to Be Forged and Not Merely Sorted
Just so we don’t all get bored with Iran war and its fallout I thought I’d write up something I’ve been meaning to do for a while but kept putting off:
Macron killed the École nationale d'administration (ENA), France's legendary civil service finishing school, in 2021. This from the man who is himself an énarque, married his teacher, and governs France with the populist credibility of Marie Antoinette at a soup kitchen (long may he continue). The irony of course wasn't lost on anyone except himself.
He replaced it with something called the INSP, which is the institutional equivalent of renaming Blackwater to Academi and hoping the Iraqis don't notice. The same people from the same arrondissements now attend the new thing and get the same jobs afterwards. The nameplate changed. Little else has changed, except that France lost something it didn't know it had until it was gone.
I want to argue that what died with the ENA matters far beyond France, because its death represents the final victory of a particular model of elite formation, the American model, over a rival continental model that was straightforwardly better. And since I seem to have developed a reputation for critiquing the Americans here, you know the drill…
I.
There are two kinds of elite institution. The first kind is hard to get into. The second kind is hard to get through. Today almost nobody distinguishes between them, and I would submit that the failure to do so is one of the great undiagnosed pathologies of modern Western governance.
Harvard is the archetype of the first type. Three to four percent acceptance rate. You get in, you are among the Chosen. Your parents update the Christmas letter. Mazel tov. But what happens once you're inside? The median grade is an A-. You could sleepwalk through a Harvard undergraduate degree and emerge with honours, which is precisely what a lot of people do, and we all know which people I mean, even after Affirmative Action has technically been banned.
The degree doesn't certify that Harvard made you better. It certifies that you were smart at 18 and your parents had the resources, or the connections, or the correct demographic profile, or all three, to package you correctly for the admissions committee. The brand does the heavy lifting for the rest of your natural life. The institution is simply a filter and not a forge.
The SCOTUS clerkship is the same logic at its apex. Thirty six slots a year, drawn from a pool already prefiltered through Yale Law and a "feeder" circuit judge. The most prestigious legal position in America. Sure the actual work isn’t easy and you’re grappling on a daily basis with some of the biggest constitutional questions of the year but we all know the real prize is what comes afterwards, the $400k signing bonus with a BigLaw firm to do Associate level disclosure work and template drafting which any competent lawyer could do just as well, isn’t given to them because of what they learned in those 12 months. The prestige is entirely in the selection.
Nobody emerges from a SCOTUS clerkship significantly transformed as a lawyer; they emerge networked and credentialled. The credential then entitles them to a $400,000+ signing bonus at a BigLaw firm, because the American legal market has decided that having been chosen by a Supreme Court Justice is worth half a million dollars in pure signal value. You were chosen, therefore you are saved. The Calvinism would be amusing if the people it produces weren't currently standing on the sidelines pretending everything is fine while a bunch of charlatans are running the most powerful country on earth into a ditch at speed while congratulating themselves on their own brilliance.
I'll call this the Filter Model. The institution's purpose is to identify pre-existing talent, sort it into tiers, stamp it with a brand, and release it into the wild. The actual content of what happens inside is secondary. The selection is the product.
II.
ENS Ulm does things differently. For the Americans in the audience: the École normale superieure is the institution that produced Sartre, Foucault (Michel, not Leon) , roughly a third of France's Fields Medallists and an absurd proportion of the country's serious intellectuals. The entrance exam, the concours, is savage. Harder in raw mathematical terms than anything the Ivy League administers, and I say this as someone who knows what hard mathematics examinations look like. But the concours is the door, not the room. What happens after you walk through it is the point.
The programme is designed to take talented people and remake them. Normaliens produce original research almost immediately. The agrégation preparation is an intellectual ordeal with no real Anglosphere equivalent. Imagine spending two years preparing for a single examination so difficult that the pass rate among some of the smartest people in France is routinely under 10%. People who survive the ENS think differently at 25 than they did at 21, not because they accumulated more facts but because the institution reshaped the machinery they think with.
The ENA worked the same way, but for governance instead of scholarship. "Formation" in French means both education and shaping, as in the shaping of metal. That's not an accident of language. Two years of intensive work in law, economics, public administration, and actual governance: stages in prefectures and embassies where you had to run things and not merely study them. The people who came out were a specific product: technocratic, institutionally minded, arrogant (let's not pretend otherwise) but genuinely formed for the task of operating a complex modern state. You can argue all day about whether the thing they were shaped into was good. Plenty of the yellow vests would tell you it wasn't. But you cannot argue that the shaping didn't happen. An énarque at 27 was a categorically different animal from the one who entered at 25. Harvard College cannot say this about the majority of its graduates, and the truly contemptible thing is that it isn't even embarrassed by the fact. I'll call this the Formation Model. The institution's purpose is not to sort but to shape the raw steel that comes through into a sharp blade.
III.
The connection to American civilisational failure is, I'm afraid, not subtle. But then again I've never been accused of subtlety around here and I'm not about to start cultivating it now.
The Filter Model is characteristically American (but now spreading throughout the world). America's founding myth is about breaking free of inherited structures, not building new ones. The whole premise of the American experiment is that you don't need to be formed by an institution to lead. You just need to be talented, survive the right selection process, and your innate qualities will carry you. This is, at bottom, a Calvinist proposition in Enlightenment clothing: the elect are chosen, their election is its own proof of grace, and no further formation is required. Predestination with a diploma.
In the early Republic this worked, because the Founders were themselves men of extraordinary formation. Classical education, deep reading in philosophy and history, practical experience in governance. Formation Model products who built a Filter Model system. It functioned as long as enough formed people were still coming through the pipeline to actually run things. The moment the pipeline dried up, the moment the system started producing people who had been filtered at every stage of their lives and never once forged by anything, the rot set in. And rot, once it starts, moves faster than you expect.
A Filter Model system, left to its own devices, selects for people who are good at being selected. Not people who are good at governing or thinking or leading under pressure. People who package themselves brilliantly for admissions committees, who say the right things at the right dinner parties, who land the right internships and clerkships, who optimise every life decision for the next credential on the CV. They have been sorted relentlessly since age 14 and shaped by absolutely nothing, regardless of how much Mummy and Daddy may like to pretend the non-profit they funded for their precious darling helped. Perfect résumés, zero formation. And when the moment comes that requires genuine judgment, the kind that can only come from having been put through something that actually changed how your mind works, the poor tempering shows through and the blade shatters.
I've made this argument before about American institutional depth and I'll compress it here because I don't want to repeat my entire screed from two weeks ago: the speed at which American institutions are being hollowed out right now is itself diagnostic. If the cultural root system had the depth that Americans believe it has, what's happening would be much harder to do. Instead a single administration has done more institutional damage in a year and a half than most people thought possible, and the Supreme Court, staffed entirely by Harvard and Yale alumni, the crème de la crème of the Filter Model, has folded on every serious test of courage like the invertebrates they are. These are the people the Filter Model selected as the finest legal minds in America. These are the people who were chosen, and chosen, and chosen again at every stage. And they have the institutional spine of a jellyfish.
Meanwhile here in the UK we don't have a written constitution. Parliament is sovereign and a majority can do literally anything it wants up to and including reinstating slavery (modulo certain comments the judiciary has made about the Rule of Law, lets hope they never need to be tested out). And yet Boris Johnson, with a massive majority and real public support, couldn't bulldoze the norms he wanted even with a massive public referendum backing what he was gunning for because the institutional immune system fought back at every level.
The difference? Britain still retains traces of the Formation Model in its governing culture. The civil service Fast Stream. The Bar, where pupillage is genuinely a formation: twelve months of being broken down and rebuilt as an advocate before you are trusted with taking real cases for real clients before a real judge. These institutions still carry some residual memory of the idea that you must be shaped before you are trusted. The US has replaced formation with filtration almost entirely, and is now discovering in real time that filtered people with no formation are extremely good at performing competence and catastrophically bad at exercising it.
IV.
So what actually died when Macron signed the decree?
Not a school. The French state can produce schools. What died was the proposition that governing a country is a métier, a craft, a trade requiring apprenticeship, and that the people who presume to practise it should be subjected to an intellectual and practical ordeal before being handed the keys. The counter-proposition, the American one, is that anyone sufficiently clever and well-credentialled can govern, that selection is sufficient (either by the elite or the people), that being chosen is identical to being prepared. I invite you to contemplate the current state of American governance with its parade of Filter Model all-stars and tell me with a straight face that this proposition is working.
The social mobility critique of ENA was real. The intake had become too narrow, too bourgeois, too 16ème arrondissement. But this was a problem of admissions, not of the institution. You fix a school whose intake is too narrow by widening the intake. You open the concours preparation to the provinces, you fund bursaries, you recruit actively from backgrounds that don't traditionally produce énarques. What you emphatically do not do is destroy the forge and replace it with something deliberately less rigorous and less prestigious, because that sends a specific message: that formation doesn't matter, that the forge was the problem and not the queue outside it.
Destroying the ENA because its intake was too Parisian is like burning down a hospital because the waiting list is too long. It's a specific kind of stupid that only makes sense if you've already internalised the Filter Model assumption that the institution's only function is selection. If you think the institution actually transforms people, if you take seriously the idea that an énarque at 27 is better at governing than the same person would have been without ENA, and not merely better credentialled, then destroying the institution over an admissions problem is an act of civilisational vandalism. Which is exactly what it was.
Every time a Formation Model institution is diluted, streamlined, or abolished in the name of accessibility or modernisation or equity, the Filter Model wins by default. And every time the Filter Model wins, we get more leaders who were brilliantly selected and never once forged. More people with credentials and no character. More people who can navigate a selection process with preternatural skill and cannot navigate a genuine crisis to save their lives because no institution ever demanded anything of them beyond showing up and being impressive.
The people currently dismantling American institutions either have impeccable credentials themselves or are assisted by teams full of such people. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, everything in the works. They were filtered, and filtered, and filtered again. They were never once formed. They emerged from the most elaborate sorting mechanism in human history without having been changed by it in any meaningful way, and they are now busy proving, with considerable energy and to the great horror of people who confused selection for preparation, that being chosen is not the same as being ready. MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIM, if only they could understand what was being said.
The cages are still hanging from St. Lambert's Church in Münster, 490 years later. Empty now, but everyone who visits the city knows the story. A permanent public record of what happens when people who are supremely confident in their own election turn out to have no formation whatsoever. An interesting factoid about the Münster Rebellion is that Jan van Leiden, the self-proclaimed King of the Anabaptists whose bones ended up in those cages, was a failed tailor's apprentice. He didn't finish his formation either.
Rest in peace, ENA. You deserved better critics and a better death.
Bringing the Münster Rebellion into this is rather odd.
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Has the French system delivered excellence? The nuclear power switchover, that was done well. High speed rail and infrastructure buildout, that was done well. The glorious years. But that's in the past.
What has the French system delivered more recently? Not joining the Iraq War, that's about it.
France has serious demographic and terror issues. There are troops constantly patrolling Paris with machine guns. This is not a sign of a well-managed society. The French economy is extremely indebted and lacks dynamism. Where is France in AI? Mistral is on the level of a single second-rate Chinese AI firm. Where is France in aerospace? The Rafale is at or below the level of China's export-grade 4th gen light fighters with export-grade missiles, as seen with India and Pakistan. France doesn't do 'export-grade', that's the best they've got.
Where is France in semiconductors? Nothing of great significance. French cars? Second-rate at best. Heavy industry and machine tools? That's Germany's department, France is behind Spain.
Only Airbus really stands out as top-tier performance. And Louis Vuitton I suppose (handbags do not matter). French nuclear power has slipped, skills have been lost and costs have soared.
French elites could have chosen to focus on uniting Europe, creating a power-bloc to rival America and China. Yet they constantly leave pan-European projects like the Eurofighter, they're arrogant and uncooperative. Instead they've focused on bringing in low-performance Africans and raising taxes punishingly high, crippling economic development. France has seriously ugly problems with pensions and spending because of the inadequacy of its leaders, the ethos and approach and ends they pursue. There's no issue with the French people, they've shown excellent abilities throughout history.
American governance can and is constantly faceplanting and they'll still be doing better than France or Britain. The US can make terrible decisions with terrible consequences but retain the core wealth-generating machine of their society, their huge technological base and be fine. The US also has all kinds of serious self-inflicted demographic problems too. But if you build and maintain the wealth machine then these are all manageable.
There's a fallacy where people see smart people running country A and dumb people running country B and assume that country A is better run. That need not be the case! Smart people can do tremendous damage to a country, as can the stupid. Well-ordered, mature, serious legal institutions with all this beautiful jurisprudence and meticulously educated officials executing well-formulated plans can absolutely crush and wreck a country like France. They'll just do it in an orderly, mature, serious, sophisticated way.
Having smart people running the country isn't at all necessary and may even be undesirable on average. Occasionally you get a Lee Quan Yew or a De Gaulle. But you might also get a skilful, cunning, sophisticated wrecker like Blair or Macron. Better an intellectually mediocre leader who sincerely loves his country than a 160 IQ genius who went to the very best schools, if he is in love with some grand ideological scheme, foreign power, personal profit or whatever else.
Regarding French aerospace: Ariane and Airbus are largely French. They're nominally "European" but in a very French dominated way.
I take your other points, but the French are capable at aerospace and military production. They're the example of a non-feeble European nation.
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It bears mentioning that the French have chewed up and spit out three dynasties, two emperors, four republics and fifteen constitutions so far. On one hand, I think this explains many things about both the ENA and your points as well. It also means that the French have the innate ability to politically regenerate themselves from time to time.
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Here's my take:
I don't think people should write posts using LLMs, and my inclination is to warn/ban anyone who does it.
The problem is that I have to be pretty damn sure because it's easy to register false positives. Already people tend to assume any long wall of text was probably written by an AI. So given a choice between being trolled by AI posts or overzealously banning anything that smells at all like AI, I'm going to mostly let it go.
Of course when you admit using AI it presents a problem, because we appreciate the honesty but don't want you to keep doing it.
There is also a gray area where people are using AI to "help" them write posts. We obviously cannot ban anything touched even a little by AI, but how much is too much? @self_made_human uses AI to draft some of his posts. I dislike this, but....shrug
Personally I like AI, but not for writing anything I care about. Your words here should be your own...unpolished, half thought out and all.
That's my opinion but we haven't really settled on an official mod position other than pure AI posts where you just paste the output of an LLM are right out.
Your record as a troll means I'm less likely to look on this charitably, but other mods seem disinclined to mod it and honestly I was only suspicious, not certain. So you get a pass this time, but do not treat this as an invitation to keep testing how much you can get away with.
Not that you really care what I think, but I think the best AI policy for this place is something along the lines of this "pure AI posts where you just paste the output of an LLM are right out" but with some "you know it when you see it" ratio of quality:length consideration.
The white-collar world, specifically Lawyers as that's related to my job, is clearly on its way to a policy/stance of "sure use AI, but you still own every word on that page". Which I think is the best way to treat AI.
It is increasingly likely that AI writing will get harder to detect. And while emotionally I would be annoyed to read 100% AI comments and if I got into an argument with someone and they were just a LLM sockpuppet account I would be really pissed off. But kind of like that matrix steak scene, if you don't know, does it matter?
Hence the quality:length thing. If someone is shitting up this site by vomiting LLM garbage all over it. Very bad. If someone "gets away" with AI posts and they're high quality, who cares?
If an AI writes a comment so good it makes me think and engage, aside from my (I wont say arbitrary, but its not a law of physics that AI writing is of low social value) preferences that say I don't value AI, does it matter?
Unfortunately there's not much we can do to get him to own every word on the page. We aren't a judge. All he has to do is post and ignore any criticism.
Hence the part about quality:length
If you're posting walls and slopping up the place, mods can do something
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I take the critique of the American model fully, I've never liked it very much and have seen it as mostly downstream of other things I don't like, namely a refusal to just administer IQ tests and deal with the disparate impact. But when I look at whatever europe has had as an alternative I don't really see anything better. If I wanted to judge a system by its fruits I'd look to the east, which unfortunately also has some notable problems with how its elites are selected. I think perhaps the best method would be to leave it up to capitalism to incentivize refinement and reward merit with power, a very libertarian direction of thought.
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This is part and parcel of the cycle I’ve noticed with democratic societies.
If a leading class of people in any society is composed exclusively of the best elements it has to offer and there’s no provisions made for the inheritance of its talents in any form then overtime it’s all but guaranteed that those abilities and talents are going to get depleted.
Democracies have an intrinsic power vacuum to them such that gifted people can with luck and effort, work their way up to the highest echelons of society. That’s usually what these institutions are designed to facilitate. But any institution or society that denies any hereditary bond as a major explanatory element and especially if it denies the hereditary inequality between people makes it impossible to recognize hereditary talents.
State organized communities will always be better off the closer it comes to meeting the condition that gifted individuals (regardless of their origin or what they come from) should always occupy a position appropriate to their gifts if there’s no one else that exceeds them in their abilities. And it’s required to protect the interests of the general public.
No government on Earth can abolish physical laws that determine the distribution of intellectual talents which is why societies should pitch themselves as having a duty to control them.
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It is a shame that the best and brightest get funneled into zero sum laptop jobs in this era of financialization. Imagine the outcomes that an educated, civic-minded intellectual powerhouse could create in their home country if they were properly educated and pushed towards making an effective difference. It'd be a real shame if a series of checkboxes just led to this raw genius sitting optimizing financial transactions instead of contributing at all to any sort of human development.
*Excited Chinese noises*
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Something like >30% of Ivy League graduates go straight to Wall Street. I assume another >30% go straight to SF to optimize addicting people to rage slop (I actually think this is a worse use of human capital than playing esoteric financial games against each other).
I'm glad you highlighted the zero-sum part. I think about this a lot.
I'm quite pro capital markets, as they're clearly the best mechanism we have as a civilization to allocate limited resources thus far. And both PE and VC, despite their reputations, play extremely important roles in the "ecosystem" as do banks and institutional funds and everyone else.
I doubt this is controversial here, but I think capital allocation mechanisms/markets are one of the greatest human inventions along with steam power, electricity, etc.
But I wonder a LOT about when (and maybe we didn't, but I doubt it) we hit the point of extremely diminishing returns/zero-sum with the financial sector.
Because it's obvious that no financial markets results in terrible price discovery and terrible allocation of resources. Having great capital markets means good price discovery means resources allocated well and the human race benefits as a whole as great ideas are rapidly rewarded and scaled. The pie grows for everyone.
But at some point, or many points over time, it does very much seem like there was a shift from "making the pie bigger hy effectively allocating capital" to "getting increasingly sophisticated at fighting eachother for slices of the pie as it grows slowly in the background". I don't think this was a nefarious plot by hedge fund managers. Ironically I think it was probably my man Marx's chickens coming home to roost. Economic growth in the developed nations has slowed a lot since the "golden age of capitalism" , the pie doesn't get bigger faster like it used to. So it's a natural shift , but it sucks.
If I had to pick a moment, my gut says somewhere around the invention of high frequency trading. That is pure zero-sum fuck fuck games.
Yeah but you also get people optimizing purely for the allocation of capital thus all the bubbles and semi-scams you see in financial fields. You can do a lot of hard, intricate work at optimizing your arm-wrestling techniques, but when end of the day it's just PVP arm-wrestling there are limits to what you can derive out of that in the end.
Also frankly as somebody who lives in the 'developing world' and meanders around it a lot, it feels in pure material terms like the best parts of mid-tier countries are perfectly on par in terms of human comfort with the richest Western countries. There hasn't really been that much innovation in terms of stuff like building houses or infrastructure in the last decade or two, and later adopters get the advantages of being able to build it with the benefit of experience plus generally having less ridiculous red tape to handle.
Not at all, the productivity of the construction sector in North America has been flat/down over the last 20 years
Such a big issue, and no one is talking about it
Yeah and later adopters have social technologies like 'removing homeless and drug addicts from the commons' that mean that frequently the nicest parts of the developing world are better than world cities.
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Imagine a Haitian Elon Musk returning to Haiti.
Oh, right, he gets set on fire.
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Shame I agree, alas the state doesn't fund jobs where these people can actually make a difference with salaries anywhere near the ballpark of what high finance pays. They don't even have to match the pay, just provide something that doesn't make it look like one is working for free and is "respectable", even paying 50-60% of high finance would be enough to pull a lot of people over to working for the public good rather than playing zero sum financial games. But hey, the common man would throw a tantrum if it turned out the British state was paying clever 22 year olds 3x the salary of the prime minister to improve things and generate an order of magnitude extra value for society than what they're getting paid, even if it were below what that 22 year could get on the open market. I don't blame the government, at least not directly; they still have enough smart people to know what's what. I blame the populace who make it politically impossible for the government to do what's optimal.
Increasingly I disagree. You can actually achieve the same outcome by not paying people at all.
Imagine if all the senior positions in the government, MPs, ministerial positions but also the most senior civil servants were all completely unpaid. Then implement a maximum age of 55. Keep the same exam.
The civil service would be staffed entirely by the children of the rich who are committed to public service, plus a few people sponsored by the unions (who, again, are already in politics). You would get some champagne socialists, but you get them already anyway. Most importantly, you’d cut out all the strivers. Let a man make his money and then send his son to parliament.
It wouldn’t even increase corruption, since the corrupt will be so anyway on a current civil service salary.
Or just want to collect power to further enrich themselves and their friends?!
It can always get worse, but also lmao true.
I actually think we should do the opposite. We should make elected politicians salaries approx $1million yearly for a member of Congress or other equivalent in other countries. I want massive competition for each seat.
The $1 million salary would also come with unfathomably harsh consequences for corruption. We're paying you fat stacks to work for the people. If you fuck with that responsibility, straight to gulag.
Have to agree with this. No one takes senior government positions for the salary. They take it for the insider trading and revolving door to industry sinecures. I'd go a step further and just put a flat out lifetime gains cap that gets progressively lower with increasing rank. I often wonder if the benefit of better aligning incentives away from corruption would be worth giving, as a crude example, a >1 million per year stipend for life to each of the president and first degree family members but completely disallowing any other source of income or gifts.
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Your proposed model is actually not too dissimilar to what used to be the case before 1911. MPs used to be unpaid before that point and the civil service was mostly gentlemen of independent means or (more regularly) their sons. It sort of worked because everyone involved was mostly properly educated and formed and despite the usual minor corruption was genuinely invested in seeing Britain stay Great.
The Roman Republic was surprsingly similar as well, the cursus honorum was ruinously expensive for everyone apart from the top patricians and therefore the people who took those positions didn't have much of an incentive to loot the state unless they were trying to prefigure Crassus or something (which of course didn't work out).
The problem is that this only works when the people at the top who take these jobs are properly forged and not merely selected. These people went to Eton and Harrow followed by Oxford before taking on their government posts and back then this was a proper rigorous education in the classical Trivium and Quadrivium. Back then these institutions didn't make you run the rat race to get in, if your stock was good and you could pay (or even if you couldn't but were academically excellent, Newton went to Cambridge on the back of nothing but his own intelligence in the 17th Century) you were in. The prestige you got from graduating form these places came from what they taught you and put you through, not because you were chosen by admissions committees as being worthy from amongst the huddled masses yearning to be given entry.
These people were formed properly before their public service began and this formation was necessary for them to do a good job. However today who are the sons of the rich by and large? With few exceptions it's mostly people who made their money in finance and technology, people who don't have much "institutional pedigree" in the intellectual sense and got where they are through "sharp practice" which of course percolates down to their children's mindset as well.
Their upbringing by and large consists of expensive private schools that optimize relentlessly for university admissions: little Johnny should do 8 weeks working in a lab with Prof. X on Drosphilla not because he cares one whit about cellular biology but because if he gets his name on a paper doing something menial but necessary then that will help him get his admission at Princemouth after which he's basically set for life. Handing governance to this class on the theory that their wealth frees them from financial incentive is like handing surgery to someone on the theory that their steady hands free them from the need for medical training.
What is far better is to have the formation without the careerism. The solution isn't to make the positions unpaid so that only the rich need apply but rather to make the formation so demanding and the culture so oriented toward duty that the careerists self-select out. ENA at its best did exactly this: the sortie, the ranking system, the culture of public service, all of it was designed to filter out people who were merely ambitious and retain people who were ambitious for the right reasons. That it failed to do so perfectly is not an argument against the principle, merely against the execution, and certainly not justification for giving it the chop.
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A man could take a year's savings or even less and try to make effective changes to their place of origin, as well. Instead of abandoning it in favor of zero sum absurdities.
Those "effective changes to their place of origin" aren't limited by money or (usually) even talent. They're limited because those in power at the place of origin are actively preventing them from happening.
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A major purpose of the Iran War is formation of combat leaders. I haven't seen anyone else mention this elsewhere. But it is quite explicit within the military officer hierarchy that one of the main reasons we invade for "funsies" is to keep us in practice for when we actually "need" to invade someone for real.
How do you know this? Do you have personal experience with that hierarchy?
Yes. I was a naval academy graduate, but am now a pacifist.
The Atlantic wasn't good enough for you, huh?
Hahaha! You made my day :)
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Count. My good sir.
I know someone using an LLM when I see it. I know you've used one. The issue is that I do not know it you were lazy and simply typed a short prompt and got Claude (in all likelihood) to do all the work, or if you shared a draft and had it edit it for you. Or something in between.
Why? Because I use them everyday. I can smell it. I also know that some effort was made to not make it glaringly obvious, but it takes a thief to catch one, at least depending on how busy/lazy the police are.
I suspect you might deserve a warning or a ban for this. The only reason I'm not doing it is because I genuinely do not know if you have used it in the manner I use it, which is minimally and doing the bulk of the labor. There are no facts here to fact check, per se, at least not in an objective sense, or I'd look for hallucinations.
Untouched by the light as you are since birth, I still wish to extend you a little charity and benefit of doubt, though I worry even that's too much. I am too tired to even get into the weeds of this, or at least how I pick up on the tells. But not too tired to not throw your post in Pangram, which says this is 17% AI. Nor too tired to remind everyone that I have used Pangram on my own edited writing and in semi-formal experimentation, and noticed that it has few false positives but many false negatives, including underestimating the degree of AI contribution. I'd eat my non-existent hat if a mere 17% of the post came from an AI. The issue is that I do not know if was 20% or 90%.
Unlike you, I feel little need to feel morally unclean because I have a pretty clean track record of good-faith, high effort engagement well before LLMs, and also because I disclose my usage to whoever asks, if I've used one to any degree. You really ought to understand that we're not the same, at least in my eyes. You still benefit from my fear of hypocrisy or error.
When all of God's Creations sing in heaven, won't a shitposter be part of the choir?
So I won't do anything. At least not right now. If the other moderators step in and whack you, I will defer to them. Alternatively, if they're busy, I will assess general sentiment and act accordingly when I'm back. I am genuinely okay with anything from tolerance, to a warning, to any kind of ban. You belong in a museum or a zoo, maybe a zoological museum. I'd pay for entry.
I didn't read his comment as it seemed long+boring. After reading yours, I went back to skim it. Even with the knowledge he did use AI, I have a hard time activating my "AI writing radar"
I pride myself on being good at detecting LLM text. I will have to think about this.
Even better that you clocked it as Claude, nicely done.
I should use Claude more I guess, I clearly don't have a taste for its style like I do ChatGPT/Gemini.
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Most of the earlier parts of his post has telltale signs of not being AI generated, it's only in the latter parts where it looks more like a mix between AI and human.
IMO the incisiveness is what really matters. AI is good at structuring sentences but bad at naturally coming up with incisive ideas on-par with the average higher quality substack or poster here. A little bit of AI use shouldn't trigger a modhat, though I'm fine with a post that looks entirely AI-made and which has no real ideas other than vague AIisms being modded.
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Ah, well done. I've had this idea for months now and wrote up a semi rambling draft of the post around midnight yesterday after a long day, asked Claude Opus 4.6 to take it and give it structure but didn't like the result, it was too bland and read like a "safe unsafe" newspaper op ed you'd find from one of the better writers in The Financial Times, asked for something less corporate and "safe" but no matter how I phrased it all it did was take the text and make it more rightoid, which absolutely wasn't what I was going for, so in the end I decided to take the Claudified Newspaper Op Ed and build the final post upon it from there.
But yes I agree, if you squint the newspaper OP Ed still comes through, for example this paragraph is something I'd never write, or at least never frame in this specific way:
I'd instead have changed it to talk about how it still had a culture of accepting as its input lower human capital from the French upper middle class over genuine talent from the lower classes (however little there may be, it still exists). Again, not because they deliberately shun such people, or at least no right thinking person (and we can be sure the ENA was chock full of right thinking people) does so overtly, but rather because of structural failures meaning that lower class talent never even seriously considered applying to the ENA, and the institution was fine with that continuing state of affairs. But again, that's a problem with the filter applied to at the beginning of the ENA process, it doesn't have any bearing on whether the forge once you are inside the process is of poor quality, and we can see that even the mediocre spawn of the French UMC emerged from the ENA better for the experience. The issues with the ENA was the "American" part of it, not the continental part. A shame that the baby had to be thrown out with the bathwater to satisfy the baying mob, but the common people have never really understood nuance.
I did change many many paragraphs from what Claude gave me and rewrote them from scratch or at most only taking some rhetorical turns of phrase that worked well and incorporating them into my own paragraph. In my daze at 1am yesterday I missed that paragraph and looking at the post again this morning some other things that I'd phrase differently if were an editor and the above post had been given to me.
Think of it as someone who designed the blueprints for a building themselves, outsourced the skeleton structure to a contractor, wasn't happy with the result they gave and so decided to finish the rest of the building themselves rather than knock it down and start from scratch. I genuinely don't know what percentage is "AI" or even whether you can put a number on it given my original draft and how heavily I worked the Op Ed it gave me into something that was fit to print. But if you insist, my median guess is going to be something like 33%, give or take.
Now, what did I tell you about agreeing with or complimenting me? It keeps me up at night, or so I'd say, if my sleep cycle wasn't shot and if I wasn't already the consumer of a cup of strong coffee.
I mostly believe you. Mostly. And mostly because you are the honest kind of criminal, once we have you in the lockup - you're usually kind enough to submit a written confession before we need to pull out the nightsticks or stage a shoot-out.
It would be... nice, of course, if you did that proactively without needing the trip in the police van. Have you seen gas prices these days? But I can't hold that against you, because I only disclose the usage of AI when required or when someone asks.
Go on. Shoo. Live to see another sunset, or continue giving Anthropic engineers a headache. I think that if the other mods were likely to act, they would have acted. I leave that door open for them, if they so choose.
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Reads to me as even more slop infused than your own forays, which as you know I think are counter to the current official stance on LLM-posting -- my question as usual is: if bot-posts are officially not allowed, but nobody is ever willing to do anything about it, in what sense are they not allowed?
(I'm aware that you personally think that they should be allowed, but AFAIK this is not in fact the position of the mod-team as a whole; the law of the land so to speak?)
The official position is that AI usage is allowed, but cannot constitute the substance of one’s comment. If it wouldn’t pass the “low effort” rules without the AI additions, we’re probably going to mod it.
@self_made_human has modded accordingly.
Unfortunately, our best examples of what isn’t allowed tend to stop at the new user filter. You’d be surprised how many psycho-political manifestos we get from first-time posters.
An actual, obvious slippery slope. Poor rulemaking imo.
What would you recommend?
I would go for what should at least have some chance of keeping the human text production factor high on this site. Prohibit AI for text production - on the honor code, same as with other rules for good conduct. Some AI help with idea creation is ok.
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Then there is no rule at all -- and the slop-lovers among us will continue to push the line until the forum is largely bots arguing with each other.
Bad way to go.
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Figuring out where the line is here is a fun and impossible task. I like the "if it would be considered low effort if you removed the AI text" rule, but then if a comment has AI writing sufficiently integrated into it throughout, I guess that means it is just invalid period? But at the same time, a sufficiently integrated comment would either read as 100% AI or its edited well enough that no one would know. I love thinking about this.
I know you can't encourage them, but I'm sad we don't get to see these. Now that I don't use 4chan anymore my exposure to skitzo-slop is too low. I miss stuff like the The Philmarilion and the rock guy.
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My understanding of current consensus is that entirely or majority LLM written posts are banned.
The problem is that there is no consensus beyond that. If we had a rule, informal or not, that a suspected X% of AI is the cutoff for action, I would enforce that, even if I think that the acceptable value of X is larger than most.
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I have to preface this by saying that I normally don't think highly of you as a poster. When I saw your header, my first instinct was to roll my eyes and minimize the conversation. But I did end up reading it, and I'm really glad I did. This was an excellent essay, a worthy indulgence for the sin of a few dozen shitposts.
Dead wrong on every single value judgement throughout, of course, but beautifully, hilariously so.
Excellent trolling. I actually had a few hundred words written before I realized you didn't include any links or real background info, and then realized why.
To hasten things for everyone else, article.
The school in question was a central planning initiative that's been captured by the French deep state since basically the beginning. It's a finishing school and personality-killing brainwashing symposeum for nomenklatura kids, and very very much an example of Selection, to the little extent that entire framing is worthwhile.
Which is, of course, the entire point of the post. Being carefully, forcefully stupid in a way that demands reponse from the 'tism.
Gr8 B8 M8.
So after all the bruhaha, are you genuinely this upset about your betters (America) or is it theater?
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I wonder what your take on AI-assisted writing is. No particular reason, of course, though you might want to look at my mod-hatted reply.
The main paragraph that stood out as AI, which @BurdensomeCount himself acknowledged above, was extremely obvious. I noticed it immediately because, I’m sorry to say, it read a lot like some of the things you’ve written recently in style and tone. The rest was a mix, but clearly quite a lot was written or rewritten by him.
In general, there are two issues with LLMposting. The first is the obvious quality issue. That paragraph and some other text stands out but eventually this issue is clearly going to be solved, this isn’t magic and it is presumably only a matter of time before the LLM can authentically recreate our small foibles and stylistic elements of our writing. The second is the honor system, where this community becomes pointless if we’re all reading LLM writing we could generate ourselves (either directly or prompted by a tweet-length thought).
For this reason, I think people are opposed to LLM users now because of what it bodes for the future. We can detect it (mostly, in some long posts, by regulars) for now, but we won’t be able to forever. Soon, it will be purely the honor system.
I disagree with this. Arguing with a LLM is lame because it'll eventually agree with you. Arguing here is fun because no matter how right you are, they wont agree with you (I also don't agree with people even after they've dunked on me) which is way more fun. A fun means more engagement, I like arguing here as it forces me to think about and articulate my position, which generally means i also refine it and as a result I usually end up believing things that are more "true" which I really like. I have no motivation to do this with ChatGPT.
Plus the LLM just makes the boring logical arguments. Here, with real humans, you get 1) illogical bad arguments, which are fun to tear into, or 2) genuinely creative good arguments with new twists and ideas, which expands my mind and thinking in a way that LLMs very rarely manage to do.
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I did not even need the "main paragraph" to know what he did, it's obvious to me, and probably other people who do use LLMs a lot. I don't doubt that you noticed too. I do not think that his "explanation" is unbelievable, but do forgive me if my reaction to him offering me a sealed bottle of water is to send it off for chemical analysis. If he hadn't admitted to it, I would have banned him. He did admit to it, so I am not sure what to do. I am slightly annoyed none of the other moderators have stepped in and taken the problem out of my hands, but can't blame them for that. My inner conflict is my own, and I am genuinely unsure if more moderation effort is required beyond telling him "We know what you're up to."
I know. I noticed and found it deeply uncomfortable. If it makes you feel better, I've already dialed downed the usage of AI for stylistic advice or editing significantly, because I've increasingly come around to the people who think that that it dilutes my own voice and personality. That, by itself, would not have been enough, but I've noticed other people doing the same thing in the wild: I do not want the primary difference between Count and myself to be the arguments we make, with our style and tone being similar.
Dialing down is, of course, not zero. But you can see how my most recent long-form post is more "me" in style than what came before. This is a recent development, mere weeks. I don't think I did anything morally wrong, but I do not want to become part of a homogeneous blob of writers with pleasant but startlingly similar prose.
For the rest of your points? I don't disagree. We will soon be unable to tell. I'm lucky that I have a digital record predating LLMs that I can point at to show that I don't need them as a crutch or as a total replacement, more as a regular tool or aide. But that is not a binary matter either.
The best use I've found for LLMs is stripping out any personality or style from corporate slop emails I am sending. No fucking way am I bringing my whole self to work - the mask is entirely sufficient for the likes of them.
This also works when you need to write HRese evaluations but your internal engineer would rather slit his wrists with a wooden spoon than manually write such bullshit.
I have used an LLM once in my life, for setting bullshit growth goals at my job. It did a good job. (I'm not against setting goals, but the context and requirements here made it basically impossible to set real, useful goals and required corporate nonsense).
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Hey, I have the same thing as well...
I'm left wondering whether there's a market for me writing a post fully from scratch and then putting it through an LLM before uploading the result instead of my original post so that keen eyed detectives such as yourselves have something to point to below the surface meaning of the text itself; think of it as an Easter Egg (quite topical), if you will. I already strive to make my posts work on multiple levels, and there's always the allure to add yet another an extra dimension in.
.... maybe. This is a very bad time to be fishing for compliments, at least from me. I do not doubt you can write well, or that you are capable of making high effort, good-faith arguments. With no comment on the former, I would prefer to see more of the latter.
Also, you have been warned for LLM-baiting in the past. I would advise, for the health and longevity of your current account, that you do not try this experiment without talking to us mods first.
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I abhor the abominable intelligence, as you may know.
But this is actually an exemption. I loved the early AI stuff because it produced spectacular surrealist humor. The AI generated conspiracy theories is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. It's hard for humans to be that creative and absurd without descending into lolquirky, but GPT2 did that by default.
I didn't get that impression from the OP, but then I have a lot less experience with explicitly AI written text. It felt like it had Count's signature sneer. Does AI tend to produce that level of quasi-coherent argumentation? If I had to guess, given the prompt "AI was used", I'd say it was a messy screed that was organized and streamlined by an AI.
I think your link might be broken. Leads to a dead reddit link.
Damn. How about this?
That's the sort of nonsensical stuff that people in your dreams say. My dreams anyway.
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This is amazing. Thank you. I absolutely adored the /r/subredditsimulator pre-2022, when it was markov chains and the like. I don't know why early AI slop is so funny, but it would have me laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes every single time I went there.
I remember a subreddit simulator thread where it was just repetitions of "Rabid dog" and "It's just a normal dog." over and over. Stuff that someone like Joyce or Gertrude Stein might write.
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A bunch of those just live in my head. "There are two kinds of food and you will never find out about the third". "The earth has no sky (but the sky does)". "Buckets are real". "The sun is a ghost/ flat moon".
Might try to write an effort post to debunk the bucket deniers.
Flat moon made me burst out laughing and then it didn't stop
Genuinely, thank you. I laughed so hard I was crying a bit. So fucking funny.
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Crazy how some people think this essay was better than my unassisted writings while others insist that it's worse.
Were I a tabloid style writer I might make a new post titled "Is AI the new Marmite?" (whether it would be made with or without AI assistance is left as an exercise for the reader).
Makes me feel good inside TBH. When I was in high school and college I can remember two of my professors calling my name out at the beginning of class and asking me to stay behind after class was over because they wanted to know where I learned to write. One of them said I wrote graduate level academic literature, full of citations, extensive vocabulary use, etc. Shocked me both times it happened. I did just enough in English classes to get by because I wasn’t very invested and engaged with the work. But I always had talent as a successful imitator, and knew how things were ‘supposed to look’, all the way down to the finest details. They always thought I had these amazing gifts, and maybe they were right. I always looked at it as being a successful bullshit artist that can produce real work when it came to boring assignments.
I was always one of those guys though who was his own best and worst critic. It’s like someone who’s been typing away at a keyboard all his life. He can type faster than most people he knows, but if you ask him to spell out the first row of keys, he couldn’t do it. If someone asked me to explain the grammatical structure and rules of the English language in detail, I couldn’t do it. I just know how it’s supposed to ‘feel’. You can get very far doing things that way but it isn’t genuine understanding. It’s pseudo-logical.
I always envied my father for this reason. He was one of those people who could just look at something and immediately understand it. And he read like an absolute maniac. When I was extremely young he’d have me look through his telescope outside at the planets and he’d explain how the big red spot on Jupiter worked. I used to ask him all sorts of questions. I remember he explained the chemistry of Titan’s atmosphere to me and how if you could stand and survive on the surface (you couldn’t), you’d be able to “taste,” the climate on the tip of your tongue, and he’d describe how it’d feel. I once saw a car crash through the front door of a pharmacy and spoke to my father about it and how it sounded and he explained “Mm. It sounded like punching through a cardboard box full of crushed glass.” We used to talk science fiction notions and uploading consciousness and being able to transport me into his frame of reference. Would you feel the same internal process of sensations? And he once came up with the analogy of Beethoven’s deafness in his late 20’s; and how even when composing his music although he couldn’t hear it, he knew and understood what he was composing and understood how it felt by abstraction. My father was like God to me. He knew everything on any topic you could put to him, down to the individual details; whether it was the Napoleonic Wars, marine biology, the history of the cosmetics industry, it literally didn’t matter. I always looked up to him like he was omniscient but I was also afraid of him. He was an intimidating and eerie person to be around.
When it came to translating abstractions into concrete notions, it requires genuine intellectual understanding. I never had that to the extent he did. I really miss the long walks I got to go on with him.
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Can't help but feel like the entire thrust of your post is based on an erroneous model of the American university system that consists entirely of undergrad. Yes, getting into Harvard out of high school for your cake-walk Bachelors is a "filter". Getting a PhD, in any actually academically rigorous field, and especially at Harvard, is a completely different matter. Following, someone with a PhD (or even a Masters degree) from any state school is going to be seen as higher status than someone who only got their undergrad at an Ivy, and will be treated as such in the job market. I think you're vastly overselling what an Ivy League bachelors degree inherently gets you, and underselling the formative nature of rigorous American Grad school programs.
I don’t think my Masters from ASU in Global Management means a 1/100th of that of any Ivy Bachelors.
If you feel otherwise, please, I’d like to hire you to help me land a better paying career.
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To add, SCOTUS clerks aren’t doing menial labor like disclosure. They go straight to appellate practices because contra the main post they now spent a few years writing opinions for some of the best judges and Justices in the world (unless you use the misfortune to clerk for KBJ)
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Here in the UK it's the opposite way around. An Oxbridge undergrad is seen as significantly higher status than an Oxbridge Masters (ignoring certain very difficult and very prestigious courses, but they are collectively tiny), which just requires you to be in the top 10% and have the money to pay for it mostly. PhDs are at the top but so few people have them that it doesn't particularly change the bulk.
You can always go to Oxbridge for Land Economy or whatever, which is probably harder to get into than UCL for engineering or math. Modern languages is easy to get into. Greek and Latin slightly harder but filter for those wealthy enough to go to public school from the outset, so you’re not competing against the general population. Getting into Oxbridge is also much easier than getting into HYS in the US. As I understand it, if you have perfect grades in the UK, have personality and charisma at interview, and don’t go for one of the hardest courses / colleges you will probably get in. That isn’t true even at the elite American schools that have more meritocratic (not fully, which is none, but more than average) admissions.
The Civil Service Fast Stream is fully affirmative (sorry, positive) action-ified and has been since at least the early 2010s, as is pupillage for barristers, where diversification in terms of gender, race and social class (ie hugely reducing the number of posh white men who went to elite schools) has been the central priority since about the same time.
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Yes. I hire for technical roles (actual science and engineering, not programming) on occasion, look at resumes and do interviews more that occasionally, and it cannot be overstated how little a prestigious institution for a Bachelor's degree matters. Actually, its probably a counter signal, especially if BS from Prestigious Institution is followed by Graduate Degree from Less Prestigious Institution. That pretty much screams "DEI pick, lawsuit waiting to happen, do not hire."
Best results? BS from a good state school or Jesuit college, followed up with a worthwhile grad degree from a school thats respected in the field. Shows personal growth, not coasting.
The value of an Ivy undergrad degree is the networking, that's it (other than maybe Math at Harvard or Princeton). Want a rigorous education? Go to big state U and pick the hardest major, or a Jesuit school and argue philosphy against people with a 500 years worth of cliff notes.
I did this. Would not recommend if one wishes to enjoy their undergrad years.
Engineering or pre-law?
Pre-law majors actually are infamously some of the worst law students, along with education majors. It's mostly a degree offered by crappy online schools. All else equal it's actually a black mark on your application, and aspiring lawyers are encouraged to major in literally anything else.
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Engineering. Pre-law would've been falling off a log in comparison.
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I will bite. What’s the difference between formation versus filtering? It has to be more than vibes. I know when I went to school I worked my ass off, but maybe I wanted it more. I took 20 credit hour semesters in Engineering (plus wanted to dabble in economics). It was work. I know there are easy paths through elite schools but those have to close to as hard as a top MBA school which academically are on the easier side. I also did drink, went to football games, had religious education in school. I feel like that is formation.
Have things changed since I got out of school. Every school I have ever attended had some kind of spirit to this that you will now become this kind of “person”. Even flagship state schools have a concept of “Michigan Man”.
I do think America had a concept of institutions “molding” people. Maybe the are credentials today, but the credential has/had value because it meant if a company was hiring you; you had certain traits.
I guess this is a recent thing where something is just a credential and acceleration 2016-2024. And likely has a parallel with America giving up on assimilation and going with diversity is our strength. America itself is no longer expected to change someone.
One of the major flaws in either the American university system or our mass culture is the push for everyone to get into higher education. It’s producing ‘far’ too many competitive, elite aspirants that aren’t good for society. When you see warning signs like this, it should start ringing alarm bells in the minds of policymakers.
The absolutely insane salaries offered are what's doing the pushing. You can have a very nice life in America on $60k/yr- for multiple people. Let alone multiple times that. There's no need for the education system to push vast numbers of smart kids to try to go to the most selective college they can get when they know that's the siren song of six figure salaries.
I’ve tried making that point to people before but it always falls on deaf ears. They don’t understand the relative strength of your purchasing power varies widely depending on where you go. But I’ve learned when it comes to finance/economics/math, Americans are horrible and can’t manage money.
That was especially evident if it wasn’t already, when you saw stimulus checks during the pandemic and the way people were spending. Holy shit. People don’t know when the Fed starts printing in anticipation of a deflationary environment, it isn’t printing ‘money’, it’s printing ‘debt’. And credit analysts were trying to point this out to public policymakers, that the inflation is going to come due in the years afterward. But to the average consumer, what do you mean, $1 is $1. Yes. Yes, homie. 1 is equal to 1. It’s the ‘value’ of said $1. People who were acting smart with the excess cash would’ve invested in stocks, because when the value of cash is decreasing and the economy is making a downturn, businesses have to figure out how to keep their heads above water by selling their products at a markup; so as knives are falling on the ground (cash), dinner is still being put on the table (equities).
People think concepts like volatility and risk are the same thing and they’re not. That’s finance 101 (“cash is trash”). Cash has no volatility but it’s risky as fuck to hold. But people just stare at you dumbfounded and in 2026 complain and say, “man why is everything so expensive today?” And sometimes I just want to look them in the eye and go “are you stupid?” You’re paying for those stimulus checks several times over and will continue to do so, along with the exogenous shocks of the war right now. There are ‘zero’ free rides in life, and the sooner people come to terms with that and learn to be responsible, their lives will begin to improve.
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