Open Thread 171

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This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want. Also:

1: Comments of the week: EHarding points out some misconceptions about the post-war US economy that I fell victim to. People who didn’t like my Neoliberalism review pointed to RedfordCastle’s comment as the best rebuttal, so check that out for the other side.

2: And Jack links to graphs of GDP growth in various world regions , showing that a common pattern is good growth until ~1980, poor growth until ~2002, then good growth until ~2012, then poor growth again. Relevant to the Neoliberalism review because neoliberalism took hold ~1980, and the book was written ~2002, so it would have been tempting to think neoliberalism = poor growth. The post-2002 growth complicates this picture - but what’s a better explanation for this pattern, and where can I learn more about it?

3: The Substack team noticed that lots of good programmers hang out here, and asked me to signal-boost that they’re hiring full stack engineers and various other technical and non-technical jobs. Please work for them so they can add lots of new features I can benefit from.