Chartbook · Economics & Policy
TIER 4 Sat, 31 Jan 2026 11:52:11 +0000
Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- --- # Mississippi rice in trouble. The enshittification of American power. PCF HQ & the making of the Indian constitution. ### Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze | | Adam Tooze --- | Jan 31 --- | --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- Thank you for opening your Chartbook email. | | ---|---|--- **Antonio Carnicero,Ascent of the Monsieur Boucle's Montgolfier Balloon in the Gardens of Aranjuez, 1784** **American rice farmers in trouble.** | | ---|---|--- **Source** : Farm Progress | | ---|---|--- > Across the country, farmers are struggling. Prices for nearly every major crop are below what it costs to grow them. Much attention has been paid to Midwestern soybean growers, whose crop was at the heart of the trade war between the United States and China. But farmers in Mississippi are perhaps worse off than farmers in the rest of the country. Rice is one of their biggest crops, and almost no one is buying. Things feel so hopeless that at a recent Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation meeting, a group representing farmers, participants floated the idea of a government program that would pay producers to destroy the harvested rice sitting in their bins. A similar program was put in place during the 1980s farm crisis, when the Agriculture Department paid farmers to idle land and reduce huge surpluses of crops. "We are making a lot of good crops, and losing money," said Gwin Smith, the longtime owner of Rutledge Investment Company, a Mississippi agricultural land broker. The Mississippi Delta is a 200-mile-long pocket of fertile soil between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. But farming costs are high. Most crops must be planted in a short window between spring rains and summer heat, and it is always a race in the fall to harvest and prepare fields before winter rains render them muddy and unworkable. This forces up labor costs during those periods. And unlike Midwest summers, when rains provide most of the water for crops, drier Mississippi summers mean crops must be irrigated, requiring equipment and expensive fuel to power pumping. … Rice prices took a dive, with futures declining about 30 percent in the last year. India, the world's largest producer of rice, eased export restrictions in late 2024, flooding the world with rice. Customers in Latin America, where most U.S. rice is exported, increasingly prefer the taste of varieties grown in other countries. The value of Mississippi's row crops, including rice, fell 9 percent from 2024 to 2025, according to the Mississippi State University Extension Service, and farm bankruptcies, though still low, are on the rise. **Source:** Kevin Draper in the New York Times | | ---|---|--- **2005 as a watershed year! I always appreciate Helen Thompson 's oblique vision of the world. Really thought-provoking.** > **Helen Thompson:** I think 2005 was in many ways a watershed year. By 2005, there was a set of obvious problems that foreshadow those now. On the geopolitical side, there were the deep divisions within NATO over the Iraq war, where effectively France and Germany sided with Russia, and within the United States there was already bipartisan pressure in the Senate for a more confrontational trade policy with China. Then below the surface there were deep energy problems. That year, 2005, saw the stagnation of oil production just as Asian demand, especially from China, was accelerating. Inside Europe, it was evident in Germany's decision to build the first Nord Stream pipeline that German politicians had concluded that Ukraine was an unreliable transit partner and that they would privilege German energy interests over Ukraine's security. Source: New York Times * * * HEY READERS, THANK YOU for opening the Chartbook email. I hope it brightens your day. I enjoy putting out the newsletter, but tbh, what keeps this flow going is the generosity of those readers who clicked the subscription button. | | ---|---|--- If you are persuaded to click, please consider the annual subscription of $50. It is both better value for you and a much better deal for me, as it involves only one credit card charge. Why feed the payments companies if we don't have to. Upgrade to paid * * * **The entshittification of American power - Ezra Klein in conversation with Henry Farrell** > OK, this is a term that we are taking very directly from Cory Doctorow, who is a science-fiction writer and general thinker who is also, I guess, a [expletive] stirrer. He uses this to talk about the way in which the platform economy works. More or less, his argument is that typically platforms start out as being absolutely awesome. You have these wonderful uses that you can make of Google Search and whatever. It is beautiful. You have incredible access to information. But over time, the platform has these incentives to get [expletive] and [expletive] and [expletive] for the user. It basically begins to see the ways in which the users are not the customers. > > The customers are, of course, the advertisers. For example, if you're using Google these days: You look up a restaurant. Google does not want you to go to that restaurant's home page. It wants you to click on some affiliate link to DoorDash or somebody else so you order via Google rather than via the restaurant. Our argument is that if you look at the ways in which United States power and United States hegemony works, it's a similar system. We are seeing the increased [expletive] of all of these platforms that the United States provides that the world relies on. > > The dollar clearing system, which we've already talked about -- the way in which the U.S. is able to use the dollar in order to leverage its advantage against other countries -- we can also think about weapons systems as being very similar. Once you buy, for example, a fifth-generation fighter aircraft, you are not just buying the aircraft. You're buying into this extensive platform that you need to support the aircraft, to provide the information that allows you to figure out where to target things, all of these other bits and pieces. And the United States can shut that off. So this is one of the big dilemmas that Canada faces. > > Canada is very, very deeply bought into these platforms. Canada is more deeply integrated into the United States military structure, I think, than any other ally. Suddenly, it's in a world where it has to make some extremely difficult choices. Does it try to withdraw from these military platforms? What kinds of consequences does that have? Once a platform becomes [expletive], you're kind of like somebody trying to figure out: Do you leave Google, or do you stick with Google? Do you leave Facebook, or do you stick with Facebook? None of the choices that you have are great. Source: New York Times **A 1786 depiction of the Montgolfier brothers' historic balloon with engineering data.** For contributing subscribers only. Upgrade to paid **French Communist Party Headquarters** | | | | | Federico Italiano --- @FedeItaliano76 French Communist Party Headquarters designed by Oscar Niemeyer (1980) | 10:20 AM * Jan 25, 2026 * 1.93M Views177 Replies * 2.63K Reposts * 30.2K Likes --- | | | | | Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta --- @readingkafka Recent books on the Constitution show how it emerged through negotiation, participation, and collective imagination. | 2:48 AM * Jan 25, 2026 * 10.9K Views28 Reposts * 157 Likes --- **The first flight** > 19 September 1783 is a key date in the history of humanity. Ever since Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th century, men had dreamed of flying through the air. In the Age of Enlightenment, it finally happened. Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier, born in Ardeche in France, began to experiment with lighter-than-air flight in 1782 using a piece of fabric billowed aloft by a fire of wool and damp straw. One of their demonstrations attracted the attention of the Academie Royale des Sciences, which asked them to repeat their experiment in Paris. Source: Chateau Versailles | | ---|---|--- If you've scrolled this far, you know you want to click: Upgrade to paid #### Invite your friends and earn rewards If you enjoy Chartbook, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. Invite Friends --- | | | Like --- | | Comment --- | | Restack --- (C) 2026 Adam Tooze 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe