The Long Read

This week: how the dollar's structural role in the global economy may be changing shape, and what class identity means when the old categories no longer hold.

Chartbook 457: The Metamorphoses of the Dollar

Adam Tooze has spent the better part of two decades thinking harder than almost anyone about the dollar's role as the keystone of the global financial order, and this essay finds him genuinely unsettled by a slow conceptual problem: how do you think about radical economic change when the categories you're using were built for a different world? The piece works through several recent challenges to dollar supremacy — sanctions-driven dedollarization, the rise of bilateral currency arrangements, the structural effects of U.S. fiscal expansion — without collapsing them into a single narrative of decline. What makes it exceptional is Tooze's honesty about the limits of his own analytical framework; he keeps catching himself reaching for concepts that don't quite fit. For anyone who wants to think seriously about where the international monetary system is actually heading, rather than absorbing another round of confident punditry, this is the rare piece that earns its length by genuinely wrestling with difficulty.

Chartbook · ~25 min read

The general question I find myself preoccupied with right now is how we think — or fail to think — radical economic change.

I Have Never Been Working Class

Noah Smith grew up in a small house with linoleum floors and one shared bathroom, and for most of his life he assumed that counted for something — that it placed him somewhere on the American class map. This essay is his careful, often uncomfortable attempt to figure out why that assumption was wrong, and what it reveals about how class identity functions in the United States when education, income, culture, and origin no longer travel together. He moves through the sociological literature seriously, engaging with debates about whether class is primarily economic, cultural, or relational, but the piece never loses the personal thread that makes the argument feel lived-in rather than academic. The sharpest passages deal with the way class rhetoric gets deployed politically — how both left and right have reasons to blur the categories — and with the particular strangeness of being a highly educated person who grew up without money, a group that fits no clean slot in either the Marxist or the conservative folk taxonomy. It's an essay that will likely irritate readers on multiple sides, which is usually a sign that something real is being said.

Noahpinion · ~22 min read