1/Today in @bopinion, I talk about the legacy and career of Jim Simons, the founder of Renaissance Technologies, who is stepping down as the hedge fund's

Very interesting new report about how America's economic geography has changed since the great recession: https://t.co/l3YE4WzgKx

Short version: Places with lots of skilled workers are doing great, other places aren't. But more people are moving to the former, which is good.

And here are cool interactive maps to go along with the

Report is via @LettieriDC, who is doing great work on struggling places.

A bit of good news: People are moving from economically bad places to economically good places, though probably too slowly.

Rural America continues to languish.

Today's @bopinion post is a review of the excellent new book "The Gift of Global Talent: How Migration Shapes Business, Economy & Society", by

This is an excellent, short, highly readable, very important book. Every business executive and politician should have a copy.

Why are skilled immigrants so good, and so important?

Because they're the backbone of high-value industries where the U.S. has a dominant position.

If we don't bring skilled immigrants to the United States, high-value industries will migrate to other countries, and America will lose industrial dominance and be a poorer country.

Contrary to popular belief, skilled immigrants - including H-1b workers - RAISE wages for native-born skilled workers.

Why?

Because downward wage pressure from competition is more than canceled out by the upward wage pressure from CLUSTERING.

Confession: I haven't the slightest interest in my genetic ancestry or where my ancestors came from or what they did.

I mean, my dad's family came from Lithuania. They changed their name from Kuznets in 1905. At some point they were blacksmiths. My mom's family came from Halychyna in Ukraine. I have no idea what they did. That's about all I know.

Oh, I do know that pretty much all of my extended family who stayed in Europe got wiped out by the Nazis.

I like to think that my ancestors were nothing and nobody. Random boring peasants with no special talents or wealth.

Except for Genghis Khan, of course. But he's everyone's ancestor.

The best thing about this approach is that I don't have anything to live up to. ;-)

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1/Today's Substack post is about Biden's chances of becoming a truly transformational president -- someone who will move U.S. economic policy onto a leftward track, as Reagan once moved it onto a rightward

2/Political scientist Stephen Skowronek has a theory that says we're due for a "reconstructive" President who will define a new paradigm for the next few

3/Like most people, I thought Biden would be an incrementalist centrist who would get little done other than restoring competence and morality to the executive branch (and that alone would have been plenty of reason to vote for him!).

4/When I read Skowronek's theory, I read it as a prediction of a Bernie or Warren presidency.

I did not imagine that Biden could be a transformational president.

BUT, it's looking like he just might be one!

5/Check out @mehdirhasan's rundown of Biden's rapid blitz.

Ever since 9/11, we've been instructed that tiny minorities of extremists are solely responsible for their reprehensible actions. There was no greater sin than blaming law-abiding people who share some of their beliefs.

That's how we got the "lone wolf terrorist" cliche. A great herd of lone wolves swept across the world, each completely isolated from anything but the most direct support for their heinous deeds. "Tiny minorities of extremists" were blamed for "hijacking" the beliefs of millions.

The Western world did backflips to completely firewall the actions of terrorists from the larger bodies of people they claimed to represent. We hired a legion of consultants to show us exactly where the line between extremism and legitimate belief was drawn.

We wouldn't even name the adversaries of civilization. We declared a "global war" on their methods, to avoid criticizing their beliefs. The Obama administration launched a huge, expensive "Countering Violent Extremism" initiative that pointedly treated extremism as generic.

The greatest of pains were taken to draw very sharp and bright lines between violent extremism and even the most provocative and incendiary acts of legitimate speech and political organization. This was true of the race riots in the Obama years, as well as terrorism.

Macron on tensions with Russia: “We continue sometimes to fight against an ideology or an organisation that no longer exists with a geopolitical logic that no longer exists and that has continued to fracture Europe.”

And on Nato: “Nobody can tell me that today’s Nato is a structure that, in its foundations, is still pertinent. It was founded to face down the Warsaw Pact. There is no more a Warsaw Pact.”

In other words, the partly confrontational policy of the West towards Russia is anachronistic.

Yet the "geopolitical logic" of today's more confrontational policy towards Russia has nothing to do with the Warsaw Pact or the Cold War. It's not true that the West is caught in anachronistic thinking.

Sanctions and the renewed focus of Nato on territorial defense was a response towards Russian aggression against Ukraine: Putin started a war of aggression against Ukraine and has annexed parts of the country, with over 13.000 people killed.