Grasping Reality with Both Hands: bradford-delong.com:

Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads...

1. Families Belong Together

2. Eliana Johnson and Annie Karni: Nielsen becomes face of Trump’s border separations: "Kelly’s status in the White House has changed in recent months, and he and the president are now seen as barely tolerating one another. According to four people close to Kelly, the former Marine general has largely yielded his role as the enforcer in the West Wing as his relationship with Trump has soured. While Kelly himself once believed he stood between Trump and chaos, he has told at least one person close to him that he may as well let the president do what he wants, even if it leads to impeachment—at least this chapter of American history would come to a close..."

3. Lee McIntyre: "Cognitive scientists recommend using a "truth sandwich" to report lies: : ay the truth, then show the liar telling the lie, then fact check it. Otherwise the well known 'repetition effect' allows the news media to be used to amplify lies..."

4. John Holbo (2008): Douthat on Conservatism: "This has to be a complete failure.... Take out the parenthetical bit and you have something that is much closer to a definition of ‘liberalism’ than ‘conservatism’, at least in the American context...

5. Ernie Tedeschi: "Jason... 3 points: The 1st is: if... prime-age... EPOP... better... than the headline unemployment rate, then why haven't wages accelerated more, given those measures have improved faster than U3?...

Paul Krugman attempts to summarize the state-of-play on the slack-and-wages puzzle: Paul Krugman: Opinion | Monopsony, Rigidity, and the Wage Puzzle: "The unemployment rate... suggest[s] an economy pretty much at full employment...

Some MOAR Links

1. Dan Davies: "Just to be clear-paid internships are bad too..."

2. J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lay of Leithien

3. J.R.R. Tolkien: Light as Leaf on Linden Tree

4. Michael McFaul: "Russia was kicked out of G7 because Putin invaded Ukraine & annexed Crimea. Letting Russia back in without any change in Russian behavior would Make America Look Weak Again..."

5. Douglas A. Irwin (2008): Trade Liberalization: Cordell Hull and the Case for Optimism

6. Kim Clausing: How will the #TCJA Impact American Workers?: "(1) Overall, the benefits of the #taxcuts are skewed toward the wealthy. (2) When the tax cuts are eventually paid for, the vast majority of American households will be worse off..." https://t.co/1HaOwddUai https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dec5gBJWAAAghdc.jpg

7. This was a private cabinet meeting. Yes, there are always lots of leaks and lots of complaisant reporters who work for sources generating a cloud of misinformation in an attempt to seek personal advantage in the court that is the White House. But "our principal is an idiot" is a message that people in the White House rarely wish to send: Dan Froomkin: "THIS IS NOT NORMAL: In private FEMA remarks, Trump’s focus strays from hurricanes..."

8. The New York Times has done an appallingly bad job in this age of Trump. What they see here about the bad job done by Republican politicians is all true. But I wish they would turn their scrutiny inward a bit: New York Times: The Cult of Trump: "Every now and again, someone sticks a neck out...

9. Well, since capitalism delivers higher real wages than any other system we know about, how can you oppose it root-and-branch except by somehow claiming it is fruit from a poisoned tree?: Matthew Yglesias: I would like to read an intellectual history of how exactly “slavery was a boon to economic development” became the leftist position, and “actually, slavery is a retrograde anti-growth system as well as an immoral one” (Marx’s view!) became the neoliberal sellout view..."

10. One would not think that it would be difficult for the rich to understand that enabling kleptocrats with little respect for the rule of law in an attempt to fend off democratic waves of social democracy is very unwise. Princeton's Harold James looks at interwar Germany: Harold James: Ten Weimar Lessons: "The collapse of the Weimar Republic and the emergence of the Nazis' Third Reich in the early 1930s still stands as one of modern history's most powerful cautionary tales...

Eliana Johnson and Annie Karni: Nielsen becomes face of Trump’s border separations: "Kelly’s status in the White House has changed in recent months, and he and the president are now seen as barely tolerating one another. According to four people close to Kelly, the former Marine general has largely yielded his role as the enforcer in the West Wing as his relationship with Trump has soured. While Kelly himself once believed he stood between Trump and chaos, he has told at least one person close to him that he may as well let the president do what he wants, even if it leads to impeachment—at least this chapter of American history would come to a close..."

Endorse. Super-strongly endorse. This has it right: Eric Rauchway: "In 1940 Henry Stimson and Frank Knox joined the Roosevelt administration. Both were Republicans. Neither supported the New Deal; Knox ran for office against it. But both opposed Nazism. I wish #NeverTrumpers invoked them as models, rather than Reagan." https://twitter.com/rauchway/status/1007625991680856064

John Holbo (2008): Douthat on Conservatism: "This has to be a complete failure.... Take out the parenthetical bit and you have something that is much closer to a definition of ‘liberalism’ than ‘conservatism’, at least in the American context...

Twitter Has Crap Aggregation Tools: June 13, 2018

• Nick Bunker: "The debates... sparked by Piketty..."

• Radly Balko: "He should probably not exalt those authoritarians... Today in Both Things Are True https://twitter.com/radleybalko/status/1006607433781972993..."

• Dan Pfeiffer: "Bob Corker should call the chair...""

• Nouriel Robini: "Tether... criminal patrons... manipulate Bitcoin..."

Ernie Tedeschi: "Jason... 3 points: The 1st is: if... prime-age... EPOP... better... than the headline unemployment rate, then why haven't wages accelerated more, given those measures have improved faster than U3?...

Nick Bunker: "I was just reminded https://twitter.com/nick_bunker/status/1006636653010661379 about the debates around marginal elasticity of substitution & returns on capital sparked by Piketty. Feels like a different lifetime, but only 4 year ago... a time when most of economics/economic policy conversation was about a big, interesting book. Slightly different debate these days..."

Radley Balko: "Today in Both Things Are True https://twitter.com/radleybalko/status/1006607433781972993: 1. Diplomacy is preferable to war. So an American president should negotiate with adversaries. Even brutal, oppressive authoritarians. 2. He should probably not exalt those authoritarians, or proclaim that they’re adored by their people..."

Dan Pfeiffer: "Bob Corker https://twitter.com/danpfeiffer/status/1006945780475678720 should call the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and see they can do something about all of this..."

Nouriel Roubini: "Tether is a fiat crypto currency https://twitter.com/Nouriel/status/1006979204888629248 printed at will by its criminal patrons to manipulate Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies. The increase in its fiat supply faster than any major fiat currency. A criminal scam that needs to be stopped now. Why is the CFTC still asleep?..."

Michael Tomasky: We Are Truly Living Through the Amateur Hour Presidency: "From the moment when Donald Trump surprised even his own staff by announcing a summit with North Korea, it was obvious, I mean achingly obvious, that the president had no idea what he was doing...

I think Michael Berube overstates his case—as his character "His" notes at the end: Slate and #Slatepitch are still a thing. But they are much less of a thing. And everyone who writes for Slate or who used to write for the "never predictably Reaganite" Even the Liberal New Republic bears the mark on their reputation: Michael Berube: R.I.P., Liberal Contrarianism: "Before #Slatepitch became a punchline, Slate (and others) really did thrive on a certain kind of anti-liberalism. It’s dead now—well, almost...

...ILLE: Here’s your reliable index: the death of the liberal contrarian.

HIC: Come again?...

Benjy Sarlin: "I’m not sure it’s possible to capture an entire era in one image, but Dennis Rodman running a cryptocurrency grift on live TV from the North Korea summit while wearing a MAGA is a serious nominee..."

Matthew Yglesias: "No one could have predicted…:

Verified account

MOAR Links for June 12, 2018

1. Petra Moser: Further extending long-lived US copyrights will do no good. : No benefits from extensions. And if extensions ever get applied to science, there'd be huge welfare loss, especially for people at less affluent institutions...

2. Paul Krugman: We've basically crossed the line into treason now -- and a whole party is acquiescing: Benjamin Wittes: "I have a whole lot to say about how the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the President of the United States teamed up to out an intelligence source who aided our country in a properly predicated counterintelligence investigation against a hostile foreign power..."

3. Jen Kirby: Laurel/Yanny: the science behind the audio trick, explained: "It comes down to how our brains pick up on, and interpret, different frequencies..."

4. Yes, there are first-class New York-style bagels in Greater San Francisco: Bagel Baron: "2701 Eighth St Berkeley, CA 94710..."

5. Lois McMaster Bujold: The Flowers of Vashnoi goes live

6. Sangria

7. Captain Mardens

8. British governance appears at least as bad today as American governance even though they are not helmed by an unstable and corrupt kleptocrat: Simon Wren-Lewis: Delusions of National Power: "Inevitable that the UK would stay in the Customs Union (CU) and the Single Market (SM)...

9. Claremont Canyon Conservancy: Map/Trails

10. Eduard Bernstein: (1895): Cromwell and Communism

Jennifer Pitts: A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France: "A dramatic shift in British and French ideas about empire unfolded in the sixty years straddling the turn of the nineteenth century...

Very much worth reading from Nick Bunker: Nick Bunker: Puzzling over U.S. wage growth: "Hiring has not been particularly strong during this recovery...

Reviewing Richard Baldwin's _The Great Convergence...

My review of the superb and extremely thought provoking: Richard Baldwin (2016): The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization http://amzn.to/2sIcr6C. Reviewed for Nature http:nature.com: The iron-hulled oceangoing steamships and submarine telegraph cables of the second half of the 19th century set off a first wave of economic globalization. The intercontinental transport of both staple commodities and people became extraordinarily cheap. The container of the second half of the 20th century made the transport of everything non-spoilable—and some things spoilable—essentially free. It set off a second wave of economic globalization.

Seth Godin: Failsafe tip: "The last thing to add to an important email is the email address...

Necessities become things that are beneath our notice. Conveniences become necessities. Luxuries become conveniences. And then we invent new luxuries—like feeling put upon yesterday because a new 2 terabyte backup disk cost as much as $70 and took 8 hours to get delivered to my door, so I couldn't get all of my backups done last night: Jeff Bezos: Divine Discontent: Disruption’s Antidote: "One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent...

June 9, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality

• Washington Post Death Spiral Watch (Fred Hiatt Edition): Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Fred Hiatt tells a lot of lies himself as he cherrypicks the Rockefeller report. Duncan Black notes:: "the headline given... is 'Blaming Bush for Iraq Is Too Easy.' And that's true! I also blame Fred Hiatt!" Fred Hiatt would prefer it if we didn't say that Bush and Cheney lied. He says that there is "no question" that Bush and Cheney "spoke with too much certainty" at times—but, he says, that's not lying...

Twitter Is Crap at Aggregation Tools: June 9, 2018

• Dan Davies: "The phrase 'virtue signalling', uttered with a sneer, is always both (a) the sound of a guilty conscience and (b) the leper's bell of the modern online asshole..."

• Matthew Yglesias: "Democratic Party governance ended up underdelivering in part because of policies that failed in technical design terms. Gotta do better next time!: Something that frustrates me about the current moment is that Team Obama owned the “bloodless technocrat” brand so well that it’s obscured the existence of very real technical failures of 2009-2010 Democratic governance. That, in turn, tends to lead people on the left who are critical of Obama-era policymaking to be completely blind to the very real importance of making your policies technically sound. There were little technical failures like so many TIGER grants for useless streetcar projects and big significant failures like crafting a stimulus bill that didn’t consider the possibility that the recession was worse than early data indicated. A fair amount of the problems were more with congressional Democrats than with the administration, but either way Democratic Party governances ended up underdelivering in part because of policies that failed in technical design terms. Gotta do better next time!..." Joseph Britt: _"How well do you think the public understood what Obama's stimulus was intended to do? I think that was a pretty significant failure right there. For such noted communicator, Obama didn't communicate very well..."

Terry McGlynn: "If a professor is not qualified to mentor women, he must be disqualified from the professoriate...

Josh Barro: "Bourdain's most essential writing, IMO, is the 'How to cook like the pros' chapter in Kitchen Confidential. It explains why restaurant food tastes better than your food at home. The main answers are: shallots, lots of butter in everything, high-quality stock, and demi-glace..."

Rick Petree: "He was more cogent, more linear: I suspect this is, again, a sign of mental deterioration. There have been many instances of him not knowing the words to our most common songs. I recall a Pentagon ceremony where he gave up singing entirely & waved his hands in time with the music. It's not at all funny...

...You don't unlearn the words to the national anthem. If you knew them in high school (a military academy, in this case), you know them for the rest of your life, unless your brain starts to deteriorate.... I agree on his basic level of intelligence. Never stellar. However, having been around him a bit over the years in NYC, he's way off his own mark of 10-20 years ago. He was more cogent, more linear. He could follow a discussion, make multi-part points over a period of minutes. He had greater concentration and focus. His vocabulary was notably larger. IMO, he's no better than 50-60% of what he was 20 years ago..."

---

#shouldread
#acrossthewidemissouri
#orangehairedbaboons

June 8, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality

• Making the Case for Globalization: I suspect that we are, right now, seeing the peak of anti-globalization economic agitation in the United States. The fall in the real value of the dollar against European currencies and its coming real value fall against Asian currencies mean that export and import-competing sectors are likely to be expanding their employment rapidly over the next several years. It would be a pity if a look back deranged our policy going forward, especially if it is because trade is perceived to be a problem by politicians even though it has ceased to be perceived as a problem by voters...

• What Does John McCain Think?: Digby writes: "A reader sent me this link to the Cunningrealist from May 5 and I was surprised by what it contained. Were you aware that John McCain wrote the forward to an edition of The Best And the Brightest? And were you aware that it said this?: 'It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay. No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.' Will anyone ask him about this?..."

• Shut Up and Calculate!: Eliezer Yudkowsky wonders aloud just what the Born probabilities in quantum mechanics are. It is, I think, an object lesson that nobody should try to understand quantum mechanics: it simply cannot be done...

Some MOAR Links: June 8, 2018

1. Marie de France: Lanval
2. Scott Aaronson (2015): Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity
3. TABLEIZER
4. Mark Kleiman: A primer on fentanyl(s)
5. Diane B. Paul
6. Ixtapa Mexican Cusine
7. Osteria Vespa
8. 30 Boltwood Restaurant
9. Francis Wilkinson and David Runciman: Democracy Will Die, Maybe in Its Sleep
10. Berkeley Data Science: Economics and Data Science-Teaching with Jupyter Notebooks

Well, since capitalism delivers higher real wages than any other system we know about, how can you oppose it root-and-branch except by somehow claiming it is fruit from a poisoned tree?: Matthew Yglesias: "I would like to read an intellectual history of how exactly “slavery was a boon to economic development” became the leftist position, and “actually, slavery is a retrograde anti-growth system as well as an immoral one” (Marx’s view!) became the neoliberal sellout view:"

Jason Mayland: "John McCain told the following joke, in public, at a GOP fundraiser: 'Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.' Chelsea was 18 years old at the time..."

June 7, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality

• Uh-Oh! Now It Does Look a Lot Like a Recession...: How deep a recession remains an open question... Jim Hamilton has some interesting thoughts on business-cycle asymmetry...

June 6, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality

• FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS VOTE REPUBLICAN: Outsourced to Matthew Yglesias and commenters: Matthew Yglesias: "'How Do We Beat The Bitch?': Mark Kleiman suggests that revisiting this appalling episode in McCainiac misogyny might be a useful party unity exercise...' John McCain—kind of an appalling guy..."

Twitter Is Crap on Aggregation Tools

• Matthew Yglesias: "Congressional Republicans are happy to stand up to Trump, they just legitimately do not object to his racist and authoritarian tendencies the way they do to higher taxes on aluminum imports: "'I’m dumfounded... I can’t be silent and complicit in this.'—House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling just assailed Pres. Trump’s trade agenda in interview with @BloombergTV. Airs in the 2pmET hour."

• Marcy Wheeler: e"Reupping this bc I'm flabbergasted reporters covering this story don't understand this. The question about the statement on June 9 meeting isn't whether Don Sr or Jr dictated it. It's whether Putin did https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/06/02/the-non-denial-denial-in-trumps-response-on-the-june-9-meeting-statement-did-putin-dictate-the-statement/. That's a question about 'collusion', not obstruction..."

• Nils Gilman: "In general, the United States is the best country in the world to be rich in, but mediocre or worse if you’re not at least affluent..."

• Nils Gilman: "#40YearsAgoToday: California voters approve Proposition 13, a key moment in the rise of #PlutocraticInsurgency, as it leads to the steady defunding of public goods in the state..."

Damn: This is good: Jeffrey A. Sachs: Laicite: "I spent six years in Quebec, a province that has moved in fits and starts toward criminalizing public displays of religiosity...

June 5, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality

• Biomedical Literary Criticism Ask the Internet "Age of Innocence" Blogging: "Edith Wharton's 1920 The Age of Innocence: My brother wonders if perhaps Edith Wharton meant us to understand that Count Olenski had tertiary syphilis a la Friedrich Neitzsche and Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill—hat he was not just your standard garden-variety European aristocrat libertine unfaithful cold penniless mentally-unbalanced domineering husband who married you for your money alone and from whom you fled back to New York—and that for Madame Ellen Olenska to return to him in Europe is to consign herself to marital rape, likely infection, and ultimate deep insanity herself. Is this a reading that Edith Wharton intended? A part of the book that literary critics lost with the discovery of penicillin? Or is it a reading that I am tempted to impose on the book simply because I have lived in the age of AIDS? And, in either case, does this reading deepen or trivialize the book?...

• Delong Smackdown Watch: Why Cap-and-Trade Beats a Carbon Tax: Felix Salmon: "Brad DeLong reckons that the relative merits of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade 'roughly offset'.... 'Cap-and-trade runs the risk that the cap will be set at the wrong place and so the price will go damagingly above its social optimum value. Carbon taxes run the risk that the tax will be set too low and so the quantity emitted will go damagingly above its social optimum value.' These two considerations do not offset each other. The second risk is high and real; the first risk is low and politically much more unrealistic..."

• The Meaning of Box 722: Rick Perlstein is a national treasure. Buy his Nixonland. Buy it now...

• Answers to Easy Questions (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps New York Times Pitiful Embarrassment Department): Marty Lederman asks:" Today's New York Times story about the arraignment of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed concludes with this sentence: 'C.I.A. officials have said that Mr. Mohammed was one of three detainees who were subjected to the simulated-drowning technique known as waterboarding during interrogation, which is described by some as torture.' If the Attorney General insisted that the sun rises in the west, would the New York Times treat it as a contested question?" Answer: Yes. The New York Times death spiral continue...

June 4, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality

• Record Prius Parade!: Five--count them, five in a row, red, green, silver, silver, red--proceeding north on Oxford Street...

• Sunny Wednesday June Afternoon People in Their Forties Drinking Iced Coffee at Starbucks Midlife Crisis "Wilma!!" Blogging: Khelona: "Huh. Is that better or worse than dreaming when you were a teenager that you would grow up to marry Stilgar, and finding in your forties that your husband more closely resembles..." Glaukon: "Fred Flintstone?" Khelona: "Exactly..."

• The Ascent of Central Bankers: "Paul Krugman writes: "BB sticks to his guns: I have no idea where that picture came from, but I had it on file and couldn’t resist using it..."

• Ryan Avent on Tyler Cowen on Ryan Avent on Robert Samuelson on Obama's Cap-and-Trade: Ryan: "As Mark Thoma says, it’s Samuelson who’s being misleading. Either that, or utterly confused." It doesn't have to be either/or, Ryan. It can be both/and. Probably is. Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?...

• Background for Berkeley Political Economy Group Major Advisory Committee and Stakeholders' Meeting

• Megan McArdle Moves the Ball Downfield on the Cap-and-Trade vs. Carbon-Tax Discussion: To first order cap-and-trade and carbon taxes are the same.... There are five second-order differences.... I don't have a dog in this fight: I think second- and third-order pluses and minuses roughly offset each other. But the substantive case for action seems very clear...

• Tyler Cowen Misreads Robert Samuelson:: The Weitzman (1974)-based discussion is worth having, and is important. But that's not what Samuelson is doing, is it? I don't see a single word of argument in there about how the risk that the price will go too high is more worth guarding against than the risk that the quantity of emissions will go too high. Do you? All I see are rants about how environmental controls are big government and big government is bad and we never should have passed the Clean Air Act or established the EPA in the first place. Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?...

• Paul Krugman Pulls Me Back in...: "Each time I think of climbing out of the swamp of shrillness and putting the Economist back on my must-read list, Paul Krugman pulls me back in: "How will the campaign be covered?... 8 years ago the press managed to portray an election in which there were large policy differences as one in which nothing much was at stake.... Part of this came from a remarkable willingness of pundits to dismiss the obviously irresponsible parts of Bush’s plan as stuff that he wouldn’t really do. Thus the Economist, in endorsing Bush , said this: 'Mr Bush’s proposal of a huge tax cut might look reckless (which it is), but either voters are happy with recklessness that gives them their money back, or they don’t take seriously a plan that could be changed as quickly as the White House curtains...'"

Tactics and operations, yes. But also logistics and strategy...

Tactics and operations, yes. But also logistics and strategy. Bobby Lee lost in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Erwin Rommel lost in North Africa and Normany: Adam Tooze (2016): Blitzkrieg manqué or a new kind of war? Interpreting the Allied Victory in the Normandy campaign1 Adam Tooze: "Given the scale of the violence that they were dealing out in the final stages of the war, it is not surprising that at least some people spoke out in protest...

Paul says: "hyperinflation is coming any day now" and "minimum wages at their current levels are killing millions of jobs" are joining "there is no such thing as global warming" and "evolution is false" as destroyers of "conservatives" in academia: *Paul Krugman: "Today's column has nothing directly to do with... the puzzling failure of wages to grow faster despite what look like tight labor markets https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/opinion/conservative-free-speech.html...

Brad Setser: "Larry Summers on Trump and trade:: 'From tweet to tweet, official to official, nobody can tell what his priorities are.' Certainly rings true to me. I have almost stopped trying to guess. Even for China:"

Yes. Twitter Has Crap Aggregation Tools

• KneelBeforeHat: "Via @SorryWhat_Now_: Senior Hoover fellow enlists college Republicans in bumbling conspiracy to oppo research and 'grind' and 'intimidate' liberals. No doubt this was for campus diversity of thought..."

• Angus Johnston: "Historian Niall Ferguson urged conservative students to 'unite against the SJWs' on a Stanford speakers' committee, encouraged "opposition research" on one student member..."

• Rules are different for Republicans: Lawrence H. Summers: "If during the Clinton or Obama Administrations there had been a statement from @POTUS or anyone senior official in the morning before the Employment Report it would have been a major scandal—with all sorts of investigations following on..."

• [Matthew Yglesias: _ "It was nice of Trump_ to preview the unexpectedly strong jobs numbers this morning and he definitely didn’t do the same thing privately last night to help any rich friends or sons do insider trading..."

• Matthew Yglesias: "The key thing, as always, is that every single House Republican and every single Senate Republican wake up every single day and decide to do nothing at all to check Trump’s corruption..."

• Dan Davies: "Mattarella looks like he's done his long-term reputation good. He's respected the majority; they can have who they want in the government. And he's preserved the anti majoritarian parts of the constitution; you can't risk major EU treaties unless you explicitly run on that policy..."

• Equitable Growth: "Just posted: Stories of #inequality & growth you should be reading. Ft. @KClausing, @SamEyler, @gabriel_zucman, @EmilyRPeck, @AlexiaCampbell & @portereduardo..."

• Equitable Growth: "'Greater education and the need for more workers to receive it are not adequate explanations of inequality. The decline in union density is.' @LipstickEcon on new research that links declining unionization to rising #inequality, via @Slate https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/05/study-unions-increasingly-represent-educated-workers.html … #EGgrantee..."

• Jeet Heer: "Winning: "New SCOOP from Singapore: The U.S. is trying to find a discreet way to pay for Kim Jong Un’s luxury five-start hotel: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-us-is-trying-to-find-a-discreet-way-to-pay-for-kim-jong-uns-hotel-in-singapore/2018/06/01/776055ce-9745-439e-9ee4-c0cef8e81523_story.html"

• Nouriel Roubini: "So please scam me as u wish as I fork u $4bn!: 'The EOS tokens do not have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features, express or implied, including, without limitation, any uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features on the EOS Platform...'"

Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads: Economic History

• Kevin Drum: What Made Marxism So Deadly?: "[Noah] Smith has the causation backward here...

• Paul Rincon: Hun migrations 'linked to deadly Justinian Plague': "Eske Willerslev, Peter de Barros Damgaard and others... sequenced genomes... recovered DNA from a strain of plague related to the one responsible for the Justinian Plague...

Jonathan Marks: Who wants Charles Murray to speak, and why?: "Geneticists of the 1920s knew that it was in their short term interests to have the public believe that any and all shit was innate...

A Few Notes on Higher Education in the Age of Trump: Hoisted from June 10, 2017

Hoisted: A Few Notes on Higher Education in the Age of Trump... (June 10, 2017):

I wrote http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/06/must-read-two-points-diversity-and-finding-truth-in-the-sense-of-rough-consensus-and-running-code-where-i-think-larry.html: Two points (diversity and finding truth in the sense of rough consensus and running code) where I think Larry Summers is 100% correct. One point (Charles Murray) where I think Larry is broadly right but that things are more complicated. And one point (sensitivity training) where I think Larry Summers is more wrong than right. But more on that anon. Definitely worth reading.

---

This is the "anon":

June 3, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality

• Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Him Now: Outsourced to Matthew Yglesias: "Though unusually juvenile in its phrasing, the underlying sentiment is typical of what I've called the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics—the conservative conceit that willpower is the crucial variable in making our national security policy work..."

• Felix Salmon Says Bear Stearns—Except for Its CEO—Was Smarter than Lehman Brothers: Felix Salmon: "During a credit crunch, when you're stuck with illiquid assets, you can't hedge them.... Just as short positions in CDO equity tranches turned out to be a really bad hedge for long positions in super-senior tranches, short positions in broad credit indices are not a great hedge for specific loans which have turned sour. Ironically, it was Bear Stearns who had at least some people, led by mortgage head Tom Marano, who understood this. They knew that the big risk to the firm was chaos in the financial markets, so they put on a 'chaos trade' which would make lots of money in such an event, and very broadly hedge the risks the bank faced. But CEO Alan Schwartz, in a fateful decision, reversed that trade..."

• Hoisted from Archives: David Stockman and William Greider: Brett Ellingson asks for background on William Greider and David Stockman.... William Greider.... "Stockman's... greatest sin, however, was telling the truth, albeit belatedly...." But there was no truth-telling exercise.... Republican Vice President George H.W. Bush knew that Reagan's fiscal policies didn't add up: he and his people coined the phrase "voodoo economics." Republican Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker knew that Reagan's plan made no sense: he called it a "riverboat gamble," meaning an imprudent and unwise throw of the dice...

• Barack Obama: Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: Final Primary Night: Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008: St. Paul, Minnesota: As Prepared for Delivery

• New York Times Death Spiral Watch: David Brooks Edition: DAVID BROOKS: "Obama‘s problem is he doesn‘t seem like a guy who can go into an Applebee‘s salad bar... "C&Ler Mitzi.... "I called my Applebee’s today to make sure I was correct and they do not have a salad bar.... None of their restaurants have a salad bar. David, sometimes the jokes write themselves. What an idiot..."

Holly Brewer: Slavery, Sovereignty, and “Inheritable Blood”: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery: "I contextualize Locke’s ideas and actions with regard to slavery in the empire...

Twitter Is Crap at Aggregation Tools...

• Jeet Heer: "You (smart person): Jeet, it's an unfair caricature that people who loudly complain about political correctness are hypocritical reactionaries who don't care for free speech but want to defend privilege. Me: Um: Niall Ferguson wanted opposition research on a student.Campus arguments over diversity and free speech are causing some distinguished academics to do extremely strange things...

• Garance Franke-Ruta: "One of America's most famous male journalists of the 1970s did not report on domestic violence in the White House because, he says, he did not understand that the president hitting his wife was a criminal act..."

• Nick Beaudrot: ";Well we have to have a quote from the opposition' is one of those rules that will suddenly reappear when Democrats have one party control..."

• Molly Jong-Fast: "Truly spectacular that an administration so stocked with oil company shills could alienate oil companies! Another day of winning in Trumpworld..."

• Nicholas Weaver: "Or who are people who do understand what is going on, and see that it is basically all fraud, scam, lies, and tulip-mania hype intent on speedrunning 500 years of economic failure with one or two additional disasters grafted on for good measure..."

• Matthew Yglesias: "Some of the press has partially internalized the White House propaganda which holds that reporting on Trump is opposition politics so there’s little need to incorporate actual opposition party viewpoints—a challenging environment for Dems..."

• Matthew Yglesias: "McCain’s final political act will be to maximize the GOP’s chances of ensuring a president he sometimes claims to deplore will face no accountability for his rampant corruption..."

• Matthew Yglesias: "A reminder that Comey used to know what the rules were for commenting on a closed investigation with no charges..."

June 2, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality

• DeLong Smackdown Watch (Edward Luttwak/Clark Hoyt/David Shipley/Greg Mankiw)_: It tells us—both the handling of Luttwak's and the handling of Mankiw's piece tell us—that the New York Times editors don't think that they have a responsibility to try as hard as they can to carry out their trusted-intermediary function.... I can't think of a reason to keep the organization around...

• The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear of Inflation Fear, or Something Like That: Paul Krugman: "This time around there’s no wage-price spiral in sight.... And since there isn’t a wage-price spiral, we don’t need higher interest rates.... When the surge in commodity prices levels off... inflation will subside on its own..."

• The Magic Asterisk: Lessons from the Master, David Stockman, on Fiscal Policy Republican Style: William Greider's ethics suck. They always have. In 1981 he allowed his people to write and his bosses to print stories on the front page of the Washington Post that he knew were false. But he writes well...

• Robert Samuelson Edition): Mark Thoma on Robert Samuelson: Economist's View: "His Readers are Now Dumber for His Efforts". Matthew Yglesias makes the same catch: "Knowledge Not Required: One might think one would have to know what one was talking about to write an op-ed for The Washington Post but of course if that were the case then Robert Samuelson would be unemployed..."

Some Fairly Recent Must- and Should-Reads About Globalization

• Ken Schultz: "I’m not an IPE expert, but it seems like you must be doing tariffs wrong if they aren’t even supported by the labor union in the protected industry..."

Ken Schultz: "I’m not an IPE expert, but it seems like you must be doing tariffs wrong if they aren’t even supported by the labor union in the protected industry..."