L'Esprit de l'Escalier for March 8, 2013
L'Esprit de l'Escalier:
Re: 'Lebergott’s reference to the German “labor-force camps” and Soviet “labor camps” in the quotation is, I would say, unfortunate, inasmuch as it could perhaps be read as drawing or implying some kind of ‘moral equivalence’ between those labor camps and the “made work” or “emergency work” of the New Deal. All I can say is I very much doubt that Lebergott intended to suggest or assert, as the OP puts it, that “people working for the WPA were morally the same as concentration camp workers in Germany in the 1930s.” But the quote is, at best, inartfully worded and is open to more than one interpretation.' I would say differently: I would say that it is all but impossible to read Lebergott without seeing him as implicitly drawing some sort of equivalence between Nazi Labor Camps and the WPA. "Labor Camps" is, however, important. It might not be wise for me to point out that the people actually in the camps found very important differences between being in a Nazi Labor Camp (Masurian Lakes), a Nazi Concentration Camp (Dachau), and a Nazi Extermination Camp (Auschwitz). You survived the first and were then drafted into the army upon release. You maybe survived the second. You did not survive the third…
Mr. Kristof, last week New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor ripped a quote from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg out of context--turning musing about how she had never thought that she would wind up as a corporate executive into an arrogant claim to entitlement, thus creating a situation in which, in the words of Anna Holmes, people were issuing "damning verdicts on a book they had not even bothered to read." A couple of months ago you wrote a column headlined "Profiting from a Child's Illiteracy" that produced extremely strong criticism as badly misinformed from people like Peter Edelman of Georgetown, Harold Pollack of Chicago, and Robert Greenstein at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities who really ought to be at the front of your Rolodex for you to talk to before you write columns about social policy. I have a sense that for a while--ever since the runup to the Iraq War, perhaps--there has been diminishing energy on the part of New York Times reporters and columnists to familiarize and educate themselves about the subject matter before they start writing, and as a result diminished influence on the New York Times of what people in places like this do and know. Do you see the same diminishing energy spent on acquiring substantive subject-matter knowledge that I see? If not, why not? If you do, what steps are you taking to try to fix it?
How about the fact that Obama's current negotiating position is substantially to the right of the Rubin Budget? Why isn't that even more gobsmacking? From my perspective, the problem is not that Robert Rubin has too much influence over Obama, it is that he has too little. Rubin is part of the Left Opposition now. The position Obama takes now shapes what policy will be in 2, 4, 6, 20, and even 50 years…
A Laffer coefficient of 0.1 for where the U.S. is now. If we were to raise taxes that number would rise…
With a P/E ratio of 20, reinvesting earnings productively or using them for stock buybacks or paying them out in dividends gets you a 5%/year average real return. Add on your 2%/year inflation and you get your 7%/year. I don't understand the argument that stock returns cannot grow faster than the economy as a whole over the long term. Total stock values cannot. But returns are greater than total stock values by dividends plus share buybacks. The argument that stock returns must equal the growth rate of the economy applies only in some Kaldor-Kalecki model in which stockowners reinvest 100% and only 100% of their earnings from stocks…
One must wonder whether Roger Mahony is an atheist, or rather how--if he is not an atheist--he is not s#$%ting himself 24/7 as he reflects on his future: "Dominus et magister noster Iesus Christus dicendo `Penitentiam agite &c.’ omnem vitam fidelium penitentiam esse voluit. Quod verbum de penitentia sacramentali (id est confessionis et satisfactionis, que sacerdotum ministerio celebratur) non potest intelligi. Non tamen solam intendit interiorem, immo interior nulla est, nisi foris operetur varias carnis mortificationes. Manet itaque pena, donec manet odium sui (id est penitentia vera intus), scilicet usque ad introitum regni celorum. Papa non vult nec potest ullas penas remittere preter eas, quas arbitrio vel suo vel canonum imposuit. Papa non potest remittere ullam culpam nisi declarando, et approbando remissam a deo…"
"It's funny how monetarist the underpinnings of the inflationistas' point of view is. Forget all that deep structural slack, just run the printing presses and you'll get that inflationary boom." OK. Wake me when your inflationary boom is underway.
