Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong
Archives Highlighted Previous Edit COVID Market for Man Slavery 20th C. Reading 'Chicago'
The Onion Is America's Finest News Source
The Arkansas Medicaid Budget-Buster

Noted for March 16, 2013

Screenshot 3 13 13 9 02 PM

  • John C. Wright: The Guest Law: "When the recitation of the law was done, Captain Descender and Captain Ereshkigal bound themselves by formidable oaths to abide by every aspect of this law. They exchanged grave and serious assurances of their honesty and good intent. Smith, listening, felt cold. The oathtaking concluded with Captain Ereshkigal saying: '… and if I am forsworn, let devils and ghosts consume me in Gaia’s Wasteland, in God’s Hell, and may I suffer the vengeance of the Machines of Earth.' 'Exactly so', said Captain Descender, smiling."

  • Margaret Hartman from Bartender Scott Prouty: Don’t Be Like Mitt Romney!: "Scott Prouty, a college-educated bartender in his late thirties... was recording Romney’s remarks as a souvenir when he realized, 'this is not a normal stump speech'. Prouty was initially undecided on whether or not to release the tape, but says, 'I felt an obligation for all the people that couldn’t be there. You shouldn’t have to be able to afford $50,000 to hear what a candidate actually thinks.'… Prouty told Ed Schultz that he deliberated about releasing the video for about two weeks, and was leaning against it when... 'I walked into the bathroom and I just looked in the mirror and the words "you coward" just came out of my mouth'."

Brad DeLong (2009): Leading Sector Technology and Aggregate Economic Growth: A Finger Exercise in the Secret History of the Industrial Revolution | Lawrence Summers (1985): On Economics and Finance | Brad DeLong (2009): Economic Growth: The Ultimate Birdʼs-Eye View | John Boehner Doesn’t Want To Pick A Government Shutdown Fight Over Defunding Obamacare | VA AG Ken Cuccinelli: "I’m a person who appeals to women with a variety of issues that they just happen to care more about that I also happen to care about. I’ve worked to improve mental health and worked to help the mentally ill for over a decade and a half, including when I was in the legislature. Women’s issues aren’t just abortion. Women’s issues are everything women care about. And I have an awful lot of issues that I appeal to women on, just as a natural course." | Sovereign wealth funds to hit record $5.6 trln by year end | Blogtrottr: Free realtime RSS and Atom feed to email service. Get your favourite blogs, feeds, and news delivered to your inbox. | Rob Portman reverses stance on gay marriage, says son is gay | For Xi, a 'China Dream' of Military Power | Today Kansas City, Tomorrow Oklahoma City! | UK Budget: No Plan B for the economy | Anne Laurie: Eavesdropping on CPAC: “Hunger Games Karaoke!” | Dave Weigel: Opening Act: Your CPAC questions answered. | Daniel Kuehn: Three unconventional theses on immigration policy: 1. It's a really bad idea to give high skill immigrants a leg up in the immigration process…. 2. Illegal immigrants are exactly who we want here and occasional amnesty is not that bad of a policy…. 3. The population that should benefit from immigration policy is a moving target. | Molly Rants: I don't get offended very often. But Samsung's long parade of '50s-era female stereotypes, in the midst of an entirely other long parade of bad stereotypes, just put me over the edge. Oh, they announced a phone? You'd barely know it. | Paul Krugman: Via Mark Thoma, a new paper in Vox on the effects of increased rail service, making clever use of natural experiments created by changes in German ownership and regulation. The results aren’t that surprising — more frequent rail service sharply reduces pollution and other costs associated with driving |

  • Paul Krugman: Night of the Living Alesina, Continued: Ryan’s status among the Very Serious People has taken a Very Steep Plunge; at this point Dana Milbank sounds a lot like, well, me back in 2010. (But that won’t stop the VSPs from considering me unsound; I was prematurely anti-flimflam, you know.)… Ryan pretends that Keynesians are for fiscal stimulus always and everywhere — as opposed to the reality, that it’s about doing something in a liquidity trap.... But what really struck me was his assertion that the notion that spending is expansionary and austerity contractionary has been debunked by 'lots of studies'. Which studies, exactly?…. And let me ask a broader question: what, exactly, have Ryan and the economists he likes to cite gotten right these past, oh, five years? How has the Heritage Foundation prediction of soaring interest rates from four years ago panned out? How has Ryan’s own warnings from two years ago that Bernanke’s debasing of the dollar would translate into sharply rising inflation panned out? How has Alesina’s prediction that European austerity would be consistent with a strong recovery panned out?"

  • Noam Scheiber: Paul Ryan’s Shtick Begins To Wear Thin, Ctd « The Dish: "You can treat politics like a game, and you can assume reporters will... But you can’t go so far.… The problem with Ryan’s new budget... is that it more or less concedes the whole campaign, with its righteous defense of Medicare, was a charade. Among the Washington press corps, this is a major no-no.... [R]eporters may be happy to enable... reinventions, but they are loath to acknowledge their role.... Ryan basically rubbed their noses in it."

  • Ludwig von Mises to Ayn Rand: “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.” H/T Corey Robin and Buce

  • Menzie Chinn: Econbrowser: Stevenson and Wolfers: “Is Paul Ryan an Inflation Nutter?”: "Market based and survey based data indicate stable inflation expectations. Historical experience also suggests that inflation will remain low. However, history has never been an impediment to a faith-based view of economics. My one quibble with the Stevenson and Wolfers article: What's so bad about hoarding spam?"

On March 15, 2013:

March 15, 2013 at 22:02 in #weblogging | | Comments (1)

Comments