Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

• Judith Tarr: "What frustrated me when I started selling professionally was the push to always write female protag because ‘you’re a girl, you have to.’ Between that and the push to squeeze the stories into set marketing categories, I sometimes got cranky. Then I’d get subversive. That wasn’t always as successful as it might have been, and I made some pretty big mistakes. But it was an awful lot of fun. Still is..." http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2015/01/31/writing-where-history-fantasy-and-science-fiction-intersect/#more-42293
• Mark Thoma: Links for 01-31-15 http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2015/01/links-for-01-31-15.html <-- Mark Thoma's daily links are especially good today...
• .@eilperin @danbalz @PhilipRucker @igorvolsky Back in 93-4 & 08-9, when I was on the inside, press reports of inside deliberations painted a very distorted picture. Why should I presume stories this time about Romney's decision to stop running are any different? Indeed, @jdavidsonlawyer, the story for which there is reliable evidence is the poll- and interview-based story: "how Americans" decide. The inside “how candidate strategized“ sources are not reliable at all. The story the horserace press can’t tell reliably is the story that @eilperin sells...
• Michael Schiavo: Jeb Bush 'Put Me Through Hell’ http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/jeb-bush-terri-schiavo-114730.html#.VMwMmkKBM2p)
• A list of "thermonuclear war" scenarios the the computer plays out, on screen, in “WarGames” http://inothernews.tumblr.com/post/545705546/a-list-of-thermonuclear-war-scenarios-the
• Paul Krugman: I See Very Serious Dead People http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/i-see-very-serious-dead-people
• Chad Stone: The Unconvincing Claim That Unemployment Benefits Hurt Jobs http://www.offthechartsblog.org/the-unconvincing-claim-that-unemployment-benefits-hurt-jobs

Links and Tweets: http://delong.typepad.com/links/

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• Paul Krugman: Bad Tayloring
• Paul Krugman: I See Very Serious Dead People
• Josh Barro: Why Obama’s Proposal for 529s Had No Chance

Plus:

• Things to Read on January 31, 2015

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• Mark Thoma: Links for 01-31-15 <-- Mark Thoma's daily links are especially good today...
• Estelle Sommeiller and Mark Price: The Increasingly Unequal States of America: Income Inequality by State, 1917 to 2012
• David Cay Johnston: Economy Grows Incomes Shrink
• Chad Stone: The Unconvincing Claim That Unemployment Benefits Hurt Jobs
• Paul Krugman: Bad Tayloring
• Paul Krugman: I See Very Serious Dead People
• Josh Barro: Why Obama’s Proposal for 529s Had No Chance

And Over Here:

Paul Krugman reads Tony Yates pointing out that John Taylor is, politely, incoherent in his advocacy that his version of the Taylor Rule be legislated in stone to command the Federal Reserve. Either monetary policy is much more powerful than the arguments for Taylor's version of his rule presumes--in which case it is a very bad idea--or the world is much more risky than the arguments for Taylor's version of his rule presumes--in which case it is a very bad idea. There is simply no coherent way to get from the macroeconomic history of the 2000s to the conclusion that John Taylor's version of his rule is a good idea:

Let me (surprise, surprise!) back up Paul here: There is no doubt that, technocratically, reflation is the low-hanging fruit to boosting equitable growth. Successfully returning to full employment would boost real GDP in the North Atlantic by 10% today, would boost future economic growth substantially as well, and would lift all economic classes more-or-less equally. No plausible policy shifts to produce "structural reform"--save possibly the "structural reform" of raising the price level in Germany and Holland relative to Italy and Spain by 20%--promises North Atlantic-wide benefits even a fifth as much.

But for many, suppose you were to endorse Keynesian fiscal of Friedmanite monetary régime-change policies right now...

The Rebalancing Challenge###

J. Bradford DeLong :: U.C. Berkeley

OëNB Conference on European Economic Integration :: Vienna :: November 24-25, 2014

https://www.icloud.com/pages/AwBUCAESEHBN_GdfxLmukcgoyRX8ocAaKQdtWwIUBlPWhv0VX8vnODUjfjWOIbeFuUiF3QHyfCeMY9RUd2SgjBXFMCUCAQEEIKm3f8UIYBcEElisfxX1c6APGaWyaYQnStJfTZ2VtGVZ#2015-01-28b--DeLong_Rebalancing_Challenge_in_Europe.pages

There is an important purpose of an opening keynote talk like this one. Its task is to start from first principles and then give a large-scale bird's-eye overview to what is to come. We have panels to come on monetary policy, balance-sheet adjustment and growth, inequality and its role in generating internal macroeconomic imbalances, external macroeconomic rebalancing, and banking sector regulation. They all presuppose that Europe, and within it the regions of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe that we focus on here, need not just higher aggregate demand in the short-term but more. They need large-scale sectoral rebalancing. And that sectoral rebalancing needs to be rapid. Why? Because these economies will not grow smoothly without deep structural reforms--in these reforms need to be not just at the bottom but at the top, reforms of institutions, governance structures, and regulatory practices and mandates need to be carried out as well.

Wikpedia: The execution of Pvt. Slovik:

On this day, Pvt. Eddie Slovik becomes the first American soldier since the Civil War to be executed for desertion-and the only one who suffered such a fate during World War II.

Pvt. Eddie Slovik was a draftee. Originally classified 4-F because of a prison record (grand theft auto), he was reclassified 1-A when draft standards were lowered to meet growing personnel needs. In January 1944, he was trained to be a rifleman, which was not to his liking, as he hated guns.

In August of the same year, Slovik was shipped to France to fight with the 28th Infantry Division, which had already suffered massive casualties in France and Germany. Slovik was a replacement, a class of soldier not particular respected by officers. As he and a companion were on the way to the front lines, they became lost in the chaos of battle and stumbled upon a Canadian unit that took them in.

There are two major taxes on the upper middle class in our future--the carbon tax and the tax on "Cadillac" health-care plans. But these tax are coming because they will not be levied on the upper-middle class but on entities classified as unworthy--coal and oil companies and health-insurers. They will just be passed through to the upper middle class.

So a lot rides over the next generation on the upper middle class's remaining confused about tax incidence:

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers on Twitter: What This Morning's U.S. Wage Numbers Mean
• Simon Wren-Lewis: Post-Recession Lessons
• Aristotle: Slavery or Technology? From "Politics"
• Paul Krugman: Whitewashing the Crazy, Fed Edition
• Carter Price: What do today’s GDP numbers teach us about the impact of oil prices?

Plus:

• Things to Read on the Evening of January 30, 2015

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• Robert Waldmann: Comment on "What Failed in 2008?"
• Paul Krugman: Europe’s Greek Test
• Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers on Twitter: What This Morning's U.S. Wage Numbers Mean
• Aristotle: Slavery or Technology? From Politics
• Paul Krugman: Whitewashing the Crazy, Fed Edition
• Ricardo Hausmann: Redistribution or Inclusion?

And Over Here:

**Jonathan Chait:

Mireille Miller-Young... angered by the [anti-abortion] sign... snatched the sign, took it back to her office to destroy it, and shoved one of the Short sisters...

The next Clinton presidential campaign... [Hillary Rodham] Clinton enters... in a much stronger position... her supporters may find it irresistible to amplify p.c. culture’s habit of interrogating the hidden gender biases in every word and gesture against their side...

When Jonathan Chait says "The P.C. Movement", both of these are in what he fears and opposes--everyone from vandals and bullies to the "supporters" of our likely next president, and everyone in between. In Chait's envisioning, they are all, along with everyone in between them part of a single Monstrous Regiment of Women (and others) that needs to be opposed in the interest of something equally if not more amorphous called "liberalism"...

Alan Rappaport of the New York Times here exemplifies the biggest problem with our current policy dialogue: when it is thought to be unfair to a current of thought to even report in plain language what they have been saying, we are all in big trouble:

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• Over at Project Syndicate: What Failed in 2008?
• The Macroeconomic Situation and Macroeconomic Policy: Insiders and Outsiders: Focus
• On the Fed’s Policy of Quantitative Easing Coupled with Promises Not to Let Prices Recover Any of the Ground Relative to Trend They Lost in the Recession: Hoisted from Three Years Ago
• Afternoon Must-Read: Gernot Wagner: Climate Shock: It's Not Over 'Til the Fat Tail Zing
• Afternoon Must-Read: Jeet Heer: The New Republic's Legacy on Race: From Du Bois to the Bell Curve
• Today's Greek Crisis: A Non-Platonic Dialogue: The Honest Broker for the Week of February 8, 2015
• Morning Must-Read: Jaume Ventura: Capital in the 21st Century
• The Rebalancing Challenge in Europe Today: The Honest Broker for the Week of February 1, 2015
• Morning Must-Read: Daniel Davies: Rules for Contrarians: 1. Don’t Whine. That Is All
• Macroeconomics: Listening to Reality: A Note from Twitter I Want to Save
• Morning Must-Read: Tim Duy: While We Wait For Yet Another FOMC Statement

Plus:

• Things to Read on the Morning of January 30, 2015

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• Paul Krugman: Those Radical VSPs
• Avery Palmer: States with Weak Gun Laws and Higher Gun Ownership Lead Nation in Gun Deaths, New Data for 2013 Confirms
• Alan S. Blinder: Beware of Woolly-Minded Attacks on the Fed
• Joseph E. Stiglitz: Europe’s Lapse of Reason
• Gernot Wagner: Climate Shock: It's Not Over 'Til the Fat Tail Zings
• Jeet Heer: The New Republic's Legacy on Race: From Du Bois to the Bell Curve
• Capital in the 21st Century
• Daniel Davies: Rules for Contrarians: 1. Don’t whine. That is all
• As Safe as Houses

And Over Here:

Scott Lemieux watches Matthew Yglesias hit one out of the park:

I would only add that I find it hard to think of a more rock-hard version of take-no-prisoners identity politics than that practiced by a group I call "friends of Marty Peretz"...

**Gnosis creates the "Stag Hunt" mosaic in the "House of the Rape of Helen" in Pella, Kingdom of Macedonia:

Wikipedia: Stag Hunt Mosaic:

The Stag Hunt mosaic (c. 300 BCE) by Gnosis is a mosaic from a wealthy home of the late 4th century BC, the so-called 'House of the Abduction of Helen' (or 'House of the Rape of Helen'), in Pella, the capital of the Macedonian Kingdom. It is now in the Pella Archaeological Museum. The emblema is bordered by an intricate floral pattern, which itself is bordered by stylized depictions of waves. The mosaic is a pebble mosaic with stones collected from beaches and riverbanks which were set into cement. As was perhaps often the case, the mosaic does much to reflect styles of painting. The light figures against a darker background may allude to red figure painting. The mosaic also uses shading, known to the Greeks as skiagraphia, in its depictions of the musculature and cloaks of the figures. This along with its use of overlapping figures to create depth renders the image three dimensional.

Apropos of Jonathan Chait's "Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say" and Hanna Rosin's "The Patriarchy Is Dead", some constructive advice from Daniel Davies:

It is a true fact that Jon Chait's extremely ill-advised New York Magazine article crossed my desk at the same moment that I was watching this equally ill-advised piece by Meg Perrett and Rodrigo Kazuo go by. They try to condemn an eight-person classical moral-philosopher reading list for various sins against leftism¹. The interesting thing is that they get no traction whatsoever, even though they are here at the University of California Berkeley at what Jonathan Chait imagines to be the hotbed of American crazy leftism.

Belle Waring administers the smackdown:

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• Over at Project Syndicate: What Failed in 2008?
• The Macroeconomic Situation and Macroeconomic Policy: Insiders and Outsiders: Focus
• Macroeconomics: Listening to Reality: A Note from Twitter I Want to Save
• Tim Duy: While We Wait For Yet Another FOMC Statement
• Nick Bunker: The federal budget, interest rates, and savings gluts

Plus:

• Things to Read at Nighttime on January 22, 2015

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• Loren Adler: What the CBO Budget Outlook says about the ACA
• Phillip Rucker: "If he runs again in 2016, Romney is determined to re-brand himself as authentic..." <--Greatest line ever!
• Alan Beattie: Greece: the case against ‘structural reform’
• Yanis Varoufakis: Finance Ministry slows blogging down but ends it not
• William Cohan: "These gifts to Wall Street came without a requirement that it change any of the most fundamental aspects of the way it does business..."
• Martin Wolf: "Creditors have a moral responsibility to lend wisely. If they fail to do due diligence on their borrowers, they deserve what is going to happen. In the case of Greece, the scale of the external deficits, in particular, were obvious. So, too, was the way the Greek state was run..."
• Christopher Neely: "The strong market reactions to the Federal Reserve’s suggestion that it would taper its asset purchases are consistent with the similarly strong reactions—in the opposite direction—to unexpected Federal Reserve asset purchase announcements. The lesson from the taper tantrum is that the QE programs have had the desired effect on asset prices, suggesting that the purchases have influenced output, employment, and inflation expectations in the desired direction."
• Glenn Greenwald: "I fundamentally agree with Jill Filipovic’s reaction: ‘There is a good and thoughtful piece to be written about language policing & ‘PC’ culture online and in academia. [Jonathan Chait's] was not it...’"
• Steven J. Davis and Till von Wachter (2011): Recessions and the Costs of Job Loss
• Tim Duy: While We Wait For Yet Another FOMC Statement

And Over Here:

The feel-bad piece from the month of July 2005 is, of course, David Gelernter and his editor Michael Kinsley, beating out--mirabile visu!--even the works of Donald Luskin.

Here's the quote from David Gelernter, the thing that Michael Kinsley thought worth spending the Los Angeles Times's space on back in July of 2005. I put it below the fold. Don't look at it unless you are willing to be triggered:

Hoisted from the Archives: The conventional Fisher-Friedman approach to the determination of nominal spending and income focuses on the equilibrium demand and supply of money through the quantity theory:

(1) PY = MV(i)

If the economy’s money-supply process has produced “too little” money for the current level of spending, businesses and households attempt to shift their portfolios and accumulate more money by (i) trying to sell some of their other financial assets for cash, and (ii) cutting back on their spending. Thus the flow of spending—and income, and production—falls until PY has fallen by enough to make households and businesses no longer seek to increase their money holdings. Combine this focus on money supply and money demand equilibrium with some model of price theory and price adjustment, and the result is a theory of the monetary business cycle.

Over at Project Syndicate: For a while the best book on the macroeconomic catastrophe that struck the North Atlantic starting in 2007 was Gary Gorton's Slapped by the Invisible Hand. Them for a while the best book was Alan Blinder's After the Music Stopped. Now these have been superseded by two: the extremely-observant sensible Tory Martin Wolf's The Shifts and the Shocks; and my friend, patron, teacher, and (until the last reshuffle) office neighbor Barry Eichengreen 's Hall of Mirrors. Read and grasp the messages of both of these, and you are in the top 0.001% of the world in terms of understanding what has happened to us--and what the likely scenarios are for what comes next.

Over at Equitable Growth:

Somebody Is Inside an Echo Chamber. But Who?

Paul Krugman fears that somebody is trapped inside an echo chamber, hearing only things that confirm what they already believe:

Disagreement... over US monetary policy... [between those] very worried that the Fed may be gearing up to raise rates too soon... [and the] sanguine... seems to depend on one thing: whether the economist in question is currently in a policy position.... We don’t have access to different facts; we don’t, in any fundamental sense, have different economic models...

But how can we tell which side has lost contact with the reality out there?

Well, I think--as does Paul--that it is the "insiders" who are being optimistic and unrealistic in their plans to start raising short-term safe interest rates from zero in June 2015 and then, if past tightenings are any guide, raise them to what they regard as a full-employment growth-along-the-potential-path level of 5%/year or so by the end of 2017. READ MOAR

.@MikePMoffatt: Things like this have raised and greatly sharpened my estimate of current ZLB fiscal multiplier: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2015/01/over-at-equitable-growth-yes-the-past-four-years-are-powerful-evidence-for-the-keynesian-view-of-what-happens-at-the-zero-l.html

Since 2007, reality has spoken.

Given the inability of the Federal Reserve to attain traction at the ZLB, its current frame of mind--which appears to be doing certainty-equivalence policy--makes no sense to me. Certainty-equivalence is appropriate only with a symmetric loss function and a symmetric ability to compensate for deviations on either side of the target. We do not have either of those.

Has there been an explanation of why the Federal Reserve's policy is appropriate given the asymmetry of the loss function and the asymmetry of the control levers that I have missed? If so, where is it?

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• Heather Boushey: On "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"
• Simon Wren-Lewis: Post-Recession Lessons
• W. Arthur Lewis, 1915-1991
• : Stephanie Lo and Kenneth Rogoff: Secular Stagnation, Debt Overhang, and Other Rationales for Sluggish Growth, Six Years on
• Heather Boushey: On "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"
• Bridget Ansel: The pitfalls of just-in-time-scheduling

Plus:

• : Things to Read on the Afternoon of January 27, 2015

And Over Here:

A generation or two ago, the push for central-bank independence was all about harnessing central banks' credibility as inflation fighters in a context in which it was feared that elected legislators would lean overboard on the excessive spending side.

Today, Simon Wren-Lewis calls for transferring not just monetary policy but fiscal policy stabilization authority over to central banks, on the grounds that their technocratic chops are much better for fiscal policy then relying on elected legislators who are the prisoners of ordoliberal ideologies, the belief the governments like households need to balance their budgets, and of the austerity-loving 0.1%.

What could possibly go wrong?

W. Arthur Lewis:

I have a very easy time believing that debt overhangs--private, international, and public--can be enormous headwinds and exert substantial drag on growth and recovery. What I cannot understand is how debt can do so without also being an impaired asset to those who hold it. Debt that is painful enough to bear that it discourages enterprise and spending is also debt that may not be collected in the end, and thus debt that sells at a low price and carries a high face interest rate.

June 2005 saw me debate John Shoven on the Bush Social Security Privatization plan--without, apparently, the Bush Administration giving him paper on what the plan currently was. So we couldn't really talk about anything other than general principles, on which we broadly agreed:

• Social Security Once Again: A Debate http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/06/social_security.html
  2005-06-14

I have not yet heard anybody say on Fox News that the current Nor'easter is "Obama's Katrina", but surely somebody will. And in the meantime:

1. Weigel: "Swine Flu: The swine flu outbreak of April 2009!... Hugh Hewitt asked whether a botched response would destroy the Obama presidency. 'A death toll is a death toll, and if one begins to pile up in the U.S. the at least four-day delay in moving decisively to control legal entry into the country from Mexico will be entered in President Obama's account.'"

2. Weigel: "The Underwear Bomber: Then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano responded to the lucky apprehension of a dim terrorist by saying 'the system worked,' inspiring a NYT news analysis.... 'Hurricane Katrina was a crisis on a different order of magnitude than this event,' wrote Peter Baker, 'certainly, but the politics of attack and parry do not dwell on context or proportionality.'"

3. Weigel: "*The Haiti earthquake: Dan Kennedy argued that Haiti was not 'Obama's Katrina,' as Haiti is not part of the United States.... But... the *Wall Street Journal... a guest op-ed titled 'Haiti: Obama's Katrina,' and pointing out that 'the death toll from Katrina was under 2,000 people' while 'deaths in Haiti as of yesterday are at least 150,000.'"

4. Weigel: "The BP oil spill: 'This was, of course, New Orleans' Katrina and Mississippi's Katrina,' said Brian Williams during an interview with the president. 'And you're familiar now that it's getting baked in a little bit in the media that BP was President Obama's Katrina. And it's also getting baked in that the administration was slow off the mark. Is that unfair?' Spoiler: He did think it was unfair."

5. Weigel: "Hurricane Sandy: To be fair, it was mostly just Sean Hannity saying this. 'With the horrifying images of Sandy’s devastation now contrasted with the president’s constant campaigning,' he said on Nov. 1, 2012, 'this is starting to look like, in my opinion, Obama’s Katrina'... before the administration's response to Sandy, and Chris Christie's praise for it, helped make New York and New Jersey two of the only states where the Obama vote increased from 2008 to 2012. (The others? Mississippi and Louisiana.)"

6. Weigel: "Benghazi/IRS/NSA: 'If the president does not soon regain control of the narrative,' wrote Todd Eberly, 'he is likely to suffer the same fate as his predecessor--a collapse in public confidence and a vastly diminished second term.'"

7. Weigel: "Obamacare: Ron Fournier even argued that the website crisis might be Obama's Katrina and Iraq. 'The crises came after a series of unrelated events that had already caused doubt among voters about the presidents,' explained Fournier. 'To borrow a cliché, Katrina was the last straw.'" And @LOLGOP: "Hope this blizzard isn't another Obama's Katrina.... One before... 10 million gained insurance...”

8. @LOLGOP: Ebola: "Hope this blizzard isn't another Obama's Katrina. In the last one, no Americans died of Ebola..."

9. The Unaccompanied Children: "CHUCK TODD: 'Speaking of immigration, are you surprised that the president is going to be in Texas and not go to the border?...' SUSAN PAGE: 'It's a Katrina moment, right?... And you're going to the fundraiser and you're not going to the border where there's this crisis?' --MSNBC 7/7/14"

10. No More Mister Nice Blog: "The IRS: 'It has been a rough week or so for the Obama administration. From Benghazi to the tapping of reporters' phones to the IRS admitting that it targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny, the press is in a frenzy, and many are questioning President Barack Obama's future.' --Todd Eberly, Baltimore Sun, 5/17/13"

11. No More Mister Nice Blog: "Sexual Assault in the Military: 'Scandals Represent Obama's "Katrina Moment"' --Darryl Watson, PolicyMic, 5/16/13"

12. No More Mister Nice Blog: "Hurricane Isaac: 'On August 30, 2012, Obama held a campaign rally at the University of Virginia. At that same time 'people in Louisiana were dealing with what the National Hurricane Center called "life-threatening hazards" caused by Hurricane Isaac.' --Conservative Daily News blog, 8/31/12"

13. No More Mister Nice Blog: "MF Global: 'MF Global collapse is Obama's Hurricane Katrina' --The Market Oracle blog, 3/25/12"

14. No More Mister Nice Blog: "**The S&P Downgrade: 'Obama's Katrina Moment?' --Patrick Ruffini, 8/24/11"

15. No More Mister Nice Blog: "Missouri River Floods: 'My friend Andy in Nebraska City says that city is expecting the flood waters to rise to a point where it will cover 1st and 2nd street. My friend Brian in Council Bluffs already has his truck packed up in case he and his wife have to leave quickly.... The only national news coverage, at all, is concerning Ft. Calhoun Nuclear Plant.... Why is the media silent? Why is the national media refusing to cover this story fully, and point out what is going on? Because, this is Obama's Katrina moment, and he has blown it.' --For God and Liberty blog, 6/27/11"

16. No More Mister Nice Blog: "Unemployment: 'Expect unemployment to remain over 9% through the midterm elections--compared to a rate of just 6.9% in November 2008, when Obama was elected. It's that number, rather than anything going on right now in the Gulf of Mexico, which is really "Obama’s Katrina".' --Felix Salmon, 6/4/10"

17. No More Mister Nice Blog: "Fort Hood: 'Could Be Obama's Katrina' --Lynne Wooley at Human Events, 11/11/2009"

18. No More Mister Nice Blog: "The ARRA: 'Is the Stimulus Obama’s Katrina?' --Bill Dupray, American Conservative, True/Slant, 11/17/09. 'Make no mistake, the economic crisis and Obama's failure to create real jobs with his stimulus package means we're looking at this president's Katrina.' --James Pinkerton, Fox News, 7/6/09

19. No More Mister Nice Blog: "Swine Flu: 'Coming epidemic of swine flu could be Obama's Katrina' --Martin Schram, Scripps Howard News Service, 8/28/09

20. No More Mister Nice Blog: "General Motors: Republicans hope General Motors is President Obama's Hurricane Katrina' --Politico, 6/28/09"

21. No More Mister Nice Blog: "Kentucky Ice Storm: 'Obama's Katrina on Ice: More than 700,000 homes are still without power in Kentucky due to a massive ice storm that struck the state six days ago, forcing Gov. Steve Beshear to mobilize his entire state's Army and Air National Guard, a total of 4,600 men and the largest call-out in Kentucky's history.... Our Hawaiian-borne President, basking in the glow of an overheated Oval Office and dining on $100/lb steak, has been utterly disinterested...' --Confederate Yankee blog, 2/1/09"

22. Sabrina Siddiqui: "Hurricane Katrina: "A new Public Policy Polling survey... found that 29 percent of Louisiana Republicans said Obama was responsible for the Katrina response. Twenty-eight percent put the blame on President George W. Bush, whose administration did in fact oversee the federal response to Katrina. Nearly half (44 percent) of the Louisiana Republicans polled didn't know who to blame..." --August 21, 2013

23. No More Mister Nice Blog: "Affordable Housing: 'A friend emails: "Obama's KATRINA. A little dramatic?" Maybe. Obama's record on "affordable housing," as described in the Globe story, isn't a case of gross ineptitude in a catastrophic regional emergency. It's not even a symbol of endemic governmental dysfunction. (Although: Is there a bigger Petri dish for corrupt incompetence than the "public-private partnership"? Think cable TV franchises.) But the Globe account does seem to capture what's most likely to be wrong with an Obama administration.' --Mickey Kaus at Slate, 6/30/08"

There needs, I think, to be some sort of special prize for the last two...

David Weigel

No More Mister Nice Blog

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• The Future of the European Project, and the Future of the Eurozone: The Honest Broker
• Robert Waldmann on the Fiscal Cliff and Fiscal Multipliers: Focus
• Kenneth Thomas: What Is Noah [Smith] Thinking?
• Ann Friedman: Heather Boushey on Can We Solve Our Child-Care Problem?
• : Brian Buetler: Repealing Obamacare Would Be Immoral
• Nick Bunker: Did Credit Replace Wage Growth in the Mid-2000s?
• Nick Bunker: Did credit really replace wage growth in the mid-2000s?

Plus:

• Things to Read on the Afternoon of January 26, 2015

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• Heather Boushey: The leap not taken: Wage growth | Marketplace.org
• Luke Brinker: "Look no further than Europe's economic mess for a lesson in the folly of austerity..."
• Jared Bernstein: Technocrats know how to fix the economy. And they did
• Via Mark Thoma: Francis Saraceno: Who are the Radicals in Europe?
• Mark Thoma: "Jamie Galbraith in interviewed by Roger Strassburg on the upcoming Greek election and the prospects and consequences of a possible Syriza government"
• Nick Bunker: Did Credit Replace Wage Growth in the Mid-2000s?
• Brian Buetler: Repealing Obamacare Would Be Immoral
• Ann Friedman: Can We Solve Our Child-Care Problem?
• Kenneth Thomas: What Is Noah [Smith] Thinking?
• Arun Garg: Value Investing as Software Eats the World

And Over Here:

Let me highlight the last paragraph of Nick Bunker's piece over at our Value Added, just for those of you who don't click through either from the home page or from the title list at right:

As someone who thinks that the "great books" approach to classical social theory is past its sell-by date, I am now distressed. I confess that I believe that, over in sunny California, the Daily Cal is trolling us all when it decides to print this:

The Future of the European Project, and the Future of the Eurozone

J. Bradford DeLong :: U.C. Berkeley and NBER :: April 16, 2013 http://eurofuture2013.wordpress.com/1

My problem this morning is that I have four starting points. Or maybe my problem is that I have five starting points:

I. A Little Dutch History

My first starting point is the history of the Netherlands.

I would have to be more rash indeed than the fifteenth century's Charles de Valois-Burgogne,² the last sovereign Duke of Burgundy, to dare to opine about classical Dutch history with Jan de Vries in the room. But my read of it tells me that "political union" is a very vague and sketchy concept indeed. Consider the "political union" of what was surely the strongest power in seventeenth-century Western Europe: the seven United Provinces of the Netherlands that dominated the economy and were the political-military lynchpin of the coalition to contain the aggressive King Louis XIV Bourbon of France. READ MOAR

Over at Equitable Growth: I was writing a piece about the rather strange belief I hear that the failure of the U.S. economy to fall into a recession in 2013-2014 demonstrates that fiscal multipliers are relatively small. But Robert Waldmann did it first, and better than I was doing:

Letter from Harry S. Truman to Bess Wallace, January 26, 1915:

Grandview Jan. 26, 1915

Dear Bess:

I am going to try and send you a Wednesday letter.

I have been chasing to town every day on account of Uncle Harry. He has been almost on the point of cashing in. I can't get him to come home. I took Mamma in yesterday and she couldn't even get him to come. I took her to the Orpheum in the afternoon. She sure enjoyed it. It is a fairly good bill, but if Martin Beck pays Lina Abarbanell two thousand dollars a week he'd better save his money and buy booze. She claims to be the Bernhardt of song. She has the movement all right but not the voice.

Dear Tampa Airport: Protip: Have a script that checks to be sure your wifi network is not currently wedged before you broadcast the announcement of free wifi over the public address system...

"[Richard Duke of] York ran into severe difficulty in early 1456.... His authority was almost visibly ebbing away. In public he was scorned: a display of five severed dogs’ heads was erected on Fleet Street in London in September, with each dog’s dead mouth bearing a satirical poem against York, 'that man that all men hate'...”

--Dan Jones: The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors