Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Links:

• Schwartzchild Orbits
• Richard Evans (1999): In Defence of History: Book
• Khoi Vinh: How Dropbox Remains Relevant
• M. Harold Page: "To people like us, the advice, 'Just write!' is about as  useful as an alien screaming at us, 'Just use your r'tkost organ and you will be able to fly like us!'..."
• Charlie Jane Anders: Is Game of Thrones all about the war between Varys and Littlefinger?

Tweets:

• @EpicureanDeal: ISIS is like Lucy cooking meth in a pup tent sewn from the shredded dreams of Linus’s piano career – Thomas Friedman
• @Popehat: ISIS is like a Shanghai Ben & Jerry's after all the bars have closed. No Chunky Monkey to be found - Thomas Friedman
• @JohnEkdahl: ISIS is like navigating an automated phone operator menu with a broken pound button” - Thomas Friedman
• @Popehat: ISIS is like the monster that lived in our toilet when I was a child. Its name was MAD FACE." - Thomas Friedman
• @ShoutingBoy: ISIS is like a knife fight between the Crips and #Gamergate over performance rights for "Hair". —Thomas Friedman
• @Popehat: ISIS is like a Humpback Whale song played by Lemmy of Motorhead and Zamfir, Master of the Panpipe. - Thomas Friedman
• @ShoutingBoy: ISIS is like that dream where you don't wear pants to work, except it turns out to be No Pants Day. —Thomas Friedman
• @Popehat: ISIS is like an Iron Chef rerun with Chen Kenichi replaced by Napoleon. Theme ingredient: radish. - Thomas Friedman
• @GabrielRossman: Isis is like an autistic adult who speaks no Latin, but has memorized Book II of the Aeneid. --Thomas Friedman
• @Popehat: ISIS is like a series of Bach variations played on a kazoo by a giant golden panda. - Thomas Friedman
• @Brian_Whit: Thomas Friedman: "ISIS is like a missile that got its guidance system from Saudi Arabia and its fuel from Iran" http://nyti.ms/1FCMBT1

Now can somebody who is up-to-speed on all of this please tell me what this means in practice?

Dan Roberts, Ben Jacobs, and Spencer Ackerman: Patriot Act to Lapse at Midnight as Senate Fails to Agree on NSA Reform: "Maverick Republican senator Rand Paul forced at least a temporary shutdown of sweeping US surveillance powers...

...on Sunday night after refusing to allow an accelerated vote on compromise legislation designed to more narrowly restrain the National Security Agency. In a double blow for Washington security hawks, represented by embattled Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, it now looks likely that Congress will have to wait several days before passing that bill, the USA Freedom Act. The reform legislation, which bans the NSA from collecting bulk telephone records, was initially opposed by McConnell. But with the clock ticking down toward the midnight expiration of broader powers initially granted after 9/11 under the Patriot Act, Republican leaders had few options but to get behind the bill as the best way of preserving other surveillance authority. ‘This is now the only realistic way forward,’ said McConnell.... McConnell’s concession was a tacit acknowledgement that the bulk collection of US phone records exposed in June 2013 by the Guardian, thanks to leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden, will end....

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Jamelle Bouie: "What do you call a $60 million film from a multibillion dollar multimedia company that grossed almost half a billion dollars? If you’re most moviegoers, you call it The Lego Movie, one of the surprise hits of last year. But if you’re Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, you call it anti-business propaganda..."

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• : Over at Project Syndicate: Putting Economic Models in Their Place
• Nick Bunker: Weekend reading
• Nick Bunker: What to make of slow 1st quarter U.S. economic growth?
• Heather Boushey: U.S. scholars need access to public and private big data

Plus:

• Things to Read on the Evening of May 31, 2015

And Over Here:

Live from Strada: Among snake people-hipsters, are smores tarts really a thing? Are personal watermelons really a thing? What else is a thing?

Matt Brown: Zeppelin Airship Attacks On London:

From 1915-1917, German airships unleashed hundreds of explosives and incendiaries on London.... For Londoners of the time, the attacks were unprecedented, unexpected and lethal. Around 200 people lost their lives in these night raids.... The first attack came on 31 May 1915. Number 16 Alkham Road in Stoke Newington carries the unenviable distinction of sustaining London’s first ever aerial bomb damage. No one was seriously injured. From there, however, the airship looped south over Hackney and round past Stratford, killing seven and injuring 35. The population and emergency services were caught by surprise in what must rank as one of the most terrifying nights in our city’s history....

The airships flew at such a height that the ponderous air force fighters of the time were often unable to climb to the defence. Even when British pilots could engage with the enemy, the airships proved remarkably resilient to gunfire. When, finally, tactical and technical advances allowed British planes to engage, the Zeppelin crews stood no chance. Without parachutes, they were faced with the terrible decision of death by fire or fall. The airship threat soon disappeared after a number of missions were gunned down. The final attack came on 19 October 1917. Flying higher than normal, the craft once again took the capital by surprise, killing 33 people.

The Right Nation: Why America is Different, by Adrian Wooldridge, John Micklethwait:

Dennis Hastert, the Republican Speaker... a hulking former wrestling coach, is a fairly straightforward conservative: antiabortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-Kyoto, pro-invading Iraq, pro-death penalty.... Hastert got a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union in the days when he voted regularly....

Compared with other “red” districts, Hastert’s (Illinois’s fourteenth) is deep scarlet. It begins in the suburbs thirty miles west of the Chicago Loop and then stretches out through miles of cornfields to a point just forty miles short of the Iowa border. To drive across it takes a good three hours. Hastert’s district can claim to be the most Republican in the country, at least if you factor in length of loyalty to the party Unlike nouveaux droites such as Texas, Illinois has been full of Republicans since the party’s founding in 1854.... Hastert’s district is resolutely “normal.” The local citizens think of themselves as typical Americans, and their geographical vision is often bounded by the Great Plains that surround them.

Earl of Chatham: Put a Stop to Hostilities in America:

My Lords, this is a dying moment; perhaps but six weeks left to arrest the dangers that surround us. The gathering storm may break; it has already opened, and in part burst. It is difficult for government, after all that has passed, to shake hands with defiers of the King, defiers of the Parliament, defiers of the people. I am a defier of nobody; but if an end is not put to this war, there is an end to this country. I do not trust my judgment in my present state of health; this is the judgment of my better days--the result of forty years' attention to America.

Over at Project Syndicate: Putting Economic Models in Their Place:

Among the voices calling these days for new--or at least substantially different--economic thinking http://ineteconomics.org is the very sharp Paul M. Romer http://paulromer.net/ of New York University, with his critique of what he calls "Mathiness" in modern economics http://paulromer.net/mathiness/. He seems, to me at least, to be very worried principally about two aspects of modern economic discourse. The first is to take what is true about one restricted class of theories and generalize it, claiming it is true of all theories and of the world as well.

Comment of the Day: Craig: Why Don't New York Times Writers Possess Any Awareness of Their Presentation-of-Self?: "One of the fascinating things--sad, but fascinating...

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Paul Krugman: Preliminary Notes on Inequality and Urbanism
• Tim Wu: Why Are There So Many Shuttered Storefronts in the West Village?
• Must-Read: Scott Lemieux: David Brooks is not on a Path of Upward Intellectual Mobility
• Must-Read: Julie Nelson: Poisoning the Well, or How Economic Theory Damages Moral Imagination
• Must-Read: Claudia Goldin: The Quiet Revolution
• Must-Read: John Quiggin: The Most Misleading Definition in Economics (Draft Excerpt from Economics in Two Lessons)
• Must-Read: Nathan Pippenger: Democracy Journal: Arguments: Arthur Brooks and the Desperate Search for a Smarter Conservatism
• Must-Read: Ben Thompson: Vox Acquires Recode; Stars, Money, and Reach; The Apple Car and Jony Ive - Stratechery
• Peter Gosselin: Government Austerity Exacts Toll on U.S. Jobs, Wages and Growth
• Must-Read: Joe Romm: 2015 Is Crushing It for Hottest Year on Record

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• Why Is the U.S. Economy Still Depressed?: The Arithmetic
• Austerity, Recovery, and Macroeconomic Analysis: In Which I Refuse to Write the Column the Honchos of Project Syndicate Wish Me To
• Refereeing Mantoux-Keynes on the Treaty of Versailles
• Research Questions: Money Incomes and Societal Well-Being
• More on Ben Bernanke vs. John Taylor: In Which I Give Up

Plus:

• Things to Read at Lunchtime on May 29, 2015

And Over Here:

Live from the Glaswegian Mists: Ken Macleod: Ralph Miliband (Pére): "[Miliband pére's] essays are hard-headed, sober, nuanced....

• Meet Google Keep – Save your thoughts, wherever you are

Google keep? No thanks, I'll pay for Evernote lest you Google Reader me. @clippingsio charges $2 to format my kindle notes? Take my money.

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) May 19, 2015

http://clippings.io

The Henry Stimson Diary and Papers (part 4): "HIROSHIMA:

5/29/45 Diary Entry:

...I had in Joe Grew the Acting Secretary of State, Jim Forrestal of the Navy, Marshall the Chief of Staff, and some assistants of each one of them. This meeting was called by Grew on the suggestion of the President and its purpose was to decide upon an announcement to the Japanese which would serve as a warning for them to surrender or else have something worse happen to them. It was an awkward meeting because there were people present in the presence of whom I could not discuss the real feature which would govern the whole situation, namely S-1. We had hesitated just before they came in whether we should go on with the meeting at all on account of that feature but decided to let Grew, who was the one who really had gotten it up, go ahead with it. He had brought with him the proposed statement of the Secretary of State to the Japanese which had been drawn up in the [State] Department. He read it and then called for our comment. I told him that I was inclined to agree with giving the Japanese a modification of the unconditional surrender formula and some hope to induce them to practically make an unconditional surrender without the use of those words. I told him that I thought the timing was wrong and that this was not the time to do it. After a discussion around the table I was backed up by Marshall and then by everybody else. [Special Counsel to the President Samuel] Rosenman was there, McCloy, \ Elmer Davis, Forrestal's legal adviser Mathias Correa, and Eugene Dooman who is the Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of State Dunn.

After that meeting was over Marshall and McCloy and I stayed and discussed the situation of Japan and what we should do in regard to S-1 and the application of it.

German Minister to theAmerican Ambassador at Berlin:

from: The German Minister for Foreign Affairs

to: The American Ambassador at Berlin   

May 28, 1915

The German Government believes that it acts in just self-defense when it seeks to protect the lives of its soldiers by destroying ammunition destined for the enemy with the means of war at its command. The English steamship company must have been aware of the dangers to which passengers on board the Lusitania were exposed under the circumstances. In taking them on board in spite of this the company quite deliberately tried to use the lives of American citizens as protection for the ammunition carried, and violated the clear provisions of American laws which expressly prohibit, and provide punishment for, the carrying of passengers on ships which have explosives on board. The company thereby wantonly caused the death of so many passengers. According to the express report of the submarine commander concerned . . . the rapid sinking of the Lusitania was primarily due to the explosion of the cargo of ammunition caused by the torpedo. Otherwise, in all human probability, the passengers of the Lusitania would have been saved.

Over at Equitable Growth: I confess that I think it is time to stop trying to make sense of John Taylor's views on the Taylor rule. There simply seem to be too many gaps in logic, and too many assertions about the literature that I cannot understand.

In fact, Tony Yates reads John Taylor's attack on Ben Bernanke, and sounds almost... shrill:

Across the Wide Missouri: That Dennis Hastert was a high-school teacher and wrestling coach from 1965-1981 is material to this money-laundering indictment. That and the fact that Hastert's conduct between 34 and 50 years ago is material, is the source of the aggrieved party's believing they deserve $3.5 million, and leads Hastert to think he should pay up tells us more than I think we need to know:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-dennis-hastert-indictment-pdf-20150528-htmlstory.html?vd

http://delong.buffalo.io/why-is-the-u-s-economy-still-depressed-delong-faq

Arithmetically, the U.S. economy is depressed because residential construction and government purchases are well below previously-expected trend levels...

Live from La Farine: Joe Romm: 2015 Is Crushing It for Hottest Year on Record:

Over on Twitter:

• @ObsoleteDogma: Niall Ferguson, still a huge hack: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/niall-ferguson-british-austerity-by-robert-skidelsky-2015-05
• @delong: .@ObsoleteDogma will it brighten or darken my day if I read Skidelsky?
• @splinterknight: @delong @ObsoleteDogma Hopefully brighten. And, @delong, it would be great if you jumped into the debate with your next @prosyn piece

Must-Read: Nick Bunker writes: Over at Bloomberg, Peter Gosselin points out the costs of contractionary fiscal policy during the current recovery:

Peter Gosselin: Government Austerity Exacts Toll on U.S. Jobs, Wages and Growth: "If federal, state and local governments were cutting taxes

Must-Read: Ben Thompson: Vox Acquires Recode; Stars, Money, and Reach; The Apple Car and Jony Ive - Stratechery: " Recode has sold to Vox, and while everyone involved is putting a happy face on the matter...

Live from La Farine:

See: http://www.vox.com/2015/5/28/8677005/embeddable-card-stacks-launch

And, once again, I wish that Apple Hypercard were still a thing...

Note to Self: Rereading Etienne Mantoux: La Paix Calomniée, ou les Conséquences Économiques de M. Keynes. "The Calumniated Peace" of Versailles. OK. So why is the title of the English translation The Carthaginian Peace? Who decided to replace "Caluminiated" with "Carthaginian", and why?

Recall that Etienne Mantoux's review of Keynes's General Theory is quite bad. At its beginning:

With his fascination Keynes combines another of the serpent's attributes--his disconcerting ability to molt at more or less frequent intervals, leaving his former conceptions behind him like so many old integuments from which the reader, somewhat disconcerted, must extract himself, having previously been at no little trouble to get in.... We are to witness a revolution. At least so one would gather from some of the more enthusiastic reviews, which go so far as to make Keynes (much to his disgust no doubt) the direct successor of Karl Marx. "My undertaking is one that has no equal, that none will ever equal. I would change the basis of society, shift the axis of civilization..." Is that facetious to place Proudhon's ironic boasts beside Keynes' ambitious sureness? Yet their two proposals are not so very unlike, for it is by decline of the rate of interest to zero that the latter would see our economic ills remedied. Curious that the most sharp-tongued economist of our time should come back, by this unexpected route, to the thought of the famous inventor of "credit gratuit"...

Live from Strada at Bancroft and College: Last year's journamalism. Is there a trend, is there a number that is correct? And is there an argument other than the sadistic undercurrent that the bottom third of America's white population (and a much greater fraction of the minority population) deserve to be fleeced by credit-card and payday-loan companies, and deserve to die prematurely from lack of routine and preventative care?

Michael Barone: How ObamaCare Misreads America "The Washington elites who designed the law must be bewildered...

...Why doesn't everyone behave as they do?...

Suppose that we have a box: kind of box that might contain, for example, a cat. Suppose that no energy is flowing into or out of the box. And suppose we them ask: what is going on inside the box?

Sean Carroll will answer, in accord with all experimental evidence and of the most sophisticated quantum mechanical thinking, that nothing is going on inside the box:

The possible measurement outcomes... spinning clockwise or counterclockwise... only become “real”... when the quantum system interacts [outside] with a large number of degrees of freedom, becomes entangled with them, and decoherence occurs.... [But] what dynamic processes are occurring while the wave function isn’t changing at all? Your first guess here--nothing at all “happens” inside a wave function that doesn’t evolve with time--is completely correct....

Surprisingly, this claim--“nothing is happening if the quantum state isn’t changing with time”--manages to be controversial!

Must-Read: John Quiggin: The Most Misleading Definition in Economics (Draft Excerpt from Economics in Two Lessons): "‘Pareto optimal’ is arguably, the most misleading term in economics...

Must-Read: Nathan Pippenger: Democracy Journal: Arguments: Arthur Brooks and the Desperate Search for a Smarter Conservatism: "President Obama spoke on poverty at Georgetown...

Must-Read: Claudia Goldin: The Quiet Revolution: "The National Longitudinal Survey... began in 1968 with women who were between 14 and 24 years old...

Must-Read: Julie Nelson: Poisoning the Well, or How Economic Theory Damages Moral Imagination: "Contemporary mainstream economics has widely ‘poisoned the well’...

Must-Read: Scott Lemieux: David Brooks is not on a Path of Upward Intellectual Mobility: ""David 'vast, lavishly taxpayer-subsidized spaces for entertaining' Brooks’s scorching Burke-abject-morons hot take on the killing of Freddie Gray...

WWII Diary of Chick Bruns:

Slept till 10 am. Wrote a letter home. Went on another picnic. Lore and I and her mother and father. We really had a swell time. When we got back her brother had come home. He had been a prisoner in the hospital, and they’re turning all prisoners loose that are not Nazi. We talked for a while and then I went home to bed.

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Mark Thoma: "The biggest surprise for me, and perhaps it shouldn't have been, is the degree to which politicians are willing to put political interests ahead of helping people in need. Watching the political/policy reaction to the Great Recession was both disappointing and eye opening..."
• Bernie Sanders: 'Our Democracy is Being Owned by a Handful of Billionaires'
• Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins: "The Republican Party is primarily the agent of an ideological movement whose supporters prize doctrinal purity, while the Democratic Party is better understood as a coalition of social groups seeking concrete government action. This asymmetry is reinforced by American public opinion, which favors left-of-center positions on most specific policy issues yet simultaneously shares the general conservative preference for smaller and less active government..."
• Fischer Black (1982): The Trouble with Econometric Models
• Joseph Stalin: "I want to tell you from the Russian point of view, what the President and the United States have done to win the war. The most important things in this war are machines.... The United States... is a country of machines. Without the use of those machines... we would lose this war..."
• Must-Read: Ashish Jha: Readmissions Penalty at Year 3: How Are We Doing?
• Must-Read: Financial Times: Cameron Points Migrant Talent Towards the Exit
• Must-Read: Marshall Steinbaum: Would Graduating More From College Reduce Inequality?
• Must-Read: James Kwak: Greg Mankiw Forgot What He Teaches

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• Heather Boushey: U.S. scholars need access to public and private big data
• Remind Me, Again: What Is Supposed to Drive Full Recovery?

Plus:

• Things to Read on the Evening of January 31, 2015

And Over Here:

Must-Read: James Kwak: Greg Mankiw Forgot What He Teaches: "Mankiw’s [Trans-Pacific Parnership] column is a perfect example of how ideology works...

Over at Equitable Growth: Take "full recovery" to be a recovery to 87% (not 89%) in the share of 25 to 54-year-old males at work:

READ MOAR

Must-Read: Marshall Steinbaum: Would Graduating More From College Reduce Inequality?: "All of these phenomena suggest that the labor market isn’t working for most employees...

Must-Read: Financial Times: Cameron Points Migrant Talent Towards the Exit: "One of the canards of British political discourse is that no one dares talk frankly about immigration...

Must-Read: Ashish Jha: Readmissions Penalty at Year 3: How Are We Doing?: "A few months ago, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)...

Comment of the Day: Brian Schmidt on "Neoliberalisms", Left and Right: "Brad raises the issue of the strength of the magic wand he's given...

I mean, it was completed only seven years ago. And now the wall between it and College Avenue and the field have been demolished? And the field has been removed? Why?

Time-Tested Rules for Life:

1. Paul Krugman is right.
2. If you think Paul Krugman is wrong, consult rule (1).

Josh Bivens reminds Mike Konczal reminds me of how out-to-lunch the Obama Treasury was about the macroeconomic situation back in late 2009:

Paul Krugman (November 20, 2009): Interest Rates: The Phantom Menace: "From various bat squeaks...

...what I think lies behind the surprising--and damaging--deficit squeamishness of the Obama administration....

Note to self:

Perhaps I imposed too much of my own preconceptions on Skidelsky. But I had always seen Skidelsky as arguing that Keynes saw:

1. France as dominated by politicians—Clemenceau, Poincare, Laval, plus Moreau--hostile to European settlement and recovery, in part because a rapidly recovering Europe would soon be one with a much more powerful and dominant Germany.
2. Germany as tenuously ruled by proto-Adenauers trying to retain power under immense pressure from both the anti-liberal left and the anti-liberal right.
3. Failure to restore prosperity as likely to unleash even worse things than World War I.
4. Hence a tilt to Germany and its proto-Adenauers and against France and its poiticians in the hope of making the Germany that would dominate Europe a liberal one and keeping France too weak to impede sensible reparations and economic policies...

Cf: Stephen A. Schuker (2014): J.M. Keynes and the Personal Politics of Reparationshttp://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fdps20

John Maynard Keynes: The Economic Consequences of the Peace: "Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature

Walrus Cam - Round Island - Oceans - explore:

Over at Equitable Growth: Robert Waldmann: In Which I try to Defend Janet Yellen from Brad DeLong: "Fed Chair Janet Yellen said, among other things:

For this reason, if the economy continues to improve as I expect, I think it will be appropriate at some point this year to take the initial step to raise the federal funds rate target and begin the process of normalizing monetary policy. To support taking this step, however, I will need to see continued improvement in labor market conditions, and I will need to be reasonably confident that inflation will move back to 2 percent over the medium term. After we begin raising the federal funds rate, I anticipate that the pace of normalization is likely to be gradual. The various headwinds that are still restraining the economy... READ MOAR

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Richard Thaler: Unless You Are Spock, Irrelevant Things Matter in Economic Behavior
• Social Credit! Mark Blyth, Eric Lonergan and Simon Wren-Lewis: Now the Bank of England needs to deliver QE for the people. We propose that the government legislates to empower the Bank with the ability to make payments directly to the household sector...
• Must-Read: Christopher L. Foote and Christopher F. Goetz (2005): The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime: Comment
• Must-Read: Nicholas Bagley: Wreck the RUC
• Must-Read: William Lazonick: Stock buybacks: From retain-and reinvest to downsize-and-distribute
• Simon Johnson and Andrei Levchenko: The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): This Is Not About Ricardo

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• Casey Schoeneberger: Weekend reading
• Kavya Vaghul: What about commuting to new economic opportunities?

Plus:

• Things to Read on the Evening of May 25, 2015

And Over Here:

Comment of the Day: Kip W on G.K. Chesterton: " I have enjoyed Chesterton's Father Brown series a good deal...

...but I get a whiff from it now and then that makes the simple man of faith and his universe seem like a bit of a stacked deck, and this makes me sad.

Eleanor Rooseelt: My Day:

HYDE PARK, Thursday—I have a letter from the Veterans Administration informing me that the educational age limit in the GI Bill of Rights is not nearly as crippling as it might seem.

Live from La-La Land: Is Maureen Dowd really this clueless as to how she is appearing to Uber drivers--and to her readers?

Maureen Dowd: Driving Uber Mad: "I had Uber. Even in the land of movie stars, you could feel like a movie star when your Uber chauffeur rolled up...

...But, suddenly, they scattered in the opposite direction. I stood in the driveway, perplexed. Finally, a car pulled up, and the driver waved me in. ‘Do you know why no one wanted to pick you up?’ he asked. ‘Because you have a low rating.’... I was shocked. Blinded by the wondrous handiness of Uber, I had missed the fact that while I got to rate them, they got to rate me back. Revealing that I had only 4.2 stars, my driver continued to school me. ‘You don’t always come out right away,’ he said, sternly, adding that I would have to work hard to be more appealing if I wanted to get drivers to pick me up. Uber began to feel less like a dependable employee and more like an irritated boyfriend....