Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Live from Crow's Coffee: Neal Beck: R for Undergraduates: "First, I got no first-hand horror stories...

...(though did get some second hand horror stories). This does not mean that such do not exist, but I am more inclined to believe they are an urban myth (but this is not updating for me very much). Also, it was pointed out it is not as though UGs love learning Stata; a move from Stata to R is not as drastic as from the Daily Show (sigh!) to the PBS Newshour. We will always have UGs who will hate whatever choice we make.

Manu Saadia, the author of the forthcoming book, Trekonomics, discusses the economic theories behind the creation of the Star Trek with J. Bradford DeLong, professor of Economics at UC Berkeley and former Deputy Assistant Secretary at the US Treasury. Inkshares' Adam Gomolin is the moderator:

• I'm an East-African plains-ape cooperator, engaged in reinforcing social ties through a web of gift-exchange relationships...
• We have already gone 95% of the way to the replicator for basic foodstuffs...
• The economic problem is not the permanent problem of the human race...
• The prime directive...
• On the Ferengi... From Ayn Rand to Lord Keynes...
• The U.S.S. Asimov...
• The Vulcans are not coming...

Live from Crow's Coffee: Ezra Klein: "We... haven’t figured out persistence. If you go to any site’s homepage...

...virtually everything on it was published that day for the first time.... I don’t think for a second that everything we put on the front page today at Vox was more useful to our readers than everything we’ve ever published. Some feature we wrote a year ago may be the best thing to read today....

Comment of the Day: Ronald Brak: Machete Order: "Great link, Brad...

...I've sent it to my friend whose spouse hasn't seen any of the Star Wars movies. If it convinces her not to make him watch The Phantom Menace it may save a marriage.

Must-Read: The highly-estimable Mark Thoma turns Stan Fischer's Jackson Hole Speech into a Q&A:

Mark Thoma: U.S. Inflation Developments: "A speech by Stanley Fischer at Jackson Hole turned into a pretend interview...

...Let me start be asking about your view of the economy. How close are we to a full recovery?

Although the economy has continued to recover and the labor market is approaching our maximum employment objective, inflation has been persistently below 2 percent. That has been especially true recently... the drop in oil prices... 12-month changes in the overall personal consumption expenditure (PCE) price index have recently been only a little above zero.... Measures of core inflation have been persistently below 2 percent throughout the economic recovery. That said, as with total inflation, core inflation can be somewhat variable....

Must-Read: The very sharp Michael Burda gets it, I think, completely wrong here.

German failure to make it better for Greece (and Italy, and Spain, and Portugal) to stay in the eurozone and undertake structural adjustment than it would have been for them to have exited the eurozone in 2010 and undertaken the standard IMF-recipe depreciation-plus-structural-reform-and-adjustment recipe is already doing incalculable long-run damage to German's position within Europe, and indeed to the concept of a European Germany. And Germany desperately needs, for its own sake as well as everybody else's, to be a European Germany:

Michael Burda: Dispelling Three Myths on Economics in Germany: "The Anglo-American world has been ganging up on Germany long before the financial crisis...

Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: To Understand Donald Trump, Look to Europe['s] Far-Right: "Newish parties... are gaining support with platforms...

Must-Read: Matthew Klein: Some Fed thoughts: QE4 and All That: "For months, the mid-September meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee was being telegraphed as the most likely start date of the ‘normalisation’ process...

Live from Yellowstone Lake Lodge: WTF!?

Daniel Little: The Case for Realism in the Social Realm: "The case for scientific realism in the case of physics is a strong one...

...The theories... postulate unobservable entities, forces, and properties. These hypotheses... are not individually testable, because we cannot directly observe or measure the properties of the hypothetical entities. But the theories as wholes have a great deal of predictive and descriptive power, and they permit us to explain and predict a wide range of physical phenomena. And the best explanation of the success of these theories is that they are true: that the world consists of entities and forces approximately similar to those hypothesized in physical theory. So realism is an inference to the best explanation...

"WTF?!" is the only reaction I can have when I read Daniel Little.

Links:

• Michael Grunwald: The Failures of the Army Corps of Engineers
• Huailu Li, Kevin Lang, and Kaiwen Leong: Competition alone will not eliminate discrimination
• Tim Duy: The Right and Wrong Arguments for September
• Federal Reserve: Federal Reserve Act: Section 4
• Must-Read: Kris James Mitchener and Marc D. Weidenmier: Was the Classical Gold Standard Credible on the Periphery? Evidence from Currency Risk
• Gillian Tett: The Silo Effect

Live from Yellowstone Lake Lodge: The Washington Post has already lasted longer than I thought it would a decade ago--kept afloat by Jeff Bezos's willingness to commit money to it without doing a proper housecleaning.

It is a great pity:

Martin Longman: The Worst Ruth Marcus Column Ever: "We need to freeze this Ruth Marcus column in amber so that it never perishes...

...Future generations will not believe that it actually existed if they can’t see it with their own eyes.... I thought I had seen Peak Beltway Trolling, but I had not seen anything. How can I find the right analogy for her argument? Imagine if you will that there is a giant anvil hanging by a rope over your head and that the rope is on fire and the anvil will soon fall on you and kill you. Now, imagine that someone comes up with a plan to put out the fire before it burns through the rope and you die. Now imagine that some people are concerned that the rope might catch fire again at some future date and are therefore against putting out the fire right now and saving your life. I could expand on this analogy to make it more realistic, but I think it’s best to keep this really simple. What Ruth Marcus is saying is that of course we should put out this fire, but we shouldn’t be impatient with the people who say that we should not.

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Huailu Li, Kevin Lang, and Kaiwen Leong: Competition alone will not eliminate discrimination
• Tim Duy: The Right And Wrong Arguments For September
• Federal Reserve: Federal Reserve Act: Section 4

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• Project Syndicate: A Cautionary History of US Monetary Tightening
• WorldPost: China's Market Crash Means Chinese Supergrowth Could Have Only 5 More Years to Run...

Plus:

• Things to Read on the Morning of August 29, 2015

And Over Here:

Live from Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: I call it: "Mt. Moran at Dawn with Central Bankers":

This is Ken Rogoff's "debt supercycle" view, by and large:

Matthew Klein: Some Fed thoughts: QE4 and all that: For months, the mid-September meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee...

was being telegraphed as the most likely start date of the ‘normalisation’ process. Or, to use another bit of central banker-ese, the day when short-term interest rates would begin ‘liftoff’ from the current range of zero to 25 basis points. There is still time before any decision is made, but the latest utterances from America’s central bankers — corroborated by interest rate futures and options — suggest that a September rate increase is becoming less likely. Bill Dudley, the boss of the New York Fed, said on Wednesday that the argument for moving in a few weeks was ‘less compelling’ than it was just ‘several weeks ago’.

Debra Liese: An interview with Josiah Ober, author of The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece:

The period considered classical Greece (roughly the 4th through 5th century BC) had a profound effect on Western civilization, forming the foundations of politics and philosophy, as well as artistic and scientific thought. Why did Greece experience such economic and cultural growth—and why was it limited to this 200-year period? Josiah Ober, Professor of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University and author of The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, took the time to explain the reasons behind Greece’s flourishing, and what its economic rise and political fall can tell us about our own world.

Rod Hilton: The Star Wars Saga: Introducing Machete Order: "Watch the films with them in this order: IV, V, II, III, VI...

...Episode I is gone. Episodes II and III aren't exactly Shakespeare, but stand ing next to the complete and utter train wreck that is Episode I, they sure look like it. At least, III does.... Episode I is a failure on every possible level..... Luckily, George Lucas has... ma[de] the content of Episode I completely irrelevant to the rest of the series.... Every character established in Episode I is either killed or removed before it ends (Darth Maul, Qui-Gon, Chancellor Valorum), unimportant (Nute Gunray, Watto), or es tab lished better in a later episode (Mace Windu, Darth Sidious). Does it ever matter that Palpatine had an apprentice before Count Dooku? Nope.... Does it ever matter that Obi-Wan was being trained by Qui-Gon? Nope.... Search your feelings, you know it to be true! Episode I doesn't matter at all....

Pet Shop Boys: Where the Streets Have No Name/I Can't Take My Eyes off You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3Zpks05Ns

Live from Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: Memo to National Park Service: I think you should add some signs saying: "Are you carrying water? How much water?" next to the "Please don't feed the animals" signs...

Live from Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: Peggy Noonan Wall Street Journal column or Onion parody?

Peggy Noonan: America Is so in Play: "Something is going on, some tectonic plates are moving in interesting ways...

...My friend Cesar works the deli counter at my neighborhood grocery store. He is Dominican, an immigrant, early 50s, and listens most mornings to a local Hispanic radio station, La Mega, on 97.9 FM. Their morning show is the popular “El Vacilón de la Mañana,” and after the first GOP debate, Cesar told me, they opened the lines to call-ins, asking listeners (mostly Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican) for their impressions. More than half called in to say they were for Mr. Trump. Their praise, Cesar told me a few weeks ago, dumbfounded the hosts. I later spoke to one of them, who identified himself as D.J. New Era. He backed Cesar’s story. “We were very surprised,” at the Trump support, he said. Why? “It’s a Latin-based market!”

Over at Project Syndicate: A Cautionary History of US Monetary Tightening: BERKELEY JACKSON HOLE – The US Federal Reserve has embarked on an effort to tighten monetary policy four times in the past four decades. On every one of these occasions, the effort triggered processes that reduced employment and output far more than the Fed’s staff had anticipated. As the Fed prepares to tighten monetary policy once again, an examination of this history – and of the current state of the economy – suggests that the United States is about to enter dangerous territory. READ MOAR

Over at WorldPost: China's Market Crash Means Chinese Supergrowth Could Have Only 5 More Years to Run: Ever since I became an adult in 1980, I have been a stopped clock with respect to the Chinese economy. I have said -- always -- that at most, Chinese supergrowth likely has five more years to run.

Then there will come a crash.... After the crash, China will revert to the standard pattern of an emerging market economy without successful institutions that duplicate or somehow mimic those of the North Atlantic... convergence to the North Atlantic growth-path norm will be slow... and political risks... [cause] the most likely surprises. I have been wrong for 25 years straight -- and the jury is still out on the period since 2005. Thus, I'm very hesitant to count out China and its supergrowth miracle. But now 'a' crash -- even if, perhaps, not 'the' crash I was predicting -- is at hand. [READ MOAR]

Live from Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: I have finally figured out what I feel like here at the Jackson Lake Lodge: I feel like Jacob Marley's Ghost.

It was 23 years ago that Larry Summers and I came here to say, among other things, that reducing the inflation target below 4% per year was extremely risky and unwise because it greatly raised the chances of running into zero lower bound in a recession.

Jeebus! We were right. By the Sacred and Holy Name of the One Who Is! We were right.

And now the Federal Reserve is stuck.

Outside on the patio as the first rays of the sun hit the peak of Mount Moran St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard was saying that Financial markets are wrong and the fact that the market 10-year inflation breakeven is now 1.5% is something the Federal Reserve is ignoring. Because the market does not know what it is doing. James Bullard. Is there any other circumstance under which James Bullard would say that the market does not know what it is doing, other than when the market is telling him that his monetary policy is inappropriately tight?

Not a 4%/year target as an average. Not a 2%/year target as an average. Not even a 2%/year ceiling. The market is saying that they are not even going to make 2%/year as a ceiling over the next decade. And the response is fingers-in-your-ears and: "We can't hear you!"

Must-Read: I cannot help but note strong divergence between the near-consensus views of Fed Chair Janet's and Fed Vice-Chair Stan's still-academic colleagues and students that tightening now is grossly premature, financial markets' agreement with the hippies as evidenced by the ten-year breakeven, commercial-banker and wingnut demands for immediate tightening, the extraordinarily awful performance since 2007 of not all but the average regional Fed president as revealed in the transcripts, and the Federal Reserve's strong predisposition to an interest-rate liftoff soon. That divergence plus the apparent focus of what is a global hegemon on its domestic situation make me think that this is not a well-functioning institution we have here:

Gavyn Davies: China’s Policy Failings Challenge the Fed: "There is something... important... doubts about the competence and credibility of Chinese economic policy...

Live from Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: Dawn sunlight reflecting off of Mt. Moran with central bankers:

I am envious: Marty Feldstein (not shown) was in the Bloomberg Interview chair the moment that the sunlight first hit Mt. Moran.

And I find myself thinking: Marty warned the world about the institutional weaknesses of the eurozone and how adopting the euro was a bad idea. He was positively shrill. The world ought to have listened. It did not.

Live from Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: It's 6800 feet up here. For the first time ever, I wish I were a vampire--I could really, really use some more oxygen-carrying red blood corpuscles right now...

What is the science on doping yourself with your own stored blood when you go up to high altitude, anyway?

Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Research Director Troy Davig and President Esther George have come up with the right topic for their program this year:

Inflation Dynamics and Monetary Policy:

What the best guess are as to how inflation will evolve if economic policies remain on their current track--or if policies change--is the topic that most urgently absorbs central bankers right now, and our base of knowledge is pitifully thin...

Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging:

We of Whose Recovery? and all of our friends at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economic Policy Conference and Drinking Party are not the only people up in Jackson Hole this week. There is the American Principles Project down-valley somewhere--a conference that seems to me to be totally composed of grifters and goldbugs, with the accent on the first. They are there, charging their attendees a healthy sum, because, they say, current Federal Reserve policies are dangerously inflationary, and so they need to "bring sanity back to U.S. monetary policy".

The top five speakers for the goldbug-grifter project: George Gilder, Steve Moore, Benn Steil, Peter Schiff, and Jim DeMint. There's no need to talk about Jim DeMint, is there? Let's talk instead some more about the conference organizer, Stephen Lonegan:

Andy Kroll (2013): 6 Crazy—and Cruel—Things Said by Cory Booker's New GOP Opponent: "Steve Lonegan... [from] 1996 to 2008...

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Must-Read: Kris James Mitchener and Marc D. Weidenmier: Was the Classical Gold Standard Credible on the Periphery? Evidence from Currency Risk
• Cherrie Buckner: Young Black America Part Four: The Wrong Way to Close the Gender Wage Gap
• Tim Duy: Dudley Puts the Kibosh on September
• Andrew Haldane: Stuck
• Gillian Tett: The Silo Effect

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

• Things to Read at Lunchtime on August 25, 2015

And Over Here:

Out on the back patio of Jackson Lake Lodge. Alas! Mount Moran and the rest of the Teton range are fogged in this dawn...

Must-Read: Kris James Mitchener and Marc D. Weidenmier: Was the Classical Gold Standard Credible on the Periphery? Evidence from Currency Risk: "We use a standard metric from international finance...

Live from Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: Must-Read: I think Miles Kimball is dead-on here: unless the advocates of interest-rate smoothing can come up with an argument for interest rate smoothing better than any they have so far, the right level of the Federal Reserve's short-term federal funds control rate is (if it is away from its zero lower bound) the level at which the Fed is uncertain whether its move at the next meeting will be up, down, or zero:

Miles Kimball: Larry Summers: The Fed Looks Set to Make a...: "Let me address one myth...

Live from Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: We of What Recovery? and all of our friends at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economic Policy Conference and Drinking Party are not the only people up in Jackson Hole this week. There is the American Principles Project down-valley somewhere--a conference of grifters and goldbugs, charging their attendees a healthy sum, because, they say, current Federal Reserve policies are dangerously inflationary, and so they need to "bring sanity back to U.S. monetary policy". Their top five headlined speakers: George Gilder--Chairman, George Gilder Fund and former Reagan advisor. Steve Moore--Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Heritage Foundation. Benn Steil, PhD--Senior Fellow & Director of International Economics, Council on Foreign Relations. Peter Schiff--Financial Analyst. Jim DeMint--President, Heritage Foundation.

I have already dealt with conference organizer Steven Lonegan and the top three headliners: George Gilder, Stephen Moore, and Benn Steil. Now it is on to Peter Schiff: Let me outsource this to Nate Heckmann:

Nate Heckmann (2013): Peter Schiff is Wrong About Everything: "A libertarian friend of mine... sent me a video... [of] Peter Schiff...

Live from the Big T-- Mountains:

Ezra Klein: "As a writer[,] I would write stories about these complicated health-care topics...

Live from Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: Paul Krugman meditates on why the goldbug-grifters currently running and speaking at the APP Monetary Policy event down-valley here in Jackson Hole make such a good living--why they find so many marks, and why it does not matter that the predictions of the goldbug-grifter-con men have proven so false for so long:

Paul Krugman: [The Old Man and the CPI](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/the-old-man-and-the-cpi/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body): "I was treated to a long ad from Ron Paul...

Live from Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: We of What Recovery? and all of our friends at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economic Policy Conference and Drinking Party are not the only people up in Jackson Hole this week. There is the American Principles Project down-valley somewhere--a conference of grifters and goldbugs, charging their attendees a healthy sum, because, they say, current Federal Reserve policies are dangerously inflationary, and so they need to "bring sanity back to U.S. monetary policy". Their top five headlined speakers: George Gilder--Chairman, George Gilder Fund and former Reagan advisor. Steve Moore--Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Heritage Foundation. Benn Steil, PhD--Senior Fellow & Director of International Economics, Council on Foreign Relations. Peter Schiff--Financial Analyst. Jim DeMint--President, Heritage Foundation.

I have already dealt with George Gilder, Stephen Moore, and the conference organizer Steven Lonegan. Now we come to headliner number 3, Benn Steil. Unlike Lonegan, Gilder, and Moore, Benn Steil is not a liar: he does not knowingly state things that he knows to be false.

He is, however, what Bugs Bunny would call: "a maroon".

Here are five examples:

(1) Benn Steil does not understand the constraints facing countries that do not issue the principal reserve currency: He writes that if the U.S. were to lose its dominant reserve-currency status:

The Federal Reserve would now be forced to operate under external constraints comparable with those imposed by the classical gold standard, under which the US needed more gold to create more dollars.... [T]he US would no longer be able to cover its current account deficits just by conjuring dollars, it would also have to issue debt in euros...

But the Eurozone, Britain, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, and many other countries are all very able to issue their own debt in their own currencies. They are able to cover their current account deficits by conjuring euros, pounds, Australian dollars, Canadian dollars, Swiss francs, and a host of others. They do not have to issue their debt in dollars. They are in no wise "forced to operate under external constraints comparable with those imposed by the classical gold standard." Not at all.

Maroon!

Comment of the Day: Robert Waldmann: "Lars E.O. Svennson can call the expected inflation imp from the vasty deep, as can you or any man, but does he come when Svennson doth call to it?

I admire Svennson a lot as an economist and a central banker, but I don't see how anyone can link 'foolproof' and 'induces expectations'.

In this case, I think we gain better insight into monetary policy from Damon Runyon who correctly noted that 'nothing between human beings is one to three. In fact,' Sam the Gonoph says, 'I long ago come to the conclusion that all life is six to five against. '"

Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: As you will remember from yesterday, the grifter-goldbug conference featuring grifter-goldbug George Gilder, Steve Moore, Benn Steil, Peter Schiff, and Jim DeMint as its five top headliners is a production of the American Principles Project. We already told you why George Gilder his no business speaking about monetary policy. Briefly, he's not only a goldbug, but a grifter, who says that he faced a difficult choice back in 1999-2000 when he decided not to tell the truth about what he thought to the paying clients of his newsletter.

In short, he lies.

Live from Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: Hoisted from the Archives from Four Years Ago: Oh Dear… the Economist Should Be Doing Better Than This: Arguments for Expansionary Fiscal Policy Watch:

Poor Richard Koo talks sense. But his adversary in the pages of the Economist is… Allan Meltzer.

Live from Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: Our text this afternoon is from the fourth chapter of To Kata Loukan Evangelion, the Gospel According to St. Luke.

Chapter 13 of the Gospel According to St. Mark makes a false prophecy: that the destruction of the Jerusalem temple will be a very strong sign of the approaching Apocalypse. The Jerusalem temple was destroyed by the army of Titus Flavius Caesar Vespasianus in the year 70. The Apocalypse has not yet come. Thus chapter 13 of Mark tells us that the writer was highly likely to have been putting his gospel together in the aftermath of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, expecting the Apocalypse to begin any day, and writing soon enough after the destruction for the continuation of the world not to prompt a rethink--the year 75 or so. Luke uses Mark as a major source, so give Mark a few years to be copied and recopied and get into circulation--and we have Luke written in the 80s, or possibly later, by a man who had talked to people who had talked to people who had seen Yeshua bar Yosef.

The fourth chapter of Luke reports Jesus's very first public sermon thus:

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Mark Thoma: The Politics of Income Inequality
• Must-Read: Rich Gilbert: E-Books: A Tale of Digital Disruption
• Must-Read: Robert Lucas (2001): Bald Peak
• Oliver Bush, Katie Farrant and Michelle Wright: Reform of the International Monetary and Financial System
• Robin Wigglesworth: Larry Summers and Ray Dalio Flag Return of Quantitative Easing
• Justin Fox: It's Often a Curse to Be Blessed With Commodities
• George Akerlof, Andrew Rose, and Janet Yellen (1998): [Job Switching and Job Satisfaction in the U.S. Labor Market](http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Projects/BPEA/1988 2/1988b_bpea_akerlof_rose_yellen_ball_hall.PDF)
• Must-Read: David Blanchflower, Mariana Mazzucato: Jeremy Corbyn's Opposition to Austerity Is Actually Mainstream Economics
• Must-Read: Paul Krugman (2013): Secular Stagnation, Coalmines, Bubbles, and Larry Summers
• Must-Read: Stephen Roach: China’s Complexity Problem
• Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Fairy Tales

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

Live from Jackson Hole: Alice Domurat Dreger: *FAQ on my resignation from Northwestern University_: "In short, I can’t work at a medical school...

...where my dean [Eric G. Neilson] is allowed to censor the work of his faculty in the name of the hospital brand’s welfare. See my letter of resignation for details. For more background, you can see this blog post about what happened to our medical school to turn my work into a ‘branding’ problem...

Seems to me that there ought to be a resignation of a dean from Northwestern tomorrow, no? And if not that, there ought to be a firing of Medical School Dean Eric G. Nielsen by Northwestern President Morton O. Schapiro on Friday, no?

And if not that, there ought to be an emergency meeting of Northwestern University Board of Trustees on Monday, no? My grandfather was proud that he had been a professor at a university with the academic and intellectual tradition of Northwestern. I do not think he would be proud today...

Must-Read: As best as I can see, Robert Lucas is here saying that at the very same moment that Paul Volcker managed to push the U.S. unemployment rate up to 10% via monetary policy, he--Robert Lucas--was convinced by Ed Prescott's "new style of comparing theory to evidence" that "monetary shocks were just not pulling their weight" in providing a potential explanation of short-run movements in production and employment.

No, Paul Romer, I will not let you blame this style of thought on the fact that Bob Solow was mean to Robert Lucas at Bald Peak. The reason that Bob Solow was mean to Robert Lucas at Bald Peak was that this episode was and is characteristic of how Bob Lucas does business:

Robert Lucas (2001): Bald Peak: "In October, 1978—leaf season—the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston sponsored a conference at the Bald Peak Colony Club in New Hampshire...

Live from Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: From the standpoint of the arguments set forth by the far right--ensoulment the moment the sperm's DNA strands touch the egg's, original sin, hence eternal separation from the embrace of the Almighty for all those souls that were never baptized--a single IVF cycle is at least ten times blacker a mortal sin and crime than is an abortion. Yet First Things does not run debates about "Killing IVF Nurses". Bishops do not preach against IVF. The American Principles Project either is silent or at most whispers very quietly about its objections to IVF. Demonstrators do not harass IVF patients, or firebomb IVF clinics:

Duncan Black: Eschaton: IVF: "The lack of conservative opposition to IVF (there is some, but not much) demonstrates that it's just an anti-sex movement...

As you will remember from yesterday, the grifter-goldbug conference featuring grifter-goldbug George Gilder, Steve Moore, Benn Steil, Peter Schiff, and Jim DeMint as its five top headliners is a production of the American Principles Project.

What is the American Principles Project? It says:

Robert P. George – Founder: Dr. George is the Chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). He is also a McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University...

I have read one thing written by Robert P. George--one thing and one thing only:

Robert P. George: Killing Abortionists: A Symposium: "I am personally opposed to killing abortionists. However, inasmuch as my personal opposition to this practice is rooted in a sectarian (Catholic) religious belief in the sanctity of human life, I am unwilling to impose it on others who may, as a matter of conscience, take a different view...

Must-Read: Rich Gilbert: E-Books: A Tale of Digital Disruption: "E-book sales surged after Amazon introduced the Kindle e-reader at the end of 2007...

• Grifters and Goldbugs and Bears, Oh My!: Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging
• What Recovery? Possible Slides for Jackson Lake Lodge/Grand Teton Teach-In
• Liberal Activism!: Federal Reserve Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging Edition
• Must-Read: I think that Paul Krugman's jump from the first to the second paragraph I quote below is wrong--or at least much too hasty: Reason is not that Cunning...
• None of Concerns About Inflation, Employment, Financial Stability, or Inequality Justify Raising Interest Rates Over the Next Year or So...
• Must-Read: Let me note, in agreement with Summers, that, all four times in the past forty years that the Federal Reserve has embarked on a significant tightening cycle, the tightening has revealed significant and dangerous previously-underappreciated financial vulnerabilities...
• Comment of the Day: Charles Steindel: "Forget about 2% vs. 4% as a target. Fed speak... is clearly viewing 2% as a ceiling!...: Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging:
• Musing on Right-Wing Affinity Fraud in Politics and Economics...
• Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: Must-Read: Noah Smith makes an extremely cogent case that any increases in interest rates by the Federal Reserve this September for this December or, indeed, next March are almost surely premature and inappropriate. So why is the Federal Reserve on track to do so?...
• What Rates of Economic Growth Could Better Economic Policy Produce Over an Eight-Year Presidential Term?
• Must-Read: Elise Gould: Prime-Age Employment-to-Population Ratio Remains Terribly Depressed...
• Comment of the Day: Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging The Idler: Lehman Brothers Once Again...: Fed transcripts: Bernanke chose to let Lehman fail...
• Comment of the Day: Jackson Hole Weblogging: Philip Wallach: Federal Reserve ad Hocracy,Precedent, and Legal Realism...
• Must-Read: It is interesting that these days even Dean Baker is calling 215,000 net jobs a strong-growth month. I would still require more than 300,000 a month for 'strong'...
• Must-Read: A set of model runs backing up the judgment of the very sharp--and, alas!, late--Federal Reserve Governor Ned Gramlich: increases in interest rates large enough to discourage a housing bubble would me much too large for there to be even a faint prayer that the economy could escape a damaging recession...
• Today's Economic History: Rudi Dornbusch Comments on Ken Rogoff's Mundell-Fleming Lecture
• Gilder, Moore, Steil, Schiff, DeMint. Would it be possible to put together a set of speakers who have been more wrong in their predictions over the past generation about how the economy works, and less willing to do anything to mark their beliefs to market? I do not think so... American Principles Project: FIVE WEEKS: Historic Economic Summit to Take Place in Jackson Hole...
• Must-Read: The very sharp Ken Rogoff calls for Europe to undertake The Acceptable Year of the Lord--cancel the debts, and redistribute the land...
• Must-Read: This remarkable tendency to abandon policies that... have worked.... The Republican Party could be taking... well-deserved victory laps... [for example] the monetary policies of Republican Ben Bernanke gave the United States the best recovery from 2009 in the North Atlantic.
• Dwight D. Eisenhower on the Koch Brothers: 'A tiny splinter group... that believes you can do these things... a few... Texas oil millionaires... an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid...

We of What Recovery? and all of our friends at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economic Policy Conference and Drinking Party are not the only people up in Jackson Hole this week. There are also moose, elk, bison, cougars, and assorted other charismatic albeit dangerous megafauna. And bears--although most of the bears appear to be in Shanghai this week...

And then there is the American Principles Project down-valley somewhere--a conference that seems to me to be totally composed of grifters and goldbugs, with the accent on the first. They are there, charging their attendees a healthy sum, because, they say, current Federal Reserve policies are dangerously inflationary, and so they need to "bring sanity back to U.S. monetary policy":

American Principles Project: FIVE WEEKS: Historic Economic Summit to Take Place in Jackson Hole, Wyoming August 27-29: "The first official Jackson Hole Summit is just five weeks away...

Over at Equitable Growth: Note to Self: Several points to try to hit this week in Jackson Hole:

• The Federal Reserve was supposed to be a people's central bank. The desire to make it a people's central bank was behind the pre-World War I democratic progressive rejection of the Aldrich plan--written by John D. Rockefeller II's father-in-law Sen. Nelson Aldrich (R-RI). Instead of being run by bankers for bankers, the Federal Reserve was to be run by wise technocrats--the Board in Washington, with presidentially-appointed members with very long terms--to be distributed around the country in 12 reserve banks only one of which would be in New York, and the directors the bank presidents served would have a solid majority representing their region's public and the Board, not representing bankers. READ MOAR

Over at Equitable Growth: Kevin Cirillo shows up in my inbox:

Kevin Cirilli: Activists Confront Fed Leaders to Warn Against Rate Hike

And my first reaction: Is he talking about former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers? Is he one of the "activists" in question?

Lawrence Summers: The Fed Looks Set to Make a Dangerous Mistake: "the Fed has put its price stability objective into practice by adopting... READ MOAR