Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Jong-Wha Lee: Containing China’s Slowdown: "China has been breaking the mold on economic growth for the last three decades...

Must-Read: Henry Aaron: Can Taxing the Rich Reduce Inequality? You Bet It Can!: "Two recently posted papers by Brookings colleagues purport to show that...

Over at Equitable Growth: Kevin Warsh and Michael Spence attack Ben Bernanke and his policy of quantitative easing, which they claim "has hurt business investment."

I score this for Bernanke: 6-0, 6-0, 6-0.

In fact, I do not even think that Spence and Warsh understand that one is supposed to have a racket in hand when one tries to play tennis. As I see it, the Fed's open-market operations have produced more spending--hence higher capacity utilization--and lower interest rates--has more advantageous costs of finance--and we are supposed to believe that its policies "have hurt business investment"?!?! READ MOAR

Over at Equitable Growth Nick Bunker says: Nick Bunker: A Kink in the Phillips Curve: "Look at the relationship between wage growth and another measure of labor market slack, however, [and] the [Phillips-Curve] relationship might hold up. Take a look at Figure 1:

READ MOAR

Joe Biden: "People have written that, you know, Beau on his death bed said, 'Dad, you've got to run', and, there was this sort of Hollywood moment that, you know, nothing like that ever, ever happened..."

Maureen Dowd: "The column is accurate..."

Dean Baquet: "It is hard to imagine that some version of this is not true..."

Maureen Dowd: What Would Beau Do?: "My kid’s dying, an anguished Joe Biden thought to himself...

...and he’s making sure I’m O.K. ‘Dad, I know you don’t give a damn about money,’ Beau told him, dismissing the idea that his father would take some sort of cushy job after the vice presidency to cash in. Beau was losing his nouns and the right side of his face was partially paralyzed. But he had a mission: He tried to make his father promise to run, arguing that the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values....

When Beau was dying, the family got rubber bracelets in blue--his favorite color--that said ‘WWBD,’ What Would Beau Do, honoring the fact that Beau was a stickler for doing the right thing. Joe Biden knows what Beau wants. Now he just has to decide if it’s who he is.

The problem for Maureen Dowd and the New York Times is that Dowd has said two things:

1. There was this huge Hollywood Moment--paralyzed face, mission, "my kid's dying" an anguished Joe Biden thought, WWBD.
2. Joe Biden is authentic, a straight-shooter, a real man's man, not the mannish manipulator that is THE WITCH!!!! have to pick (1) or (2) to stick to. And she cannot decide...

Live from the Roasterie: Thoreau: Benghazi Fever: "I will not assert that the State Department did everything right for [consulate] security [in Benghazi]...

Eric Schlosser (2006): On Upton Sinclair: 'I Aimed For The Public's Heart, And... Hit It In The Stomach': "'The Jungle' Was A Socialist's Cry For Labor Justice....

...It Launched A Consumer Movement Instead....

Must-Read: Tim Harford: The Real Benefits of migration: "UK Home Secretary Theresa May gave a speech... designed to polarise.... She succeeded...

The Dynamics of Political Language: Partisan Asymmetries Weblogging:

Comment on Jacob Jensen, Ethan Kaplan, Suresh Naidu, and Laurence Wilse-Samson, 'The Dynamics of Political Language': as prepared for delivery:

Let me pick up and expand on the line of discussion initiated by David Gergen's excellent comment.

I think this paper does an excellent job of documenting and helping us understand ideological polarization.

I think this paper does not do a good job of understanding partisan polarization.

Theodore Roosevelt in 1896 was a Republican attack dog, denouncing Democratic Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan as a mere puppet of the Alien Communist Anarchist John Peter Altgeld. Bryan, Roosevelt said:

Comment of the Day: Phil Koop: Monday Smackdown: Matt O'Brien Reminds Us of Michael Kinsley: "'Journalists will be kicking themselves...

Must-Read: Kathleen Maclay: Climate Change Will Reshape Global Economy: "Unmitigated climate change is likely to reduce the income of an average person on Earth by roughly 23 percent in 2100...

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Robert Solow** (1985): Economic History and Economics
• Kevin Drum: Red States Spent $2 Billion in 2015 to S---- the Poor
• Martin Wolf: Lunch with the FT: Ben Bernanke
• Tierney Sneed: Cosmic Irony: States That Didn't Expand Medicaid Paying More
• Charles Bean: Causes and Consequences of Persistently Low Interest Rates
• Kevin Drum: The Great 1998 [Global Warming Denier] Chart Swindle Is Now Officially Over
• Nick Buffie and Dean Baker: Rising Disability Payments: Are Cuts to Workers’ Compensation Part of the Story?

Live from the Algonquin Hotel: Dorothy Parker: "Curiosity is the cure for boredom. There is no cure for curiosity."

Good Siri! Admittedly, "The bolt of Tash falls from above!" was only your second-choice transcription. (First was: "the both of Tash falls from above!")

But, still, good!

Must-Read: So what is the argument against shifting the monetary-policy target to 4%/year PCE inflation or 6%/year nominal GDP growth again? I mean, Larry Summers and I wrote 23 years ago that the danger of hitting the zero lower bound made it potentially unwise to aim to push inflation much below 5%/year--and that was when we expected both a small equity risk premium--hence Treasury rates not far below the return on physical investment--and not a global savings glut but rather a global savings shortfall:

Charles Bean: Causes and Consequences of Persistently Low Interest Rates: "Demographic developments... the partial integration of China...

Can anybody tell me why the New York Times Book Review gave Ben Bernanke's memoir to Michael Kinsley to review, rather than to somebody who would have known what he was talking about--like, say, Martin Wolf or Alan Blinder or Paul Volcker or Larry Summers?

That time Michael Kinsley said the coming hyperinflation would be a financial 9/11 http://t.co/DAaTotsUgp pic.twitter.com/X1sLhsV99U

— Matt O'Brien (@ObsoleteDogma) September 24, 2015

Or I guess Michael Kinsley had no idea what he was talking about when he predicted a coming storm of inflation!

— Matt O'Brien (@ObsoleteDogma) September 22, 2015

I guess we got a miracle! http://t.co/cP409Q0Ev0 pic.twitter.com/lqnJGptnBa

— Matt O'Brien (@ObsoleteDogma) September 22, 2015

Must-Read: Martin Wolf: Lunch with the FT: Ben Bernanke: "'The notion that the Fed has somehow enriched the rich...

Must-Read: Nobody is saying anymore that states' rejecting Medicaid expansion is a way of raising the chances of repealing-and-replacing ObamaCare with something better. Only true dead-enders--cough, Michael F. Cannon--are claiming that Medicaid is ineffective. And more and more evidence piles up that Medicaid expansion lowers rather than raising state-level health spending even in the short run. The remarkable thing is that the anti-Medicaid expansion zombies just keep on going--and it's not just the poor, it's the disabled, it's the elderly whom Medicare copays have made poor, and its the hospitals and doctors and nurses who treat the poor:

Kevin Drum: Red States Spent $2 Billion in 2015 to S---- the Poor: "In 2015... spending by states that refused to expand Medicaid...

Live from Evans Hall: Robert Solow (1985): Economic History and Economics:

Robert M. Solow (1985), "Economic History and Economics", American Economic Review 75:2 (May), pp. 328-331 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1805620

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Matt O'Brien: Europe Just Made It Harder for the Fed to Raise Rates
• Katie Martin: Dovish Mario Draghi sends bond yields to new lows
• Jeff Spross: Will Americans Ever Embrace the 30-Hour Workweek?
• Uwe Reinhardt (2013): Health Care Deserves More Respect
• Uwe Reinhardt (2010): Is Health Care Special? | Health Care, Uncertainty and Morality | Is 'More Efficient' Always Better? | When Value Judgments Masquerade as Science
• Nick Bunker: How tax expenditures distort our understanding of the U.S. tax code
• James Surowiecki: The Rise and Fall of For-Profit Colleges

Robert Farley: The Most Horrific War of All Time: Russia vs. Germany:

The raw statistics of the war are nothing short of stunning. On the Soviet side, some seven million soldiers died in action, with another 3.6 million dying in German POW camps. The Germans lost four million soldiers in action, and another 370000 to the Soviet camp system. Some 600000 soldiers from other participants (mostly Eastern European) died as well. These numbers do not include soldiers lost on either side of the German-Polish War, or the Russo-Finnish War.... Around 15 million Soviet civilians are thought to have been killed. Some three million ethnic Poles died (some before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, but many after) along with around three million Jews of Polish and another two million of Soviet citizenship (included in the Soviet statistics). Somewhere between 500000 and 2 million German civilians died in the expulsions that followed the war.

: Matthew O'Brien: Yes, Niall Ferguson Knew He Was Playing Three-Card-Monte with the "Wall Street Journal's" Readers via His Misuse of Budget Baselines. Why Do You Ask?: Noted: Matthew O'Brien: Truth in the Age of Niallism: "Harvard historian Niall Ferguson still thinks bluster can substitute for facts...

...Here are three facts about how the 10-year budget outlook has changed in the past year: 1) the fiscal cliff deal raised $600 billion in new revenue; 2) the sequester, if left in place, cut $1.2 trillion; 3) the CBO revised its projection for federal healthcare spending down by $600 billion. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has a counterfactual take. Here's how he described how our debt trajectory changed the past year:

Must-Read: Matt O'Brien: Europe Just Made It Harder for the Fed to Raise Rates: "Europe is going to have zero interest rates for a lot longer...

...that is going to make it harder for the United States to stop having them.... The ECB seems set to do something at its December meeting to try to prevent the emerging market slowdown from spilling over into Europe and get inflation moving back up toward its 2 percent target. It that sounds familiar, that's because it is. Those are the same problems the U.S. has now. But instead of thinking about new ways to stimulate the economy, the Federal Reserve is getting ready to do less. Why? Well, unemployment is half as high here as it is in Europe, so there should be more upward pressure on inflation. Look at that last sentence again, though. That's a lot of faith to put in one of the most dangerous words in the English language--should--when the cost of being wrong is so high. Indeed, inflation isn't increasing at all now even though unemployment is down to a pretty normal level....

Consider this: according to Goldman Sachs, just talking about raising rates has already tightened financial conditions as if the Fed had actually raised them around three times. And that was when the ECB was only buying 60 billion euros of bonds a month. It'd be even more of a problem if it was buying more.... If two monetary policies diverge even more in, well, not a wood, we might take the path every other country that has tried to raise rates from zero has traveled by--back to where we started.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/23/europe-just-made-it-harder-for-the-fed-to-raise-rates/

Katie Martin: Dovish Mario Draghi sends bond yields to new lows: "Yields on two-year debt now stand below zero for almost every member of the eurozone...

...Investors have been piling into eurozone debt since a press conference on Thursday at which ECB president Mario Draghi suggested further cuts to the deposit rate could be on the way. The deposit rate already stands at minus 0.2 per cent.... The ECB has already been buying an average of €60bn a month since March, mostly in government bonds, and intends to continue that programme until at least September next year. But investors now think the programme could last longer, encompass more instruments or grow in size.... Economists think the euro weakness that would inevitably accompany a fresh bout of easing from the ECB will create headaches for other central banks in the region. Swedish bank SEB wrote on Friday that the prospect of further easing is ‘a nightmare’ for the Riksbank, which already has interest rates at rock bottom to try and support inflation. Renewed strength in the krona, the flip side of weakness in the euro, would probably depress consumer prices still further.

The View from Evans Hall: I had thought--mistakenly, it appears--thought that everyone had had the same thoughts and came to the same conclusion back the first semester they were a TA:

1. Don't hit on students. No matter how "pure" your intentions are and no matter how much you think you are a nice guy, they can never know whether or not you are threatening to withhold the grades, letters, and mentoring they deserve if they don't come across. To put any young person in such a position is the act of a real asshole. And if there is any sign you are not as nice a guy as you think you are, that is it.
2. A sensible administration policy would be: one complaint, and you are on notice; two complaints, and you go to talk therapy to think through your failure to empathize with young people who cannot know whether you are threatening them; three complaints--well, even if you claim that everything is misinterpreted and that they all the complaints are from psychos, that you have managed to attract three psychos who complain is a very good reason for you to find a different kind of job someplace else, no?

Comment of the Day: Robert Waldmann: Reaching for Yield: "I have read your Bean excerpt which is very brief...

• Jeb Lund: Republicans' 11-Hour Gift to Hillary Clinton: "The Republicans wanted Hillary Clinton's head mounted on a wall, and they'll get it. At this rate... it will... come in the form of her official presidential photo..."
• Kenneth Thomas: "The gist of the three cases is that tax haven subsidiaries of each company (Starbucks in the Netherlands, Fiat in Luxembourg, and Apple in Ireland) were given advance tax rulings by each country that [the EU judged] were so removed from economic reality as to constitute illegal subsidies ('state aid' in Euro-speak) under EU competition law..."
• Francesco Saraceno: "Inflation-targeting central banks, like the ECB, de facto target the output gap, but timidly and without explicitly saying so. This leads to low reactivity and opaque communication.... Those who followed the EMU policy debate in the past few years will know what I am talking about.... [at] the Fed the opacity results from an ongoing debate on how to best attain an objective that is clear and shared.... The ECB opacity is intrinsically linked to the confusion between its mandate and its actual action, and as such it cannot lead to any meaningful discussion, but just to legalistic disputes..."
• Martin Sandbu: "In response to Federal Reserve vice-chairman Stanley Fischer’s latest speech, Brad DeLong succinctly explains why the challenge of reducing interest rates below zero means central banks should optimally aim to stay behind the curve rather than ahead of it--that is to say, better tighten too late than too soon..."
• Paul Krugman: "It’s also worth noting the difference in perspective that comes from having your original intellectual home in international versus domestic macroeconomics. I would say that Brainard’s experience is dominated not so much by the Great Moderation as by the Asian financial crisis and Japan’s stagnation; internationally oriented macro types were aware earlier than most that Depression-type issues never went away..."
• Charles Bean: Causes and Consequences of Persistently Low Interest Rates
• Nancy LeTourneau: The Real Effect of Citizens United on the GOP

Live from La Farine: Here there is no "why": Republicans and Sidney Blumenthal:

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Charles Bean: Causes and Consequences of Persistently Low Interest Rates
• Noah Smith Eats Greg Mankiw's Just Desserts | Noah Smith: I get what you get in ten years, in two days
• Charles Bean et al.: Low for Long?: Causes and Consequences of Persistently Low Interest Rates
• Michael Hiltzik: Maybe there won't be an interest rate hike this year after all
• Matt Phillips: Bernanke: I’m not really a Republican anymore
• Paul Krugman: Keynes Comes to Canada
• Orazio Attanasio: Angus Deaton, Nobel Laureate
• Paul Krugman: Scam They Am
• Matthew Yglesias: What the right doesn't get about Piketty

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog:

Must-Read: So: On the one hand, risk tolerance is disappointingly and inappropriately low--but should return to normal some day. On the other hand, investors are "reaching for yield" and taking inappropriate risks by crowding into bubbly assets. I cannot be the only person who wants a real model of how this is supposed to work, and real evidence that it is a factor at work, plus a real argument that higher interest rates would exert enough of a curb to pass some reasonable benefit-cost test. The very sharp Gabriel Chodorow-Reich looked for this and did not find it...

Charles Bean: Causes and Consequences of Persistently Low Interest Rates: "Demographic developments... the partial integration of China...

K.S.B. Keats-Rohan: The Genesis of the Honour of Wallingford:

From a twelfth-century perspective, the honour of Wallingford appears to be a typical Norman institution. However, a re-examination of its constituent parts indicates that through marriage it was largely derived from the lands of Wigod of Wallingford and his family. Wigod appears to have been one of Edward the Confessor’s stallers and the estates that he held were what was effectively a pre-conquest ‘castlery’ with origins in a period before the formation of the county of Berkshire. Throughout its history the honour was to remain under the tight control of the crown, reflecting its strategic role in the defence of the middle Thames valley.

Live from Parkville, MO: Two things crossing my screen. The first is a correspondent informing me that ex-Old New Republic writer Mickey Kaus, who I will remember as the crusader against Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein who got wingnut welfare from Slate to the tune of $350 per weblog post (that averaged 1.5 paragraphs each), is opposing Paul Ryan from the right for being too-big of a pro-amnesty squish on immigration to be a proper Speaker of the House.

The second is this:

Jeb Bush: Team Bush in a Fog: "If this is an election about how we’re going to fight...

...to get nothing done, I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people are literally in decline in their lives. That is not my motivation. I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around being miserable, listening to people demonize me and me feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke. Elect Trump if you want that.

Charlie Stross: 21st Century: A Complaint:

I want to complain to the studio execs who commissioned the current season of '21st century'; your show is broken.

I say this as a viewer coming in with low expectations. Its predecessor '20th century' plumbed the depths of inconsistency with the frankly silly story arc for World War II. It compounded it by leaving tons of loose plot threads dangling until the very last minute, then tidied them all up in a blinding hurry in that bizarre 1989-92 episode just in time for the big Y2K denouement (which then fizzled). But the new series reboot is simply ridiculous! It takes internal inconsistency to a new low, never before seen in the business: the '21st century' show is just plain implausible.

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Scam They Am: "Eric Lipton and Jennifer Steinhauer... find that the...

[Tea Party] PACs... [of] the Freedom Fraud caucus are basically in it for the money... consultants’ fees... paid to the... people organizing the drives.... As Rick Perlstein pointed out several years ago, the modern conservative movement is in large part a ‘strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers’ with ‘a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.’...

Live from Parkville, MO: I must say: Jeb Bush seems not to be an entitled twit who is the son of one and the brother of another president, and is running for the office. He seems to be a performance artist playing the part of an entitled twit who is the son of one and the brother of another president, and is running for the office:

Jeb Bush: “Blah blah blah blah, that’s my answer, blah blah blah.

Over at Equitable Growth: Insofar as there is any thought behind the claims of John Taylor and others that the Federal Reserve is engaged in "price controls" via its monetary policy actions.

Strike that.

There is no thought at all behind such claims at all.

Insofar as one did want to think, and so construct an argument that the Federal Reserve's monetary policy operations are destructive and in some ways analogous to "price controls", the argument would go something like this: READ MOAR

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig (2014): The Shape of Things: "Certainly the expectation is to comport yourself...

...with a certain mannerliness, to perform even opposition within a kind of collegial parameter that suggests, as I have argued before, the equality of positions even when you don’t believe in such a thing. The threat that presents itself when you express yourself in one of the non-friendly, non-gentle, non-civil styles is this: you won’t have a career.

Must-Read: As I have said before and will stay again, the Republican Party could be taking a serious policy victory lap right now, not just with respect to health policy--as Mitt Romney tried to do yesterday before losing his nerve and pulling back--and with respect to monetary policy. they could be pointing out right now that the most successful recovery in the North Atlantic from 2008-9 was engineered by Republican Ben Bernanke following Friedmanite countercyclical monetary policies.

But no!

Live from the Roasterie: I find myself hearing a huge amount of this from all kinds of people: John Boehner, Kevin McCarthy, Trey Gowdy, and company in the Republican congressional caucus appear to have paid for Hillary Rodham Clinton to make an 11-hour campaign commercial with very good production values that is having a large and material impact both in impressing potential swing voters with her competence and energy and in impressing the base that otherwise spends substantial time thinking about why she is not an ideal candidate. Quite remarkable, actually:

Thoreau: I don’t cry for yesterday; there’s an ordinary world: "My mother.... before today... would have been happy to find a reason...

Harry S Truman: Proclamation of United Nations Charter and Statute of the International Court of Justice:

WHEREAS the Charter of the United Nations, with the Statute of the International Court of Justice annexed thereto, was formulated at the United Nations Conference on International Organization and was signed in San Francisco on June 26,1945 by the Plenipotentiaries of the United States of America and the respective Plenipotentiaries of forty-nine other Governments, and was signed in Washington on October 15,1945 by the Plenipotentiary of one other Government, the original of which Charter, with annexed Statute, in the Chinese, French, Russian, English, and Spanish languages, as certified by the Department of State of the United States of America, is word for word as follows....

Eleanor Roosevelt, : My Day:

All over our country we destroy old historic buildings when we should preserve them, and here in New York City I understand that the war is on again between our very efficient Park Commissioner, Robert Moses, and such people in the city as really care about preserving old landmarks. The issue this time is Fort Clinton, which was designed by John McComb, the architect of our City Hall

Walter Warlimont: My Position in the OKW:

Eleanor Roosevelt: My Day:

The other evening I finished reading Henry Morgenthau, Junior's book, 'Germany Is Our Problem.' The facts in this book are carefully checked. It is not written with any hate of the German people, but with the purpose of making it clear to us that this land which lies in the center of Europe must not be allowed to start another war. I think it is the best answer to some of the industrialists, both in Great Britain and here, who think more of their pockets than they do of world safety. Listening to them, one would think that Russia had been our enemy, and not Germany—so vocal are those who fear Russia's potential power and who therefore want to rebuild Germany's industrial strength. They forget, I think, that this power has never yet been used by Russia to bring about a world war. That cannot be said of Germany.

Khan Academy: Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction: "Why Warren Buffett called...

...Credit Default Swaps 'financial weapons of mass destruction'...

Financial weapons of mass destruction: Why Warren Buffett called Credit Default Swaps financial weapons of mass destruction

Comment of the Day: Captain Domestic: Testing Time for Spreadsheets: "I'm biased as a MathWorks employee...

...but you may want to look into MATLAB. It is really strong in the kinds of data analysis and plotting that econ students need to do. MATLAB has a pretty non-programmer friendly editor and model that helps new users.

Mitt Romney: [The late Staples founder Thomas Stemberg was] an extraordinarily creative and dynamic visionary.... Mr. Stemberg was one of the great business leaders...

...of our state and our nation,’ Romney said. ‘He was not only the founder, but someone who grew the company to a multi-billion dollar enterprise. He built an industry that employs thousands and thousands of people.... Without Tom pushing it, I don’t think we would have had Romneycare. Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare. So, without Tom a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance...

Mind you, Romney could claim he was criticizing the late Tom Stemberg--"without Tom, a lot of people wouldn't have health insurance through RomneyCare and ObamaCare, and that would be a better world than this." But somehow I don't think Romney is going to go there.

I mean... Romney had so many opportunities over the past six years to play a constructive role... He took advantage of none of them... I... I can't even...

Come to the Medicare Part D Health Fair on Saturday, October 24!

9-Noon, Pierson Auditorium, Atterbury Student Success Center, 5000 Holmes St, Kansas City, MO 64110, 51st & Cherry

UMKC’s School of Law and School of Pharmacy [are] host[ing] a health fair aimed at making sure older adults understand their benefits and how to save money on medications.... The health fair is free and open to community members who receive, or are eligible for, Medicare Part D:

• Medicare Part D Health Fair in Kansas City, MO - Oct 24, 2015 9:00 AM | Eventful
• UMKC Chapter Lends Hand to Help explain Medicare Part D Options
• Health Fair answers Medicare questions

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Michael Clemens: The South Pacific Secret to Breaking the Poverty Cycle
• Martin Wolf: Lunch with the FT: Ben Bernanke
• Adair Turner: Debt Déjà Vu
• Eduardo Porter: The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor
• Tim Duy: Fed Struggles With The High Water Mark
• Marshall I. Steinbaum and Bernard A. Weisberger: Economics was Once Radical: Then It Decided Not to Be
• Nick Bunker: A look at U.S. tax rates at the top
• Brad Plumer: The math on staying below 2°C of global warming looks increasingly brutal
• Paul Krugman: Rethinking Japan
• Kenneth Thomas: "The gist of the three cases is that tax haven subsidiaries of each company (Starbucks in the Netherlands, Fiat in Luxembourg, and Apple in Ireland) were given advance tax rulings by each country that [the EU judged] were so removed from economic reality as to constitute illegal subsidies ('state aid' in Euro-speak) under EU competition law..."

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

Live from the Roasterie: Ogged: More Like AlderGONE!: "Have you ever wanted to look inside the neocon mind?...

...I mean, really look at it? No, of course you haven't. Too bad:

@BillKristol: .@adesnik @DouthatNYT No objective evidence Empire was "evil." A liberal regime w meritocracy, upward mobility. Neocon/reformicon in spirit.

Must-Read: Michael Clemens: The South Pacific Secret to Breaking the Poverty Cycle: "The average Tongan household that participated was earning just NZ$1,400 per year...