Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Live from Bernie Sanders's Self-Made Gehenna: Jonathan Saker: On Twitter:

Bernie Sanders: ‘You are asking me questions about Latin America... but right now I’m running for president of the U.S.'

Over at Equitable Growth: Must-Reads:

• Nick Bunker: Why public assistance for children should address what happens before birth - Equitable Growth
• Ann Johnson: Environmental regulation and technological development in the U.S. auto industry - Equitable Growth
• Michael Gorman: Emerging technologies, education, and the income gap - Equitable Growth
• Kostadis J. Papaioannou: “Hunger Makes a Thief of Any Man”: Poverty and Crime in British Colonial Asia
• Josh Bivens: Larry Summers, the Congressional Progressive Caucus Budget, and the Abandonment of Fiscal Policy
• Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, and Andrei Shleifer: Diagnostic Expectations and Credit Cycles
• Eric Loomis: Jobs for Those Who Lack College Degrees

Live from the Republicans' Self-Made Gehenna: David Roberts: Trump promises "complete American energy independence -- COMPLETE." That is utter nonsense: "Trump energy speech about to begin...

...I might be live tweeting it. Mute as necessary.

**Live from the Republicans' Self-Made Gehenna: A Republican Salute to Hillary Clinton:

Hoisted from 2006: Main Currents of Marxism: Back in the early 1970s, Leszek Kolakowski tells English historian E.P. Thompson what he thinks of him:

Socialist Register (1974): Your letter contains some personal grievances and some arguments on general questions. I will start with a minor personal grievance. Oddly enough, you seem to feel offended by not having been invited to the Reading conference and you state that if you had been invited you would have refused to attend anyway, on serious moral grounds. I presume, consequently, that if you had been invited, you would have felt offended as well and so, no way out of hurting you was open to the organizers.

Now, the moral ground you cite is the fact that in the organizing Committee you found the name of Robert Cecil. And what is sinister about Robert Cecil is that he once worked in the British diplomatic service. And so, your integrity does not allow you to sit at the same table with someone who used to work in British diplomacy.

O, Blessed Innocence!

Must-Read: Kostadis J. Papaioannou: “Hunger Makes a Thief of Any Man”: Poverty and Crime in British Colonial Asia: "Extreme rainfall, both droughts and floods, lead to a large increase in property crimes (such as robbery, petty theft and cattle raiding)...

Live from the Republicans' Self-Made Gehenna: Jonathan Bernstein: The Republican Party Got the Voters It Deserved: "Megan McArdle thinks people are exaggerating the Republican Party's responsibility for Donald Trump...

Live from the Republicans' Self-Made Gehenna: kstreet607: WATCH: This 10 Minute Elizabeth Warren Speech Needs To Be Played On Repeat Through November:

Must-Read: Very clever indeed...

Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, and Andrei Shleifer: Diagnostic Expectations and Credit Cycles: "We present a model of credit cycles arising from diagnostic expectations...

Live from the Self-Made Gehenna which is Twitter: Verb. sap.:

Anderson: ThusTweeted:

I have created this beautiful thing for you all. pic.twitter.com/EcXrc8PbYl

— Phillip Bastien (@PABastien) May 25, 2016

Must-Read: Perhaps I have fallen down on the job. Perhaps I have not EconomistSplained enough to the very sharp Eric Loomis that the Education Fraction does not believe that everybody ought to get a college education. The Education Fraction, rather, believes that the demand for college-educated workers is relatively inelastic, so that small increases in the relative numbers of college-educated workers will produce large decreases in the college wage premium and large increases in the wages of high school-educated workers. They--we--may be right and we may be wrong. But it's not that we completely ignores the fact that some people are simply not cut out for a college education. Rather, we believe in supply and inelastic labor demand...

Eric Loomis: Jobs for Those Who Lack College Degrees: "As I have stated many times here...

Over at Equitable Growth: Must-Reads:

• Eric Loomis: Jobs for Those Who Lack College Degrees
• Branko Milanovic, Janet Gornick, and Paul Krugman: Talking Global Inequality
• Brad DeLong et al.: Paul Volcker and the Human League: "Monetary Superneutrality"--Claiming That Real Variables Are Invariant to Changes in the Average Inflation Rate--Is No Longer a Thing...

Winston S. Churchill: The World Crisis:

In the tense naval controversy upon Jutland the keenest minds in the Navy have sifted every scrap of evidence. Every minute has been measured. The speed, the course, the position of every ship great or small, at every period in the operation, have been scrutinized. The information in the possession of every Admiral in each phase has been examined, weighed, canvassed. The dominant school of naval thought and policy are severe critics of Sir John Jellicoe. They disclaim all personal grounds or motives; they affirm that the tradition and future of the British Navy join in demanding that a different doctrine, other methods and above all another spirit must animate our captains at sea, if ever and whenever the Navy is once again at war. They declare that such an affirmation is more important to the public than the feelings of individuals, the decorous maintenance of appearances, the preservation of a superficial harmony, or the respect which may rightly be claimed by a Commander-in-Chief who, over the major portion of the war, discharged an immense and indeed inestimable responsibility.

Andrew Gordon: The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command:

Interaction between Beatty and Evan-Thomas appears, by contrast, to have been non-existent.

Evan-Thomas was by age, temperament and background a root and branch Jellicoe man and by no stretch of the imagination a potential member of the Beatty club. His Victorian code of honour – his sense of what was and wasn’t ‘the done thing’ – itself precluded a hail-fellow friendship with his fast and flashy (and considerably younger) superior. Vice-Admiral Sir Geoffrey Barnard later wrote:

A month ago I wrote:

"You are not doing enough in the way of promiscuous link-sluttage", my conscience says to me, occasionally. "You are not doing enough in the way of making people who come to your weblog aware of very smart people whom they ought to be paying attention to--but are not. You have an obligation not only to punch up, but to extend a hand down--to promote people who, by accidents of chance and historical contingency, are just as smart (or more) and are as (or more) worth reading as you are."

"So what can I do?" I say.

Must-Watch: Branko Milanovic, Janet Gornick, and Paul Krugman: Talking Global Inequality:

Comment of the Day: Lee Arnold: Why is it that Tocqueville, Keynes, and Polanyi are still "it" as far as policy-relevant useful social theory is concerned?: "I sometimes think about your question...

...and I think that the answer is because we still remain in their era, but we don't know it.

Must-Read: Brad DeLong et al.: Paul Volcker and the Human League: "Monetary Superneutrality"--Claiming That Real Variables Are Invariant to Changes in the Average Inflation Rate--Is No Longer a Thing...:

Over at Equitable Growth: Must-Reads:

• Nick Bunker: U.S. tax policy complicated by falling taxes on U.S. stocks - Equitable Growth
• : The Intellectual Industry of Manufacturing Objections to Helicopter Money/Social Credit Is a Peculiar One... - Equitable Growth
• Today's Economic History: John Maynard Keynes (1931): Unemployment as a World Problem - Equitable Growth
• Hoisted from the Archives: Me Reviewing Robert Skidelsky on John Maynard Keynes - Equitable Growth
• Atif Mian and Amir Sufi: Who Bears the Cost of Recessions? The Role of House Prices and Household Debt
• Larry Summers: What You Need to Know About the Next Recession (Starring Donald Trump)
• Patrick Iber and Mike Konczal: Karl Polanyi for President

Must-Read: Atif Mian and Amir Sufi: Who Bears the Cost of Recessions? The Role of House Prices and Household Debt: "We... show... differential shocks to household net worth coming from elevated household debt and the collapse in house prices play an underappreciated role...

The very sharp Nick Rowe is distressed and depressed:

Nick Rowe: "This article on helicopter money is such a mare's nest...

...I don't know where to begin to untangle the mess. https://t.co/C0sqyNSjM3

— Nick Rowe (@MacRoweNick) May 25, 2016

I agree with Rowe: Borio, Disyatat, and Zabal seem to me to be confused.

Live from the Great Transformation: Why is it that Tocqueville, Keynes, and Polanyi are still "it" as far as policy-relevant useful social theory is concerned? They all wrote long, long ago now...

Unemployment as a World Problem

John Maynard Keynes :: Harris Foundation Lectures

I. THE ORIGINATING CAUSES OF WORLD-UNEMPLOYMENT

I. We are today in the middle of the greatest economic catastrophe—the greatest catastrophe due almost entirely to economic causes—of the modern world. I am told that the view is held in Moscow that this is the last, the culminating crisis of capitalism and that our existing order of society will not survive it. Wishes are fathers to thoughts. But there is, I think, a possibility—I will not put it higher than that—that when this crisis is looked back upon by the economic historian of the future it will be seen to mark one of the major turning-points. For it is a possibility that the duration of the slump may be much more prolonged than most people are expecting and that much will be changed, both in our ideas and in our methods, before we emerge. Not, of course, the duration of the acute phase of the slump, but that of the long, dragging conditions of semislump, or at least sub-normal prosperity which may be expected to succeed the acute phase. Not more than a possibility, however. For I believe that our destiny is in our own hands and that we can emerge from it if only we choose—or rather if those choose who are in authority in the world.

Live from the Republicans' Self-Made Gehenna: Overwrought. But prescient for the Age of Trump. From 1998: Chris Hedges quoting Richard Rorty on Edward Luttwak: The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism: "Richard Rorty in his last book, ‘Achieving Our Country’...

...written in 1998, presciently saw where our postindustrial nation was headed.

Must-Read: What Larry Summers says:

Larry Summers: What You Need to Know About the Next Recession (Starring Donald Trump): "How should we respond to the next recession?...

Live from Twitter's Incomprehensible User Interface: Timothy B. Lee: Twitter replies are broken, and Twitter has a great plan to fix them: "Twitter's handling of replies might be the platform's most confusing feature...

Live from the Left-Wing Twitter Flying Monkey Herd: Jesse Singal tries to tell a flying monkey to calm down:

Jesse Singal: On Twitter: "Quick protip...

...One of the biggest Twitter dick moves imaginable is to refuse a request to talk offline...

Live from the Huffington Post's self-made Gehenna of Lies: It has a serious quality control problem with Zach Carter too. But the time to talk about that won't come until November...

Clean up your act, Huffington Post!

Seth Abramson: On Bernie Sanders and Experimental Journalism: "When I began covering Bernie Sanders for The Huffington Post...

Live from Cupertino in 1997: Ben Thompson: The Curse of Culture: "Shein defines leadership in the context of culture:

When we examine culture and leadership closely... cultural norms define how a given nation or organizations will define leadership.... On the other hand... the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture... it is an ultimate act of leadership to destroy culture when it is viewed as dysfunctional.

A great example of this sort of destruction was Steve Jobs’ first keynote as interim CEO at the 2007 Boston Macworld, specifically the announcement of Apple’s shocking partnership with Microsoft:

J. Bradford DeLong(2001): Review of Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed and The Economist as Saviour: Robert Skidelsky (1983), John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed (London: Macmillan: 033357379x). Robert Skidelsky (1992), John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour (London: Macmillan: 0333584996). And my review of volume 3: Fighting for Britain.

A couple of months ago I wrote a less-than-totally-enthusiastic review of the third volume of Robert Skidelsky's Keynes biography--Robert Skidelsky (2000), John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain (London: Macmillan: 0333604563). I wrote that I was disappointed: that:

I was expecting this to be a great book: as stunning as the first two volumes.... But it was not. Do not get me wrong: it is still a good book, well worth reading. Anyone who loved Skidelsky's first two volumes will like this one...

Now let me repair the damage by writing a totally enthusiastic, totally adulatory review of Skidelsky's first two volumes. He gives us John Maynard Keynes's life, entire. And he does so with wit, charm, control, scope, and enthusiasm. You read these books and you know Keynes--who he was, what he did, and why it was so important.

Must-Read: Patrick Iber and Mike Konczal: Karl Polanyi for President: "Today, Polanyian arguments are once again in the air...

**Over at Equitable Growth:

Must-Reads:

• Nick Bunker: U.S. tax policy complicated by falling taxes on U.S. stocks - Equitable Growth
• Artir: No Great Technological Stagnation
• Noah Smith: Don't Give Up on Equality of Opportunity
• Tim Duy: Curious

Must-Read: Noah Smith: Don't Give Up on Equality of Opportunity: "The purpose of an ideal of equality isn’t to serve as a blueprint for the creation of a utopia...

Must-Read: Artir: No Great Technological Stagnation: "Some people many economists say we are living through a Great Stagnation...

Live from Hollywood in the 1930s: From the literary critic of the New Masses. How dare Ernest Hemingway write anything bad about a Comintern apparatchik!

Alvah Bessie: Review of "For Whom the Bell Tolls", by Ernest Hemingway: "To Have and Have Not was a vastly imperfect work...

...the author’s satirical treatment of the human parasites who lived on luxury yachts of the Florida keys was both brittle and jejune, and his old limitations were amply manifest: the interchangeability of his conversation; his feeble understanding of female character; his inability to fully explore and plumb character at all....

Andrew Gordon: The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command:

Two dramatic events at the end of April 1916 greatly weakened Sir John [Jellicoe]’s grip on the disputed [5th Fast-Battleship] Squadron. First, on the 22nd, the battlecruisers Australia and New Zealand illustrated his worry about fog by colliding in it.... The B[attle ]C[ruiser ]F[leet] entered a sudden fog-bank which made the flagship invisible. What should the individual ships do? Australia zagged by the clock while New Zealand held her course. The enquiry found BCF Signal Orders to be ambiguous, and Beatty himself shouldered the blame.... Australia had to go down to Devonport for repairs and would be absent for several weeks, diminishing Beatty’s margin of strength over Franz Hipper.

William Howard Taft: To Alexander Graham Bell:

Wikipedia: Battle of Jutland:

On the 23rd, U-74 departed to lay mines in the Moray Firth.... UB-27 passed Bell Rock on the night of 23 May on its way into the Firth of Forth as planned, but was halted by engine trouble...

Live from Over the Cascade Range: Paul Krugman: The Truth About the Sanders Movement: "Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels have an illuminating discussion...

Must-Read: Tim Duy: Curious: "I find the Fed's current obsession with raising interest rates curious to say the least...

Over at Equitable Growth: Must-Reads:

• Social Credit and "Neutral" Monetary Policies: A Rant on "Helicopter Money" and "Monetary Neutrality" - Equitable Growth
• Monetary Policy 201 - Equitable Growth* Thomas Philippon: Finance vs. Wal-Mart: Why are Financial Services so Expensive?
• Tim Duy: This Is Not a Drill. This Is the Real Thing
• Paul Volcker: Cardiff Garcia's Long Chat with Paul Volcker

Must-Read: An absolutely key issue: why doesn't the logic of cost-reduction via scale and technology work for finance as a whole? It certainly works for commissions...

Thomas Philippon: Finance vs. Wal-Mart: Why are Financial Services so Expensive?, in Rethinking the Financial Crisis, edited by Alan Blinder, Andrew Lo, and Robert Solow (Russell Sage Foundation, 2012): "Despite its fast computers and credit derivatives...

Over at Equitable Growth: This from Paul Volcker strikes me as substantially wrong:

Paul Volcker and Cardiff Garcia: AlphaChatterbox Long Chat:

[My] first economics course... at Harvard... Arthur Smithies.... Session after session he would drill into our head that a little inflation was a good thing. And I could never figure out why. But I know he kept saying it, so already at the time I for some reason had an allergy to what he was saying. But it's interesting, his lectures, it's the same thing that central banks are saying today.... Read MOAR at Equitable Growth

Must-Read: This from Paul Volcker strikes me as really substantially wrong:

Paul Volcker: Cardiff Garcia's Long Chat with Paul Volcker: "I would never interpret it as you have to have [inflation] exactly zero...

Must-Read: Again. I do not understand Janet Yellen and Stan Fischer's thinking at all. A 25 basis-point rate hike is a small contractionary thing. But it is a thing. The credibility gained by sticking to a bad policy long past the point where its badness ought to have been recognized is not the credibility worth gaining. The rest of the world is shaky--and the last thing it needs is to have risk-bearing capacity pulled out of it by a U.S. rate hike. And whatever interest-rate hikes might be made this summer could be made up with ease next spring, after the situation becomes clear.

Yet they continue:

Tim Duy: This Is Not a Drill. This Is the Real Thing: "The June FOMC meeting is live...

Must-Read: Badly-intentioned or incompetent policymakers can mess up any system of macroeconomic regulation. And we now have two centuries of history of demand-driven business cycles in industrial and post-industrial economies to teach us that there is no perfect, automatic self-regulating way to organize the economy at the macroeconomic level.

Over and over again, the grifters, charlatans, and cranks ask: "Why doesn't the central bank simply adopt the rule of setting a "neutral" monetary policy? In fact, why not replace the central bank completely with an automatic system that would do the job?"

Most-Recent Must-Reads:

• Jeremiah Dittmar and Ralf R Meisenzahl: The Protestant Reformation, Economic Institutions, and Development
• Dietrich Vollrath: Can We Get Rich by "Doing Business" Better?
• Justin Wolfers: Brownback's Kansas Experiment a Failure
• Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen: The Political Legacy of American Slavery
• Simon Wren-Lewis: Helicopter Money and Fiscal Policy

Most-Recent Links:

• Rick Juzwiak: Twitter Drove Me Crazy, So I Stopped Using It
• Daniel Altman: Economics Has Failed America: "When it comes to the impact of global trade, the dismal science has done a dismal job explaining how to help workers hurt by globalization..."
• Nate Silver: The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support

Live from Rupert Murdoch's Employees' Self-Made Gehenna: News Hound Ellen: Fox & Friends Attacks Obama For Making The Bison The National Mammal: "Apparently... the Curvy Couch Crew suggested the bison was going to replace the bald eagle...

...which is a bird....

Over at Equitable Growth: Must-Reads:

• Jeremiah Dittmar and Ralf R Meisenzahl: The Protestant Reformation, Economic Institutions, and Development
• Dietrich Vollrath: Can We Get Rich by "Doing Business" Better?
• Justin Wolfers: Brownback's Kansas Experiment a Failure
• Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen: The Political Legacy of American Slavery

Comment of the Day: Joe Vogel: The Poisonous Fruit of a Very Poisoned Tree: "Maybe it's just a case of Tacitus having been right:

It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured.

Tacitus? I had thought it was Machiavelli.... And, indeed, I was wrong. From Agricola:

Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris...