Must-Read: Josh Hausman: What Was Bad for General Motors Was Bad for America: The Automobile Industry and the 1937/38 Recession:
July 2016
Live from the Republicans' Self-Made Gehenna: Zack Beauchamp finds a Republican validator--one of those who has spent most of the past decade stridently arguing that ObamaCare will make America a worse place and needs to be repealed-and-replaced--in the midst of what appears to be a nervous breakdown:
Zack Beauchamp: A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die:
[Avik Roy:]
I don’t think the Republican Party and the conservative movement are capable of reforming themselves in an incremental and gradual way.... The conservative movement is fundamentally broken. Trump is not a random act.... Goldwater... a historical disaster....
"Gunpowder Empire": Should We Generalize Mark Elvin's High-Level Equilibrium Trap?
OK. Popping the distraction stack again. A chance remark by the extremely sharp Cosma Shalizi when he came through Berkeley has caused me to spend a lot of time meditating upon a passage written by Bob Allen:
Robert Allen (2006): The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective:
The different trajectories of the wage-rental ratio created different incentives to mechanize production.... It was not Newtonian science that inclined British inventors and entrepreneurs to seek machines that raised labour productivity but the rising cost of labour... due to... Britain’s success in the global economy... in part the result of state policy... Britain['s] vast and readily worked coal deposits....
Ploughing with Twelve Yoke of Oxen? 24 Oxen! In Israel in 1000 BC? Wednesday Economic History
What field in the Levant could possibly require a plough pulled by 24 oxen? What is going on here?
1 Kings: 19:15-21:
And the Lord said unto [Elijah]: "Go, return on thy way to the wilderness of Damascus: and when thou comest, anoint Hazael to be king over Syria: And Jehu the son of Nimshi shalt thou anoint to be king over Israel: and Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abelmeholah shalt thou anoint to be prophet in thy room.
Expenditure Shares, Price Measurement, and True Relative Labor Productivity Growth in Post-WWII Manufacturing: What the Aggregate Deta Suggest
Tuesday Morning Distraction: Well, I was supposed to be sitting three tables down from Aaron Edlin at the Claremont Peets this morning doing research. But I got myself distracted--convinced myself that I ought to right something about the sharp Matthew Yglesias's (and why, Harvard Economics Department, was he not an economics major?) piece on premature deindustrialization. And then I got myself redistracted...
Let's start with one of the standard graphs: the American share of (nonfarm) employment that is in manufacturing:
Testing Datawrapper...
(Late) Monday Smackdown/Tuesday Hoisted Idiocy: Embarrassingly Poor Legal Reasoning from Michael Cannon and Jonathan Adler
Hoisted from Four Years Ago: What passes for Republican think-tannery these days. Judge Paul Friedman's smackdown should have ended this then--rather than later, at the Supreme Court, 6-3, with John Roberts writing:
Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter...
The idiocy, from Michael Cannon and Jonathan Adler:
The Wayback Machine: From Ten Years Ago: July 20-July 26, 2006
- The Invisible College http://www.bradford-delong.com/2006/07/the_invisible_c.html 2006-07-25: I would like a larger college, an invisible college, of more people to talk to, pointing me to more interesting things. People whose views and opinions I can react to, and who will react to my reasoned and well-thought-out opinions, and to my unreasoned and off-the-cuff ones as well. It would be really nice to have Paul Krugman three doors down.... The political scientists are too far away to run into by accident — somebody like Dan Drezner would be nice to have around (even if he does get incidence wrong sometimes). Over the past three years, with the arrival of Web logging, I have been able to add such people to those I bump into — in a virtual sense — every week. My invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least...
Continue reading "The Wayback Machine: From Ten Years Ago: July 20-July 26, 2006" »
Live from the Gamma Quadrant: The Star Trek movie reboot series strips the utopian core out of Star Trek--and continues the process of turning it into a third-rate "Guardians of the Galaxy" knockoff...
A.X.S.: “Star Trek: Beyond” strips politics from the universe:
The television series and some of the films studiously explored the big moral questions facing a bloc as diverse as the Federation, from the limits on cultural integration right through to how a peace-loving organisation should tackle imperial forces.
Live from Translunar Space: Rick Mastracchio: A Real Photo:
The moon passed between @NASA climate observatory and the earth. Almost unbelievable that this is a real photo pic.twitter.com/MWxwgDfUIw
— Rick Mastracchio (@AstroRM) July 26, 2016
Live from America's Better Self: "When They Go Low, We Go High!"
What I, at least, thought was the highest of the high points at the 2016 DNC:
Michelle Obama: "Barack and I... try to guide and protect our girls through the challenges of this unusual life in the spotlight, how we urge them to ignore those who question their father’s citizenship or faith.
How we insist that the hateful language they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country.
How we explain that when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level.
No, our motto is: when they go low, we go high!...
Continue reading "Live from America's Better Self: "When They Go Low, We Go High!"" »
Liveblogging World War II: July 26, 1946: Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt: My Day:
NEW YORK, Thursday—Most of us listened to the radio with great interest yesterday when the under-water atom bomb was tried out in Bikini Lagoon. The damage seems to have been considerable, and I cannot help feeling a little sad at the sinking of the aircraft carrier Saratoga. Her fame will live in the annals of the Navy, and I suppose it is a perfectly good end for a valiant ship.
Continue reading "Liveblogging World War II: July 26, 1946: Eleanor Roosevelt" »
Liveblogging the American Revolution: July 25, 1778: From John Adams to Thomas Cushing
John Adams: To Thomas Cushing:
Passi July 25. 1778
Dear sir--
I had this Day the Pleasure of your Letter by Captain Barnes, of June 9. I did myself the Honour, when in Boston to call at your House, but was told you was ill and could not be seen, upon which I sent in my Name, as the Fashion is, intending to call at another opportunity, but was dissappointed.
Must-Read: The Macro Impact of Short-Termism:
:Managerial short-termism... I examine through the lens of analyst earnings targets.
Must-Read: Is the Great Recession Really Over?:
:Starting the recession in a below-median 2007-2009-employment-shock area caused workers to be 1.0 percentage points less likely to be employed in 2014....
Live from the Texas That Never Was: Comic Book Legends Revealed #329: "E. Nelson Bridwell, longtime assistant editor to Mort Weisinger at DC Comics!
:Procrastinating on July 25, 2016
Over at Equitable Growth: Must-Reads:
- What’s the Problem With Protectionism? :
- Rethinking Capitalism :
- Ari Berkowitz: Is Your Nervous System a Democracy or a Dictatorship?
- Rex Nutting: Manufacturing Output Has Doubled in Three Decades
- John Quiggin: Do Climate Sceptics Exist?
- Nick Bunker: Did the Great Recession reduce U.S. productivity growth? - Equitable Growth:
Continue reading "Procrastinating on July 25, 2016" »
Must-Read: What’s the Problem With Protectionism?:
:The next president will not be a committed free trader.
Must-Read: John Quiggin: Do Climate Sceptics Exist?:
June 2016 was the hottest month globally since records began in 1880, and marks the fourteenth record month in a row.
Live from America's Better Self: Adam Silverman: And Now for the Other Side of Policing: What You Don’t Hear Much About:
As valued commenter CMM has reminded us in comments to the previous thread, most law enforcement officers are good people that do a lot of good things that don’t get a lot of press attention.
Monday Smackdown: Hacks Gotta Hack Department!
Despite Studies, Minimum Wage Hikes Reduce Employment https://t.co/bREkxvsGic pic.twitter.com/u6Fshqt1MT
— Manhattan Institute (@ManhattanInst) December 5, 2015
Continue reading "Monday Smackdown: Hacks Gotta Hack Department!" »
Must-Read: Rex Nutting: Manufacturing Output Has Doubled in Three Decades:
The number of jobs in the manufacturing sector has declined by about 5 million since 2000, falling from 17.3 million at the turn of the century to 12.3 million in 2015... only 8.7%....
Live from the Phanerozoic: Sarda Sahney and Michael J Benton (2008): Recovery from the Most Profound Mass Extinction of All Time:
The end-Permian mass extinction, 251 million years (Myr) ago, was the most devastating ecological event of all time....
Must-Read: Rethinking Capitalism:
:In Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth... some of the world’s leading economists propose new ways of thinking about capitalism....
Live from the Journamalists' Self-Made Gehenna: Doug!: Only love can break your heart:
I’ve been impressed by how many right-wing pundits--George Will and Robert Kagan stand out--are so freaked out and upset about Trump that they’re willing to be anti-Trump all the time and note devote any columns to fragging Hillary. Meanwhile, the professional centrists continue to treat Trump and Hillary as two sides of the same coin:
Live from the Republicans' Self-Made Gehenna: Reince Priebus Defends Donald Trump's Right to Imply Your Dad Killed JFK:
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus took a bold stand in favor of free speech on Sunday, specifically, Donald Trump’s freedom to speak about your father and his possible connection to the murder of John F. Kennedy, The Washington Examiner reports. “He’s got a right to talk about whatever he wants to talk about,” said Priebus....
What Thinkers Will Define Our Future?: No Longer Fresh at Project Syndicate
Over at Project Syndicate: Which Thinkers Will Define Our Future?: BERKELEY – Several years ago, it occurred to me that social scientists today are all standing on the shoulders of giants like Niccolo Machiavelli, John Locke, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim.
One thing they all have in common is that their primary focus was on the social, political, and economic makeup of the Western European world between 1450 and 1900. Which is to say, they provide an intellectual toolkit for looking at, say, the Western world of 1840, but not necessarily the Western world of 2016. What will be taught in the social theory courses of, say, 2070? What canon – written today or still forthcoming – will those who end their careers in the 2070s wish that they had used when they started them in the late 2010s? Read MOAR at Project Syndicate
Continue reading "What Thinkers Will Define Our Future?: No Longer Fresh at Project Syndicate" »
Links for the Week of July 24, 2016
Most-Recent Must-Reads:
- Ari Berkowitz: Is Your Nervous System a Democracy or a Dictatorship?
- The Forgotten State :
- Other Austerity Bloopers (2013):
- Noah Smith: "In macroeconomics, falsified theories never die, and their proponents often don't acknowledge empirical failures..."_
Most-Recent Links:
- Loren Adler and Paul B. Ginsburg: Obamacare Premiums Are Lower Than You Think
- David Zilberman: Agricultural economics as behavioral economics
- Elon Musk: Master Plan, Part Deux
- William G. Bowen and Michael S. McPherson: The student loan debt crisis is overblown. The real problem is college completion rates
John Haas: "First federal regulations of business was Miss. steamboats (I think)..."
Lucy P. Marcus: The British Leadership Disease
- Josh Marshall: Trump & Putin. Yes, It's Really a Thing:
- Franklin Foer: "Let's review the question of Russian intelligence's involvement in these leaks, which seems controversial to some..."
Most-Recent Storified:
Continue reading "Links for the Week of July 24, 2016" »
Live from America's Better Self: Howard Wolfson: “As the nation’s leading independent and a pragmatic business leader, Mike Bloomberg has supported candidates from both sides of the aisle. This week in Philadelphia he will make a strong case that the clear choice in this election is Hillary Clinton...”
Live from the Olympic Peninsula: Sea otter population: 500,000 pre-fur trade, down to 1-2,000 in early 1900s, now back at 100,000...
Michael Carman: Sea Otter Madness Close to Hoh Head:
THE CALLS POURED in. To the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, to the National Parks Service and to the Olympic Coast Marine Sanctuary. Have you seen all those sea otters? What visitors were spying off the Pacific Ocean coastline, a raft of hundreds upon hundreds of sea otters, was unusual in both scope and location.
Must-Read: Neuronal dictatorship for speed of response, neuronal democracy for accuracy of perception and movement:
Ari Berkowitz: Is Your Nervous System a Democracy or a Dictatorship?:
For some behaviors, a single nerve cell does act as a dictator.... Touching a crayfish on its tail; a single spike in the lateral giant neuron elicits a fast tail-flip that vaults the animal upward, out of potential danger.
Weekend Reading: Aceto: Review of Cynthia Ozick: "Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Lit..."
Review of: Cynthia Ozick: Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Lit...: I am the Problem:
:Cynthia Ozick has written a collection of essays centered on criticism. Criticizing criticism is a thankless job. One gets oneself into all sorts of quagmire. She posits 'nothing is worth doing unless it has never been done before...', as one mode, then the other as '...the sweet value of ripeness.'
Procrastinating on July 24, 2016
Over at Equitable Growth: Must-Reads:
- Other Austerity Bloopers (2013):
- The Forgotten State :
Continue reading "Procrastinating on July 24, 2016" »
Must-Read: The Forgotten State: "Where Levin sees the government crowding out more worthwhile enterprises...
:...Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue in American Amnesia that the state is central to the success of our economy. In fact, it is impossible to separate them, and you wouldn’t want to anyway.
Must-Read: This really ain't rocket science, people. Or brain surgery...
Other Austerity Bloopers: "It’s worth recalling the other paper that swept through the ranks of the VSPs...
(2013):...briefly becoming orthodoxy, what everyone knew, until people took a hard look at the data. Remember Alesina and Ardagna? That was the paper that supposedly showed that spending cuts were actually expansionary, because of ConfidenceTM.
Liveblogging Postwar: July 24, 1946: Operation Crossroads: Baker Shot
Live from the Republican Party's Self-Made Gehenna: Adam Gopnik: Being Honest About Trump:
Trump's language remains not merely sloppy or incendiary but openly hostile to the simplest standards of truth and decency that have governed American politics.
The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation--Hoisted from the Milken Review of Nine Months Ago
Live from Cyberspace: Welcome praise for J. Bradford DeLong (2015): The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation - Milken Institute Review: Hiccup ... or Endgame? Let me put a copy of the whole thing below the fold...
Paul Krugman: "Good Review by Brad DeLong: There are still real policy issues out there! 'The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation'" https://t.co/f5ancyOEHT
In Which I Face My Social Media Ineptitude Squarely
Live from Cyberspace: Welcome praise for J. Bradford DeLong (2015): The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation - Milken Institute Review: Hiccup ... or Endgame? Much appreciated. Thanks...
Paul Krugman: "Good Review by Brad DeLong: There are still real policy issues out there! The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation" https://t.co/f5ancyOEHT
Good review by Brad DeLong. There are still real policy issues out there! The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation https://t.co/f5ancyOEHT
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) July 23, 2016
Continue reading "In Which I Face My Social Media Ineptitude Squarely" »
Must-Read: Noah Smith thinks Chicago-style macroeconomics is a diseased intellectual discipline. I believe he is correct:
Noah Smith: "In macroeconomics, falsified theories never die, and their proponents often don't acknowledge empirical failures..."_:
Liveblogging World War I: July 23, 1916: Battle of Pozières
Wikipedia: Battle of Pozières:
The Battle of Pozières was a two-week struggle for the French village of Pozières and the ridge on which it stands, during the middle stages of the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Though British divisions were involved in most phases of the fighting, Pozières is primarily remembered as an Australian battle. The fighting ended with the Allied forces in possession of the plateau north and east of the village, in a position to menace the German bastion of Thiepval from the rear. The cost had been very large for both sides and in the words of Australian official historian Charles Bean, the Pozières ridge "is more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth"....
Continue reading "Liveblogging World War I: July 23, 1916: Battle of Pozières" »
Procrastinating on July 23, 2016
Over at Equitable Growth: Must-Reads:
- Noah Smith: "In macroeconomics, falsified theories never die, and their proponents often don't acknowledge empirical failures..."_:
- The Growing Dependence of Britain on Trade During the Industrial Revolution :
- Trump Happened Because Conservatism Failed :
- Danny Blanchflower: "UK Headed to Recession..."
- Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: “Luck of the Irish GDP” edition - Equitable Growth
- Nisha Chikhale and John Schmitt: Yesterday at Equitable Growth: A workshop on distributional national accounts - Equitable Growth
Continue reading "Procrastinating on July 23, 2016" »
Liveblogging Postwar: July 22, 1946: The Terrorist Bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem
On July 22, 1946, a bomb demolished the southern wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. This newsreel shows the aftermath of the explosion. “The hotel housed the British army headquarters, and the Palestine government offices, and casualties were very heavy,” the British reporter announces, as workers on-screen sift the rubble for bodies. “The tragic scene is like a serious incident during the Blitz.”
Weekend Reading: David Kurtz, Tierney Sneed, and Lauren Fox: Whence the Republican Base's Anger?
David Kurtz: Whence The Anger?:
If there's one thing Tierney Sneed and Lauren Fox found while reporting for us in Cleveland that I probably don't factor in enough in assessing the Trump phenomenon it's the deep resentment and bitterness Republican Party rank-and-file feel toward their own leaders for not fulfilling the extravagant promises made to them since the 2010 Tea Party revolt. I tend to focus more on the white resentment, race-baiting, and xenophobia that arise from the tectonic social shifts way below the surface. They're not decoupled from each other, but the promise that Obama would be put in his place (with all the accompanying racial overtones to that notion) and his political and policy agenda expunged from the public record were powerful GOP draws for three election cycles, as detached from political reality as those promises may have been.
For the Weekend...
Live from the Republicans' Self-Made Gehenna: Clay Shirky: Trump Could Win:
Trump... wasn't on stage because he has unusual views. He was on stage because he has the usual ones, loudly.... So, believe this: Trump could win. We can help stop him, but that means giving up on a lot of comfortable illusions
Weekend Reading: Donald Trump: Bananas Attack on Ted Cruz
Live from Gehenna, with the Republicans in Bed with the Short-Fingered Vulgarian: Needless to say: There is no picture of Ted Cruz's father and Lee Harvey Oswald having breakfast. There is no picture of Ted Cruz's father and Lee Harvey Oswald not having breakfast. There is no picture of Ted Cruz's father and Lee Harvey Oswald.
Dylan Matthews: Trump: One of His Weirdest, Cruz-Bashing, JFK Conspiracy-Theorizing Rallies Ever:
I looked for signs, but at no point in the video does Pence blink twice or otherwise signal that he was being held against his will, but his presence is by far the most bizarre part of the video. Mike Pence endorsed Ted Cruz for president. He clearly thinks he’s a respectable politician.
Donald Trump: Bananas Attack on Ted Cruz:
If you turn on the television, if you turn on some of the dishonest media, you’ll see, "Oh well, this happened and this happened." What happened? Somebody [Cruz] got booed the hell out a place by thousands and thousands of people. There wasn’t one person in the room. Not one. And then they said: "There may not be unity!" Unity? There wasn’t one person in the room who wasn’t--including the Texas delegation, right?
Continue reading "Weekend Reading: Donald Trump: Bananas Attack on Ted Cruz" »
Must-Read: The Growing Dependence of Britain on Trade During the Industrial Revolution: "Many previous studies of... the British Industrial Revolution have found little or no role for trade...
:Must-Read: Trump Happened Because Conservatism Failed: "The Republican presidential candidate was usually a gray, bland figure, a stalwart conservative but not a fire-breathing one...
:Must-Read: Danny Blanchflower: "UK Headed to Recession...":