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March 2017

Must-Read: Ray Dalio often climbs to the top of my must-read list. (a) He is very sharp. And (b) he thinks very differently than I do (c) on subjects in which I have considerable expertise. That combination of (a), (b), and (c) means that I learn more from reading him than from reading almost anybody else.

But one—huge—complaint. “Populism” is a phenomenon of the 1880s and 1890s, centered in the American west, and other movements since that have been similar to it. The movement that reaches its first peak in the 1930s is called “Fascism”. If Ray wants to be polite, he should call it “neofascism”. But he should not go any further. He should not destroy the meaning of the word “Populism” because we obsess about being overly polite. Call things by their names: the Fascists called Fascism Fascism because they thought that carried good connotations. That it no longer carries good connotations is an important fact about the world, and not one we should sweep under the rug:

Ray Dalio et al.: Populism: The Phenomenon: “This report is an examination of populism, the phenomenon…

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Should-Read: This doesn’t even make sense:

Mick Mulvaney is about to break something, some states will then step in to fix it, and that makes it a “local problem” that we should not “look to the federal government to… fix”? This does not even make any sense at all.

It’s not that I disapprove of the Trump administration’s methods here. I see no method here–not even from the most supposedly “technocratic” and “competent” members of it:

Caitlin MacNeal: Mulvaney: If Your State Doesn't Mandate Maternity Care, Change Your State: "Budget Director Mick Mulvaney... brushed off concerns about... repeal[ing] the Essential Health Benefits requirement....

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Notes: What Does President Donald Trump Mean for the US Economy?

Clowns (ICP)

What Does President Donald Trump Mean for the US Economy?: As the moment Trump took office, it seemed as though Trump could have become any one of three figures.

We really did not know which.

We had very little real indication of what policies Trump will follow, or what kind of president he would be. The US press corps had done an extraordinarily poor job in making the issues at stake in this election clear and transparent—not just to the mass audiences, but even to the most sophisticated of audiences, those that are very interested in asset prices and how they're affected by government policies.

Those three were:

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Sequel of the Return of Rise of the Robots Again

Preview of Sequel of the Return of Rise of the Robots Again

Our age--meaning 2000-2020, and longer, but how far into the further future I do not know--is not an age of the Rise of the Robots.

It does not, primarily, see the replacement of human workers by information technology on a large scale, and the consequent generation of technological unemployment.

What it does see, primarily, are two different ongoing processes:

  1. The extraordinary build-out of our global mobile communications infrastructure, the shift of people's leisure and work time toward making use of that infrastructure, and consequent large potential gains in human utility largely unconnected with increases in measured GDP or measured productivity.

  2. A now fourteen years-long and continuing era of near-deflation and slack aggregate demand producing first a small and now a large chronic shortage of jobs.

But, as the very sharp Larry Mishel keeps pointing out with increasing frustration, ours is not the age of the Rise of the Robots.

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FIRST DRAFT: Review for "Nature" of "A Culture of Growth", by Joel Mokyr

School of Athens

FINAL DRAFT here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v538/n7626/full/538456a.html

Joel Mokyr's (2016) A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 9780691167773: http://amzn.to/2c9TJ2y), published in October 2016, is the latest and most successful extended brief by Northwestern University economic historian Joel Mokyr for his point of view on the causal origins of modern economic growth.

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Are There Benefits from Free Trade?: DeLong FAQ

Shenzhen skyline 2015 Google Search

Q: Prominent economists and politicians often say that free trade will benefit America in the long run. Many Americans disagree strongly. What is your take on this situation?

A: Well, typically and roughly, the average import we buy from other countries we get for 30% off--we use foreign currency that costs us $1.40 to purchase goods and services made abroad that would cost us $2.00 worth of time, energy, resources and cash to make at home.

But there's more.

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Procrastinating on March 21, 2017

We re All Public Intellectuals Now The National Interest

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

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Ian Morris: Why the West Rules--for Now: Econ 210b: Hoisted from the Archives

Ian Morris: Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

Cursor and Earl Cook s Estimates of Energy Capture

Supplementary:

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On Nicholas Lemann's Partial Recantation of His "Neoliberalism": Hoisted from the Archives

Il Quarto Stato

2014: On Nicholas Lemann's Partial Recantation of His "Neoliberalism": On the career of the Washington Monthly: Nicholas Lemann: A bygone age…:

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Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Erik Loomis: Dumbasses of America: "The genre of 'let’s talk to idiotic white voters who support Trump even though he will decimate their lives' is already more stale than bread baked on November 8...

...However, it does lead to the occasional special anecdote that truly sums up the stupidity of many white people:

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Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed": Hoisted from the Archives

Il Quarto Stato

(2007): Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed": Hoisted from the Archives: "I did not even loathe Nickel and Dimed because of the strong pains Barbara Ehrenreich took in her prose to demonstrate that she was not one of "them"...

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Procrastinating on March 19, 2017

We re All Public Intellectuals Now The National Interest

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

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Links for the Week of March 19, 2017

Must-Reads:

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Weekend Reading: Erik Loomis Quoting Rich Yeselson: The CIO, Race, and Liberalism

Il Quarto Stato

Weekend Reading: Erik Loomis: The CIO, Race, and Liberalism: "Yeselson has an excellent long-form review...

...of two new books on the CIO, race, and New Deal liberalism that look flawed but necessary anyway. You will want to read the whole thing if you care about the issues of the working-class, race, and the government in these perilous times. Here’s [Yeselson's] conclusion:

But this isn’t true. Unions and black workers are closer than they have ever been.

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Weekend Reading: Bill Moyers: What a Real President Is Like

Cursor and Preview of Lyndon Johnson 1964 Speech at the Jung Hotel New Orleans October 9 Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading: Bill Moyers: [What a Real President Is Like][]: "WHILE Lyndon Baines Johnson was a man of time and place, he felt the bitter paradox of both...

...I was a young man on his staff in 1960 when he gave me a vivid account of that southern schizophrenia he understood and feared. We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs:

I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you...

[What a Real President Is Like: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1988/11/13/what-a-real-president-was-like/d483c1be-d0da-43b7-bde6-04e10106ff6c/

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Must-Read: What is the rule of law here? What should courts do when the President announces that he will not take care that the laws be faithfully executed? When a president announces that his policies will violate the Establishment clause, should courts let him proceed and so ignore the question whether pretexts publicly announced to be mere pretexts are in fact mere pretexts?

Ronald Nikles: Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain: the Great Oz has spoken...: "When a presidential candidate promises to ban Muslims from the country as his first act in office...

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Weekend Reading/Hoisted: Reading the Soul of Thomas Jefferson

Cursor and Preview of Weekend Reading Hoisted Reading the Soul of Thomas Jefferson

E.M. Halliday (2001): Quotes from Understanding Thomas Jefferson:

p. 1: In June 1782... Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roche-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de la Fayette, was an honored guest at possibly the most lavish full-dress ball... Marie-Antoinette... had ever given at Versailles... Twenty-four, Lafayette... a general in both the American and French armies... lionized in both countries... amalgam of ultra upper-class French snobbery and passionate dedication to liberte and the rights of man, he had gone to help the American cause entirely on his own... purchasing outright... the vessel that took him there. Now... he dances a quadrille "flawlessly"... with the young queen in the Hall of Mirrors... scintillat[ing] with the light of five thousand candles. The king has gone to bed, but his twenty-seven-year-old blue-eyed consort and diamond-bedecked entourage of courtiers dance, sip, and sup the night away, finally wandering off to one bed or another...

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Weekend Reading: Preface: Sam Acheson (1932): Joe Bailey: The Last Democrat

Weekend Reading: Sam Acheson (1932): Joe Bailey: The Last Democrat: Preface: "SENATOR BAILEY of Texas...

...one of the most conspicuous and influential Democrats in official life at Washington during the Administrations of McKinley, Roosevelt and Taft, has often been called the last Democrat. As elected head of the minority in the House during the fateful years leading to the Spanish-American War, and later as the real leader of the opposition in the Senate during the first twelve years of the new century, he went far toward meriting the arrogant phrase. Master of the Democratic party of Texas, he became the most powerful voice of the Southern wing of the Democratic national party and as such played a determining role in its councils. Time alone tends to sustain the phrase, for he survived all of the three great antagonists with whom he disputed the course which Democracy should take: Cleveland, Bryan and Wilson.

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Lee Atwater, Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, and Joseph Bailey...

Cursor and Preview of Lyndon Johnson 1964 Speech at the Jung Hotel New Orleans October 9 Weekend Reading

Back in 1981, Lee Atwater said:

Now you don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying 'n_gger, n_gger, n_gger'. By 1968... that hurts you.... You... get... abstract... talk... about... cutting taxes and all these things... totally economic things, and the byproduct often is Blacks get hurt worse than whites.... If it is getting that abstract and that coded, that we're doing away with the racial problem one way or the other...

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Lyndon Johnson (1964): Speech at the Jung Hotel, New Orleans (October 9): Weekend Reading

Cursor and Preview of Lyndon Johnson 1964 Speech at the Jung Hotel New Orleans October 9 Weekend Reading

Lyndon Johnson (October 9, 1964): [: Speech at the Jung Hotel, New Orleans][]: "Mr. Chairman; Governor McKeithen; your great senior Senator Allen Ellender, my old friend; your fine mayor, Mayor Schiro...

...Mrs. Long; my longtime and my valued friend and colleague, one of the most promising young men in this Nation, Russell Long; Congressman Willis, Congressman Morrison, Congressman Thompson, Congressman Gillis Long--all of whom serve this Nation and this State with great distinction and with credit to Louisiana and the Congress; Mr. Marshall Brown; Mr. Donelon--all my friends in Louisiana:

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Lee Atwater (1981): Interview with Alexander P. Lamis: Rough Transcript: Weekend Reading

Cursor and Preview of Lee Atwater Interview with Alexander P Lamis Rough Transcript Weekend Reading

Lee Atwater (1981): To answer that question, Saul, you have to analyze the nature of Southern politics since the 1940s. I think Southern politics begins with V.O. Key. What he did was analyze the Democratic party, because you didn't have a Republican party. He came up with the idea that the parties were very factionalized. He came up with three different types of factions, of state parties, all within the Democratic framework. It was all personality—that type of thing.

Race was not really an issue.

Race didn't become an issue in the South, again, until 1954.

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Procrastinating on March 16, 2017

We re All Public Intellectuals Now The National Interest

Over at Equitable Growth: Must- and Should-Reads:

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As Cosma Shalizi Says, "The Singularity Is in Our Past": Hoisted from the Archives

Cursor and Preview of As Cosma Shalizi Says The Singularity Is in Our Past Hoisted from the Archives

: As Cosma Shalizi (2010) Says, "The Singularity Is in Our Past": Look at the bleeding edge of urban North Atlantic or East Asian civilization, and you see a world fundamentally unlike any human past. Hunting, gathering, farming, herding, spinning and weaving, cleaning, digging, smelting metal and shaping wood, assembling structures--all of the ‘in the sweate of thy face shalt thou eate bread’ things that typical humans have typically done since we became jumped-up monkeys on the East African veldt--are now the occupations of a small and dwindling proportion of humans.

Cosma Shalizi (2010): The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone (November 28) http://bactra.org/weblog/699.html

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John Peter Altgeld: Wednesday Economic History

John Peter Altgeld

Michael Maggidson (2000_: 1896: John Peter Altgeld: "John Peter Altgeld was born in the German village of Nieder Selters on December 30, 1847...

When he was about three months old, his parents brought him to the United States, settling in Ohio. After a brief stint in the Union Army during the Civil War, Altgeld read the law and was admitted to the bar in 1872. He served as city attorney of Savannah, Missouri and in 1874, was elected county prosecutor. He resigned this post after a year and moved to Chicago, where he established himself as a lawyer. He was married three years later. He soon began investing in real estate and made a small fortune.

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