Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

• A Spontaneous Order: Women and the Invisible Fist: RadGeek produces what I can only call the intellectual love child of Susan Brownmiller and Friedrich Hayek. Extremely well done: "When a large enough minority of men choose to commit widespread, intense, random acts of violence against a large enough number of women. And it can happen quite naturally without the raping men, or the protecting men, or the women in the society ever intending for any particular large-scale social outcome to come about. But what will come about, quite naturally, is that women’s social being—how women appear and act, as women, in public—will be systematically and profoundly circumscribed by a diffuse, decentralized threat of violence. And, as a natural but unintended consequence of many small, self-interested actions, some vicious and violent (as in the case of men who rape women), some worthwhile in their origins but easily and quickly corrupted (as in the case of men who try to protect women from rape), and some entirely rational responses to an irrational and dangerous situation (as in the case of women who limit their action and seek protection from men), the existence and activities of the police-blotter rapist serve to constrain women’s behavior and to become dependent on some men—and thus dependent on keeping those men pleased and serving those men’s priorities—for physical protection from other men. That kind of dependence can just as easily become frustrating and confining for the woman, and that kind of power can just as easily become corrupting and exploitative for the man, as any other form of dependence and power. (Libertarians and anarchists who easily see this dynamic when it comes to government police and military protection of a disarmed populace, shouldn’t have any trouble seeing it, if they are willing to see it, when it comes to male 'protection' of women)..."

1870: The Real Industrial Revolution?:: The most important fact to grasp about the world economy of 1870 is that the economy then belonged much more to its past of the Middle Ages than to its future of—well, of us, and what our successors eventually decide they want to use as an overarching term with which to label our age of fuel, machine, and digit.

• 8 of 35 Monarchs of England from 1066 to 1850 dead in war or murder: 23%...

• 7 of 44 Queens of England from 1066 to 1850 dead and childbirth: 16%...

I am somewhat surprised: I had thought childbed would be a higher risk than war/murder. (But then there are Queens Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard who get murdered... Are there any more?)

Listening at the Amherst College graduation to: Morris Dees: One Nation with Liberty and Justice for All. It struck me that Morris Dees of the SPLC speaks not as a lawyer but as a prophet. But when he spoke of "forgiveness" and of Martin Luther King, Jr., I found myself thinking that he wasn't expressing what he wanted to say very well—certainly not nearly as well as Martin Luther King, Jr., had...

• Petra Moser: Further extending long-lived US copyrights will do no good. : No benefits from extensions. And if extensions ever get applied to science, there'd be huge welfare loss, especially for people at less affluent institutions...

• Paul Krugman: We've basically crossed the line into treason now -- and a whole party is acquiescing: Benjamin Wittes: "I have a whole lot to say about how the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the President of the United States teamed up to out an intelligence source who aided our country in a properly predicated counterintelligence investigation against a hostile foreign power..."

• Jen Kirby: Laurel/Yanny: the science behind the audio trick, explained: "It comes down to how our brains pick up on, and interpret, different frequencies..."

• Yes, there are first-class New York-style bagels in Greater San Francisco: Bagel Baron: "2701 Eighth St Berkeley, CA 94710..."

• Lois McMaster Bujold: The Flowers of Vashnoi goes live

Martin Feldstein (1979): Introduction to The American Economy in Transition: "The post-[World] War [II] period began in an atmosphere of doubt and fear...

About one-fifth of western European cities saw a total eclipse of the sun during medieval times. Those triggered cities were thereafter more likely to build public mechanical clocks early. And building a clock early boosts your population by a quarter across the centuries. This is either freakish statistical mischance, or a truly great thing: Lars Boerner and Battista Severgnini: Time for Growth: "This paper studies the impact of the early adoption of... the public mechanical clock...

Wild Heart

Watching the Orange-Haired Baboons: Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads:

• The states have been serving as laboratories of democracy over the past decade, with Wisconsin and Kansas seeing the greatest policy swerves and serving as the most striking ominous warnings: David Cooper: As Wisconsin’s and Minnesota’s lawmakers took divergent paths, so did their economies: Since 2010, Minnesota’s economy has performed far better for working families than Wisconsin’s: "Seven years removed from when each governor took office, there is ample data to assess which state’s economy—and by extension, which set of policies—delivered more for the welfare of its residents. The results could not be more clear: by virtually every available measure, Minnesota’s recovery has outperformed Wisconsin’s..."

Comment of the Day: Graydon: Mobilization for Total War and Democratic Order: "Great War mobilization levels are fundamentally voluntary...

No longer fresh at Project Syndicate: The Destruction of the Republican Party: There can no longer be any doubt that America has an unhinged, unqualified kleptocrat presiding in the White House. Nor can there be any question that the Republicans who put him there may be sealing their party's fate as the manifestation of Trumpism, rather than traditional conservatism.

• "Fundamental Weighting" and Indexing: Divide investors into... (i) passive investors, (ii) active investors who know more than the average active investor, (iii) active investors who know less than the average active investor but think they know more, and (iv) active investors who know less than the average active investor and think they know less. Group (i) should index.... Group (iv) should index.... Group (ii) profit from their knowledge... group (iii) and those of (iv) who don't act on their knowledge of their own ignorance are their lawful prey... everybody who thinks that he or she is in group (ii) should ponder hard whether he or she is in fact in group (iii) instead. "Fundamental indexing" is a form of (ii): those who engage in it are active investors, and their informational edge—the thing they know that the average active investor doesn't—is that there are enough noise traders of group (iii) out there in the market that book or earnings or other fundamental weighting factors provide an easy way to take on the role of the house in the casino that is the stock market. This is, I think, true—until there comes a day when there are enough investors following fundamental-indexation strategies that they become part of the least-informed half of active investors...

Note to Self: I am pretty good at making sure Twitter does not seize my attention and hack my brain. But many other people are not. Platforms so that you can control aggregators.

How was it that Tim Berners-Lee's Open Web crushed the Walled Gardeners in the 1990s? And how have the Walled Gardeners made their comeback?

And what can be done?: Manton Reece (2014): Microblog Links: "Brent Simmons points to my post on microblogs and asks...

The Wall Street Journal works for its sources, not its readers: Susanne Craig: Lehman's Straight Shooter: "Finance Chief Callan Brings Cool Jolt of Confidence To Credit-Rattled Street.... After sifting through the numbers for nearly an hour, Ms. Callan coolly answered more than 20 analyst questions. Then she strode down to Lehman's bond-trading desk and high-fived trading executive Peter Hornick. Later that day, bond traders gave her a standing ovation, a Wall Street rite typically reserved for CEOs. Profit had plunged, yet Lehman shares surged 46%.... The 42-year-old Ms. Callan is emerging as a galvanizing force at Lehman and a finance chief who topples much of the conventional wisdom about CFOs. She also is the highest-ranking woman on Wall Street. Many Lehman insiders consider her among the contenders to become the firm's president someday. Unlike Lehman's two previous CFOs, Ms. Callan isn't an accountant and had never worked in the finance department. She embraces television, appearing frequently. She receives a slimmer daily financial summary than her predecessors, relying more on data from the trading-floor contacts built during her 13-year Lehman career...

In Grasping Reality:

True then; true now: After the Examination All Professors Are Sad: A Dialogue About Teaching the Wrong Thing: Looking back over my syllabus this semester, I realized that I spent five full weeks... teaching them the Solow growth model... [which] doesn't tell us anything first-order about the world—aside from post-WWII Japanese convergence from a bouncing-rubble B-29 testfield to a prosperous OECD economy...

British governance appears at least as bad today as American governance even though they are not helmed by an unstable and corrupt kleptocrat: Simon Wren-Lewis: Delusions of National Power: "Inevitable that the UK would stay in the Customs Union (CU) and the Single Market (SM)...

Comment of the Day: Graydon: Understanding Karl Marx: "The thing -- well, a thing, and I think an important thing still generally missed -- Marx missed was the metallic cartridge. From ~1860 through 1914, the decisive aspect of your military campaign was 'how many riflemen, how well fed, and how well trained?'...

A Huge Honking Mess of Should-Reads, of All Kinds:

• Another piece worrying that human beings are simply unequipped to deal with an advertising supported internet, in which money flows to those who hack your brain to glue your eyeballs to the screen: Ben Popken: As algorithms take over, YouTube's recommendations highlight a human problem: "A supercomputer playing chess against your mind to get you to keep watching...

• The New York Times tried to suck up to the eminent and intelligent Alice Dreger the wrong way. Boy! Is she pissed! And she only gets pissed when getting pissed helps fix a significant problem: that the New York Times today is a central part of a "postapocalyptic, postmodern media landscape where thoughtfulness and nonpartisan inquiry go to die": Alice Dreger: Why I Escaped the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’: "I asked what this group supposedly had in common...

• Adam Smith (George Goodman) (1972): Supermoney: "Anyway, we sat at the great man’s knee, and then we went out to apply the theory...

Note to Self: Human intelligence can be thought of in three ways: we are rational beings, we are rationalizing beings, and we are debating and consensus-forming beings...

My real problem is that my normal daily cycle is about 23 hours. So the last hour or two before going to sleep is a zero for any purpose. So I’m always tempted to just go to bed, and hope I will have extra energy to recoup the following morning. And so I wake up too early and find myself suffering from bio rhythm upset.

I do not know what to do to get out of this—except for drinking lots of coffee in the evening. But I want to preserve the effect of coffee on my attention span for serious emergencies.

I am stuck...

Those of us who do digital economics owe Suzanne Scotchman a lot as we stand on her gigantic shoulders. Those of us who seek a free and equal society are deeply indebted to Suzanne along other dimensions as well...

Remembering Suzanne Scotchmer

Another piece worrying that human beings are simply unequipped to deal with an advertising supported internet, in which money flows to those who hack your brain to glue your eyeballs to the screen: Ben Popken: As algorithms take over, YouTube's recommendations highlight a human problem: "A supercomputer playing chess against your mind to get you to keep watching...

• Another piece worrying that human beings are simply unequipped to deal with an advertising supported internet, in which money flows to those who hack your brain to glue your eyeballs to the screen: Ben Popken: As algorithms take over, YouTube's recommendations highlight a human problem: "A supercomputer playing chess against your mind to get you to keep watching...

• OK, Ben: how do we write regulations that constrain aggregators that want to hack our brain and attention and empower platforms that enable us to accomplish what we prudently judge our purposes to be when we are in our best selves? How was it that printing managed to, eventually, generate a less-unhealthy public sphere? Young Habermas, where are you now that we need you?: Ben Thompson: Tech’s Two Philosophies: "Apple and Microsoft, the two 'bicycle of the mind” companies'... had broadly similar business models... platforms.

Someone who wishes me ill reminds me of this from six years ago.

Could the Swedish academy please stop giving nobel prizes to economists—like Eugene Fama—who lack basic historical literacy? This isn't rocket science, after all. I really do not think that this is very much to ask: Paul Krugman (2011): Boom For Whom: "While I’m talking about inequality and the crisis, I realized recently that there’s another channel not usually talked about, via the misperception of success...

Ann Marie Marciarille: Minutes Matter, Don't Wait!: "Or so my local 'Emergency Room of Brookside' bleats from its website  but, even more oddly, from the pop up advertising that is dogging my web browsing these days...

20th century British Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan is most known not for anything he did but for a witty letter that he wrote to Dick Cressman, Director of Psychological Warfare at Allied Forces Headquarters in the Mediterranean…

"Greeks to Their Romans"-The Twentieth Century Superpower Succession

Thx to Wavelength and the very interesting micro.blog http://delong.micro.blog/2018/04/21/greeks-to-their.html

Text: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/03/harold-macmillan-greeks-to-their-romans-document-on-the-twentieth-century-imperial-succession.html

RSS: http://delong.micro.blog/podcast.xml.

Three approaches to history:

1. As an image of what we should become—The study of history as a way of motivating us to recover what has been lost and return to a golden age

2. As a linear story of human progress, leading up to us, who are either perfect as we are or are going to continue to progress into the future because the arrow of time is also the arrow of history and the arrow of progress

3. Benjamin’s: we are the hunchback dwarf concealed out of sight inside the Mechanical Turk: we seek messianic redemption and we pull the strings of science and historical knowledge to strive for utopia. History provides us with flashes of illumination insight as we seek to carry out our messianic task.

Adam Smith (George Goodman) (1972): Supermoney: "Anyway, we sat at the great man’s knee, and then we went out to apply the theory...

The New York Times tried to suck up to the eminent and intelligent Alice Dreger the wrong way. Boy! Is she pissed! And she only gets pissed when getting pissed helps fix a significant problem: that the New York Times today is a central part of a "postapocalyptic, postmodern media landscape where thoughtfulness and nonpartisan inquiry go to die": Alice Dreger: Why I Escaped the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’: "I asked what this group supposedly had in common...

Maybe I have become unhinged and have lost my mind, but when I read this by Barry "whistling past the graveyard" comes to mind. Democracies vote incumbents out of office when things go wrong not when incumbents mismanage. A system that could produce a more informed effective electorate than the uniformed democratic electorate would seem likely to have an edge. The counter has always been that a restricted franchise may produce more competence, but it definitely produces plutocracy. These days, however, democracies seem increasingly to be likely to produce plutocracy without the competence. And the recent rise of transnational neo-fascism makes things even worse: politicians reconcile a broad democratic electorate with their desires to pursue plutocracy via performative cruelty against those they label as "others".

From China's perspective, what "democracy" generates is the same amount of plutocracy, much less competence, and mob rule in the sense that giddy minds will be dizzied by demagogues with foreign (and domestic) quarrels.

Yes, China does face the five-good-emperors-in-a-row-is-the-limit problem. But modern democracies face problems too.

I have less confidence in "built-in course-correction" than Barry does.

Time to go read The Federalist Papers, written when it was not a slam-dunk belief anywhere that a republic could be sustained, again: Barry Eichengreen: China and the Future of Democracy: "Growing geostrategic influence, rising soft power, and, above all, continued economic success suggest that other countries will see China as a model to emulate...

I can't help it. Every time I see a 60 plus male from the South or the Midwest, I cannot help but think: "There goes an easily grifted moron!" The strong that has to be rolled uphill to keep Trumpland from falling further behind the rest of the country is very large and heavy: Paul Krugman: What’s the Matter With Trumpland?: "Regional convergence in per-capita incomes has stopped dead. And the relative economic decline of lagging regions has been accompanied by growing social problems...

Weekend Reading: Teresa Nielsen Hayden (2005): Some things I know about moderating conversations in virtual space: "Getting online just gets easier and easier...

...It’s an inescapable truth that for some people, the most interesting way to participate in online discourse is to kick holes in the conversation. Others—many of them young, but some, alas, old enough to know better—have a sense of entitlement that leads them to believe that their having an opinion means the rest of us are obliged to listen to it. Still others plainly get off on verbally abusing others, and seek out conversations that will offer them opportunities to do so. And so on and so forth: the whole online bestiary:

Dan Ziblatt (2012): Moderation and Radicalization in Conservative Parties: "While we may be correct to assert that 'theories of parties' predict establishment candidates win primaries, this is really a theory about the U.S, particularly... the... Republican Party...

Gabrielle Coppola: Trump’s TPP Pullout May Have Cost Missouri Its Harley Factory: "Harley-Davidson Inc.’s chief executive officer said he may have kept a plant open in Missouri if the U.S. had stayed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement that President Donald Trump withdrew from last year...

The extremely intelligent Martin Wolf reviews Maria Mazzucato. I blush to say that her book is still in THE PILE—I have not read it yet: Martin Wolf: Who creates a nation’s economic value?: "Who creates value? Who extracts value? Who destroys value?...

OK, Ben: how do we write regulations that constrain aggregators that want to hack our brain and attention and empower platforms that enable us to accomplish what we prudently judge our purposes to be when we are in our best selves? How was it that printing managed to, eventually, generate a less-unhealthy public sphere? Young Habermas, where are you now that we need you?: Ben Thompson: Tech’s Two Philosophies: "Apple and Microsoft, the two 'bicycle of the mind” companies'... had broadly similar business models... platforms...

And now David Brooks decides that it is time for him to triangulate by making false, flimsy, and flagrantly spurious pro-Trump arguments: Yastreblansky: No More Mister Nice Blog: It takes a thief: "David F. Brooks finally starting to give in to his inner sycophant, as he contemplates Donald Trump's and Michael Cohen's histories with organized crime. Maybe it's a feature-not-a bug!...

I agree with Noah Smith that a lot of interesting work is being done in academic economics—even in macro. I agree with the Economist that academic economists are more-or-less neutralized at best in the public sphere, with bad actors, bad methodology, and bad ideologues drowning out information. I agree that economics should do a much better job of policing its own internal community and standing within it via what my colleague Alan Auerbach calls "obloquy". I agree that economics should do a much better job of managing its discursive modes, in both empirical and theoretical work. But I do wish the Economist would turn its microscope on what purports to be economic journalism more: Noah Smith: OK, so The Economist has an ongoing series of articles about the shortcomings of the economics profession: "https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21740403-first-series-columns-professions-shortcomings-economists...

Will the Trump Fed be "normal"? I will give Ken Randy Quarles. I grant Rich Clarida. But Marvin Goodfriend does not seem to me to be a particularly normal Federal Reserve appointment. He's one of the "debasement" crowd who had no respect for Ben Bernanke's judgment and tried as hard as they could to limit his freedom of action. If that's "normal", "normal" is not a good thing. And otherwise... a lot of unfilled seats. I told Jason Furman he needed to fill up the Fed Board on January 4, 2017. He did not do so: Ken Rogoff: Donald Trump’s Normal Fed : "Unfortunately, the battle for the Fed’s independence is far from over...

The behavior of the Federal Reserve remains a puzzle. They seem to be reacting month-to-month, and to be happy with their current policy stance of gradual raising until and unless something goes wrong. They do not seem to be thinking down the game tree very far—not taking account of how their current policy stance exposes them to huge downside risks should low r-star continue, should "secular stagnation" be the correct diagnosis, and should there be any kind of significant adverse demand shock to the economy: Tim Duy: Set To Stay On Current Path: "When is the economy at or beyond full employment?...

81%? Only 81% of "Initial Coin Offerings" created by "con artists, charlatans, and swindlers"? What are the other 19%? What of their own resources are the issuers putting on the line, and what is the path to long-run value? Not 81%: 100%, Nouriel!: Nouriel Roubini: Initial Coin Scams: "Initial coin offerings have become the most common way to finance cryptocurrency ventures, of which there are now nearly 1,600 and rising...

"Economists for Trump"—I do not know whether to be gratified that only 100 economists would sign this, or horrified that even 100 economists would sign this. It is certainly a remarkable document—one that I do not think anybody who was not both 100% cynical and 100% deluded could sign. Cynical: you have to genuinely not care about whether you are making contrary-to-fact assertions. Deluded: you have to believe that what you say will be credited by anybody other than partisan Trumpist ideologues and the professional opinions-of-shape-of-earth-differ crowd:

• At this point, you need to be cynical and deluded to be willing to claim that the TCJA is a middle-class tax cut that will boost economic growth, rather than an upward redistribution of income with more than 100% of the value of the small growth effects it will have going to foreigners.

• At this point, you need to be cynical and deluded to be willing to claim that Trump offers regulatory relief rather than a Berlusconi-like corrupt advantaging of favored clients.

• At this point, you need to be cynical and deluded to be willing to claim that Trump is for "reciprocal free trade with lower trade barriers on all sides". To the extent that Trump is for anything, it is for managed trade with bilateral trade balanced or in export surplus for the U.S.

• At this point, you need to be cynical and deluded to be willing to claim that there are any signs that "President Trump's negotiations on trade are working".

• At this point, you need to be cynical and deluded to be willing to claim that there has been an "improvement in the economic growth trajectory" or that CBO's estimates justify such a claim.

I look at this, and I cannot help but think: I know that America has lots of easily-grifted morons on it. But this moronic? And this easily grifted?: Economists for Trump: A ECONOMISTS LETTER IN SUPPORT OF PRESIDENT TRUMP'S ECONOMIC POLICY AGENDA : "We enthusiastically endorse President Trump's economic agenda to create jobs and restore economic growth...

No, the Roman Republic did not fall because its leaders like wild parties. Any further questions?...

Misapplied History-Aye Yie Yie!

Thx to Wavelength and the very interesting micro.blog http://delong.micro.blog/2018/04/21/misapplied-history-aye.html

Text: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/03/niall-ferguson-fetch-the-purple-toga-emperor-trump-is-herehttpswwwthetimescoukarticlefetch-the-purple-toga-e.html

Weekend Reading: Abraham Lincoln (December 3, 1861): First State of the Union Message: "It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government--the rights of the people...

Geoffrey Hodgson: 200 Years of Karl Marx: "At least two major aspects of Marx’s thought removed protections of human rights and paved the way for brutal totalitarianism...

Kevin Drum: What Made Marxism So Deadly?: "[Noah] Smith has the causation backward here...

The Brexiters never had a plan for what they would do if they won the referendum. And they still do not have a plan. I do not see a road other than "transitional" arrangements that keep things as they are without the UK having any voice in Brussels—"transitional" arrangements that will keep getting indefinitely extended: Robert Hutton: Stuck In the Middle: These Are Theresa May's Four Brexit Options: "Her inner Brexit Cabinet has rejected her proposed customs relationship with the European Union...

Paul Rincon: Hun migrations 'linked to deadly Justinian Plague': "Eske Willerslev, Peter de Barros Damgaard and others... sequenced genomes... recovered DNA from a strain of plague related to the one responsible for the Justinian Plague...

Anecdotes trump data for what I wish were a surprisingly large proportion of male American economists: Economist: Barriers to entry: "In economics, men receive tenure at a rate 12 percentage points higher than women do, after controlling for family circumstances and publication records...