Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Kate Aronoff: What the ‘New York Times’ Climate Blockbuster Missed: "Nathaniel Rich’s article illustrates American failures, not global ones...

Dan Drezner: The invisible heroism of Paul Ryan: "Back in March, I wrote.... 'Why, exactly, is Paul D. Ryan being so quiet? What does he hope to accomplish at this point? I don’t know. I would love to hear from someone who does'...

Socialism with German Nationalist Characteristics: Sheri Berman: Weekend Reading: "Even Hilferding recognized that his position doomed the SPD to continued sterility. In a letter to Karl Kautsky, he wrote: 'Worst of all in this situation is that we cannot say anything concrete to the people about how and by what means we would end the crisis. Capitalism has been shaken far beyond our expectations but... a socialist solution is not at hand and that makes the situation unbelievably difficult and allows the Communists and Nazis to continue to grow'...

F--- you, @jack. Use Twitter if and only if you find it useful. But everyone is now under a moral obligation to diminish its profits and hasten its obsolescence: Steve Randy Waldman: "F--- @twitter for killing their third-party clients: " for the second time. I wish it were credible for me to say I’m leaving the platform. It’s not credible. Twitter has market power, I will use the platform, but increasingly I wish the company ill...

Nate Silver: How FiveThirtyEight’s House Model Works

Rory McVeigh, David Cunningham, and Justin Farrell: Political Polarization as a Social Movement Outcome: 1960s Klan Activism and Its Enduring Impact on Political Realignment in Southern Counties, 1960 to 2000: "Short-term movement influence on voting outcomes can endure when orientations toward the movement disrupt social ties, embedding individuals within new discussion networks...

Wise to people who want to be journalists in our current age: (1) Don't expect backup from your peers. (2) rather, the reverse. (3) Falsehood comes faster than you can report it, let alone debunk it: Alexey Kovalev: A message to my doomed colleagues in the American media: "Congratulations, US media! You’ve just covered your first press conference of an authoritarian leader with a massive ego and a deep disdain for your trade and everything you hold dear. We in Russia have been doing it for 12 years now—with a short hiatus when our leader wasn’t technically our leader—so quite a few things during Donald Trump’s press conference rang a bell. Not just mine, in fact—read this excellent round-up in The Moscow Times..."

There was an opportunity to pass a corporate tax cut—excuse me, "reform"—that would be durable. The Republicans did not do it. So now there is a tax code that has little depth as far as support is concern. And so there is likely to come an opportunity to run the table. The master of legislative and technical detail Greg Leiserson and Equitable Growth Fearless Leader Heather Boushey provide a roadmap: Heather Boushey and Greg Leiserson: Taxing for Equitable Growth: "Tax reform... when the time comes, here are the three areas progressives must focus on...

Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva: Misperceptions about Immigration and Support for Redistribution: "The debate on immigration is often based on misperceptions about the number and character of immigrants...

How, again, is Donald Trump supposed to win a breath-holding contest with an authoritarian régime that both controls its media and sees little downside in redirecting resources to cushion the impact on potentially noisy losers?: Paul Krugman: How to Lose a Trade War: "Trump’s declaration that 'trade wars are good, and easy to win' is an instant classic, right up there with Herbert Hoover’s 'prosperity is just around the corner'

In retrospect, this from the usually-reliable Karl Smith and Brandon Arnold looks really, really, really awful, no? But they really should have known better: Anyone who goes the extra mile to give the version of Kevin Hassett on display these days the benefit of the doubt is likely to wind up naked on the Moon. That, I think, is the real lesson here—shading your thoughts to think more highly of Kevin these days either out of comity or because you think he is broadly on your policy side will put you in the same position as those who surrender their dignity to Donald Trump: Karl Smith and Brandon Arnold: Kevin Hassett’s Defense of Tax Reform is Right on Point: "The Tax Policy Center... had recently issued a report suggesting that the “Big Six” tax-reform proposal would add nearly $2.4 trillion to the budget deficit over the next ten years, raise taxes on many upper-middle class households, and slash taxes for the top 1 percent. Mr. Hassett was invited to respond to the report. His remarks were, unsurprisingly, unsparing. After all, the government’s top economist shouldn’t sit quietly while premature invectives are launched at the administration’s signature fiscal proposal...

Should Kansas's (and Missouri's) Future Be "a Lot More Like Texas"?: Hoisted from the Archives: Three paragraphs later Burrough is writing of... "an oppressive post-Civil War government of Radical Reconstructionists..." To talk in the twenty-first century of oppressive Radical Reconstructionists who thought the 14th Amendment ought to mean something is to play not just the race card but the entire race deck...

Am I the only one who remembers journamalist Erica Grieder's carrying water for Texas Governor Greg Abbott's tinfoil hat fear of Operation Jade Helm?: "Greg Abbott’s announcement... that he would direct the Texas State Guard to monitor Operation Jade Helm... has been widely derided as political pandering, stoking paranoia, wasting state resources, and making Texas look silly. Way harsh, guys..." Bending over backward to claim tinfoil hat behavior is not tinfoil hat behavior is never "balance", guys: Cassandra Pollock and Alex Samuels: Hysteria Over Jade Helm Exercise in Texas Was Fueled by Russians, Former Cia Director Says: "Gov. Greg Abbott's decision in 2015 to ask the Texas State Guard to monitor a federal military exercise.... A former CIA director said Wednesday that the move emboldened Russians to next target elections...

Michael Tomasky: Hail to the Chief: "It’s worth stepping back here to review quickly the steps by which the Republican Party became this stewpot of sycophants, courtesans, and obscurantists...

It is necessary to remember, every day, what Dan Froomkin reminds us of: THIS IS NOT NORMAL. This was a private cabinet meeting. Yes, there are always lots of leaks and lots of complaisant reporters who work for sources generating a cloud of misinformation in an attempt to seek personal advantage in the court that is the White House. But "our principal is an idiot" is a message that people in the White House rarely wish to send. But that is, as Dan Froomkin points out here, the message that the Whire House insiders are saying: Dan Froomkin: THIS IS NOT NORMAL: "In private FEMA remarks, Trump’s focus strays from hurricanes...

Opposition to Medicaid expansion was one of the cruelest deeds of reactionaries in the 2000s: Ralph Northam: "As a doctor, I believe ensuring all Virginians have access to the care they need is a moral and economic imperative. This budget expands Medicaid and will empower nearly 400,000 Virginians with access to health insurance, without crowding out other spending priorities...

Comment of the Day: Graydon: "What you're seeing is an active ethnogenesis; Trump's base are recreating themselves as something that's not 'Americans'...

The wise Ian Buruma on the Trumpists' attempts to construct a global Fascist International: Ian Buruma: Steve Bannon’s European Adventure: "The reputed mastermind of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has launched a full-scale effort to unite Europe's right-wing forces and bring down the European Union...

David Rothkopf: "A brief note to my Republican friends: (and other supporters of the president): Keep your eye on the penny. It is about to drop...

(Early) Monday Smackdown: New York Magazine Has a Huge Quality Control Problem with Andrew Sullivan. It Needs to Fix It...

Dan Davies: "Expats who give us a bad name overseas by trying to excuse their shitty behaviour by going 'oh it's a British thing' should have their passports removed. You're meant to be on your best behaviour, tool..."

Aspen: Security: Reactions to the Four Ex-National Security Advisors Panel

Some of My Less Polite Thoughts from Aspen

Dan Davies: "Expats who give us a bad name overseas by trying to excuse their shitty behaviour by going 'oh it's a British thing' should have their passports removed. You're meant to be on your best behaviour, tool...

Is this right? Is this robust? If it is, this is amazing: Kevin Drum: College-Educated Republican Women are Extinct: "College-educated white women? They support Democrats by a net of nearly 50 points. And it shows no signs of bouncing back and forth...

Sharply distinguishing "ideology" from "partisanship" seems to me to be a potentially fatal flaw in what is otherwise an absolutely brilliant essay. We East African Plains Apes think in groups: we outsource a great deal of what we believe to others whom we trust. Thus "partisanship" and "ideology" reinforce each other massively. But that also means that when thought-leader elites change what the partisans with access to audiences say, people's "ideologies" will change as well—without the thinking about it much, if it all: Nathan P. Kalmoe: Uses & Abuses of Ideology: "Ideology is a central construct in political psychology, and researchers claim large majorities of the public are ideological, but most fail to grapple with evidence of ideological innocence in most citizens...

Kevin Drum: "I’ve been blogging for 15 years, and there’s never been a day when I wanted to stop...

Herbert Hoover: As Bad to Ally with Stalin and Churchill Against Hitler as to Ally with Hitler Against Stalin and Churchill

Kevin Drum: About That Hillary Clinton Dirt: "There’s something about the whole Trump Tower meeting that might be obvious to everyone by now, but I’m not sure it is. It might not even be especially important. For what it’s worth, though, here’s what I think happened...

Seems to me I can think of many reasons why his friends would have told him this would not be a good book to write: Joe Patrice: Law School Professor Has New Murder Mystery: "Law professor who quit Twitter in a temper tantrum is back with a new book.... Earlier this year, the conservative Edmund Burke Society at the University of Chicago advertised an event to discuss whether or not immigrants were 'toilet people'...

I have a question for Stanford's Michael @McFaul... We know that "If the heritability of IQ were 0.5 and the degree of assortation in mating, m, were 0.2 (both reasonable, if only ballpark estimates), and if the genetic inheritance of IQ were the only mechanism accounting for intergenerational income transmission, then the intergenerational correlation of lifetime incomes would be 0.01..." (see Bowles and Giants (2002)). That is only two percent the observed intergenerational correlation. Why, then, is it important to invite to your campus to speak someone whose big thing is the intergenerational transmission of intelligence through genes, and racial differences thereof? And if one were going to invite to your campus to speak someone, etc., why would you pick somebody who likes to burn crosses? Wouldn't a healthier approach be to regard such a person—who focuses on the intergenerational transmission of intelligence through genes, harps on genetic roots of differences between "races", and likes to burn crosses—as we regard those who know a little too much about the muzzle velocities of the main cannon of the various models of the Nazi Armored Battlewagon Version 4?: Jonathan Marks: Who wants Charles Murray to speak, and why?: "The Bell Curve cited literature from Mankind Quarterly, which no mainstream scholar cites, because it is an unscholarly racist journal... http://anthropomics2.blogspot.com/2017/04/who-wants-charles-murray-to-speak-and.html

What was really existing socialism, comrade? This was really existing socialism: Yen Ho: Our Handling of 'The Great Wind': "In the tasks of editing and publishing the poem, we were in error...