Orange-Haired Baboons: Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads
No surprise: throwing people off Medicaid has substantial costs and no benefits at all: Thomas DeLeire: The Effect of Disenrollment from Medicaid on Employment, Insurance Coverage, Health and Health Care Utilization: "From July through September 2005, TennCare, the Tennessee Medicaid program, disenrolled approximately 170,000 adults following a change in eligibility rules...
The more Geoff Kabaservice insists that William F. Buckley was much more than a Klansman with a big vocabulary, the more people send me things that seem to strongly indicate that he was little more than a Klansman with a big vocabulary—or, possibly, a grifter who wanted to appear to be a Klansman with a big vocabulary. Is that better? Is that worse?: Jeet Heer (2015): National Review's Racism Denial, Then and Now: "[The] massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, but conservative writer Mona Charen seems to have been doubly upset. Writing in National Review... complained that the prospect that the tragedy could be politically exploited by Democrats was 'even more depressing' than the actions of the killer...
Thomas Piketty: Social-Nativism, The Italian Nightmare: "It is time for Europe to demonstrate to the working classes that it is best suited to defend them by finally implementing a policy to relaunch the economy and for a just form of taxation. As long as the centrists on all sides practise a similar form of anti-social liberalism, social-nativism will have a promising future ahead...
Paul Campos: Trump: Symptom or Cause? (Or, tomorrow's historical revisionism today): "The functionalist position will emphasize... continuity between Trump... [and] Goldwater... a triumph of mass movement politics over elite control....
Thinking About This Again: Extremely wise and interesting on how the more empirical reality tells the Trumpists to mark their beliefs to market, the more desperate they are to avoid doing so: John Holbo: Epistemic Sunk Costs and the Extraordinary, Populist Delusions of Crowds?: "Here’s a thought.... The first rule of persuasion is: make your audience want to believe...
Comment of the Day: John Howard Brown: Talking Points on Trump: "I came of age in 1973. However, I grew up in a manufacturing city in Northeast Ohio. I can assure you that everyone growing up in that time and place was very aware of the impact of immigration...
Paul Krugman: "Maybe it's worth laying out the incoherence of Trump's trade war a bit more, um, coherently...
Alexandra Erin: Fear, and Fear of Witches: "There's fear, and then there's fear of witches...
Jeet Heer: McCain's Funeral: "McCain's funeral was very moving and appropriately political (as befits the funeral of a major political figure)...
Note to Self: Talking Points on Trump: We have no idea how bad Trump‘s trade and immigration policies will turn out to be. The policy as Trump says he want wants to pursue would be very bad indeed. But it is not clear if they are competent enough to implement any policies. Nevertheless, an army of chaos monkeys has a destructive power all its own...
Cass R. Sunstein: It Can Happen Here: "In They Thought They Were Free, Mayer decided to focus on ten people, different in many respects but with one characteristic in common: they had all been members of the Nazi Party. Eventually they agreed to talk, accepting his explanation that he hoped to enable the people of his nation to have a better understanding of Germany. Mayer was truthful about that and about nearly everything else. But he did not tell them that he was a Jew...
Tom Sugrue: "Geoffrey Kabaservice, whose scholarship on moderate Republicanism and internal GOP debates is excellent,: "has launched a sharp critique of histories of conservatism in Politico.... He... falls prey to the crudest identitarian assumptions about who is and isn't a legitimate narrator...
Doug Irwin: Trump’s Trade Policy Is An Exercise In Futility: "Yet for all the Sturm und Drang of his trade policy, the president is likely to end up being terribly disappointed by the results of his efforts...
Mattheew Fay: The U.S. Military is a Tool, but the President Thinks it’s a Trophy: "The president routinely complains that the United States can’t afford to maintain its alliance commitments... suggests military exercises on the Korean Peninsula are so costly that they can be traded for vague promises of North Korean denuclearization.... The president will preside over a military parade in Washington, D.C., later this year that will cost nearly as much as the exercises. What explains this apparent contradiction?...
The New York Times has done an appallingly bad job in this age of Trump. What they see here about the bad job done by Republican politicians is all true. But I wish they would turn their scrutiny inward a bit: New York Times: The Cult of Trump: "Every now and again, someone sticks a neck out...
The Trumpists appear happy to lose, as long as they can convince themselves that others are losing more. So much "winning". May I have more of this "winning" please?: Edward Luce: The West Minus One: How Donald Trump Is Helping China: "Europe, Canada and Japan are united against Mr Trump’s trade belligerence...
I disagree with Simon here. He claims that "Alesina or Rogoff featured so much in... austerity... not because they were influential, but because they were useful to provide some intellectual credibility to the policy that politicians of the right wanted to pursue". It's not one or the other. They gave credibility. And because they gave credibility the media-political machine made them influential. And there influence was such that they neutralized the rest of us, who understood what was going on and were desperately trying to stop it: Simon Wren-Lewis: The biggest economic policy mistake of the last decade, and it had nothing to do with academic economists: "Reading the article brought back memories of my first year or two writing this blog, where I became part of a mainly US blog scene of mainstream academics opposed to austerity...
The last time that a Republican voted for a live and possible deficit-reduction package—a combination of spending cuts and tax increases relative to baseline that might attract legislative majorities—was 1990. Since then Republicans have voted for spending cuts and spending increases. And they have voted for tax cuts for the rich. Deficit reduction? Nope. Alice Rivlin is in the position of the person who goes out in the night on December 31, 999 firmly expecting the Messiah, when nothing happens says "I must have miscounted: it will happen next year", and keeps it up. Well, it is now 1027. 28 such non-appearances, soon to be 29. And she still has firm faith that the Republican Budget Messiah will arrive next year, if not this one: Brendan Greeley: Goodbye to Sunday morning economics: "Whenever Alice Rivlin speaks in public it feels like a tent revival...
Paul Krugman: Partisanship, Parasites, and Polarization: "Parasites are a huge force in the natural world.... A number... actually change their hosts’ behavior, in ways that benefit the parasites but damage and perhaps eventually kill their victims...
Comment of the day: JEC: There is something deeply mentally, morally, and psychologically wrong here—with Glenn Kessler, with his bosses, and with his colleagues. In a Washington Post with good journalists, there would be a substantial number of resignations today: "Wow. Kessler et al fail basic Fact Checking Journalism 101 here...
Adolf Hitler Interviewed by George Sylvester Viereck in 1923: Weekend Reading
Comment of the Day: Graydon: Jacob Levy: I don’t think there’s anything—anything—on which I’ve gotten so much disbelief-that-becomes-near-anger as when I contradict the post-2014 Fox narrative about campus life...: "I think the shorter version is 'participants in authoritarian systems seek to destroy any alternative source of authority'...
A plea of despair for our politics and public sphere discourse from Duncan Black: Duncan Black: Eschaton: "Nobody Who Works Full Time Should Live In Poverty": "This, or a version of this, has become some sort of crazy left idea...
Comment of the Day: Jim Lund: Yes, Republicans Are or Are Pretending to Be Easily Grifted Morons: "And over at the National Review on Aug 27, Wesley J. Smith from the creationist Discovery Institute writes an article on how conservatives must insist on teaching the controversy on global warming...
Laura McGann: John McCain's Legacy: Sarah Palin, and the Rise of Reality TV Politics: "McCain empowered a demagogue who put the Republican Party on the path to Donald Trump. The party of Donald Trump began almost 10 years ago to the day, when John McCain tapped Sarah Palin to join his ticket...
Comment of the Day: Graydon: Jacob Levy: I don’t think there’s anything—anything—on which I’ve gotten so much disbelief-that-becomes-near-anger as when I contradict the post-2014 Fox narrative about campus life...: "The campus narrative is a way to assign moral wrong because they can't assign factual wrong back to the institutions and processes which are assigning factual error to them...
Noah Feldman: Southern District of New York Will Tear Into Trump Organization: "This isn’t over. In the span of one week, we learned that the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York had both secured a guilty plea from Trump Organization lawyer Michael Cohen and offered an immunity deal to the company’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg...
Rob Beschizza: President Trump colors U.S. flag wrongly in classroom photo opg: "Maybe Trump should kneel before it a while, so he at least knows what it looks like. I've created a useful graphic of the Trumpamerica Flag
Comment of the Day: Tracy Lightcap: Jacob Levy: I don’t think there’s anything—anything—on which I’ve gotten so much disbelief-that-becomes-near-anger as when I contradict the post-2014 Fox narrative about campus life...: "This is it, but I think the process is a bit more complicated. People who have made up their minds on a topic and committed themselves to it are still susceptible to arguments that work through repetition to undermine authority figures...
Comment of the Day: Graydon: Josh Marshall: We Know Trump Is Guilty. We’re Having a Hard Time Admitting It: "The problem isn't Trump's manifest guilt; the problem is that, in a two party system, the majority-of-power party is guilty...
Paul Krugman: The Slippery Slope of Complicity: "When was the last time centrist talking heads declared, “Donald Trump just became president” (because he bombed someone, or something like that)? I think it’s been more than a year...
Josh Marshall: We Know Trump Is Guilty. We’re Having a Hard Time Admitting It: "The greatest conceit in public life today is the notion that we don’t already know President Trump is guilty... of... conspiring... with a foreign power... and then continuing to cater to that foreign power either as payback for the assistance or out of fear of being exposed...
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..."
The awesomely smart and industrious Chye-Ching Huang of the CBPP praises Greg Leiserson's must-read guide to understanding last December's tax bill. There was space for a growth-promoting corporate tax cut that did not widen income inequality that much. That space was occupied, instead, by something that manages to increase inequality sharply while reducing projected national income—three steps backward for equitable growth.
The Sisyphean work of getting to people to recognize that the Reagan "morning in America" boom was a standard Keynesian reaction to a larger federal deficit in a time of high unemployment—it continues: Menzie Chinn: The Reagan Tax Cuts and Defense Buildup: Supply-Side Miracle or Keynesian Stimulus?: "This set of outcomes does not deny the existence of some supply side effect—the dots in Figure 2 don’t line up exactly on a straight line—but the overall pattern seems to be more consistent with an AD shift from the tax cuts and spending increases (combined with monetary policy relaxation) as opposed to a supply-side scenario as laid out by Wanniski and Laffer.... Bruce Bartlett, who was there at the inception, reminds me of Barry Ritholtz’s review of Reaganomics. See also Bartlett’s piece on the subject..."
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)...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
If the U.S. wants to avoid a very damaging outcome to all this, the less immoderate Republicans and the Democrats need to be thinking hard about how to take power away from Donald Trump on trade matters—and national security matters—come January 5, 2019: Martin Wolf: Donald Trump declares trade war on China: "The Trump administration has presented China with an ultimatum on trade...
National Taxpayers Union: More Than 1,100 Economists Join NTU to Voice Opposition to Tariffs, Protectionism: "The lowering of trade barriers between nations has been one of the great achievements of the global economic system in the postwar era...
The White House press corps: working for their sources first, their bosses second, and themselves third. Do they view themselves as working for their readers at all?: Katha Pollitt: A Press Corps Full of Aunt Lydias: "The real reason... would call into question the underlying presumption of the dinner, which is that there is no price for 'access'...
Ashley Feinberg: Leak: The Atlantic Had A Meeting About Kevin Williamson. It Was A Liberal Self-Reckoning: "In a staff meeting, Jeffrey Goldberg and Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed the hiring and firing of a conservative writer. But it wound up being about a lot more than that...
The extremely sharp Joe Romm: Trump voters hurt most by Trump policies, new study finds: "Failure to stop business-as-usual global warming will deliver a severe economic blow to Southern states, a recent paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds..." and he sends us to: Riccardo Colacito, Bridget Hoffman and Toan Phan: Temperature and Growth: A Panel Analysis of the United States: "Seasonal temperatures have significant and systematic effects on the U.S. economy...
Republicans purge every thinker who was correct. Republican economists who were right about 2007-2012 are now, as best as I can see, all ex-Republican economists. And the same dynamic has long been working in the national security space: Gene Healy (2015): Think Tanks and the Iraq War: "It would be even better if the GOP’s 2016 contenders weren’t still, 12 years later, so eager to seek foreign policy advice from people who got the Iraq War Question spectacularly wrong...
This phenomenon is truly deplorable, on many levels: Gillian Tett: True believers: why US evangelicals support Trump: "80 per cent of white evangelicals voted for him in the 2016 election...
I do think that this is the best thing on Paul Ryan's retirement: Alexandra Petri: Paul Ryan can’t possibly have made a deal with the Devil: "His piano-playing has not improved. He has not become any wiser. He has not been able to travel widely and see the great sights of the present and past...
Should not the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School bigtime rethink the support services it provides to potential donor admittees, and do so pronto? He does have what Wharton calls an economics degree: Justin Wolfers: "If OPEC were boosting oil prices,
Eight years of Governor Sam Brownback has seen Kansas lose 8% of its jobs relative to the national average. Now Kansas is Ground Zero for Trump's trade war. Joshua Green: Chinese Sorghum Tariffs Will Hit Hard in Trump-friendly Kansas: "Trump’s Trade War Hits Another Red State: What’s the matter with Kansas? It’ll be hardest hit by new Chinese tariffs...
Credulous business-friendly reporters willing to publish cries of "labor shortage" without evidence are annoying: Neel Kashkari: "The extreme emotions around the labor market 'historic, severe worker shortages'. Sounds like a real crisis. Is it?...
Alessandro Nicita, Marcelo Olarreaga, and Peri da Silva: [A trade war will increase average tariffs by 32 percentage points(https://voxeu.org/article/trade-war-will-increase-average-tariffs-32-percentage-points): "A trade war will increase average tariffs by 32 percentage points...
"If getting China to pay what it owes for technology were the goal, you’d expect the U.S.... to make specific demands... and... build a coalition", a Tran-Pacific Partnership, so to speak: Paul Krugman: The Art of the Flail: "Whenever investors suspect that Donald Trump will really go through with his threats of big tariff increases... stocks plunge...
The idea that the collapse of the aristocratic Roman Free State into the Roman Empire was due to wild dissipative partying—luxus, a vice caught from the Greeks and "Asiatics", giving rise to avaritia, which then leads to ambitio and cupido imperii—was originally a meme put forward by those I regard as the true villains—plutocrats and political norm breakers—to avoid responsibility: A.W. Lintott (1972): Imperial Expansion and Moral Decline in the Roman Republic: "Imperial expansion in general did of course have divisive economic and political effects...
Imposing tariffs on intermediate inputs is especially bad, especially destructive: Chad Brown: The Element of Surprise Is a Bad Strategy for a Trade War: "Trump’s decision to impose restrictions on intermediate inputs and capital equipment is a step backward...
@#$#@!*&%%!! Ana Swanson: Trump Proposes Rejoining Trans-Pacific Partnership to Shield Farmers From Trade War: "President Trump... [said] he was directing his advisers to look into rejoining the multicountry trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership...
Justin Fox: Paul Ryan's Roadmap Was an Epic Fiscal Failure: "Paul Ryan did not cause the financial crisis. He has nonetheless failed pretty spectacularly... his actions have made the situation much worse than it had to be...
Jonathan Chait: Trump Attacks Comey for Handing Him the Presidency: "Comey all but confirms the Democrats’ complaints.... He considered Clinton a lead-pipe cinch to win...
Robert Skidelsky: The Advanced Economies’ Lost Decade: "Policy interventions immediately following the 2008 crash did make a difference.... The 2008 collapse was as steep as that of 1929, but it lasted for a much shorter time...
Lisa Mascaro and Bill Barrow: Ryan Retirement Fuels House GOP Desperation To Maintain Control: “'It’s like Eisenhower resigning right before D-Day', said Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia...
Matthew Yglesias: House Speaker Paul Ryan’s retirement: good riddance: "The many lives of Paul Ryan: Ryan joined Congress in 1998 but first really made his mark during the Social Security privatization wars of 2004-’05...
Ezra Klein (2012): A not-very-truthful speech in a not-very-truthful campaign: "Honestly? I didn't want us to write this piece...
Steve M.: NEEDY, RAGE-FILLED TRUMP IS THE PERFECT CANDIDATE FOR CONSERVATIVES NOW: "Past presidents, most of whom were emotional adults, knew they'd be attacked and tried to appear above the fray...
Paul Krugman: Unicorns of the Intellectual Right: "Economics... a field with a relatively strong conservative presence.... [But] trying to find influential conservative economic intellectuals is basically a hopeless task...
Heidi Moore: "What is going on at the Atlantic?](https://twitter.com/moorehn/status/983049473386524672): 'Too far'?" It’s the genteel form of white ethnicism...
Mark Mazower: Opinion | Anti-Semitism and Britain’s Hall of Mirrors: "I am not sure that my grandfather would have seen much change in the Labour Party...
Justin Fox: Beware Economists Who Warn of an Entitlement Explosion: "A quintet of notable Republican economists... Michael J. Boskin, John H. Cochrane, John F. Cogan, George P. Shultz and John B. Taylor...
Henry Farrell: Who has any use for conservative intellectuals?: "The firing of Kevin Williamson has led, predictably, to outrage from other conservatives, and in particular from anti-Trumpers like Bill Kristol and Erick Erickson...
Noah Smith: "Yep. Restrictionists lie when they say that our current system is 'open borders'. Restrictionists lie when they say Democrats want open borders. Restrictionists lie, all the time, about everything.
Larry Summers: No, “Obamasclerosis” wasnt a real problem: "The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip... finds credible... claims that President Barack Obama’s policies... materially slowed economic growth...
Mark Antonio Wright: Oklahoma’s Teachers & Education Funding Issues: "No reasonable examination of the facts can avoid laying blame at the feet of Republican governor Mary Fallin...
Joe Pompeo: “Journalism Is Not About Creating Safe Spaces”: Inside the Woke Civil War at The New York Times: "For someone like Dean Baquet, the Times’s then 60-year-old executive editor, the dominant emotion was exhilaration about this new national epic...
Morgan Gstalter: McConnell: Midterms could be 'a Category 3, 4 or 5' storm for GOP: "'We know the wind is going to be in our face. We don’t know whether it’s going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5'...
Paul Krugman: Trade Wars, Stranded Assets, and the Stock Market: "Even a trade war that drastically rolled back globalization wouldn’t impose costs on the economy comparable to the kinds of movement we’ve seen in stock prices...
Charles F. Manski (2011): Genes, Eyeglasses, and Social Policy: "Suppose that nearsightedness derives entirely from the presence of a particular allele of a specific gene...
Martin Wolf: How China can avoid a trade war with the US: "The objectives of these US actions are unclear... to halt alleged misbehaviour... or, as the labelling of China as a “strategic competitor” suggests, is it to halt China’s technological progress altogether—an aim that is unachievable and certainly non-negotiable...
Max Boot: Why I changed my mind about John Bolton: "To accommodate... Trump, the Republican Party has betrayed its principles on issues including Russia, immigration, free trade and fiscal austerity...
Ezra Klein: Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science : "This is not 'forbidden knowledge'. It is America’s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality...
Thomas Piketty: Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017): "Using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US...
Kevin Drum: National Review Still Has a Race Problem: "The Atlantic recently hired... Kevin Williamson... [who] believes abortion is murder and... any woman who gets an abortion should be executed...
Paul Krugman: Globalization: What Did We Miss?: "Anyone who worked on the political economy of trade policy knew that fights over tariffs look very much as if they come out of a specific-factors world...
Quinn Slobodian: The World Economy and the Color Line: Wilhelm Röpke, Apartheid, and the White Atlantic: "The article takes 'white Atlantic' as a useful term to describe the worldview that Röpke and his collaborators cultivated in this period...
A Treasury Secretary None Worse than Whom Can Be Conceived: I give up. Steve Mnuchin is the worst Treasury Secretary that can be conceived—an ontological singularity of sorts a la Saint Anselm of Canterbury. Phenomenally underbriefed and uncurious: Manu Raju: "Told line-item veto was ruled unconstitutional, Mnuchin says: 'Congress can pass a rule that allows them to do it'...
Matthew Yglesias: "The highbrow intellectual leaders of the modern conservative movement explicitly conceptualized it as a white nationalist undertaking. Trump is true to this legacy and his intra-movement critics are the innovators...
Shawn Donnan: Trump is about to launch a trade war with no way out: "Business chiefs have pleaded for the Trump administration not to impose tariffs on electronics, shoes and other imports from China that go far beyond the steel and aluminium he has already targeted...
Ed Luce: Anti-Semitism in the age of Donald Trump: "Whether you are a Muslim, Hispanic, African-American or a globalist, America’s president has made it safe to disparage you...
David Zilbermann: What economics and cars can tell us about guns: "Willie Brown states it as a matter of fact that the NRA is “the political arm of a gun manufacturing industry intent on increasing sales..."
Simon Wren-Lewis: Beliefs about Brexit: "I want to... ask why public opinion seems oblivious to the failures of all those claims before the negotiations that ‘we hold all the cards’ compared to the reality that the UK has largely agreed to the terms set out by the EU...
Live from the Baboon Cage: Marcy Wheeler: "'What did the president do, and what the fuck was he thinking when he did it?' are questions not about the cover-up, but about the substantive crime. And that's the question Mueller's Watergate prosecutor has now posed to the president's lawyers..."
David Brady: We... would be delighted by... lift[ing] all single mothers out of poverty.... Making a substantial fraction of people not poor would reduce poverty. Duh: "In @washingtonpost, Robert Samuelson has written a 'critique' of our NY Times piece...f
Live from the Baboon Cage: Steve M.: TRUMP—NOT COMPLETELY OFF THE CHAIN?: '@Tara_Mckelvey: "Whisked" is right – members of the pool were told to rush - (i.e. run) - to the vans in the motorcade at the White House. We're here at the golf club now, waiting for developments...'
Paul Krugman: Trump and Trade and Zombies: "Until now, the most visible neo-goldbug in the administration has been David Malpass... the former chief economist of Bear Stearns...
Those beats won't sweeten themselves!: Zack Kanter: "Absolutely bizarre, fawning NYT piece [by Zach MacFarquhar]. I’m not sure I’ve read anything quite like it in recent memory..."
Martin Feldstein: The Real Reason for Trump’s Steel and Aluminum Tariffs: "The US tariffs will... increase the likelihood that China will accelerate the reduction in subsidized excess capacity...
Dan Shaviro: Another new publication!: "'Evaluating the New U.S. Pass-Through Rules'...
Brad DeLong (2012): Ahem! Niall Ferguson Fire-His-Ass-from-NewsBeast-Now Department: Niall Ferguson writes
FT: Thoughts for the weekend: "'To wit, Phil Gramm was right: We are in a mental recession, not an actual recession.' - 2008 comments from President Trump's new economic advisor [Larry Kudlow]..."
Paul Bedard: Larry Kudlow predicts 4%-5% growth, 'investment boom': "Larry Kudlow, picked to be President Trump’s new economic adviser...
Jonathan Chait: New Trump Economist Kudlow Has Been Wrong About Everything: "The Republican Party... supply-side economics... not merely a generalized preference for small government with low taxes...
Ed Kilgore: What the Christian Right Sowed, Trump Reaped: "Gerson is especially insightful [in saying]: Conservative Evangelicals didn’t back Trump despite his unsavory personality...
Dean Baker: Doesn't Anyone Care If the Trump Tax Cuts Are Working?: "Capital goods orders for January...
Josh Barro and Isaac Chotiner: Policy without politics, immigration, and Trump’s self-awareness: Isaac Chotiner: "Are you enjoying this moment? By 'this moment', I mean the last 14 to 15 months of being a political commentator?...
Dani Rodrik: Trump’s Trade Gimmickry: "The imbalances and inequities generated by the global economy cannot be tackled by protecting a few politically well-connected industries, using manifestly ridiculous national security considerations as an excuse...
Bill McBride: Larry Kudlow is usually wrong... "...and frequently absurd, as an example, in June 2005 Kudlow wrote...
Andrew Reeves: "A really, really good sign that someone has read neither Thucydides, Tacitus, Homer, nor Plato is when that person talks about how Greek and Roman literature teach us about the Greatness of the West...
Dave Roberts: American white people really hate being called “white people”: "They want their America, the America where white dominance is so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable, back. They keep saying so.... Being judged and asked to justify itself, as so many subaltern groups are judged and asked to justify themselves, feels like an insult. If you doubt that, go read this Twitter thread."
Jared Bernstein: [Trump did a bunch of stuff to strengthen the dollar; now he’s upset about the strengthening dollar(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/07/20/trump-did-a-bunch-of-stuff-to-strengthen-the-dollar-nows-hes-upset-about-the-strengthening-dollar/?noredirect=on&utmterm=.576fbc1e4803)_: "Trump is annoyed that the Fed is raising rates and that the stronger dollar is making our exports less competitive...
Kevin Drum: We Need to Figure Out How to Fight Weaponized Disinformation: "I’ve been blogging for 15 years, and there’s never been a day when I wanted to stop...
Doug Rushkoff: Survival of the Richest: "The hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after 'the event'...
Cory Doctorow: I was naive: "I've been thinking of all those 'progressive' Senators who said that... Jeff Sessions was a gentleman, honorable, decent—just someone whose ideas they disagreed with. They approved Sessions for AG on that basis, and he architected this kids-in-cages moment...
No, the Trump administration is not very competent at achieving its stated goals. But that does not mean that the Trump administration is not doing enormous harm under the radar by simply being its chaos-monkey essence. The smart David Leonhart tries to advise people how to deal with this: David Leonhardt: Trump Tries to Destroy the West: "[Trump's] behavior requires a response that’s as serious as the threat...
The sharp and well-intentioned Will Wilkinson still thinks that the name "libertarianism" is worth fighting for, or perhaps that "liberaltarianism" is worth fighting for. I, however, for one, think that "libertarianism" is poisoned in the same way that "fascism", "communism", "socialism", and "neoliberalism" are poisoned. Too many bad people have waved their banners in bad faith. In libertarians' case, the bad people waving in bad faith have been those who think that the only rights that matter are the rights to discriminate, to exchange, and to hold what you have no matter how you acquired it. Maybe "positive libertarians" has a chance, maybe not: Will Wilkinson: Liberaltarianism: Back the Future: "Misean economics,... filtered through Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard's peculiar views of rights and coercion...
Paul Krugman: Brexit Meets Gravity: "These days I’m writing a lot about trade policy. I know there are more crucial topics, like Alan Dershowitz. Maybe a few other things? But getting and spending go on; and to be honest, in a way I’m doing trade issues as a form of therapy and/or escapism, focusing on stuff I know as a break from the grim political news...
David Brooks explicitly practicing identity politics. What's odd is that Jews are almost always first on the block to be excluded from "Western Europe" whenever someone embarks on the journey that leads to ultimately saying that the only true civilization bearers are the Anglo-Saxons (or the Saxon-Saxons, depending), with the wogs starting at either Calais or Liege, depending. Does he even know that the only sovereigns who made significant outreach to rescue the Sephardim expelled from Spain was named Bayezid II Osmanli?: Yastreblyansky: Identity politics with David Brooks: The wolves are in the henhouse: "David Brooks's hot take on the Trump-Putin summit ('The Murder-Suicide of the West') was that it was like when C.S. Lewis's mother died, not that he was there, it was in 1908, but he's read about it, and it's pretty sad...
Spencer Ackerman: U.S. Officials ‘at a Fucking Loss’ Over Latest Russia Sellout: "PERSONA NON GRATA: The White House’s refusal to rule out turning over former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul to the Russians has current and former State Department officials seeing red...."
There are two ways this could go—extending "whiteness" or permanent Republican minority status. In the past, "whiteness" has always been expanded so that it includes a vast majority of the American population—and so now we have people named Mark Krikorian denouncing the threat of a Hispanic wave that will pollute America: Kevin Drum: White Party, Brown Party: "I don’t think that our political system will literally become the White Party vs. the Brown Party, but it’s already closer to this than any of us would like to admit. What’s worse, it’s all but impossible to imagine how Republicans can turn things around in their party. They’re keenly aware of the need to address their demographic challenges, but the short-term pain of reaching out to non-whites is simply too great for them to ever take the plunge. Democrats aren’t in quite such a tough spot, but their issues with the white working class are pretty well known, and don’t look likely to turn around anytime soon either
A Britain led by Theresa May or Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbin will not "rediscover its own way... the Britih re most resilient, most inventive, and happiest when they feel in control of their own future". That is simply wrong. And if it were right, May and Johnson and Corbin are not Churchill or Lloyd-George or even Salisbury: Robert Skidelsky: The British History of Brexit: "I am unpersuaded by the Remain argument that leaving the EU would be economically catastrophic for Britain...
I think Paul Krugman puts his finger on the decline of Niall Ferguson here: Paul Krugman: _"What we have here is an example of a phenomenon I've seen a number of times: the doom loop of hackery...
How much of the forthcoming announcement of an upward bump in GDP growth in the second quarter is due to people battening down the hatches for Trump's trade war, and will be reversed over the course of the next year? That is what we are all trying to estimate right now: Paul Krugman: Trump, Tariffs, Tofu and Tax Cuts: "More than half of America’s soybean exports typically go to China, but Chinese tariffs will shift much of that demand to Brazil, and countries that normally get their soybeans from Brazil have raced to replace them with U.S. beans. The perverse result is that the prospect of tariffs has temporarily led to a remarkably large surge in U.S. exports...
Blaming the Pollyannaish fecklessness of the Bank of England on the feckless indolence of Britain's reporters: Simon Wren-Lewis: How UK deficit hysteria began: "Monetary policy ran out of reliable levers to manage the economy. However, journalists wouldn’t know that from the Bank of England, who tended to talk as if Quantitative Easing was a close substitute to interest rates as a monetary policy instrument...
Extremely wise and interesting on how the more empirical reality tells the Trumpists to mark their beliefs to market, the more desperate they are to avoid doing so: John Holbo: Epistemic Sunk Costs and the Extraordinary, Populist Delusions of Crowds?: "Here’s a thought.... The first rule of persuasion is: make your audience want to believe...
Paul Krugman: "Maybe it's worth laying out the incoherence of Trump's trade war a bit more, um, coherently...
IMHO, betting that "even the Tory Party can spot a wrong 'un" seems a lot like drawing to an inside straight: Dan Davies: "The hard brexit types have been bounced into deal which has taught them that they're not as clever as they thought they were. Now they'll react to that with a leadership challenge which will teach them that they're not as popular as they thought they were. It's like education in the Montessori system-each little independence of discovery builds on the next..."
Anne Applebaum: Brexit is reaching its grim moment of truth—and the Brexiteers know it: "David Davis... and Boris Johnson.... At no point... have they or any of their Brexiteer colleagues offered what might be described as a viable alternative plan. That is because there isn’t one...
Marcy Wheeler: The Mueller Questions Map Out Cultivation, a Quid Pro Quo, and a Cover-Up: "I wasn’t going to do this originally, but upon learning that the Mueller questions, as NYT has presented them, don’t maintain the sixteen subjects or even the 49 questions that Jay Sekulow drew up from those 16 areas of interest, and especially after WaPo continues to claim that Mueller is only investigating 'whether Trump obstructed justice and sought to thwart a criminal probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election', I am going to do my own version of the questions, as released by the NYT. I’m not pretending that this better represents what Mueller has communicated to Sekulow, nor am I suggesting NYT’s version isn’t valid. But the questions provide an opportunity to lay out a cultivation, quid pro quo, and cover-up structure I’ve been using to frame the investigation in my own mind..." https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/02/the-mueller-questions-map-out-cultivation-a-quid-pro-quo-and-a-cover-up-part-one-cultivation/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/02/the-quid-pro-quo-a-putin-meeting-and-election-assistance-in-exchange-for-sanctions-relief/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/03/the-quo-policy-and-real-estate-payoffs-part-three/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/04/the-quest-trump-learns-of-the-investigation-part-four/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/07/the-sekulow-questions-part-five-attempting-a-cover-up-by-firing-comey/
John Quiggin: Shibboleths: "I was reminded of... 2011, about when the baton was being passed from Palin to Trump...
IIRC, back when I first read Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, I thought it was a joke: He spent all this space ranting about how nobody is allowed to make consequentialist arguments, and then makes the consequentialist argument that Lockeian appropriation of pieces of the global commons as private property is fine because it has the consequence of making the world richer? And then there was this: using the Cambridge Rent Control Board to break his contract—his self-actualization as a promise-making autonomous moral being—to extort 30,000 dollars from Eric Segal: Anarchy, State, and Rent Control: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal
No, the Trump administration is not very competent at achieving its stated goals. But that does not mean that the Trump administration is not doing enormous harm under the radar by simply being its chaos monkey essence: David Leonhardt: Trump Tries to Destroy the West: "[Trump's] behavior requires a response that’s as serious as the threat...
I missed this when it first came through: Lessons from special elections, especially PA-18: Josh Barro: Why Pennsylvania special-election result should terrify Republicans: "Should Democrats seek to build a coalition of college-educated suburbanites plus white urbanites and minorities, or should they try to win back blue-collar white voters...
Isaiah Berlin (1972): [The Bent Twig: A Note on Nationalism](http://delong.typepad.com/isaiah-berlin-1972--the-bent-twig.pdf" title="Isaiah Berlin (1972)- The Bent Twig.pdf" alt="Isaiah Berlin 1972 The Bent Twig">Isaiah Berlin (1972)- The Bent Twig.pdf): "THE rich development of historical studies in the nineteenth century transformed men's views about their origins and the importance of growth, development and time...
No, the Trump administration is not very competent at achieving its stated goals. But that does not mean that the Trump administration is not doing enormous harm under the radar by simply being its chaos monkey essence: David Leonhardt: Trump Tries to Destroy the West: "[Trump's] behavior requires a response that’s as serious as the threat...
Alex Barker and Peter Campbell: Honda faces the real cost of Brexit in a former Spitfire plant: "Honda operates two cavernous warehouses.... They still only store enough kit to keep production of the Honda Civic rolling for 36 hours...
Josh Rogin: On Twitter: "In a private meeting, Swedish PM Stefan Lofven explained to Trump Sweden is not a member of NATO, but sometimes partners with the alliance. Trump responded that the U.S. should consider the same approach..."
Eliana Johnson and Annie Karni: Nielsen becomes face of Trump’s border separations: "Kelly’s status in the White House has changed in recent months, and he and the president are now seen as barely tolerating one another. According to four people close to Kelly, the former Marine general has largely yielded his role as the enforcer in the West Wing as his relationship with Trump has soured. While Kelly himself once believed he stood between Trump and chaos, he has told at least one person close to him that he may as well let the president do what he wants, even if it leads to impeachment—at least this chapter of American history would come to a close..."
John Holbo (2008): Douthat on Conservatism: "This has to be a complete failure.... Take out the parenthetical bit and you have something that is much closer to a definition of ‘liberalism’ than ‘conservatism’, at least in the American context...
Michael Tomasky: We Are Truly Living Through the Amateur Hour Presidency: "From the moment when Donald Trump surprised even his own staff by announcing a summit with North Korea, it was obvious, I mean achingly obvious, that the president had no idea what he was doing...
I think Michael Berube overstates his case—as his character "His" notes at the end: Slate and #Slatepitch are still a thing. But they are much less of a thing. And everyone who writes for Slate or who used to write for Even the Liberal New Republic bears the mark on their reputation: Michael Berube: R.I.P., Liberal Contrarianism: "Before #Slatepitch became a punchline, Slate (and others) really did thrive on a certain kind of anti-liberalism. It’s dead now—well, almost.... ILLE: Here’s your reliable index: the death of the liberal contrarian. HIC: Come again?...
Josh Marshall: And you shall know him by his body language:"
Matt O'Brien: "The funniest thing is Niall Ferguson now says he's "going back to what I do best." What's that, writing conspiracy theories about how inflation is "really" 10%? Or attacking the Fed for doing its job? Or falsely saying Keynes didn't care about the long run because he was gay?..."
The interesting question is why are those who call themselves conservatives on the brink of extinction in so much of academia. Some self reflection from Niall Ferguson on this might be useful. But it might not. And I am not holding my breath: Jacob T. Levy: "If it appears that a powerful right-wing professor is the source of the suppression of disagreement on campus, that just further proves that left-wing student political correctness is the real threat. #unfalsifiable:"
Paul says: "hyperinflation is coming any day now" and "minimum wages at their current levels are killing millions of jobs" are joining "there is no such thing as global warming" and "evolution is false" as destroyers of "conservatives" in academia: *Paul Krugman: "Today's column has nothing directly to do with... the puzzling failure of wages to grow faster despite what look like tight labor markets https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/opinion/conservative-free-speech.html...
Brad Setser: "Larry Summers on Trump and trade:: 'From tweet to tweet, official to official, nobody can tell what his priorities are.' Certainly rings true to me. I have almost stopped trying to guess. Even for China:"
Jonathan Marks: Who wants Charles Murray to speak, and why?: "Geneticists of the 1920s knew that it was in their short term interests to have the public believe that any and all shit was innate...
Patrick Iber: "Before we spend all day calling for Niall Ferguson's tenure to be revoked: I don't think he has tenure...
Paul Krugman: "An ugly story from Stanford. But I think Brad gets only a small piece of the issue when he talks about Stanford's intellectual quality control problem...
Ken Schultz: "I’m not an IPE expert, but it seems like you must be doing tariffs wrong if they aren’t even supported by the labor union in the protected industry..."
Paul Krugman: Oh, What a Stupid Trade War: "Even if tariffs were expansionary, that would just make the Fed raise rates faster, which would in turn crowd out jobs in other industries...
Paul Krugman* @paulkrugman: Trump is going all in on (a) claiming that undocumented immigrants are responsible for a huge crime wave; (b) Democrats supporter immigrant criminal gangs. Both claims are lies, pure and simple https://t.co/0orSpr9o5e. One important thing to realize about the immigrant crime wave thing is that the people who believe it mostly come from places where there are hardly any immigrants. https://t.co/wNse30FZwp...S
Doug J. Balloon: "'The coarsening of discourse' is a standard conservative pundit lament, but nothing illustrates the unfortunate reality better than the writings of conservative pundits themselves. Read a typical George Will column. It's probably wrong but the most aesthetically disturbing thing you're likely to encounter is a Mark Twain quote taken badly out of context. Read a typical Bobo, Bret, or Douthat column and you'll find discussions of how many sex partners a teen should have, defenses of pedophilia, and sex robots..."
Carlos (2007): Internet race and IQ debate: Andrew Sullivan Edition:): "Doug, the guy is also a perfect vector for promoting nitwit ideas through a credulous population...
David Frum: 15 Criminal-Law Questions Surrounding the President: "Open questions...
WTF happened to Brendan Nyhan? The braineater has eaten his brain: Josh Marshall: "There are several problems with this logic.: The first is that you are applying jury trial standards to what are political questions. You are also applying statutory standards where they do not exist. As a factual matter the obstruction question is not in doubt...
Just think: if the New York Times had been willing to play ball with Nate Silver, they could have things of this quality—rather than more of their standard politician-celebrity-gossip and "Javanka are going to save us all" that has done so much to empower the Orange-Haired Baboons of the world: Nathaniel Rakich: 538 Election Update: How Our House Forecast Compares With The Experts’ Ratings: "FiveThirtyEight’s forecast is a tad more bullish on Democrats’ chances overall than the three major handicappers...
Why are Fox News's victims so easily-grifted with respect to making them scared of liberal universities?: Jacob T. Levy: "I’ve made a lot of arguments in my life to people who didn’t want to hear them. I argued about sodomy laws and Bowers vs Hardwick with my grandmother when I was 15...
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...
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...
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
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...
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...
- "Populism" or "Neo-Fascism"?: Rectification of Names Blogging: Hoisted from a Year Ago
- Epistemic Sunk Costs, Political Bankruptcy, and Folding Your Tent and Slinking Away: The Approaching End of the Trump Grift?
