Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (December 2, 2018)
Monday Smackdown/Hoisted: The "Hastert' and "Hastertland" Paragraphs from Wooldridge and Micklethwaite's "The Right Nation"
Monday Smackdown Watch: The New York Times and Bret Stephens Continue to Beclown Themselves Bigtime
Weekend Reading: The Royal Proclamation of 1763
Contra Tim Duy, The Lack of Federal Reserve Maneuvering Room Is Very Worrisome...
Von Hayek, to put it bluntly, loved Pincohet's shooting people in soccer stadiums: the "Lykourgan Moment" in which unconstitutional and illiberal actions create the space for future stable libertarian capitalism was a recurrent fantasy of his. Friedman saw his trips to Chile to be an opportunity to preach to the gentiles—to primarily preach free markets and small government, but also respect for individuals, for their liberty, and for democracy. And he had no tolerance for those who said it was evil to try to make the Chilean people more prosperous because that might reinforce the dictatorship. Buchanan... where was Buchanan on this spectrum, anyway? It's complicated: Andrew Farrant and Vlad Tarko: James M. Buchanan’s 1981 Visit to Chile: Knightian Democrat or Defender of the ‘Devil’s Fix’?: "Buchanan has repeatedly argued that the 'political economist should not act as if he or she were providing advice to a benevolent despot' (Boettke Constitutional Political Economy, 25, 110–124, 2014: 112), but an increasingly influential body of scholarship argues that Buchanan provided a wealth of early 1980s policy advice to Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile (e.g., Fischer 2009; Maclean 2017). In particular, Buchanan reportedly provided an analytical defense of military rule to a predominantly Chilean audience when he visited the country in late 1981... #buchanan #publicchoice
Jo Johnson: The Inside Story of Brexit and Where It All Went Wrong: "My oldest brother Boris, one of the leaders of the Leave campaign, recently observed that the proposed arrangements were 'substantially worse than staying in the EU'. Iain Dale, a leading Conservative commentator, wrote in despair this week that the deal was 'so damaging to our country both in the short and long term that if I had to make a choice between voting for this deal or remaining in the European Union, I’d do the latter'. They are both influential thinkers in the party and they are both unquestionably right... #orangehairedbaboons
Brink Lindsey: "Another election, another round of libertarians' dumping on the right to vote. I used to just find this inane and self-defeating, but now I think it's bad citizenship and affirmatively harmful...
Steve M.: Hey, There's No Reason TO Get Worked Up—It's Only the Death of Democracy: "Leonhardt... is arguing that the electoral problems Democrats have complained about are much worse than what Republicans have cited (Republicans, in fact, are citing nonexistent acts of cheating)—but... that we should be quieter than the Republicans when they complain about nothing.... Yes, Kemp stole the election. But don't say so, because you might upset people...
David Warsh: Situations Wanted: "The mood at Duke has been gloomy since its economics department failed to make a place last year for Steven Medema, of the University of Colorado at Denver, in a quarrel over resources. Both sides became the loser. Medema, an expert on the law and economics movement and a stalwart of the discipline, was expected to join professors Bruce Caldwell and Kevin Hoover in the core faculty of the Center for the History of Political Economy...#historyofeconomicthought
This may well be the most interesting working paper the WCEG released last month: Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett: Consequences of Routine Work Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Wellbeing: "Research... has overwhelmingly focused on the economic dimension of precarity, epitomized by low and stagnant wages. But the rise in precarious work has also involved a major shift in the temporal dimension of work such that many workers now experience routine instability in their work schedules... #equitablegrowth
Paul Krugman: The Trump Tax Cut and the Balance of Payments=: "It seems likely that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will turn out to have been the only major piece of legislation enacted under Donald Trump.... The TCJA played almost no role in the midterms: Republicans dropped it as a selling point, focusing on fear of brown people instead, while Democrats hammered health care. But now... seems like a good idea to revisit the bill and its effects. What I want to focus on in this piece is the effects on the balance of payments. Why?... Because the theory of the case... depended crucially on claims about what tax cuts would do to international movements of capital... [via] the balance of payments... #fiscalpolicy #globalization #orangehairedbaboons
Margaret Sullivan: The Media’s Eagerness to Discount the ‘Blue Wave’ Feeds a Dangerous Problem: "Democratic strategist James Carville... was among the first to make the proclamation... 'When you look at what’s going on here tonight, this is not a blue wave.'... On a stage Friday night in Manhattan, forecasting that Democrats would ultimately gain 37 House seats (not 29, as some early results had it), the data-oriented journalist Nate Silver said what happened certainly looked like a wave to him. Silver has been in a dust-up with New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who wrote a column last week titled 'The Midterm Results Are a Warning to the Democrats'. Silver said he was 'enjoying thinking about Bret Stephens knowing deep down how dumb his hot take was and cringing a little bit every time Dems win an additional House seat'... #journamalism
Is there any chance for a revival of the California Republican Party? Not as long as the national party is Trumpist—or rather, Pete Wilsonesque. This is what Pete Wilson wrought, after all: Carla Marinucci: RIP, California GOP: Republicans Lash Out After Midterm Election Debacle: "‘There is no message. There is no messenger. There is no money. And there is no infrastructure,' says one top Republican.... even longtime conservative stronghold Orange County bereft of a single Republican in the House of Representatives, a growing chorus of GOP loyalists here say there’s only one hope for reviving the flatlining party: Blow it up and start again from scratch...
Listening to Gabe Zucman last week on this reminded me that Heather Boushey said wise things about distributional national accounts before the U.S. Congress's Joint Economic Committee: Heather Boushey: Testimony Before the Joint Economic Committee: "The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis releases a new estimate of quarterly or annual GDP growth every month. Distributional national accounts would add to this release an estimate that disaggregates the topline number and tells us what growth was experienced by low-, middle-, and high-income Americans. Academics have already constructed such a measure. The so-called DINA dataset constructed by economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman... #equitablegrowth
Joseph Schumpeter on the Ricardian and Keynesian vices. The echo of bdsm practices—le vice anglais—that you hear is intentional on Schumpeter's part, as is his feminization of Keynesians, and the misogyny. Schumpeter was a very smart but very interesting man: Joseph Schumpeter (1953): History of Economic Analysis https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1134838700: "Ricardo’s… interest was in the clear-cut result of direct, practical significance. In order to get this he... piled one simplifying assumption upon another until... the desire results emerged almost as tautologies... It is an excellent theory that can never be refuted and lacks nothing save sense. The habit of applying results of this character to the solution of practical problems we shall call the Ricardian Vice... #books #schumpeter #keynes #economicsgoneright #economicsgonewrong #historyofeconomicthought
Jing Dong, Harold Pollack, and Rita Tamara Konetzka: Effects of Long‐Term Care Setting on Spousal Health Outcomes: "A large expansion in noninstitutional long-term care (LTC) use... shifting away from nursing homes toward home- and community- based services (HCBS).... The rationale... (a) LTC users generally prefer HCBS to institutional care, and (b) for nursing home residents with less intensive care needs, HCBS may be cheaper...
Thiemo Fetzer: Did Austerity Cause Brexit?: "The rise of popular support for... UKIP... strongly and causally associated with an individual’s or an area’s exposure to austerity since 2010...
Once again, the Trump administration does not have to be competent for its chaos-monkey nature to wind up doing enormous damage: Gabe Gutierrez and Annie Rose Ramos: Harley-Davidson workers stunned by plant closure after tax cut: "Tim Primeaux has worked at the Harley-Davidson plant in Kansas City, Missouri, for 17 years. He was sure he was going to retire from the company. That all changed when Harley-Davidson told its 800 employees in January that the plant will be closing next year. Operations will be shifted to the motorcycle manufacturer's facility in York, Pennsylvania...
