Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

1. Lawrence F. Katz: Alan B. Krueger (1960–2019): "Alan's scholarship revealed the operation of real-world labor markets, the impacts of the minimum wage and school resources, the measurement of subjective well-being, and the plight of the unemployed. He pushed the field of economics toward a more evidence-based and scientific approach to research and policy analysis...

2. Cryptocurrency! It would appear that TETHER is now being looted to prop up BITFINEX, which has been defrauded, as routinely happens in this space. Anybody seen the principals of Quadriga SX recently?: Izabella Kaminska: We All Become Mf Global Eventually, Tether Edition: "The New York attorney-general's office... obtained a court order directing Bitfinex's parent company to suspend making transactions from Tether accounts into Bitfinex accounts for the purpose of masking a loss somewhere in the order of a 850m due to a suspected fraud by a partner processor. The documentation... contains... stuff... from a Bitfinex employee—codename Merlin—on August 15th last year, to... a Panama-based entity called Crypto Capital... which also... just happened to provide payment processing for Quadriga XS, the Canadian exchange whose founder 'died' with the keys to about 140m of customer money): 'Please understand this could be extremely dangerous for everybody, the entire crypto community. BTC could tank to below $1k if we don't act quickly.'... Opacity offers huge temptation with respect to wrongly taking advantage of customer flow information for prop trading purposes or for dipping into customer deposits for proprietary purposes without customer approval. Or just losing funds in other careless ways.... The key points are as follows...

3. Jonathan Portes: Scruton Is Part of an Intellectual Culture Giving Respectability to Racism: "Scruton's essay... is a defence, of sorts, of Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech. The direct political peg for Powell's speech was his opposition to the 1968 Race Relations Act, which outlawed direct discrimination in housing or employment, as exemplified by signs saying 'No blacks, no dogs, no Irish'.... Scruton's... final point... more extreme.... Immigrant integration... is logically impossible, even for the British-born children of immigrants. 'Like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, they [liberal politicians] practiced the art of believing six impossible propositions before breakfast, including the proposition that pious Muslims from the hinterlands of Asia would produce children loyal to a secular European state.'... Scruton's writings from the 2000s could have come straight from the BNP manifesto of the time, and legitimised those who made such claims...

4. Rosa Luxemburg: Library: "Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege...

5. Jason Furman and Lawrence H. Summers: Further Thinking on the Costs and Benefits of Deficits: "1. IS THE POLITICAL SYSTEM SO BIASED TOWARDS DEFICIT INCREASES THAT ECONOMISTS HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO OVEREMPHASIZE THE COSTS OF DEFICITS?... The political system can be biased towards greater deficits. But the opposite is often the case as well.... The fiscal stimulus was too small in the wake of the Great Recession.... Deficit reduction in the late 1990s was probably excessive, especially in light of the license it gave for unproductive tax cuts. Germany is one of many countries that has also shown that politicians can generate excessive fiscal prudence. Japan has done the same at many points.... With interest rates so low that they could limit central banks’ ability to respond in a downturn everywhere in the industrial world, the dangers posed by anti-deficit dogma in the next recession could be enormous.... The role of economists is to analyze the economy and not to lean one way or the other to counteract some presumed bias of politicians.... 2. DO THE CHANGING ECONOMICS OF DEFICITS MEAN THAT ANYTHING GOES AND WE DO NOT NEED TO PAY ANY ATTENTION TO FISCAL CONSTRAINTS?... No. The costs and benefits of deficits have changed, but we still need a limiting principle in order to conduct fiscal policy.... YOU ADVOCATE DOING NO HARM, BUT IS THAT ENOUGH TO STABILIZE THE DEBT AT A REASONABLE LEVEL? Yes, it likely is enough, if we also do what is widely agreed, which is to eventually close the shortfalls in both Social Security and Medicare hospital insurance and not use the savings to pay for other priorities.... 4. ISN’T ACTION ON THE DEFICIT URGENT IN ORDER TO REDUCE THE RISK OF A FISCAL CRISIS? No.... 5. DO YOU THINK ANYTHING ABOUT FISCAL POLICY IS URGENT? Yes. We should be making contingency plans for the next recession...

6. How and why did they corrupt Wharton's Jeremy Siegel?: Cardiff Garcia: "'But his presence would serve to remind Fed governors that there are many ways to interpret economic data'. Gotta say "let's start putting incompetent people on important committees to remind other committee members that some people are incompetent" is multiverse-level thinking... 'Sujeet Indap: "This is embarrassing, Jeremy Siegel: 'Jeremy Siegel: A Professor for Stephen Moore: "I am not a fan of a gold or even a strict commodity standard, but analyzing sensitive commodity markets’ price signals should be an important input.... As for Mr. Moore’s earlier warnings that former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing would lead to rapid inflation, recall that some well-respected monetary economists echoed them...

1. Wikipedia: Adalbert von Bredow

2. Wikipedia: Battle of Mars-la-Tour

3. Christian P. Potholm: Understanding War: An Annotated Bibliography: "Citino's final emphasis ofn the German tradition of Tottenritt...

4. Wikipedia: List of Particles | Quark | Fermion | Lepton | Boson | Hadron | Baryon | Meson

5. Wikipedia: Children of Jacob

6. Wikipedia: Fugitive Slave Clause

7. Wikiquote: Rosa Luxemburg

8. Wikipedia: Rosa Luxemburg

9. Max Shachtman (1938): Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg (1938)

10. Rosa Luxemburg: The Russian Revolution: "Chapter 8: Democracy and Dictatorship...

11. Rosa Luxemburg: The Russian Revolution: "Chapter 6: The Problem of Dictatorship: Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins (the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month periods!) Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc....

12. Rosa Luxemburg: Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy

13. Hal Draper (1987): The 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' in Marx and Engels

14. Wikipedia: Dictatorship of the proletariat

15. 5-Minute History: 10 Fascinating Facts About the Belle Époque

16. Wikipedia: Belle Époque

17. Review of Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed and The Economist as Saviour

18. Author: Review of: Robert Skidelsky (2000), "John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain"

19. Writing Bulls--- for the WSJ Op-Ed Page as a Career Strategy: The Nine Unprofessional Republican Economists

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