Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (May 10, 2019)
Note to Self: Comment on Richard Baldwin: The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work: We can worry along either of two dimensions... another wave of globalization—... will hit a world of absolutely enormous and extraordinary income and wealth inequality.... [Or Peak Horse, for] until the 1920s, if there was a horse in America, there was a use for the horse...
Note to Self: Richard M. Johnson (1780-1850), Vice President and Senator, and Julia A. Chinn (1790-1833), slave and châtelaine...
Note to Self: If, after the EMP data wipeout and the collapse, future raccoon historians of fascism dig up this statue, they are going to be very confused...
It Was Political Decisions, Not Trade or even Technology, That Done It...
Robert Kuttner: Karl Polanyi Explains It All
Wikipedia: Friedrich von Hayek: "In August 1926, Hayek married Helen Berta Maria von Fritsch (1901–1960), a secretary at the civil service office where Hayek worked, on the rebound upon hearing of his cousin's marriage. They had two children together. Upon the close of World War II, Hayek restarted a relationship with his cousin, who had married since they first met, but kept it secret until 1948. Hayek and Fritsch divorced in July 1950 and he married his cousin Helene Bitterlich (1900–1996) just a few weeks later after moving to Arkansas to take advantage of permissive divorce laws. His wife and children were offered settlement and compensation for accepting a divorce. The divorce caused some scandal at LSE where certain academics refused to have anything to do with Hayek.] In a 1978 interview to explain his actions, Hayek stated that he was unhappy in his first marriage and as his wife would not grant him a divorce he had to enforce it. He rarely visited his children after the divorce...
Peter Kafka: Disney says its over $400 million Vice investment is now worthless - Vox: "A now-familiar story: Investors say they overvalued a high-flying digital publisher...
Amrita Chakrabarti Myers: The Erasure and Resurrection of Julia Chinn: "The main house at Johnson’s Blue Spring Farm is gone.... On the right-hand side... stands an antebellum-era building... so overgrown with weeds, grasses, and brush that it is barely visible... but it looks sturdier than the Choctaw Academy school building. It is believed to have been one of the slave cottages or a kitchen building at Blue Spring.... On the other hand, just a few miles away, thousands of visitors annually stream through the impeccably maintained gardens and halls of Ashland, the home of Henry Clay.... The contrast between the two sites couldn’t be any starker. And the difference has everything to do with race. Make no mistake: Richard’s decision to live publicly with Julia and their children, Imogene and Adaline, and Henry’s decision to hide his black 'mistresses' in the slave quarters and sell their offspring downriver to New Orleans, played enormous roles in how the two men are remembered today...
Michael Staub: The Mismeasure of Minds: "Seeking to wipe away forever the fake science of The Bell Curve.... The book’s analysis refuses to die, animated by already existing racial resentment in U.S. politics and culture and helping to fuel more in its turn...
Samuel Brittan (1980): Hayek, the New Right, and the Crisis of Social Democracy
Robert Waldmann Has an Interpretation of Karl Marx that Is New to Me...: I tend to read Marx as a Christian heretic--as writing in an eschatological mode in which the time when "labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly" is exactly as real and near to him as the expectation of Paul of Tarsus that someday soon: "we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord..." (1 Thess. 4:17). Robert disagrees, and hears a sneer whenever Marx says "come the Millennium" that I cannot...
Hayek and the "Shut Up and Be Grateful You Were Even Born!" Argument: I ran into a passage that makes me wonder whether Hayek in his inner core believed that democracy had any value—even any institutional value—at all.... "Egalitarianism is of course not a majority view but a product of the necessity under unlimited democracy to solicit the support even of the worst.… It is by the slogan that 'it is not your fault' that the demagoguery of unlimited democracy, assisted by a scientistic psychology, has come to the support of those who claim a share in the wealth of our society without submitting to the discipline to which it is due. It is not by conceding 'a right to equal concern and respect’ to those who break the code that civilization is maintained…" Now it is certainly true that of the trio "Prosperity, Liberty, Democracy," Hayek puts prosperity first and liberty second—or, rather, that freedom of contract needs to be more closely safeguarded than freedom of speech, for if there is freedom of contract then freedom of speech will quickly reappear, but if there is no freedom of contract than freedom of speech will not long survive. But the passage above makes me wonder whether democracy has any place in Hayek's hierarchy of good things at all...
H. Clay and Richard L. Troutman: The Emancipation of Slaves by Henry Clay
Mark Thoma: Economist's View: Links (5/8/19): "Competitive Edge: Principles and presumptions for U.S. vertical merger enforcement policy: Antitrust and competition issues are receiving renewed interest, and for good reason. So far, the discussion has occurred at a high level of generality. To address important specific antitrust enforcement and competition issues, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth has launched this blog, which we call “Competitive Edge”...
Joakim Book: Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year
Susie Madrak: Rep. Escobar: 'We Have A President Who Has Created An Addiction To Hate': "I'll tell you, that clip, when I saw it last night, it made me very, very sad, very sad for our country, that we are at such a moral rock bottom," Rep. Escobar said...
Nancy LeTourneau: Why Is Trump So Afraid of Mueller?: "The fact that the Commander in Chief is describing an investigation conducted by his own administration as “treasonous” ranks right up there with some of the worst. Why would Trump be so afraid of what Mueller has to say, especially when he claims that the special counsel’s report totally vindicated him? It could be because Mueller has earned a tremendous amount of political capital by conducting himself as the consummate professional surrounded by a sea of angry lunatics otherwise known as the Trump administration...
Paul Mason: Reading Arendt Is Not Enough: "Arendt’s descriptions of the dynamics of totalitarian movements hold good—... [but] her explanations for them do not.... If Trump has triggered a crisis of progressive thought, it is in particular a crisis for the cult of Hannah Arendt. The United States of America was her last and enduring hope: the only political institution on earth that was supposed to be immune to totalitarianism, nationalism, and imperialism...
Martin Wolf: How Our Low Inflation World Was Made: "Where has this left us today? Not where we would like to be, is the answer, in three respects. First, while financial and household debt have fallen relative to incomes in mature economies, that is not true for debts of governments or non-financial corporates. Second, the transatlantic crisis triggered offsetting debt explosions elsewhere, notably in China. Third, crisis-hit economies are still far below pre-crisis trend output levels, while productivity growth is also generally low. Finally, the populist politics of left and right remain in full force. All this is in keeping with past experiences with big debt crises, which have always thrown long shadows into the future...
Plutarch: Life of Tiberius Gracchus: "This is said to have been the first sedition at Rome, since the abolition of royal power, to end in bloodshed and the death of citizens; the rest though neither trifling nor raised for trifling objects, were settled by mutual concessions, the nobles yielding from fear of the multitude, and the people out of respect for the senate. And it was thought that even p193 on this occasion Tiberius would have given way without difficulty had persuasion been brought to bear upon him, and would have yielded still more easily if his assailants had not resorted to wounds and bloodshed; 2 for his adherents numbered not more than three thousand. But the combination against him would seem to have arisen from the hatred and anger of the rich rather than from the pretexts which they alleged; and there is strong proof of this in their lawless and savage treatment of his dead body...
It is power and surveillance rather than worker displacement that is the principal issue on the table with respect to automation for the next decade, and probably for the next two decades: Brishen Rogers: Beyond Automation: The Law & Political Economy of Workplace Technological Change: "This article unpacks the relationship among advanced information technologies, employment law rules, and labor standards. Based on a detailed review of the capacities of existing technologies, it argues that automation is not a major threat to workers today, and that it will not likely be a major threat anytime soon. Companies are, however, using new information technologies to exercise power over workers in other ways, all of which are enabled by existing employment laws. For example, they are increasingly using algorithms to monitor, direct, or schedule workers, in the process reducing workers’ wages or autonomy. Companies are also using new technologies to “fissure” employment: outsourcing work tasks or processes and then disclaiming legal duties toward workers, all while closely monitoring workers’ performance. These findings have policy implications. If the major threat facing workers is employer domination rather than job loss, then exotic reforms such as a universal basic income are less urgent. Rather, policymakers could expand the scope and stringency of companies’ duties toward their workers, and/or enable workers to contest the introduction of new workplace technologies...
Danny Blanchflower: Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?: "Don't trust low unemployment numbers as proof that the labor market is doing fine—it isn't. Not Working is about those who can’t find full-time work at a decent wage—the underemployed—and how their plight is contributing to widespread despair, a worsening drug epidemic, and the unchecked rise of right-wing populism.... Blanchflower draws on his acclaimed work in the economics of labor and well-being to explain why today's postrecession economy is vastly different from what came before. He calls out our leaders and policymakers for failing to see the Great Recession coming, and for their continued failure to address one of the most unacknowledged social catastrophes of our time. Blanchflower shows how many workers are underemployed or have simply given up trying to find a well-paying job, how wage growth has not returned to prerecession levels despite rosy employment indicators, and how general prosperity has not returned since the crash of 2008.... Blanchflower practices the 'economics of walking about'—seeing for himself how ordinary people are faring under the recovery, and taking seriously what they say and do. Not Working is his candid report on how the young and the less skilled are among the worst casualties of underemployment, how immigrants are taking the blame, and how the epidemic of unhappiness and self-destruction will continue to spread unless we deal with it...
Our massive economic overreliance on formal education, coupled with a high school system that appears half a century out-of-date and no alternative to standard or semi-standard college is not serving us well: Kyle Herkenhoff: The Case for More Internships and Apprenticeships in the United States: "Learning from co-workers accounts for 24 percent of the aggregate U.S. human capital stock. Roughly 40 percent of a typical worker’s human capital is accumulated on the job, and of that human capital accumulation, 60 percent comes from learning the skills of co-workers. These benefits of learning from co-workers could be increased markedly, however, if U.S. policymakers encouraged more firms to offer internships, apprenticeships, and other types of mentoring such as vocational training. But this is easier said than done. In the U.S. labor market,... not enough mentorship relationships are formed between high- and low-skill workers. If low-skill workers are able to leave immediately after learning new skills, then their employers have little incentive to train and educate those workers. But, from society’s standpoint, we want those low-skill workers to be taught so that they produce more and eventually go on to train the next generation of workers.... A simple 3.6 percent tax break on the wages of interns, or a 3 percent tax break on the wages of mentors (defined to be those whose primary capacity is to work with interns), would generate welfare gains of roughly 2 percent per annum in the long-run...
Over the past generation, tax avoidance and evasion have gone from an annoyance to a major societal catastrophe: Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman: Tax Evasion and Inequality: "Why do the rich evade so much? The straightforward answer is because they can. There is a whole industry – in Switzerland, Panama and other tax havens around the globe – that provides wealth concealment services to the world’s wealthiest individuals. This industry typically only targets the very wealthy (people with more than $20 million or sometimes $50 million to invest), since serving too many would-be evaders would increase the risk of these banks and law firms being found in violation of the law. Moderately wealthy individuals (those below the top 0.1%) do not have access to the services they sell and therefore don’t evade much tax. Further down the ladder, the majority of the population only earns wages and pension income, which cannot be hidden from the tax authority...
The creator of the World Wide Web tries to provide some guidelines for getting it back onto a useful course: Tim Berners-Lee: The World Wide Web Turns 30. Where Does It Go From Here?: "The web has become a public square, a library, a doctor’s office, a shop, a school, a design studio, an office, a cinema, a bank, and so much more. Of course with every new feature, every new website, the divide between those who are online and those who are not increases, making it all the more imperative to make the web available for everyone.And while the web has created opportunity, given marginalized groups a voice, and made our daily lives easier, it has also created opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all kinds of crime easier to commit...
Andrew Carnegie (1889): Wealth: An Historical Document: "No substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department...
John Maynard Keynes 1926): The End of Laissez-Faire
Chris Hughes: It’s Time to Break Up Facebook
Pedro Nicolaci da Costa: [Beware of Billionaires Peddling Solutions for Extreme Inequality(https://www.marketwatch.com/story/beware-of-billionaires-peddling-solutions-for-extreme-inequality-2019-05-02): "Ray Dalio’s diagnosis of capitalism’s flaws repeats disproven tropes about technology, skills and productivity...
William H. Townsend: Lincoln and the Bluegrass: Slavery and Civil War in Kentucky https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1789120489
David Petriello: The Days of Heroes Are Over: A Brief Biography of Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson
Newspapers.com: Louisville Courier-Journal
Noah Smith: ‘Smart Beta’ Might Not Be So Smart After All: "Research suggests that factor investing’s success will be fleeting...
Econ 115 Lecture: September 24, 2009: The Knot of War, 1914-1920 and After
[This Time, It Is Not Different: The Persistent Concerns of Financial Macroeconomics(https://delong.typepad.com/20120411-russell-sage-delong-paper.pdf)
Review: Robert Skidelsky (2000), John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain
Review: Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed and The Economist as Saviour
Jenny Lawson: The Bookmobile: "The San Angelo Museum of Fine Art owns it now.... They considered my offer to take it off their hands but they want to rebuild it and use it the way it once was. And I was disappointed, but honestly also relieved because it probably belongs there, with people who can love it and bring it back to its former glory...
National Park Service: Secret Symbol of the Lincoln Memorial: "Repeated elsewhere in the memorial, the fasces throughout the Lincoln Memorial reveal the higher meaning of the memorial and the man. In ancient times, fasces were a Roman symbol of power and authority, a bundle of wooden rods and an axe bound together by leather thongs...
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