Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

1. Smart from Carmen Reinhart on inflation: Carmen M. Reinhart: Explaining Inflation Inertia: "Price-stability targets have proved elusive in countries like Argentina, where inflation is soaring, and Japan, which can't shake the specter of deflation.... The BOJ now holds about 50% of the outstanding stock of government bonds. This is no small achievement, as Japan’s government debt ratio, at 238% of GDP, is the highest in the world. And yet, despite these policies, inflation expectations five years out are still anchored close to 1%.... Argentina... inflation... has accelerate... to about 55%.... Pass-through from the exchange rate to the price level is only part of the story. And an overheated economy has played no role at all.... What can governments do to induce turning points in stubborn inflation expectations when central banks’ policies prove insufficient to the task?... Japan, convincing the private sector that higher inflation is the path of the future requires a break from the current practice of indexing public-sector wages to the previous year’s inflation. Bold increases in public-sector wages may provide the official signal.... As for Argentina... de-indexation requires significant reductions in real wages, starting with the public sector. The political difficulty of doing this (especially when the public sector is large, as it is in Argentina) is daunting...

2. I disagree here: our soft power has been blown up by George W. Bush's and Donald Trump's liking to come off as cartoon villains on the international stage. A large stock of social capital built up by Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, GHWB, Clinton, and Obama has been trashed. Now we are just another normal nation. We need to figure out how to deal with this. Nye hopes that our attractive civil society will win through. But in the age of Trump our civil society is no longer attractive: Joseph Nye: American Soft Power in the Age of Trump: "Skeptics argue that such cycles show that soft power does not matter much; countries cooperate out of self-interest. But this argument misses a crucial point: cooperation is a matter of degree, and the degree is affected by attraction or repulsion. Fortunately, a country’s soft power depends not only on its official policies, but also on the attractiveness of its civil society. When protesters overseas were marching against the Vietnam War, they often sang 'We Shall Overcome', an anthem of the US civil rights movement. Given past experience, there is every reason to hope that the US will recover its soft power after Trump, though a greater investment in public diplomacy would certainly help...

3. Jeet Heer: The historian John Lukacs (1924-2019), whose death at age 95 has just been announced.... In 1975... predicting that a post-Soviet Russia would be dominated by a criminal underworld.... Lukacs was born in Hungary in 1924.... Lukacs was a conservative... of a type that is virtually extinct.... a traditionalist wary of mass politics based on nationalism and scapegoating of minorities. He was for that reason properly scornful of American conservative movement. Lukacs' scorn for right-wing populism surfaced in the early 1950s. As a refugee from Hungary he was anti-communist, but still quick to detect and denounce the dangers of demagogues like Joseph McCarthy, who he feared would destablize society and incite war.... Lukacs's anti-populist conservatism... proved prophetic.... He long feared that populist-nationalist-authoritarian demagoguery was the wave of the future.... He once dismissed movement conservatives' worldview as... 'narrow enough to be ignorant, broad enough to be flat'.... Aside from his valuable critiques of nationalist populism, Lukacs was an eloquent defender of historical consciousness as a distinct & valuable form of thinking, with his own work exemplifying how being steeped in history can help illuminate the present and future...

4. Paul Krugman: The Sabotage Years: "Republicans were up in arms, warning that the Fed’s policies would lead to runaway inflation. A Congressman named Mike Pence introduced a bill that would prohibit the Fed from even considering the state of the labor market in its actions. A who’s who of Republicans signed an open letter to Ben Bernanke demanding that he stop his monetary efforts, which they claimed would 'risk currency debasement and inflation'. And supposedly respectable Republicans engaged in conspiracy theorizing, suggesting that the Fed was secretly in league with the Obama administration. Paul Ryan and the economist John Taylor declared that the Fed’s policy 'looks an awful lot like an attempt to bail out fiscal policy, and such attempts call the Fed’s independence into question'. Of course, all these warnings were totally wrong...

5. Harold James stabs his discipline in the back—fairly, I think. There should are a rule that any historian who opines needs to present a menu of five different historical analogies and parallels for their piece to be taken as a treasure for all time: Harold James: Stories That Can’t End Well: "The sheer depth of political and economic uncertainty turned historians into pundits whose critiques of conventional social science are overly biased toward random pet narratives. Worse, many historians have begun to lend their academic authority to policy prescriptions that are even more problematic than anything pre- or post-crisis economists ever proposed.... Peddling fallacious assertions about the centrality of sovereignty... historians have played a devastating role in precipitating the Brexit crisis. They would have British voters believe that leaving the European Union is no different than Henry VIII’s declaration of sovereignty in opposition to the Roman pontiff.... Historians... when they advance simple narratives that imply specific policy prescriptions, they are even more dangerous than social scientists...

6. John Holbo: The Steelwool Scrub–A Fallacy: "It IS unfair to strawman a position by conflating it with its least thoughtful, most irrational, animus-afflicted exponents. Yet descriptively–sociologically–it’s absurd to steelman a socio-cultural order-or-group by conflating its practices and norms with unrepresentative, intellectual outliers. If you think the reason trans people struggle for respect, recognition, rights is that they are surrounded by well-meaning, rationally-convicted neo-Thomists, you’re nuts.... Spinning actually-existing bigotry as, ideally, the better angel of some natural law argument, is just a weird way to excuse what’s right there in front of you.... But isn’t it awfully mean, ad hominem and unfair if thoughtful Christian philosophers and theologians, Thomistic would-be anthropologists, get lumped in with bog-standard bigots? Rod Dreher thinks so. Damon Linker thinks so, too.... But now we come to the tell. Who should Ryan T. Anderson-types be indignant with, by rights, for unfairly trashing his reputation? Well, that would obviously be, first and foremost, the bigots he is consistently mistaken for. You have a society in which certain forms of bigotry are endemic. You have, by hypothesis, a few rare eccentrics who exhibit outwardly similar attitudes, allegedly on a completely alternate, inwardly entirely bigotry-free basis of rather outré philosophical argument. These eccentrics should fully expect to be mistaken for the bigots. How not? Therefore, they should rail first against the bigots whose bigotry is not merely dragging down their reputations but surely serves as the single greatest obstacles to the spread of their allegedly good teachings.... Within the ecosystem of Christian cultural politics and belief, the role of someone like Ryan T. Anderson is not to scourge conservative Christians for having something in the neighborhood of right attitudes, but only as a culturally bigoted, hence surely spiritually poisonous inheritance of animus. Rather, his role is to apologize for bad attitudes as defensible and righteous–to ensure no one can call bigotry ‘bigotry’, by inserting himself in the line of fire as a model, steel-reinforced unbigot. This is, to shift metaphors once more, belief laundering. Not money laundering, but the same principle.... The fact that someone can come up with an ingenious philosophical defense of a view that most people, who hold something like that view, hold for plain old bigoted reasons, is not a good reason to treat those who are, actually, bigoted, as if they are, instead, ingenious philosophers–just of a closet sort. One steelman can’t scrub away the sins of a community of non-steelmen. Doesn’t work that way. So it seems to me...

7. Eric Rauchway: The New Deal Was on the Ballot in 1932: "On February 22, 1933, just over a week before Roosevelt’s inauguration, Hoover wrote to Senator David Reed (R-PA) that '90% of the so-called new deal' consisted of inflationary measures, massive borrowing to build public works, and indefinite delay in balancing the budget...

8. Péter Harasztosi and Attila Lindner: Who Pays for the Minimum Wage?: "This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the margins along which firms responded to a large and persistent minimum wage increase in Hungary. We show that employment elasticities are negative but small even four years after the reform; that around 75 percent of the minimum wage increase was paid by consumers and 25 percent by firm owners; that firms responded to the minimum wage by substituting labor with capital; and that dis-employment effects were greater in industries where passing the wage costs to consumers is more difficult. We estimate a model with monopolistic competition to explain these findings...

9. J. Bradford DeLong (2000): America's Historical Experience with Low Inflation: Hoisted from 1999: "The inflation of the 1970's was a marked deviation from America's typical peacetime historical pattern as a hard-money country. We should expect America to continue to be a hard-money--low inflation--country in the future, at least in peacetime. The low rate of future inflation that we thus forecast changes the balance of macroeconomic risks and opportunities. The risk of debt-deflation-mediated recessions is somewhat higher because a low trend rate of goods-and-services price index inflation somewhat increases the chances of deflation. But it does not raise such risks as much as one might think...

10. Hold it? It was the fault of the Gracchi that they were killed? That is really bizarre: Robert Merry: Like Rome, America Could be Ripe for Tyranny: "'Again and again', writes Callahan, 'following the precedent of the Gracchi, some ambitious politician, finding his agenda blocked along all constitutional routes, flouted tradition and used popular sentiment along with the threat or actual employment of mob violence to achieve his ends'...

11. Wikipedia: Augustus: "In the beginning of his Annals, the Roman historian Tacitus (c. 56–c.117) wrote that Augustus had cunningly subverted Republican Rome into a position of slavery. He continued to say that, with Augustus' death and swearing of loyalty to Tiberius, the people of Rome simply traded one slaveholder for another. Tacitus, however, records two contradictory but common views of Augustus...

1. Media Training for Academics, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Spotlight

2. Wikipedia: Louis-Philippe | Military career of Adolf Hitler | February 26 Incident | Takahashi Korekiyo | List of Prime Ministers of France | Wikipedia: François Guizot

3. Marco Fioramanti and Robert Waldmann: Econometrics and Its Consequences for Human Beings: "The European Commission is currently evaluating compliance with the Stability and Growth Pact across the Eurozone. However, differences in the econometric methods used by member states and by the Commission can lead to estimates that are at odds. This column argues that the Commission’s method of estimating the non-accelerating wage rate of unemployment for Eurozone members, which relies on an accelerationist Phillips curve, is inferior to specifications with a traditional Phillips curve. The findings highlight how technical aspects of an estimation procedure can have serious effects on policy outcomes...

4. John, by the grace of God, King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Anjou...

5. Robert Waldmann: What Happened to the European Phillips Curve? | The Phillips Curve Is Alive and Well and Living in Europe | NAWRU III Hysteresis | NAWRU II: There Is No Such Thing as a NAWRU | NAWRU 1: The Totally Arbitrary Estimated Natural Rate of Unemployment and Euro Block Fiscal Policy. | NAWRU Constructive (?) Proposals

6. Atanas Hristov and Werner Roeger: On Econometrics with a Human Face and Business Cycles: A Reply to Fioramanti and Waldmann’s Criticism on the EU’s NAWRU Methodology

7. Karl Marx: Critique of the Gotha Programme: "In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after 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 – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!...

8. Democracy and Its Vicissitudes in the Nineteenth Century: A Note: The Communists--no, there were no Communists as we have known them before 1917, say rather that wing of the nineteenth-century socialists who were to become the organizational and intellectual ancestors of the twentieth century economists Communists--had a very uneasy relationship with democracy. Democracy in theory--as a part of the post-capitalist utopia-to-be when the New Jerusalem descended to earth, and as they claimed was prefigured in the operations of the 1870-1871 Paris Commune--was wonderful. Really existing democratic politics was not. You can see the problem arise in Friedrich Engels's 1890 preface to the Communist Manifesto...

9. Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (1875): Gothaer Programm

10. Social Democracy (1891): The Erfurt Program

11. Karl Kautsky (1892): The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program)

12. Pontos World: The Exchange of Populations Between Greece and Turkey

13. British Pathe (1910): The Revolution in Portugal

14. Cliotexte: Le Boulangisme et la IIIe République

15. Alexis De Tocqueville: Democracy In America: "Chapter V: How Democracy Affects the Relation Of Masters And Servants...

#noted #weblogs