Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

1. Scott Lemieux: Matters of Life and Death: "15,000 people died in three years because Republican states refused to accept the Medicaid expansion.... And let us not forget that this was all made possible by the intervention of the Supreme Court, based on arguments so weak that, as Joan Biskupic’s new bio finds, John Roberts himself initially rejected them.... 'Regarding the expansion of Medicaid for poor people, all four liberal justices... voted to uphold the program... punctured... arguments that Congress had exceeded ints spending power and its ability to attach conditions.... In the private March 30 conference, Roberts also voted to uphold the Medicaid expansion...

2. Barry Eichengreen: The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era: "Focuses on the global resurgence of populism today and places it in a deep context.... Populists tend to thrive most in the wake of economic downturns, when it is easy to convince the masses of elite malfeasance. Yet while there is more than a grain of truth that bankers, financiers, and 'bought' politicians are responsible for the mess, populists' own solutions tend to be simplistic and economically counterproductive. Moreover, by arguing that the ordinary people are at the mercy of extra-national forces beyond their control—international capital, immigrants, cosmopolitan globalists—populists often degenerate into demagoguery and xenophobia. There is no one solution... [but] there is an obvious place to start: shoring up and improving the welfare state.... America's patchwork welfare state was not well equipped to deal with the economic fallout that attended globalization and the decline of manufacturing in America.... Lucidly explaining both the appeals and dangers of populism across history, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand not just the populist phenomenon, but more generally the lasting political fallout that follows in the wake of major economic crises...

3. I do not think that they "hinted it may cut again this year". They said that future moves would be data-dependent—which could mean keeping them the same, could mean cutting further, could mean deciding that Eric and Esther are right and raising the rate back: Christopher Condon: Fed Cuts Rates by Quarter Point and Signals Potential for More: "The Federal Reserve reduced interest rates for the first time since the financial crisis and hinted it may cut again this year to insulate the record-long U.S. economic expansion from slowing global growth... voted... to lower the target range for the benchmark rate by a quarter-percentage point to 2%-2.25%.... 'In light of the implications of global developments for the economic outlook as well as muted inflation pressures, the committee decided to lower' rates, the Federal Open Market Committee, led by Jerome Powell, said in a statement following a two-day meeting in Washington.... 'Uncertainties' about the economic outlook remain. Officials also stopped shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet.... Kansas City Fed President Esther George and Boston's Eric Rosengren voted against the cut...

4. Yes, Bret Stephens is too dumb to write. Why do you ask? Steve M.: Bret Stephens Will Write in Colin Powell Next Year: "This is ridiculous. I'll ignore what Stephens says about Afghanistan, which is essentially a call for permanent occupation. On the need to 'innovate our way out of [the] problem' of carbon emissions, every Democrat in the race would agree. And they'd all agree that those meetings with Trump were 'a huge win' for Kim.... 'Democrats did well in last year’s midterms thanks to vote switchers electing moderate candidates like Utah’s Ben McAdams. They did considerably less well with turnout campaigns that failed to elect progressives like Florida’s Andrew Gillum...' Gillum lost by four-tenths of a percentage point. McAdams won by two-tenths of a percentage point. The difference between these outcomes was infinitesimal...

5. A reminder that eliminating trade barriers and boosting trade through reducing tariffs, reducing quotas, and harmonizing regulations is one of the two things (along with deficit reduction at full employment when interest rates are high) we know how to do to materially and significantly boost prosperity in the medium run. Yes, it has an impact on income distribution. But everything has an impact on income distribution. Focusing your policies for equity on trade restrictions is counterproductive. Yes, Thea Lee, I see you: Doug Irwin: Does Trade Reform Promote Economic Growth? A Review of Recent Evidence: "The findings from recent research have been remarkably consistent. For developing countries that are behind the technological frontier and have significant import restrictions, there appears to be a measurable economic payoff from more liberal trade policies... economic growth... roughly 1.0–1.5 percentage points higher... cumulated to about 10–20 percent higher income after a decade. The effect is heterogeneous across countries, because countries differ in the extent of their reforms and the context in which reform took place. At a microeconomic level, the gains in industry productivity from reducing tariffs on imported intermediate goods—inputs used to produce final goods—are even more sharply identified. They show up time and again in country after country. Some questions remain about how much of the economic growth following trade reform can be attributed to trade policy changes alone, as other market reforms are sometimes adopted at the same time. Even if the reduction of trade barriers accounts for only a part of the observed increase in growth, however, the cumulative gains from reform appear to be substantial. As Estevadeordal and Taylor (2013, 1689) ask, 'Is there any other single policy prescription of the past twenty years that can be argued to have contributed between 15 percent and 20 percent to developing country income?'...

6. The interesting fact here is that the U.S.-owned contribution to global value chains is increasingly becoming "stateless": it is not the U.S. that is providing intellectual property services to kick-off the production process, but rather the Cayman Islands. How much international tax arbitrage and evasion is contributing to the polarization of wealth remains unclear to me. But I do find it deeply worrisome: Mark Thoma sends us to: Brad Setser: Vietnam Looks To Be Winning Trump's Trade War: "Vietnam, like China really doesn’t import very many manufactures from the United States. That’s partially a function of the fact that the value added in Vietnam is often low, and thus Vietnam cannot afford a lot of top of the line U.S. capital goods (yet). But it is also a function of the fact that many of the global value chains that generate large (often offshore) profits for U.S. firms don’t give rise to that much U.S. production these days. There just isn’t much sign that the Asian value chains stretch back to include U.S. factories and workers. Fabless semiconductor firms that design chips likely export their designs to a low tax jurisdiction before they license their designs to an Asian contract manufacturer. The rise in Vietnam's exports hasn't been associated with a commensurate rise in exports from the United States to Vietnam...

7. This is brilliant. It has, I think the implication that a lot of people in rich areas are not benefitting from the region's wealth—which is what David Author found in his Ely Lecture: Robert Manduca: National Income Inequality in the United States Contributes to Economic Disparities Between Regions: "In 1980, just 12 percent of Americans lived in metropolitan areas with a mean family income more than 20 percent higher or lower than the national average. By 2013, more than 30 percent did. Today a handful of metros—cities such as San Francisco and Washington, DC—have mean family incomes 40 percent or 50 percent greater than average and more than double the average incomes in many rural areas.... Most previous research has emphasized the role of income sorting.... I show, however, that a much bigger portion of the growing disparities is due to rising income inequality at the national level...

8. Why our economic system works as well and is as intelligent as it is is a deep question, in need of much more thought. Michale Jordan thinks it noteworthy that the human brain is not the only system that looks capable of "intelligent behavior". I wonder if the things that have made our economy appear intelligent in the past may disappear in the future: Michael I. Jordan: Dr. AI or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Economic: "I view the scientific study of the brain as one of the grandest challenges that science has ever undertaken, and the accompanying engineering discipline of ‘human-imitative AI’ as equally grand and worthy.... [But] let us suppose that there is a fledgling Martian computer science industry, and suppose that the Martians look down at Earth to get inspiration for making their current clunky computers more ‘intelligent.’ What do they see that is intelligent, and worth imitating, as they look down at Earth? They will surely take note of human brains and minds.... What else is intelligent on Earth? Perhaps the Martians will notice that in any given city on Earth, most every restaurant has at hand every ingredient it needs for every dish that it offers, day in and day out. They may also realize that, as in the case of neurons and brains, the essential ingredients underlying this capability are local decisions being made by small entities that each possess only a small sliver of the information being processed by the overall system. But, in contrast to brains, the underlying principles or algorithms may be seen to be not quite as mysterious as in the case of neuroscience. And they may also determine that this system is intelligent by any reasonable definition—it is adaptive (it works rain or shine), it is robust, it works at small scale and large scale, and it has been working for thousands of years (with no software updates needed). Moreover, not being anthropocentric creatures, the Martians may be happy to conceive of this system as an ‘entity’—just as much as a collection of neurons is an ‘entity.’ Am I arguing that we should simply bring in microeconomics in place of computer science? And praise markets as the way forward for AI? No, I am instead arguing that we should bring microeconomics in as a first-class citizen into the blend of computer science and statistics that is currently being called ‘AI.’ This blend was hinted at in my discussion piece; let me now elaborate...

9. Peng Dehuai: On the Great Leap Forward: "Grain scattered on the ground, potato leaves withered;/Strong young people have left to make steel;/Only children and old women reap the crops;/How can they pass the coming year?/Allow me to raise my voice for the people!...

10. Moral fault attaches to all those who fund or otherwise carry water for the New York Times: Duncan Black: Garbage Newspaper: "/Saying @RashidaTlaib (D-Detroit) and @IlhanMN (D-Minneapolis) are from the Midwest is like saying @RepLloydDoggett (D-Austin) is from Texas or @repjohnlewis (D-Atlanta) is from the Deep South. C’mon.' JonathanWeisman... Deputy Washington Editor, New York Times. Cancel your f------ subscriptions...

11. Dan Froomkin: Seeking Best Practices for Covering Trumpism: "I’m looking for... examples.... The opinion pages of our newspapers feature a fair amount of Trump-related anguish, and some essayists have been particularly eloquent. Here, for instance, is Jamil Smith, writing for Rolling Stone...

12. Scott Lemieux: The Wages of Shelby County: "It’s not exactly news that Shelby County v. Holder not only did not have 'legal reasoning' in any meaningful sense but was based on absurd empirical assumptions. But it’s still worth pointing out: 'Using data released by the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) in June, a new Brennan Center analysis has found that between 2016 and 2018, counties with a history of voter discrimination have continued purging people from the rolls at much higher rates than other counties. This phenomenon began after the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, a decision that severely weakened the protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Brennan Center first identified this troubling voter purge trend in a major report released in July 2018.' The holding in Shelby County was that it was literally irrational for Congress to conclude that jurisdictions with a history of vote suppression were more likely to discriminate going forward. As the late Robert Cover once said about Warren Burger, there is no possible reason to have the slightest interest in what any of the five ridiculous hacks responsible for this atrocity have to say about the Constitution except that they have the power of life and death...

13. Mike Fleming: Phil Lord & Christopher Miller Make Universal Film Deal: "Universal Pictures has set in a first-look film production deal with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the franchise-launching duo who shared the Best Animated Film Oscar for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and who hatched the Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie franchises. Their films have collectively grossed $3.3 billion.... This is a natural next step for Lord & Miller, which has been expanding its ambitions and recently brought in former Genre Films president Aditya Sood to head film for their Lord Miller banner. This is the first overall movie deal for the duo; they set their TV operations at Sony Pictures Television in an epic-sized five-year deal last April...

14. If you believe—as so many do—that one important source of the disaster of 2008-10 was that economies had too much potentially-insecure debt, you should be highly concerned today: John Authers and Lauren Leatherby: Financial Crisis: Decade of Deleveraging Debt Didn’t Quite Work Out: "This was the decade of de-leveraging that wasn’t. A decade ago... there was agreement... too much debt had caused the crisis, and so there must be a huge de-leveraging. It has not worked out like that.... Companies, particularly in the U.S., took advantage of the rock-bottom interest rates meant to bail out banks to go on their own borrowing spree. And the world found a new borrower of last resort. Ten years ago, China had been enjoying phenomenal economic growth for two decades, and largely avoided debt to fund it. No more. China’s debt has ballooned, transforming the geography of global debt in the process. It’s now bipolar, revolving around the U.S. and China...

15. We won the Cold War because we realized—most of the time and to the greater extent—that winning it was about changing ourselves so that we became better: it was about us rather than about them. The current corp who wish to wage a Cold War against China do not recognize this: George Kennan (1947): Sources of Soviet Conduct: "The possibilities for American policy are by no means limited to holding the line and hoping for the best.... It is rather a question of the degree to which the United States can create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problem of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own.... The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.... The thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear...

16. Heather Boushey directs us to Sarah Miller: "About 15k people died between 2014-2017 as the result of states deciding to not expand Medicaid eligibility through the ACA: Sarah Miller, Sean Altekruse, Norman Johnson, and Laura R. Wherry: Medicaid and Mortality: New Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data: "Changes in mortality for near-elderly adults in states with and without Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions. We identify adults most likely to benefit using survey information on socioeconomic and citizenship status, and public program participation. We find a 0.13 percentage point decline in annual mortality, a 9.3 percent reduction over the sample mean, associated with Medicaid expansion for this population. The effect is driven by a reduction in disease-related deaths and grows over time. We find no evidence of differential pre-treatment trends in outcomes and no effects among placebo groups...

17. Scott Alexander: Epistemic Learned Helplessness](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/): "A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid argument for something, then you should accept the conclusion.... And I nodded my head, because it sounded reasonable enough, and it wasn’t until a few hours later that I thought about it again and went 'Wait, no, that would be a terrible idea'.... There are people who can argue circles around me. Maybe not on every topic, but on topics where they are experts and have spent their whole lives honing their arguments.... What finally broke me out wasn’t so much the lucidity of the consensus view so much as starting to sample different crackpots. Some were almost as bright and rhetorically gifted as Velikovsky, all presented insurmountable evidence for their theories, and all had mutually exclusive ideas. After all, Noah’s Flood couldn’t have been a cultural memory both of the fall of Atlantis and of a change in the Earth’s orbit, let alone of a lost Ice Age civilization or of megatsunamis from a meteor strike. So given that at least some of those arguments are wrong and all seemed practically proven, I am obviously just gullible.... Given a total lack of independent intellectual steering power and no desire to spend thirty years building an independent knowledge base of Near Eastern history, I choose to just accept the ideas of the prestigious people with professorships in Archaeology, rather than those of the universally reviled crackpots who write books about Venus being a comet. You could consider this a form of epistemic learned helplessness, where I know any attempt to evaluate the arguments is just going to be a bad idea so I don’t even try.... There are still cases where I’ll trust the evidence of my own reason.... For 99% of people, 99% of the time, taking ideas seriously is the wrong strategy. Or, at the very least, it should be the last skill you learn, after you’ve learned every other skill that allows you to know which ideas are or are not correct.... You have to be really smart in order for taking ideas seriously not to be immediately disastrous. You have to be really smart not to have been talked into enough terrible arguments to develop epistemic learned helplessness...

18. Paul Campos: Where Do Lone Wolf Mentally Ill Mass Murders Get Their Ideas About a "Hispanic Invasion"?: "From their Republican President Donald Trump: 'When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.'... From their Republican U.S senator John Cornyn: 'Texas gained almost nine Hispanic residents for every additional white resident last year.'... From Fox News's Laura Ingraham: 'As the so-called US-bound “caravan” traveling through Mexico continues to swell, some questions arise that the media will not ask. Who is funding these efforts? How has it grown so quickly and what did the Democrats have to offer besides a bunch of cliches and bromides, and of course grandstanding? If you have been watching other networks, you have been treated to sympathetic, overwrought coverage of this invading horde.'...

19. A message for New York Times pundit David Brooks, New York Times op-ed page editor James Bennet, New York Times editor Dean Baquet, to New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzburger, and all who fund and carry water for them: moral fault attaches to you: Scott Lemieux: Today is the Day Marianne Williamson Became President: "Donald Trump has been bad for the country but great for lazy pundits, and perhaps because of this pundits of various stripes have been desperately hyping the candidacy of anti-vaxx grifter Marianne Williamson. The problem for this campaign is that pundits appear to be her only actual constituency.... The only other candidate with net-negative approval ratings is deBlasio. Even Seth Moutlon, for Chrissakes, is above water. The Williamson hype is based on nothing at all. Ordinarily, theater critic pundits showing that they’re not even good at theater criticism is annoying but mostly harmless, but that’s not true here. Hyping Williamson won’t make her the nominee, of course, but it may mean that, say, more people with depression google here and refuse to take appropriate medication. So maybe stop trying to prop up her stillborn candidacy?...

20. After hanging out with Madeleine Albright last week, I'm going to start calling all of this what it is: neo-fascism: Annalee Newitz (2008): Larry Niven Tells DHS to Spread Organ Harvesting Rumors: "There's a small group of science fiction authors who call themselves SIGMA and offer the U.S. government advice on futuristic scenarios.... One of them—Larry "Ringworld" Niven — offered the Department of Homeland Security some of the creepiest advice we've ever heard about how to handle problems with overcrowding in hospitals... a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants. 'The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren't going to pay for anything anyway', Niven said. 'Do you know how politically incorrect you are?' Pournelle asked. 'I know it may not be possible to use this solution, but it does work', Niven replied.... Other authors in SIGMA include Greg Bear (Darwin's Radio, Eon), Sage Walker (Wild Cards), and Eric Kotani (Between the Stars)...

21. I am sorry. This is just bad, and wrong: Joseph S. Nye, Jr.: Speaking Truth to Power: "The Bush administration did not order intelligence officials to lie, nor did they. But political pressure can subtly skew attention... "a big pile of evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and a smaller pile that he did not. All the incentives were to focus on the big pile."... The presentation of intelligence to (and by) political leaders was also flawed. There was little warning that 'weapons of mass destruction' was a confusing term in the way it lumped together nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.... The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate cited Saddam’s purchase of aluminum tubes as proof that he was reconstituting his nuclear program, but Department of Energy analysts, who had the expertise, disagreed. Unfortunately, their dissent was buried in a footnote that was dropped (along with other caveats and qualifiers) when the executive summary was prepared for Congress.... Political heat melts nuances. The dissent should have been discussed openly in the text. Political leaders cannot be blamed for the analytical failures of intelligence, but they can be held accountable when they go beyond the intelligence and exaggerate to the public what it says. US Vice President Dick Cheney said there was 'no doubt' that Saddam had WMD, and Bush stated flatly that the evidence indicated that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear programs. Such statements ignored the doubts and caveats that were expressed in the main bodies of the intelligence reports...

1. Ronald Reagan on Ambassador Hinton!: From Douglas Brinkley, ed. (2007), The Reagan Diaries (New York: Harper Collins: 9780060876005): "Thur Feb 17 1983: Jeanne Kirkpatrick reported on her trip to Central America. A grim story. Our Ambas. Hinton under the direction of the same kind of St. Dept. bureaucrats who made Castro possible are screwing up the situation in El Salvador. I'm now really mad. Bill C. is bringing George S. up to date and then I'm determined heads will roll, beginning with Ambas. Hinton.... Thu Jun 9 1983: Ambas. Hinton just relieved as Ambas. to El Salvador, stopped by. He's a good man and did a fine job under extremely difficult circumstances. I hope he can convince some of our left leaning Congressmen how wrong they are...

2. H. Rider Haggard: King Solomon's Mines: "Allan Quatermain... Sir Henry Curtis... Captain Good... a quest for the fabled King Solomon's Mines.... They also take along a mysterious native, Umbopa, who seems more regal, handsome and well-spoken than most porters of his class, but who is very anxious to join the party.... King Twala.... Gagool... has already sensed what Umbopa soon after reveals: he is Ignosi, the rightful king...

3. Wikipedia: Boris Johnson

4. Wikipedia: Ali Kemal: "An Ottoman Turkish journalist, newspaper editor, poet and a politician of liberal signature, who was for some three months Minister of the Interior in the government of Damat Ferid Pasha, the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. He was murdered during the Turkish War of Independence...

5. Wikipedia: Stanley Johnson

6. The Grand Strategy of Rising Superpower Management

7. Three "Protestant Winds"

8. Wikipedia: Fourth Anglo-Dutch War

9. Wikipedia: Anglo-Dutch Wars

10. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:

11. Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management: Yingyi Qian

12. Hike Snowmass: Explore Our Trails: Vista Trail | Sierra Club Loop | Melton Ranch Trail | Mountain View Trail...

13. Jared Rubin: Syllabus: The Path to the Modern Economy

14. The Grand Strategy of Rising Superpower Management

15. TableFlip

16. Brett Terpstra: Precise Web Clipping to Markdown with Bullseye

17. Slouching Towards Utopia? The Economic World of the Twentieth Century: Chapter 7.2: The World in 1900: Poverty

18. Slouching Towards Utopia? The Economic World of the Twentieth Century: Chapter 7.1: The World in 1900: The View from 1900

19. Hoisted from Archives: Upper-Class Living Standards in 1900

20. Wikipedia: Liburna

21. Wikipedia: Penteconter

22. Raffaele D’Amato: Imperial Roman Warships 193–565 AD

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