Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Alice Dreger: Napoleon Chagnon Is Dead https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191023-dreger-chagnon?key=mi0Bff1vaLHL09_no2Emg5PWXO__JoamjKQr2Gq1TY9HA2L6VXvdoh4Rvoh8qT3jdHhUVUhoODlYamhvVlh6UU9CV3lfUzl2cjZPaV81b3ZjSzhuRmttZlBrYw: "Consider the recent blog post published by science journalist John Horgan at Scientific American’s website, in which, in light of Nap’s death, he revisits his review of Darkness in El Dorado for the New York Times Book Review. Horgan now confesses that, warned by Chagnon’s most prominent allies not to support Tierney’s falsehoods, he doubled down in his influential review: 'I ended up making my review of Darkness more positive. I wanted Darkness to get a hearing'. He apologizes now not for amplifying a work full of lies, but only for understating the subtleties in Chagnon’s work. In his 2000 review of Darkness for the Washington Post, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins also endorsed Tierney’s bullshit. In that review, speaking of things he knew nothing about, Sahlins seconded Tierney’s sharp criticism of Chagnon for pressing the Yanomamö for information about their dead: 'As for the dead', Sahlins wrote, 'they are completely excluded from Yanomami society, ritually as well as verbally, as a necessary condition of the continued existence of the living'. 'It’s a goddamned lie', Hames told me when we talked soon after Nap died. 'You walk into any Yanomamö village on any evening, and you will hear people mourning their beloved deceased family members. You will hear the sobbing. They never forget.' The Yanomamö dead, Ray told me, 'are not forgotten and obliterated from memory. They’re kept alive by the people who love them'. After we hung up, I thought about why Ray was harping on this particular factual error. Then it came to me. The people who became like kin to Chagnon never expected the people who considered themselves journalists and scholars to love Nap. They did, however, expect that journalists and scholars would feel as Nap did—that we ought to always be aiming for the earthly truth. Because that is how we can begin to take care of each other...

Ernest Gellner: The Price of Velvet: Thomas Masaryk and Vaclav Havel https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/5373/ssoar-1995-1-gellner-the_price_of_velvet_thomas.pdf: 'Masaryk’s 1925 book was in due course translated into English as The Making of a State, whereas the Czech title means World Revolution. The English version can be justified on the grounds that it gives the reader a far more accurate account of the actual contents of the book, which is a fascinating description of Masaryk’s activities and thoughts during the First World War period, and which eventually led to the establishment of the Republic. A subsidiary reason for the English title is that the Western publishers did not like the Bolshevik-sounding stress on revolution in the title. But in a deeper sense, the English title is an appalling mistranslation: the Czechs weren’t creating their own state out of some capricious wilfulness or opportunism; they were, on Masaryk’s account, doing it because this was part of an overall trend which was both global and deeply moral. Masaryk wanted it clearly understood that he would not be seen indulging in state-creation, unless it was manifest that it was morally right to do so and history had decreed that it should be done–and these two conditions were linked to each other, for history did not do things lightly or without good cause. Like the men who drafted the American Declaration of Independence, he was not going to indulge in state-creation lightly, without due cause and deep philosophic reflection. No State Formation without Philosophic Justification! The victory of their nationalism was the victory of democracy, reason, sobriety, scepticism, individualism. It was not something to be undertaken lightly. But, and this is the second theme in Masaryk’s interpretation of the great transformation, the Czechs weren’t merely jumping onto a bandwagon, belatedly and without having made much of a contribution to it. They had once, in the late Middle Ages and early modern times, been at the very heart and forefront of that movement which they were now re-joining: that was the deep meaning of Czech history...

Heather Boushey: In Conversation with Leemore Dafny https://equitablegrowth.org/in-conversation-with-leemore-dafny/: 'Leemore Dafny: 'How can it possibly be a bad thing for consumers if insurers use some of their bargaining power to bring down the prices of the inputs into the health insurance product? The answer to that question is that it depends on how they are bringing down those prices.... From an antitrust enforcement perspective, savings passed through would be considered a benefit to consumers... a change in the division of existing surplus. But now, suppose something different—suppose that the only way the insurers get lower prices is not by taking away the margin, holding quantity constant, but by exercising their market power vis-à-vis these healthcare providers such as purchasing less, as well as paying less.... Lower prices in this setting can have an impact on the quantity and/or the quality of services, and that’s called monopsony, and it’s the flipside of monopoly. And just as monopoly benefits the seller of a good, monopsony benefits the buyer, in this case, the insurer, but at the expense not only of the healthcare providers but also of consumers in general...

It is very hard, given China's growth over the past two generations plus its outstripping those economies that were its peers in the 1980s, to criticize Chinese macroeconomic and industrial policy. Nevertheless, we economists keep trying—and thus, implicitly at least, reinforcing our reputation for arrogance by hinting that we could have done it better: Panle Jia Barwick, Myrto Kalouptsidi, and Nahim Bin Zahur: China's Industrial Policy: an Empirical Evaluation https://www.nber.org/papers/w26075: 'Despite the historic prevalence of industrial policy and its current popularity, few empirical studies directly evaluate its welfare consequences. This paper examines an important industrial policy in China in the 2000s, aiming to propel the country's shipbuilding industry to the largest globally. Using comprehensive data on shipyards worldwide and a dynamic model of firm entry, exit, investment, and production, we find that the scale of the policy was massive and boosted China's domestic investment, entry, and world market share dramatically. On the other hand, it created sizable distortions and led to increased industry fragmentation and idleness. The effectiveness of different policy instruments is mixed: production and investment subsidies can be justified by market share considerations, but entry subsidies are wasteful. Finally, the distortions could have been significantly reduced by implementing counter-cyclical policies and by targeting subsidies towards more productive firms...

Urban Dictionary: Tankie: 'A hardline Stalinist. A tankie is a member of a communist group or a "fellow traveller" (sympathiser) who believes fully in the political system of the Soviet Union and defends/defended the actions of the Soviet Union and other accredited states (China, Serbia, etc.) to the hilt, even in cases where other communists criticise their policies or actions. For instance, such a person favours overseas interventions by Soviet-style states, defends these regimes when they engage in human rights violations, and wishes to establish a similar system in other countries such as Britain and America. The term is used to distinguish the rare individuals with these kinds of beliefs from communists more broadly (including Communist Party members), whose adherence to Soviet doctrine and attachment to existing "socialist" states is somewhat weaker. It is always more-or-less abusive in the sense that those termed tankies do not use the term themselves, but it doesn't have any particular bite (unlike, say, Trot). The term derives from the fact that the divisions within the communist movement first arose when the Soviet Union sent tanks into communist Hungary in 1956, to crush an attempt to establish an alternative version of communism which was not embraced by the Russians. Most communists outside the eastern bloc opposed this action and criticised the Soviet Union. The "tankies" were those who said "send the tanks in". The epithet has stuck because tankies also supported "sending the tanks in" in cases such as Czechoslovakia 1968, Afghanistan 1979, Bosnia and Kosovo/a (in the case of the Serbian state), and so on (whereas the rest of the communist movement has gravitated towards anti-militarism)...

Arindrajit Dube on our going long-time mentor and friend Marty Weitzman, who committed suicide last summer. His "price and quantities" article is at https://scholar.harvard.edu/weitzman/files/prices_vs_quantities.pdf. His memory is a blessing: Arindrajit Dube: Mary Weitzman: "Marty's book on share economy was something I read, thought, and argued a lot about in my undergrad and grad years. Ultimately, I don't think I agree with the argument, but I am so thankful to him for helping me think about the relevant issues https://hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674805835#.XXBiuT0dujQ.twitter.... Needless to say, Marty's work on catastrophic climate change was monumental. This is what he is best known for today, and rightfully so https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/weitzman/files/review_of_stern_review_jel.45.3.pdf... He has a QJE 1976 paper that has become THE basis for an enormous literature on “green accounting”, which only got picked up after Solow referred to it a decade later, prompting a boom in work in that area, which is still ongoing.... Weitzman's paper on the 'ratchet principle' https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/weitzman/files/rachetprincipleperformanceincentives.pdf—so simple, and by modern standards no doubt only a toy model, but for me a lasting insight into allocation under a hierarchy. Two... Weitzman also contributed on production-function accounting for Soviet growth https://scholar.harvard.edu/weitzman/files/sovietpostwareconomicgrowth.pdf.... I have to add his work on prices versus quantities, which was so insightful...

Great conversation between Heather Boushey and Emmanuel Saez. My favorite highlight: Heather Boushey: In Conversation with Emmanuel Saez: "Kansas... illustrates beautifully from a research perspective even though it’s a disaster in terms of public policy... tax avoidance... pass-through businesses... huge incentives for high-income earners to reclassify... a big erosion of the wage income tax base in the state... a much bigger negative impact on tax revenue than would have been predicted mechanically.... When governments have actually to balance their budgets, they realize that taxes are useful, and that brings the two pieces of the debate together.... Certainly Kansas didn’t experience an economic boom...

Ben Casselman: "The prime-age (25-54) employment and participation rates both held at their post-recession highs https://twitter.com/bencasselman/status/1202958816163303425. Adjusting for demographic shifts, the participation rate is now back to its prerecession level. And the employment rate is getting close to its 2000-era peak, which is something many of us doubted we'd ever see. The gender split in participation is really striking, though. Participation among prime-age women is well above its prerecession level. For men, the rate has barely rebounded...

Noah Smith: Economics Will Never Be the Same https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-09/economics-will-never-be-the-same: 'The Shift to the Left: In the 1970s and 1980s, libertarian economists such as Milton Friedman commanded the limelight and dominated the policy conversation, while conservative supply-siders filled  Washington's think tanks. But in the 2010s... left-leaning economists became the public face of the discipline... Paul Krugman... Thomas Piketty... Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman... Economists for Inclusive Prosperity.... The Fight Against Sexism: The pervasive sexism in the economics profession has long been an open secret. But in the 2010s the problem began to get the attention it deserved.... Warming to Minimum Wage.... Research is also suggesting that concentrated corporate market power is a reason the real world doesn’t work like the simple theories in introductory textbooks.... Warning About Monopolies: As megamergers become more common, gigantic companies are taking over industry after industry. Economists are warning that this could be leading to low productivity growth, higher consumer prices and greater inequality.... Heresy on Trade.... A growing literature suggests that China’s entry into the World Trade Organization had dire consequences for a large swath of the American workforce.... The Diminished Clout of Economics: It’s a sad coincidence that just as economics is improving in so many ways, its public influence is on the wane. But the financial crisis and the devastating recession that followed discredited the discipline in the eyes of much of the public. Meanwhile, decades of rising inequality and stagnating mobility has made economists the targets of leftist ire and scorn just as the field has become substantially more progressive...

Josiah Ober: Agamemnon's Cluelessness https://delong.typepad.com/files/ober-agamemnon-selections.pdf: 'For Aristotle, ethics and politics must take into account “merely living” (zên) as the foundation for the end of living well (eu zên)... in a way... cognizant of the kinds of expertise necessary for living, without losing sight of the ultimate goal of living well. The domain of expertise... concerned with natural material conditions and forms of authority (especially master-slave) required by the end of self-sufficiency is designated oikonomia. But the definition of oikonomia and especially its relationship to money-making (chrêmatistikê) is, Aristotle says, contested.... Among the many goals of Politics book 1 is to put chrêmatistikê–as expert knowledge of a particular relationship among production (poiêsis), exchange (allangê/metablêtikê), and consumption/possession (ktêsis), all characteristically involving coined money—into the normatively correct place in his naturalized hierarchy of value. The critical conclusion is that chrêmatistikê (or one specific type of chrêmatistikê) is a subordinate part of oikonomia. It is not “according to nature” (kata phusin) but rather a technê arising from practical experience (empeiria). It aims the possession and increase of wealth, at accumulation of money, as an end. That accumulation is by its internal logic unbounded and unconstrained, insofar as wealth denominated in monetary terms has no natural limit. Chrêmatistikê thus is a matter of maximizing a single resource (one thought to give access to all other resources), rather than optimizing or satisficing in respect to other values. It is at once contrary to the true end of human existence, a prevalent approach to the management of material goods, and (at least potentially) an essential instrument for both the oikonomos and the politikos. Among the delicate tasks of book 1 of the Politics is, then, to demonstrate that Aristotle knows enough about this dangerous and vulgar (phortikon) instrument to specify its proper uses, while avoiding appearing to honor it as a science worthy of a detailed treatment. Much of Politics book 1.8-11 is devoted to sorting out the contested relationship between chrêmatistikê and oikonomia...

Katherine Policelli and Alix Gould-Werth: California Paid Family Leave Reduces Poverty: "Between 2004 and 2013, the California paid leave program increased household income levels and lowered poverty rates for mothers of 1-year-olds... an average 3,407 increase in income.... Also... good news specific to the bottom end of the income distribution: The introduction of paid leave in California is tied to a 10.2 percent decrease in risk of new mothers dropping below the poverty threshold and disproportionately helps women with lower levels of education and who are unmarried: Alexandra Boyle Stanczyk: Does Paid Family Leave Improve Household Economic Security Following a Birth? Evidence from California...

I have not yet seen a good estimate of the impact of Trump's trade war on supply-side growth. Half a percentage point per year is what my own back-of-the-envelope guesses are suggesting to me now, but I have no confidence in them. I would really love to see a comprehensive assessment that I could trust: Jayant Menon: The Knock-On Consequences Of The Us-China Trade Tariffs on Global Value Chains https://voxeu.org/article/knock-consequences-us-china-trade-tariffs-global-value-chains: "The impact of a simple 25% trade tariff can go far beyond the costs of directly impacted goods. This column shows that seemingly small tariffs can substantially disrupt global value chains, both through the difference between nominal and effective tariff rates and the relative costs of relocation and transhipment, and also because of how the trade dispute is being perceived. If it is seen as a symptom of an enduring geopolitical struggle for global economic dominance, then it could recur.... Effective rather than the nominal tariff rate, and the perception that the dispute will not end with the trade war... explain how a relatively small tariff has permanently fractured GVCs. The recent escalation in the trade war, both in terms of increases in tariffs and its greater coverage of products, suggests that the disruption will be even higher.... A similar dispute took place just over 30 years ago, also triggered by a large bilateral trade imbalance, but between the US and Japan.... Japan responded by moving labour-intensive segments of manufacturing production to lower wage destinations in Southeast Asia, giving birth to ‘Factory Asia’ (Baldwin 2006). In the process, Japan was able to retain its export competitiveness... shift a part of its export surplus to the balance of payments accounts of the countries it had invested in, thereby appearing to shrink its bilateral surplus.... The creation of Factory Asia benefitted consumers around the world and raised world incomes. This trade war is having the opposite effect. And the fallout could continue for a long time yet...

Looking forward to the next recession, and to the unwillingness of politicians to reserve fiscal space for fighting it, makes Keynes message more urgent than ever: Paul Krugman: Introduction to Keynes's General Theory https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/03/krugmans_intro_.html: 'In the spring of 2005 a panel of “conservative scholars and policy leaders” was asked to identify the most dangerous books of the 19th and 20th centuries.... Charles Darwin and Betty Friedan ranked high on the list. But The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money did very well, too. In fact, John Maynard Keynes beat out V.I. Lenin and Frantz Fanon. Keynes, who declared in the book’s oft-quoted conclusion that “soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil,” would probably have been pleased.... It’s probably safe to assume that the “conservative scholars and policy leaders” who pronounced The General Theory one of the most dangerous books of the past two centuries haven’t read it. But they’re sure it’s a leftist tract, a call for big government and high taxes.... The arrival of Keynesian economics in American classrooms was delayed by a nasty case of academic McCarthyism. The first introductory textbook to present Keynesian thinking, written by the Canadian economist Lorie Tarshis, was targeted by a right-wing pressure campaign aimed at university trustees. As a result of this campaign, many universities that had planned to adopt the book for their courses cancelled their orders, and sales of the book, which was initially very successful, collapsed. Professors at Yale University, to their credit, continued to assign the book; their reward was to be attacked by the young William F. Buckley for propounding “evil ideas.” But Keynes was no socialist—he came to save capitalism, not to bury it. And there’s a sense in which The General Theory was... a conservative book.... Keynes wrote during a time of mass unemployment, of waste and suffering on an incredible scale. A reasonable man might well have concluded that capitalism had failed, and that only... nationalization... could restore economic sanity.... Keynes argued that these failures had surprisingly narrow, technical causes... because Keynes saw the causes of mass unemployment as narrow and technical, he argued that the problem’s solution could also be narrow and technical: the system needed a new alternator, but there was no need to replace the whole car...

Michael Kades: 'It is a great time https://twitter.com/Michael_Kades/status/1194690760794353666: to look at @EquitableGrowth's "The State of U.S. Federal Antitrust Enforcement" https://equitablegrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/091719-antitrust-enforcement-report-1.pdf… Lots of graphs...

For the weekend: One powerful and very common presumption among the thinkers of the nineteenth century was that if the problems of overpopulation could be solved, and if that coupled with better technology solved the problem of inadequate resources to provide necessities, then the distribution of conveniences and luxuries would take care of itself, and the distribution of necessities would be unproblematic as an immediate consequence of common humanity in an age of abundance. They were wrong:

Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward 2000-1887 https://delong.typepad.com/files/bellamy-backward.pdf: '“Who is capable of self-support?” he demanded. “There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as not even to know family coöperation, each individual may possibly support himself, though even then for a part of his life only; but from the moment that men begin to live together, and constitute even the rudest sort of society, self-support becomes impossible. As men grow more civilized, and the subdivision of occupations and services is carried out, a complex mutual dependence becomes the universal rule. Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support; and that it did not in your day constituted the essential cruelty and unreason of your system”...

Worthy Reads at Equitable Growth:

1. Equitable Growth Steering Committee member Karen Dynan in a conversation what about whether the US government is properly prepared to fight the next recession. The answer is no: Karen Dynan, Jay Shambaugh, and Eduardo Porter: What Tools Does the U.S. Have to Combat the Next Recession?: "Today's lower equilibrium interest rates make it more likely that monetary policy would need to make use of unconventional tools to spur the economy. On the fiscal front, we have a much larger level of government debt relative to GDP than we did prior to the financial crisis. However, viewing this level of debt to GDP as a reason to restrain stimulus spending in case of a crisis could make the problem worse. Whether the government uses fiscal policy to stimulate the economy will depend more on political willingness, than on the actual limits on fiscal policy...

2. Patent publication turns out to be a very valuable societal institution indeed, viewed as a way of diseminating knowledge: Deepak Hegde, Kyle Herkenhoff, and Chenqi Zhu: Patent Publication and Technology Spillovers: "Invention disclosure through patents (i) increases technology spillovers at the extensive and intensive margins (ii) increases overlap between distant but related patents and decreases overlap between similar patents (iii) lowers average inventive step, originality, and scope of new patents (iv) decreases patent abandonments and (v) increases patenting...

3. Workers, but only high-paid workers, capture about $0.30 of every extra dollar in revenue generated by the monopoly power conferred by a patent. This is another piece of evidence that workers, but only high-paid workers, are to a substantial but not overwhelming extent effective equity holders in America is business is: Patrick Kline, Neviana Petkova, Heidi Williams, and Owen Zidar: Who Profits from Patents? Rent-Sharing at Innovative Firms: "Comparing firms whose patent applications were initially allowed to those whose patent applications were initially rejected... patent allowances lead firms to increase employment, but entry wages and workforce composition are insensitive to patent decisions.... Workers capture roughly 30 cents of every dollar of patent-induced surplus in higher earnings.... These earnings effects are concentrated among men and workers in the top half of the earnings distribution, and are paired with corresponding improvements in worker retention among these groups...

4. An excellent interview with Equitable Growth's Lisa Cooke: Lisa Cook: On invention gaps, hate-related violence, discrimination, and more: "One of the first things I do is to buy a Bic pen.... Each one was 10 dollars! Ten dollars! This completely stunned me. I knew how poor most people were. I knew students had to have these pens to write in their blue books. It just started this whole train of thought...

5. Scale economies are not growing in the American economy. But monopoly power is: Jonathan Baker: Market Power or Just Scale Economies?: "Growing market power provides a better explanation for higher price-cost margins and rising concentration in many industries, declining economic dynamism, and other contemporary US trends, than the most plausible benign alternative: increased scale economies and temporary returns to the first firms to adopt new information technologies (IT) in competitive markets. The benign alternative has an initial plausibility.... Yet six of the nine reasons I gave for thinking market power is substantial and widening in the US in my testimony cannot be reconciled with the benign alternative.... None of the reasons is individually decisive: there are ways to question or push back against each. But their weaknesses are different, so, taken collectively, they paint a compelling picture of substantial and widening market power over the late 20th century and early 21st century...

Worthy Reads Elsewhere:

1. Educating people who tend to think right wing about the IQ nature-nurture debate is probably impossible, but Cosma Shalizi tries: Cosma Shalizi (2007): .In Different Voices: "Q: How would you react to the idea that a psychological trait, one intimately linked to the higher mental functions, is highly heritable? A: With suspicion and unease, naturally. Q: It's strongly correlated with educational achievement, class and race. A: Worse and worse. Q: Basically nothing that happens after early adolescence makes an impact on it; before that it's also correlated with diet. A: Do you work at the Heritage Foundation? Such things cannot be. Q: What if I told you the trait was accent? A: I'm sorry? Q (in a transparently fake California accent): When you, like, say words differently than other people? who speak, like, the same language? because that's how you, you know, learned to say them from people around you?...

2. I keep saying that Equitable Growth should cozy up to these people: they are our mirror image—and not in an evil-Mr.-Spock-with-a-beard way: Brink Lindsey, Will Wilkinson, Steven Teles, and Samuel Hammond: The Center Can Hold: Public Policy for an Age of Extremes: "We need both greater reliance on market competition and expanded, more robust, and better-crafted social insurance... government activism to enhance opportunity... less corrupt and more law-like governance... a new ideological lens: one that sees government and market not as either-or antagonists, but as necessary complements...

3. But there is a lot in China's success that simply cannot be called "mainstream economics": Dani Rodrik: China’s Boldest Experiment: "China’s leadership did not follow any guidebook and resolutely marched to the beat of its own drummer.... China has not violated the tenets of mainstream economics so much as it has offered a master class in applying them creatively in complicated political and economic terrain...

4. A very strange reversal of direction here. Marco Rubio could have done something about this a year ago, but did not: Laura Davison: [Rubio Tweets Tax Bill He Voted For Helps Companies Over Workers(https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-13/rubio-slams-trump-tax-law-for-helping-corporations-over-workers): "Florida Republican aligns himself with Democrats on tax law Stock buybacks have jumped as wages show modest increase...

5. Carlos Lozada: Anti-Trump Conservatives Want to Reverse the GOP’s Destruction. But They Helped Light the Fuse: "What kind of conservatism can survive, let alone thrive, in American politics today? The question hangs over the Never Trump volumes.... Flake... keeps the faith. 'With hard work... and maybe a little luck, we will right this ship'...

6. Tony Yates is profoundly unhappy with Mervyn King's embrace of Brexit. I do not understand why Prime Minister Teresa May doesn't call for a revote, on the grounds that the initial "Leave" campaign was poisoned by its misrepresentations: Tony Yates: Why Mervyn King’s Defence of Brexit “Isn’t Worthy of a Bank of England Governor”: "Mervyn King, Mark Carney’s predecessor as the governor of the Bank of England, has burnished his Brexit credentials in an opinion piece for Bloomberg. King has made his pro-Brexit views known already. The trigger for reprising them was the publication of the Bank of England’s assessment of different trajectories either through or without Brexit...

7. I think that the very sharp Jacob Levy may well be wrong here. The "Culture War" was never about "culture". It was about women, or atheists and Jews, or Negroes who did not know their place. Placing a high priority on demanding upright behavior from powerful men was never how they rolled. Carter was a churchgoing Christian. Reagan not so much: Jacob Levy: Populism's Dangerous Companions: "It’s an interesting and illuminating exercise to single out a shift from debates about cultural moralism to those about nationalism as the important destabilizing influence. It’s certainly true that the culture war fights of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s have lost a great deal of their political force.... Jerry Falwell Jr.’s sycophancy toward a serial adulterer, multiple divorcé, and seeker of sexual favors from nude models and porn actresses is a nice synecdoche for the apparent surrender of the old religious right, even in the United States, on everything except abortion...

8. Wise words from Yale's Jason Stanley. I do think that he gets it wrong in one respect. Neo-fascism (or fascism) is not a mode of government, but a mode of organization and distraction. What policies the government follows are largely independent of this mode. Mussolini was expansionist. Franco was not. Huey Long was genuinely populist. Augusto Pinochet was not: Sean Illing: What Is Fascism? Yale Philosopher Jason Stanley Explains How It Works: "This is probably a good time to pivot to the glittering elephant in the room: Donald Trump. Is he a fascist?" Jason Stanley: "I make the case in my book that he practices fascist politics. Now, that doesn’t mean his government is a fascist government. For one thing, I think it’s very difficult to say what a fascist government is...

9. I still do not understand why this "kooky legal theory" is any kookier than any of the other anti-ObamaCare legal theories: Matthew Yglesias: Ruling Obamacare Unconstitutional: A Pattern of Undemocratic GOP Conduct: "Misha Tseytlin... had just been working as an attorney in the West Virginia Attorney General’s office... suing the Obama administration and he thought the Wisconsin gig would be... fun.... He cooked up this lawsuit, persuaded his bosses in state government to sign on, and eventually got 20 state governments to pursue his argument. Friday night he scored his triumph—his kooky legal theory is the law of the land, according to at least one federal judge...

10. This by the very sharp Henry Farrell seems to me to be largely wrong. Farrell thinks that parties, plural, became "unwilling to compete for voters across tricky political issues". I see it as right-wing party, singular, taking the neo-fascist turn to which the system was always vulnerable—winning mass support for policies of plutocracy and kleptocracy by mobilizing fear and hatred of a distinct and sinister internal and external other. Four times in the past hundred yeras have we seen this in the United States. Teddy Rooevelt vs. the Malefactors of Great Wealth, Ike Eisenhower vs. the McCarthyites, and Richard Nixon's Flaws vs. Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan were three earlier episodes. In the past we were lucky. We won through because of conservative elitss that valued liberty and an open society. We may win through again: Henry Farrell: The Hollowing Out of Democracy: "There are strong similarities between what is happening in the United States, Hungary, the United Kingdom, and France... where democracy is backpedaling rapidly, such as the Philippines. This is the product both of common shocks... and of cross-national reinforcement... the family resemblances are undeniable. What Davies arguably gets wrong though is the significance of these changes...

Michael Boskin wrote this two years ago. To my knowledge, not once in the past two years has he acknowledged that his "professional judgment" about the effects of the Trump-McConnell-Ryan tax bill were wrong. There has been no jump in the equipment investment share of national income. And those of us whose judgment is better than Michael Boskin's were damned certain back in late 20127 that there would not be: Michael Boskin: Another Look at Tax Reform and Economic Growth: 'With the Republican tax package now finalized and coming to a vote in both houses of Congress, a debate has been raging over the bill's possible growth effects. In that debate, those who oppose the package seem to be underestimating the outsize impact of equipment investments.... I agree that the current tax bill could, in principle, have been better.... Barro and I have clearly come to a different conclusion than Summers and Furman have about the bill, based on our own judgments about the links between corporate-tax reform and economic growth. While I certainly respect Summers and Furman’s right to their views, I am not about to cede my professional judgment to others, in or out of government...

Introduction: Let me write, overwhelmingly, about inequality understood as inequality between people who regard themselves as members of a common culture, economy, nation. There is the separate issue of inequality between the different cultures, economies, nations that make up the world, but let me leave that for the very end, and then deal with it only briefly.

History of Inequality: For most of human history since the invention of agriculture, typical settled human societies have been about 80% as unequal as they could possibly be: were anything to stretch out the distribution of income and wealth by more than an additional 20%, and working-class women would have become too skinny to ovulate regularity and working-class children would have had compromised immune systems, and so the population would have failed to reproduce itself. The typical economy's Gini index was about 45 or so (the same Gini value as if 72% of wealth and income were evenly divided among the top 28%, and the rest evenly among the rest)—with New Spain in the eighteenth century estimated up at above 60 (the same Gini value as if 4/5 were evenly divided among the top 1/5, and the rest evenly among the rest) and the Kingdom of Naples and China estimated down below 30 (the same Gini value as if 65% were evenly divided among the top 35%, and the rest of income evenly among the rest).

https://www.icloud.com/pages/0jK0cjqqw-D4wRayNOo87pLYw

Amanda Borschel-Dan: Factory for Romans' Favorite Funky Fish Sauce Discovered Near Ashkelonl https://www.timesofisrael.com/factory-for-romans-favorite-funky-fish-sauce-discovered-near-ashkelon/: 'Northwest of... Ashkelon, Erickson-Gini’s team uncovered... a rare Holy Land garum production center, or cetaria.... In addition to evidence of fish pools, the team uncovered giant plastered vats, jars used for storing liquid, and what appears to be a large receptacle to hold the strained goopy substance.... The paucity of production sites had always surprised and puzzled the archaeologist, she said. Throughout the Empire, the sauce graced the tables of the Roman world’s rich and famous, as well as the troughs of commoners.... Pliny the Elder mentions the sauce throughout his “Natural History,” both as a foodstuff and as medicine.... Even in the storerooms of 1st century BCE King Herod’s isolated Masada palace, a rare labeled amphorae of garum was found that was possibly imported from Andalusia.... To accomplish its pungent putrefaction, the craftsman would place whole small fish such as sardines or anchovies, or chopped up larger fish such as tuna or mackerel, at the base of a jar and pour on top of it spices and salt, followed by another fish layer, etc. According to Erickson-Gini, the recipe’s ratio called for five parts fish to one part salt. A lively video, “Garum, Rome’s Favorite Condiment (Ancient Cooking),” on the Invicta History YouTube channel, said the concoction inside a closed jar would bake in the hot Mediterranean sun for a week as the fish deteriorated, but was saved from rot by the salt. It was then opened and stirred for another 20 days or more (Erickson-Gini suggested up to three months). The resultant “puree of fish goop” was strained through a basket, and the strained liquid is the garum. Other, more solid leftovers could be made into a different sauce or lesser-regarded fish paste called allec.... The height of the garum fad was circa the 2nd century CE, but its use is recorded even much later...

Note to Self: Progress in Pottery:

Adolf Hitler: To Hermann Rauschning http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/fascism_and_communism-socialism.html: 'Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the party as the representative of the general good. There will be no license, no free space, in which the individual belongs to himself. This is Socialism—not such trifles as the private possession of the means of production. Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them then own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over them, regardless whether they are owners or workers. All that, you see, is unessential. Our Socialism goes far deeper...

...The people about us are unaware of what is really happening to them. They gaze fascinated at one or two familiar superficialities, such as possessions and income and rank and other outworn conceptions. As long as these are kept intact, they are quite satisfied. But in the meantime they have entered a new relation; a powerful social force has caught them up. They themselves are changed. What are ownership and income to that? Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings!

Christopher Pissarides: Why Worry About Automation? https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/digital-automation-impact-on-jobs-poverty-inequality-by-christopher-pissarides-2019-11: 'The impact of today’s digital technologies on the labor market raises three questions. Will there be enough jobs for workers to do? Where will these jobs be? And will the compensation be high enough to avoid an increase in poverty and inequality?... Fear of technological unemployment persists because it is rooted in uncertainty about new job creation. New machines’ capabilities enable us to identify the jobs at risk, but not the jobs yet to emerge.... The challenge that all new technologies pose is not that they create too few jobs, but rather that too few workers have the skills to fill them.... The jobs threatened in the early stages of robotics and artificial intelligence were routine or relied on processing data. Moving big boxes in warehouses, or loading agricultural produce onto trucks, was easily mechanized. Data-processing jobs could be carried out by AI software; a search engine and a few key words could easily replace a paralegal who searches court records for relevant precedents. These properties led to the polarization of employment, challenging workers to shift to jobs that were either complementary to the new technologies, such as computer programming or robotics, or to jobs that could not be programmed, such as management consultancy or nursing care.... The sectoral employment transition is easier where the educational system teaches a broad range of skills, rather than encouraging specialization from an early age, and where flexible labor markets have good retraining facilities. Access to finance also is essential in facilitating the transition.... The third question, about inequality, is more difficult to address. Economics is good at providing unambiguous answers to questions about the efficiency of labor markets. The question of inequality, by contrast, is partly about political choices.... The key question, however, should not be whether some people become very rich, but whether the wages of lower-skill people are sufficiently high to avoid poverty.... Companies in the digital era have a choice: They can use technology to substitute capital for labor and keep wages low, or use technology for the good of their workers with a view to longer-term profits...

MUST OF THE MUSTS:

1. Walter Womacka Stained-Glass Restoration https://www.moz.de/kultur/artikelansicht/dg/0/1/1043774/ https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/walter-womackas-socialist-realist-stained-glass.html in the former State Council building on Berlin's Schlossplatz, now the home of the European School of Management and Technology: How the East German Government Wanted to Pretend It Had Been, Was, and Would Be...

2. Wendong Zhang et al.: 3 Reasons Midwest Farmers Hurt by the U.S.-China Trade War Still Support Trump https://theconversation.com/3-reasons-midwest-farmers-hurt-by-the-u-s-china-trade-war-still-support-trump-126303: 'Although farmers have lost billions of dollars in exports, China’s strategy hasn’t created the intended effect, with surveys of farmers continuing to show strong support for the president. We conducted our own survey of corn and soybean farmers. Published in October, it suggests three reasons farmers support Trump’s trade policies despite the costs.... Tthe Trump administration’s efforts to ease their pain have paid off. The administration gave soybean, sorghum and other farmers 12 billion in assistance in 2018, which the vast majority of our survey participants found useful. The survey was conducted before an additional 16 billion in payments went to farmers this year.... We also found that farmers largely view the trade disruption as short-term pain for long-term gain. While only 14% think their farm operations will be better off financially a year from now, more than half said they expected something good to ultimately come out of the trade war.... Finally, we found a growing frustration with China’s erratic buying behavior. For example, China shut out U.S. beef for 14 years over a mad cow scare in 2003, keeping the ban more than a decade after other countries like Japan and South Korea lifted theirs. Chinese purchase of products such as distillers grains or corn sometimes just disappear. These may have been offshoots of adjustments China made to its corn support policy, but, from the perspective of U.S. farmers, Chinese demand for certain U.S. agricultural commodities has been annoyingly inconsistent.... “The Chinese do not play by the rules,” one Illinois farmer said. “They cancel shipment orders that are not in their favor. They continue to steal our patents. Only President Trump has tried to stop these unfair trade practices”.... Most farmers recognize that they will continue to be the biggest victims of the U.S.-China trade war.... Yet 56% still said they supported imposing tariffs on Chinese products, while only 30% oppose them...

3. Hoisted from the Archives: Executive Summary of Obama Transition Economic Policy Work: Note that if 600 billion in fiscal stimulus would have reduced the expected unemployment rate as of the end of 2010 from 9.5% to 8%, 900 billion would still have left the economy with an expected end-of-2010 unemployment rate of 7.25%. And, of course, the memo ought to have highlighted that things had a 50% chance of being worse than expected—even considerably worse, which they were: the end of 2010 unemployment rate was 9.3%. To seek as your economic policy goal a set of policies that would might well have—and did—leave the unemployment rate two years hence above 9% seemed like malpractice on the part of the Obama-Emmanuel-Biden team then. It still seems like it was malpractice now...

4. Hoisted from the Archives: If You Are So Rich, Why Aren't You Smart?: From Ten Years Ago https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/if-you-are-so-rich-why-arent-you-smart.html: The explicit argument, of course, is that the parents are rich because they are genetically smart, and that the children test well because they have inherited smartness genes from their parents, and all is good because it is right that the worthy should be rich and the most important part of being worthy is being smart. And Mankiw drops it there—without even acknowledging that, say, being able to afford an extra bathroom is a good signal that you can afford to spend more money on your children's education. Without trying to do a quantitative calculation of the expected slope. But, rather, hingeing the entire thing on "good genes". IMHO, merely saying that correlation is not always causation and dropping the issue is profoundly unhelpful—moreover, it shows a... certain lack of work ethic as well.... The rule of thumb, I think, is that half of the income-test score correlation is due to the correlation of your test scores with your parents' IQ; and half of the income-test score correlation is coming purely from the advantages provided by that component of wealth uncorrelated with your parents' (genetic and environmental!) IQ. The curve is less steep, but there is definitely a 'what' here to be thought about. There is no "so what" here at all... The masters at explaining this, of course, are Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis...

5. Brad DeLong Says More...: Project Syndicate https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/brad-delong-says-more-project-syndicate.html: Back in 1992, Larry Summers and I warned participants at the Fed’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that low inflation and high equity-return and bond-risk premiums do not play well together. Dealing with a typical recession had, historically, required that the Fed cut the federal funds rate by five full percentage points. A large recession would require even larger cuts How could macroeconomic stability be maintained in a world where the real federal funds rate was 3% at the peak of the business cycle, and the inflation rate was 2% or less? It was a very good question then. It is an even better question today...

6. Project Syndicate: Eternal September: How Trolls Overran the Public Square https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/project-syndicateannalee.html https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trolls-win-control-of-the-public-square-by-j-bradford-delong-2019-12: The impact of the changing technological, organizational, and productivity foundation on the public sphere of ideas of ideas about politics and societal organization has been one of the most consequential areas...

7. Project Syndicate: No, We Don’t “Need” a Recession https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/no-we-dont-need-a-recession-by-j-bradford-delong-project-syndicate.html https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/myth-of-needed-recession-by-j-bradford-delong-2019-10: It was not uncommon for commentators to argue for a “needed” recession before the big one hit in 2008-2010. But I, for one, assumed that this claim was a decade dead. Who in 2019 could say with a straight face that a recession and high unemployment under conditions of low inflation would be a good thing?...

Strom Thurmond (1959): Against Hawaii Statehood https://delong.typepad.com/files/thurmond-hawaii.pdf: 'There are also those in this world who are the devisees of a totally different heritage and with whom we have no identity in either antiqulty or modern times.... Our society may well be said to be... the exemplification of the maximum development of the Western civilization.... At the opposite extreme exists the Eastern heritage, different in every essential, not necessarily in a way that it is inferior, but different.... The chasm of difference between the two... is in heritage, the force that shapes the man to form unchangeable, except, if at all, by the infinite passage of time.... Oriental and Hawaiian groups constitute in excess of 70% of Hawaii's population. This large segment of the population has a heritage... in a word, Eastern.... There is serious doubt in my mind as to whether the Hawaiian people would not be seriously handicapped, possibly even precluded, in defending themselves from such as the communist-dominated Longshoremans Union by the imposition upon them of Western institutions of government, since their heritage has not equipped them to comprehend the philosophy essential to the effective operation of these institutions.... There is even greater doubt in my mind that the Hawaiian people could contribute to the degree of harmony remaining in the conduct of affairs of our Federated Republic.... An abandonment of the United States of America in favor of a United States of America and Pacific—precedenting a United States of the World—would actually benefit no one but toll the death-knell of our Federated Republic...

Back in 2005, the very wise Raghu Rajan tried to warn the assembled economic policymakers of the world about the heightened risks of a financial meltdown. They did not listen: Raghu Rajan (2005): Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier? https://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/sympos/2005/pdf/rajan2005.pdf: 'Risk never can be reduced to zero, nor should it be. We should be prepared for the low probability but highly costly downturn. In such an eventuality, it is possible the losses that emanate from a financial catastrophe cannot be entirely borne by current generations and are best shared with future generations. Some of the mechanisms for sharing such systematic risks with future generations, such as (defined benefit) social security, are being changed. While there are gains from doing so, and from ensuring their sustainability, we need to ensure that the intergenerational risk-sharing mechanism they offer is not overly weakened. We also need to continue improving the intrinsic flexibility of our economies, so as to better ride out the downturns that, almost inevitably, will occur...

Hoisted from the Archives: Note that if 600 billion in fiscal stimulus would have reduced the expected unemployment rate as of the end of 2010 from 9.5% to 8%, 900 billion would still have left the economy with an expected end-of-2010 unemployment rate of 7.25%. And, of course, the memo ought to have highlighted that things had a 50% chance of being worse than expected—even considerably worse, which they were: the end of 2010 unemployment rate was 9.3%. To seek as your economic policy goal a set of policies that would might well have—and did—leave the unemployment rate two years hence above 9% seemed like malpractice on the part of the Obama-Emmanuel-Biden team then. It still seems like it was malpractice now: Obama National Economic Council Presumptive (December 2008): EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF ECONOMIC POLICY WORK https://delong.typepad.com/20091215-obama-economic-policy-memo.pdf: 'In the absence of fiscal stimulus the economy is projected to lose 3 to 4 million jobs in 2009. Together with the jobs we have already lost and population growth, we will be 7 million jobs short of full employment. The unemployment rate is projected to rise above 9 percent and not projected to start falling until 2011. We believe that $600 billion in stimulus over two years would create 2.5 million jobs relative to what would happen in the absence of stimulus. However, this falls well short of filling the job shortfall and would leave the unemployment rate at 8 percent two years from now. This has convinced the economic team that a considerably larger package is justified.... The memo outlines four alternative plan ranging from $550 billion to $890 billion...

Hoisted from the Archives: If You Are So Rich, Why Aren't You Smart? http://www.bradford-delong.com/2009/08/if-you-are-so-rich-why-arent-you-smart.html: A correspondent emails me a link to https://web.archive.org/web/20090830190212/http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/08/least-surprising-correlation-of-all.html... Greg Mankiw looks at:

And says:

The Least Surprising Correlation of All Time: So what? This fact tells us nothing about the causal impact of income on test scores.... This graph is a good example of omitted variable bias, a statistical issue discussed in Chapter 2 of my favorite textbook. The key omitted variable here is parents' IQ. Smart parents make more money and pass those good genes on to their offspring.... Suppose we were to graph average SAT scores by the number of bathrooms a student has in his or her family home. That curve would also likely slope upward.... But it would be a mistake to conclude that installing an extra toilet raises yours kids' SAT scores. It would be interesting to see the above graph reproduced for adopted children only. I bet that the curve would be a lot flatter...

The explicit argument, of course, is that the parents are rich because they are genetically smart, and that the children test well because they have inherited smartness genes from their parents, and all is good because it is right that the worthy should be rich and the most important part of being worthy is being smart. And Mankiw drops it there—without even acknowledging that, say, being able to afford an extra bathroom is a good signal that you can afford to spend more money on your children's education. Without trying to do a quantitative calculation of the expected slope. But, rather, hingeing the entire thing on "good genes".

IMHO, merely saying that correlation is not always causation and dropping the issue is profoundly unhelpful—moreover, it shows a... certain lack of work ethic as well. Off the top of my head...

Guo Xu and Hans-Joachim Voth: Patronage and Performance in the Age of Sail https://voxeu.org/article/patronage-and-performance-age-sail: 'People in power may use their discretion to hire and promote family members and others in their network. While some empirical evidence shows that such patronage is bad, its theoretical effects are ambiguous–discretion over appointments can be used for good or bad. This column examines the battle performance of British Royal Navy officers during the Age of Sail and finds that patronage ‘worked’. On average, officers with connections to the top of the naval hierarchy did better on every possible measure of performance than those without a family connection. Where top administrators have internalised meritocratic values and competition punishes underperformance, patronage may enhance overall performance by selecting better individuals...

Somin Park: _Wealthier Individuals Receive Higher Returns to Wealth _ https://equitablegrowth.org/wealthier-individuals-receive-higher-returns-to-wealth/: 'Why do the wealthy get higher returns from their wealth? In part, it’s because they invest a higher share of their assets in the stock market and other risky assets, and therefore are rewarded for their risk tolerance with higher average returns. Wealthier investors also benefit from the scale of their wealth, for example, by using checking accounts that pay higher rates for larger deposits and buying financial advice that leads to higher returns—what the authors call “economies of scale in wealth management.” Yet the authors also find that risk compensation and scale, while important, are not enough to fully account for the variation in returns, or, in economic parlance, “return heterogeneity.” Bank deposit accounts are safe assets that bear essentially no risk. If return heterogeneity were explained by compensation for risk-taking, then there should be no variation in the returns that people get from deposit accounts holding the same amount of wealth. The authors find, however, that there is sizable heterogeneity: People with more education tend to deposit at high-return banks. Persistent variation in returns is therefore also explained, in part, by differences in financial sophistication and differences in ability to access and use superior information about investment opportunities...

A brilliant must-read: Kevin Rinz: Did Timing Matter? Life Cycle Differences in Effects of Exposure to the Great Recession https://equitablegrowth.org/working-papers/did-timing-matter-life-cycle-differences-in-effects-of-exposure-to-the-great-recession/: 'Exposure to a recession can have persistent, negative consequences, but does the severity of those consequences depend on when in the life cycle a person is exposed? I estimate the effects of exposure to the Great Recession on employment and earnings outcomes for groups defined by year of birth over the ten years following the beginning of the recession. With the exception of the oldest workers, all groups experience reductions in earnings and employment due to local unemployment rate shocks during the recession. Younger workers experience the largest earnings losses in percent terms (up to 13 percent), in part because recession exposure makes them persistently less likely to work for high-paying employers even as their overall employment recovers more quickly than older workers’. Younger workers also experience reductions in earnings and employment due to changes in local labor market structure associated with the recession. These effects are substantially smaller in magnitude but more persistent than the effects of unemployment rate increases...

In all his columns on Project Syndicate about how dangers of global warming are overblown, Bjorn Lomborg does not appear to have ever called for a carbon tax—at least, searching the website for "Bjorn Lomborg carbon tax" produces no hits, and I cannot recall a call for one. If he does, it's not a central part of his thought. I wonder why not. What's the upside to you of our not yet having implemented a carbon tax, Bjorn?: Bjørn Lomborg: Humans Can Survive Underwater https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rising-sea-levels-media-alarmism-by-bjorn-lomborg-2019-11: 'Climate change is a problem we need to tackle, and we should be particularly mindful of how it will hurt the poorest in society. But the bigger, unreported story is that today’s climate policies will do very little to resolve the “challenge” of more people living below the high-tide mark.... Even when we read stories from the world’s top media outlets, we need to maintain perspective. Deaths from climate-related causes (floods, hurricanes, droughts, wildfire, and extreme temperatures) have declined by 95% over the past hundred years. Furthermore, despite the constant barrage of claims that the global climate crisis is spiraling out of control, the cost of extreme weather as a proportion of GDP has been declining since 1990. Alarming media stories that twist the facts about rising sea levels are dangerous because they scare people unnecessarily and push policymakers toward excessively expensive measures to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The real solution is to lift the world’s poorest out of poverty and protect them with simple infrastructure...

The best thing I have seen on the dilemmas produced by trying to rope parties opposed on a fundamental level to democracy into a democratic system Daniel Ziblatt: Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/conservative-parties-and-the-birth-of-democracy/919E566A69893DA8E25F845349D5C161#fndtn-information: 'How do democracies form and what makes them die? Daniel Ziblatt revisits this timely and classic question in a wide-ranging historical narrative that traces the evolution of modern political democracy in Europe from its modest beginnings in 1830s Britain to Adolf Hitler's 1933 seizure of power in Weimar Germany. Based on rich historical and quantitative evidence, the book offers a major reinterpretation of European history and the question of how stable political democracy is achieved. The barriers to inclusive political rule, Ziblatt finds, were not inevitably overcome by unstoppable tides of socioeconomic change, a simple triumph of a growing middle class, or even by working class collective action. Instead, political democracy's fate surprisingly hinged on how conservative political parties–the historical defenders of power, wealth, and privilege–recast themselves and coped with the rise of their own radical right. With striking modern parallels, the book has vital implications for today's new and old democracies under siege....

And I am ashamed that I still have not read Steve Greenhouse's new book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor https://www.google.com/books/edition/Beaten_Down_Worked_Up/bBl5DwAAQBAJ: Joseph A. McCartin: The Future of American Labor https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/squeeze-stranglehold: 'From Squeeze to Stranglehold: No writer is better equipped than Steven Greenhouse to assess how both American workers and the American labor movement are doing in the early twenty-first century.... Greenhouse has spent the past five years freelancing important labor stories and stepping back to write his new book.... He opens with a string of disturbing vignettes that illustrate workers’ current struggles, including rampant wage and hour violations, deteriorating workplace-safety enforcement, unpredictable scheduling practices, stagnant wages, retirement insecurity, lack of paid sick or vacation days, and abusive management...

Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen: How Can We Develop Transformative Tools for Thought? https://numinous.productions/ttft/: 'We’ll begin with three principles we used when writing the cards in Quantum Country. Note that these are just three of many more principles–a more detailed discussion of good principles of card construction may be found in Augmenting Long-term Memory...

Claire Montialoux: "Thrilled to present the new version of https://twitter.com/cmontialoux/status/1179783865331638272 'Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality' with Ellora Derenoncourt: http://clairemontialoux.com/files/DM2019.pdf. Key finding: 20% of the decline in the racial earnings gap during Civil Rights Era stemmed from one single reform of the minimum wage...

Barry Eichengreen, Poonam Gupta, and Oliver Masetti: On the Fickleness of Capital Flowsl https://voxeu.org/article/fickleness-capital-flows: "According to conventional wisdom, capital flows are fickle. Focusing on emerging markets, this column argues that despite recent structural and regulatory changes, much of this wisdom still holds today. Foreign direct investment inflows are more stable than non-FDI inflows. Within non-FDI inflows, portfolio debt and bank-intermediated flows are most volatile. Meanwhile, FDI and bank-related outflows from emerging markets have grown and become increasingly volatile. This finding underscores the need for greater attention from analysts and policymakers to the capital outflow side...

Ben Thompson: The Google Squeeze https://stratechery.com/2019/the-google-squeeze/: 'In 3Q 2014 Google had 16.5 billion in revenue and 2.8 billion in profit. I proceeded to write an article entitled Peak Google. Fast forward to last quarter, and Google had 36 billion in revenue and 6.7 billion in profit, increases of 118% and 139% respectively. It is difficult to imagine being more wrong! For the record, my thesis was... that... Google would continue to grow but that its relevance had peaked, in large part because brand marketing would become much more important on the web.... What truly misses the mark... is the suggestion that Google’s relevance has in any way decreased.... The biggest mistake... was in underestimating just how far Google could go in terms of showing users more ads, even once you accounted for more users using Google more often... more ads into mobile search results.... Google started to transform mobile results... instead of forcing users to click a link for an answer... Google would give it to them; they didn’t even need to “feel lucky”. Most importantly, though, when it came to vertical search categories, Google would offer an entirely new kind of results page.... What we saw was a continued shift of essentially the free links further down the page, by other modules that were inserted.... Note just how many screens you now have to scroll to reach organic results—at least 3 on an iPhone 11 Pro.... With the hotel module, Google captures demand more efficiently, which not only makes Google search more attractive to end users, but also transforms OTAs into suppliers, paying to provide the service that Google doesn’t want to. It is a textbook example of what Tren Griffin calls Wholesale Transfer Pricing: "Wholesale transfer pricing—the bargaining power of company A that supplies a unique product XYZ to Company B which may enable company A to take the profits of company B by increasing the wholesale price of XYZ." In this case the unique product is demand—users.... The most compelling pitch I have heard Yelp give... “The big companies are full of spam and misinformation, while we take the time to get reviews right.” It is hard not to wonder just how much more popular Yelp’s product might be if this message were spread as stridently as its anti-Google arguments. And, of course, there is Amazon: more product searches start on Amazon than Google, not because Amazon spent its energy complaining about Google favoring its own shopping results, but because Amazon went out and delivered a better experience for users. I remain very concerned about monopoly, particularly, when it comes to consumer tech, digital advertising; this Wall Street Journal story is an excellent overview of how Google makes it extremely difficult to compete (for competitive ad-tech companies) and extremely difficult to go elsewhere (for its customers)...

An excellent piece from Fiona Scott Morton on the current state-of-play in antitrust: Fiona Scott Morton: Modern U.S. Antitrust Theory and Evidence Amid Rising Concerns Of Market Power and Its Effects: An Overview Of Recent Academic Literature: "The experiment of enforcing the antitrust laws a little bit less each year has run for 40 years, and scholars are now in a position to assess the evidence. The accompanying interactive database of research papers https://equitablegrowth.org/research-paper/modern-u-s-antitrust-theory-and-evidence-amid-rising-concerns-of-market-power-and-its-effects/ for the first time assembles in one place the most recent economic literature bearing on antitrust enforcement.... Horizontal mergers.... Vertical mergers.... Exclusionary conduct.... Loyalty rebates.... Most Favored Nation clause.... Predation.... Common ownership.... Monopsony power.... Macroeconomics and market power...

Moving to carbon-free electricity by 2050 appears to be remarkably cheap: Geoffrey Heal: The Cost of a Carbon-Free Electricity System in the U.S. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26084: 'I calculate the cost of replacing all power stations in the U.S. using coal and gas by wind and solar power stations by 2050, leaving electric power generation in the U.S. carbon free. Allowing for the savings in the cost of fossil fuel arising from the replacement of fossil fuel plants this is roughly 55 billion annually. Allowing in addition for the fact that most fossil plants in the U.S. are already old and would have to be replaced before 2050 even if we were not to go fossil free, this annual cost is reduced to 23 billion...

Peter J. Klenow and Andres Rodriguez-Clare (1997): The Neoclassical Revival in Growth Economics: Has It Gone too Far? https://delong.typepad.com/klenow-rodriguez-clare.pdf: "We find a very modest role for growth in human capital per worker in explaining growth.... We find that TFP growth accounts for most of the growth of output per worker in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan. And we stress that this relative importance of TFP growth for three of the four Asian tigers generalizes to our sample of 98 countries: we find that roughly 90% of country differences in Y/L growth are attributable to differences in A growth. Combining these growth results with our findings on levels, we call for returning productivity differences to the center of theorizing about international differences in output per worker...

Willem Jongman: Gibbon Was Right: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Economy https://delong.typepad.com/jongman-gibbon-was-right.pdf: 'To qualify as real economic growth, both population and per capita incomes... must move in the same direction, and for a lengthy period of time. Did this ever happen before the Industrial Revolution? It is my contention that Rome in the late Republic and early Empire was one of those rare examples... [like] the Dutch Republic and England in the centuries just before the Industrial Revolution.... Roman material culture of the early Empire was unprecedented, and would remain unsurpassed for many centuries (until, perhaps, a century ago).... Roman grandeur was more than brick and marble, and included a new prosperity for many if not all.... Only archaeology... can provide the large datasets... for a time series analysis of long term economic change in antiquity.... The independent repetition of the same pattern in a large number of separate archaeological datasets argues firmly against too much scepticism.... Hopkins... Roman shipwrecks.... Calatay... metal extraction.... Wood... from western and southern Germany.... We can see an improved standard of living... in the face of a rising population.... This new wealth was also, I now believe, shared more widely than earlier pessimistic critics of Roman society such as myself were willing to acknowledge.... New fruits and vegetables... Pigs, cows, sheep, or horses, and even chickens, were much larger than ever before, and for a long time after...

Bret Devereaux: Collections: Where Does My Main Battery Go? https://acoup.blog/2019/11/29/collections-where-does-my-main-battery-go/: 'This week, we’re going to have a bit of fun. We’re going to take a look at a science fiction ship design–the eponymous Battlestar Galactica–through the lens of some ship design principles developed for early dreadnoughts. We’re going to be talking about gun position.... These... issues–what sort of main battery to have, and where should it go–bedeviled naval design in the late 1800s and early 1900s, both before and for the first few years after the development of HMS Dreadnought (launched 1906).... Better loading systems and range-finding had improved accuracy (especially at long range) and rate of fire on the big guns, reducing the dependence of fast-firing secondaries (whose duties were, in many cases, offloaded onto escorting cruisers anyway), while improvements in battleship armor made it increasingly clear that anything less than the heaviest artillery was likely to be useless. Since all of the work was likely to be done by the main battery, it made sense to prioritize it more heavily.... There are a lot of really fascinating designs in the early years after Dreadnought and in terms of main battery layout.... Dreadnought cannot face all of her guns in any direction–of the five turrets, only four can fire to port or starboard (the two wing turrets being the problem here), only one turret can fire directly aft (due to the placement of the rear tower). In theory, three turrets can fire forward, but in practice–remember I said we’d come back to this–actually firing the wing guns directly forward was likely to blow out the conning tower (whoops…).... The South Carolina with just four double-turrets could put all four to either side, 2 to the aft and two to the fore, without any danger of accidentally blowing out her own conning tower. Now, there were some challenges for superfiring gun arrangements–taller turrets meant moving more mass up on the ship, bringing the center of gravity up and potentially destabilizing the entire ship. That, in turn, put a sharp limit to the number of turrets which could be ‘stacked’ (typically just two). Which was just as well, because it rapidly became apparent that–forced to choose between more guns and bigger guns–bigger was generally the best option. While it took a few years to fully catch on, for battleships, superfiring gun layouts eventually dominated battleship design, because it allowed the ship in question to concentrate all of its big-gun anti-capital ship firepower on a single target...

I believe Greg Leiserson does as well as anyone can to lay out how the PWBM reaches the very odd conclusion that deficit reduction at full employment slows growth over the next decade. It is not coherent: Penn Wharton Budget Model: The Wealth Tax Debate https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/events-1/2019/11/14/the-wealth-tax-debate: 'Presidential candidates such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed taxes on wealth. Why a wealth tax? Will it likely raise the money they hope? What are the trade-offs? What has been the experience of other countries?... Kimberly Burham... Greg Leiserson... Richard Prisinzano... Natasha Sarin...

Note to Self: A historical question I want answered: Some historical questions I want to find the answers to: What was the typical pre-agricultural density of hunter-gatherer populations?

MSW: The Black Watch at Fontenoy https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2019/07/14/the-black-watch-at-fontenoy/: 'off they went at the double led by Lieut.-Col. Sir Robert Munro, and stormed forward against the French positions about Fontenoy with tremendous spirit and elan. The French, protected by field fortifications and in considerable strength, were much shaken by this unusual attack launched by Highland furies armed – thanks to the granting of a request that this day they should fight with their native weapons – with broadsword and targe. Over the first line of entrenchments poured the Highlanders, but the French musketry was sustained and deadly and many of them fell and died before the fortifications. After a bitter struggle the Highlanders had to retreat, carrying with them the Lieutenant-Colonel, a man of such tremendous girth that he stuck in one of the entrenchments and barely escaped being made prisoner.... [Later] the Highlanders and another battalion were detailed to cover the inevitable retreat, a difficult duty even though there was no sustained pursuit, and the regiment was singled out for special praise by Cumberland in his report of the battle....

*Charles Stross: Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace? http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artificial-intelligence-threat.html: 'Changes happen faster, and there are more disruptive unknown-unknowns hitting us from all quarters with every passing decade. This is a long-established trend: throughout most of recorded history, the average person lived their life pretty much the same way as their parents and grandparents. Long-term economic growth averaged less than 0.1% per year over the past two thousand years. It has only been since the onset of the industrial revolution that change has become a dominant influence on human society. I suspect... 85% of the world of 2029 is here today, about 10% can be anticipated, and the random, unwelcome surprises constitute up to 5% of the mix. Which is kind of alarming, when you pause to think about it...

Wikipedia: 2019 United Kingdom General Election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_election: 'Boris Johnson: Conservative: 43.6%. Jeremy Corbyn: Labour: 32.1%. Jo Swinson: Liberal Democrats: 11.6%. Nicola Sturgeon: SNP: 3.9%...

Elimination of "the influence of the working-class movement" understood as demands for equitable growth and limitations on inequality, yes. Elimination of "democracy", no. As Hitler is claimed by Hermann Rauschning to have said, "Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings!" Fascists are very happy to have majorities on their side. Today's Republican Party which seeks to rule as a minority is an anomaly. Boris Johnson is not unhappy that he beat Jeremy Corbyn by 14%-points in the December 12, 2019 British general election. And Adler's assumption that there is a ruling class is naive. Fascism can be turned to serve the interests of an economically dominant class, yes; but it can also be turned to serve the interests of other groups defined and that define themselves in other ways:

Rakesh Bhandari: 'Max Adler on fascism https://twitter.com/postdiscipline/status/1205721944126939137: "The conscious exploitation of all the various currents of discontent, declassement and worker-hatred, as well, of course, as antisemitism, to construct a movement by means of which, despite the opaque and mutually antagonistic interests of these various groups, democracy and with it the influence of the working-class can be eliminated." The autonomy of the fascist state from all classes is illusory: "When government appears to free itself from the interests of particular classes, even of the ruling class, and become, as it were, common property in its relations to everyone without exception. this process of dissociation in actual fact only takes place in the minds of those who believe in it"...

Galaxy Quest E! Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjT0KWn6T7I&feature=emb_logo: