Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Michael Nielsen: Notes on the Dynabook http://mnielsen.github.io/notes/kay/dynabook.html: 'Computing as envisioned circa 1960: "The only surviving computing system paradigm seen by MIT students and faculty was that of a very large International Business Machine in a tightly sealed Computation Center: the computer not as a tool, but as a demigod."–Wesley Clark.... Alan Kay's "A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages" (1972, what I'll call “the Dynabook paper”): Many of the ideas in the Dynabook paper now appear commonplace, even banal. That's because those ideas won. At the time, this kind of thinking was a big change in perspective from computers-as-demigods. The Dynabook paper (and related work) was posing a fundamental new question: what might personal computing for everyone be? By facing squarely up to this (and some related) questions, PARC invented much of the foundation for modern personal computing...

Back late in the decade of the 2000s, Barry Eichengreen opined that China's middle-income trap growth slowdown might began... now... Barry Eichengreen: Escaping the Middle-Income Trap https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4d9b/9d3f8041e4bc9e133182180ea2a5d85b11a5.pdf: 'Growth slowdowns typically occur at per capita in- comes of 16,700. At that point, the per capita growth rate slows from 5.6 percent to 2.1 percent, or by an average of 3.5 percentage points. For purposes of comparison, note that China’s per capita GDP, in constant 2005 international (purchasing power parity) prices, was 8,500 in 2007. Extrapolating its growth rate between then and now, China will reach the threshold value of 15,100 around 2016—that is to say, five years from now...

Note to Self: WTF!?!?, Richard Muller????: Richard Muller (2013): A Pause, Not an End, to Warming https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/opinion/a-pause-not-an-end-to-warming.html: ‘In an essay published online then at MIT Technology Review, I worried that the famous “hockey stick” graph plotted by three American climatologists in the late 1990s portrayed the global warming curve with too much certainty and inappropriate simplicity…

Here is the hockey stick:

The yellow indicates uncertainty. "Too much certainty", Richard?!?! And the temperature proxies have plenty of signal before 1900. "Inappropriate simplicity", Richard?!?! I do wonder how long it had been since he had read Michael E. Mann &al.: Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Thousand Years: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations https://web.archive.org/web/20040311175934/http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/millennium-camera.pdf: 'Building on recent studies, we attempt hemispheric temperature reconstructions with proxy data net- works for the past millennium. We focus not just on the reconstructions, but the uncertainties therein, and important caveats. Though expanded uncertainties prevent decisive conclusions for the period prior to AD 1400, our results suggest that the latter 20th century is anomalous in the context of at least the past millennium. The 1990s was the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, at moderately high levels of confidence. The 20th century warming counters a millennial-scale cooling trend which is consistent with long-term astronomical forcing...

William J. Connell: New Light on Machiavelli’s Letter to Vettori, 10 December 1513 https://www.storiadifirenze.org/pdf_ex_eprints/143-connell.pdf: 'What makes the subscription to the Borromeo letter so especially interesting are three factors: (1) The letter’s recipient was Machiavelli’s friend and patron, Francesco Vettori. (2) The letter was produced in the very chancery office that Machiavelli had directed for 14 years. (3) The date, 12 November 1513, was only two days after the completion of Machiavelli’s relegatio. Perhaps–just perhaps–the subscription altered to «N. Mach(e)l.» represented a way for one of Machiavelli’s chancery friends to confirm to Vettori in Rome that the confinement had ended uneventfully. Machiavelli was in official good standing and able to leave the dominion from 10 November. We know that Vettori received the letter from the Ten with its curious subscription on 18 November89. On 23 November Vettori, who had been out of touch with Machiavelli since August, at last sent his friend a long, warm letter, inviting him to visit him in Rome. And, on 10 December 1513, Machiavelli replied with his famous letter. That letter’s opening words, «Tarde non furon mai grazie divine» [Divine favors were never late], are a comment not so much on the completion of the relegatio (which occurred one month earlier), but on the arrival of Vettori’s let- ter and invitation after more than three months of silence...

Worthy Reads at Equitable Growth:

1. If you missed Anne Case and Angus Deaton on "deaths of despair" when it came out at the start of this year, you need to go back and read it: Iris Marechal: The Opioid Crisis: A Consequence of U.S. Economic Decline?: "The opioid epidemic continues to devastate families and communities across the United States, causing serious health and socioeconomic crises. The high prescription rate for opioids and the subsequent misuse of this medication by millions of Americans accelerated addiction and has led to a four-fold increase in the rate of overdoses since 1999.... Anne Case and Angus Deaton at Princeton University attribute the sharp increase in drug overdoses between 1999 and 2015 to 'deaths of despair' rather than to the increased ease of obtaining opioids: That is, their research suggests that higher drug suicides are attributable to social and economic factors such as a prolonged economic decline in many parts of the United States. They show that white Americans are more affected by the opioid epidemic, yet less affected by economic downturns than other racial and ethnic groups in the country...

2. Our Raksha Kopparam makes a very nice catch, and sends us to the enter for Financial Services Innovation's “U.S. Financial Health Pulse: 2018 Baseline Survey”: Raksha Kopparam: New Financial Health Survey Shows That Traditional Metrics of Economic Growth Don’t Apply to Most U.S. Households’ Incomes and Savings: "Single aggregate data points do not capture how economic growth is experienced by different people in very different ways.... Underscoring the importance of knowing who specifically benefits from a strong economy is a new survey by the Center for Financial Services Innovation...

3. Our Kate Bahn responds to Redwood Girl in Chico's puzzlement about why she is not seeing opportunity in the low-unemployment economy: @RedwoodGirl: On Twitter: "Does the U6 number also include self-employed folks like myself who need more work to afford to live?..." @LipstickEcon: "It does not, since it only includes unemployed workers plus workers who aren't looking for a job but say they would take one if offered plus workers who are part-time wage and salary workers but would rather be full-time. Under-employed self-employed workers aren't counted here. This is part of why economists like Blanchflower and Bell think U.S. statistics do not capture under-employment accurately, since it doesn't include people who wish they worked more (or fewer) hours but can't find a job that is the right fit of hours https://www.nber.org/papers/w24927...

4. Do apply for Equitable Growth grants: Equitable Growth: Apply for a Grant: "We are now accepting applications in response to our 2019 Request for Proposals. Letters of inquiry for academic grants are due by 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, January 31, 2019. Proposals for doctoral/postdoctoral grants and applications to the Dissertation Scholars Program are due by 11:59 p.m. EDT on Sunday, March 10, 2019...

5. Rhonda Sharpe is praising us herre at Equitable Growth for trying to diversify the economics profession: Rhonda V. Sharpe: On Twitter: "L @LipstickEcon E @ @equitablegrowth T @ @TrevonDLogan ' S @SandyDarity D @drlisadcook I @itsafronomics V @ValerieRWilson E @Em_Gorman R @rbalakra S @SadieCollective I @IAFFE F @femme_economics Y @YanaRodgers T @TrevonDLogan H @HBoushey E @eliselgould...

Jacobo Timmerman (1990): A Summer in the Revolution https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/11/i-cannot-find-jacopo-timmermann-on-gabriel-garcia-marquez-on-fidel-castro.html: 'When I read one of Gabriel Carcia Marquez's essays on the [Cuban] Commandante [Fidel Castro], I was remind of paeans to Stalin—of the whole state of mind described by Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon. Garcia Marquez praises Fidel Castro for needing only six hours of sleep after a day's hard work—the same six hours that were often presented as proof of Josef Stalin's vitality, extolled in writings that also described his Kremlin window lit until the small hours of the night—and praises the wisdom of the Commandante in stating that "learning to rest is as important as learning to work". If the cumulative tasks in Fidel Castro's workday as it is describe by Garcia Marquez are counted up, the Castro who emerges is a prodigy—someone who triumphs by supernatural intelligence:

His rarest virtue is the ability to foresee the evolution of an event to its farthest-reaching consequence...

and: "He has breakfast with no less than two hundred pages of news from the entire world..." (a long breakfast, surely), and: "He has to read fifty-odd documents [daily]..." And the list goes on: "No one can explain how he has the time or what method he employs to read so much and so fast.... A physician friend of his, out of courtesy, sent him his newly-published orthopedic treatise, without expecting him, of course, to read it, but one week later he received a letter from Castro with a long list of observations.... There is a vast bureaucratic incompetence affection almost every realm of daily life, especially domestic happiness, which has forced Fidel Castro himself, almost thirty years after victory, to involve himself personally in such extraordinary matters as how bread is made and the distribution of beer.... He has created a foreign policy of world-power dimensions..." Fidel Castro, then, has a secret method, unknown to the rest of mankind, for reading quickly, and he knows a lot about orthopedics, and yet thirty years after the Revolution he has not managed to organize a system for baking bread and distributing beer...

Eric Hobsbawm (1998): The Communist Manifesto in Perspective https://www.transform-network.net/en/publications/yearbook/overview/article/journal-112012/the-communist-manifesto-in-perspective/: 'It is, of course, a document written for a particular moment in history. Some of it became obsolete almost immediately.... More of it became obsolete as the time separating the readers from the date of writing lengthened. Guizot and Metternich have long retired.... The Tsar (though not the Pope) no longer exists. As for the discussion of “Socialist and Communist Literature”, Marx and Engels themselves admitted in 1872 that even then it was out of date.... Though Marx and Engels reminded readers that the Manifesto was a historical document, out of date in many respects, they promoted and assisted the publication of the 1848 text.... Unlike Marxian economics, the “materialist conception of history” which underlay this analysis had already found its mature formulation in the mid-1840s. and remained substantially unchanged in later years. In this respect the Manifesto was already a defining document of Marxism. It embodied the historical vision, though its general outline remained to be filled in by fuller analysis...

...How will the Manifesto strike the reader who comes to it for the first time in 1998? The new reader can hardly fail to be swept away by the passionate conviction, the concentrated brevity, the intellectual and stylistic force, of this astonishing pamphlet. It is written, as though in a single creative burst, in lapidary sentences almost naturally transforming themselves into the memorable aphorisms which have become known far beyond the world of political debate: from the opening “A spectre is haunting Europe–the spectre of Communism” to the final “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win”. Equally uncommon in nineteenth-century German writing: it is written in short, apodictic paragraphs, mainly of one to five lines—in only five cases, out of more than two hundred, of fifteen or more lines. Whatever else it is, The Communist Manifesto as political rhetoric has an almost biblical force. In short, it is impossible to deny its compelling power as literature....

What will undoubtedly also strike the contemporary reader is the Manifesto’s remarkable diagnosis of the revolutionary character and impact of “bourgeois society”. The point is not simply that Marx recognised and proclaimed the extraordinary achievements and dynamism of a society he detested, to the surprise of more than one later defender of capitalism against the red menace. It is that the world transformed by capitalism which he described in 1848, in passages of dark, laconic eloquence, is recognisably the world in which we live 150 years later....

Two things give the Manifesto its force. The first is its vision, even at the outset of the triumphal march of capitalism, that this mode of production was not permanent, stable, “the end of history”, but a temporary phase.... The second is its recognition of the... bourgeoisie... [and its] miracles ascribed to it in the Manifesto.... In 1850 the world produced no more than 71,000 tons of steel (almost 70 per cent of it in Britain) and had built less than 24,000 miles of railroads (two-thirds of these in Britain and the USA). Historians have had no difficulty in showing that even in Britain the Industrial Revolution (a term specifically used by Engels from 1844 on) had hardly created an industrial or even a predominantly urban country before the 1850s. Marx and Engels did not describe the world as it had already been transformed by capitalism in 1848; they predicted how it was logically destined to be transformed by it.

We now live in a world in which this transformation has largely taken place, even though readers of the Manifesto in the third millennium of the Western calendar will no doubt observe that it has advanced even further since 1998...

Civil Liberties: I have always tended to be an advocate of "playing your position". But there are times when one's position involves looking far afield. These days, on what surveillance and information-collection mechanism are doing to our society. Here we have Marcy Wheeler saying "I told you so" about how the FBI's use of FISA for searches has long been unreasonable, and hence—if the fourth amendment has any meaning—unconstitutional:

Marcy Wheeler: How Twelve Years of Warning and Six Years of Plodding Reform Finally Forced FBI to Do Minimal FISA Oversight https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/10/12/how-twelve-years-of-warning-and-six-years-of-plodding-reform-finally-forced-fbi-to-do-minimal-fisa-oversight/: "A condemnation of how the government has been using 702 (and its predecessor PAA) for 12 years. A (partial—but thus far by far the most significant one) success of the new oversight mechanisms put in place post-Snowden. An opportunity to reform FISA—and FBI—more systematically.... 12 years after this system was first moved under FISA... we’re only now going to start getting real information.... We will learn (even more than we already learned from the two reported queries that this pertained to vetting informants) the degree to which back door searches serve not to find people who are implicated in national security crimes, but instead, people who might be coerced to help the FBI find people who are involved in national security crimes. We will learn that the oversight has been inadequate. We will finally be able to measure disproportionate impact on Chinese-American, Arab, Iranian, South Asian, and Muslim communities. DOJ will be forced to give far more defendants 702 notice. Irrespective of whether back door searches are themselves a Fourth Amendment violation (which we will only now obtain the data to discuss), the other thing this opinion shows is that for twelve years, FISA boosters have been dismissing the concerns those of us who follow closely have raised (and there are multiple other topics not addressed here). And now, after more than a decade, after a big fight from FBI, we’re finally beginning to put the measures in place to show that those concerns were merited all along...

A bunch of Obama's governing not as a left-populist but as "Third Way" was, IMHO, bait-and-switch. And a bunch was his own incoherence: he alternated between presenting himself as a left-populist who would get things deon and as a purple-America unifier. But a bunch was the realities for power and process. This is very smart from; Henry Kraemer: "Obama ran as a populist https://twitter.com/HenryKraemer/status/1195012774633648128, & governed as something closer to Third Way. At least one big reason is that the realities of governing in a republic tend to moderate policy. Running as Third Way more or less guarantees governing as a conservative: Adam Jentleson: 'This. The Deval/Pete recasting of candidate Obama as a Third Way, unity candidate is revisionist history. He ran as an outsider attacking a broken and corrupt system...

The point of the Senate majority's and of the current political appointees at HHS's actions here is not to create flexibility, but to make it legal to provide not-insurance: Sarah Gantz: A Philly Woman’s Broken Back and 36,000 Bill Shows How Some Health Insurance Brokers Trick Consumers into Skimpy Plans https://www.inquirer.com/health/consumer/limited-benefit-skimpy-health-plans-sales-pitch-20191114.html?__vfz=medium%3Dsharebar: 'She was left with 36,000 in hospital bills that she’s still paying off. “What the hell did I do? How did I get into this mess?” said Martin, 54, of Horsham, recalling the panic she felt after the December 2017 fall. “I have a broken wrist, a broken back, and I don’t have real health insurance.”... Access to these plans was limited under the Affordable Care Act, but the websites selling such plans have gotten bolder in their marketing as President Trump and free-market Republicans chip away at ACA rules, saying people need more affordable alternatives. But shopping savvy isn’t necessarily enough to protect consumers. The insurance brokers who rely on such websites for leads use scripts carefully worded to instill trust and push consumers to act quickly...

Walter Womacka Stained-Glass Restoration https://www.moz.de/kultur/artikelansicht/dg/0/1/1043774/ 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:

Very Briefly Noted 2019-12-11:

1. Wikipedia: Gendarmenmarkt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendarmenmarkt...

2. Nir Jaimovich &al.: A Tale of Two Workers: The Macroeconomics of Automation http://events.berkeley.edu/documents/user_uploads/Paper01122019.pdf...

3. Groningen Growth and Development Center: PWT 9.1 https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/productivity/pwt/...

4. Nick Rowe: Increased Price Flexibility is Destabilising in New Keynesian Models. (And a Price-Level Path Target is Stabilising) https://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2019/12/increased-price-flexibility-is-destabilising-in-new-keynesian-models-and-a-price-level-path-target-i.html: 'It's more complicated than this, of course. Because I have over-simplified the model by assuming that the central bank has a lag of "one period", and that the only real interest rate that matters is that same "one period" real interest rate. But you get the gist...

5. Chartwell: Carl Benedikt Frey https://www.chartwellspeakers.com/speaker/carl-benedikt-frey/...

6. Wikipedia: Ahmose I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmose_I...

7. Financial Times: Business School Rankings 2019 http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/european-business-school-rankings-2019...

8. Clickspring: Reconstructing The Antikythera Mechanism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRXI9KLImC4...

9. David Teece &al.: New Enlightenment Conference https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIg3ObdikHUdFtLCqMBfNLQ/playlists: ', Edinburgh, 2019...

Project Syndicate: [Brad DeLong Says More...](htt*PS*: //us10.campaign-archive.com/?u=9116789a51839e0f88fa29b83&id=646c7b19aa&e=a7192bc790): Project Syndicate: One forgotten lesson of the Great Depression, you wrote last month, is that “persistent ultra-low interest rates mean the economy is still short of safe, liquid stores of value, and thus in need of further monetary expansion”...

...Since then, the US Federal Reserve has cut the federal funds rate – a move that you argued in March could either stave off a recession or drastically undermine the Fed’s capacity to respond to one. What steps should the Fed take to help encourage the former and prevent the latter? At a time of growing political pressure on the Fed, what approach is it likely to take?

Brad DeLong: 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.

Great-grandfather Roland: Roland G. Usher (1913): Pan Germanism https://net.lib.byu.edu/~rdh7/wwi/comment/PanGer/PanGerTC.htm: 'BY: ROLAND G. USHER, PH.D. Associate Professor of History, Washington University, St. Louis.... BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge.... TO THAT ENERGETIC, CAPABLE ADMINISTRATOR, THAT ENTHUSIASTIC STUDENT OF CONDITIONS, THAT BEST OF COMRADES, THAT DEAREST OF FRIENDS, MY WIFE.... I. THE CAUSES OF GERMAN AGGRESSION.... The logic of facts, proving the necessity of expansion, is, to such Germans as General Bernhardi, unanswerable. The population has increased so rapidly that it is already difficult for efficient, well-trained men to secure any employment. Not only is the superficial area of the country suitable for cultivation practically exhausted, but intensive scientific agriculture is speedily limiting the possibilities of the employment of more hands on the same acres or the further increase of the produce. Industry has grown at a stupendous rate, and the output from German factories is enormously in excess of the needs of even the growing population. Her exports per capita are 24 dollars a year, as against England's 40, and France's 25, and she has not their exclusive colonial markets. Unless some outlet can be found for the surplus population, and a new and extensive market discovered for this enormous surplus production, prosperity will be inevitably succeeded by bankruptcy. There will be more hands than there is work for, more mouths than there is food, and Germany must either get rid of the surplus mouths and hands or swell the surplus product by employing them at home, which cannot be done without entailing national ruin. Expansion is, therefore, the only alternative, for the German considers equivalent to ruin the reduction of the pressure of population by emigration,(2) and the avoidance of overproduction by the proportionate reduction of output. Merely to retain what she now has, Germany is condemned to increase her navy at any pace the English see fit to set. Something more will be absolutely essential if the dire consequences of an economic crisis are not to impoverish her and pave the way for her ultimate destruction at the hands of her hereditary enemies, France and Russia...

Otto von Bismarck's self-portrait of himself as—like Karl Marx—an Atheistic Young Hegelian. How much Bismarck believed what he wrote, and how much Bismarck's beliefs were accurate, are things that I must leave to the judgment of those more expert than I. From The German Classics: Masterpieces of German Literature Translated Into English: Volume X: Prince Otto Von Bismarck, Count Helmuth Von Moltke, Ferdinand Lassalle:

Otto von Bismarck: "Hotel de Prusse, Stettin. (Not dated: written about the end of December, 1846.) "TO Herr von Puttkamer:

Most Honored Sir:

I begin this communication by indicating its content in the first sentence—it is a request for the highest thing you can dispose of in this world, the hand of your daughter. I do not conceal from myself the fact that I appear presumptuous when I, whom you have come to know only recently and through a few meetings, claim the strongest proof of confidence which you can give to any man. I know, however, that even irrespective of all obstacles in space and time which can increase your difficulty in forming an opinion of me, through my own efforts I can never be in a position to give you such guaranties for the future that they would, from your point of view, justify intrusting me with an object so precious, unless you supplement by trust in God that which trust in human beings can not supply. All that I can do is to give you information about myself with absolute candor, so far as I have come to understand myself. It will be easy for you to get reports from others in regard to my public conduct; I content myself, therefore, with an account of what underlay that—my inner life, and especially my relations to Christianity. To do that I must take a start far back...

I would simply remark that an awful lot of the written record inherited from antiquity is a weird combination of Foreign Affairs the National Enquirer, and should be read—both when it speaks about the disempowered and the empowered—with the hermeneutic of suspicion one would apply to those publications today: Comment of the Day: Philip Koop https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/mitchell-carroll-_greek-women_-phryne-with-a-modesty-one-would-not-expect-in-a-woman-of-her-class-was-very-careful.html?cid=6a00e551f0800388340240a4a741db200c#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a4a741db200c: 'Here is something that James Davidson had to say about Phryne in his book Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens: "These megalomisthoi hetaerai are the rich and famous ones, the ones catalogued in scholarly treatises, who had plays written about them and speeches composed on their behalf, the ones whose bons mots were recorded in anecdotal collections like those of Machon and Lynceus of Samos. Thanks to Apollodorus’ speech and a comedy of Timocles named after her, Neaera herself could claim a place on this exalted list along with Laïs the younger, Laïs the elder, Sinope, Mania, Gnathaena, Naïs, Thaïs and many others. Of all of these Phryne was perhaps the most renowned. Like Theodote, she allowed artists to paint her. It was she who modelled for Praxiteles, it was said, his revolutionary female nude, first of its kind, known as the Venus of Cnidus, and, for Apelles, the Birth of Venus that was reimagined so famously by Botticelli. Another statue sua ipsa persona, again modelled by Praxiteles in gilt or gold, was dedicated at Delphi and placed between Philip of Macedon and Archidamus, King of Sparta. It was a dedication, said the Cynic Crates, to Greek self-indulgence. These works of art not only immortalized the form of Phryne for posterity but spread her image throughout Greece. According to Callistratus in his work On Hetaeras, she became so rich that after the Macedonians had razed the city of Thebes to the ground she said she would pay for the city wall to be rebuilt, providing the citizens put up an inscription: ‘Alexander may have knocked it down, but Phryne the hetaera got it back up again’, one of the very few occasions when these women gave themselves the label...

Project Syndicate: How Trolls Overran the Public Square https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trolls-win-control-of-the-public-square-by-j-bradford-delong-2019-12: Since the invention of writing, human innovation has transformed how we formulate new ideas, organize our societies, and communicate with one another. But in an age of rapid-fire social media and nonstop algorithm-generated outrage, technology is no longer helping to expand or enrich the public sphere: Every year since 1900 we have had change in human technology and organization at a blistering pace: human productivity, organization, and technological capabilities now change at a rate that packs into one year what would have been 50 years of change back before 1500. It used to be that culture, war, the rise and fall of individuals' statuses, and politics were the meat of human history, with technology and organization much of an unchanging background, and productivity growing only very slowly on average. But that is not the world we live in today.

Project Syndicate: Stop Inflating the Inflation Threat https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-inflation-flat-phillips-curve-by-j-bradford-delong-2019-10: Given the scale and severity of inflation in America in the 1970s, it is understandable that US monetary policymakers developed a deep-seated fear of it. But, nearly a half-century later, the conditions that justified such worries no longer apply, and it is past time that we stopped denying what the data are telling us.: I remember September 2014: That month the U.S. unemployment rate dropped below 6%, and I was assured by very many that that meant that the Phillips Curve predicted that inflation would soon be on the rise, and that it was time for the Federal Reserve to begin to—rapidly—normalize monetary policy—to begin shrinking the monetary base, and raising interest rates back into a "normal" range. Today unemployment is 2.5%-points lower than what I was then assured was the "natural" rate of unemployment. According to the rule-of-thumb as they stood back when I was an assistant professor in 1990, such a low unemployment rate should lead annual inflation to climb by 1.3%-points every year: if this year inflation were to be 2.0%, next year's would be 3.3%, and—if unemployment stayed this low—the year after that's would be 4.6%, and the year after that 5.9%.

Project Syndicate: No, We Don’t “Need” a Recession https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/myth-of-needed-recession-by-j-bradford-delong-2019-10: Business cycles can end with a "rolling readjustment" in which asset values are marked back down to reflect underlying fundamentals, or they can end in depression and mass unemployment. There is never any good reason why the second option should prevail: BERKELEY – I recently received an email from my friend Mark Thoma of the University of Oregon, asking if I had noticed an increase in commentaries suggesting that a recession would be a good and healthy purge for the economy (or something along those lines). In fact, I, too, have noticed more commentators expressing the view that “recessions, painful as they are, are a necessary growth input.” I am rather surprised by it.

For a bit over the first half of the 1860s-2010s Long 20th Century, global history was profoundly shaped by the peculiarity of Prussia. The standard account of this peculiarity—this sonderweg, sundered way, separate Prussian path—has traditionally seen it has having four aspects. Prussia—and the “small German” national state of which it was the nucleus—managed to simultaneously, over 1865-1945: (1) wage individual military campaigns with extraordinary success; (2) wage wars no sane statesman would have entered; (3) via the role, authority and interests of the military-service nobility societal caste, divert the currents of political development from the expected channel into a sonderweg; (4) engage in continent-spanning systematic patterns and campaigns of terror, destruction, murder, and genocide that went far beyond anything other European powers engaged in within Europe, and even went far beyond the brutalities of colonial conquest and rule. Did Prussia—and the “small German” national state of which it became the core—in fact follow a separate and unusual path, with respect to economic, political, cultural, social development, relative to other western European national states in the arc from France to Sweden? Do these four aspects as components rightly summarize the sonderweg? What is their origin, and what is the relation between them?...

https://www.icloud.com/pages/0sJdHr8FwY3J2-1k5BlH6SYVw

Peter J. Klenow, Huiyu Li, and Theodore Naff: Is Rising Concentration Hampering Productivity Growth? https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2019/november/is-rising-concentration-hampering-productivity-growth/: 'The initial rise in concentration was accompanied by a burst of productivity growth and that concentration in local markets may actually have declined.... Rising concentration was a byproduct of the information technology (IT) revolution, with effects on productivity growth that vary over time.... Large firms expanded by adding establishments in new locales. To the extent that the number of establishments is connected to the number of products or markets, this evidence suggests that large firms increased their national sales share by adding new markets rather than increasing their sales share within existing markets. This is consistent with the rise in concentration coming from lower costs for managing many establishments as a result of the IT revolution.... IT improvements may have enabled efficient firms to expand into new markets and set the stage for the burst of productivity growth in the decade leading up to 2005. The expansion of large firms also may have intensified competition and cut into profits, discouraging them from innovating within markets. This, in turn, could have contributed to the eventual slowdown of productivity growth in recent years.... Policymakers need to gain a fuller understanding of the tradeoffs to formulate appropriate policy and avoid potential unintended consequences...

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...

António Henriques and Nuno Palma: Comparative European Institutions and the Little Divergence, 1385-1800 http://cgeh.nl/sites/default/files/WorkingPapers/cgehwp84HenriquesPalma.pdf: "Why did the countries which first benefited from access to the New World–Castile and Portugal–decline relative to their followers, especially England and the Netherlands? The dominant narrative is that worse initial institutions at the time of the opening of Atlantic trade explain Iberian divergence. In this paper, we build new quantitative measures which allow for a comparison of institutional quality over time. We consider the frequency and nature of parliamentary meetings, the frequency and intensity of extraordinary taxation and coin debasement, and real interest spreads for public debt. We find no evidence that the political institutions of Iberia were worse at least until the English Civil War...

MUST OF THE MUSTS:

1. Weekend Reading: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn Wrestles with the American Christian Church for His Soul, and Wins and Saves It https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/weekend-reading-mark-twains-huckleberry-finn-wrestles-with-the-american-christian-church-for-his-soul-and-wins-and-saves-i.html: 'I about made up my mind to pray; and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was, and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double...

2. I have been quite surprised to discovery that the 2019 Economics Nobel Laureates have not received enough praise since the announcement. So go read this: Oriana Bandiera: Alleviating Poverty with Experimental Research: The 2019 Nobel Laureates https://voxeu.org/article/alleviating-poverty-experimental-research-2019-nobel-laureates: 'Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”.... Development economics had no PhD courses, no group at the NBER or CEPR, and hardly any publications in top journals until the early 2000s. What this year’s Nobel laureates did was to build the infrastructure to make fieldwork widely accessible and the methods to make the analysis credible. What they did, and what they were awarded for, is to put development economics back on centre stage.... What is unusual and relevant is that the nomination explicitly mentions that the winners lead a group effort: “The Laureates’ research findings–and those of the researchers following in their footsteps” (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 2019). What is even more unusual and extremely relevant is that the nomination emphasises the practical applications of their methods, which “have dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice”. This is a monumental change, and one that the profession should welcome for the obvious reason that making the world a better place is a desirable goal.  To be clear, each of them could have easily won the prize the ‘usual’ way – that is, by doing research of the highest quality, which has had lasting influence both in theoretical and applied economics. The economist (still) on the street might notice that of the top three cited papers for each of the three laureates, only two are randomised controlled trials (RCTs).... The need for policy to fix market failures generates the need for tools to evaluate policy. RCTs were developed to achieve this in a systematic way. They and other experimental methods had been widely used in the natural sciences and to a lesser extent in economics well before Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer began their work. Their contribution was to make them accessible to a large number of researchers, creating a research ‘firm’ which, like those in Banerjee and Newman (1993) and Kremer (1993), combines the talent of many to produce more than the sum of its individual components...

3. Which Political Party's Policies Boost Investment in America, Again? https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/which-political-partys-policies-boost-investment-in-america-again.html: 'Suppose you were a stranger to humanity, and looked at this graph of trends in the investment share of output under various administrations. Would you then credit the claim that the red-presidents political party was dedicated to boosting investment in America, and that the blue-presidents political party was dedicated to sacrificing investment and growth to achieve egalitarian redistributional social goals? No...

4. Marx's Capital: Part VII: The Accumulation of Capital https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/marxs-capital-part-vii-the-accumulation-of-capital.html: 4.3) Part VII: The Accumulation of Capital: 4.3.1. The Bourgeoisie Is the Ruling Class: This is where the book starts to sing (to me, at least). The first important thing I get out of Part VII is that, to quote from the Communist Manifesto, “the executive of the modern state is a committee for managing the affairs of the _business class”. Wealth speaks loudly, and influences the government to arrange things for the convenience of wealth—to keep wages low, and workers available... https://www.icloud.com/pages/0howtV7CndvjkSCCLmtjmq_SA...

5. Lecture Notes: Smith, Marx, Keynes: Thanksgiving 2019 DRAFT https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/lecture-notes-smith-marx-keynes-thanksgiving-2019-draft.html: I have finished (a draft of) my "Smith, Marx, Keynes" lecture notes—well, I have not written 7.6 and 8.2. For 7.6, I have simply dumped in (much of) Paul Krugman's Mr. Keynes and the Moderns. 8.2 I have not written anything on. But what it is, it is... https://www.icloud.com/pages/0howtV7CndvjkSCCLmtjmq_SA And the course slides: https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0osOOsPvSrTaiK4__D5MghPVA...

Worth highlighting from last January, as even America's businesses begin to worry that our system gives too much a share of good things to shareholders: Greg Leiserson: Wealth taxation: An Introduction to Net Worth Taxes and How One Might Work in the United States: "Probably the most significant challenge in implementing a net worth tax is that determining tax liabilities requires a valuation for all of the assets subject to the tax.... Such a tax would impose burden primarily on the wealthiest families—reducing wealth inequality—and could raise substantial revenues. As noted above, the United States taxes wealth in several forms already. Thus, the policy debate is less about whether to tax wealth and more about the best ways to tax wealth and how much it should be taxed. A net worth tax could be a useful complement to—or substitute for—other means of taxing wealth, as well as a tool for increasing overall taxation of wealth...

It is now very, very clear that whatever Facebook says about how it strives to keep your data private is unreliable. Organizations are what they do: Facebook is an organization that makes money out of offering people data they can use to try to hack your brain: Kate Conger, Gabriel J.X. Dance and Mike Isaac: Facebook’s Suspension of ‘Tens of Thousands’ of Apps Reveals Wider Privacy Issues https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/technology/facebook-data-privacy-suspension.html: "Facebook said on Friday that it had suspended tens of thousands of apps for improperly sucking up users’ personal information and other transgressions, a tacit admission that the scale of its data privacy issues was far larger than it had previously acknowledged. The social network said in a blog post that an investigation it began in March 2018—following revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British consultancy, had retrieved and used people’s Facebook information without their permission—had resulted in the suspension of 'tens of thousands' of apps that were associated with about 400 developers. That was far bigger than the last number that Facebook had disclosed of 400 app suspensions in August 2018.... Facebook... suspended 69,000 apps. Of those, the majority were terminated because the developers did not cooperate with Facebook’s investigation; 10,000 were flagged for potentially misappropriating personal data from Facebook users. The disclosures about app suspensions renew questions about whether people’s personal information on Facebook is secure, even after the company has been under fire for more than a year for its privacy practices...

Joan Robinson: Open letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist: Tuesday Sixty Years Ago on the Non-Internet Weblogging https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/07/joan-robinson-open-letter-from-a-keynesian-to-a-marxist-tuesday-sixty-years-ago-on-the-non-internet-weblogging.html?asset_id=6a00e551f08003883401901dbd9795970b: "Again, suppose we each want to recall some tricky point in Capital, for instance the schema at the end of Volume II. What do you do? You take down the volume and look it up. What do I do? I take the back of an envelope and work it out. Now I am going to say something still worse. Suppose that, just as a matter of interest, I do look it up, and I find that the answer on my old envelope is not the one that is actually in the book. What do I do? I check my working, and if I cannot find any error in it, I look for an error in the book. Now I suppose I might as well stop writing, because you think I am stark staring mad. But if you can read on a moment longer I will try to explain...

Matthew Ball: 'Star Wars' Fatigue Is a Myth (but Disney’s Mistakes Were Real, Costly and Avoidable): "What we’re seeing is what I’d term 'accrued disappointment', a trend obfuscated by unprecedented short-term success but that almost always surfaces later down the line.... After only two films had been released, four of the directors originally announced for the first six films had been fired or replaced. Two of the firings happened so late into filming that upwards of 80% of the two films had to be reshot, to the tune of more than 100MM each. Until Solo, this chaos didn’t seem to affect the franchise’s box office.... In The Force Awakens... J.J. Abrams set up three major antagonists: Supreme Leader Snoke, Captain Phasma and The Knights of Ren. However, Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi (Episode VIII) quickly killed the first two and ignored the third.... With Abrams returning to close out the trilogy, more whipsaw seems likely...

Wikipedia: Antikythera Mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism: 'An ancient Greek analogue computer.... Retrieved from the sea in 1901, and identified on 17 May 1902 as containing a gear by archaeologist Valerios Stais.... The instrument is believed to have been designed and constructed by Greek scientists... within a generation before the shipwreck, which has been dated to approximately 70–60 BC. The device, housed in the remains of a 34 cm × 18 cm × 9 cm (13.4 in × 7.1 in × 3.5 in) wooden box, was found as one lump, later separated into three main fragments which are now divided into 82 separate fragments after conservation works. Four of these fragments contain gears, while inscriptions are found on many others. The largest gear is approximately 14 centimetres (5.5 in) in diameter and originally had 223 teeth.... Detailed imaging of the mechanism suggests that it had 37 gear wheels enabling it to follow the movements of the Moon and the Sun through the zodiac, to predict eclipses and even to model the irregular orbit of the Moon, where the Moon's velocity is higher in its perigee than in its apogee. This motion was studied in the 2nd century BC by astronomer Hipparchus of Rhodes, and it is speculated that he may have been consulted in the machine's construction. The knowledge of this technology was lost at some point in antiquity. Similar technological works later appeared in the medieval Byzantine and Islamic worlds, but works with similar complexity did not appear again until the development of mechanical astronomical clocks in Europe in the fourteenth century. All known fragments of the Antikythera mechanism are now kept at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, along with a number of artistic reconstructions and replicas of the mechanism to demonstrate how it may have looked and worked...

James Kwak: Further Reading: Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality https://economism.net/further-reading-6be8c611cd46: 'One of the central themes of Economism is the idea that the competitive market model taught early in Economics 101 (the one that says markets produce optimal outcomes) has become disproportionately influential in our contemporary political and intellectual culture. That raises the question of what would constitute a richer and more realistic understanding of economics and the economy. I wrote a short article for Signature discussing five easily accessible books that provide a more accurate portrait of what economics can say about the world. They are probably all well-known to online economics junkies, but perhaps less so to a general audience: Partha Dasgupta, Economics: A Very Short Introduction...

Tim Duy: Fed Holding Steady For Now https://blogs.uoregon.edu/timduyfedwatch/2019/12/02/fed-holding-steady-for-now-2/: 'The Federal Reserve will hold rates steady at the upcoming December FOMC meeting.... Until the outlook shifts meaningfully one way or the other, the Fed is content to sit on the sidelines.... Inflation continues to track below the Fed’s target: With neither the economy on fire nor inflation rising, the Fed has little reason to turn their attention to reversing this year’s rate cuts anytime soon.... The Fed in general, and it seems Powell in particular, has clearly had an epiphany regarding the benefits of persistently low unemployment. In prior cycles central bankers would be looking upon sub-4% unemployment rates with much more suspicion as a warning sign that inflation will soon be on the rise. The shift has substantial implications for policy; the Fed views the costs of high unemployment as sufficiently high relative to those of the risk of inflation at these levels that they very much err against the possibility of recession. This in turn lessens the possibility that Fed action or inaction helps trip the economy into recession and brightens the near- to medium-term outlooks...

John Cassidy: Trump Is Poison for Suburban Republicans—So Why Won’t They Turn on Him? | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/trump-is-poison-for-suburban-republicansso-why-wont-they-turn-on-him: 'when will endangered Republicans summon up some courage and challenge their rogue President? For at least two reasons, the answer is: not until the voters repudiate him first. Most elected Republicans live in mortal fear of Trump’s Twitter feed, which he turns on anyone from his own party who dares to criticize him...

Daniel Kuehn: “We Can Get a Coup”: Warren Nutter and the Overthrow of Salvador Allende https://delong.typepad.com/files/nutter.pdf: 'In 1969, Warren Nutter left the University of Virginia Department of Economics to serve as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Nixon administration. During his time in the Defense Department, Nutter was deeply involved in laying the groundwork for a military coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Although Nutter left the Pentagon several months before the successful 1973 coup, his role in the ascendance of the Pinochet regime was far more direct than the better-known cases of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Arnold Harberger. This paper describes Nutter’s role in Chile policy planning and generating a “coup climate.” It shows how Nutter’s criticisms of Henry Kissinger are grounded in his economics, and compares and contrasts Nutter with other economists who have been connected to Pinochet’s dictatorship...

4.4.2) “Freedom” Inverted: It’s Really Powerlessness: Capitalists and their ideologists write about how everybody is “free” in a capitalist economy: slavery and serfdom have both been abolished, so that workers can go where they want, take the jobs they want, and so raise society’s productivity. Marx reacts with very heavy-handed snark.

The serf was not free: he was tied to the land, and had to stay there and present his lord with the customary feudal rents specified under that form of land tenure. The coming of capitalism frees the serf: he is no longer required to stay on his inherited piece of land, and farm it.

But the coming of capitalism “frees” the serf in another sense as well: he is “freed” from his connection with the land, which now belongs to the landlord. And he can do what he used to do—farm the land—only if he can strike a bargain and rent it from the landlord. He is, in the words of Milton and Rose Director Friedman, “free to choose”. But he is also free to lose. And—if he cannot strike a bargain to rent the land and then cannot strike a bargain to work as an employee—free to starve.

Yes, he is no longer constrained by the web of obligations that constrained him under the feudal or the petty-bourgeois mode of production. But by the same token that freedom from social position and social ties may well reduce his bargaining power when he goes to the labor market. Constraints can keep you from doing better, but they can also keep you fro being forced to do worse.

Moreover, that bargaining-power reduction is essential for the system’s operation, at least in Marx’s view. Capitalism can only form if there are a lot of workers who have lost their feudal status as serfs who are both owned by and own the land, and lost their petty-bourgeois status as artisans or merchants who own their tools and their businesses. Only if there is a proletariat—a large group of workers who must find a capitalist employer, and must do so under conditions in which workers have very little bargaining power:

The starting point of the development that gave rise to the wage labourer as well as to the capitalist, was the servitude of the labourer. The advance consisted in a change of form of this servitude, in the transformation of feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation.… Revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capital class in course of formation; but, above all, those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and “unattached” proletarians on the labour-market…

Mitchell Carroll: Greek Women https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32318/32318-h/32318-h.htm: 'Phryne, with a modesty one would not expect in a woman of her class, was very careful to keep her beautiful figure concealed, avoiding the public baths and having her body always enveloped in a long and graceful tunic. But on two occasions the beauty-loving Greeks had displayed to them the charms of her person. The first was at the solemn assembly at Eleusis, on the feast of the Poseidonia. Having loosened her beautiful hair and let fall her drapery, Phryne plunged into the sea in the sight of all the assembled Greeks. Apelles, the painter, transported with admiration at the sight, retired at once to his studio and transferred to canvas the mental image which was indelibly impressed upon his fancy; and the resulting picture was the Aphrodite Anadyomene, the most celebrated of his paintings...

The Economist quotes our Kate Bahn from here at Equitable Growth: Economist: Belligerent unions are a sign of economic health - Free exchange https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/11/07/belligerent-unions-are-a-sign-of-economic-health: 'When economists argue that unions impose economic costs, they typically assume that markets are competitive. Across much of the American economy that is not always the case. Sometimes one or a few big employers dominate local labour markets, and can thus impose below-market wages on vulnerable workers, a condition economists call “monopsony”. In recent testimony in a congressional hearing on antitrust issues, Kate Bahn of the Washington Centre for Equitable Growth, a think-tank, noted that though wages in manufacturing industries are close to the level one would expect in competitive markets, those in some others, like health care, are not. For workers frustrated by stagnant pay, a work stoppage may be the only way to determine if an employer is constrained by competitive markets or abusing its market power. In the latter case, interventions by unions could prove economically useful. In a paper published last year, Mark Stelzner of Connecticut College and Mark Paul of the New College of Florida, argued that in the presence of monopsony power, collective bargaining can reduce the rents collected by dominant firms and increase economic efficiency. In practice, America’s diminished labour movement cannot on its own fix the problem of uncompetitive markets, or strike much fear into the hearts of employers. Nonetheless, workers are daring to try...

Be sure to apply by January 26!: Equitable Growth: 2020 Request for Proposals https://equitablegrowth.org/research-paper/2020-request-for-proposals/: 'Equitable Growth considers proposals that investigate the link between economic inequality and individuals’ economic outcomes and well-being, poverty and mobility from poverty, the macroeconomy, and sustainability. We are particularly interested in dimensions of inequality, including race, ethnicity, gender, and place, as well as the ways in which public polices affect the relationship between inequality and growth...

An excellent piece from across the Pond that is the Atlantic Ocean: Britain is not at all ready for the next recession, or the next financial crisis. And the U.S. is in no better shape: Jack Leslie, James Smith, Cara Pacitti, and Fahmida Rahman: Recession Ready?: "This report... provides the most comprehensive assessment of the UK’s macroeconomic policy framework since the financial crisis, focusing on the ability of the framework to provide effective support to the economy in the face of the next recession. This work is important, given the crucial role macroeconomic policy plays in mitigating the negative impacts of downturns, and urgent given that the UK faces its highest recession risk since the financial crisis. We find that the UK’s macroeconomic policy framework has not kept pace with significant changes to our economic environment and is therefore at risk of leaving the country underprepared for the next recession. That is not a risk policy makers should take lightly... https://www.youtube.com/ZJCeBKFJ9lM

We now have a manufacturing recession. Paul Krugman correctly explains why: Paul Krugman: Manufacturing Ain’t Great Again. Why? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/opinion/manufacturing-trump.html?emc=rss&partner=rss: 'Many of Trump’s economic promises were obvious nonsense. The hollowing out of coal country reflected new technologies, like mountaintop removal, which require few workers, plus competition from other energy sources, especially natural gas but increasingly wind and solar power. Coal jobs aren’t coming back, no matter how dirty Trump lets the air get. And farmers, who export a large fraction of what they grow, should have realized that Trump’s protectionism and the inevitable retaliation from other countries would have a devastating effect on their incomes.... Trumponomics has effectively turned rural Americans, who are far more conservative than the nation at large, into wards of the state: This year almost 40 percent of farm income will come from trade assistance, disaster assistance, the farm bill and insurance indemnities.... Over the past year, manufacturing employment has fallen significantly in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.... Trump’s... domestic economic agenda has been pure, orthodox Republican voodoo.... But business investment, which the tax cut was supposed to promote—and which is a key source of demand for U.S. manufacturers—is actually falling.... Analysts blame Trump’s trade war. His tariffs have the direct effect of disrupting global supply chains.... Destructive uncertainty... [from] crony capitalism across the board.... Things might look very different if he had actually followed through on his campaign promises to make big investments in infrastructure, which would have created a lot of sales for U.S. manufacturing.... Trump is presiding over an economy that, despite low unemployment, doesn’t feel like a boom to most Americans. And he has utterly failed in his politically crucial promise to make manufacturing in key swing states great again...

The psychological makeup of the American conservative media pundit is very strange indeed: Paul Krugman (2014): Phosphate Memories https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/phosphate-memories/: "Does anyone remember this, from Erick Erickson of Red State? 'Washington State has turned its residents into a group of drug runners—crossing state lines to buy dish washer detergent with phosphate. At what point do the people tell the politicians to go to hell? At what point do they get off the couch, march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot? At some point soon, it will happen.' Yes, because there’s no possible reason meddling politicians should interfere with Americans’ God-given right to use phosphates however they like. Oh, wait. 'It took a serendipitous slug of toxins and the loss of drinking water for a half-million residents to bring home what scientists and government officials in this part of the country have been saying for years: Lake Erie is in trouble, and getting worse by the year. Flooded by tides of phosphorus washed from fertilized farms, cattle feedlots and leaky septic systems, the most intensely developed of the Great Lakes is increasingly being choked each summer by thick mats of algae, much of it poisonous. What plagues Toledo and, experts say, potentially all 11 million lakeside residents, is increasingly a serious problem across the United States.' It’s true that farms are the biggest problem, but every little bit hurts...

It's a waterfall: at each stage of the process by which the innovation workforce is built, being Black and being female is a powerful disadvantage at making it through the filter and proceeding to the next stage: Lisa Cook and Jan Gerso: The Implications of U.S. Gender and Racial Disparities in Income and Wealth Inequality at Each Stage of the Innovation Process: "Gender and racial disparities exist at each stage of the innovation process, from education to training, and from the practice of invention to the commercialization of invention, and can be costly to the U.S. economy. These disparities can also lead to increased income and wealth inequalities at each stage for those who would otherwise participate in the innovation economy. Let’s look at each stage to assess this problem in further detail...

Beth Gutelius and Nik Theodore: The Future of Warehouse Work: Technological Change in the U.S. Logistics Industry http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/future-of-warehouse-work/: 'Are “dark” warehouses, humming along without humans, just around the corner? Predictions of dramatic job loss due to technology adoption and automation often highlight warehousing as an industry on the brink of transformation.... We project that the industry likely won’t experience dramatic job loss over the next decade, though many workers may see the content and quality of their jobs shift as technologies are adopted for particular tasks. Employers may use technology in ways that decrease the skill requirements of jobs in order to reduce training times and turnover costs. This could create adverse effects on workers, such as wage stagnation and job insecurity. New technologies potentially can curtail monotonous or physically strenuous activities, but depending on how they are implemented, may present new challenges for worker health and safety, employee morale, and turnover. Additionally, electronically mediated forms of monitoring and micro-management threaten to constrain workers’ autonomy and introduce new rigidities into the workplace...

Income and wealth inequality corrupt politics in the interest of maintaining and expanding income and wealth inequality: Back in 1867, Karl Marx notes The Times of London protesting against manufacturing's cotton lords' pressure on British governance and legislation: Karl Marx (1867): Capital https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch23.htm: 'The Times answered the cotton lord as follows: "Edmund Potter is so impressed with the exceptional and supreme importance of the cotton masters.... ‘Is it worth while keeping the machinery in order?’ again asks Mr. Potter.... By the ‘machinery’ Mr. Potter means the human machinery.... We must confess that we do not think it ‘worth while,’ or even possible, to keep the human machinery... shut... up and... oiled till it is wanted. Human machinery will rust under inaction, oil and rub it as you may. Moreover, the human machinery will, as we have just seen, get the steam up of its own accord, and burst or run amuck.... He says that it is very natural the workers should wish to emigrate; but he thinks that in spite of their desire, the nation ought to keep this half million of workers with their 700,000 dependents, shut up in the cotton districts; and as a necessary consequence, he must of course think that the nation ought to keep down their discontent by force.... The time is come when the great public opinion of these islands must operate to save this ‘working power’ from those who would deal with it as they would deal with iron, and coal, and cotton...

A better-run IRS would devote much more in the way of resources to investigating "independent contractor" fraud and abuse: Corey Husak: How U.S. Companies Harm Workers By Making Them Pretending That They Are Independent Contractors: "Being classified as either an employee or an independent contractor can determine whether workers in the United States have access to reliable pay, benefits, and protection from discrimination. Intense fights are cropping up across the country as companies try to argue that their workers are just “independent contractors” and do not qualify for many protections under U.S. labor law, while workers and some courts say the opposite, that some workers are actually employees. Many “gig economy” companies, such as Uber Technologies Inc., base their business models around misclassifying their workers as self-employed. Billions of dollars in worker pay is at stake...

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0N4QFCcL94j_TnZYP0SUTjcUA

Interesting that Henry Fielding uses the phrase "King of Prussia" in 1749 in Tom Jones: the Kings in Prussia were not to claim the title King of Prussia until 1772. Indeed, the point of the Crown Treaty of 1700 was that the Prince-Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia Friedrich III Hohenzollern sought recognition that he was by the Treaty of Bromberg sovereign—i.e., not a vassal of the King of Poland—over those parts of Prussia he controlled, and definitely not freed from vassalage for his German-Imperial to the Emperor Leopold I Habsburg. "King of Prussia" introduces some ambiguity there. And in 1749 either Henry Fielding or Aunt Western is unaware of this distinction between "in" and "of", which was important enough for Leopold I Habsburg to have made it a red line in his negotiations with Friedrich III Hohenzollern to get the Margravate of Brandenburg's troops on his side in the War of the Spanish Succession:

Henry Fielding: The History of Tom Jones https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6593/6593-h/6593-h.htm#link2H_4_0003: '“Indeed, Miss Western,” cries the lady, “I shall not bear this usage; you have learnt of your father this manner of treating me; he hath taught you to give me the lie. He hath totally ruined you by this false system of education; and, please heaven, he shall have the comfort of its fruits; for once more I declare to you, that to-morrow morning I will carry you back. I will withdraw all my forces from the field, and remain henceforth, like the wise king of Prussia, in a state of perfect neutrality. You are both too wise to be regulated by my measures; so prepare yourself, for to-morrow morning you shall evacuate this house”...

Benoît de Courson and Nicolas Baumard: Quantifying the Scientitic Revolution https://drive.google.com/file/d/14XXlDjyru9i05_SN3ybp-FGmbsZDhm5U/view: 'We leverage large datasets of individual biographies to build national estimates of scientific production during the early modern period.... Per capita estimates reveal striking differences across countries, with the two richest countries of the time (England and the United Provinces)... much more scientifically productive than the rest of Europe.... Scientific creativity is associated with other kinds of creative activities in philosophy, literature, music and the arts, suggesting a common underlying factor. Our results also challenge long-held hypotheses regarding the role of religion, universities, demography, and the printing press, and support the idea that economic development and rising living standards are key to explaining the rise of modern science...

Brandy Clark: Big Day In A Small Town https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAppyuYLgkQ_:

Very Briefly Noted 2019-12-06:

1. Patrick Stewart: Galaxy Quest https://web.archive.org/web/20140113105956/http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/st/interviews/stewart/page13.shtml: 'I had originally not wanted to see [Galaxy Quest] because I heard that it was making fun of Star Trek and then Jonathan Frakes rang me up and said "You must not miss this movie! See it on a Saturday night in a full theatre". And I did and of course I found it was brilliant. Brilliant. No one laughed louder or longer in the cinema than I did, but the idea that the ship was saved and all of our heroes in that movie were saved simply by the fact that there were fans who did understand the scientific principles on which the ship worked was absolutely wonderful. And it was both funny and also touching in that it paid tribute to the dedication of these fans...

2. David Romer (2018): Economics 134: Macroeconomic Policy from the Great Depression to Today https://www.econ.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/course-homepage/2018-01-14/syllabus/Economics%20134%20Syllabus.pdf...

3. Wikipedia: The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_Depression_Economics_and_the_Crisis_of_2008: 'Krugman suggests that policymakers "relearn the lessons our grandfathers were taught by the Great Depression" and prop up spending and enable broader access to credit...

4. Youtube: Disney's Zorro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0icu-DbZr28&list=PL150C101BDB5788AE...

5. George A. Akerlof (2019): What They Were Thinking Then: The Consequences for Macroeconomics during the Past 60 Years https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.33.4.171...

6. Paul Krugman (2011): Mr. Keynes and the Moderns https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/keynes_and_the_moderns.pdf...

7. D. E. Moggridge and Susan Howso: Keynes on Monetary Policy, 1910-1946 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2662224.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A388ccc8f3ac7d38d097622a88e770b85...

8. Moses Finley: The World of Odysseus https://delong.typepad.com/finleyodysseus.pdf...

9. FRED: Four Components of Aggregate Demand https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=524363&rn=499...

10. Timothy B. Lee: How Neural Networks Work—And Why They’ve Become A Big Business https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/12/how-neural-networks-work-and-why-theyve-become-a-big-business/: 'This is the first in a multi-part series on machine learning—in future weeks we'll take a closer look at the hardware powering machine learning, examine how neural networks have enabled the rise of deep fakes, and much more.... Making neural networks deeper didn't do much to improve performance if the training data set wasn't big. Conversely, expanding the size of the training set didn't improve performance very much for small neural networks. You needed both deep networks and large data sets—plus the vast computing power required to complete the training process in a reasonable amount of time—to see big performance gains. The AlexNet team was the first one to put all three elements together in one piece of software...

11. FRED: Real Gross Private Domestic Investment/Real Potential Gross Domestic Product https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=516169&rn=403...

12. Barry Naughton (2017): Is China Socialist? https://delong.typepad.com/files/naughton.pdf...

13. Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett Dunsany: Fifty-one Tales https://archive.org/details/fiftyonetales00dunsgoog/page/n4...

14. King James Version: Ecclesiastes 9:11 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+9%3A11&version=KJV: 'I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all...

15. Diego Velázquez: The Surrender of Breda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surrender_of_Breda...

16. Wikipedia: Spanish Road https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Road...

17. Christopher Marlowe: The Jew of Malta https://www.gutenberg.org/files/901/901-h/901-h.htm...

18. Friedrich Engels (1877) Anti-Duhring https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch11.htm: 'Up to this point we have proceeded from the assumption that Herr Dühring's persistent habit of misquoting is done at least in good faith, and arises either from his total incapacity to understand things or from a habit of quoting from memory — a habit which seems to be peculiar to historical depiction in the grand style, but is usually described as slovenly. But we seem to have reached the point at which, even with Herr Dühring, quantity is transformed into quality...

19. Michael Boskin &al. (2010): An Open Letter to Ben Bernanke https://economics21.org/html/open-letter-ben-bernanke-287.html: 'The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed's objective of promoting employment...

20. *Tsinghua University *: School of Economics and Management http://www.sem.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/qianyy: 'Qian, Yingyi: Professor, Department of Economics; Distinguished Professor of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsinghua University; The Fourth Dean (2006-18), School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University...

21. Robert Waldmann: Critique of the Golgotha Program https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/07/robert-waldmann-has-an-interpretation-of-karl-marx-that-is-new-to-me.html...

22. Barack Obama (January 27, 2010): Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address | whitehouse.gov https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-state-union-address: 'Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address...

John Holbo: Ersatz Better Angels? http://crookedtimber.org/2019/12/04/ersatz-better-angels/: 'We tend to think of the relationship between ideal and non-ideal theory as aspirational and/or clarificatory. Ideal theory represents either 1) a distant point towards which you ought to move; 2) a pristine expression of your real values, unblemished by extraneous, pragmatic considerations. You could sort of roll 1) and 2) up together and say: ideal theory should be a polestar. A clear, fixed point by which you can steer somewhere better than where you are. But, in these Vavilovian/Steelwool cases... the point of dragging in ideal theory is, in effect, to footdrag, extenuate and obfuscate.... You are bad (see above), so pretending to be GOOD-good is hard. But you might be able to pull off semi-not-bad, from a middle-distance. So you invent a semi-not-bad aspirational self. Angel of my less-bad nature! But, really, this aspirational self is just there to provide plausible deniability. This ersatz angel lets you stay bad, rather than making you have to be even a little better...