It is curious that—so far at least—this from the extremely sharp McKay Coppins has turned out to be wrong: McKay Coppins: ‘People who spent years coddling the president will recast themselves as voices of conscience, or whitewash their relationship with Trump… LINK: <https://uphill.thedispatch.com/p/biden-cabinet-inauguration-gop-future>

The Republicans are all doubling down on Trump, even though he is now out of office, and off of Twitter. He has all but disappeared from the general public sphere. Is he still ruling the fever swamps? And do the Republicans not recognize that there is anything else?

Plus Two Videos Well Worth Watching:

Roosevelt & Churchill: Christmas, 1941

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Governor Schwarzenegger’s Message Following This Week’s Attack on the Capitol

Very Briefly Noted:

• Joshua Gans: B.1.1.7: ‘B.1.1.7 has an advantage… when the mitigation strategies are in place… [in] getting around them.... The fight against B.1.1.7 requires the places that have been the most vigilant need more action. It is hard to know what that is… LINK: <https://joshuagans.substack.com/p/b117>

• Nora Caplan-Bricker: An Overlooked Novel from 1935 by the Godmother of Feminist Detective Fiction: ‘A new group biography establishes Dorothy L. Sayers’s “Gaudy Night” as a forerunner of works by Gillian Flynn and Tana French… LINK: <https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/an-overlooked-novel-from-1935-by-the-godmother-of-feminist-detective-fiction>

• Annalee Newitz: What Ancient Roman Hospitality Workers Can Teach Us About This Moment in History <https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/what-ancient-roman-hospitality-workers…

• Ben Sasse: ‘Many party leaders and consultants thought they could preach the Constitution while winking at QAnon. They can’t. The GOP must reject conspiracy theories or be consumed by them. Now is the time to decide what this party is about… LINK: <https://uphill.thedispatch.com/p/biden-cabinet-inauguration-gop-future>

• Acropolis Museum: Digital Museum: ‘The Acropolis Museum enters dynamically into the world of digital technology and opens new channels of communication with the public… LINK: <https://www.theacropolismuseum.gr/en/digital-museum>

Seven Paragraphs-Plus for Dinnertime:

Anna Akhmatova: From ‘Requiem’ : ‘During the years of the Yezhovschina, I spent seventeen months standing outside the prison in Leningrad, waiting for news. One day someone recognized me. Then a woman with lips blue from the cold, who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all. She whispered in my ear (for we all spoke in whispers there): “Can you describe this?” I said, “I can.” Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face… LINK

Ken Untener: Prophets of a Future Not Our Own : ‘It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us. No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the Church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything. This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities. We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own. LINK

Rosa Luxemburg: The Russian Revolution: ‘The socialist system of society should only be, and can only be, an historical product, born out of the school of its own experiences, born in the course of its realization, as a result of the developments of living history…. Socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed or introduced by ukase…. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot. New Territory. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways. Only unobstructed, effervescing life falls into a thousand new forms and improvisations, brings to light creative new force, itself corrects all mistaken attempts.

The public life of countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress…. Otherwise, socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals…. Life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously–at bottom, then, a clique affair–a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins (the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month periods!)

Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc… LINK: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch06.htm>

Noah Smith: Short Thoughts on the Insurrection: ‘I think Republicans who still support the insurrectionists—or who are still on the fence—are motivated not by hate but by fear. To understand the mind of American conservatives, you have to understand the constant diet of fear that they consume every day. For decades, right-wing talk shows and Fox News have understood that they could get conservatives to tune in by constantly pumping up the fear—fear of a War on Christmas, fear of gay culture, fear of terrorism, fear of Black crime, fear fear fear. During the Trump Era, the chief bugaboos have been A) wokeness, B) immigration, and C) antifa. To be a conservative in America is to exist in a constant state of having people trying to scare you.

Now, in the era of Trumpist insurrection, the chief threat that the fearmongers are hawking is that Republicans and conservatives will become a persecuted class in America….. Some Republicans will see this threatening warning and think “Ehh, that’s hysteria; let’s focus on the real threat of insurrection and then things will be back to normal.” But some will think “OMG it’s true…. I’m going to be hunted and persecuted in my own country just because I’m a conservative…. Who can protect me from this terror?” And for many, the only possible answer to the question of “Who can protect me from this terror?” will be “Trump, and the people who stormed the Capitol”. Having been told that the institutions of America are an existential threat to them, they will cling to the only force they feel might be capable of protecting them….

All the insurrectionists have to do to retain Republican support is to keep pumping up the threat, and keep presenting themselves as the only port in the storm. And some Republicans, tragically, will cling ever tighter to the very monster that is at their throats… LINK <https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/insurrection-thoughts-113>

Tom Snyder: The American Abyss: ‘When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around.... Social media... supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true… LINK: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html>

Haley Bird Wilt: The Consequences of Lying to People: ‘Republican lawmakers misled millions of people into believing the results of a legitimate election could be overturned. Many of them viewed contesting the outcome as a relatively easy way to gain political currency among Trump supporters, knowing all the while that their efforts would have no real impact on who will be sworn into office in two weeks. The deception—primarily led by Trump, yet enabled by members of Congress—set the stage for the violence that unfolded at the Capitol Wednesday. Four people died....

The normally dry procedural affair of counting of the Electoral College votes was viewed by everyday Republicans and zealots alike as the place to make a final stand to overturn the election—even though elected Republicans knew the outcome would ultimately remain unchanged. As my colleague Jonah writes this morning, “Convincing people they need to prevent a coup when no such coup exists is a recipe for violence.” This was the energy that fueled the horde on Wednesday… LINK: <https://uphill.thedispatch.com/p/the-consequences-of-lying-to-people>

Scott Alexander: Still Alive: ‘513,000 people read my blog post complaining about the New York Times’ attempt to dox me (for comparison…. So many people cancelled their subscription that the Times’ exasperated customer service agents started pre-empting callers with “Is this about that blog thing?”… I got emails from no fewer than four New York Times journalists expressing sympathy and offering to explain their paper’s standards in case that helped my cause. All four of them gave totally different explanations, disagreeing about whether the reporter I dealt with was just following the rules, was flagrantly violating the rules, was unaffected by any rules, or what. Seems like a fun place to work. I was nevertheless humbled by their support….

Someone who knows New York Times reporters says the guy on my case was their non-hit-piece guy; they have a different reporter for hatchet jobs. After I torched the blog in protest, they seem to have briefly flirted with turning it into a hit piece, and the following week they switched to interviewing everyone who hated me and asking a lot of leading questions about potentially bad things I did….

I think the New York Times wanted to write a fairly boring article about me, but some guideline said they had to reveal subjects’ real identities, if they knew them, unless the subject was in one of a few predefined sympathetic categories (eg sex workers). I did get to talk to a few sympathetic people from the Times, who were pretty confused about whether such a guideline existed, and certainly it’s honored more in the breach than in the observance (eg Virgil Texas)….

I had a phobia of being doxxed. But psychotherapy classes also teach you to not to let past traumas control your life even after they’ve stopped being relevant. Was I getting too worked up over an issue that no longer mattered? The New York Times thought so. Some people kept me abreast of their private discussions (in Soviet America, newspaper’s discussions get leaked to you!) and their reporters had spirited internal debates about whether I really needed anonymity. Sure, I’d gotten some death threats, but everyone gets death threats…. Sure, I might get SWATted, but realistically that’s a really scary fifteen seconds before the cops apologize and go away. Sure, my job was at risk, but I was a well-off person and could probably get another….

In the New York Times’ worldview, they start with the right to dox me, and I had to earn the right to remain anonymous by proving I’m the perfect sympathetic victim who satisfies all their criteria of victimhood…. I don’t think anyone at the Times bore me ill will, at least not originally. But somehow that just made it even more infuriating…

From 2021-01-29 Fr

From <http://.delongtoday.com>

On Tuesday, January 26, 2021, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted out one word—GameStonk!!—with two exclamation points, and with a link to a board on the internet discussion site Reddit, a board that describes itself as: “WallStreetBets: Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal”. The word “GameStonk” is a mashup of “stonk”, a misspelling of “stock”, and “GameStop”—the Dallas-headquartered U.S. bricks-and-mortar videogame retailer with 5000 stores, $1 million of annual revenue per store, and currently $200 million a year of losses. The misspelling of “stock” means that Musk wants his readers to know that he is adopting a pose of enthusiasm and excitement: the pose is that he must communicate, and cannot be bothered to spellcheck anything before he sends his words out to the internet. “GameStonk!!” could therefore be translated thus: “excitement, enthusiasm, and approval for (or perhaps for what is currently going on with) the stock of the company GameStop.” 

The price of  GameStop (ticker $GME) immediately rose 60%.

The stock had doubled earlier in the day. The supposed trigger was early Facebook executive and current venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya’s tweeting that he had bought call options on GameStop, betting the stock would go still higher than it had before. The total equity value of GameStop was $5.5 billion Tuesday morning, $11 billion Tuesday afternoon, $17 billion Tuesday evening, a peak (so far) of $26 billion Wednesday, and $18 billion Thursday as I am taping this.

OK. So what is going on? And what does this mean?

Wikipedia tells us that GameStop is headquartered in suburban Dallas, TX, near to a LEGOLAND:

GameStop is an American video game, consumer electronics, and gaming merchandise retailer. The company is headquartered in Grapevine, Texas, United States, a suburb of Dallas, and operates 5,509 retail stores throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe as of February 1, 2020. The company's retail stores primarily operate under the GameStop, EB Games, ThinkGeek, and Micromania-Zing brands. In addition to retail stores, GameStop also owns Game Informer, a video game magazine.

GameStop last made a profit in calendar 2017: $35 million. It lost $673 million in 2018, lost 20% of its revenue in 2019 down to $6.46 billion for a loss of $471 million, looks to realize $5.26 billion in revenue and lose $200 million, and is forecast—but tracking analysts forecasts are usually optimistic—at revenues of $5.84 billion and break-even in 2022. Up until September, it was worth some $5 per share, $350 million for the 70 million shares outstanding.

The stock jumped in September and October—roughly tripled, boosting the company’s equity valuation from about $350 million to about $1 billion. Why? Because of Ryan Cohen. Ryan Cohen had founded online pet retailer MrChewy in 2011 at the age of 25. He had made a success of it, selling it to PetSmart for $3.35 billion and stepping down from the CEO position in 2019. He had bought 10% of GameStop. He hoped to turn it around: “GameStop needs to evolve into a technology company that delights gamers and delivers exceptional digital experiences—not remain a video game retailer that overprioritizes its brick-and-mortar footprint and stumbles around the online ecosystem…” he wrote. 

Before Ryan Cohen’s appearance, the consensus was that GameStop would be closed in a decade. The market’s valuation was that of the $50 billion in revenue the firm might collect before it closed, it would be generous to think that 1% of that might be ultimately paid out to shareholders. Afterwards, the market was more optimistic: maybe with Ryan Cohen involved, there was a 20% chance GameStop could, instead, become an internet property as valuable as MrChewy was when Cohen sold it to PetSmart. Maybe Ms. Market was right here; maybe Ms. Market was wrong. I tend to think that Ms. Market was being too enthusiastic about the ability of one charismatic 35er with successful experience in an adjacent market segment to make a big difference. But I would not say that I was at all sure that Ms. Market was wrong.

One other thing happened in September-October: an extra 35 million shares or so were shorted. As of August, there were 100 million shares in long positions—people who stood to gain if GameStop went up or paid dividends—and 30 million shares in short positions—people who stood to gain if GameStop went down. By the end of October there were 135 million shares in long positions in 65 million shares in short positions. And then nothing happens until January 12, 2021.

So what happens in the two weeks between the end of January 12 and dawn on January 26? The stock-market valuation of the company then went from $1 to $5.5 billion. Why and how? 

One part of it is a “technical” story. The technical story has two parts. The first part is the “short squeeze” part. Suppose that you are a short seller. And suppose that the price of a stock you have shorted goes up—goes way up. What do you do? On the one hand, the profits from your short, if it comes in, are now much bigger, so you hold on to and may well increase your short position. 

On the other hand you are now poorer—perhaps a lot poorer—and your tolerance for risk goes down. Moreover, you are in this as a business: you cannot get yourself into a situation where one bet going wrong will destroy your ability to make other bets in the future, no matter how big a winner this one bet looks. And, in addition, the fact that the stock has moved against you is evidence that your initial analysis of the situation was, to some degree at least, not accurate. Those will tend to make you shrink your position.

The net effect of these factors is that, for short sellers, their demand curve may well slope the wrong way. Markets are stable because when price goes up demand tends to go down. But if short-sellers decide to cover rather than increase their positions when the price rises, their component of the demand curve does not slope down but slopes up—unless and until much bigger short sellers with much deeper pockets and much greater risk tolerances are attracted into the market.

The second part of the technical story is the call option part. Suppose you want to bet on Ryan Cohen’s success—or bet that it might look like he might possibly be a success. You could buy the stock. Or you could amplify your potential winnings by buying a way-out-of-the-money call option on the stock. That way you can make a bet that might come in really big, and make it cheaply. If you think you have more knowledge than capital, and yet you want to limit your downside exposure by not borrowing to buy stock and hence being on the hook if the stock goes bankrupt, a call option can look attractive.

The question is: who do you buy the call option from? If you can find somebody who wants to make the opposite bet—to bet that Ryan Cohen will not succeed—well and good. But odds are you will buy the call option from somebody who does not have strong views about Ryan Cohen and GameStop. They simply want to collect some money for making a market up front, and then be out of the game. They do not want to gamble. They want to hedge their position.

How do they hedge their position? Well, they sell you a call option and then they buy a little bit of the stock at the market price. If the call option price goes up, it must be because the stock price has gone up. When the call option is way out-of-the-money, a $1 increase in the stock price produces only a very small increase in the value of the option, so you do not need to buy much stock. But as the stock price approaches the option strike price—the price at which you get to buy the stock if you “call” your option—the proper delta hedge requires more and more of the stock. And at the limit, as the option comes into the money, the delta hedge amount becomes one.

Thus as the stock price goes up, your counterparty who has sold you the option must increase his or her long position in the stock in order to stay hedged. From your perspective, you are not doing anything as the stock price rises. You have an option. You are just letting it ride as the stock bounces around. But the combination of you-and-your-counterparty-who-has-hedged-their-position as a unit is another positive-feedback trader: somebody else whose demand curve slopes the wrong way, with your collective demand for the stock not falling but rising as the stock price rises.

And, of course, as the stock price rises, it gains more mindshare. And some of those whom news about the stock touches will decide to buy.

So far we have three factors: short-sellers who can be squeezed, and thus turned into positive-feedback traders; counterparties of call option purchasers, who are positive-feedback traders as well; and the fact that news and buzz is a source of stock demand. There are also three more factors: call them YOLO (as Matt Levine does), rage-against-the-(financial)-machine (as John Authers does), and pump-and-dump.

Let me quote from Matt Levine on YOLO:

The people on the WallStreetBets subreddit sometimes all get into a stock at once. This is fun, a nice social outing in an age of social distancing, a risky but potentially lucrative collective entertainment. Recently they decided to do GameStop. Because, I don’t know, they’re gamers… it’s a little comical to pump the stock of… mall video-game stores during a pandemic, or because… professional investors are short GameStop and they thought it’d be funny to mess with them. Or, especially, because their friends on Reddit were buying…. Take one person who’s long for fundamental reasons, add 100 people who are long for personal-amusement reasons like “lol gaming” or “let’s mess with the shorts,” and then add thousands more who are long because they see everyone else long, and the stock moves: “‘It was a meme stock that really blew up’, said WallStreetBets moderator Bawse1…. GameStop seemed so utterly doomed that the current situation was actually sort of funny to the subreddit’s denizens. Banded together, WallStreetBets members bought in big enough to move the stock…. Here is a seven-hour YouTube video from Friday in which a guy called “Roaring Kitty” dips a chicken tender in champagne to celebrate his GameStop wins. “This is the thing, overbought can stay overbought, remain overbought, even get more overbought,” he says, which is as good a summary of the situation as anything else…

And let me quote from John Authers on rage-against-the-(financial)-machine:

I argued that it was misplaced to take pleasure at the pain for the short-sellers who had attacked GameStop stock, and then been subjected to a “short squeeze” for the ages by traders coordinating on Reddit. I received a bumper crop of feedback… leaving out many with unprintable expletives): “How much did [GameStop short-position hedge fund] Melvin pay you to write this garbage? shill. Literally trying to protect an industry trying to fleece jobs from low income workers. Sleep well chump…” “Watching entitled institutional shorts whine… that millennials equipped with margin accounts & zero fees are collaborating on Reddit to target them is my new favorite sport. Looks perfectly healthy… plus 1 for the little guys.” “Normal isn't putting the retail trader down for being independent while organized hedge funds force you to take their way or suffer in fear. Normal is the American dream and being able to make your own way. This isn't a casino. This is a riot…”

We coordinated our purchases on Reddit, and we got rich, and in the process we made a bunch of overrich institutional Wall Street plutocrats sad and poorer. What is not to like?—that seems to be their view.

Well, what is not to like is that ultimately all the money there is is the dividends that will be paid by GameStop and the price that will be paid by its acquirer whenever the GameStop corporate shell is dissolved and its assets are repositioned. At the moment those who have sold GameStop on its ride up have collected perhaps $14 billion—$7 billion from the shorts and $7 billion from current GameStop holders who were late into their long positions. The short-sellers have lost $7 billion. Current stockholders of GameStop have an asset 

worth $14 billion that they paid $7 billion for—and so a paper profit of $7 billion right now. But the only value to back GameStop is the money that will be flowing out of the firm as distributed profits—and that is likely to be $400 million only, or maybe $700 million, or maybe $1 billion at best.

Current GameStop shareholders are thus looking to lose at least $6 billion of the $7 billion they have paid for the stock—unless they find greater fools willing to take their shares off their hands at something like its current $14 billion paper-profit valuation.

And here we get to the pump-and-dump question: How much do those who have already received $14 billion in profits from GameStonk so far overlap with those who currently hold a $14 billion paper position in GameStonk—a position that was $28 billion at one moment Thursday afternoon? And how much have those who have profited already dumped their positions? And what role did those who have profited play in pumping up the stock in the first place?

Combine pump-and-dump, rage-against-the-(financial)-machine, YOLO, hedged call options as strong sources of positive-feedback trading, and the short squeeze with the excitement provoked by the hope that Ryan Cohen could repeat his success with MrChewy, and you have the stage set for Elon Musk and Chamath Palihapitiya to trigger the quintupling of Tuesday and Wednesday. It is hard to know why they did what they did. It seems likely to be YOLO—for if they had positions, they are likely to spend the rest of their lives enmeshed in nets of lawsuits.

The story is really reminiscent of the bad old days of Gilded Age Wall Street—the Harlem corner, the stats bearcat corner, the Northern Securities panic. (The family story is that one of my great-great grandfathers killed himself with his revolver because he could not face telling his family the scale of his losses in Northern Securities).

There is, however one big difference. In previous search episodes of short squeezes, corners, and massive immediate fast-moving bubble divergences of market prices from fundamentals, there was considerable uncertainty about what those fundamentals really were. Was the stock being pumped above its value by cynics who wanted to dump it later? Or were people who had learned that there was about to be great news about the business trying to quietly buy it up in advance? And were the rumors that there was a pump-and-dump going on false-flag diversions to keep the general public from getting in on a good thing?

Before there was always a universe to be understood and mastered, or Masters of the Universe who you could profit be emulating. Knowledge either about what fundamental values really were or about the plans of insiders. But this time there is no knowledge, there is no pattern.

Just as Donald Trump was a reality-TV simulacrum of a president, so this feels like a reality-TV version of financial Robber Barons. A going-through-the-motions for the camera, but, somehow, not the real thing. Then there was a reason to think things might work out as planned.

Now there is only: GameStonk!!  

---

<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hayek-and-einstein>

Chasing down an intellectual rabbit hole at Wednesday lunchtime...

I was browsing through Friedrich von Hayek's The Fatal Conceit—although it is not clear to me how much of this very late (1988) Hayek is Hayek, and how much is “editor” William Warren Bartley. Why? Because Hayek is playing a larger part in my history of the Long 20th Century, Slouching Towards Utopia?, as it moves toward finality, and I am concerned that I be fair to him. And I ran across his claim that the “socialists” felt:

an urgent need to construct a new, rationally revised and justified morality which… will not be a crippling burden, be alienating, oppressive, or`unjust', or be associated with trade. Moreover, this is only part of the great task that these new lawgivers—socialists such as Einstein, Monod and Russell, and self-proclaimed 'immoralists' such as Keynes—set for themselves. A new rational language and law must be constructed too, for existing language and law also fail to meet these requirements…. This awesome task may seem the more urgent to them in that they themselves no longer believe in any supernatural sanction for morality (let alone for language, law, and science) and yet remain convinced that some justification is necessary….

The aim of socialism is no less than to effect a complete redesigning of our traditional morals, law, and language, and on this basis to stamp out the old order and the supposedly inexorable, unjustifiable conditions that prevent the institution of reason, fulfilment, true freedom, and justice. The rationalist standards on which this whole argument, indeed this whole programme, rest, are however at best counsels of perfection and at worst the discredited rules of an ancient methodology which may have been incorporated into some of what is thought of as science, but which has nothing to do with real investigation…

Who are these Mephistophelean demons seeking to destroy human morality? Keynes, Russell, Monod, and… Einstein?

Let’s leave John Maynard Keynes to one side—even though the paragraph in his essay My Early Beliefs where Keynes calls himself an “immoralist” is, in context, a declaration that when he was young he was foolish, that he is not yet fully wise, and that as a result people regard him with justified suspicion as someone who is “not aware that civilization was a precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rule and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved…” Anybody who makes this and claims that Keynes boasted that he was—and saw himself as—an “immoralist” a la André Gide is not in the business of informing but of misleading you.

Let’s leave Bertrand Russell to one side (even though there was nobody more skeptical of idealist thinkers suffering from “the fatal conceit”, and nobody more willing to seek truth from facts.)

But let’s focus for a moment on Jacques Monod. What seems to have incited Hayek’s (or Bartley’s) ire? It is Monod’s short book Chance and Necessity. For Monod, we—indeed, all life—are completely and purely the result of chance and necessity working together, through the process of variation and evolution by natural selection. And what is a choice or a chance decision at one level—the cell can choose to admit or not admit a virus, the antibody can choose to grab onto and tag the virus or let the virus pass by—is at a lower level the result of necessity as the molecules do or do not fit together so that the key can turn the lock or not.

Science, Monod says, has taught us this, and in so teaching has “outrage[d] values… subvert[ed] every one of the mythical or philosophical ontogenies upon which the animist tradition, from the Australian aborigines to the dialectical materialists, has made all ethics rest: values, duties, rights, prohibitions…” Monod’s belief is that as the scientific pursuit of knowledge has brought us to this wisdom, we should response by wisely taking the further advance of scientific knowledge as our ethical touchstone, and accept that our purpose is—we are made—to be Francis Bacon’s Salomon’s House, for which “the end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible…”

Now I would have thought that Monod’s ideas would have been attractive to the Hayek who sees the people’s god as “just a personification of that tradition of morals or values that keeps their community alive”.

So I cannot but believe that Hayek’s (or Bartley’s) real beef with Monod is that he says what are supposed to be the quiet parts too loudly—that it is good for other people to believe that their god is more than just a personification of their moral tradition.

And then we come to… Einstein.

Einstein?

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is not opinion or doctrine, but fact: When you measure the clocks and yardsticks of others who are moving rapidly relative to yourself, you do measure that their clocks tick more slowly than yours and their yardsticks are contracted in the direction of motion and so measure smaller distances than yours. That is simply a fact. GPS satellites are so programmed that if that were not a fact, they would not work.

Why this animus against Einstein? It is true that he did say that socialism was a necessity, and did say something like: “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” But how does that translate into Einstein being a crusader “to effect a complete redesigning of our traditional morals, law, and language”?

Am I wrong in misreading this as, at base, simply Hayek viewing a prominent Jew (pretty much any prominent Jew) as an Enemy of the People (George Soros today, anyone?)?

In the same era as The Fatal Conceit was published, you could read the right-wing American Spectator stating as fact that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was simply an enormous conspiratorial con game played against the righteous and the conservative, and that ‘the constancy of the speed of light, irrespective of the observer's movement, has not been demonstrated experimentally”. Never mind that that constancy was what had been tested and demonstrated in the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment that the American Spectator had just referred to on the previous page.

And you could read stated as fact that even though all professional physicists know that Relativity Theory is false, for the most part they “shrug and accept relativity theory—theirs is not to quarrel with the sainted genius of the twentieth century”, while:

among intellectuals in general, the theory has been much admired: so abstruse, so deliciously disrespectful of the eternal verities, so marvelously baffling to the bourgeoisie. It doesn't interfere with the daily routine, makes no practical difference to the Newtonian world. But it does upset its theoretical underpinnings. Wonderful!”

<https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/bethel-einstein-i.pdf>

<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/wh-auden-spain>

Written just before WWII, during the Spanish Civil War...

There seems to be no fundamental reason to do so. But it does seem that there may be community-discovery and network reasons to do so. So yesterday I threw a bunch of things up at SubStack: http://braddelong.substack.com:

• Taking þe Temperature of Twitter: 2021-01-27 We: Twitter has always been absolute s--- at aggregation tools. & that is one of the things that makes it so effective at keeping people inside its walled garden. Aggregation tools allow you to step back, evaluate, and assess. So I am going to see if I can use SubStack to try to do that. I always see myself on Twitter as a pig digging for truffles. Here’s what I have found… LINK: https://braddelong.substack.com/p/taking-e-temperature-of-twitter-2021-ae4

• Briefly Noted: 2021-01-27 We: What I have been reading this morning that has arrested me, and made me think. This may be one use I make of my substack as I try to figure out what this platform is useful for. Let me start with things that whizzed by, and follow with some long-paragraph chunks that I think are very worth reading, and that I noted this morning.... Very Briefly Noted: Jen Sorensen: For January 26, 2021: GoComics: Freedom LINK. William H. Shrank, Nancy-Ann DeParle, Scott Gottlieb, Sachin H. Jain, Peter Orszag, Brian W. Powers, and Gail R. Wilensky: Health Costs & Financing: Challenges & Strategies For A New Administration | Health Affairs: ‘The HHS secretary should… work… with Congress to decrease the age of Medicare eligibility to fifty-five… LINK…

• Hayek & Einstein...: Chasing down an intellectual rabbit hole at Wednesday lunchtime... I was browsing through Friedrich von Hayek.... Why? Because Hayek is playing a larger part in my history of the Long 20th Century, Slouching Towards Utopia, as it moves toward finality, and I am concerned that I be fair to him. And I ran across his claim that the “socialists” felt: "an urgent need to construct a new, rationally revised and justified morality which… will not be a crippling burden, be alienating, oppressive, or 'unjust', or be associated with trade. Moreover, this is only part of the great task that these new lawgivers—socialists such as Einstein… LINK

• Written just before WWII, during the Spanish Civil War...: W.H. Auden (1937): Spain: 'The stars are dead. The animals will not look./We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and/History to the defeated/May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon... LINK

Plus:

• Fascism: This is the current draft of chapter 11 of my Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long 20th Century 1870-2016. This is the chapter of the book that I am currently having the most trouble with. So advice & comments are very seriously genuinely welcomed, & badly needed… LINK: https://braddelong.substack.com/p/fascism

Relatively, that is. Compared to the raging dumpster fire before:

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Take a Look at:

Three short thinking pieces on what Biden is doing/should do:

 

Eric Levitz: Biden’s Inaugural Address: ‘Biden’s speech was riddled with contradictions. He called for unity (against everything the GOP stands for), and decried extremism (while demanding “bold” action on climate and racial justice). How he resolves these tensions will define his presidency <LINK>

 

Ezra Klein: Joe Biden & Democrats Must Help People Fast: ‘Among the many tributaries flowing into Trumpism, one in particular has gone dangerously overlooked. In their book “Presidents, Populism and the Crisis of Democracy,” the political scientists William Howell and Terry Moe write that “populists don’t just feed on socioeconomic discontent. They feed on ineffective government—and their great appeal is that they claim to replace it with a government that is effective through their own autocratic power”… <LINK>

 

Ed Luce: Joe Biden Embraces His Inner Radical to Confront Winter Of Peril: ‘America’s… most consequential presidents—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and FDR—were all leaders of moderate temperament. Their skill was to bring others along…. Biden… spelt out the way… to advance his agenda…. Civility. At another time, such boilerplate language might prompt narcolepsy…. But… Biden’s hand of friendship is also a weapon…. No significant Republican[s]… wav[ing] Mr Trump off from the White House or Andrews Air Force Base speaks volumes…. Biden sketched out the “winter of peril and significant possibility” that is facing America. In practice, Mr Biden’s first 100 days could prove to be very interesting indeed… <LINK>

 

 

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One thing you should think about studying this spring. Why? Because the subfield of economic development has gotten unbalanced, so that these days it tells us a lot about micro-behavioral parameters and relatively little about, well, economic development. STEG is trying to offer people tools to think about this:

STEG: Key Concepts in Macro Development: ‘Why? Macro development is a small field. Textbooks are unavailable, and while many graduate programs teach some of these concepts in their courses, very few have a specific course organised around and dedicated to macro development. This virtual course will fill the gap for Ph.D. students or even junior faculty throughout the profession who are interested in these topics but do not have access otherwise. The virtual classes will be interactive, just as virtual graduate lectures in most departments are now… <LINK>

Plus:

We have no idea whether the person writing this was serious. We have little idea how many people believe that it is, or might be, true:

 
 
1  

Tom Snyder: The American Abyss https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html: ‘When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around.... Social media... supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true…

Haley Bird Wilt: The Consequences of Lying to People https://uphill.thedispatch.com/p/the-consequences-of-lying-to-people: ‘Republican lawmakers misled millions of people into believing the results of a legitimate election could be overturned. Many of them viewed contesting the outcome as a relatively easy way to gain political currency among Trump supporters, knowing all the while that their efforts would have no real impact on who will be sworn into office in two weeks. The deception—primarily led by Trump, yet enabled by members of Congress—set the stage for the violence that unfolded at the Capitol Wednesday. Four people died.... The normally dry procedural affair of counting of the Electoral College votes was viewed by everyday Republicans and zealots alike as the place to make a final stand to overturn the election—even though elected Republicans knew the outcome would ultimately remain unchanged. As my colleague Jonah writes this morning, “Convincing people they need to prevent a coup when no such coup exists is a recipe for violence.” This was the energy that fueled the horde on Wednesday…

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BRIEFLY NOTED:

Joshua Gans: B.1.1.7 https://joshuagans.substack.com/p/b117: ‘B.1.1.7 has an advantage over older variants in infecting people when the mitigation strategies are in place. In other words, it is getting around them.... My guess is that the new variant can obtain more cases in certain settings—like workplaces that previously were able to keep transmission low—and then people carry the new variant home where fewer mitigations are in place and transmission occurs more easily there.... That means that the fight against B.1.1.7 requires the places that have been the most vigilant need more action. It is hard to know what that is.... The other option—and I will continue to beat this still live horse here—is ramping up testing…

Nora Caplan-Bricker: An Overlooked Novel from 1935 by the Godmother of Feminist Detective Fiction https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/an-overlooked-novel-from-1935-by-the-godmother-of-feminist-detective-fiction: ‘A new group biography establishes Dorothy L. Sayers’s “Gaudy Night” as a forerunner of works by Gillian Flynn and Tana French…

Annalee Newitz: What Ancient Roman Hospitality Workers Can Teach Us About This Moment in History https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/what-ancient-roman-hospitality-workers…

Ben Sasse https://uphill.thedispatch.com/p/biden-cabinet-inauguration-gop-future: ‘Many party leaders and consultants thought they could preach the Constitution while winking at QAnon. They can’t. The GOP must reject conspiracy theories or be consumed by them. Now is the time to decide what this party is about…

McKay Coppins https://uphill.thedispatch.com/p/biden-cabinet-inauguration-gop-future: ‘People who spent years coddling the president will recast themselves as voices of conscience, or whitewash their relationship with Trump altogether. Policy makers who abandoned their dedication to ‘fiscal responsibility’ and ‘limited government’ will rediscover a passion for these timeless conservative principles. Some may dress up their revisionism in the rhetoric of ‘healing’ and ‘moving forward,’ but the strategy will be clear—to escape accountability by taking advantage of America’s notoriously short political memory...

Acropolis Museum: Digital Museum https://www.theacropolismuseum.gr/en/digital-museum: ‘The Acropolis Museum enters dynamically into the world of digital technology and opens new channels of communication with the public. The large number of applications that were developed under the programme “Creation of the Digital Acropolis Museum” showcases the multiple aspects of its exhibits, offers unique experiences in its galleries and creates a new, exciting world for kids and grownups alike. At the same time its new website captures in a contemporary way the Museum’s function and activities, provides multidimensional orientation and entertainment, renders all its collections open and accessible to the international community and forms an attractive environment, designed specifically for children…

Kiona Smith: This Is How Hominins Adapted to a Changing World 2 Million Years Ago https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/01/this-is-how-hominins-adapted-to-a-changing-world-2-million-years-ago/: ‘Jacks of all trades: And even if the earliest hunters and gatherers at Ewass Oldupa would have found later versions of the place totally alien, they would still have recognized the tools people used to survive it. For roughly 200,000 years, hominins relied on the same basic tools to tackle the bracken meadows beside the river, the patchwork of woods and grassland, the lush lakeshore, and the dry steppe. The chopping, scraping, and pounding tools of the Olduwan were relatively simple, but they were also incredibly versatile. According to Petraglia and his colleagues, Olduwan technology offered a basic, general toolkit that worked as well in a lakeside palm grove as it did on a dry steppe. Humans took over the world because we’re generalists, and generalists can adapt to nearly anything. Our early relatives clearly had the same advantage…

Sam Arbesman: Reinventing Book Publishing in the Tech World https://arbesman.substack.com/p/-reinventing-publishing-in-the-tech: ‘attempts to constantly reexamine and reinvent the democratization, distribution, and furthering of knowledge should be watched closely (and please let me know of other examples you are aware of!). For ultimately, publishers are catalysts of world-changing ideas…

John Maynard Keynes (1942): How Much Does Finance Matter https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-keynes-finance-matter.pdf...

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Governor Schwarzenegger's Message Following This Week's Attack on the Capitol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_P-0I6sAck&feature=youtu.be...

40 minutes: JaydenX: Shooting and Storming Of The US Capitol In Washington DC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfiS8MsfSF4&bpctr=1610381708…

Gerard Baker (2020-11-16): Four Seasons Total Landscaping Isn’t Exactly the Reichstag https://www.wsj.com/articles/four-seasons-total-landscaping-isnt-exactly-the-reichstag-11605545752: ‘Trump’s shambolic vote challenges provoke cries of “coup” and the usual comparisons to Hitler…

Substack CEO Chris Best https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRJUNF5tHG4…

Model Economic History Papers https://delong.typepad.com/teaching_economics/model-economic-history-papers.html…

Congressional Record 2021-01-06 https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/congressional-record-2021-01-06.pdf...

K. N. Chaudhuri (1968): International Economy in the Nineteenth Century: An Historical Survey https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-chaudhuri-india-1800s.pdf...

Economic History Society: The Long Run https://ehsthelongrun.net/…

John Maynard Keynes (1924): A Tract on Monetary Reform https://delong.typepad.com/keynes-1923-a-tract-on-monetary-reform.pdf...

Colonial Williamsburg: Men’s Dress in the 1770s https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2875778182533255

Graydon: COVID Evolving: Comment https://www.bradford-delong.com/2021/01/briefly-noted-for-2021-01-11.html?cid=6a00e551f080038834026bdeb50696200c#comment-6a00e551f080038834026bdeb50696200c: ‘SARS-CoV-2 derives from a bat disease. Bats are weird; bats, unlike nearly all other mammals, have two body temperatures. There's the high, active, flapping around body temperature and the low, resting/estivating, don't starve to death until you can feed again, hanging-upside-down-in-a-cave body temperature...

<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-for-2021-01-11> I feel uneasy today, as most of this is outside my wheelhouse. But, for what it is worth, here is what I have found most worthwhile over the weekend...

Must-Read:

Bernie Sanders: Why Impeach Now? @BernieSanders: Some people ask: Why would you impeach and convict a president who has only a few days left in office? The answer: Precedent. It must be made clear that no president, now or in the future, can lead an insurrection against the U.S. government...

Ian Millhiser: Minority Rule @imillhiser: When Warnock and Ossoff are seated, Democrats and Republicans will each control half of the seats in the Senate. But the Democratic half will represent 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.  America’s anti-democratic Senate, in one number41,549,808...

 

Joshua Gans: B.1.1.7 <https://joshuagans.substack.com/p/b117>: ‘B.1.1.7 has an advantage over older variants in infecting people when the mitigation strategies are in place. In other words, it is getting around them.... My guess is that the new variant can obtain more cases in certain settings—like workplaces that previously were able to keep transmission low—and then people carry the new variant home where fewer mitigations are in place and transmission occurs more easily there.... That means that the fight against B.1.1.7 requires the places that have been the most vigilant need more action. It is hard to know what that is.... The other option—and I will continue to beat this still live horse here—is ramping up testing…

Tom Snyder: The American Abyss <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html> : ‘When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around.... Social media... supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true…

====

Should-Read: My (Possibly Uninformed) Reflections on the Coup

DeLongTODAY: Why Storm the Capitol Building & Then Do Nothing But Take Selfies?2021-01-08

Bernie Sanders: Why Impeach Now? https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1347625769242140675: ‘Some people ask: Why would you impeach and convict a president who has only a few days left in office? The answer: Precedent. It must be made clear that no president, now or in the future, can lead an insurrection against the U.S. government…

Ian Millhiser: Minority Rule https://twitter.com/imillhiser/status/1346834407626334209 ‘When Warnock and Ossoff are seated, Democrats and Republicans will each control half of the seats in the Senate. But the Democratic half will represent 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half…

====

BRIEFLY NOTED:

Edward Luce: America’s Dangerous Reliance on the Fed <https://www.ft.com/content/bcb8d4d9-ca6d-45b7-aafc-9e9ecf672a5b>: ‘Alas, the chances are that the Fed will remain “the only game in town”. This would be both a missed opportunity and pose a severe danger. The opportunity is for the US government to borrow long term funds at near zero rates and invest it in productive capacity. The danger of not doing that can be expressed in a simple equation: QE — F = P. Quantitative easing minus fiscal action equals populism…

Wikipedia: Metanarrative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanarrative: ‘In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), Lyotard highlights the increasing skepticism of the postmodern condition toward the totalizing nature of metanarratives and their reliance on some form of "transcendent and universal truth": “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.... The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language…. Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?…” Lyotard and other poststructuralist thinkers (like Foucault) view this as a broadly positive development… grand theories tend to unduly dismiss the naturally existing chaos and disorder of the universe…. Postmodernists attempt to replace metanarratives by focusing on specific local contexts as well as on the diversity of human experience. They argue for the existence of a "multiplicity of theoretical standpoints" rather than for grand, all-encompassing theories.… Postmodern narratives will often deliberately disturb the formulaic expectations.… Others have related metanarratives to masterplots, “recurrent skeletal stories, belonging to cultures and individuals that play a powerful role in questions of identity, values, and the understanding of life”…

Simon Schama: Donald Trump’s Weaponised Lies Blew Up in His Face https://www.ft.com/content/6cde0715-5506-4c09-a804-538031a667d9: ‘The violent attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the electoral result should be seen in the context of Mr Trump's (not baseless) belief that a sizeable part of the country cares less about the constitution than it does about him. Wednesday saw the most dramatic consummation of what has always been standard operational procedure for Trumpism: the wink to violence and the empire of lies. His 2016 campaign regularly featured invitations to rough up the media…

Salvatore Cerchio & al.: A New Blue Whale Song-Type Described for the Arabian Sea & Western Indian Ocean https://www.int-res.com/prepress/n01096.html: ‘Blue whales in the Indian Ocean… 2 or 3 subspecies… 4 populations, each with a diagnostic song-type. Here we describe a previously unreported song-type that implies the probable existence of a population that has been undetected or conflated…. We label it the ‘Northwest Indian Ocean’ song-type.… Moreover, the potentially restricted range, intensive historic whaling, and the fact that the song-type has been previously undetected, suggests a small population that is in critical need of status assessment and conservation action…

J. A. M. de Sanchez: Stabilizing the Franc https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/france/1928-10-01/stabilizing-franc: ‘Thus almost exactly twenty-three months after accepting the portfolio of Minister of Finance, M. Poincaré brought to a conclusion the task of fiscal reform which he had set himself. If M. Poincaré's achievements in his first year were remarkable,[i] those in his second have been no less so. Not only have the measures which were adopted in 1926-1927 continued to be strictly enforced, but new ones have been sought and applied which have resulted in a further strengthening of the credit structure of the State proper and of the national economy as a whole. So careful and complete were the preparations for de jure stabilization of the franc that the event itself was received in France almost phlegmatically…

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Budget Act of 1974 https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-RIDDICK-1992/pdf/GPO-RIDDICK-1992-34.pdf…

Robert Keith (2009): The Budget Reconciliation Process: The Senate’s “Byrd Rule” https://budgetcounsel.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/crs-the-budget-reconciliation-process-the-senate_s-e2809cbyrd-rulee2809d-bob-keith-rl30862-july-8-2009.pdf…

Unemployment Rate: 1890-2009 https://origins.osu.edu/sites/origins.osu.edu/files/4-3-chart1487_0.jpg…

Wikipedia: Republic of Artsakh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Artsakh#Current_situation…

Gaston Jéze: The Economic and Financial Position of France in 1920 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1883886.pdf…

Historical Currency Converter https://www.historicalstatistics.org/Currencyconverter.html…

Lwatts: Parler Free Speech Social Network https://parler.com/search?hashtag=trump: ‘Everyone needs to understand my President: Plays 3 layer chess! What did Trump do?????… He said walk down 1600 he didn't know the ANITIFA HIRED BY PENCE WAS THERE, HE NEW THE SUPPORTERS were fine!!!! It was the left that jumped first!!!!! Yall killed a VET,,, A HERO" HOW DARE YOU ALL..... Yeah if I f—- up this bad I would be on every TV channel trying to lie your asses off... #millionmagamarch #supremecourt #voterfraud #MEME #PARLER #PARLERUSA #USA #QANON #MAGA #trump2020 #trump #patriots #StopTheSteal #tuckercarlson #tucker #sidneypowell #kag #2020elect

Karl Marx: Theories of Surplus-Value, Chapter 17 Mhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch17.htm>: 'The Childish Babble of a Say...

Wikipedia: Quarrel of the Ancients & the Moderns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarrel_of_the_Ancients_and_the_Moderns...

Karl Marx (1867): Capital: Primitive Accumulation https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm...

==========

Erik Hornung: Immigration and the Diffusion of Technology: The Huguenot Diaspora in Prussia https://funginstitute.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/HornungDiaspora20141.pdf: ‘In 1685, religiously persecuted French Huguenots settled in Brandenburg-Prussia and compensated for population losses due to plagues during the Thirty Years’ War. We combine Huguenot immigration lists from 1700 with Prussian firm-level data on the value of inputs and outputs in 1802 in a unique database to analyze the effects of skilled immigration to places with underused economic potential. Exploiting this settlement pattern in an instrumental-variable approach, we find substantial long-term effects of Huguenot settlement on the productivity of textile manufactories…

The bureaucratic deglobalization blowback from Brexit has begun, making a poorer, weaker, littler England: Dutch Bike Bits: Shipping: Brexit https://www.dutchbikebits.com/shipping: ‘Unfortunately, we will not be able to send parcels to the UK from mid December 2020 onward. Quite apart from uncertainty surrounding the shipping cost, taxation etc. after that time, there is also a problem caused by the British government deciding to impose a unique taxation regime which will require every company in the world in every country in the world outside the UK which exports to the UK to apply and collect British taxes on behalf of the British government. For providing this service they intend to charge a fee to every company in the world in every country in the world which exports to the UK. Clearly this is ludicrous for one country, but imagine if every country in the world had the same idea. If every country decided to behave in the same way then we would have to pay 195 fees every year, keep up with the changes in taxation law for 195 different countries, keep accounts on behalf of 195 different countries and submit payments to 195 tax offices in 195 different countries, and jump through whatever hoops were required to prove that we were doing all of this honestly and without any error. Therefore from mid December 2020 onward we ship to every country in the world... except the UK…

Trump. But not smart. Can this really be the bottom line on Brazil’s Bolsonaro?: Gideon Rachman: Jair Bolsonaro’s Populism Is Leading Brazil to Disaster https://www.ft.com/content/c39fadfe-9e60-11ea-b65d-489c67b0d85d: 'I had a chat with a prominent financier about the parallels between Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. “They are very similar,” she said, before adding: “But Bolsonaro is much stupider.” This answer took me aback since the US president is not generally regarded as a towering intellect. But my banker friend was insistent. “Look,” she said. “Trump has run a major business. Bolsonaro never made it above captain in the army.”... The coronavirus pandemic has reminded me of that observation national unity will not emerge while Mr Bolsonaro is president. In classic populist fashion he thrives on the politics of division. Brazil is already a deeply polarised country, where conspiracy theories are rife. The deaths and unemployment caused by Covid-19 are exacerbated by Mr Bolsonaro’s leadership. But, perversely, a health and economic disaster could create an even more hospitable environment for the politics of fear and unreason…

John McLaren & Su Wang: Effects of Reduced Workplace Presence on COVID-19 Deaths: An Instrumental-Variables Approach https://www.nber.org/papers/w28275: ‘Numerous government policies have attempted to keep workers out of the workplace, on the assumption that this will lower transmission of COVID-19. We test that assumption, measuring the effect of aggregate workplace absence on US COVID deaths at the county level through August. Instrumenting with an index of how many local workers pre-pandemic can work from home, based on differences in county occupational mix, we find no effect of workplace absence until mid-May, then a sharply rising effect. By August, moving 10 percent of a county's workers from the workplace would lower deaths there by three quarters one month later…

Wikipedia: Axial Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age: ‘Axial Age... is a term coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers in the sense of a "pivotal age", characterizing the period of ancient history from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE. During this period, according to Jaspers' concept, new ways of thinking appeared in Persia, India, China and the Greco-Roman world in religion and philosophy, in a striking parallel development, without any obvious direct cultural contact between all of the participating Eurasian cultures. Jaspers identified key thinkers from this age who had a profound influence on future philosophies and religions, and identified characteristics common to each area from which those thinkers emerged…

Substack Blog: Substack Welcomes The Dispatch, a New Type of Media Company https://blog.substack.com/p/substack-welcomes-the-dispatch-a: ‘We’ve long believed that people don’t really subscribe to “content”—they subscribe to voices they trust. This collaboration represents what that “subscribe to a person” model might look like when pushed a step further, and it gives us an opportunity to further explore how groups of writers can work together on Substack. We’re also pleased to support The Dispatch’s mission of trying to create a space for discourse that doesn’t have to play by the rules of the attention economy. In their mission statement, Hayes and Goldberg write: "We think the clickbait model is an anathema to serious discourse. We also believe it is a blight to the eye and a disturbance of the mental peace. So we are rejecting the advertising that makes clickbait seem so necessary. It might seem oxymoronic in the current climate, but we want as many readers as possible, but we do not care a whit about traffic." We believe this reader-first approach to publishing is a smart one for the news industry, and we hope others will see it as a model to follow…

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Martin Wolf: The Fading Light of Liberal Democracy https://www.ft.com/content/47144c85-519a-4e25-9035-c5f8977cf6fd: ‘The election of Joe Biden as US president is a relief. But this story is not yet over.... Branko Milanovic.... Capitalist economies go with two distinct political systems in leading economies: the “liberal” model of the US and its allies, which is the concern of Messrs Garton Ash and Diamond, and China’s “political” model...

...Mr Milanovic argues correctly that liberal democracy is a good in itself and also allows peaceful self-correction. People do desire freedom and US voters have disposed of Donald Trump. The Chinese cannot do the same with Premier Xi Jinping.... A third political version of capitalism exists: demagogic authoritarian capitalism.... The ruler is above the law and democratically unaccountable—elections are a sham. But power is personal, not institutionalised. This is corrupt gangster politics. It rests on the personal loyalty of sycophants and cronies. Often the core consists of the family members, viewed as most trustworthy of all. This is the political system Mr Trump wished to install in the US. Such rulers are like wasp larvae that eat the spider from within. They manage to win an election and then erode the institutional and political bulwarks against indefinite personal rule....

Events in the US have shown two crucial things. First, core American institutions including the courts have resisted.... Second, a huge proportion of the Republican party has abetted his lie that the election was rigged. This has underlined another reality of the past four years: the Republican leadership showed absolute obedience to their leader, almost to the last gasp. This is no accident. It is the logical outcome of the political and economic strategy of the “pluto-populist”. Mr Trump is a natural outcome of the strategic goal of the donor class—tax cuts and deregulation. To achieve this end, they have to convince a large proportion of the population to vote against its economic interests by focusing on culture and identity. This strategy has worked and will continue to work: Mr Trump may have gone; Trumpism has not. Not entirely dissimilar patterns can be seen in Brexit Britain....

None of today’s dominant systems is working well. Capitalism is innovative, but creates huge social, political and environmental challenges. Liberal democracy is corroded, even at its core. But the authoritarian politics that challenge it are vastly worse. Unaccountable rule by gangsters or brutal bureaucrats is deeply depressing, even if the latter are much less incompetent. Those of us who continue to believe in freedom and democracy hope Mr Trump was the warning we all needed. But I doubt it. There is none so blind as rich egotists who will not see…

David French: Debunking the Frivolous & Dangerous Last-Gasp Effort to Overturn the Election https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/debunking-the-frivolous-and-dangerous-8a0: ‘One of the most dispiriting aspects of a dispiriting year has been watching the supremely cynical post-election contest by conservative lawyers and conservative politicians who know exactly what they’re doing. Intimidated by Trump and desperate for the approval of Trump’s base, they have lent their own gravitas to utterly frivolous arguments, used their platforms to falsely whip up public concerns about election integrity, and then used the concerns they helped create as the justification for continuing a fruitless fight. I could point to any number of public figures, but let’s focus for a moment on two—Sen. Josh Hawley and talk radio host Mark Levin...

..."Issues of mere administration of a general election do not mean there has not been a 'general ballot' at a 'general election.' Plaintiff’s conflation of these potential nonconformities with Constitutional violations is contrary to the plain meaning of the Electors Clause. If plaintiff’s reading of 'Manner' was correct, any disappointed loser in a Presidential election, able to hire a team of clever lawyers, could flag claimed deviations from the election rules and cast doubt on the election results. This would risk turning every Presidential election into a federal court lawsuit over the Electors Clause.")... The time to challenge election procedures is well before the election, not after. In fact, this is a matter of basic election precedent. “Before a court can contemplate entering a judgment that would void election results,” Judge Scudder wrote, “it ‘must consider whether the plaintiffs filed a timely pre-election request for relief.”...

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals isn’t the ultimate authority on Wisconsin law... neither is the junior senator from Missouri. But he knows this. So does Mark Levin. It must be emphasized that both of these men are smart, capable lawyers. And while they may be drinking so much of their own Kool-Aid that they’re now believing their own nonsense, I doubt it. And if they do believe their own nonsense, their lapse in judgment is inexcusable....

Ben Sasse.... "When we talk in private, I haven’t heard a single Congressional Republican allege that the election results were fraudulent—not one. Instead, I hear them talk about their worries about how they will 'look' to President Trump’s most ardent supporters."... We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage. But they’re wrong–and this issue is bigger than anyone’s personal ambitions. Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government…

Gianna Marciarille: Facebook https://www.facebook.com/: Gianna Marciarille is with Michael DeLong. Just now: 'My literal big brother talking about big brother:

Over at Substack: Why Storm the Capitol Building & Then Do Nothing But Take Selfies? https://braddelong.substack.com/p/why-storm-the-capitol-building-and: What did the people who stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021 think what’s going to happen?

Let us look at what happened at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue before the insurrection. At the beginning of Donald Trump speech, he tells his audience that they are the overwhelming majority of America, and that the corrupt media are trying to hide that fact:

Donald Trump: Speech “Save America” Rally Transcript January 6: 'The media will not show the magnitude of this crowd. Even I, when I turned on today, I looked, and I saw thousands of people here, but you don’t see hundreds of thousands of people behind you because they don’t want to show that...

Time to de-escalate and read and watch something totally unrelated to bad political actors destroying norms of republican political conduct in an attempt to further entrench a plutocracy: Plutarch: Life of Tiberius Gracchus http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Tiberius_Gracchus*.html…

Perhaps the second best romance novel I have ever read. Not at all bad as a mystery either: Dorothy Leigh Sayers: Gaudy Night https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQiVYVBRO7U…

I am happy not getting 3/4 of the illusions that Dorothy L. Sayers makes to history and literature. But if you are not, this is essential: Bill Peschel: Annotations to Gaudy Night https://planetpeschel.com/the-wimsey-annotations/gaudy-night/…

Heron of Alexandria was a BOSS: Jeremy Norman: Automata Invented by Heron of Alexandria https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=10

I do know not whether I should be amazed at how much or depressed at how little computing can be done without semiconductors: Wikipedia: Mechanical Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_computer#Examples…

The start of the positive utopian apocalyptic mode in "western literature": Isaiah: 10-11 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+10&version=KJV...

Continuing the positive utopian apocalyptic mode in "western literature": Daniel: _7 & 12 HCSB https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Daniel%2012&version=HCSB...

Good for helping people to understand the place of Aristotle in the medieval and early-modern "western civilization" intellectual mind: Dante: Inferno https://www.danteinferno.info/translations/canto4.html: ‘…Canto 4-Compare Side by Side Translations by Longfellow, Cary, and Norton...

And what little the Spartans said: Plutarch: Apophthegmata Laconica http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Sayings_of_Spartans*/main.html...

Charlie Sykes: Trumpageddon https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/trumpageddon: ‘January 6: The Fire Rises: Chris Truax provides a preview for this remarkable day: "This effort to interfere with the Electoral College count is going to fail, but it has created a blueprint for the next time. The next aspiring authoritarian—and there will be one—will be smarter, smoother, and more organized. Today will be truly dangerous because it will demonstrate that under the current system, a party that controls both houses of Congress can install their candidate as president regardless of the election results. All they need is the political will to do so." Or to put it another way: All they need is to believe that overturning the election is what the majority of their base voters want…

Charlie Sykes: Trumpageddon https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/trumpageddon: ‘The GOP’s Georgia meltdown: First a confession: I thought the Republicans would hold both seats and was, frankly, stunned by last night’s results. So, apparently, was much of what’s left of the GOP. There’s no mystery about what happened: Donald Trump happened: Erick Erickson: "Very clear there's been voter suppression in Georgia. The Georgia Republican Party Chairman, the President of the United States, and the Georgia GOP congressional delegation are the culprits..." Based on the early numbers, Democratic turnout—especially among African Americans—was phenomenal. Republican turnout was meh..." Dave Wasserman: "It's tempting to put it this way: Perdue/Loeffler embrace of Trump in the runoff phase of #GASEN may have alienated suburban Biden/R (Nov.) ticket-splitters, and it's not clear it did as much to drive up turnout in deep red rural GA..." How bad is all for the GOP? On a scale of 0 to 10, Nate Silver tweeted this morning, it’s probably a 9 “not just because of the immediate implications, but also because it may imply that Trump is sort of a poison pill for how the party navigates its future.” The big question now is whether the GOP has learned any lessons from this debacle? Probably not: McKay Coppins: "Republicans lost the White House, the Senate, and stayed out of power in the House this cycle, and a sizable faction of the party will continue to argue that the solution is 'More Trump'…

BRIEFLY NOTED:

Mary Boykin Chesnut: Mary Chesnut's Civil War https://archive.org/details/marychesnutscivi0000ches_c1c9/page/36/mode/2up…

Fournée Bakery: 2912 Domingo Ave https://www.fourneebakery.com/new-page: ‘Berkeley, CA, 94705… Tu-Sa 08:00-18:00 Su 08:00-15:00…

2005: The Lowest Deep on Hoxby-Rothstein https://web.archive.org/web/20050419010702/http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000735.html: ‘Rothstein makes a convincing case that Hoxby doesn't satisfy (3), if his definition of "small tweaks" is correct…

Rory Muir: Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune: How Younger Sons Made Their Way in Jane Austen's England https://www.amazon.com/Gentlemen-Uncertain-Fortune-Younger-Austens-ebook/dp/B07VZWG67Q/…

Peet's Coffee: Domingo https://locations.peets.com/ll/US/CA/Berkeley/2916-Domingo-Avenue: ‘2916 Domingo Avenue Berkeley, CA 94705 (510) 843-1434 :: Mo-Su 05:30-18:00...

Theodore Sturgeon: The World Well Lost https://bristolsf.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/the-world-well-lost.pdf…

Ver Brugge Foods https://www.facebook.com/vbfoods/: ‘Mo-Su 09:00-18:00…

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Chris Best & al.: Substack’s View of Content Moderation https://blog.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderation: ‘We favor civil liberties, believe in democracy, and are against authoritarianism of all kinds. We also hold a set of core beliefs that are reflected in every aspect of the company: We believe that subscriptions are better than advertising. We believe in letting people choose who to trust, not having click-maximizing algorithms choose for them. We believe that the prevailing media ecosystem is in disrepair and that the internet can be used to build something better. We believe that hosting a broad range of views is good for democracy. We believe in the free press and in free speech–and we do not believe those things can be decoupled.  These beliefs inform how we have designed Substack, which is why, for instance, we don’t support advertising in the product despite many calls to do so, and it’s why we will never use algorithms that optimize for engagement. However, we believe that our design of the product and the incentive structure we have built into it are the ultimate expression of our views. We do not seek to impose our views in the form of censorship or through appointing ourselves as the judges of truth or morality…

Paul Campos: If the Rule You Followed Has Brought You to This, of What Use Was the Rule? https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/12/if-the-rule-you-followed-has-brought-you-to-this-of-what-use-was-the-rule: ‘I was talking yesterday to a prominent person about potential steps that might be taken to deal with the fact that the president of the United States is a delusional autocrat, who has no intention of leaving office just because he lost an election he has apparently now sincerely—or “sincerely”—convinced himself he didn’t lose.... Trump and his enablers were, to use the relevant wrestling terminology, engaging in a “work” that was likely to morph into a “shoot” eventually. This does seems to have happened in Trump’s case specifically, with one result being that the vast majority of Republicans now believe that the election was in fact stolen.... Neither Trump nor much more important the tens of millions of Americans who now actually do believe the election was stolen are going anywhere for the foreseeable future.... The person I was speaking with... pitched the following idea to me: Trump should be impeached again, immediately.... Trump is still president, and what Trump has been doing to attempt to overturn and discredit the election makes him as much or more deserving of impeachment and removal as anything any president of the United States has ever done, including, remarkably enough, himself. So why not do it?... This will not, of course, “work” in the sense that Trump will be removed from office, but it will emphasize that what Trump has been doing for the past several weeks is or rather should be utterly beyond the pale.... What, my correspondent pressed me, is the argument against doing this? It’s a good question…

Réka Juhász, Mara P. Squicciarini, & Nico Voigtländer: Away from Home & Back: Coordinating (Remote) Workers in 1800 & 2020 https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28251/w28251.pdf: ‘This paper examines the future of remote work by drawing parallels between two contexts: The move from home to factory-based production during the Industrial Revolution and the shift to work from home today. Both are characterized by a similar trade-off: the potential productivity advantage of the new working arrangement made possible by technology (mechanization or ICT), versus organizational barriers such as coordinating workers. Using contemporary data, we show that organizational barriers seem to be present today. Without further technological or organizational innovations, remote work may not be here to stay just yet…

John Naughton: Control Shift: Why Newspaper Hacks Are Switching to Substack https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/26/control-shift-why-newspaper-hacks-are-switching-to-substack: ‘The biggest surprise, though, was how popular the audio diary was: it was consistently the most clicked-on link. And slowly, it dawned on me that audio seems to reach parts of the human psyche that other media cannot. Because the email was coming from a mailing-list server, some subscribers’ spam filters would occasionally block it, and on several occasions I received alarmed emails from readers who wondered if I had succumbed to Covid. But there was clearly something about the regularity of hearing a familiar voice every morning that was important. One reader used to play it during breakfast every morning; one day his wife observed that it was “like Thought for the Day but without the God stuff”. Recording it was quite hard work, and after 100 days I had to stop, as the demands of my day jobs began to ramp up, but the transcripts are now available as an e-book…

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Martin Wolf: Five Forces That Will Define Our Post-Covid Future https://www.ft.com/content/dd359338-6200-40d3-8427-901bad134e21: ‘First, technology. The march of computing and communications technology continues.... Now, broadband communications, together with Zoom and similar videoconferencing software, has made it possible for a huge number of people to work from home.... Inevitably, this will not only include workers in their home countries, but workers sourced from abroad, too, usually on lower salaries. The result is likely to be a destabilising increase in what might be called “virtual immigration”. Second, inequality. Many higher-paid office workers have been able to work from home, while most others could not.... The likelihood is that the inequalities exacerbated in the pandemic will not have reduced by 2025.... Third, indebtedness.... The pandemic has dramatically increased borrowing by private and public sectors.... Fortunately, government debt is now extremely cheap.... Fourth, deglobalisation. The plausible future is not that international exchange is going to die. But it is likely to become more regional and more virtual.... After the global financial crisis, trade ceased to grow faster than world output.... Covid-19 reinforced these trends. A marked result has been a desire to shift supply chains back home, or at least out of China.... Finally, political tensions... a decline in the credibility of liberal democracy, the rise of demagogic authoritarianism... the rising power of China’s bureaucratic despotism... the rise of populism in core western countries and especially the US. While the victory of Joseph Biden represents a defeat for populism, president Donald Trump’s large share of the vote shows it has not disappeared.... The biggest challenge will demand a global co-operation that will not exist. Sustaining a dynamic world economy, preserving peace and managing the global commons were always going to be hard. But an era of populism and great power conflict will make this far more difficult…