Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

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:

 
 
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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

<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…

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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…

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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...

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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:

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…

Wikipedia: Aelius Aristides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aelius_Aristides#cite_note-4…

Doris Groshen Daniels: Theodore Roosevelt and Gender Roles https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-groshen-roosevelt-gender.pdf: ‘…

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

Wikipedia: Dialogus de Oratoribus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogus_de_oratoribus: ‘A short work attributed to Tacitus, in dialogue form, on the art of rhetoric. Its date of composition is unknown, though its dedication to Lucius Fabius Justus places its publication around 102 AD…

Wikipedia: Rota Fortunae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rota_Fortunae#Origins…

Paul Campos: The Last Days of Donald https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/12/the-last-days-of-donald: ‘This report from Jonathan Swan reminds us that the presidency is still in the hands of a mentally ill aspiring despot who is decompensating quickly…

Wikipedia: New Atlantis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atlantis: ‘[Francis Bacon] portrayed a vision of the future of human discovery and knowledge. The plan and organisation of his ideal college, "Salomon's House", envisioned the modern research university in both applied and pure science. The end of their foundation is thus described: "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"…

Scott Lemieux: Our Grifter Problem https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/12/our-grifter-problem: ‘As you are hopefully unaware of, a bunch of Twitter/YouTube grifters on the broad anti-anti-Trump “left” are ginning up a hate campaign against AOC because she won’t go along with their incredibly dumb campaign to “force a vote” on M4A, a tactic which (as AOC points out) has zero chance of making the enactment of M4A or any roughly equivalent program more likely on any time horizon. As Eric Levitz explains, this is very bad.… The idea that structural barriers can be easily overcome by individual politicians who just want it badly enough—like politics is a bad sports movie—is incredibly pernicious…

James McGrath: Teaching Cyborg Students https://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2020/12/teaching-cyborg-students.html: ‘Rather than prohibiting students from using technology, we need to realize how many ways they already are that we take for granted, and how many they ought to be yet are not or at least are not doing so wisely, efficiently, or effectively. We need to design activities and assessments that teach them and then evaluate them on their ability to do the things we have always been trying to train them to do–write, read, research–in a manner that does not rely on technology to tell them whether they write well or how to format a reference, but teaches them what they need to know in order to create a bibliography using Word’s built-in function, discern which search results are relevant and credible, and whether the words they have strung together make good sense regardless whether their word processing software has things underlined or not. Currently they are like Joey Tribbiani using the thesaurus function writing a letter…

Bruce Gyory: How Biden Won: Six Hard Truths https://thebulwark.com/how-biden-won-six-hard-truths/: ‘Digging into the exit poll data on gender, education, age, and more.... 1. Women Won the Election for Biden. Women outvoted men—by 4 percent in the Edison data and 6 percent in the AP VoteCast survey—and rejected Donald Trump, denying him re-election. According to the AP VoteCast, Biden carried women by 55-44, while Trump carried men by 52-46.... 2. The ‘Education Gap’ and Its Link to Race and Sex.... White men without college degrees (19 percent of the total vote), gave Trump a landslide margin of 64-34, while white women without college degrees (24 percent of the total vote) gave Trump a large but lesser margin of 60-39.... Among non-white voters, by contrast, Biden won regardless of education status (or sex): among non-white non-college-educated men (7 percent of the vote), he won by 68-30.... 3. Location, Location, Location.... The suburbs cast 45-47 percent of the total vote in high-turnout elections and 48-50 percent of the electorate in low-turnout elections.... 4. The Young and the Faithful. Fourth, the youth vote helped Biden win, even as it did not expand its share of the total vote from 2016.... 5. The Real Enthusiasm Gap.... Among the 46 percent of voters who reported in the AP VoteCast survey that they “disapprove strongly” of President Trump, Biden won 97-1. On the flip side, meanwhile, the voters who said they “approve strongly” of Trump, who voted for him by 98-2, amounted to a much smaller 31 percent of the electorate.... 6. Big Turnout But No Big Shift to the Left.... The one thing Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could agree on was that the impact of Never Trump Republican initiatives—like Republican Voters Against Trump and the Lincoln Project—would be minimal. That assessment was flat-out wrong…

Garnet Wolseley (1862): The American Civil War: An English View https://books.google.com/books?id=Qu4nCB-cVoYC: ‘The slaves in large towns are inferior in moral character to those upon plantations; and amongst the former there is always a large admixture of white blood, which is very rare, indeed, amongst farm hands. In many, or I might say in most States, if a woman upon a plantation gives birth to a child of any but ebony hue, it is considered a sort of slur upon the owner of the estate; and she is usually sold to some city master as soon as the fact becomes known, in order, if possible, to hush up the scandal certain to arise in the neighbourhood from the circumstance. I have been informed by many planters that, as a rule, the negresses on estates are a moral class; and as their appearance is repulsive in the extreme, I can well understand there being so few half-caste children in neighbourhoods where the only white men are those of the better classes…

Mary Boykin Chesnut (1861): Mary Chesnut's Civil War https://books.google.com/books?id=WojvfHAX4lgC: ‘I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land. Men and women are punished when their masters and mistresses are brutes, not when they do wrong. Under slavery, we live surrounded by prostitutes, yet an abandoned woman is sent out of any decent house. Who thinks any worse of a Negro or mulatto woman for being a thing we can't name? God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds. My disgust sometimes is boiling over. Thank God for my country women, but alas for the men! They are probably no worse than men everywhere, but the lower their mistresses, the more degraded they must be...

Paul Campos: The Last Days of Donald https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/12/the-last-days-of-donald: ‘This report from Jonathan Swan reminds us that the presidency is still in the hands of a mentally ill aspiring despot who is decompensating quickly…

Wikipedia: New Atlantis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atlantis: ‘[Francis Bacon] portrayed a vision of the future of human discovery and knowledge. The plan and organisation of his ideal college, "Salomon's House", envisioned the modern research university in both applied and pure science. The end of their foundation is thus described: "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"…

Scott Lemieux: Our Grifter Problem https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/12/our-grifter-problem: ‘As you are hopefully unaware of, a bunch of Twitter/YouTube grifters on the broad anti-anti-Trump “left” are ginning up a hate campaign against AOC because she won’t go along with their incredibly dumb campaign to “force a vote” on M4A, a tactic which (as AOC points out) has zero chance of making the enactment of M4A or any roughly equivalent program more likely on any time horizon. As Eric Levitz explains, this is very bad.… The idea that structural barriers can be easily overcome by individual politicians who just want it badly enough—like politics is a bad sports movie—is incredibly pernicious…

James McGrath: Teaching Cyborg Students https://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2020/12/teaching-cyborg-students.html: ‘Rather than prohibiting students from using technology, we need to realize how many ways they already are that we take for granted, and how many they ought to be yet are not or at least are not doing so wisely, efficiently, or effectively. We need to design activities and assessments that teach them and then evaluate them on their ability to do the things we have always been trying to train them to do–write, read, research–in a manner that does not rely on technology to tell them whether they write well or how to format a reference, but teaches them what they need to know in order to create a bibliography using Word’s built-in function, discern which search results are relevant and credible, and whether the words they have strung together make good sense regardless whether their word processing software has things underlined or not. Currently they are like Joey Tribbiani using the thesaurus function writing a letter…

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…

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…

Matthew Yglesias: The Real Economic Challenge in 2021 https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-real-economic-challenge-in-2021: ‘Back in 2018, there were a lot of articles with headlines like “6 reasons that pay has lagged behind US job growth” and “7 reasons why wage growth is so slow.” In retrospect, this wasn’t that mysterious. The labor market recovery had simply been very slow and 2018 turned out to be a year of accelerating wage growth. Then in 2019, things accelerated further. But the existence of articles puzzling over slow pre-2018 wage growth underscores the dangers of a sluggish recovery. Not only does sluggishness directly reduce wages, it generates complicated explanations for the sluggishness which distract policy attention from the urgent need to simply keep on keeping on with job creation…

Duncan Black: The Good Doctor https://www.eschatonblog.com/2020/12/the-good-doctor.html: ‘Birx has had some pals in the media all along, desperate to keep her reputation intact, so this won't hurt at all: "WASHINGTON (AP) — As COVID-19 cases skyrocketed before the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus response, warned Americans to “be vigilant” and limit celebrations to “your immediate household.” For many Americans that guidance has been difficult to abide, including for Birx herself. The day after Thanksgiving, she traveled to one of her vacation properties on Fenwick Island in Delaware. She was accompanied by three generations of her family from two households. Birx, her husband Paige Reffe, a daughter, son-in-law and two young grandchildren were present..." Lives are complicated, but the people who rule us should at least try to pretend to set an example…

Tim Miller: This Is Your Brain on Newsmax https://thebulwark.com/this-is-your-brain-on-newsmax/: ‘I would guess with a high level of confidence that all of these gentlemen know that Donald Trump lost. Spicer said as much on November 5 before Newsmax realized just how much juice they could get out of the scam. Ruddy openly told the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner that he saw a business opportunity in providing wall-to-wall election fraud fanfic. What these characters are doing is exploiting Trump Nation’s need to believe that their great, nectarine idol is unbreakable and that the only way he could “lose” is if people whom they hate—the Deep State, Big Tech, Antifa, the media, black people—are conspiring against him. So here is the dangerous story they are being told—minute by agonizing minute: Monday, November 30, 11:20 a.m.—National Report: For reference, I am working from bed and live streaming Newsmax via the YouTube TV app. I am armed only with my computer and a pour over coffee in an Ellen Show mug. I’m bracing for pain. First up it’s Trump campaign lawyers, Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, together in what appears to be their fancy Washington, D.C. home (Drain the Swamp!). They are praising Jared Kushner’s Middle East genius. The first commercial I see is a Newsmax promo that has Donald Trump saying “Newsmax, you like Newsmax, I like it too” twice in 10 seconds. The next ad is Pat Boone pushing silver. I did not know that Pat Boone was still alive…

NASA: The ‘Great’ Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn https://www.nasa.gov/feature/the-great-conjunction-of-jupiter-and-saturn: ‘What makes this year’s spectacle so rare, then? It’s been nearly 400 years since the planets passed this close to each other in the sky, and nearly 800 years since the alignment of Saturn and Jupiter occurred at night…

Origins of the Drill Sergeant trope in western literature, and in history: William Shakespeare: Henry V, Act III, Scene 6 https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=henry5&Act=3&Scene=6&Scope=scene&LineHighlight=1554#1554...

Wikimedia Commons: File:Dishing-the-Whigs-1867.jpeg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dishing-the-Whigs-1867.jpeg…

Wikipedia: Anton Cermak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Cermak: ‘44th Mayor of Chicago. In office: April 7, 1931 – March 6, 1933…

Clarence Darrow: Darrow -The Story of My Life http://clarkcunningham.org/PR/Darrow-Strike.htm: ‘The Railroad Strike...

Luke A. L. Reynolds: Who Owned Waterloo? Wellington’s Veterans and the Battle for Relevance https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4392&context=gc_etds…

Jason Furman & Lawrence Summers: A Reconsideration of Fiscal Policy in the Era of Low Interest Rates https://www.piie.com/system/files/documents/furman-summers2020-12-01paper.pdf…

Aristotle_: Politics http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.1.one.html: ‘Book I…

Jules Verne & Michel Verne: In the Year 2889 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19362/19362-h/19362-h.htm…

Wikipedia: In the Year 2889 (Short Story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Year_2889_(short_story)…

Christine McCloud: How To Use A Shuttle On A Loom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O98vJ8VEF4: ‘How To Use A Shuttle On A Loom…

Anton Howes: Is Innovation in Human Nature? https://www.antonhowes.com/blog/is-innovation-in-human-nature: ‘John Kay’s flying shuttle... an improvement to the loom, which radically increased the productivity of weaving.... Weavers would lift every other warp thread and pass the shuttle from hand to hand, hence passing the weft under the warp threads that were lifted, and over the ones that were not lifted. Under and over, under and over. Kay’s innovation was to use two wooden boxes on either side to catch the shuttle. And he attached a string, with a little handle called a picker, so that the shuttle could be jerked across the loom, at great speed. Here’s a video of it in action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O98vJ8VEF4. Kay’s innovation was extraordinary in its simplicity. As the inventor Bennet Woodcroft put it, weaving with an ordinary shuttle had been “performed for upwards of five thousand years, by millions of skilled workmen, without any improvement being made to expedite the operation, until the year 1733”. All Kay added was some wood and some string. And he applied it to weaving wool, which had been England’s main industry since the middle ages. He had no special skill, he required no special understanding of science for it, and he faced no special incentive to do it…

Noah Smith: Why I'm so Excited About Solar & Batteries https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-im-so-excited-about-solar-and: ‘In the 19th century we switched to coal... in the 20th century we upgraded to oil.... After World War 2, a global extraction regime and price controls allowed us to keep cheap oil flowing. That ended with the Oil Shocks of the 70s. And though oil became cheaper again in the 80s and 90s, it never attained its former lows, or its low volatility. Then in the 00s it got expensive again.... We didn’t get anything better than oil during this time.... More expensive energy makes physical innovation harder in every way.... This stagnation in energy technology almost certainly contributed to the productivity slowdown of the 1970s.... Why didn’t bits fill the gap?... IT did drive the re-acceleration of productivity that began in the late 80s and continued through the early 00s.... But around 2005... that productivity growth faded.... Some have argued that digital services are substantially undervalued in our economic production statistics.... Physical technology is less “skill-biased” than IT, meaning that pretty much anyone can be a factory worker but only a few people can use computers productively and effectively... [or] IT simply touches less of our lives than energy does.... “Bits” innovation sometimes drives fast productivity growth, and sometimes doesn’t.… The cost declines in solar and batteries — and to a lesser extent, in wind and other storage technologies—comprise a true technological revolution.... And there’s no end in sight to this revolution. New fundamental advances like solid state lithium-ion batteries and next-generation solar cells seem within reach, which will kick off another virtuous cycle of deployment, learning curves, and cost decreases…

British Ambassador to Germany Eric Phipps looking back after two years at the extraordinary successes inside Germany and in the opinion of Germans of Hitler’s first two years—saving Germany from Versailles, from domination by the Allies, from the Great Depression, and from his own “gangsters” in the form of the SA:

Eric Phipps: Diary https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-phipps-diary.pdf 1935-04-01: ‘Over two years have now elapsed since the electorate of this country, stampeded by the Reichstag fire, voted for the abolition of the Parliamentary régime and the establishment of a National Socialist dictatorship...

During these two years, Adolf Hitler, without losing the loyalty of his old followers to any alarming extent, has won over the great mass of the Opposition to himself and his policy both internal and external. He has achieved this by accomplishing in the opinion of the masses not one but several miracles. In the first place, he has obtained work (or what amounts to work so far as the individual is concerned) for 3 million people. Secondly, he has torn up Part V of the Treaty of Versailles under the very noses of Germany’s former enemies. And thirdly, he has, as it were, liberated Germany from the clutches of his own National Socialist gangsters who threatened at one time to make life a purgatory for all but a privileged caste. The return to more normal conditions during the last six months has indeed been so rapid and so marked that the great bulk of Hitler’s one-time opponents are now, to say the least of it, reconciled to his rule if not to National Socialism.

Furthermore, it is now dawning upon friends and enemies alike that a benevolent despotism has immeasurable advantages over the Parliamentary system in the case of a defeated country. Not only has it an advantage over the travesty of a parliamentary system known as the Weimar Republic but many intelligent Germans are now of opinion that it is preferable to the French and British systems of representative government. It would certainly seem to an unprejudiced observer that a country which is anxious to free itself from the shackles of an oppressive treaty has better prospects if it is prepared to accept a restriction of individual liberty and a concentration of all powers in one hand, provided of course the hand be firm and wise. In the case of Hitler no doubt exists in the German mind that the country’s choice has been fully justified by the history of the last two years….

For years before he came into power Hitler doggedly refused to give any explanation of his mysterious programme for coping with unemployment. Why, he asked should he betray his panacea to his rivals? The mystery is now cleared up and it is evident that Hitler was well-advised to keep his secret to himself. As we now realise, his programme consists not merely of public works of the normal kind but of the very important work of rearming Germany. Today military contracts and contracts for public works are almost indistinguishable. The provision for motor roads which serve equally as military roads is a case in point. In addition the expansion of the army and air force has absorbed large masses of men from the labour market. The simplicity of many of Hitler’s basic ideas savours of genius to the public mind.

In regard to the rearmament of Germany and her return to the field of international politics on an equal footing, neither the Army, the intelligentsia nor the Ministry for Foreign Affairs conceived that the time was ripe for “calling the allied bluff”. Any attempt on Germany’s part to challenge the Versailles Treaty would lead, they firmly believed, to intervention and possibly to the occupation of the Rhineland. Any parliamentary government in this country would have courted disaster in the Reichstag had it embarked on Hitler’s policy of flouting the Treaty.

Even in Hitler’s case the adventure was not devoid of grave personal risk. There was always the chance during the early stages that the signatories of Versailles would pull themselves together and veto German rearmament by the threat of a preventive war. In that case the Hitler régime would have come to an end and Hitler and his chief supporters would have had to choose between suicide and exile. Now that Hitler has put his bold plan into execution his influence is highest in those very quarters where it was at first regarded with most suspicion, namely the Reichswehr Higher Command, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, permanent officialdom and responsible circles generally.

The Germans are not disposed to minimise their difficulties. But they regard Herr Hitler as a prophet and the majority expect with calm obedience that he will find the way to the promised land. He, on his side, is more convinced than ever that fate has chosen him as its instrument just as it chose Frederick the Great65 for the regeneration of the German people. In truth, can we wonder at his conviction? His foreign policy since my arrival at Berlin has been the reverse of that of a “good European”; it has been a crescendo of violence and has hitherto failed to evoke any stronger reaction on the part of the ex-allies than some notes of platonic protest.

Having helped himself, in defiance of the Treaty, on land and in the air, Herr Hitler now suggests, with grim humour, that the British Empire may some day be grateful for the protection of the fleet that he intends to build.66 The size of that fleet at present seems uncertain, but if Herr Hitler adheres to his intention of attaining naval parity with France he will eventually possess a fleet half the size of our own concentrated in an infinitesimal fraction of the waters over which ours is called upon to sail.

So far as I can see, only economics and finance can be expected to counter these proud plans, but economics and finance have in the past proved so elastic as to defy all expert prophecy. Stalin, on the other hand, when he pointed at “that little island” to Mr. Eden on the map, seemed to think that we alone could finally prevent the hegemony of Germany by withholding from her certain raw materials without which she would be unable to continue her present orgy of expenditure on armaments. I do not know whether this course be feasible or not. In any case let us hope that our pacifists at home may at length realise that the rapidly growing monster of German militarism will not be placated by mere cooings, but will only be restrained from recourse to its idolised “ultima ratio” by the knowledge that the Powers who desire peace are also strong enough to enforce it…

.#noted #2020-12-21

Here we have Britain's ambassador to Germany writing in 1933 that Britain needs to take Hitler seriously but not literally–for if it took him literally it would have no logical choice but ‘to adopt the policy of a “preventive” war’. Food for thought for modern times: Trump, Bolsonaro, Modhi, and Johnson need definitely to be taken literally, and it is only acceptable to not take them seriously if you are dead certain not only of their incompetence but of their inability to pass the baton to anyone both competent and ruthless:

Eric Phipps: Diary https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-phipps-diary.pdf 1933-11-21: ‘In contemplating the present situation arising out of an electoral campaign waged against a practically non-existent adversary and conducted with propaganda methods of unexampled violence and mendacity, one is tempted to put certain far-reaching questions regarding the future of the Hitler movement and the future policy of Hitler. It has been asked, for instance, whether the movement is not a convenient screen behind which the old Prussian Nationalism is weaving its dark web. This may well be, but if so the screen itself is singularly inefficacious and fails to conceal the fact that the youth of Germany is being reared in a purely militarist spirit...

...When I told the Chancellor that militarism seemed to me to be the Leitmotiv of this country, whereas elsewhere it was merely an incident, that a spark might suffice to kindle the militarist spirit into a war-like flame, I might have added that the above-mentioned campaign of lies, depicting Germany as the one innocent lamb among a pack of wolves, was not calculated to inculcate in German youth that spirit of peace and understanding advocated so inappropriately and so loudly after Germany’s banging of the Geneva door.

As regards Hitler, I doubt whether he himself realises how far he is at pre- sent the author of Mein Kampf, the full-blown blood-and-thunder book as originally published in Germany, that is to say, and not the recent pale abridged and bowdlerised edition which has been published by his direction and translated into English.

Who can tell how far that Hitler resembles the present German Chancellor who has been making the welkin ring with shouts of peace? In some respects it is certain that he remains true to type for he has not varied over the Jewish question or Austria since writing the book; but it would be too simple and even perhaps dangerous to assume that he maintains intact all the views held and expressed with such incredible violence in a work written in a Bavarian prison 10 years ago, though, of course, those views cannot be left out of consideration in any endeavour to gauge the Chancellor’s intentions on any given subject. His hatred of France, Germany’s deadliest enemy, for instance, is written in flaming letters, and certainly seems difficult to reconcile with his recent attempts to wheedle her into a tête-à-tête conversation.

Again, the recent no-force agreement with Poland is undoubtedly regarded by my French colleague as an attempt to drive a wedge between that country and France. Yet, though this may have entered into Hitler’s calculations, the fact of German-Polish apaisement should nevertheless facilitate France and Germany. In this connection General von Blomberg’s remarks to me are of interest.

To revert to Hitler: we cannot regard him solely as the author of Mein Kampf for in such case we should logically be bound to adopt the policy of a “preventive” war, nor can we afford to ignore him. Would it not therefore be advisable soon to try to bind that damnably dynamic man? To bind him, that is, by an agreement bearing his signature freely and proudly given? By some odd kink in his mental make-up he might even feel impelled to honour it. His signature under even a not altogether satisfactory agreement, only partially agreeable to Great Britain and France and not too distasteful to Italy might prevent for a time any further German shots among the International ducks.

His signature, moreover, would bind all Germany like no other Germans in all her past. Years might then pass and even Hitler might grow old, and reason might come to this side and fear leave it. New problems would present them- selves and old problems, including disarmament, might perhaps have solved themselves through the mere passage of time, and without those Hurculean and hitherto vain efforts to satisfy German “honour” and allay French fear…

.#noted #2020-12-21

Josiah Ober: Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule. https://www.amazon.com/Political-Dissent-Democratic-Athens-Intellectual-ebook/dp/B00EM2W92E/…

Josiah Ober: Mass & Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, & the Power of the People https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691028648…

Daily Beast: Pence Plans to Confirm Trump’s Defeat Then Flee the Country, Says Report https://www.thedailybeast.com/pence-plans-to-confirm-trumps-defeat-then-flee-the-country-says-report>…

James Politi & Colby Smith: Powell Preserves His Dovish Credentials at Tricky Moment for Fed_ https://www.ft.com/content/2a32037d-612d-43bc-b472-ba124bddf47d…

Tyler Cowen: The Ideological Shift of the Libertarian Movement on Pandemics https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/the-ideological-shift-of-the-libertarian-movement-on-pandemics.html…

Minxin Pei: Totalitarianism’s Long Dark Shadow Over China https://www.ned.org/events/lipset-lecture-minxin-pei-totalitarianism-china/…

Richard Setterston & al.: Living on the Edge: An American Generation’s Journey through the Twentieth Century https://uchicago.app.box.com/s/82xshvgproh5xf9sf0np8qby41wszehq/file/722218825412…

Amazon.com: Elgato Green Screen https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0743Z892W/: ‘Collapsible chroma key panel for background removal with auto-locking frame, wrinkle-resistant chroma-green fabric, aluminum hard case, ultra-quick setup and breakdown: Computers & Accessories…

Amazon.com: Elaro Pop-Up Retractable Green Screen (Self-Contained Case) https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07QWXVN9J/…

====

Plus:

Charles Sykes: Can We Quit Trump? https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/can-we-quit-trump: ‘For the last four years, Vichy Republicans have rationalized their support by insisting that we ignore the tweets and focus on the policies and “accomplishments”. But in his post-presidency there will no wins, just the rage, narcissism, and tweets.... And that’s all there will be, except for the possible indictments, trials, and bankruptcies. That’s why stoking outrage is so crucial for his post presidency. The stab-in-the-back stolen election lie is the wind beneath his wings; grievance is his only real asset. That may be enough to keep his base riled up. But there is also the possibility that rather than consolidate his control of the GOP, he will marginalize himself by continuing to embrace the most deranged elements of his own MAGAverse. His base of operations may drift from Fox News to OAN and his appeal from populism to raw crackpottery…

Jonathan V. Last: 'McMaster believed that power in the Trump administration derived from his job https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/the-nature-of-power. Sarah Huckabee Sanders realized that power in the Trump administration derived from having the president watch you defend him on TV. And further, SHS seems to have figured out that she could parlay that power into power in another context. Watch and see if she becomes governor of Arkansas purely on the basis of being seen as one of the most loyal Trumpists in the country.... Mitch McConnell is entering into a power struggle with Donald Trump.... Mitch declared Joe Biden president-elect yesterday. And good for him, I guess. Though I’m not sure people should get a ton of credit for admitting that the sky is blue after spending five weeks insisting that it was red. McConnell’s calculation is that power derives from holding elected office because that confers the ability to pass legislation.... Trump believes that the real source of power lies further upstream and derives from the ability to command—totally—a large bloc of voters within a single party. Because... it grants him ownership of the Republican party.... McConnell’s view looks like the safer bet right now, because the next time that large bloc of voters gets to exercise their power is two years from now. But my money’s on Trump here.... And then there’s the January 6 vote. McConnell has pushed a lot of chips into the pot by saying that no Republican Senator should force a vote on the Electoral College.... But the dynamics of this are all in the other direction. There will be at least one member of the House who objects and demands a vote, which means that the Senate Republicans will effectively be facing a yes-no vote on supporting Trump, since it will only require one senator to also object. Do you believe that every single Republican senator will be willing to be seen as effectively saying “no” to Trump on what will be basically function as a roll-call vote for a roll-call vote?…

Simon Schama: What Makes John le Carré a Writer of Substance https://www.ft.com/content/04df988d-9b09-4e6a-b7d8-70b1a5e654dc: ‘Someone, sometime, had to translate Dean Acheson’s famous 1962 characterisation of a Britain that had “lost an empire but has not yet found a role” into literature. But until le Carré came along, no writer had nailed the toxic combination of bad faith and blundering, the confusion of tactical cynicism with strategic wisdom, with such lethal accuracy.... His writing did... have some precedents.... He belonged to the same “lower-upper-middle-class” as George Orwell.... Like Orwell... le Carré had a pitch-perfect ear for the disingenuous hypocrisies sustaining those who mistook “Getting Away with It” for national purpose. Le Carré’s other literary pedigree... came from Anthony Trollope: the shrewd sense that institutions had collective personalities and psychologies, as if they were extended families. As such, they were the theatre of deadly, high-stakes dramas of loyalty and betrayal…. The scene at the beginning of An Honourable Schoolboy in the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club, where “a score of journalists, mainly from former British colonies . . . fooled and drank in a mood of violent idleness, a chorus without a hero” is one of the great set pieces of le Carré writing. At its centre is one of his Dickens-Modern creations: the ancient Aussie, “old Craw” based on someone le Carré knew from that field trip to south Asia, and “who had shaken more sand out of his shorts than most of them would walk over”…

============

John le Carré: The Honourable Schoolboy https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-le-carre-schoolboy.pdf: 'Perhaps a more realistic point of departure is a certain typhoon Saturday in mid-1974, three o’clock in the afternoon, when Hong Kong lay battened down waiting for the next onslaught. In the bar of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, a score of journalists, mainly from former British colonies - Australian, Canadian, American - fooled and drank in a mood of violent idleness, a chorus without a hero. Thirteen floors below them, the old trams and double deckers were caked in the mud-brown sweat of building dust and smuts from the chimney-stacks in Kowloon. The tiny ponds outside the highrise hotels prickled with slow, subversive rain. And in the men’s room, which provided the Club’s best view of the harbour, young Luke the Californian was ducking his face into the handbasin, washing the blood from his mouth...

A “Bezos Chart” is a chart that has no scale, anywhere: it is a chart that conveys absolutely no accurate quantitative information:

Jason Snell: ‘I apologize, I forgot to add a label to my Bezos Chart https://twitter.com/jsnell/status/481863414180896769...

Randall Munroe is an international treasure. This is the best 2020 election map that I have yet seen. It combines geographic fidelity with information accuracy and density. You will learn a lot not just about what and where Biden’s edge was in the 2020 election, but also about who Americans are…

Randall Munroe: 2020 Election Map https://twitter.com/xkcd/status/1339341149488746498: ‘http://xkcd.com/2399 ...

.#noted #2020-12-17

Jonathan V. Last: Everyone Trump Touches Dies: The List https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/everyone-trump-touches-dies-the-list…

Edward B. Foley (2019): Preparing for a Disputed Presidential Election: An Exercise in Election Risk Assessment and Management https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2719&context=luclj…

Jason Snell: ‘I apologize, I forgot to add a label to my Bezos Chart.https://twitter.com/jsnell/status/481863414180896769...

Simon Schama: What Makes John le Carré a Writer of Substance https://www.ft.com/content/04df988d-9b09-4e6a-b7d8-70b1a5e654dc: ‘Someone, sometime, had to translate Dean Acheson’s famous 1962 characterisation of a Britain that had “lost an empire but has not yet found a role” into literature. But until le Carré came along, no writer had nailed the toxic combination of bad faith and blundering, the confusion of tactical cynicism with strategic wisdom, with such lethal accuracy.... His writing did... have some precedents.... He belonged to the same “lower-upper-middle-class” as George Orwell.... Like Orwell... le Carré had a pitch-perfect ear for the disingenuous hypocrisies sustaining those who mistook “Getting Away with It” for national purpose. Le Carré’s other literary pedigree... came from Anthony Trollope: the shrewd sense that institutions had collective personalities and psychologies, as if they were extended families. As such, they were the theatre of deadly, high-stakes dramas of loyalty and betrayal…

Clove & Hoof: Oakland Butchery & Restaurant https://cloveandhoofoakland.com/…

Sascha Segan: Qualcomm Is a Little Too Unbothered by Apple's M1 Macs https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/qualcomm-is-a-little-too-unbothered-by-apples-m1-macs: ‘Qualcomm execs brushed off the superior performance of Apple's new ARM-based Macs. They shouldn’t…

John Gruber: M1 Macs: Truth & Truthiness https://daringfireball.net/2020/12/m1_macs_truth_and_truthiness: ‘M1 Macs embarrass all other PCs—all Intel-based Macs, including automobile-priced Mac Pros, and every single machine running Windows or Linux. Those machines are just standing around in their underwear now because the M1 stole all their pants…

Nadim Kobeissi: On the Apple Silicon M1 MacBook Pro https://nadim.computer/posts/2020-11-26-macbookm1.html: ‘Five nanometer process, an ARMv8-AArch64 instruction set, unified memory, separate performance and efficiency cores and a ton of accompanying hardware offering acceleration for video decoding, cryptographic operations and more. There’s also a bunch of dedicated silicon for GPU cores that have been shown to rival the Nvidia GTX 1060. This is all on an integrated SoC that consumes a maximum of 15 watts and that generally runs on far less. This is all in a context where Intel is shipping 45W and 65W processors inside laptops, built on 10-14nm transistors, with a dinosaur-age x64 instruction set and integrated graphics that are certainly not even close to competing with a dedicated GTX 1060…

Supreme Court: 'The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution’ https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/121120zr_p860.pdf...

The Hellenistic Age Podcast: Syrian Nights, Macedonian Dreams https://hellenisticagepodcast.wordpress.com/2020/11/26/055-the-seleucid-empire-syrian-nights-macedonian-dreams/…

Melissa: My Singing Vegetables https://www.mysingingvegetables.com/…

Robert J. Gordon: The Rise & Fall of American Growth: 'The year 1870 represented modern America at dawn. Over the subsequent six decades, every aspect of life experienced a revolution. By 1929, urban America was electrified and almost every urban dwelling was networked, connected to the outside world with electricity, natural gas, telephone, clean running water, and sewers. By 1929, the horse had almost vanished from urban streets, and the ratio of motor vehicles to the number of households reached 90 percent. By 1929, the household could enjoy entertainment options that were beyond the 1870 imagination, including phonograph music, radio, and motion pictures exhibited in ornate movie palaces…

Noah Smith: Why I'm so Excited About Solar & Batteries https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-im-so-excited-about-solar-and: ‘In the 19th century we switched to coal... in the 20th century we upgraded to oil.... After World War 2, a global extraction regime and price controls allowed us to keep cheap oil flowing. That ended with the Oil Shocks of the 70s. And though oil became cheaper again in the 80s and 90s, it never attained its former lows, or its low volatility. Then in the 00s it got expensive again.... We didn’t get anything better than oil during this time.... More expensive energy makes physical innovation harder in every way.... This stagnation in energy technology almost certainly contributed to the productivity slowdown of the 1970s.... Why didn’t bits fill the gap?... IT did drive the re-acceleration of productivity that began in the late 80s and continued through the early 00s.... But around 2005... that productivity growth faded.... Some have argued that digital services are substantially undervalued in our economic production statistics.... Physical technology is less “skill-biased” than IT, meaning that pretty much anyone can be a factory worker but only a few people can use computers productively and effectively... [or] IT simply touches less of our lives than energy does.... “Bits” innovation sometimes drives fast productivity growth, and sometimes doesn’t.… The cost declines in solar and batteries — and to a lesser extent, in wind and other storage technologies—comprise a true technological revolution.... And there’s no end in sight to this revolution. New fundamental advances like solid state lithium-ion batteries and next-generation solar cells seem within reach, which will kick off another virtuous cycle of deployment, learning curves, and cost decreases…

.#brieflynoted #noted #2020-12-12

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/12/briefly-noted-for-2020-12-13.html

SIEPR Associate's Meeting with Josh Bolten https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVLqRr-PlhM&feature=youtu.be…

Matthew Yglesias: The Real History of Race & the New Deal https://www.slowboring.com/p/new-deal…

Robert Wade (2003): What Strategies Are Viable for Developing Countries Today? The World Trade Organization and the Shrinking of 'Development Space’ https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-wade-2003-strategies.pdf…

Wikipedia: Martha Gellhorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Gellhorn…

Martha Gellhorn: The Face of War https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-gellhorn-face.pdf...

Vowel https://www.vowel.com/…

Apple: AirPods Max https://www.apple.com/airpods-max/…

Filipe Espósito: iPad Air 4 Benchmark Results https://9to5mac.com/2020/10/04/ipad-air-4-benchmark-results-emerge-on-the-web-as-apple-reportedly-prepares-a14-apple-tv/: ‘First observed by the Twitter user Ice universe, the Geekbench test was performed on an iPad Air 4 running iOS 14.0.1. The Geekbench score reports 1583 for single-core and 4198 for multi-core, compared to 1112 for single-core and 2832 for multi-core of the A12 Bionic chip that powers the previous iPad Air 3. That means the A14 chip has 42% better performance than the A12 chip in single-core and 48% better in multi-core — which can be considered a great improvement for those upgrading from an iPad Air 3. Compared to the iPhone 11’s A13 Bionic chip, the A14 chip is about 20% faster in single-core (1327) and 28% faster in multi-core (3286)…

Jessica Price: Do Not Be Daunted...: https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1024317315620294657: '"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work. But neither are you free to abandon it...". The text it's referencing is from Pirkei Avot... part of the Mishnah.... Here's the quote that that meme is referencing (Pirkei Avot 2:15-16): "Rabbi Tarfon said: 'The day is short and the work is much, and the workers are lazy and the reward is great, and the Master of the house is pressing'. He used to say: 'It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it...'" While it's a translation that definitely isn't word-for-word, it's actually a very good interpretive translation and completely in keeping with the text.... The "do justly, now" triad is from Micah 6:8. The rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud assumed intimate familiarity with the entire Tanakh/Hebrew Bible, so they often make oblique references to verses and assume the reader will know the verse they're hinting at. The passage from Micah is one of the most famous elucidations of what the work of repairing the world, tikkun olam, consists of. So Shapiro adding it here isn't really an interpretive stretch--it's more just making the implicit explicit. And that beautiful opening? "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief"? It's definitely a bit of poetic license, but I'd say that's the point of "the day is short and the work is much”…

Robert J. Gordon: The Rise & Fall of American Growth: 'The year 1870 represented modern America at dawn. Over the subsequent six decades, every aspect of life experienced a revolution. By 1929, urban America was electrified and almost every urban dwelling was networked, connected to the outside world with electricity, natural gas, telephone, clean running water, and sewers. By 1929, the horse had almost vanished from urban streets, and the ratio of motor vehicles to the number of households reached 90 percent. By 1929, the household could enjoy entertainment options that were beyond the 1870 imagination, including phonograph music, radio, and motion pictures exhibited in ornate movie palaces…

Tom Friedman (2005): It’s a Flat World, After All https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-friedman-2005-flat.pdf…

Daniel Jaffee (2012): Weak Coffee: Certification and Co-Optation in the Fair Trade Movement https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-jaffee-2012-weak-coffee.pdf…

Olga San Miguel-Valderrama (2009): Community Mothers & Flower Workers in Colombia https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-sanmiguel-2009-colombia.pdf…

Casey Newton: How Microsoft crushed Slack https://www.platformer.news/p/how-microsoft-crushed-slack: ‘And why the era of worker-centered work tools may be over…

George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt…

DeLong COVID Dashboard https://research.stlouisfed.org/useraccount/dashboard/56322…

Ellora Derenoncourt & Claire Montialoux: Minimum Wages & Racial Inequality http://www.clairemontialoux.com/files/DM2020.pdf: ‘The earnings difference between white and black workers fell dramatically in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.... The expansio... in this decline. The 1966 Fair Labor Standards Act extended federal minimum wage coverage to agriculture, restaurants, nursing homes, and other services which were previously uncovered and where nearly a third of black workers were employed.... Earnings rose sharply for workers in the newly covered industries. The impact was nearly twice as large for black workers as for white. Within treated industries, the racial gap adjusted for observables fell from 25 log points pre-reform to zero afterwards. We can rule out significant dis-employment effects for black workers.... The 1967 extension of the minimum wage can explain more than 20% of the reduction in the racial earnings and income gap during the Civil Rights Era…

Jonah Goldberg: Screwtape Went Down to Georgia https://gfile.thedispatch.com/p/screwtape-went-down-to-georgia: ‘A certain subset of the right has convinced itself that the Democrats aren’t just wrong or even bad, but that they are singularly evil and lethally dangerous enemies of America, hell-bent on destroying all that is sacred by imposing godless socialism on us all. I’ll skip the usual structural reasons for this development—the Big Sort, media balkanization, and, yes, the behavior of some Democrats—and focus instead on the part relevant to my point. The president of the United States said this sort of thing a lot.... The president is a deeply flawed and crude person with a thumbless grasp of the Constitution, the duties of his office, and the most rudimentary tenets of religion and traditional morality. Because this is so incandescently obvious, casting the Democrats as an existential threat to All We Hold Dear makes it a lot easier to overlook these things. Hence all of that “He’s our King David” gibberish from the early days of the Trump presidency. When you’re in a Manichean existential battle with the unholy Forces of Darkness, it’s much easier to overlook the adultery, greed, deceit, and corruption of your anointed champion. Now, normally I’m not one to leap to the defense of Democrats, but I think offering the faint praise that they are not all evil incarnate is literally the least I can do.... For nearly five years now, it has been obvious that Trump was unfit for the job and the arguments marshaled in his defense were cynical rationalizations that, for some, eventually mutated into sincerely held delusions.... For a lot of otherwise decent politicians and commentators, doing the right thing was just too damn hard. At every stage, they fed the Trumpian alligator another piece of themselves and said “This much, but no more.” But now all that is left are stumps, and it’s hard to walk in the right direction on stumps or hold your hands up to shout, “Stop!” when you have no hands.... I understand that this all sounds awfully self-righteous. But I’ll tell you, I feel like I deserve my gloating. I’m not alone in my right to it, but I deserve my share. I’ve been saying “don’t do this” for five years and I’ve been mocked and shunned for it. So forgive me if I enjoy my I-told-you-so moment. Or don’t forgive me. I’m used to it…

Lisa Bryan: Hollandaise Sauce (Easy and No-Fail https://downshiftology.com/recipes/hollandaise-sauce/: ‘The key to getting the consistency right all comes down to the hot melted butter. This recipe emulsifies butter into an egg yolk and lemon juice mixture. So you want to make sure you’re streaming in butter that’s hot enough (just melted won’t do). But in the case that your sauce does break and becomes a speckled mess, don’t fret. Below are two methods to try that will help bring your sauce back to life. Blend 1-2 tablespoons of boiling hot water: As you’re blending, slowly add in the hot water and blend until the consistency is right Add an extra egg yolk: While the blender is on, add an extra egg yolk with a teaspoon of hot water into the blender and blend until it becomes perfectly creamy…

Jonah Goldberg: As outrageous as his effort to delegitimize the election is—and it is very outrageous—that outrage pales like a lit candle next to the noonday summer sun when you compare it to an effort to literally overturn the popular and Electoral College vote and steal the election. But because that outcome is so unlikely, and Trump’s effort to pull it off is so comically inept, people are focusing on the more likely outrage rather than the more outrageous outrage. This was the plan.... His goal was always to steal the election if he didn’t win.... He told all of his voters to vote on Election Day. He expected this would give him a “mirage” lead that night, and then, because he had already established the illegitimacy of mail-in ballots, he could pretend to be justified in proclaiming victory on Election Night. Sure, there would be lawsuits and the like later, but Trump would have momentum on his side. He even telegraphed over and over that he expected the Supreme Court to come to his rescue.... That was his primary explanation for why he thought it was important to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed. But as Grossman points out, there was just one problem: Trump wasn’t actually leading on Election Night.... This, by the way, explains why Trump World was so very, very, very, angry about Fox’s decision to call Arizona.... The Arizona call ruined the pretext. If Pennsylvania had been the tipping point, they thought they could get the election thrown to the court. But the Arizona call combined with the undeclared result in Georgia preempted that…

Mark Price: Adam Looney. Phd from Harvard. Undergrad at Dartmouth https://twitter.com/price_laborecon/status/1332651699450810371. Oh boy, can you smell trouble. If you can’t you may want to get tested for COVID-19. He served among other places in Obama’s Treasury. He has an op-ed from a little over a week ago which I’m not going to share again where he argues against the Warren-Schumer proposal to cancel up to $50,000 in student loan debt…. The point of the Schumer-Warren proposal is Biden can act without the Senate. We all want and need effort to help people cushion the crippling blow of COVID-19 but we have to wait for the Senate. Elevating food stamps as a superior form of stimulus is dishonest at best and deeply hypocritical for a man whose income is facilitated by a Koch-funded enterprise.... Another economist tweeted out the Looney Op-ed invoking their having worked with him in the Obama Administration.... The world is full of really wonderful people who went to Dartmouth and Harvard and work very hard to make sure that millions of poor and middle income children don’t get the same opportunities in life as their own children. That’s a hard lesson for people to learn and it’s an illustration of the way elite networks reinforce and reproduce inequality…

Duncan Black: ell Paid Bullshit Artists https://www.eschatonblog.com/2020/11/well-paid-bullshit-artists.html: ‘A standard trick in DC policy circles is to derail any policy by focusing on a "better" policy, which lets you imply the policy's advocates are stupid and/or cruel. One reason to focus on something like debt reduction is that it is something Biden has the power to do, unlike most everything else. This isn't the only reason. It's good on the merits, too, for a variety of reasons, but unless you have a plan to get Mitch McConnell to pass your fantasy plan, then you are just trolling…\

Andy Matuschak & Michael Nielsen: Quantum Country https://quantum.country/…

Jean-Louis Gassée: PC Life After Apple Silicon https://mondaynote.com/pc-life-after-apple-silicon-a96861f58442: ‘Apple Silicon, in its first incarnation as the M1 System-on-a Chip, combined with a new macOS version, is about to expand Apple’s share of the PC market — at Intel’s expense…

Paul Musgrave: McDonalds Peace Theory Epitomized America's 1990s Hubris https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/26/mcdonalds-peace-nagornokarabakh-friedman/: ‘In the rich, lazy, and happy 1990s, Americans imagined a world that could be just like them…

Scott Cunningham: Causal Inference: The Mixtape https://scunning.com/cunningham_mixtape.pdf…

Charles P. Pierce: George H.W. Bush Dead at 94-41st President Failed to Confront the Republican Party's Rising Madness...

Sully Prudhomme: Le Vase Brisé (The Broken Vase) https://onbeing.org/poetry/le-vase-brise-broken-vase/…

Jay Rosen: https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/1329582924728037376: The GOP's verified account sent this out. That he won in a landslide. Here, I think, the party made official its break with American democracy. Not saying it wasn't apparent before. It was. Just more official now. As ridiculous as Sydney Powell is, this is a sobering moment. https://twitter.com/GOP/status/1329490975266398210…

Kevin Liptak & Devan Cole: Chris Christie Calls Trump's Legal Team a 'National Embarrassment' https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/22/politics/chris-christie-donald-trump-election/index.html: ‘Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Trump has failed to provide any evidence of fraud, that his legal team was in shambles and that it's time to put the country first. "If you have got the evidence of fraud, present it," Christie said.... He decried efforts by the President's lawyers to smear Republican governors who have not gone along with the President's false claims of voter malfeasance. "Quite frankly, the conduct of the President's legal team has been a national embarrassment," he said, singling out Trump attorney Sidney Powell's accusations against Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp…

Lex: Workers vs Robots: A New Kind of Onshoring https://www.ft.com/content/734d7da1-737d-481c-8838-b58b471338ae: ‘Oil rigs have been on the automation march for most of the past decade. Remote control rooms can manage everything from drilling to procurement. The safety advantage of having fewer bodies on rigs is obvious in a pandemic. Benefits to the bottom line are just as clear. Equinor, as Statoil is now known, says the move added more than NKr2bn ($212m) to earnings within a year of its Johan Sverdrup rig going digital. The biggest savings come from shrunken payrolls. In the developed world, robots are set to replace humans in a range of physically tough, repetitive jobs, from order picking in warehouses to lifting the old and infirm…

Josh Marshall: Folks, Let’s Get It the F--- Together https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/folks-lets-get-it-the-fuck-together: ‘I really don’t know what the two years holds. But I’m certain of one thing. It is and will be immeasurably better than Donald Trump having been reelected to a second term in office. No question. You did that. You owe it to yourself to get pumped and rejoice in that. It’s something to savor. It will help sustain you through endless civic work to come…

Jodi Enda: Trump’s Unexpected Power Helps Republicans Win Even If He Doesn’t https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/11/04/trumps-unexpected-power-helps-republicans-win-even-if-he-doesnt/: ‘When Trump’s name is on the top of the ballot, Republicans down the line do better. It feels strange to write that sentence since Trump himself might lose the presidency in this nail-biter of an election. But it remains true that both times he topped the ticket, Republicans down the ballot out-performed expectations…

Wikipedia: Leo Strauss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss#American_years: Strauss had also been engaged in a discourse with Carl Schmitt. However, after Strauss left Germany, he broke off the discourse when Schmitt failed to respond to his letters…. In 1932, Strauss left his position at the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin for Paris… married Marie (Miriam) Bernsohn, a widow with a young child…. Strauss became a lifelong friend of Alexandre Kojève and was on friendly terms with Raymond Aron, Alexandre Koyré, and Étienne Gilson…. Strauss found shelter, after some vicissitudes, in England, where, in 1935 he gained temporary employment at University of Cambridge, with the help of his in-law, David Daube, who was affiliated with Gonville and Caius College. While in England, he became a close friend of R. H. Tawney…. Unable to find permanent employment in England, Strauss moved in 1937 to the United States, under the patronage of Harold Laski, who made introductions and helped him obtain a brief lectureship…. Strauss secured a position at The New School, where, between 1938 and 1948, he worked the political science faculty and also took on adjunct jobs…. In 1949 he became a professor of political science at the University of Chicago…

Om Malik: Why Are We Underestimating Zoom & It’s Impact? https://om.co/2020/11/25/zoom-its-long-term-impact/: ‘The prevalence of Zoom has shown us that working from a home office can be better than sitting in traffic for two hours. Even if, at this point, we find ourselves despising Zoom and complaining of persistent Zoom fatigue, we will not be going back to our pre-Zoom ways after the pandemic subsides. Whether Zoom remains the standard or gets overtaken by some upstart, Bill Gates predicts “that over 50% of business travel and over 30% of days in the office will go away”…

Rated: 5: Scott Peterson: ROX Sonoma Coast Chardonnay 2019 https://us.nakedwines.com/products/rox-scott-peterson-sonoma-coast-chardonnay-2019#…

Alison Roman: Dan Roman's Buttery Roasted Chestnuts in Foil https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/dan-romans-buttery-roasted-chestnuts-foil…

Christy Denney: Classic Stuffing Recipe https://www.the-girl-who-ate-everything.com/classic-stuffing-recipe/...

The thoughtful and insightful Eric Boehlert misses the major moment at which Rupert Murdoch put his press empire at the service of Joe Biden and America in ending the insane clown show that his been the presidential reign of Donald Trump. On the evening of election day, at 23:20 EST, Arnon Mishkin on the Fox News decision desk called Arizona and its 11 electoral votes for Joe Biden. Without Arizona, Trump would need not just Georgia (which Biden won by 0.2%) and Wisconsin (which Biden won by 0.7%) but also at least one of Pennsylvania (which Biden won by 1.2%) or Michigan (which Biden won by 2.8%). Calling Arizona for Biden put out of reach an election close enough that it could be decided for Trump by complaisant judges and a little more voter suppression. Yet Biden won Arizona, in the end, by only 0.3%.

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0yDiAW0blL0iFnRMqyYSAuWIQ

Bibliotheca Augustana: Tapetum Bagianum http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost11/Bayeux/bay_tama.html: ‘c. 1080…

Bret Devereaux: Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers! https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/…

Bret Devereaux: Collections: Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-mining/…

Wikipedia: Pioneer Hi Bred International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Hi_Bred_International…

Wikipedia: DeKalb Genetics Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeKalb_Genetics_Corporation…

Steven Rattner: God Help Us if Judy Shelton Joins the Fed https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/opinion/federal-reserve-judy-shelton.html?smid=tw-share: ‘Trump’s latest unqualified nominee to the Federal Reserve Board must be rejected...

Jeremiah: 22 KJV https://biblehub.com/kjv/jeremiah/22.htm: ‘Thus saith the LORD: "Execute ye judgment and righteousness, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor: and do no wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, nor the widow, neither shed innocent blood in this place. For if ye do this thing indeed, then shall there enter in by the gates of this house kings sitting upon the throne of David, riding in chariots and on horses, he, and his servants, and his people. But if ye will not hear these words, I swear by myself", saith the LORD, "that this house shall become a desolation." For thus saith the LORD unto the king's house of Judah: "Thou art Gilead unto me, and the head of Lebanon: yet surely I will make thee a wilderness, and cities which are not inhabited. And I will prepare destroyers against thee, every one with his weapons: and they shall cut down thy choice cedars, and cast them into the fire. And many nations shall pass by this city, and they shall say every man to his neighbour, 'Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto this great city?' Then they shall answer, 'Because they have forsaken the covenant of the LORD their God, and worshipped other gods, and served them'"…

Duncan Black: Failed 4th Estate https://www.eschatonblog.com/2020/11/failed-4th-estate.html: ‘I think the very Trump-specific sin of the media (as opposed to their normal sinning) was confusing an understandable decision to "treat this lunatic freakazoid as we would normally treat a president" with "go out of our way to portray this lunatic freakazoid as normal." I get it. It was difficult to do the first part without doing the second part. If the scandal-o-meter goes up to 7 on a tan suit, then anything resembling normal practices can't cope when Trump makes it hit 11 by 7am most days. And, who knows, maybe they didn't even do him any favors. Maybe The People love their lunatic freakazoid president. But the first draft of history has hardly been an accurate one…

Utah HERO Project: Covid-Research State Chart https://marriner.eccles.utah.edu/covid-research-state-chart/…

Joan Robinson (1962): Economic Philosophy …

Bret Devereaux: Collections: Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-mining/…

Oliver Wyman: Model Projections for COVID-19 Cases https://pandemicnavigator.oliverwyman.com/forecast?mode=country&region=United%20States&panel=baseline…

On 2017-12-17, Michael Boskin claimed the TMR tax cut would generate a big boom in equipment investment. Perhaps a full percentage point or so. None of the model-builders agreed with him. And he was wrong: there was none such in 2018 or 2019; spending did not wheel from consumption to investment; “unlocked” foreign earnings were paid out in dividends, not invested in equipment. He has never explained or analyzed why he was wrong. Or why he was confident in the first place: Michael Boskin (29017): Another Look at Tax Reform and Economic Growth__https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/republican-tax-plan-growth-effects-by-michael-boskin-2017-12…

100+ Economists (2017): Pass tax reform and watch the economy roar https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-tax-reform-opinion-congress-pass-2017-11…

Stan Sakai: Usagi Yojimbo https://www.usagiyojimbo.com/: ‘First published in 1984, [it] continues to this day. Usagi Yojimbo is one of the longest independent serialized comic book series in existence. Stan Sakai, the sole creator, author, and artist who is best known for his series Usagi Yojimbo, the epic saga of Miyamoto Usagi, a samurai rabbit living in late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century Japan.  Since then, Stan Sakai has received numerous awards for Usagi Yojimbo including the  National Cartoonists Society Award, multiple Eisner Awards, the Parents' Choice Award, and Harvey Award for Best Cartoonist…

An unprofessional beat sweetener about a Trumpism lobbyist who could neither plan nor execute a successful trade war: Jim Zarroli (2019): China Trade Talks: USTR Robert Lighthizer Is Trump's Hardball-Playing Negotiator https://www.npr.org/2019/02/21/696277594/expect-change-robert-lighthizer-is-trump-s-hardball-playing-china-trade-negotiat…

John Gruber: One More Thing: The M1 Macs https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/one_more_thing_the_m1_macs: ‘The M1. The new M1-based MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini are... three different manifestations of the same computer... far faster machines than the Intel-based Macs they’re replacing. But the big win, and clear focus from Apple, isn’t speed but battery life.... This is the sellable bullet point for the mass market consumer.... The M1 really is an entire system on a chip. Everything is on the M1. The various processors, of course: the CPU cores, the GPU cores, the Neural Engine cores. But everything else is on the M1 too: the storage controller, the Secure Enclave, the memory controller, and, yes, the memory itself. The DRAM for M1-based Macs is on the package (“on the substrate”, I believe, is the technical lingo).... There’s no separate “video memory” and “system memory”—just memory.... Apple’s chip team is really proud of this UMA system and the integrated GPU on the M1. It’s a design that increases performance and power efficiency.... For over a decade, iPhones and iPads have had Apple-designed chips the competition could not and still cannot match. Now the Mac does too…

Sara Gibbs: Everything I Never Wanted to Have to Know About Labour & Antisemitismm https://medium.com/@sararoseofficial/everything-i-never-wanted-to-have-to-know-about-labour-and-antisemitism-649b5bc1e576: ‘I want the last four years of my life back.... If you’re new to this and listening, thank you. I know a lot of my fellow activists will be annoyed that I’m taking this tone but at this point I am so exhausted from four years of begging people to listen on this subject that I am grateful for any new allies and support. If you are listening, you’re already doing more than most. One of the most devastating aspects of Labour’s antisemitism crisis has been seeing the sheer volume of people I like, respect, even consider friends, denying or minimising this issue which has caused me so much personal devastation…

A huge amount—an absolutely huge amount—was lost when Harry Dexter White overrode John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods and placed responsibility for closing "fundamental disequilibria" on deficit countries alone. This policy mistake still haunts us. And odds are that it is about to haunt us again. Jeremy Bulow and Company sound the alarm: Jeremy Bulow & al.: The Debt Pandemic https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2020/09/debt-pandemic-reinhart-rogoff-bulow-trebesch.htm: ‘The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly lengthened the list of developing and emerging market economies in debt distress. For some, a crisis is imminent. For many more, only exceptionally low global interest rates may be delaying a reckoning.... Yet new challenges may hamper debt workouts unless governments and multilateral lenders provide better tools to navigate a wave of restructuring…

*Neil Fligstein & Steve Vogel *: Political Economy After Neoliberalism http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/neil-fligstein-steven-vogel-political-economy-after-neoliberalism: ‘First, then, governments and markets are co-constituted. Government regulation is not an intrusion into the market but rather a prerequisite for a functioning market economy.... Second, real-world political economy hinges on power, both political and market power. Specific forms of market governance—of the kinds we just sketched—do not arise naturally or innocently. They are the product of power struggles between firms, industries, workers, and governments within particular markets and in the political arena.... Third, there is more than one way to organize society to achieve economic growth, equity, and access to valued goods and services. The balance of power between government, workers, and firms differs greatly across countries and time…

Rachel Reeves: Best for Britain https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1288825505333030923: ‘The PM said… a trade deal would be secured by the end of July. Well… we don’t have a trade deal. All we have is a blueprint for a giant lorry park in the middle of Kent…

Alan S. Blinder & Mark W. Watson (2016): Presidents & the US Economy: An Econometric Exploration https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20140913: ‘The US economy has performed better when the president of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican, almost regard- less of how one measures performance. For many measures, includ- ing real GDP growth (our focus), the performance gap is large and significant. This paper asks why. The answer is not found in technical time series matters nor in systematically more expansionary mone- tary or fiscal policy under Democrats. Rather, it appears that the Democratic edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, supe- rior total factor productivity (TFP) performance, a more favorable international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumer expectations about the near-term future…

Wikipedia_: Cocoliztli Epidemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics: ‘A mysterious illness characterized by high fevers and bleeding. It ravaged the Mexican highlands in epidemic proportions... often referred to as the worst disease epidemic in the history of Mexico.... Recent bacterial genomic studies have suggested that.. a serotype of Salmonella enterica known as Paratyphi C, was at least partially responsible for this initial outbreak.[3] It might have also been an indigenous viral hemorrhagic fever

Paul Krugman: Why Did Trump’s Trade War Fail? https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/Programs/Economics/Other%20docs/tradewarfail.pdf: ‘There used to be an extensive literature on “effective protection”.... Tariffs on imported inputs provided negative effective protection to downstream activities. And that’s what seems to have happened with the Trump trade war. Tariffs were largely focused on intermediate rather than final goods. The net effect, then, may actually have been to discourage manufacturing!…

====

Plus: Kevin Drum: Why Are Republicans Being Such Assholes?s https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/07/why-are-republicans-being-such-assholes/: ‘Bonus unemployment payments... expire today.... The main reason for extending them is because there are millions of Americans who are out of work and they desperately need the money.... [Plus] if the payments are cut off it will devastate an already ravaged economy.... So why are Republicans hemming and hawing?... From a purely selfish perspective, Republicans ought to be in favor of doing anything they can to keep the economy in decent shape through the election.... The whole thing is a disgrace.... Why are Republicans acting so contemptibly?…

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson & Mark Vandevelde: Stephen Schwarzman Defended Donald Trump at CEO Meeting on Election Results https://www.ft.com/content/558f2a68-7d42-4702-b86d-fae5458b3e64: ‘Mr Schwarzman, a Republican donor who has been one of Mr Trump’s most energetic supporters on Wall Street, sought to assuage such fears, saying the president was within his rights to challenge election results and forecasting that the legal process would take its course. He asked whether other participants did not find it surprising that early votes in Pennsylvania had favoured Mr Trump, only for later counts to tip the state in Mr Biden’s favour. Mr Schwarzman said there had been news reports stating that ballots continued arriving days after the election and that some of them may not have been real—issues, he said, that needed to be resolved by the courts, as the president’s legal team has argued…

Jonathan Bernstein (2020-11-19): Senate Republicans, Stop Trump’s Vote Antics Now https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-11-19/senate-republicans-stop-trump-s-vote-antics-now: ‘It’s no longer enough just to acknowledge the obvious fact that Biden won…

Jonathan Bernstein (2020-11-10): Donald Trump’s Antics Show Contempt for His Own Voters https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-11-19/donald-trump-s-antics-show-contempt-for-his-own-voters: ‘The president’s election challenges have no realistic chance of succeeding. The goal now is to keep the donations flowing…

Jonathan Bernstein (2020-11-18): Why Are Republicans Embracing Judy Shelton for the Fed Now? https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-11-18/why-are-republicans-embracing-judy-shelton-for-the-fed-now: ‘After months of blocking her nomination to the Fed, suddenly the Senate majority has had a change of heart…

Jonathan Bernstein (2020-11-17): Joe Biden Has One Urgent Task Right Now https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-11-17/joe-biden-has-one-urgent-task-right-now: ‘The president-elect can do something Donald Trump never has: offer a coherent message on Covid-19…

Jonathan Schifman: The Entire History of Steel https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a20722505/history-of-steel/: ‘From hunks of iron streaking through the sky, to the construction of skyscrapers and megastructures, this is the history of the world's greatest alloy…

Wikipedia: David Malpass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Malpass…

Wikipedia: Kenneth Elzinga https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=kenneth+elzinga&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8…

Wikipedia: Ferrous Metallurgy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrous_metallurgy | History of the Steel Industry (1850–1970) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steel_industry_(1850%E2%80%931970) | History of the Steel Industry (1970–Present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steel_industry_(1970%E2%80%93present)

Steve Randy Waldman: Social democracy or feudalism https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/8012.html: ‘if we should recognize an echo of empire in contemporary trade imbalances, should we not also recognize an echo of feudalism in contemporary class dynamics? The class wars embedded in trade wars of the past generation have provoked growing chasms of inequality (within societies inscribed by nation-state borders), along with (oh Gatsby curve) declining mobility and dynamism between classes…

Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22120/22120-h/22120-h.htm: ‘Now preye I to hem alle that herkne this litel tretis or rede, that if ther be any thing in it that lyketh hem, that ther-of they thanken oure lord Iesu Crist, of whom procedeth al wit and al goodnesse. And if ther be any thing that displese hem, I preye hem also that they arrette it to the defaute of myn unconninge, and nat to my wil, that wolde ful fayn have seyd bettre if I hadde had conninge. For oure boke seith, 'al that is writen is writen for oure doctrine'; and that is myn entente…

Scott Lemieux: COVID's Been Everywhere, Man https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/11/covids-been-everywhere-man: ‘Remember when Bret Stephens assured us that it was unpossible for COVID to spread beyond the densest urban areas? Obviously, he started with the premise that doing anything to stop the pandemic was bad…. Pro-Trump Republicans are no more likely to update their priors despite them being massively wrong all along…. Bret Stephens is, at least in a strictly formal sense, a professional writer…

Steve M.: Is This Futile? https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2020/11/are-we-sure-they-know-this-is-futile.html: ‘47% of the country will have an even darker view of Democrats and cities and black voters and "the Deep State." Then we'll be even more divided and the right will be even angrier and more paranoid…. But these cynics don't care that they're encouraging a state of permanent cold civil war…

I very much hope that Matt Yglesias’s new weblog http://slowboring.com becomes the place to see and be seen on the internet.

Not, mind you, that I expect Matt to get everything right. Or that I expect all of his quick takes to be sound takes:

====

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1330313756522536963.html

Matt--

I find myself more with Tom Scocca here than you. You write https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-wrong-with-the-media:

The problem here, to me, is not that Walker ought to “stick to sports.” It’s that the analysis is bad. But because it’s in a video game console review rather than a policy analysis section and conforms to the predominant ideological fads, it just sails through to our screens...

And then you say:

What actually happened is that starting in March the household savings rate soared.... Middle class people are seeing their homeowners’ equity rise and... their debt payments fall, while cash piles up on their balance sheets…

This makes sense as a criticism of Ian Walker only if you think that when Ian Walker wrote 'I’d be remiss to ignore all the reasons not to be excited for the PlayStation 5...', it was meant to be the start of an argument that the PS5 will not sell very well because of the epidemiological-economic-cultural uproar of the plague year.

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0HbVeT91VG7G4lI6FMjrekmQw

Note to Self: I very much hope that Pelosi and Schumer are already talking to Collins, Murkowski, Romney, Sasse, and company: the potential for an absolute dog’s breakfast on January 6, 2021 is already remarkably high, and may well increase in probability as things get crazier and crazier over the next two months.

It is also not too early for the House of Representatives to be thinking hard about how to maintain their own security—both on the U.S. Capitol grounds, and for members in transit to the Capitol itself.

The argument that Trump is not trying to gain support among the Republicans for a coup, and that Republicans are not egging one another one to see if they dare to do it, but rather doing something else seems to me to be overhasty and overconfident. Yes, Trump might be trying to establish an extradition-free bolthole for himself in Abu Dhabi. Yes, Trump might be trying to destroy as much evidence linking him to criminality as he can. Yes, Trump might be trying to show that he can disrupt the system so that he can then strike a deal that will leave him confident he will remain out of jail next year. Yes, Trump might simply be confused.

But he might not. And while Giuliani is clearly neither his Göring, his Himmler, or his Heydrich, that does not mean that nobody else is:

Jack Maskell & Elizabeth Rybicki: Counting Electoral Votes: An Overview of Procedures at the Joint Session, Including Objections by Members of Congress https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL32717.pdf: ‘Basis for Objections: The general grounds for an objection to the counting of an electoral vote or votes would appear from the federal statute and from historical sources to be that such vote was not “regularly given” by an elector, and/or that the elector was not “lawfully certified”...

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0r5Pt_jJe95PxqqyIbfHlMvPg
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/11/maskell-rybicki-counting-electoral-votes-an-overview-of-procedures-at-the-joint-session.html
2020-11-10

Adam Frost: Entrepreneurial Transformation of Socialist China https://ysi.ineteconomics.org/project/5f316897689c756fb5c52785/event/5f6b2b94a21037043d0c1458: ‘Generations of scholars argued that beginning with the Communist’s victory over the Nationalists in 1949 and culminating until the establishment of collective economic institutions in 1957, private entrepreneurship was effectively purged from the Chinese economy.... [But] capitalist entrepreneurship was an enduring feature of the modern Chinese economy.... 2,600 cases of “speculation and profiteering” that were prosecuted by local government agencies in the 1960s and 1970s...

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0z0Btdoy-vo9Rm1GKFxXBwoBw

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0aP8gr2_cfSeHzTQEw9OVC6hg

Little additional information seems to be available at this moment:

Pfizer and BioNTech (2020-11-09): Announce Vaccine Candidate Against COVID-19 Achieved Success in First Interim Analysis from Phase 3 Study https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201109005539/en/: ‘Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis. Analysis evaluated 94 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in trial participants. Study enrolled 43,538 participants, with 42% having diverse backgrounds, and no serious safety concerns have been observed; Safety and additional efficacy data continue to be collected. Submission for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) planned for soon after the required safety milestone is achieved, which is currently expected to occur in the third week of November. Clinical trial to continue through to final analysis at 164 confirmed cases in order to collect further data and characterize the vaccine candidate’s performance against other study endpoints…

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0hyYd_ySdCyLyX4IseQV6_I4A
https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/noted-wolf-global-role-2020-10-31.pptx
2020-10-31

Martin Wolf: The Threat of Long Economic Covid Looms https://www.ft.com/content/f9a0c784-712e-4bf9-b994-55f8d63316d9: ‘Covid-19 has left many patients with debilitating symptoms after the initial infection has cleared. This is “long Covid”. What is true of health is likely to be true of the economy, too…. To meet the threat of a “long economic Covid”, policymakers must avoid repeating the mistake of withdrawing support too soon, as they did after the 2008 financial crisis. This danger is real, even if there remains much uncertainty about how the crisis will unfold…. We know that many businesses have been hurt, as demand for their output collapsed or they were locked down. The second waves of the disease now crashing on to many economies will make this worse.... But we also know that things could have been far worse. The world economy has benefited from extraordinary support from central banks and governments.... We know, nevertheless, that what has already happened is going to leave deep scars. The longer the pandemic continues, the bigger those scars will be.... Fiscal policy has to play a central role, as it alone can provide the necessary targeted support... Governments have to spend. But, over time, they must shift their focus from rescue to sustainable growth. If, ultimately, taxes have to rise, they must fall on the winners. This is a political necessity. It is also right…

.#noted #2020-10-30 <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/10/wolf-long-economic-covidnoted.html>

Donald Trump: 'In California https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1321548174427852801, you have a special mask. You cannot under any circumstances take it off. You have to eat through the mask. Right, right, Charlie? It's a very complex mechanism. And they don't realize those germs, they go through it like nothing…

DeLong: COVID Dashboard https://research.stlouisfed.org/dashboard/56322…

Ulrike Malmendier, Stefan Nagel, & Zhen Yan: The Making of Hawks & Doves: Inflation Experiences on the FOMC https://www.nber.org/papers/w23228.pdf...

Dan Froomkin: New York Times Nailed for Publishing Republican Propaganda—Yet Again https://www.salon.com/2020/10/23/new-york-times-nailed-for-publishing-republican-propaganda--yet-again/: ‘Two supposedly "average" voters in a Times story turn out to be hardcore Republicans. And it's happened before... It raises serious questions about whether Times editors and reporters, rather than actually trying to determine how voters feel, are setting out to find people to mouth the words they need for predetermined story lines that, not coincidentally, echo the Trump campaign's propaganda…

Fox and Briar: Mediterranean Lamb Bowls https://www.foxandbriar.com/mediterranean-lamb-bowls/…

Marc Flandreau: How Vulture Investors Draft Constitutions: North & Weingast 30 Years Later https://us02web.zoom.us/w/86160838299?tk=duPA9Ka5nc9J1jZ0ZeuMESHoiEx_l54-alP8YvwejVE.DQIAAAAUD5YOmxZkLVd6UEtOZFFOU2pXZEJZblV5bHpnAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

George Dangerfield: The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914 https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-dangerfield-strange-death.pdf

Gaius Julius Caesar: The Civil War https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-caesar-civil.pdf

Gaius Julius Caesar: The Gallic War https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-caesar-gallic-war.pdf

Marcus Tullius Cicero: Letters to Atticus https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/letters-cicero-atticus-i.pdf https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/letters-cicero-atticus-ii.pdf https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/letters-cicero-atticus-iii.pdf

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus: Meditations https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-marcus-aurelius-meditations.pdf

Sonam Sheth & Eliza Relman: Former Republican Presidential Candidate Herman Cain Has Died After Being Hospitalized for Coronavirus https://www.businessinsider.com/herman-cain-dies-after-being-hospitalized-for-covid-19-2020-7...

George Borjas (2016): EJMR https://web.archive.org/web/20160701000601/https://gborjas.org/2016/06/30/a-rant-on-peer-review/: ‘Janet Currie… takes an even easier approach to dismiss EJMR: sexism. I personally find the forum refreshing. There’s still hope for mankind when many of the posts written by a bunch of over-educated young social scientists illustrate a throwing off of the shackles of political correctness and reflect mundane concerns that more normal human beings share: prestige, sex, money, landing a job, sex, professional misconduct, gossip, sex, and putting down “reg monkeys”… https://twitter.com/delong/status/750084264335544320

Women’s Untold Stories https://www.myscience.org/news/wire/berkeley_s_campus_community_explores_women_s_untold_stories-2020-berkeley: ‘In the 1970s, Berkeley economics professor Laura D’Andrea Tyson would endure derogatory treatment for being a woman... was told not to wear "tight jeans" while teaching, because it would make the "boys crazy." "There was a way in which my failure to recognize that economics was a male-dominated discipline for a long time really helped me," Tyson said in an interview with Berkeley’s economics department. "... But when I realized that there were likely to be very few women in my program, and that there were very few well-known women in economics, I started to have my doubts”…

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/davies-lying-book-talk-2020-10-16.pptx
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0Y-8YsQfbZm3XA4JhpDYJ_4PA

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0S8zhpTx-pPo8Tln5WNl8fBWA https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/column-cowen-reject-great-barrington-noted.pptx 2020-10-16

Philippe Weil (1989): The Equity Premium Puzzle & the Riskfree Rate Puzzle https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-weil-1989-riskfree.pdf...

Donald Harris: Introduction to Bukharin: “Theory of the Leisure Class” https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-harris-bukharin-intro.pdf…

Constance L. Hunter: Economic Outlook: Riding the COVID-Coaster https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/presentation-hunter-covid-coasterpresentation-hunter-covid-coaster.pdf…

Joan Robinson: Rereading Marx https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-robinson-rereading-marx……

Vanessa Stovall: A Tale of Two Creons: Black tragedies, White anxieties, and the Necessity of Abolition https://medium.com/corona-borealis/a-tale-of-two-creons-black-tragedies-white-anxieties-and-the-necessity-of-abolition-4d1816ce3f7a...

Athol Fugard, John Kani, & Winston Ntshona: The Island (Play) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(play)

Emmanuel Saez & Gabriel Zucman: The Rise of Income & Wealth Inequality of America: Evidence from Distributional Macroeconomic Accounts https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Rise%20of%20Income%20and%20Wealth%20Inequality%20in%20America-%20Zucman.pdf...
 Scott Hanselman (2014): Virtual Machines, JavaScript and Assembler https://youtu.be/UzyoT4DziQ4?t=94…

Plus:

I must say, the world-historical reception of Karl Marx would have been very different had he stuck to his initial word choices, and not substituted "bourgeoisie" and "bourgeois" for what he had originally called "Juden" and "Judentum" as labels for his concepts: Shlomo Avinieri (2019): Karl Marx: Philosophy & Revolution https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-avineri-marx.pdf: ‘In German parlance of the time, Judentum also stood for commerce, trade, huckstering in general, just as the English verb “to jew” (now excised from the Oxford English Dictionary) used to mean “to cheat.” So when Marx says that American society is the apotheosis of the power of “Judaism” or that society should be emancipated from the thrall of “Judaism,” there is a subtext here: contemporary readers would recognize that he was not writing just about Jews. Fear of censorship might also have convinced Marx to use the colloquial Judentum rather than “capitalism.” Second, and ironically, Marx’s identification of Judaism with capitalism has a paradoxical literary origin. It appears for the first time in Germany in an article by Marx’s socialist colleague Moses Hess called “On Money” [Über das Geldwesen]…

Really, really not my favorite person. Someone who knows nothing at all about how market economies work, and yet thinks his political allegiance to something he calls "Marxism" makes him an expert. The U.S. in 2008-9 was—as anyone looking at interest rates would know—very far indeed from exhausting its debt capacity: David Harvey (2009): Why the U.S. Stimulus Package Is Bound to Fail https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/02/department-of-huh-in-praise-of-neoclassical-economics-department.html: ‘Any attempt to find an adequate Keynesian solution has been doomed at the start.... A Keynesian solution would require massive and prolonged deficit financing.... The problem for the United States in 2008-9 is that it starts from a position of chronic indebtedness to the rest of the world (it has been borrowing at the rate of more than $2 billion a day over the last ten years or more) and this poses an economic limitation upon the size of the extra deficit that can now be incurred. (This was not a serious problem for Roosevelt who began with a roughly balanced budget). There is also a geo-political limitation since the funding of any extra deficit is contingent upon the willingness of other powers (principally from East Asia and the Gulf States) to lend…

Excellent to watch to see Michael Kades present his point-of-view on video: Michael Kades: Proposals to Strengthen the Antitrust Laws & Restore Competition Online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--jXAdjieTo…

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Leak: The Atlantic Had A Meeting About Kevin Williamson https://www.huffpost.com/entry/leak-the-atlantic-had-a-meeting-about-kevin-williamson-it-was-a-liberal-self-reckoning_n_5ac7a3abe4b0337ad1e7b4df: ‘Black writers... would be brought in... [to] give a view of black life that I felt like very few black people actually would recognize themselves in their own private spaces.... I got incredibly used to learning from people... who... were fucking racist.... I didn’t... have the luxury of having teachers who... saw me completely as a human being.... I couldn’t speak to Andrew on the blog the way I would speak to my wife about what Andrew said on the blog in the morning when it was just us…

Neel Kashkari: Why I Dissented https://medium.com/@neelkashkari/why-i-dissented-feb698ae4d08: ‘We misread the labor market.... We heard repeatedly from businesses who complained that... we had a “historic worker shortage.”... [My] proposed language guards against the risk of underestimating slack.... We would only lift off... [after] core inflation... had... actually hit or exceed[ed] 2 percent...

God! He's long-winded: Joseph Schumpeter: Fiat Money & Social Product https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-schumpeter-fiat-money-and-social-product.pdf...

Forbes: Schumpeter & Keynes https://www.forbes.com/2007/10/10/schumpeter-keynes-economics-biz-cz_pd_1011schumpeter.html#182b9957d4f7: ‘THE TWO MEN WERE NOT ANTAGONISTS.... While Schumpeter considered all of Keynes' answers wrong, or at least misleading, he was a sympathetic critic…

Forbes: Schumpeter & Keynes https://www.forbes.com/2007/10/10/schumpeter-keynes-economics-biz-cz_pd_1011schumpeter.html#182b9957d4f7: ‘Keynes, in turn, considered Schumpeter one of the few contemporary economists worthy of his respect. In his lectures he again and again referred to the works Schumpeter had published during World War I, and especially to Schumpeter's essay on the Rechenpfennige (i.e., money of account) as the initial stimulus for his own thoughts on money…

Bapu Jena & al.: Acute Myocardial Infarction Mortality During Dates of National Interventional Cardiology Meetings https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29523525/…

Tim Miller: Actually, Virtue Signaling Is Good https://thebulwark.com/actually-virtue-signaling-is-good/...

Kate Bahn: 'Unemployment Benefits Initial Claims https://twitter.com/LipstickEcon/status/1311648495300947968 [are] not good... have plateaued around 800,000 [per week] for the last 8 weeks... at the level and about the length (from my eyeballing) of the peak during the Great Recession.... It's just so bad…

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: 1933 Inaugural Address https://www.c-span.org/video/?5792-1/president-roosevelt-1933-inaugural-address https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos1.asp…

Tim Duy: Trump Kills Fiscal Stimulus Negotiations https://blogs.uoregon.edu/timduyfedwatch/2020/10/06/trump-kills-fiscal-stimulus-negotiations/: ‘From a campaign perspective, it seems ludicrous.... Ultimately, I think McConnell just isn’t willing to get a deal done.... Interestingly, Trump’s abandonment of fiscal stimulus comes soon after the latest plea from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for additional support for what he sees as a still struggling economy...

Vladimir Lenin (1917): State & Revolution https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-lenin-1917-state-%26-revolution.pdf

Leon Smolinski: Lenin & Economic Planning https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-smolinski-lenin.pdf…

Carl Shapiro & Hal Varian (1998): Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy https://books.google.com/books?id=aE_J4Iv_PVEC

Ryan McMorrow, Nian Liu, & Sherry Fei Ju: The Transformation of Ant Financial https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/articler-mcmorrow-ant.pdf

Josef Schumpeter (1917): Fiat Money & the Social Product https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-schumpeter-fiat-money-and-social-product.pdf

Mall History: Ku Klux Klan Rally http://mallhistory.org/items/show/175: ‘In 1925 the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. The organized event brought 25,000 members in full regalia to the city…

EPI: The Productivity–Pay Gap https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/…

Eric Lemieux: This Day in Labor History: July 28, 1932 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/07/liveblogging-history-july-28-1932-the-bonus-army.html: ‘On July 28, 1932, the U.S. Army 12th Infantry regiment commanded by Douglas MacArthur and the 3rd Calvary Regiment, supported by six battle tanks commanded by Major George Patton violently evicted the Bonus Army from their Washington, D.C. encampment. This violent action and horrible treatment of impoverished veterans shocked the American public and demonstrated the utter indifference of Herbert Hoover to the desperate poverty the nation faced…

Plus:

John Bellamy Foster: On the Laws of Capitalism https://monthlyreview.org/2011/05/01/on-the-laws-of-capitalism/#en19: ‘The Socialist Party of Boston wrote to the Harvard economics department, proposing a debate on capitalism and socialism.... The debate was held... with Sweezy and Schumpeter as the two protagonists, before a packed audience in Harvard’s Littauer Auditorium…. Leontief, as chair, summarized.... "The patient is capitalism. What is to be his fate? Our speakers are in fact agreed that the patient is inevitably dying. But the bases of their diagnoses could not be more different. On the one hand there is Sweezy, who utilizes the analysis of Marx and of Lenin to deduce that the patient is dying of a malignant cancer. Absolutely no operation can help. The end is foreordained. On the other hand, there is Schumpeter. He, too, and rather cheerfully, admits that the patient is dying. (His sweetheart already died in 1914 and his bank of tears has long since run dry.) But to Schumpeter, the patient is dying of a psychosomatic ailment. Not cancer but neurosis is his complaint. Filled with self-hate, he has lost the will to live. In this view capitalism is an unlovable system, and what is unlovable will not be loved. Paul Sweezy himself is a talisman and omen of that alienation which will seal the system’s doom...

Om Malik: Apple Watch’s Sensory Overload https://om.co/2020/09/15/apple-watchs-sensory-overload/: ‘Longtime readers are familiar with my theory around hyper-personalization, and Apple has brought that to a mass-produced product. Oh, and it also tells time!" || This Mirror with Sensors Points to a New Connected Future. Here Is Why https://om.co/gigaom/this-mirror-with-sensors-points-to-a-new-connected-future-here-is-why/: ‘By offering a uniquely/hyper personal experience, simplehuman can go from being an invisible brand to one that is center stage in our minds. Think of it this way—connectivity and sensors allow us  to turn any large-scale platform into a personal one. Call me crazy, by when we add a dash of connectivity to those omnipresent sensors then interesting and/or magical things can happen...

Wikipedia: Martha Gellhorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Gellhorn…

Martha Gellhorn: The Face of War https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-gellhorn-face.pdf...

Yun Sheng: Little Emperors: Memoir of an Only Child https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n10/sheng-yun/little-emperors…

Evan Cheng & Sandi Khine: Over 100 Faculty Sign Open Letter Calling for Faculty Senate to Reconsider Hoover Institution’s Relationship with Stanford https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/09/23/over-100-faculty-sign-open-letter-calling-for-faculty-senate-to-reconsider-hoover-institutions-relationship-with-stanford/

Matthew Yglesias: One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger https://www.amazon.com/One-Billion-Americans-Thinking-Bigger-ebook/dp/B082ZR6827…

PAA DEI Committee: Demographics of Racial Violence https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_pbVXnchhQtac5enVKSPzxw…

Ursula K. LeGuin (1973): The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/story-leguin-omelas.pdf...

Wikipedia: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas...

Gabrielle Bellot (2017): Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” Defies Genre https://www.tor.com/2017/08/07/ursula-le-guins-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas-defies-genre/...

Our World in Data: Coronavirus Pandemic https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus…

Wikipedia: Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie,_Duchess_of_Hohenberg…

Wikipedia: Vaso Čubrilović https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaso_%C4%8Cubrilovi%C4%87#World_War_II_and_later_life…

KJV: Revelation 6 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation%206&version=KJV: ‘And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying: "Come and see!"…

Manton Reece: Micro.blog 2.0 Makes It Easier to Customize Your Blog https://news.micro.blog/2020/09/29/press-release-microblog.html…

Nic Newman: The Resurgence & Importance of Email Newsletters http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2020/the-resurgence-and-importance-of-email-newsletters/: ‘Email newsletters... are proving increasingly valuable to publishers looking to build strong direct relationships with audiences…

Noah Smith: The Late '10s Were Better for Incomes than the '90s https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-09-23/median-household-income-grew-more-in-the-10s-than-the-90s...

Claudia Foroni, Massimiliano Marcellino, & Dalibor Stevanovic: Forecasting the COVID-19 Recession & Recovery https://voxeu.org/article/forecasting-covid-19-recession-and-recovery: ‘Adjusting for forecasting errors made during the financial crisis of 2007-2009 better aligns the COVID forecasts with observed data. The results suggest a slow recovery to pre-COVID-19 levels, lasting several years…

Plus:

George-Marios Angeletos & Chen Lian: Confidence & the Propagation of Demand Shocks https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-angeletos-%26-lian-confidence.pdf: 'Intertemporal substitution in production... rational confusion (or bounded rationality) in consumption. The first element allows aggregate supply to respond to shifts in aggregate demand.... The second introduces a “confidence multiplier,” namely a positive feedback loop between real economic activity, consumer expectations of permanent income, and investor expectations... [that] amplifies the business-cycle fluctuations triggered by demand shocks (but not those triggered by supply shocks); it helps investment to comove with consumption; and it allows front-loaded fiscal stimuli to crowd in private spending...

Duncan Dowson & Bernard Hamrock (1980): History of Ball Bearings https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19810009866: ‘The familiar precision rolling-element bearings of the twentieth century are products of exacting technology and sophisticated science. Their very effectiveness and basic simplicity of form may discourage further interest in their history and development. Yet the full story covers a large portion of recorded history and surprising evidence of an early recognition of the advantages of rolling motion over sliding action and progress toward the development of rolling-element bearings. The development of rolling-element bearings is followed from the earliest civilizations to the end of the eighteenth century. The influence of general technological developments, particularly those concerned with the movement of large building blocks, road transportation, instruments, water-raising equipment, and windmills are discussed, together with the emergence of studies of the nature of rolling friction and the impact of economic factors. By 1800 the essential features of ball and rolling-element bearings had emerged and it only remained for precision manufacture and mass production to confirm the value of these fascinating machine elements...

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0n4PwgGO6FAEEAqRG6I72oXtg https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/grasping-reality/fama-volcker-disinflation-denialism.pdf

This is very much worth watching—very much subscribing for:

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0d2ynI15JBBHNdu1j90_0i1pQ

Out-of-Africa explosion 50KY ago, & patriarchal collapse of male (but not female) effective population size 8KY ago…

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0TSPFIGJUsBJHWm0UMAqLe6UQ

This is significantly better in terms of the employment report than I was expecting to see. It heartens me about the economy for the third quarter and maybe the fourth. But it depresses me about 2021, as it seems to indicate a lot of the country’s decision makers are not taking the virus as seriously as they should Perhaps this week will change their minds:

Heather Boushey: New Employment Data https://twitter.com/HBoushey/status/1312007393480511490: ‘The economy added 661,000 jobs in September.... We are still down 10.7 million jobs.... People searching for work for 27 weeks or more rose by 781,000 to 2.4 million. Regular unemployment benefits end after 26 weeks. Congress will need to act to extend the # of weeks for these benefits.... Given that the pandemic isn't over, the change in this # concerns me: "22.7 percent of employed people teleworked in September because of the coronavirus pandemic, down from 24.3 percent in August." Employers brought folks back to work in September: Of those who are no longer unemployed, 1.5 million of them had been on temporary layoff. Yet, at the same time, 345,000 people transitioned from temporary to permanent layoff…

Well, a decade late and many dollars short, we seem to have become the conventional wisdom! Would only that the Economist had listened to our arguments, and been on our side a decade ago! It was always more than tenable. It was always very attractive:

Economist: Governments Can Borrow More than Was Once Believed https://www.economist.com/schools-brief/2020/09/12/governments-can-borrow-more-than-was-once-believed: ‘The global financial crisis pushed rates around the world to near zero.... In 2012 Larry Summers... and Brad DeLong... suggested a large Keynesian stimulus... the gains it would provide by boosting the growth rate of gdp might outstrip the cost of financing the debt…. As the years went by... the notion of borrowing for fiscal stimulus started to seem more tenable, even attractive…. Governments ideally ought to make sure that new borrowing is doing things that will provide a lasting good, greater than the final cost of the borrowing. If money is very cheap and likely to remain so, this will look like a fairly low bar…

Walter Womacka: Socialist "Realist" Stained Glass https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/walter-womackas-socialist-realist-stained-glass.html: ‘East Germany as it wished it had been, was, and would become…

Sagarmatha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Everest…

Bertolt Brecht: To Those Born Afterward https://holgerszesnat.wordpress.com/2005/04/25/bertolt-brecht-to-those-born-later/…

URL to Interact https://url-to-interact.herokuapp.com/…

Daron Acemoglu: Colonial Origins Data Archive https://economics.mit.edu/faculty/acemoglu/data/ajr2001: ‘The zipped data and program files necessary for reproducing the tables and figures in The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation...

Wikipedia: Dark Shadows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Shadows_(televised_storylines): ‘Storylines…

Dan Seifert: Ring’s Latest Security Camera Is a Drone that Flies Around Inside Your House https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/24/21453709/ring-always-home-cam-indoor-drone-security-camera-price-specs-features-amazon…

Chrystia Freeland: The rise of the New Global Super-Rich https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6NKdnZvdoo…

Walter Greason & Kari Leigh Merritt: The 2020 Election & Beyond https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9XvCoYh6Tk: ‘Greason explains how we should not become solely focused on the upcoming election, but instead see the broader picture and honor the successes of the MOVEMENT. He discusses his experiences as a multi-cultural organizer and lays out a brilliant plan to help save higher education.... The importance of art, comics, and Afrofuturism.... The importance of friendship, camaraderie, and community…

At a 1% mortality rate, this means COVID-19 had as of three weeks ago already burned through 1/10 of the African-American community—as opposed to 1/20 of the white American community. But there is large differential mortality comparing African-Americans and white Americans as well, which I cannot now put my hands on good estimates of: Trevon Logan: ’1 in 1020 Black Americans https://twitter.com/TrevonDLogan/status/1309475741231460352 have died of COVID-19.

This is a very useful near real-time take on what is going on right now, out there in the economy: Raksha Kopparam & al.: Equitable Growth’s Household Pulse Graphs: September 2–14 Edition https://equitablegrowth.org/equitable-growths-household-pulse-graphs-september-2-14-edition/: ‘Over 50 percent of respondents in households making less than $50K reported having experienced loss of employment income since March 13…

I do not think we understand who the median effective investors in financial markets are, and why they think what they do: John Auther: It's a Weird World Where FANGs Are a Haven Asset https://delong.typepad.com/files/column-authers-2020-09-21-fangs.pdf: ‘FANG popularity... rests on the perception that they are defensive... eentrenched competitive position[s]... thought to offer safety. Meanwhile, the banks are the polar opposite…. [Since] March… the 10-year Treasury yield… has oscillated… around... 0.666% level... strange because the Federal Reserve isn’t yet formally attempting to control 10-year yields, despite widespread speculation that it will start to do so before long. And views on inflation... have gone through huge changes during the .666 era…

Shapiro and Varian have long had great success by saying that the information-age economy raises little in the way of questions about antitrust that the First Gilded Age did not. But that is not quite true: Michael Kades & Fiona Scott Morton: Interoperability as a Competition Remedy for Digital Networks https://equitablegrowth.org/working-papers/interoperability-as-a-competition-remedy-for-digital-networks/: ‘Addressing entry barriers created by network effects is critical to remedying... monopolization... (e.g. Facebook).... Interoperability... a necessary, but not necessarily a sufficient, condition.... How to make an interoperability requirement effective... how rulemaking could ameliorate these challenges…

Not even Johnson in Britain or Bolsonaro in Brazil has as limited and faulty a grasp of what's what as American president. And nobody in the administration appears to be doing anything constructive: Jonathan Bernstein: ‘Some 200,000 people in the U.S. have died.... https://delong.typepad.com/files/column-bernstein-2020-09-22-trump-denial.pdf The fight against the pandemic... has... severely disrupted the lives of almost everyone. For a dissenting view, however, we have the president… “Below the age of 18, like—nobody… It affects virtually nobody....” Emphasis added. Look: I don’t like to dwell on this stuff. But... this is monstrous behavior from any elected official…

Reporting from an Ohio county that went for Trump over HRC by 3-to-1 in 2016, John Scalzi finds the Trumpists will be dead and damned before they will mask up themselves: John Scalzi: The State of Masking in Trump Country: An Anecdotal Report https://whatever.scalzi.com/2020/09/22/the-state-of-masking-in-trump-country-an-anecdotal-report/: ‘Trump... has made wearing them both political and a referendum on masculinity, so it’s not entirely surprising if his supporters have followed suit. Does this mean that I am getting terrible looks from dudes because I’m wearing a mask? Not at all; mostly everyone in Kroger and elsewhere is working on minding their own business…. My anecdotal experience is anecdotal…. I’m not thrilled…. What I’m going to do is a) stay home most of the time, b) mask myself up when I do go out, and c) keep out of the way of the maskless when I can, and I mostly can…

Plus:

This is by far the worst news I have seen in six months, because Aaron Carroll is a very credible observer and guide, and he is now profoundly depressed. Given American political dysfunction and given the current prevalence of the virus, we need to get testing up to 10 million a day—and then act on what those tests tell us—to have a chance of pushing our current well below one so that anything like normal life can resume. Yet there are no signs we are on a path to anything like that outcome:

Aaron Carroll: Stop Expecting Life to Go Back to Normal Next Year https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/opinion/coronavirus-precautions.html?smid=tw-share: ‘We still need to figure out how to live in this new world, now, and that means embracing, finally, all the strategies for fighting the virus that many of us have resisted. It’s not too late to invest in testing both symptomatic and asymptomatic people. Back in the spring, I estimated that we might need a million tests a week to manage the virus. That estimate assumed that America would drive the prevalence rate of the disease into the ground, much as other countries did. We failed.... We need much more than a million tests a week... ubiquitous, cheap, fast tests... distributed widely... isolate... quarantine.... We need to normalize mask-wearing.... Finally, we need a functioning scientific infrastructure to provide detailed and specific plans.... This is a marathon, not a sprint. Both, though, require running…

Start with the propositions the role of the university system is to maximize societal value-added well also enabling upward social mobility. With those goals in mind, we could then have discussions about (a) how much to invest in higher-education institutions (b) of which types, and (c) how to allocate places in those institutions, plus (d) what is the best way to finance that societal investment. Very, very, very few discussions of admissions policies have this framing. One result is that we know astonishingly little about the effects of different setups. Here the very wise Zach Bleemer closes some of our knowledge gap:

Zachary Bleemer: Top Percent Policies & the Return to Postsecondary Selectivity http://zacharybleemer.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ELC_Paper.pdf: ‘University policies that boost the chances of admission for targeted groups with relatively low standardized test scores are highly controversial. I provide new evidence on the impact of a “top percent” admissions policy implemented by the University of California (UC) system between 2001 and 2011. Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) guaranteed admission to participating UC campuses for the top 4 percent of graduates from most California high schools. Using a novel longitudinal database covering the ELC era’s 1.7 million UC applicants–including each student’s enrollments, degree attainment, and early-career earnings–and a regression discontinuity research design, I begin by showing that ELC eligibility increased the likelihood that barely-eligible applicants from bottom-SAT-quartile high schools enrolled at four selective UC campuses by 16 percentage points, all of whom would have otherwise enrolled at a less-selective public college or university in California. Those barely-eligible ELC participants had higher five-year graduation rates than barely-ineligible students by 31 percentage points and higher annual mid-20s California earnings by $15,000. ELC participants who would have other- wise enrolled at community colleges or California’s least-selective public universities benefited the most from UC enrollment under ELC; indeed, universities’ graduation rates are shown to effectively proxy ELC participants’ causal effect of enrollment. These results suggest that ELC participants substantially gained from increased overall university quality despite having lower average SAT scores than their UC peers by almost 300 points, dispelling concerns about mismatched university ‘fit’ for the targeted high-GPA low-SAT applicants...

William Cohan: Jay Powell Adds Voice to Small Business Cry for Help https://www.ft.com/content/60d8bd2b-0bb5-4e8a-99bc-93653277ec42: ‘US recovery will never come until the companies that account for most jobs get back on their feet…

Teresa Nielsen Hayden: Stupid Plot Tricks https://web.archive.org/web/20070930165557/http://sff.net/paradise/plottricks.htm: ‘The Evil Overlord Devises a Plot…

John Davis: The Mystery of Fort Zinderneuf in Beau Geste https://mysteriouswritings.com/the-mystery-of-fort-zinderneuf-in-beau-geste-by-john-davis/…

Simple Minds: Don't You Forget About Me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zfcwq44q-vA…

Keri Leigh Merritt: 'Am absolutely THRILLED to announce my new fall #Merrittocracy series (in both @youtube & #podcast formats!) 🔥🔥🔥 https://twitter.com/KeriLeighMerrit/status/1303317030133805056. In the 6 weeks leading up to 2020 Election, I will interview 6 top scholars on: The 2020 Election & Beyond: The Possibilities & Pitfalls of a Post-Trump America…

Wikipedia: Lusitania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lusitania: ‘an ancient Iberian Roman province located where modern Portugal (south of the Douro river) and part of western Spain (the present autonomous community of Extremadura and a part of the province of Salamanca) lie…

Bertholt Brecht: To Those Born After http://languagehat.com/page/4/: ‘Men’s strength was little. The goal/Lay far in the distance,/Easy to see if for me/Scarcely attainable./So the time passed away/Which on earth was given me…

Elizabeth Bear: What to Do When You Feel Awful & Nothing Seems to Make Sense: Identifying & Navigating Gaslighting https://medium.com/@matociquala_57740/what-to-do-when-you-feel-awful-nothing-seems-to-make-sense-identifying-navigating-gaslighting-62918f7946c: ‘One mistake we often make is to assume that gaslighting is intentional and calculated. It’s not: like most abuse, it’s reactive and triggered. This status is precisely why the behaviors can seem so random and incomprehensible that they make us, the targets or observers of the behavior, feel out of control ourselves, or as if our own perceptions must be skewed…

Branko seems here to be saying something that is both true and not true: John Woodbridge: 'An old debate https://twitter.com/JVWoodster/status/1306101839205720064 https://youtube.com/watch?v=nsT6gQmesdQ between DeLong and Tim Kane. I feel like these right wing talking points of 1) things are much better than they were in 1910 (or pick a date) and 2) and the impact of technology and it's raising of living standards isn't captured by official statistics seem, honestly, pretty hollow. Branko Milanovic wrote about this comparison in a far more intelligent way than I can: "Had anyone tried grand-parental comparison in Eastern Europe in 1989, he would have been laughed out. And yet, there was not a single indicator (income, life expectancy, education level, housing space) that in 1989 was not better than in 1949...

How to be publicly effective in the dysfunctional public sphere created by the age of Trump—and after: Jonathan Crowe: Opposition in the Age of Gish Gallops https://www.jonathancrowe.net/2016/12/opposition-in-the-age-of-gish-gallops/: ‘The Gish Gallop, named after creationist Duane Gish, is a rhetorical strategy of “drowning your opponent in a flood of individually weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort…

How to be privately effective in the dysfunctional world created by the age of Trump—and after: Masha Gessen (2016): Autocracy: Rules for Survival https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival/: ‘The electoral college... two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be…

Norm-breaking as the road to catastrophe: historical analogy: Plutarch: Life of Tiberius Gracchus http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Tiberius_Gracchus*.html: ‘This is said to have been the first sedition at Rome, since the abolition of royal power, to end in bloodshed and the death of citizens; the rest though neither trifling nor raised for trifling objects, were settled by mutual concessions, the nobles yielding from fear of the multitude, and the people out of respect for the senate…

J. Bradford DeLong: Imperialism & Underdevelopment, 1870-1914: Intro https://share.mmhmm.app/71d9afc8ded940af83fcfdb582f0f658…

J. Bradford DeLong & A. Michael Froomkin (1999): Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow's Economy http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/spec.htm: ‘Adam Smith's case for the invisible hand... will be familiar to almost all.... The revolutions in data processing and data communications may shake these foundations…

Plus:

Teresa Nielsen Hayden (2003): As you know, Bob... http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004046.html: ‘I have to quote this one. LanguageHat posted it in the Egoscanning comment thread, in the wake of Arthur Hlavaty’s remark that “I cast no first stones; I was egoscanning when the Web was a scientifictional dream”...

Ralph 4CR looked around in astonishment. “You mean… there are invisible beams all around us, carrying information to all parts of the globe, even as we speak?” The Master of Communications turned towards him solemnly. “Yes,” he asseverated, “and the information is not carried whole, but is broken up into a myriad of infinitesimal packets, to be reassembled without fail when they reach their destination.” “You astonish me,” breathed Ralph. “And this information is accessible to all?” “It is,” nodded the Master. “The issues of the day are debated by all citizens, no matter where they may be located, and communication no longer waits on tides or weather.”

“And what are the great issues so decided?” The Master cast a glance at the poll on his screen: Which Jedi Knight Are You? He looked severe. “I fear our issues would mean nothing to you across the great gulf of time you have traversed. You should go now and refresh yourself. We will speak later. You have much to learn. Vanna, show our young guest to his room.” A lissome blonde appeared from behind a curtain and beckoned…

Joseph A. Schumpeter (1946): John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946 https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-schumpeter-keynes-obituary.pdf: 'He was not the sort of man who would bend the full force of his mind to the individual problems of coal, textiles, steel, shipbuilding.... He was the English intellectual, a little deracine... childless and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy...

...So he turned resolutely to the only "parameter of action" that seemed left... monetary management.... It might heal.... It would sooth.... Return to a gold system at pre-war parity was more than his England could stand.... Keynesianism is a seedling which cannot be transplanted into foreign soil: it dies there and becomes poisonous....

The social vision first revealed in the Economic Consequences of the Peace... in which investment opportunity flags and saving habits nevertheless persist, is... implemented in the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money... consumption function... efficiency-of-capital... liquidity-preference... the given wage-unit and the... quantity of money "determine" income and ipso facto employment... the great dependent variables to be "explained."... With Marx, capitalist evolution issues into breakdown.... With Keynes, it issues into a stationary state that constantly threatens to break down.... In both theories, the breakdown is motivated by causes inherent to the working of the economic engine.... This feature naturally qualifies Keynes's theory for the role of "rationalizer" of anti-capitalist volition....

[In] the General Theory, we find... overstatements, moreover, which cannot be reduced to the defensible level, because results depend precisely upon the excess.... One word in the book that cannot be defended... the word "general."... Keynesians may hold that these special cases are the actual ones of our age. They cannot hold more than that.... Keynes wished to secure his major results without appeal to the element of rigidity, just as he spurned the aid he might have derived from imperfections of competition. There were points, however, at which he was unable to do so.... And at other points, rigidities stand in reserve....

It is, of course, always possible to show that the economic system will cease to work if a sufficient number of its adaptive organs are paralyzed. Keynesians like this fire escape no more than do other theorists. Nevertheless, it is not without importance. The classical example is equilibrium under-employment....

Most orthodox Keynesians are "radicals" in one sense or another.... Disciples... see one thing only-an indictment of private thrift and the implications... with respect to the managed economy and inequality of incomes.... Saving had come to be regarded as the last pillar of the bourgeois argument.... Adam Smith['s]... system... amounts to all-around vituperation directed against "slothful" landlords and grasping merchants or "masters".... Marshall and Pigou were in this boat... took it for granted that inequality... was "undesirable."... Many... who entered the field... in the twenties and thirties had renounced allegiance to the bourgeois scheme... sneered at the profit motive and at the element of personal performance in the capitalist process. But... they still had to pay respect to saving-under penalty of losing caste.... Keynes broke their fetters: here, at last, was theoretical doctrine that not only obliterated the personal element and was... at least mechanizable, but also smashed the pillar into dust.... Via saving, "the unequal distribution of income is the ultimate cause of unemployment." This is what the Keynesian Revolution amounts to...

FOLD https://readfold.com/

William Baumol (1990): Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, & Destructive https://delong.typepad.com/baumol-1990-entrepreneurship.pdf

Wikipedia: French Conquest of Algeria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_conquest_of_Algeria…

Gillian Tett, Paul Collier, & Martin Wolf: þe New Social Contract Agenda https://newsocialcontract.live.ft.com/agenda?login=ML: ‘Why Democracy's Future Depends on Citizenship…

Gideon Rachman: Germany Has More Pressing Concerns than Brexit https://www.ft.com/content/e9b7b193-47d4-4887-abe1-2c12f344922a: ‘Chatting to a diplomat in Berlin last week, I suggested that Brexit probably ranked about number four on the list of German foreign-policy concerns. He looked thoughtful and then replied: “I think lower than that”...

Mary Burfisher, Sherman Robinson, & Karen Thierfelder: Agricultural & Food Policies in a United States-Mexico FTA https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/106294089290004B: ‘This paper analyzes the effects of a U.S.-Mexico free trade agreement (FTA) on agriculture. We use a 28-sector, three-country computable general equilibrium (CGE) model in which we explicitly model agricultural and food policies in both countries, and differentiate land types…

W. Arthur Lewis (1977): þe Evolution of þe International Economic Order https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-lewis-evolution-selections.pdf...

Claudia Rei, Bitsy Perlman, & Felipe Valencia Caicedo: Virtual Economic History Seminar https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/crei/virhist/...

Joshua Gans: Reproduction Numbers Tend to 1 & þe Reason Could Be Behavioural https://voxeu.org/article/reproduction-numbers-tend-1-and-reason-could-be-behavioural: ‘Epidemiological models that incorporate rational economic agents tend to predict that pandemics may move towards a steady state for a significant period of time...

I confess that I had greatly underestimated the damaging effects of Jim Crow on even the “talented 10th” of the African-American population:

Eric S. Yellin: How þe Black Middle Class Was Attacked by Woodrow Wilson’s Administration https://theconversation.com/how-the-black-middle-class-was-attacked-by-woodrow-wilsons-administration-52200: ‘When Woodrow Wilson arrived in the nation’s capital in March 1913, he brought with him an administration loaded with white supremacists.... Wilson’s personal racism tends to distract us from a bigger story about the changing place of race in American life and politics. Wilson’s administration['s]... impact was not merely the result of one man’s prejudice...

The Economist now fears not that the Chinese model will fail and leave China much poorer than it has to be, but that it will succeed:

Economist: þe Chinese Economic Model: Xi Jinping Is Reinventing State Capitalism. Don’t Underestimate It https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/08/13/xi-jinping-is-reinventing-state-capitalism-dont-underestimate-it: ‘The Trump administration... [thought] China’s steroidal state capitalism is weaker than it looks.... Simple, but wrong.... Xi’s... ruthless mix of autocracy, technology and dynamism could propel growth for years. Underestimating China’s economy is hardly a new phenomenon...

Another thing that I would not have predicted: that TSMC would become such a key node, asset, and resource in the global economy—something not just producing great economic surplus for the world, but becoming a strategic key in the “weaponized interdependence“ sense:

Paul Mozur: TSMC https://stratechery.com/2020/an-interview-with-paul-mozur-on-technology-in-china: ‘TSMC has basically been pulled into the American camp.... It does feel like in that kind of geopolitical chess match, Taiwan and TSMC are now with the United States, and that leaves China in a very difficult position…

I am a sucker for “China pessimism“ pieces. But then, while I have been optimistic about the short-run future of state capitalism with Chinese characteristics, egalitarian aspirations, and Stalinist instincts for 40 years, I have also spent those same 40 years being pessimistic about the long-run future. 40 years is a long time, long enough for it to be clear that I was wrong. So I am not someone you should ask to peer into the crystal ball with respect to China:

Jamil Anderlini: Behind þe Recovery, China’s Economy Is Wobbling https://www.ft.com/content/ef2ac2d3-6389-4ac6-8608-90dbc3e68465?shareType=nongift: ‘The solid rebound was only achieved with Herculean effort from an interventionist state falling back on the same tools it has relied on since the financial crisis of 2008.... A bicycle laden with enormous boxes of debt, ridden by a drunk and with strategic competitors such as the US trying to knock it over...

Here the editorial board of the Financial Times grasps at the straw hope that modern neofascism will prove incompetent at governing, even according to the standards of its core supporters. They have not read their 1984. Orwell saw very clearly that what the fascist and Stalinist base want is not for the government to raise the chocolate ration, but only that they be told on the TV that the chocolate ration has been raised. The editorial board knows and they should reflect on how Boris Johnson has managed to move his goalposts so that after the fact he will proclaim Brexit to be a success no matter what happens—for at least England will have “stood up” against the eurocrats and the deracinated rootless cosmopolites:

Financial Times: Competence Is þe Test for Populists https://www.ft.com/content/8e375a56-fddb-4de4-965f-a8edab644a97: ‘Johnson’s campaign poetry has now caught up with him. Far from “getting Brexit done”, his own deal is—in his telling—getting in the way.... It is the political version of a Ponzi scheme: always move on to the next promise before you are asked to deliver on the last one…

Plus

Willem Jongman (2006): Gibbon Was Right: þe Decline & Fall of þe Roman Economy https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-jongman-gibbon.pdf: ‘Imagine a pre-industrial and largely agricultural economy in a fairly stable equilibrium. Next that equilibrium is disturbed by catastrophic mortality: what do we expect to happen when the proportion between people and assets changes?… Prices and wages rose quite dramatically in the wake of the Antonine Plague… [and] the coinage itself began its slide into substantial debasement. Theoretically, there was no need for that. The money stock was large, and by now even too large…

...The reason must have been the needs of the state. It had become difficult to collect taxes in the turmoil of the day, precisely when the state also had to finance huge military efforts…. The biggest economic and social change, however, was to the land-labour ratio…. Production per man hour must have gone up…. Conversely, rents [should] have gone down…. The Roman Empire should have turned into a world of happy and prosperous peasants, and much greater social equality…. Theory is impeccable….

Reality was, of course, different…. What we witness from the late second century is the emergence of a new social, political and legal regime, where oppression replaces the entitlements of citizenship…honestiores and humiliores…. Demand for slaves declined because citizens could now be exploited more fully…. Rome debased the value of citizenship and followed the same route that Prussian Junkers were to follow during the so-called second serfdom…. The coloni of the Saltus Burunitanus of 180 were not alone to complain to the emperor about increased oppression and growing abuse. When pushed hard enough, they could have moved, but that was precisely what was to become illegal. Tied to the land, they lost their powers in the market…. The declining legal status of citizens was… an instrument imposed in the face of what would have been an improved economic position for the peasantry if the market would have had its way.

This change in social relations is also reflected culturally. The late second century was a period of important cultural changes… Mithraism… Christianity… new forms of belonging and a sociability that no longer depended on civic life or patronal benevolence….

For me, the interesting thing is the resilience of the Roman state. For more than half a century, the Severan regime maintained the integrity and continuit …. The surprise is not that it finally collapsed, but that it survived… for so long that the crisis later became known as the crisis of the third century, rather than… of the second century…. Just as remarkable as the temporary Severan recovery is the recovery from Diocletian… [which] also generated a measure of economic recovery… substantial enough for late antique economic decline to be dramatic.

The real beginnings of that decline and fall, however, may have been in the beginning of a period of much colder and dryer weather, and in the scourge of the Antonine Plague. With the growth of its Empire, with the growth of its cities, and with the growth of a system of government and transportation based on those cities, Rome had created the perhaps most prosperous and successful pre-industrial economy in history. The age of Antoninus Pius was indeed probably the best age to live in pre-industrial history.

Is it the staying at home with lots of time to think, the economic distress and uncertainty, or the heightened fear and consciousness of mortality, or just chance that turn the coronavirus spring into Black Lives Matter spring? Barry Eichengreen believes that it is the second:

Barry Eichengreen: Rage Against þe Pandemic https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/covid19-racial-disparities-fuel-usa-protests-by-barry-eichengreen-2020-06: ‘The connection running in the other direction—from the pandemic to the demonstrations—has received far less attention. Without diminishing for a moment the horror of Floyd’s death, the question is: why now? After all, before Floyd, there was the police killing of Michael Brown... Eric Garner... nearly 100 African-Americans who died in police custody over the past six years...

...One explanation for why Floyd’s killing triggered a national uprising is that an especially horrific recording quickly dominated social media and traditional news outlets alike. But this answer will satisfy only those who have forgotten the equally horrific recording of Garner’s killing. A more convincing explanation must include the pandemic....

The COVID-19 mortality rate is 2.4 times as high among black Americans as white Americans. Even without more images of police brutality, the situation facing many African-Americans, disproportionately affected by the pandemic, was already approaching the unbearable. That is because of America’s threadbare social safety net. Unemployment insurance benefits are typically limited to 26 weeks in the US. Certain states in the South provide fewer. Indeed, some, such as Florida, have intentionally designed their bureaucracies to make applying for unemployment benefits as difficult as possible...

Things have not gone as badly in the past two months as Jacob Robbins feared back in mid-July. But we still stand on the knife’s edge of an even deeper depression then we are currently in, with governments about to apply a large deflationary demand shock this fall:

Jacob Robbins: Sleepwalking into Depression: The Economic Response to COVID-19 in the United States https://equitablegrowth.org/research-paper/wage-discrimination-and-the-exploitation-of-workers-in-the-u-s-labor-market/: ‘The few green shoots of improved economic data belie the fact that the health and economic crises are far from over. In fact, we are in danger of sleepwalking into economic depression…. Thanks in large part to pandemic-related income support, spending recovered somewhat in May, rising 8.2 percent… I use real-time payment data from Earnest Research, a company that analyzes spending data from credit and debit cards, to study the latest on how consumer spending is responding to the pandemic…