Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

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

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

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

J. Bradford DeLong: What Lifted Trump Could Sink Biden https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/austerity-will-kill-the-income-growth-that-helped-trump-by-j-bradford-delong-2020-12?referral=8420da: ‘Donald Trump managed to receive 74 million votes despite countless failures for the simple reason that he presided over three years of a high-pressure economy in which wages grew rapidly. If the Democrats ignore this lesson or listen to fiscal hawks already pushing for austerity, they will face a painful reckoning in 2024. Very few of the people who voted for US President Donald Trump in the 2020 election are plutocrats who benefited from his and congressional Republicans’ tax cut, or even wannabe plutocrats who can hope to benefit from it in the future. Some Trump voters doubtless are very focused on the installation of right-wing judges on the federal bench. But many among the 74 million who voted for Trump did so for other reasons…

I was browsing through Friedrich von Hayek's The Fatal Conceit—although it is not clear to me how much of this very late (1988) Hayek is Hayek, and how much is “editor” William Warren Bartley https://web.archive.org/web/20050308180246/http://libertyunbound.com/archive/2005_03/ebenstein-deceit.html. Why? Because Hayek is playing a larger part in my history of the Long 20th Century, Slouching Towards Utopia?, as it moves toward finality, and I am concerned that I be fair to him. And I ran across his claim that the “socialists” felt:

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

Pairagraph: Is America in Decline? https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/fc2f8d46f10040d080d551c945e7a363/4

I confess I think that this came out very well as an intellectual exercise. I am, however, as I say in it, depressed that Om Malik—for whom I have enormous respect, and whose judgment is very, very good—does not have stronger arguments on his side that America is not "in decline". I had very much hoped to end this debate at least half-convinced to his side. But I am not. Sigh.

I see in my twitter feed right now—the morning of 2020-12-22—that more than 40% of Americans surveyed still "approve" of the job that Donald Trump is doing as president. With the U.S. having had 330,000 coronavirus plague deaths—1 in a thousand people—while Australia has had 908 total—one thirtieth the death rate—with a thousand children kidnapped and permanently separated from their parents, with him and his family trying to steal everything that isn't nailed down, what is to approve? Yet 40%. And 74 million people voted for him.

Om wants to say things like "The sheer number of Americans who participated in our November election should be a source of national pride and renewed optimism" and "it is about taking the steps necessary for moving forward, which we will never do if we insist on dragging our feet while a cloud of gloom swirls above us" and "America has always managed to invent a better tomorrow, even on its most difficult days" and "this is not about pretending".

I say: Yes, America has vast strengths. But we also have 73 million fascists, grifters, asshole racists, assholes, and easily-grifted morons whom the rest of us must carry on our backs as we try to make things better. It would be one thing if they just sat on their hands. But they are trying, actively, to break stuff that we must then fix.

Sisyphus just had to role the rock uphill. He did not have a raving violent madman on his back whom he had to carry while doing so:

Brad DeLong & Om Malik: Pairagraph: Is America in Decline? https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/fc2f8d46f10040d080d551c945e7a363/4: Brad DeLong 2020-09-10: Life expectancy at birth in the United States today is 78.6 years. Life expectancy at birth in Japan today is 84.5; in Singapore, 85.1; in Switzerland, 84.3; France, 83.1; in Germany, 80.9. U.S. life expectancy is on a par with Poland, Tunisia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Albania; below Peru, Colombia, Chile, Jordan, and Sri Lanka; and only a year greater than China...

...The United States currently has ~300 deaths per hundred million people per day from the coronavirus plague. The United Kingdom, Japan, Italy, Germany, and Canada each have less than 10.

The United States has the amazing spectacle not just of Donald Trump as president, but of a huge number of American worthies—from Mitch McConnell in the Senate and Kevin McCarthy in the House, from Paul Ryan to Chris Christie, from Dean Baquet and Maureen Dowd and James Bennet to James Comey, all of them deciding that rather than do their proper jobs they would work to raise the odds that Trump would obtain and maintain power and increase the likelihood that he would do major damage in order to boost their personal positions in various ways.

As one of my friends from a not-rich part of East Asia says: "Students from my country come to the U.S. these days. They see dirty cities, lousy infrastructure, and the political clown show on TV, and an insular people clinging to their guns and their gods who boast about how they are the greatest people in the world without knowing anything about what is going on outside. They come back and tell me: 'We have nothing to learn from those people! Why did you send me there?’"

This is a very different vibe from what we had twenty years ago, at the end of the Clinton-Gore years, when the U.S. was victorious in the Cold War, trying to build a freer, more integrated, more peaceful, and more prosperous world; riding the wave of the great internet boom; and had—for the first time in a generation—seen eight years in which typical Americans' wages and salaries were rising rapidly. And now it has been another generation since we have seen typical Americans' wages and salaries rise rapidly.

This is a very different vibe from 70 years ago, when we had the U.S. of the great post-WWII boom and the Marshall Plan that was also, finally, turning its attention to advancing Civil Rights.

This is a very different vibe from 100 years ago, when Leon Trotsky would talk about how he regretted leaving New York for Petrograd, for he was "leaving the furnace where the future was being forged.”

This is a very different vibe from 180 yeas ago, when Alexis de Tocqueville was preaching to one and all that everyone needed to closely examine America, for understanding it was the key to understanding the world's democratic future.

The only argument that America is not in decline is that other countries have worse problems. That may well be true. But that strikes me as too low a bar.

====

Om Malik 2020-10-07: It has been a strange year for the planet, and a particularly challenging one for America. It is as if the universe held up a giant mirror to the country and made us look directly at our most severe and festering troubles. A virus has undone our broken healthcare system, made our upside-down economy even more fragile, and exacerbated our political and social divisions. Recognizing all that, readers might assume I am pessimistic about the prospects of our great country.

But humans, unlike mirrors, can see beyond the surface. Even the most beautiful glimpse the ugliness in themselves. And the imperfect can recognize their own potential.

Let me tell you my own story. Over a decade ago, I was an overworked reporter with a three-packs-a-day smoking habit. I didn’t work out and practiced atrocious eating habits. Not surprisingly, I ended up in the hospital fighting for my life. Forced to take a hard look at myself, I didn’t like what I saw. I made a commitment to turn things around — and I followed through.

Our country and its citizens are at a similar point of reckoning. Given the historical arc of a nation’s life, we should not rush to judge a nation’s prospects based on a single (and so far, single-term) administration — or even a bungled response to one specific crisis. America is an ongoing project. As a society, we are fighting tooth and nail to protect our democratic traditions from attacks both internal and external. Is our performance perfect? No. But we are a long way from Belarus.

In college, I read about the American industry’s decline and the offshoring of jobs to other countries. In the twilight of the last century, it seemed the end was near. And yet, we saw the birth of companies such as Amazon, Google, and Netflix. About a dozen of these large American companies have since become part of the global society and economy.

As other American industries have in the past, the modern tech industry provides an ecosystem in which people throughout the world desire to participate and thrive. Even China, our country’s greatest economic rival, takes its technology cues (and intellectual property) from America. What was a little search engine now employs hundreds of thousands. This is also where Elon Musk, whether you like him or not, willed a commercial electric vehicle industry into existence through a combination of chutzpah, capital, and yes, government support. Tesla may sell fewer cars than its German rivals, but it has convinced the world to adopt this new approach to transportation. It is true that Tesla, Google, and Amazon are not perfect. Capitalism never is.

Our planet is facing an arduous future due to our changing climate. The answers to the myriad problems this creates will emanate from American minds and in the same freethinking, entrepreneurial tradition that allowed Google to be born here. Though we certainly don’t have a monopoly on innovation, we have a track record of doing it better and more frequently than anywhere else. While it is fashionable to be bemused by America, nobody overseas should forget that this is where the necessary ingredients for global prosperity are most likely to be found.

There is no shame in admitting that we are in need of self-improvement. We must begin by addressing the horror of this year, which has exposed a range of problems. I am confident that long-term and even permanent solutions to many of these problems exist. We can and will be better. Maybe it is my day job, or perhaps it is the delusion of an immigrant’s mind, but I believe the tradition of dreaming up something from nothing is still alive in this country. And that is what keeps me betting on America.

====

Brad DeLong 2020-10-07: When this was pitched to me, I jumped at the chance: It seemed to me that ranting about American decadence might get it off my chest and improve morale, which was low. And then when I learned that Om Malik was on the other side I was really excited. I have long thought that Om was great. That he was willing to take the non-decline side made me confident there were much stronger arguments for it than I had recognized. I looked forward to ending this debate heartened, encouraged, and much more than half-convinced.

But after reading Om's response, I find myself worried that his heart is not in it. My précis of it would be: We must imagine that America is not in decline. Why? Because if we recognize that it is in decline we will lose all hope of being able to turn things around.

It is an argument along the lines of Camus's "we must imagine Sisyphus happy". Why must we imagine Sisyphus happy? Because we are in his situation, and if we cannot imagine—i.e., "imagine" in the sense of "pretend", not in the sense of entering into his thought-processes—Sisyphus happy, we despair and cannot do our own work, pointless and futile as that own work may be. It is an argument along the lines of Antonio Gramsci, dying of mistreatment in Mussolini's jails, recognizing that the intellect told him to be pessimistic, but that he needed to overcome that with "optimism of the will”.

Sisyphus happy, we despair and cannot do our own work, pointless and futile as that own work may be. It is an argument along the lines of Antonio Gramsci, dying of mistreatment in Mussolini's jails, recognizing that the intellect told him to be pessimistic, but that he needed to overcome that with "optimism of the will”.

Om's message is that America is not in decline because we might still "take a hard look at [our]sel[ves]... not like what [we] saw... ma[ke] a commitment to turn things around—and... follow... through". Perhaps we will.

This is not helping my morale.

The facts that America has astonishing land, abundant natural resources, and a long history of welcoming immigrants who feel cramped and constrained and unappreciated elsewhere—all these should make America's greatness a slam-dunk and America's future bright. But right now, in the world in which we live, I read my friend Dan Wang writing "I’ve spent the past month in Shanghai, which I think is the best place in the world right now: It’s always been the most fun and livable city in China; and there has been no transmission of the virus since April, with restaurants, bars, and museums all open for months..." I think that America has 150,000 new coronavirus cases and 1,000 deaths a day, that that amount of virus risk puts a serious crimp in day-to-day activities, that there is no plan for dealing with it, and that at this caseload we are still... three years from likely herd immunity, which we will reach after 1,000,000 more deaths.

It is certainly true we have a long way to fall. Things can still be very comfortable on the way down for a long time. "There is", Adam Smith said in 1776, "much ruin in a nation”.

But I had hoped Om would change my mind.

====

Om Malik 2020-12-22: I have had a long time to noodle on Professor Delong’s response to my continued optimism in America. He certainly didn’t share that hopefulness, and he may have missed the nuance of my argument. So, I will reiterate: If we recognize our problems, we can fix them.

This is not about pretending. It is about taking the steps necessary for moving forward, which we will never do if we insist on dragging our feet while a cloud of gloom swirls above us. I’m happy to report that the forecast calls for better conditions ahead.

In a matter of months, if not sooner, Professor Delong will (I hope) be administered a vaccine that will prevent infection from a novel coronavirus. It may come from a company called Moderna, a venture-backed, American biotech company that is redefining the next frontier of medicine.

Our handling of COVID-19 is emblematic of what makes America a very unique place. Though we absolutely botched our response to the pandemic, this country has also produced one of the vaccines to fight it. Our country has many problems, and we are uniquely capable of solving them.

In his response, the good professor points to a friend’s comments about Shanghai and how livable it feels. If that friend were a Uighur or a Mongolian, they might think differently. It’s a futuristic place, sure, but one with little room for intellectual freedom and debate. For example, Alibaba founder and CEO Jack Ma paid the price when he spoke bluntly about certain things the ruling party didn’t care to have discussed. The initial public offering of his extremely successful company, Ant Financial, was canceled. It’s also worth noting, as ProPublica recently pointed out, that China’s government-controlled Internet was behind the censorship of coronavirus-related information.

Here at home, we currently have politicians making wild and embarrassing claims about our elections. I suppose in places like Shanghai, where voting for the country’s leader isn’t an option, people are spared such unpleasantness — but that hardly seems preferable. The sheer number of Americans who participated in our November election should be a source of national pride and renewed optimism.

Soon, we will transition to a new administration. Vaccines will be administered. We will move forward. But we must not forget the failures of 2020 or ignore our many other issues. America needs to rebuild its infrastructure, prepare for a changed climate, address its healthcare crisis, and take a hard look at its education system.

Neither self-flagellation nor looking enviously at other countries will solve these problems. Many entrepreneurs I get to interact with are working on solutions. They acknowledge our many shortcomings, rather than wallowing in them, and then they move on to designing and implementing better policies.

America has always managed to invent a better tomorrow, even on its most difficult days. Reality is complex. Where there is struggle, there can also be transcendence. In order to experience the latter, we must first convince ourselves that it is possible.

.#americanexceptionalism #highlighted #orangehairedbaboons #politicaleconomy #2020-12-22

And it looks like even without Trump Republican senators will continue to be orange-haired baboons:

That any Republican senators at all are thinking of voting for Judy Shelton—a woman views whom Milton Friedman dismissed by saying "it would be hard to pack more error into so few words"—for a Fed Governor position reveals an astonishing lack of spine. Yet the Senate Banking Committee chair appears to be attempting to advance her nomination on Tuesday:

Hoisted from the Archives:_ Shelton the Charlatan_ https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/shelton-the-charlatan-project-syndicate.html: In 1994 Milton Friedman wrote about Judy Shelton: "In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece (July 15)... Judy Shelton started her concluding paragraph: “Until the U.S. begins standing up once more for stable exchange rates as the starting point for free trade...” It would be hard to pack more error into so few words.... A system of pegged exchange rates, such as the original IMF system or the European Monetary System, is an enemy to free trade. It is no accident that the 1992 collapse of the EMS coincided with the agreement to remove controls on the movement of capital..." https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collections/2016c21/NR_09_12_1994.pdf. To turn monetary policy away from internal balance toward preventing exchange rate movements that market fundamentals wanted to see occur was, in Friedman's view, the road toward disaster. It was simply wrong. And it could be held together only if economies moved from free trade back toward managed trade—and so beggared not just their neighbors but themselves.

Two and a half decades later, today's Judy Shelton seems no freer from error, but to it has added an enormous amount of incoherence. There is no consistent thread of argument in what she says. She is, rather, a weathervane pointing in the direction of whatever political wind she thinks likely to get her her next job. Last year she said that the Federal Reserve should be careful not to do anything to curb stock prices: "More than half of American households are invested through mutual funds or pension funds in this market. I don’t want the Fed to pull the rug out from under them..." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/trump-fed-pick-shelton-says-central-bank-should-support-markets. But in 2016—when unemployment was higher and the case for easy money stronger—it was the Fed's "appeasing financial markets" that was the thing to be avoided https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-trumps-latest-fed-pick-is-that-bad-heres-why/2020/02/10/a13fa1ec-4c44-11ea-9b5c-eac5b16dafaa_story.html. Back then under the Obama administration when there were lots of unemployed workers who could be put to work producing exports, policies to produce a weaker dollar to boost exports were to be shunned: "The obvious quick route to export success for any nation is to depreciate its currency. Dollar depreciation is already being pushed by the Obama administration.... Let's not compromise our currency in a misguided attempt to boost U.S. job growth. America's best future is forged through sound finances and sound money..." https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704698004576104260981772424. These days "compromising the currency" is a plus from the interest-rate cuts she wants to see https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-fed-choice-judy-shelton-says-interest-rate-cut-needed-because-europe-is-set-to-devalue-euro-2019-07-05. Today monetary policy should be made looser "as expeditiously as possible" https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/06/19/fed-meets-trumps-potential-next-pick-wants-see-lower-rates-fast-possible. Back then "loose monetary policy... leads to internal bankruptcy... whole nations have foundered on this path..." https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123742149749078635.

Catherine Rampell https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-trumps-latest-fed-pick-is-that-bad-heres-why/2020/02/10/a13fa1ec-4c44-11ea-9b5c-eac5b16dafaa_story.html earlier this month correctly called Judy Shelton "an opportunist and a quack", and reported that Republican senators think she is not qualified.

Kevin Cramer (R-ND) said: "I wouldn't want five [Fed Board] members like her".

Thom Tillis (R-NC) said that her views on the gold standard do not matter because return to the gold standard is off the table.

Tim Scott (R-SC) agreed with Tillis, stating that "controversial statements" were "not relevant".

Pat Toomey (R-PA) worried about the "very, very dangerous path to go down" she advocated. Richard Shelby (R-AL) was "concerned".

John Kennedy (R-LA) said: "Nobody wants anybody on the Federal Reserve that has a fatal attraction to nutty ideas" https://www.wsj.com/articles/republican-senator-raises-concerns-over-sheltons-fed-candidacy-11581608467?mod=hp_major_pos1.

But the Wall Street Journal editorial board has decided to back Judy Shelton's "more error packed into so so few words" over Milton Friedman by praising her as a believer that "monetary policies that ignore exchange-rate stability wreak political and economic havoc". Trump wants Judy Shelton on the Fed Board so he can threaten to—and possibly actually—replace Jay Powell with her as chair. If we have learned anything over the past three years, it is that furrowed brows of concern from Republican senators are worth precisely nothing. John Kennedy (R-LA) followed his furrowed brow by saying "I’m not saying that’s the case here". Mike Crapo (R-ID) praised her "deep knowledge of democracy, economic theory and monetary policy", and denounced the "war on Judy Shelton".

If Republican senators are going to save the country from yet another Trump misstep that makes America less great, first core Republican supporters have to step up and give their senators 53 spine transplants.

That is all...

This has surfaced again in my feed. Please, people stop ending it to me! It leads me down rabbit-holes—what a loon Samuel P. Huntington was, and how favorably citing him is a powerful sign that you are a loon unmoored from reality yourself—that I don't have time for today!

Anyone who thinks—as Gregory Mitrovich apparently does—that Great Britain in 1920 had intrinsic strengths then that enabled it to thereafter retain its global dominance is truly a total idiot. When did Britain dominate anything after 1920? Gregory Mitrovich: Beware Declinism: America Remains Poised for Greatness https://nationalinterest.org/feature/beware-declinism-america-remains-poised-greatness-163810: ‘There can be no doubting that America’s international standing has been undermined by ill-considered wars and the deadly failures of Trump’s pandemic response. However, the intrinsic strength of the United States will, like that of Britain a century ago, enable America to retain its dominance...

What can we say about the economy? That depends on the course of the coronavirus plague. So what can we say about the coronavirus plague? We can say, it turns out, little that is good. (22 minutes).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKpEKGhBvLE

David Brooks says: "American democracy is in trouble because my journamalistic colleagues and I will not do our jobs on November 3":

Steve M.: Just Do Your Damn Jobs https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2020/09/just-do-your-damn-jobs.html: ‘David Brooks writes: "On the evening of Nov. 3... Donald Trump seems to be having an excellent night. Counting the votes cast at polling places, Trump is winning Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.... Trump quickly declares victory. So do many other Republican candidates. The media complains that it’s premature, but Trumpworld is ecstatic. Democrats know that as many as 40 percent of the ballots are mail-in and still being counted... but they can’t control the emotions of that night. It’s a gut punch." Why? Why should what's happening be a gut punch? Why should it be perceived that Donald Trump is having an excellent night?... What happens on TV on election nights? On MSNBC, to take one example, Steve Kornacki stands at a digital map and discusses not just the current vote totals but the nature of the votes that haven't been counted... that the untallied votes come from precincts or counties that are stronger for one party than another. He'd give us a sense of what it would take for the candidate who's trailing to make up the deficit. And up to a point in every contest he'd say: This is why we can't call the race yet…

I agree with Erik here. The Trump administration isn't "creeping fascism" any more. This is the real thing. Their plan is to have Breitbart, Fox, Sinclair, & QAnon come out hard Wednesday after the election saying "nobody can really tell who won", and then see what happens on the streets: Erik Loomis: American Fascism https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/08/american-fascism-3: ‘Anyone who sees this as bluster and doesn’t take it seriously are equivalent to those who didn’t really take Hitler or Mussolini seriously early on: Reporter: "Is the President saying if he doesn't win this election that he will not accept the results unless he wins?" Kayleigh McEnany: "The President has always said he'll see what happens and make a determination in the aftermath"… .#fascism #highlighted #moral responsibility #noted #orangehairedbaboons #moralresponsibility #2020-08-19

Still mulling this over...

The insightful and usually highly reliable Michelle Goldberg makes, I think, a big mistake here.

& something bad does seem to happen often to many people when they start hanging around the New York Times newsroom. They lose their moral compass, and some (not Goldberg) forget that they are supposed to work for their readers and not for their insider sources and their bosses...

Ok, that ends the throad-clearing:

Here Goldberg half-defends Bennet and Sulzburger's decision to publish Senator Cotton's call for massive violence against demonstrating American citizens by the security services—even William F. Buckley would not go quite so far half a century ago, when all he was willing to say was that white supremacists in the south had the right to defend white supremacy against protesters "by any means necessary"—on the grounds that New York Times readers are ignorant of what people like Cotton think, "readers should grasp what people like Cotton are arguing... because it is being taken seriously" and "the very qualities that make Cotton's Op-Ed revolting...make him an important figure in Trump's Republican Party".

But to publish the thing without surrounding context—that's just to give Cotton a megaphone.

Yes, you can argue that the cure for speech is more speech. But you are wrong. The "more speech" has to appear in the appropriate time, place, and manner.

At some level, I think, Michelle Goldberg knows this. Near the end of her piece is one sentence: "The paper could convey his views by reporting on them, but for the Opinion section, letting him express them himself is more direct." Not "more effective" or "more informative" or "more useful". Why did she choose "direct"?

I think because she knew she could not use any of those other words:

Michelle Goldberg: Tom Cotton's Fascist Op-Ed https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2020/06/michelle-goldberg-gives-her-employers.html: 'I figured he'd helpfully revealed himself as a dangerous authoritarian.... I can sort of appreciate my bosses' decision.... The Times Opinion section wants to include the views of people who support Trump... the very qualities that make Cotton's Op-Ed revolting—his strongman pretensions, his sneering apocalypticism—make him... important...

...Trump's Republican Party. (He might someday come to lead it.) Readers should grasp what people like Cotton are arguing, not because it's worth taking seriously but because it is being taken seriously, particularly by our mad and decomposing president.... The paper could convey his views by reporting on them, but for the Opinion section, letting him express them himself is more direct...

And Goldberg's conclusion? "Opinions of shape of earth differ". She won't say that Bennet's decision to publish was wrong. But she won't say that is right either. It is just as "crisis for our understandings of... marketplace[s] of ideas..."

It’s important to understand what the people around the president are thinking. But if they’re honest about what they’re thinking, it’s usually too disgusting to engage with. This creates a crisis for traditional understandings of how the so-called marketplace of ideas functions. It’s a subsidiary of the crisis that has the country on fire.

#highighted #journamalism #orangehairedbaboons #pubicsphere #moralresponsibility #2020-08-16

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I confess that back in March I was flummoxed by the fact that the American government and the American health sector could not scale-up to test people for coronavirus at the needed scalr. Today I am even more flummoxed by Americas continuing testing deficit. It makes it impossible to even figure out where we are with the virus, let alone plan how to try to fight it successfully at reasonable cost:

Brian Resnick: US Covid-19 Testing & Surveillance Is Still in þe Dark https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/8/5/21351766/covid-19-testing-tracking-hospitalizations-schools-reopening: ‘“It’s like we’re flying blind”: The US has a Covid-19 data problem: And fall is fast approaching...

Weekend Reading: Since the mid-1800s, the primary way conservatives have won elections has been to mobilize fear of strangers and of the strange to trump the majority economic interest in a less unequal society. But while fear can trump interest, can fear Trump fear? Perhaps not:

Steve M.: But Giving People þe Opposite of What þey Want Has Worked so Well for Republicans Until Now! https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2020/07/but-giving-people-opposite-of-what-they.html: ‘Shockingly, it appears that trying to kill constituents is bad for your poll numbers if you're an elected official.... Since the Reagan era, corporatist Republicanism has weakened the middle class, increased inequality, gutted regulations on corporations, and, in this century, crashed the economy twice. But because Republicans distract their base with culture-war talk and other forms of lib-owning, none of the harm GOP politicians do to their voters has ever seemed to cause them trouble at the polls...

The ghouls who ran Herman Cain's twitter feed while he fought for his life & then drowned in his hospital bed continue the grift: Rob Beschizza: Herman Cain Tweets From Beyond Þe Grave https://boingboing.net/2020/08/13/herman-cain-tweets-from-beyond.html: ‘Herman Cain... banal pro-Trump propaganda... a grim month-long spectacle seemingly pumped out by political handlers willing to speak with Cain's voice even as that voice ceased to exist. I speculated that the tweets would continue after his death, a melding of Trumpian incompetence, obscenity and indifference. I was asked to stop posting on grounds of "Rob, He Just Died", but sadly that exortation was not made to whoever is wearing Cain's corpse today on Twitter… .#noted #orangehairedbaboons #2020-08-13

The House Republicans caucus could not govern when they were in the majority. The House was then run by a caucus composed of non-Tea Party Republicans negotiating with Nancy Pelosi, so that she would give permission for enough Democrats to vote for a bill to make up a majority.

Now it looks like Mitch McConnell has decided that his Senate caucus has the same degree of dysfunction: it looks as though he will sign on to whatever economy-rescue bill Pelosi agrees on with Mnuchin.

Here Karl Smith gives his take on how that happened:

Karl W. Smith: Coronavirus Relief Bill Has Republicans in Disarray https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-22/coronavirus-relief-bill-has-republicans-in-disarray: ‘The pandemic has left GOP lawmakers deeply splintered, not just over tactics or strategy but on basic principles. There are roughly four factions...

...If they don’t find a way to heal their fractures, U.S. workers and the overall economy will suffer even more.... Republicans... have traditionally supported government-led action and unrestrained spending only to battle foreign foes; with some notable exceptions, they have preferred to leave domestic issues to the private sector or the states....

The pandemic has pushed [one] group over the edge. Congress has spent almost half as much fighting Covid-19 over the last four months as it spent in nearly 20 years fighting the war on terror.... They are not prepared to spend another dime....

There is another group... that sees the main issue as the reckless promiscuity of the original Cares Act... that... gave potentially hundreds of billions of dollars to people who didn’t need it and created an unemployment insurance system that paid people not to work....

A third faction continues to believe that Covid-19 should be treated as external threat and that the full force of the U.S. government should be enlisted against it. That means more money for public health, schools and biomedical research, as well as continuing aid for struggling workers and businesses....

Lastly, there are a few senators who are not enthusiastic about more spending, but could tolerate it if it were accompanied by longer-term measures to help the economy....

Bringing them all together will require what the party is most lacking right now: a clear vision of how get out of this crisis with as little death and devastation as possible.... What that vision might consist of is anyone’s guess…

.#coronavirus #moralresponsibility #noted #orangehairedbaboons #2020-08-05

Deplorably, a large number of easily-grifted morons thought Trump was their friend—or at least that the people lower down in the Trump base were their prey to be scammed...

Back in 2015, I concluded that the Donald Trump campaign was a deplorable multi-level marketing scam. At the top, a few grifters running lots of cons. In the middle-levels, a bunch of people who thought that they could take advantage of the situation to get rich—or richer—but who were actually easily-grifted morons themselves. And at the bottom, people who thought that Trump was their friend, rather than viewing them as suckers he could take.

Nothing I have seen since has changed that opinion of mine.

Deplorably, one of the easily-grifted morons in the middle was former Godfather's Pizza executive and Republican politician Herman Cain:

On June 20, 2020, Herman Cain was boasting that he was having a "fantastic time" at Donald Trump's massless, non-social distancing Tulsa rally:

Trump had required attendees to: "acknowledg[e]... that an inherent risk of exposure to COVID-19 exists in any public place where people are present. By attending the Rally, you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19 and agree not to hold Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.; BOK Center; ASM Global; or any of their affiliates, directors, officers, employees, agents, contractors, or volunteers liable for any illness or injury..."

On June 24, 2020, Herman Cain wrote, with respect to the public-health emergency measures of March and April: 'Never again. We now have the evidence it didn't help at all...'

On July 1, 2020, Herman Cain wrote very approvingly of Trump's next rally: 'Masks will not be mandatory for the [Mt. Rushmore] event, which will be attended by President Trump. PEOPLE ARE FED UP!: South Dakota Governor: "We will not be social distancing. We’re asking them to come, be ready to celebrate, to enjoy the freedoms and the liberties that we have in this country, and to talk about our history...'

Also on July 1, 2020 Herman Cain was hospitalized for coronavirus. On July 30, 2020, life support measures were discontinued, and Herman Cain died.

At some point the 'Masks will not be mandatory... PEOPLE ARE FED UP!' Post on twitter was deleted from Herman Cain's account.

After his hospitalization, Herman Cain's twitter account was run by a rather cynical gang of ghouls.

On Twitter: Shelton's Confirmation to the Fed Would Be Very Ill-Advised II https://twitter.com/delong/status/1285609064706248706: The only person out there saying "confirm Judy Shelton" this morning is John Tamny... who says: confirm her because she's a goldbug and the gold standard is a good thing:

John Tamny: Let's Bring Rationality to the Monetary Discussion: Confirm Judy Shelton https://realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/07/21/lets_bring_rationality_to_the_monetary_discussion_confirm_judy_shelton_499540.html: As always with money, it should be stressed up front how much better the monetary discussion would be if those who insert themselves into it actually understood money. Most don’t. Strange about this is that money is simple. It’s simple when it’s properly understood...

Filippos Petroulakis: 'This is remarkable stuff. I’m fine with him being a goldbug, but he’s original in that he doesn’t even believe the Fed can lower rates. Or that lowering rates is ineffective, it’s not exactly clear, but my impression of goldbugs was they were afraid of runaway inflation; he’s not.

Brad DeLong: A good way to view it is that both Judy Shelton and John Tamny are GPT-3: they are not economists, but rather expert systems trained on a text corpus. Thus you should not try to use their words to build a model of the Turing-class mind behind them, for there is no such mind. In fact, there is not even a sub-Turing class mind behind their words: just predictive text generation at the level of current AI technology, just like GPT-3 http://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html.

That any Republican senators at all are thinking of voting for Judy Shelton—a woman views whom Milton Friedman dismissed by saying "it would be hard to pack more error into so few words"—for a Fed Governor position reveals an astonishing lack of spine. Yet the Senate Banking Committee chair appears to be attempting to advance her nomination on Tuesday:

Hoisted from the Archives: Shelton the Charlatan https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/shelton-the-charlatan-project-syndicate.html: In 1994 Milton Friedman wrote about Judy Shelton: "In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece (July 15)... Judy Shelton started her concluding paragraph: “Until the U.S. begins standing up once more for stable exchange rates as the starting point for free trade...” It would be hard to pack more error into so few words.... A system of pegged exchange rates, such as the original IMF system or the European Monetary System, is an enemy to free trade. It is no accident that the 1992 collapse of the EMS coincided with the agreement to remove controls on the movement of capital..." https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collections/2016c21/NR_09_12_1994.pdf. To turn monetary policy away from internal balance toward preventing exchange rate movements that market fundamentals wanted to see occur was, in Friedman's view, the road toward disaster. It was simply wrong. And it could be held together only if economies moved from free trade back toward managed trade—and so beggared not just their neighbors but themselves.

Two and a half decades later, today's Judy Shelton seems no freer from error, but to it has added an enormous amount of incoherence. There is no consistent thread of argument in what she says. She is, rather, a weathervane pointing in the direction of whatever political wind she thinks likely to get her her next job. Last year she said that the Federal Reserve should be careful not to do anything to curb stock prices: "More than half of American households are invested through mutual funds or pension funds in this market. I don’t want the Fed to pull the rug out from under them..." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/trump-fed-pick-shelton-says-central-bank-should-support-markets. But in 2016—when unemployment was higher and the case for easy money stronger—it was the Fed's "appeasing financial markets" that was the thing to be avoided https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-trumps-latest-fed-pick-is-that-bad-heres-why/2020/02/10/a13fa1ec-4c44-11ea-9b5c-eac5b16dafaa_story.html. Back then under the Obama administration when there were lots of unemployed workers who could be put to work producing exports, policies to produce a weaker dollar to boost exports were to be shunned: "The obvious quick route to export success for any nation is to depreciate its currency. Dollar depreciation is already being pushed by the Obama administration.... Let's not compromise our currency in a misguided attempt to boost U.S. job growth. America's best future is forged through sound finances and sound money..." https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704698004576104260981772424. These days "compromising the currency" is a plus from the interest-rate cuts she wants to see https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-fed-choice-judy-shelton-says-interest-rate-cut-needed-because-europe-is-set-to-devalue-euro-2019-07-05. Today monetary policy should be made looser "as expeditiously as possible" https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/06/19/fed-meets-trumps-potential-next-pick-wants-see-lower-rates-fast-possible. Back then "loose monetary policy... leads to internal bankruptcy... whole nations have foundered on this path..." https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123742149749078635.

Words for those who worked very hard to hobble the response to the coronavirus crisis back in February, and who now contemplate the clusterf--- they worked so hard to make while they wriggle to evade responsibility: Duncan Black: You F---ed The Whole Thing Up https://www.eschatonblog.com/2020/07/you-fucked-whole-thing-up.html: ‘Let's check in with Mick Mulvaney: "Any stimulus should be directed at the root cause of our recession: dealing with Covid. I know it isn’t popular to talk about in some Republican circles, but we still have a testing problem in this country. My son was tested recently; we had to wait 5 to 7 days for results. My daughter wanted to get tested before visiting her grandparents, but was told she didn’t qualify. That is simply inexcusable at this point in the pandemic." [weird scratching backwards music noise as we rewind time back a few months] Ah, here we are, CPAC Feb. 28: "White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney suggested Friday that Americans ignore the media’s coverage of the coronavirus, arguing that journalists are ratcheting up fears to try to hurt President Donald Trump politically…" .#noted #orangehairedbaboons #2020-07-15

LawProfBlog: _I Was Brave, Once https://abovethelaw.com/2020/07/i-was-brave-once/: ‘There was an outpouring of conservative support, the likes I haven’t seen since I and others tweeted that it was a terrible idea for a law student to clean his gun on screen during a zoom class.... The original outrage was about a subtweet...

...This post isn’t about the Arizona case or either of those two professors: It is the notion of academic bravery....

I’ll be defending Godzilla. Godzilla entered the United States, and immediately started wreaking havoc in San Francisco. The military sought to bomb Godzilla and kill him. I thought to myself: What a perfect time to bring an action via the Endangered Species Act! Who could be more oppressed that Godzilla? He suffers from being unique, way beyond the “discreet and insular” minority contemplated in Carolene Products. And he doesn’t have a voice (okay, literally, he roars and that’s it).  And like Anakin Skywalker, he brings balance to the Force (if you have seen the most recent movies)....

My legal practice as an academic clearly does not demonstrate my core values. Sometimes you just got to take the hard cases for higher principles. Don’t judge me! There are bigger issues at stake!... It’s weak tea to complain about my moral core. If I had a dime for every time someone cried about their baby getting stomped by Godzilla! They just don’t understand that I’m the underdog fighting against a big bad oppressor who is trampling (pun intended) upon (my interpretation of) the Constitution. Many of my friends have been crushed by Godzilla! My mother, too! That’s just how much I love (selected parts) of the Constitution. I’m willing to have others sacrifice for me. I’m very brave, and my scholarly impact score soars!

And, I’m brave because I don’t see anyone else in the cowardly academy defending Godzilla....

Yes, the law DOES require lawyers and law professors to take controversial and adversarial positions. And no one is saying Our Hero shouldn’t be able to defend bar owners or that he should be punished for it.... However, what we are defending should transcend political football teams. It says something about the principles of a law professor who defends the right to peacefully assemble, both when the neo-Nazis seek to march and when antifa seeks to do the same. It says something about the lawyer’s principles, too, if their practice is based only on defending neo-Nazis. We might call the former principle consistency, and it often is missing when law professors choose political football teams.

Silence says something, too. For example, one might be silent when a law professor is being bullied for advocating gender equality, yet outraged when someone questions whether it is a good idea to open bars given all the evidence of bar patrons and COVID-19 being perfect companions. And it might say something if we are silent when students are forced to take a bar exam during a pandemic all the while applauding someone who seeks to open bars for alcohol. It might say something when we vigorously defend the gun-cleaning student and stay silent as students seek desperately not to have to risk their health to take the bar exam...

 .#moralresponsibility #orangehairedbaboons #2020-07-14

Duncan Black: Eschaton: The Anti-Mask Brigade https://www.eschatonblog.com/2020/07/the-anti-mask-brigade.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/bRuz+(Eschaton): ‘I got the play a couple of months ago. Sure it was gross and cynical—these are, charitably, gross and cynical people—but it made sense. The evil libs had a problem in big cities like New York and were trying to impose their Stalinist precautions on the rest of the country, mostly to make Dear Leader look bad. Even New York Times columnist Bedbug Stephens agreed! But now cases are booming elsewhere and they're in their own bases trying to murder their base…

.#coronavirus #moralresponsibility #noted #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-07-09

John Scalzi: Back Into Quarantine https://whatever.scalzi.com/2020/07/05/back-into-quarantine/: ‘We could have managed this thing—like nearly every other country has—if we had political leadership that wasn’t inept and happy to use the greatest public health crisis in decades as political leverage for… well, who knows? Most of the areas being hit hardest now—places like Florida, Arizona, and Texas—are deep red states; there is no political advantage to be had by having them hit by infection and death and economic uncertainty four months before a national election...

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing I have seen this week came from Trump economist Tomas Philipson, with his claim that Trump’s economic analysis instincts are “on par with many Nobel economists I have worked with at Chicago” https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-economist-tested-positive-for-covid-19-11593212011>. It is certainly the case that I do not have much of a regard for Phillipson's economic intuition: he seems to me to have made a career of advocating for a “freedom to try alternative therapies“ on the part of the sick that is overwhelmingly, in practice, a freedom for bad actors to steal from the sick by lying to them in order to hold out false hopes. (I must, however, admit that even I did not anticipate seeing Philipson waving to us from a prominent place on the hydroxychloroquine train.) But Philipson and his praise of Trump’s economic instincts is not the least competent thing Trump administration economists have done this spring. That prize goes to Kevin Hassett:

Joseph Zeballos-Roig (2020-05-05): White House Adviser Devised Model Showing Covid-19 Deaths Hitting 0 in 10 Days https://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-economic-adviser-hassett-model-coronavirus-deaths-zero-10-days-2020-5: ‘The White House is relying on a model prepared by a controversial White House economic advisor that shows coronavirus deaths dropping to zero by May 15 to help guide their decision-making.... The White House is reportedly relying on a "cubic model" prepared by controversial White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett that shows coronavirus deaths plunging to zero by May 15 to help guide their economic decision-making during the pandemic.... The "cubic model" from Hassett clashes with the assessment of public health experts who say the virus will continue infecting people and swell the US death toll for the foreseeable future.... Other critics argued that an economist with an unreliable track record on issues within his own realm of expertise shouldn't wade into public health matters... #coronavirus #economicsgonewrong #moralresponsibility #noted #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-07-03

I look at the Trump professional economists Republicans—Kevin Hassett, Tomas Philipson, Casey Mulligan, & co.—and I really do wonder: Why were they so incompetent? Why did they get so strongly behind the "epidemiologists have it wrong", the "reopen the economy"—originally by Easter—and the "this will burn itself out quickly"—deaths down near zero by mid-May—pushes? At least now Philipson and Hassett appear to be silent—although Mulligan is still out there, claiming that the depression is the result of government lockdowns alone, which he values at "15,000 dollars per household per quarter" not counting "intrinsic costs of forgone civil liberties".

By the end of January we knew that this coronavirus was (a) highly infectious, (b) transmitted by the presymptomatic, (c) something against which no human had immunity, (d) a disease with a normal-behavior herd-immunity point likely to be more than 50% of the population, and (e) a disease that killed—with treatment—about 1% of the infected. Those facts made it obvious that keeping it from killing 30 million people worldwide would bet a very difficult task, and that adding up mortality and morbidity costs valued at three million or so per death meant that the stakes we were playing for to avoid a worst-case three million dead epidemic amounted to ten trillion dollars, compared to which the 350 billion cost of a one-month complete non-essential business lockdown that reduced national income by 20% was relatively small change.

And, indeed, the rest of the global north—even Britain—with the exception of Sweden has bit the bullet, taken the lockdown hit, now has the virus (temporarily) on the run, and can move to test-and-trace and social distancing to stomp the virus. We and Sweden have not. We have thus become pariah nations, as far as coronavirus is concerned.

Dunning-Krueger to the max: Shorter Tomas Philipson: It's great that Trump is taking hydroxychloroquine, & encouraging others to suck up the supply away from lupus patients for whom it works. It's great that Trump refuses to wear a mask!: Tomas Philipson (2020-05-20): 'There's nothing new about https://twitter.com/TomPhilipson45/status/1263228191457583105 @POTUS using healthcare, in consultation with a physician, that hasn't undergone government approved randomized trials. Most healthcare spending is on services/procedures lacking such evidence. And the majority of cancer drugs are prescribed without it. Patients and doctors, based on trade-offs between effectiveness, side-effects, and prices, often correctly disagree with one-size-fits-all blind randomized trials, which have many problems. This is one reason why @POTUS signed Right to Try to let patients—not bureaucrats—decide. Indeed, the same people who argue POTUS should wear a mask to guard against COVID, for which there is no randomized evidence yet and blinding would be difficult, are the same people who argue that such evidence is crucial for COVID Rx use… .#economicsgonewrong #moralresponsibility #noted #notetoself #orangehairedbaboons #2020-06-30

The anti-Patton. Maybe he was a good regimental or brigade commander. Maybe. But no appreciation for the frictions of war in attempting complicated simultaneous actions, and no appreciation for the power of the defense and the rifle: John Bell Hood: Advance & Retreat: Personal Experiences in the United States and Confederate States Armies https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-hood-advances-%26-retreat.pdf: 'I dispatched a messenger to General Cheatham to lose no time in gaining possession of the pike at Spring Hill. It was reported back that he was about to do so.... I became somewhat uneasy, and again ordered an officer to go to General Cheatham.... I entrusted another officer with the same message... finally requested the Governor of Tennessee, Isham G. Harris, to hasten forward and impress upon Cheatham the importance of action without delay...

Jon Stokes: Unpacking the Logic Behind “Slow the Testing Down, Please” https://theprepared.com/blog/logic-behind-slow-the-testing-down/: ‘A lot has been made of the President’s claim that we should “slow the testing down,” a claim that he doubled down on in subsequent remarks to reporters. Most commentators state that he’s under the mistaken impression that if we just don’t look at the problem, it’ll go away. But I follow a bunch of virus skeptics.... I think I understand the reasoning behind the president’s remark.... There is an actual school of thought behind this.... I want to unpack all this... because it’s important... to understand... [the] virus skeptics... [and the] story they’re telling themselves and anyone who’ll listen, and that this story is driving the US response to the virus at the highest levels.... The story the virus skeptics are currently telling goes something like this: "The outbreak actually peaked in March, and at far higher numbers than we know about. The cases were probably in the millions, and were undercounted... because the virus is very mild... unless you’re very old or otherwise compromised.... The number of uncounted cases has been dropping dramatically as the outbreak fizzles, and you can see this in the ongoing drop in deaths.... Therefore, the rise in detected cases is simply because we’re doing a bunch of track-and-trace and testing, which is leading us to uncover all these previously undetected cases that were out there. So the bottom line... is that if we weren’t sending “hotspot hunters” (a real term I’ve come across) to do contact tracing and find all the remaining pockets of infections, we wouldn’t be seeing these alarming rises in case counts. By this logic, this “phantom” rise in apparent cases (remember, really we’re just finding more old cases that are mild) is giving rise to media hysteria and economic devastation.... At this point, goes the reasoning, the economic damage from the “fake” rise in cases is far worse than any damage from the very mild virus, so we need to just quit testing.... To be clear, the above is still head-in-the-sand-ism, but it reflects a sophisticated head-in-the-sand-ism that’s being earnestly promoted by a crowd that includes some prominent medical professionals in the US and abroad. The government of Sweden, for instance.... What's happened in Sweden is crystal clear, as it has happened out in the open: the Swedes thought & said the virus was very weak & already quite widespread, and that assumption was the basis of their strategy & projections. It turns out they were wrong https://t.co/lecQxpqVS5... .#coronavirus #noted #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-06-26

Paul Campos: Remember when Bret Stephens Told Us That Covid Was Just a NYC Problem? https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/06/remember-when-bret-stephens-told-us-that-covid-was-just-a-nyc-problem: ‘[Bret Stephens (2020-04-24):] "Much of America has dwindling sympathy with the idea of prolonging lockdown conditions.... The curves are flattening; hospital systems haven’t come close to being overwhelmed; Americans have adapted to new etiquettes of social distancing. Many of the worst Covid outbreaks outside New York... have specific causes that can be addressed without population-wide lockdowns. Yet Americans are being told they must still play by New York rules—with all the hardships they entail—despite having neither New York’s living conditions nor New York’s health outcomes. This is bad medicine, misguided public policy, and horrible politics." Remember when firing James Bennet was the worst persecution of free speech since that thing that happened at a college somewhere? The claim was that the New York Times wasn’t willing to publish conservative voices on its op-ed page, and that just proved that Political Correctness Has Gone Too Far. James Bennet hired this guy, and he’s still there… .#noted #moralresponsibility #orangehairedbaboons #2020-06-26

https://delong.typepad.com/files/twitter-delong-goldberg-2020-06-08.pdf

Josh Marshall: What’s the Allure of Hydroxychloroquine? https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/whats-the-allure-of-hydroxychloroquine: ‘There’s a growing body of clinical evidence that hydroxychloroquine (alone or with an accompanying antibiotic) not only has no therapeutic effect for COVID but can increase substantially the risk of death.... Trump has been pushing it for months, for reasons which are not altogether clear. What is weird and fascinating in its own right, however, is that what we might call hydroxy-mania seems to be a common feature of right-wing nationalism across the globe.... What could possibly be the connection between rightist-populist nationalism and this until-recently relatively obscure anti-malarial drug?... There must be something about this drug or rather the hope of a quick cure it engenders that resonates with this ideology and mentality. And in any case [Trump's endorsement] doesn’t address why it has such a hold on Trump in the first place. My own hunch is that it is precisely the lure of a quick fix. This is an abiding feature of rightist nationalism, quick fixes to often intractable problems, usually focused on seeking revenge against a designated group of internal or external outsiders. But the desire for quick fixes runs deep. So too does the war against expertise and knowledge elites.... TPM Reader PT... suggests that elite disdain for these nostrums is actually part of the appeal… #cognition #coronavirus #easilygriftedmorons #noted #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-06-04

What the Democrats Must Do https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/democrats-must-embrace-full-employment-by-j-bradford-delong-2020-06: Although the United States has entered a period of deepening social strife and economic depression, the Republicans who are in charge have neither the ideas nor the competence to do anything about it. The Democrats must start planning to lead, starting with a commitment to full employment…. A federal commitment to full employment is not a new idea. The US Employment Act of 1946 embraced the principle.... The best response to... objections has always been John Maynard Keynes.... “Anything we can do, we can afford.”...

Far from acting as an independent binding constraint on economic activities, the financial system exists precisely to support such activities. Finding useful jobs for willing jobseekers is surely something we are capable of doing.

Adjusting the prevailing payments and financial structure to support full employment would of course have consequences.... Supporting full employment... may... require higher and more progressive taxes... sky-high debt... that we divert demand from elite consumption to labor-intensive sectors like public health. It also may require a large-scale labor-intensive public-works program. So be it. It’s time to make full employment our highest priority. Once we have done that, everything else will fall into place...

Equitable Growth’s Amanda Fischer finds the acting Comptroller of the Currency going way beyond his competence, apparently in order to try to curry favor with his political masters. It is his job to help avoid unnecessary negative financial and economic fallout from necessary public health measures. It is not his job to try to put constraints that would prevent undertaking necessary and desirable public health measures:

Amanda Fischer: ‘About this letter from Acting @USOCC head Brian Brooks to mayors & county officials... https://twitter.com/amandalfischer/status/1267831757950328832: ‘I have not seen such an opportunistic, inappropriate & frankly dangerous statement from a financial regulatory official maybe ever https://occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2020/nr-occ-2020-73a.pdf. Brooks wrote to state & city officials basically telling them, "nice economy you have there; I wouldn't want anything to happen to it." It should be read as more of a threat than a warning. And it is obviously theatrics meant to endear himself to the President. Brooks is telling mayors & county officials that there may be a banking crisis if they don't reopen, as commercial businesses default on loans & cause a cascade of defaults that elected officials should consider.

A couple points on why Brooks is wildly inappropriate:

First, he's not an epidemiologist, and the OCC is independent of the Executive branch. He has no idea if reopening is actually worse for the economy. In fact, plenty of economists have cautioned against premature reopening as being bad for long-term growth & public health.

Second, it is not mayors' or county officials' responsibility to worry about financial stability. His examiners should do a better job of predicting losses, and the OCC and Federal Reserve should do a better job of ensuring banks are well-capitalized. Don't put this on mayors. It is also rich given the actions taken by the OCC and Federal Reserve to deplete banks' loss-absorbing capital, including allowing banks to continue to pay out dividends given all the risks Brooks cites in this letter.

Finally, the letter is wild, considering the debate in Congress right now. A simple way to keep the economy on ice is to ensure people & small businesses have adequate money to pay their bills. If people have money, creditors have money, & banks will be fine. Brooks' own political leadership seems to oppose extending UI, direct payments or other relief—relief that would ease pressure on the banking sector. Instead, Brooks is trying to threaten states and cities to reopen without regard for public health recommendations…

#coronavirus #macro #noted #orangehairedbaboons #2020-06-02

Herbert Hoover: As Bad to Ally with Stalin and Churchill Against Hitler as to Ally with Hitler Against Stalin and Churchill https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/08/herbert-hoover-as-bad-to-ally-with-stalin-and-churchill-against-hitler-as-to-ally-with-hitler-against-stalin-and-churchill.html: I was reading Herbert Hoover (1964): Freedom Betrayed https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0817912363 on the plane, and it is really clear to me why nobody wanted Hoover to publish it during his lifetime and why his heirs buried it for half a century. I will tell you what I think. I think Hoover does not quite dare say:

When Hitler attacked Stalin in June 1941, the U.S. should have told Britain to cool it—embargoed Britain until, and then offered it security guarantees when, it made peace with Germany. And then the U.S. should have supported Hitler in his war on Communism, by far the worst of the three totalitarianism of Communism, Naziism, and New Dealism. Afterwards, Hitler and his successors would have had their hands full ruling their Eurasian empire, and Naziism would have normalized itself, and Communism would be gone. Too bad about Nazi rule over the French, Belgians, Dutch, Danes, and Norwegians, but that would have been a price well worth paying...

He does not quite dare say it, but he is thinking it. It is Jeanne Kirkpatrick's: "we should always and everywhere support authoritarian regimes and movements against communist regimes and movements" turned up to 11.

And he tiptoes way way way up to it and almost gets there...

Things that have not aged well. Hassett was not an excellent choice for Chairman of the CEA: Mark M. Zandi, Justin Wolfers, & al. (2017): Letter in Support of the Nomination of Kevin Hassett to be Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers https://medium.com/@hassett.economists.letter/letter-in-support-of-the-nomination-of-kevin-hassett-to-be-chairman-of-the-council-of-economic-78c483f9821b: ‘Dr. Hassett has a record of serious scholarship on a wide range of topics, including tax policy, business investment, and energy. He has engaged on an even wider range of topics in the public policy debate and in his work at the Federal Reserve and as a consultant to the Department of the Treasury during the Administrations of President George H.W. Bush and President William J. Clinton. In addition, we appreciate that Dr. Hassett has consistently made an effort to reach out to a wide range of people from across the ideological spectrum both to promote economic dialogue and to collaborate on research and public policy proposals. For all of these reasons we believe that Dr. Hassett would be an excellent choice for Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and urge the Committee to move as expeditiously as possible… #economicsgonewrong #incompetence #moralresponsibility #noted #orangehairedbaboons #2020-05-29

Some very, very, very strange things went on inside this White House. Perhaps the strangest was how American Enterprise Institute “economist” Kevin Hassett persuaded Donald Trump and his coterie that COVID-19 deaths would be less than 100 a week starting May 15—or so Hassett’s enemies and ill-wishers inside the White House and their tame journalists are now claiming it went down:

David Anderson: Cubic Fits & Department of D'OH https://www.balloon-juice.com/2020/05/05/cubic-fits-and-department-of-doh/: ‘The first thing a data analyst trainee should learn is that playing with Excel’s functions and tools is a great way to get into trouble when you don’t have an underlying understanding of the fundamental data’s behaviors AND don’t understand the functions and tools core assumptions.  This is important.  The second or third lesson a data analyst trainee will learn is to not use Excel but that is advanced training. Why does this matter? It seems like the White House is using Excel and not understanding the phenonomenon they are trying to model. Eyeballing the data, there sure as hell seems to be a day of the week seasonality. But let’s go beyond that. If we were to assume that a cubit fit is an appropriate choice to model the data, and that we can project out of the current data to the near future so that there are almost no deaths on May 15th, that requires a ‘What the Hell’ response… #coronavirus #incompetence #moralresponsibility #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-05-29

Cristina Cabrera: GOP Guv. Doug Burgum Tearfully Pleads Anti-Maskers To ‘Dial Up Your Empathy’ and End ‘Political’ Divide https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/gop-guv-tearfully-pleads-anti-maskers-to-dial-up-your-empathy-and-end-political-divide: ‘North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) despairs.... “If someone is wearing a mask, they’re not doing it to represent what political party they’re in or what candidates they support,” the Republican governor said during an emotional press briefing on Friday. “They might be doing it because they’ve got a 5-year-old child who’s been going through cancer treatments,” he continued, voice breaking. Burgum took a moment to collect himself before continuing: “They might have vulnerable adults in their life who currently have COVID, and they’re fighting.” The governor begged North Dakotans to avoid “creating a divide” either “ideological or political” over the importance of wearing a mask with so many lives at stake. “This is a, I would say, senseless dividing line,” he said. “And I would ask people to try to dial up your empathy and your understanding.” Burgum’s plea comes as some of his fellow Republicans, including President Donald Trump, publicly refuse to wear masks that prevent the spread of COVID-19, disregarding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommendation… #fascism #noted #moralresponsibility #orangehairedbaboons #2020-05-29

Mar 26, 2020: The Trump Administration’s Epic COVID-19 Failure https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-covid19-testing-failure-by-j-bradford-delong-2020-03: Whereas many other countries afflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic have pursued mass testing, quarantines, and other measures to reduce community transmission, the Trump administration has simply dithered. Although America could still shut down for a month to overcome the crisis, the sad truth is that it won't.

BERKELEY – Even to US President Donald Trump’s most ardent critics, his administration’s disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic has come as a surprise. Who would have guessed that Trump and his cronies would be so incompetent that merely testing for the disease would become a major bottleneck?

IMHO, It is long past time for advertising-supported social media to die. The incentives facing Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and company are extremely poisonous. And—unlike Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, even Elon Musk—Jack and Mark regard themselves as in the business of piling up as much money as they can, rather than as enabling and guiding human progress. It needs to stop. They are, as somebody-or-other said, our modern tobacco companies—only profiting from human addiction to controversy and polarization and susceptibility to misinformation rather than human addiction to nicotine: Brian Klaas: 'Trump took the tragic death of a young woman, Lori Klausutis https://twitter.com/brianklaas/status/1265239671140909058, and has tried to exploit it for political gain in the most disgusting way imaginable. This letter from her husband to [Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey] asking him to delete Trump’s sick tweets is a heart-wrenching must read.…

#fascism #journamalism #moralresponsibility #noted #orangehairedbaboons #publicsphere #2020-05-27

There are some nuggets of valuable information to be found in the huge sea of misinformation, chaos, and anger that is Twitter. I strongly recommend that you follow Andy Slavitt if you are on what I have heard called "the bad website": Andy Slavitt: COVID Update May 21 https://twitter.com/ASlavitt/status/1263628261470461955: ‘Something is happening... that we should pay attention to... [but] we are ignoring it and the many warnings it represents.... "Waves"... emerge in the interaction of people & virus. It's not the virus attacking & retreating. It's not like waves that come in from the sea carrying momentum & energy. It's us. We’re not having the summer lull in the US. We’re not exploding but the death rate isn’t materially dropping. If we keep hovering around R=1, small factors may push us to one side or another of the divide. So it is possible there will be a perceived summer lull. But we could be crushing this virus instead if we doubled down on SD. Hardly anyone's even saying that. Fauci & others have repeatedly warned that while summer conditions may be less favorable to the virus, given how contagious it is & given our lack of population immunity, there is no reason to be confident it can't grow through the Summer. It has NOT declined significantly in US. 100,000+ DEAD AMERICANS BY THIS MONDAY, 150,000+ BY THE ELECTION due to Trump’s delays and lack of leadership...

#coronavirus #noted #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth

With Trump, almost always, this is true: the cruelty is the point: Steve M.: How It Must Pain Trump's Followers to Observe His Cruelty! https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2020/05/how-it-must-pain-trumps-followers-to.html: ‘As U.S. deaths from COVID-19 reach 100,000, President Trump—laser-focused as always on America's most serious problems...

...is picking a fight with Joe Scarborough, insinuating, despite all evidence, that Scarborough murdered Lori Klausutis, a staffer who died in the then-congressman's office in 2000. The pro-Trump New York Post assumes that most of Trump's supporters wish he would stop behaving this way:

There seems to be one big piece of good news in the fight against Covid-19. The battle to keep the caseload low enough that hospitals do not collapse and the death rate rise from 1% to 4% or so appears to have been won, worldwide.

Now there is a second battle: to push the bulk of the potential caseload out beyond the date at which an effective vaccine arrives and so reduce the global death toll from its likely non-vaccine value of 50 million to a small fraction of that:

1. That battle can be lost.
2. That battle can be won expensively, through prolonged and expensive social distancing and other measures that push the virus ’s reproduction rate R down to near one.
3. That battle can be won quickly and cheaply, by sharp short-term massive virus repression, followed by controlling reemergences via large scale and frequent trace-&-test-&-isolate.

Sane, intelligent, and competent countries are trying for option (3) in this second battle, and it looks like many of them will succeed. The Trump administration and its crowd of grifters and enablers appear to have decided that (1), losing this second battle, is best for their personal pocketbooks and reelection chances.

The very wise Matt Yglesias protests:

Matthew Yglesias: Coronavirus Mitigation Could Kill Thousands. Suppress the Virus, Don’t Just “Flatten the Curve” https://www.vox.com/2020/5/6/21241058/coronavirus-mitigation-suppression-flatten-the-curve: ‘With the disease seemingly beaten back domestically, Hong Kong is now in a position to start switching emphasis to a strategy focused on border controls.... The city has a clearly articulated strategy that it calls “suppress and lift”: ease restrictions now when cases are at zero, but then clamp back down as necessary to push cases back down if they pop up. Taiwan has also had no new cases for several days...

...New Zealand has not done quite this well, but the government believes it has successfully identified and isolated all of the country’s coronavirus cases and is lifting restrictions, on the claim that the virus has been “eliminated” in the country. South Korea’s outbreak is now down to single-digit numbers of new cases per week.... The United States, meanwhile, is moving to open up on the basis of a vaguely articulated assumption that settling for mitigation is good enough....

The United States has not really tried the strategies that have made suppression successful. To accomplish that, America would need to invest in expanding the volume of tests, invest in more contact tracers, and create centralized quarantine facilities.... Since the US didn't spend April doing that, trying to achieve suppression—along the lines of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and New Zealand—would necessarily involve more delay and more economic pain. But doing so would save potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of lives and almost certainly lead to a better economic outcome by allowing activity to truly restart…

#coronavirus #noted #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-05-19

Twitter: _In utilitarian order of desirability https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1258601578153431042.html: Plan A: stomp the virus immediately via trace-&-test-&-quarantine. Plan B: after the virus gets established, lockdown until R is low enough & maintain lockdown long enough that you can then stomp the virus via trace-&-test-&-quarantine… https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/twitter/coronavirus-scenarios-2020-05-19.pdf

We really have very little idea what the long-term and even the short term economic effect of the coronavirus will be. We have a somewhat better handle on the human mortality costs: a worst-case scenario of 240 million worldwide deaths, a bad-case scenario of 50 million worldwide deaths, and hopes that vaccines and much better antiviral treatment protocols will arrive soon enough to substantially reduce that death toll. But virus suppression is now a lost cause—individual countries can suppress and can thus hope to insulate their populations until vaccine arrival, but for the globe as a whole, we are in mitigation mode. And as for morbidity? We really do not know enough to say much of anything: James K. Jackson & al.: Global Economic Effects of COVID-19 https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R46270.pdf: ‘Since the COVID-19 outbreak was first diagnosed, it has spread to over 190 countries and all U.S. states. The pandemic is having a noticeable impact on global economic growth. Estimates so far indicate the virus could trim global economic growth by as much as 2.0% per month if current conditions persist. Global trade could also fall by 13% to 32%, depending on the depth and extent of the global economic downturn. The full impact will not be known until the effects of the pandemic peak. This report provides an overview of the global economic costs to date and the response by governments and international institutions to address these effects…

#coronavirus #macro #noted #orangehairedbaboons #2020-05-18

It now seems much more likely than not that of all the OECD nations the United States will turn out to have the worst coronavirus response: the highest death rate when this thing comes to an end, coupled with extraordinarily low benefits in terms of how many lives saved by the economic costs incurred. I suspect it will look in retrospect as though any strategy was better than the Trump administration's incoherent an inconsistent mix of strategies. Only Britain seems to have a chance of doing worse. And yet it is almost unthinkable that Boris Johnson will prove to be even less competent than his American counterpart: Andy Slavitt: ‘COVID-19a Uniquely Tough American Foe https://twitter.com/ASlavitt/status/1257477774220066827. The rest of the world is figuring it out. The Czech Republic did it with masks. China with isolation. Germany with testing. Hong Kong with experience. New Zealand with alerts. Greece with discipline. The cost of these lessons is already too high. But it is not beyond our power to change it. But I’m afraid to change this, we do have to first face it…

#coronavirus #noted #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-05-18

In the end, Trump's acquittal may be viewed by future historians much like the Roman Senate's decision to block the Gracchi is regarded by current historians: as the start of a huge downward spiral. That presidential corruption and malfeasance are subject to no checks as long as 34 senators fear their reelection chances would be damanged by removal is not a state I ever thought I would ever see America reach, but it has:

Paul Campos: Another Brow-Furrower http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/02/another-brow-furrower: 'This looks like one of those deals where the president says I’ll stop illegally withholding those federal services I’m withholding from your constituents if you stop investigating those financial crimes I committed. Donald J. Trump: "I’m seeing Governor Cuomo today at The White House. He must understand that National Security far exceeds politics. New York must stop all of its unnecessary lawsuits & harrassment, start cleaning itself up, and lowering taxes. Build relationships, but don’t bring Fredo!" “Fredo” btw is Cuomo’s brother, who is a CNN reporter. What’s the over-under on how many impeachable offenses this guy has committed since the Senate “acquittal” all those many months weeks days ago?...

#americancollapse #fasciam #noted #orangehairedbaboons #2020-05-13

Steve M.: Better to Reign in Randian Hell https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2020/05/better-to-reign-in-randian-hell.html: ‘Danes kept their jobs. The trauma of massive numbers of people losing jobs and health insurance, of long lines at food banks—that is the American experience, but it’s not what’s happening in Denmark.... Our response to the pandemic has been worse than Sweden's or Denmark's, and one consequence is that our economy will be in the toilet for years to come. I understand that we're reopening much of America prematurely because our corporate overlords have contempt for their employees and their customers and just want revenue to start flowing again as quickly as possible. But why are they unable to grasp the obvious point that their customers are afraid to come back, and that they'll be even more afraid when, inevitably, the premature reopenings cause a spike in COVID-19 cases and deaths? In other words, why aren't the CEOs who have Donald Trump's ear telling him that, for his benefit and theirs (they really don't care about ours), he should be working harder to bend the curve and increase testing and tracing, because that's what it will take to give Americans the confidence to go out and consume?... I've come to the conclusion that many American capitalists aren't seekers of pure profit. They often prefer control.... They don't like being ordered to shut down by the government. They want to forcibly reverse the shutdown—even though it's likely to mean more death and less business, and even though letting the lockdown run its course would make them more money in the long run...

#coronavirus #noted #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-05-13

The Project Syndicate people titled this "American Carnage": a good title. They also had to cut it massively. Here is the draft I am most satisfied with: J. Bradford DeLong: American Carnage https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-coronavirus-lethal-incompetence-by-j-bradford-delong-2020-04: ‘Throughout Donald Trump's presidency, it has been obvious that the American political system and public sphere are broken. But only with the federal government's embarrassingly incompetent response to the COVID-19 pandemic has that breakdown translated into a significant loss of life…

Matthew Yglesias: Coronavirus Mitigation Could Kill Thousands. Suppress the Virus, Don’t Just “Flatten the Curve” https://www.vox.com/2020/5/6/21241058/coronavirus-mitigation-suppression-flatten-the-curve: ‘With the disease seemingly beaten back domestically, Hong Kong is now in a position to start switching emphasis to a strategy focused on border controls.... The city has a clearly articulated strategy that it calls “suppress and lift”: ease restrictions now when cases are at zero, but then clamp back down as necessary to push cases back down if they pop up. Taiwan has also had no new cases for several days.... New Zealand has not done quite this well, but the government believes it has successfully identified and isolated all of the country’s coronavirus cases and is lifting restrictions, on the claim that the virus has been “eliminated” in the country. South Korea’s outbreak is now down to single-digit numbers of new cases per week.... The United States, meanwhile, is moving to open up on the basis of a vaguely articulated assumption that settling for mitigation is good enough.... The United States has not really tried the strategies that have made suppression successful. To accomplish that, America would need to invest in expanding the volume of tests, invest in more contact tracers, and create centralized quarantine facilities.... Since the US didn't spend April doing that, trying to achieve suppression—along the lines of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and New Zealand—would necessarily involve more delay and more economic pain. But doing so would save potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of lives and almost certainly lead to a better economic outcome by allowing activity to truly restart…

Duncan Black: Two Sources Close To Jared And Ivanka https://www.eschatonblog.com/2020/05/two-sources-close-to-jared-and-ivanka.html: ‘It did diminish, somewhat, but I wonder if any of the journalists who served as their de facto PR agents for a couple of years feel bad. Haha I keed.…

David Anderson: Cubic Fits & Department of D'OH https://www.balloon-juice.com/2020/05/05/cubic-fits-and-department-of-doh/: ‘The first thing a data analyst trainee should learn is that playing with Excel’s functions and tools is a great way to get into trouble when you don’t have an underlying understanding of the fundamental data’s behaviors AND don’t understand the functions and tools core assumptions.  This is important.  The second or third lesson a data analyst trainee will learn is to not use Excel but that is advanced training. Why does this matter? It seems like the White House is using Excel and not understanding the phenonomenon they are trying to model. Eyeballing the data, there sure as hell seems to be a day of the week seasonality. But let’s go beyond that. If we were to assume that a cubit fit is an appropriate choice to model the data, and that we can project out of the current data to the near future so that there are almost no deaths on May 15th, that requires a What the Hell response…