Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

First:

Kevin Kwok: Populism: 'We have lived in the golden era provided by the industrial revolution in so many ways that we take for granted. One of them is that the industrial revolution was an innately distributed wave. It was a huge technological, productivity, and financial wave. But it required a large base of humans. This is because its returns to scale tilted towards many mid to large cities co-located with transportation and natural resource hubs. And labor was a major factor of production. This was not the sole factor, but one of the major ones for why we see a middle class arise in the world. Before the industrial revolution we see far greater inequality, with elites capturing far more power and wealth.... The question then, is whether we are living through the reversion to the mean..... Another macro trend... for the last 75 years, the US has been an anomalous market by absorbing value from the rest of the world... Platform Americana. By rejecting the full stack nature of the European Colonial Approach and instead becoming a platform–the US struck a bargain with the rest of the world. It would provide the production, consumption, guarantee of trade routes, security, and financing for the world. Our middle class is a function of the value that was supposed to be generated in the rest of the world that we captured as the platform for world.... To be in the US then, appears akin to sitting on a beach watching the waves flow back to the ocean.... We’re seeing a similar dynamic... playing out... with blue-collar white males.... centuries because of legal, cultural, and fiat norms around women.... The adage “Growth solves all problems” is not just true of companies. It’s true of countries too. With growth, people believe in cooperation. They find common ground in the pursuit of mutual success and growth. Without growth, people become zero sum…

LINK: <https://kwokchain.com/2018/10/02/populism/>

PROJECT SYNDICATE: Is þe US Economy Recovering or Overheating?

The fact that core inflation is rising on the back of substantial GDP growth and declining unemployment should not come as a surprise. Those who are wringing their hands about economic "overheating" should remember that an absence of price increases would reflect an economy that is still struggling. <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-inflation-shows-economy-is-reshuffling-and-recovering-by-j-bradford-delong-2021-05>

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BERKELEY – The financial and economic news in the United States lately has been dominated by concerns about inflation. “Runaway inflation is the biggest risk facing investors, Leuthold’s Jim Paulsen warns,” according to the cable news channel CNBC. As a potential hedge against inflation, “Bitcoin’s time to shine is fast approaching,” reportsFortune’s Robert Hackett. According to US News and World Report, “There is a lot of talk about inflation in 2021 as fears of high government spending creep in and the recent rebound in prices from pandemic-related levels has some investors worried that the trend will continue for some time.”

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember... <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-for-2021-05-05-we>

The fact that core inflation is rising on the back of substantial GDP growth and declining unemployment should not come as a surprise. Those who are wringing their hands about economic "overheating" should remember that an absence of price increases would reflect an economy that is still struggling. <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-inflation-shows-economy-is-reshuffling-and-recovering-by-j-bradford-delong-2021-05>

BERKELEY – The financial and economic news in the United States lately has been dominated by concerns about inflation. “Runaway inflation is the biggest risk facing investors, Leuthold’s Jim Paulsen warns,” according to the cable news channel CNBC. As a potential hedge against inflation, “Bitcoin’s time to shine is fast approaching,” reportsFortune’s Robert Hackett. According to US News and World Report, “There is a lot of talk about inflation in 2021 as fears of high government spending creep in and the recent rebound in prices from pandemic-related levels has some investors worried that the trend will continue for some time.”

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With Cory Doctorow; Noah Smith & Brad DeLong's 30:00 < Weekly Podcast < 60:00 <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-xiii-mandated-interoperability>

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Key Insights:

• Cory Doctorow is AWESOME!

• It is depressing. We once, with the creation of the market economy, got interoperability right. But now the political economy blocks us from there being any obvious path to an equivalent lucky historical accident in our future.

• The problems in our society are not diametrically opposed: Addressing the problems of one thing doesn't necessarily create equal and opposite problems on the other side—but it does change the trade-offs, and so things become very complex and very difficult to solve.

• Always keep a trash bag in your car.

• Hexapodia!

 

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References:

Books:

Cory Doctorow: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism <https://www.google.com/books/edition/How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism/W20NzgEACAAJ>

Cory Doctorow: Attack Surface <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Attack_Surface/rFfEDwAAQBAJ>

Cory Doctorow: Walkaway <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Walkaway/MKMsDAAAQBAJ>

Cory Doctorow: Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom/h8DvDwAAQBA>

Cory Doctorow: Little Brother <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Little_Brother/r1zne2mZDW8C>

William Flesch:Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Comeuppance/JSRWPYp1nNUC>

Daniel L. Rubinfeld: A Retrospective on U.S. v. Microsoft: Why Does It Resonate Today? <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003603X20950227>

Louis Galambos & Peter Temin: The Fall of the Bell System: A Study in Prices & Politics <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Fall_of_the_Bell_System/CXNPVjdxfAEC>

Websites:

Electronic Frontier Foundation: <http://www.eff.org>

• Adversarial Interop Case Studies: <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability>

• Privacy without Monopoly: <https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy>

Cory Doctorow: Craphound <http://craphound.net>

Cory Doctorow: Pluralistic <https://pluralistic.net>

&, of course:

Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://books.google.com/books?id=fCCWWgZ7d6UC>

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Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

First:

Zeynep Tufekci: Sunday Open Thread for Subscribers: ‘The one big part of the tragedy here is that we had most of the science we needed really early on…. There was more to learn, for sure, but the basics were there. There have been very few scientific surprises… outside of how vaccinable this (luckily!) turned out to be (we didn’t know partly because we didn’t really try for the others exactly because we didn’t care). But sociologically, I am shaken. I knew about all of this, because I teach and study it. The group-think, the institutional resistance and inertia, the cognitive biases, the social dynamics… I know about them all! But I’ve been truly surprised most is how much stronger than I thought these dynamics were, even in a crisis. Perhaps because of the crisis. I’ve learned a lot about viruses last year, but I did not really need that much beyond an introductory textbook to write the policy oriented pieces I’ve published. I think we need to update our social science textbooks and assumptions, though. The dynamics that have dominated our world aren’t novel in the sense that we were new to them, but they are clearly so much stronger than we usually acknowledge…

LINK: <https://www.theinsight.org/p/sunday-open-thread-for-subscribers-d93>

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This, I thought, was an interview that turned out very well...

The Best Books on the Classical Economists

recommended by Brad DeLong

They were an eclectic bunch, including, among others, a stock market speculator, a moral philosopher, a cleric, a lawyer and a journalist. From the late-18th to the mid-19th century, they provided the first systematic explanations of how economies work, where they fail and how they might be made to work better. Here, Brad DeLong, a professor of economics at UC Berkeley, introduces the classical economists, and suggests books to read to learn more about them and what they were trying to achieve.

Interview by Benedict King

The Passions and the Interests by Albert Hirschman

The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L Heilbroner

The Classical Economists Revisited by D. P. O'Brien

Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment by Emma Rothschild

Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber

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My testimony before Sen. Sherrod Brown's subcommittee...

Earlier today Eric Rauchway @rauchway wrote that people should take a look at my 2009-03-31 testimony that Sen Sherrod Brown (D-OH) invited me to give:

Eric Rauchway @rauchway

or see @delong 's Congressional testimony of 2009 Lessons from the New Dealbooks.google.com

April 27th 2020

2 Retweets72 Likes

He is right: my 2009-03-31 testimony is damned good!

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

First:

Free speech advocates who care about the functioning of their community have never thought it appropriate for the free-speech principle to empower chaos monkeys who seek to destroy their society and replace it with something with speech that would be less free:

John Milton: Areopagitica: ‘Yet if all cannot be of one mind—as who looks they should be?—this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and the misled: that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or manners no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw itself: but those neighbouring differences, or rather indifferences, are what I speak of, whether in some point of doctrine or of discipline, which, though they may be many, yet need not interrupt THE UNITY OF SPIRIT, if we could but find among us THE BOND OF PEACE…

LINK: <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/608/608-h/608-h.htm>

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Very Briefly Noted:

• Crash Course: Black American History Preview<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPx5aRuWCtc>

• Charles Goodhart: Less Lower for Longer; More Higher and Sooner<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFGQ_4msKUA>

• Harry Enten: Voters Used to See Moderation in Trump. Not Anymore<https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/voters-think-trump-has-moved-to-the-right/>

• German Lopez: Biden’s First 100 Days, Explained in 600 Words: ‘Biden is drawing on the lessons of FDR and the New Deal to try to revitalize American democracy… <https://www.vox.com/2021/4/30/22412137/biden-congress-speech-100-days-fdr-new-deal>

• Dylan Matthews: US Covid–19 Response: How Stimulus Checks, Unemployment Insurance, & Tax Credits Sped Up Economic Recovery: ‘I looked for a country that got the economic response to Covid–19 right. I found the US… <https://www.vox.com/22348364/united-states-stimulus-covid-coronavirus>

• Alex Abad-Santos: Can Fully Vaccinated People Return to Indoor Dining? It’s Complicated: ‘Even if you’re vaccinated, indoor dining is still complicated Epidemiologists want the US vaccination rate to get a little bit higher before resuming eating indoors at restaurants… <https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22406332/indoor-dining-restaurants-vaccinated-risk-covid-19>

• Lynn Parramore: America Hasn’t Reckoned with the Coup That Blasted the Black Middle Class: ‘In 1898, upwardly mobile Blacks in Wilmington, NC were terrorized and slaughtered in a violent insurrection… <https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/america-hasnt-reckoned-with-the-coup-that-blasted-the-black-middle-class>

• Scott Lemieux: The Counter-Majoritarian Atrocity: ‘As we saw in [Senator] Scott’s response speech last night, the stock response of Republican elites and their most shameless supporters and apologists is now to claim that one-person-one-vote, fair access to the ballot, and a majority of voters being allowed to choose their representatives is ACTUALLY the election-rigging… <https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/04/the-counter-majoritarian-atrocity>

• Michael Lee & Antoine Martin: Hey, Economist! What’s the Case for Central Bank Digital Currencies?: ‘Bitcoin is not a claim on anything or anyone. By contrast, a CBDC would be a central bank liability…. Offering a payment method that has a stable value is one of the reasons central banks were created in the first place. The exchange mechanism is also very different. The central ethos of cryptocurrencies is the idea that transactions can take place without a trusted intermediary…. By contrast, a CBDC embraces the involvement of a trusted intermediary, namely a central bank… <https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2021/04/hey-economist-whats-the-case-for-central-bank-digital-currencies.html>

• Ed Zitron: Why We Continue To Have Awful Meetings: ‘Meetings exist, in my mind, for a reason. If it’s a weekly call with a client, you’re there to give updates, get updates on things, make plans, or follow up on loose threads…. Meetings also exist to put faces to names, and potentially hash out any issues…. There are good reasons for meetings to happen, even in brief, especially if you’re working remote…. I am encouraging you to take a minute and realize that someone talking a lot does not mean they’re actually doing anything… <https://ez.substack.com/p/why-we-continue-to-have-awful-meetings>

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John Authers: Markets Give Powell a Break on Inflation. It May Be Transitory: ‘The latest Federal Open Market Committee meeting still left us with a few more clues on how the Fed intends to navigate through an exceptionally dangerous environment…. Virtually every data release for the last month has suggested a very strong recovery. The Fed wants great improvement in unemployment, which is still running at a 6% rate, compared to 3.5% before the pandemic…. So there are two questions. Do we see any signs of rising prices caused by anything more than a transitory bottleneck? And, are inflation expectations showing signs of settling “materially above 2%”? If there is any clear sign of a possible bottleneck, it is in… industrial metals…. Markets give us nice and precise measures of inflation expectations, via the breakevens between inflation-protected bonds, or TIPS, and conventional fixed-income Treasuries. The prediction this generates for average inflation over the next five years is just under 2.5%…. Ten-year expectations are slightly lower…. The best measure to justify continued lenience is the so-called 5-year, 5-year breakeven…

LINK: <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-29/markets-give-powell-a-break-on-inflation-it-may-be-transitory>

Patrick Wyman: Ancient South Asia: ‘If we were to touch down in South Asia at the end of the Younger Dryas and the beginning of the Holocene around 12,000 years ago, however, we wouldn’t have seen many people. Archaeological traces of a human presence are few and far between at the end of the Pleistocene. Much of the region wasn’t particularly welcoming to people at that time; the Deccan Plateau, which makes up much of South Asia, would have been exceptionally arid. That is largely because the monsoon, which brings torrential but life-giving rain every summer, was either much weaker or altogether absent. The rain-fed seasonal rivers that make much of South Asia welcoming to people wouldn’t have flowed, leaving only the river valleys of the Indus and Ganges as particularly viable spots for people to live. As the Pleistocene gave way to the Holocene, the monsoon began to take on something more like its current form. As was the case elsewhere in the world at that time, the number of people living in South Asia dramatically expanded with improving climatic conditions. Many of these new residents were the descendants of long-established hunter-gatherers. Some of them kept foraging; others experimented with new ways of life. But others were new arrivals who set themselves up on the edges of the Indus Valley, bringing with them an agricultural package first developed far to the west in the Fertile Crescent…

LINK: <https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/ancient-south-asia>

Joseph A. Francis: King Cotton, the Munificent Slavery & (Under)development in the United States, 1789–1865: ‘Slaves were necessary for the country’s cotton boom because cotton was not sufficiently remunerative to attract yeoman farmers. Cotton exports then balanced the imports that the Federal Government taxed to obtain most of its revenues. Those revenues were used to fund westward expansion, both directly through the acquisition and conquest of new territory, and indirectly through the policy of retiring the national debt, which pumped liquidity into the country’s nascent capital markets and bolstered the reputation of American bonds among foreign investors. State government could then borrow to finance the transportation infrastructure that connected the new lands to markets, allowing them to be serrled. Westward expansion tended to weaken slaveholders’ position in Congress because they were excluded from the rapidly growing Midwest. They therefore seceded. The North would not let the South leave the Union, however, because secession threatened to take away the Federal Government’s main source of revenues. As a result, the Civil War began, leading to emancipation. Slavery had thus financed the development of the settler society that would eventually abolish it, while the slaves themselves became an underdeveloped nation within a nation… 

LINK: <https://joefrancis.info/pdfs/FrancisUS_slavery.pdf>

Aswath Damodaran: Equity Risk Premiums (ERP): Determinants, Estimation, and Implications–The 2021 Edition: ‘The equity risk premium is the price of risk in equity markets, and it is not just a key input in estimating costs of equity and capital in both corporate finance and valuation, but it is also a key metric in assessing the overall market. Given its importance, it is surprising how haphazard the estimation of equity risk premiums remains in practice. We begin this paper by looking at the economic determinants of equity risk premiums, including investor risk aversion, information uncertainty and perceptions of macroeconomic risk. In the standard approach to estimating the equity risk premium, historical returns are used, with the difference in annual returns on stocks versus bonds, over a long period, comprising the expected risk premium. We note the limitations of this approach, even in markets like the United States, which have long periods of historical data available, and its complete failure in emerging markets, where the historical data tends to be limited and volatile. We look at two other approaches to estimating equity risk premiums – the survey approach, where investors and managers are asked to assess the risk premium and the implied approach, where a forward-looking estimate of the premium is estimated using either current equity prices or risk premiums in non-equity markets. In the next section, we look at the relationship between the equity risk premium and risk premiums in the bond market (default spreads) and in real estate (cap rates) and how that relationship can be mined to generate expected equity risk premiums. We close the paper by examining why different approaches yield different values for the equity risk premium, and how to choose the “right” number to use in analysis…

LINK: <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3825823>

Gary Gorton: Recent Changes & the Future of the US Financial System: ‘The financial crisis has not been solved because financial crises are inherent in market economics. A financial crisis is always about runs on short-term debt, e.g. in the repo market. The general trend in the past couple decades has been a decline in deposits replaced with other short-term debt instruments like repo contracts…. Stablecoin is essentially unregulated free banking that issues deposits. However, free banking never worked in the past, even in cases whether the government required backing. There needs to be credible backing for Stablecoin as they are now runnable without any entity overseeing them…. The fundamental theorem of bank regulation stipulates that bank regulators can only decide the location of the banking system. Without carrots—or incentives—to keep a bank, they can move, as evidenced by the rise of mortgage and loan origination outside of the banking system given the high costs of staying a bank…

LINK: <https://bcf.princeton.edu/events/gary-gorton-on-recent-changes-and-the-future-of-the-us-financial-system/>

Anton Troianovski: ‘We Know How to Defend Our Interests’: Putin’s Emerging Hard Line: ‘KYIV, Ukraine — The world according to President Vladimir V. Putin looks like this: Russia is on the rise while the West is in chaos. The West, spurred on by a new American president who is more anti-Russian than his predecessor, seeks Russia’s—and Mr. Putin’s—destruction. And it is time for Russia, imbued with a moral authority and a thinning supply of patience, to hit back. “They may think that we are like them, but we are different, with a different genetic, cultural and moral code,” Mr. Putin said last month, excoriating the United States. “We know how to defend our interests”…

LINK: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/world/europe/putin-biden-ukraine-navalny.html?searchResultPosition=3>

James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson: Identification & Estimation of Dynamic Causal Effects in Macroeconomics Using External Instruments: ‘The increasing use of external sources of as-if randomness to identify the dynamic causal effects of macroeconomic shocks… the time series counterpart of the highly successful strategy in microeconometrics of using external as-if randomness to provide instruments…. This lecture exposits this approach and provides conditions on instruments and control variables under which external instrument methods produce valid inference on dynamic causal effects…. We consider two methods, a one-step instrumental variables regression and a two-step method that entails estimation of a vector autoregression…

LINK: <https://www.princeton.edu/~mwatson/papers/Sargan_Lecture_Stock_Watson_20180104.pdf>

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Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

John Scalzi: ’I’m a dude with the usual amount of bullshit on his karma; I try to imagine the better version of me, and then cosplay that in public until hopefully it sticks. Or to quote Vonnegut: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be”…

John Scalzi @scalzi

I'm a dude with the usual amount of bullshit on his karma; I try to imagine the better version of me, and then cosplay that in public until hopefully it sticks. Or to quote Vonnegut: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

Jeffrey Skarski @JeffreySkarski

@scalzi You seem like a really nice guy, and you write really good books.

January 29th 2021

64 Retweets599 Likes

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Very Briefly Noted:

• Wikipedia: Emanuel Derman <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Derman>

• PIIE: Jacob Funk Kirkegaard <https://www.piie.com/experts/senior-research-staff/jacob-funk-kirkegaard>

• Eyepatch Wolf: Buying a PC with Dell: My Journey Into Hell

Eyepatch Wolf @EyePatchWolf

Buying a PC with Dell: My Journey Into Hell

April 14th 2021

1,543 Retweets6,507 Likes

• Travis Gettys: Trump-loving lawyer Lin Wood Bizarrely Claims He Roamed White House—& Found Ex-President Still There <https://www.rawstory.com/l-lin-wood-2652826035/>

• Financial Times: Empire of Pain: The story of the Sacklers & OxyContin<https://www.ft.com/content/1db7800f-78d5-474e-9b1e-744b1c1a837c>

• 2015: The “Hangover Theory” of the 2008–2009 Crash Fails Because of Timing: ‘"We should have a recession,” Cochrane said in November, speaking to students and investors in a conference room that looks out on Lake Michigan. “People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do… <https://equitablegrowth.org/hangover-theory-2008-2009-crash-fails-timing/>

• Matthew Yglesias: If You Want to Talk About Racism, Talk About Racism: ‘From the 2007 launch of his presidential campaign through to his successful re-election in 2012, I think the best way to characterize Obama’s treatment of racial issues in his rhetoric was massive, largely justified paranoia about white backlash… <https://www.slowboring.com/p/english-kalla>

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John Quiggin: Republicans & the End of Hard Neoliberalism: ‘After four years of the Trump Administration, and a few months of post-election madness, the Republican Party has completed a transition that has been going on for decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Republicans were a hard neoliberal party…. Now the situation is reversed. The Republicans are a white grievance party… [that] still attempt to attract support from corporations by advocating tax cuts….

Think of the Eisenhower-era Republican party as a complicated mixture of many dissolved ingredients, in which the dominant element was the business establishment, and the Trump era party as a crystalised mass of plutocratic economics, racism and all-round craziness. The development over the 60 years between the two has consisted of keeping the mixture simmering, while adding more and more appeals to racial animus and magical thinking (supply-side economics, climate denial, the Iraq war and so on). In this process various elements of the original mix have boiled off or precipitated out and discarded as dregs.

Boiling off is the process by which various groups (Blacks and Northeastern liberal Republicans in C20, liberaltarians more recently) have left the Republican coalition in response to its racism and know-nothingism. The dregs that have precipitated out are ideas that were supposed to be important to Republicans (free trade, scientific truth, classical liberalism, moral character and so on) that turned out not to matter at all. Trump’s arrival is the catalyst seed crystal that produces the phase change. The final product of the reaction emerges in its crystallised form.

LINK: <https://crookedtimber.org/2021/04/26/republicans-and-the-end-of-hard-neoliberalism/>

Matthew Zeitlin: Personnel Isn’t Policy, Policy Is Personnel: ‘Janet Yellen is a fiscal and monetary hawk. Or at least she was. Sorta. But no longer…. The Biden administration, as might be expected, has many of the same figures from the Obama years and even the Clinton years…. Yellen herself was Obama’s choice to run the Federal Reserve and the chair of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors after some time on the Fed Board. While on the Fed and in the Clinton White House, she supported policies that would be anathema to the current administration, she was affiliated with deficit hawk groups that, for now, have no particular hold over current Democratic Party thinking. And yet I have no doubt that Yellen will be an effective advocate and architect of exactly what the Biden administration and Democratic congress wants to do right: spend money on families, Covid relief, the environment, and not get too stressed about the deficit….

It wasn’t Larry Summers who allegedly told Romer that monetary policy had “shot its wad,” or tried to explain high unemployment with reference to bank tellers and ATMs.  It was Barack Obama…. We are attuned to a model where advisors influence and shape the thinking of their “principal,” but it seems just as likely that the principal shapes the advisors, or essentially farms out different “modules” of thinking to different people (a deficit hawk here, a stimulus advocate there, a health care reformer over there) and then shifts the degree to which she takes their input in accordance with what she already wants to do. Inasmuch as the advisors differ, they differ within a fairly narrow band set by the principal…. [Summers] is as on board for more spending as anyone in Greater Bidenberg—but will remain at least somewhat estranged, even if the winds of change blow from the same direction both within and without it…

LINK: <https://zeitlin.substack.com/p/personnel-isnt-policy-policy-is-personnel>

Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks III: ’That facet of today’s crisis which is lamented as a “wave of materialism” is related to the so-called “crisis of authority”. The ruling class has lost its coordination—is not leading but merely dominant solely by force. The overwhelming majority no longer believe what they used to believe, and so have become unmoored from the ideologies of tradition. This, precisely, is the crisis: The old order is dying. The new order cannot be born. There is an interregnum. It is a time of monsters….

Can a gap between the popular majority and the ideologies of the rulers as serious as that since World War I ended be bridged by simple force, which attempts to stop the ideologies of the future from coming to organize society. Will the current interregnum end not in the normal-history process, which naked force blocks, but rather in a restoration? The shape of the ideologies is such that that can be ruled out in any practical if not absolute sense. he character of the ideologies, that can be ruled out-yet not in an absolute sense. In the meantime depression will lead eventually to wide scepticism, and a new accommodation—catholicism will even more become simply Jesuitism, and so forth.

These are highly favorable conditions for an unprecedented expansion of Marxism’s influence. Marxism’s oversimplicity and inadequacy when it takes its popular form will help it spread. Dead old ideologies turn into skepticism with respect to all theories and frameworks, to a focus on economic fact and money, and to politics that is either fantastical or cynical…. But this reduction to economic money and to political power means exactly the disappearance of established frameworks of ideas as anything other than rationalizations. That opens up the possibility—and creates the necessity—of creating the new culture…

Hoisted From the Archives:

From 2011: LECTURE: Seven Sects of Macroeconomic Error: Wrong Models of the Great Recession

<https://www.icloud.com/pages/0zwSkfmRDPILOSmiq0_91g5nw><https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/seven-sects-of-macroeconomic-error-2011-03-14.pdf> <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2021/04/seven.html> 2011-03-14

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By Noah Smith & Brad DeLong: Joan Robinson to Bob Solow: "I would not be unkind if you would not be pig-headed..."

FIRST:

Robert P Baird: The Invention of Whiteness: The Long History of a Dangerous Idea: ‘By the time The Bell Curve appeared, Du Bois’s assertion that racial categories were not biologically grounded was widely accepted. In the years since, the scientific evidence for that understanding has only become more overwhelming. A 2017 study examined the DNA of nearly 6,000 people from around the world and found that while that while some genetic differences among humans can be traced to various ancestral lineages—for example, eastern African, southern European or circumpolar—none of those lineages correspond to traditional ideas about race…. During the second half of the 20th century a number of historians demonstrated that… Du Bois… was correct that it was only in the modern period that people started to think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race.…

LINK: <https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other>

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Very Briefly Noted:

• Wikipedia: Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping%27s_southern_tour>

• Wikipedia: Great Helmsman <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Helmsman>

• CMP: A Brief History of the Helmsmen<https://chinamediaproject.org/2020/11/02/a-brief-history-of-the-helmsman/>

• Wikipedia: Wei Jingsheng <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei_Jingsheng>

• Zhao Ziyang: Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang<https://books.google.com/books?id=_3WTqOaAOWkC>

• Wikipedia: Miracle on the Han River<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_the_Han_River#1948%E2%80%931960:_The_First_Republic_and_Korean_War>

• Global Demographics: China’s Labour Force is, and is not, Growing: ‘The total employed labour force of China is projected to decline from 759 million to 661 million between 2017 and 2037. A drop of 13% or 1 in 8 workers leaves today’s workforce. However, the urban component of it increases from 398 million to 485 million, a 22% increase… LINK: <https://www.globaldemographics.com/china-labour-force>

• Scott Lemieux: Tucker Carlson Celebrated the Murderer of Harvey Milk & George Moscone <https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/04/tucker-carlson-celebrated-the-murderer-of-harvey-milk-and-george-moscone>

• Steven Perlberg: The New York Times Responds to the Substack Boom: ‘The New York Times is readying a big newsletter push as Substack tries to poach its top writers with advances worth hundreds of thousands… <https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-times-responds-to-the-substack-boom-2021-4>

• Charles Q. Choi: Brain Signals Can Drive Exoskeleton Parts Better With Therapy: ‘Training patients to use muscle electrodes for robotic limb control works better than previously thought possible… <https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/biomedical/devices/brain-computer-interface-exoskeleton-neural-link#disqus_thread>

• Molly Jong-Fast: Why The U.S. Should Be Shipping Its Vaccines to the Rest of the World—Right Now <https://www.vogue.com/article/export-covid-vaccine>

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Paragraphs:

Dietz Vollrath: Who Are You Calling Malthusian?: ‘I recently had a student ask me if I was a “Malthusian”…. It’s always asked in a way that implies it is a belief system, similar to “Christian”, “Muslim”, or “Packer Fan”…. I’m not a Malthusian “believer”, because that isn’t a thing. But I do think that several of Malthus’ assumptions about how economies function, in particular prior to the onset of sustained growth during the 1800’s, are well founded. And those assumptions have implications that help make sense of the world…

LINK: <https://growthecon.com/blog/Malthus/>

W.E.B. Du Bois: The Souls of White Folk: ‘The Middle Age regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful! This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts; even the sweeter souls of the dominant world as they discourse with me on weather, weal, and woe are continually playing above their actual words an obligato of tune and tone, saying “My poor, un-white thing! Weep not nor rage. I know, too well, that the curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to say, but be brave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the good Lord that into heaven above, where all is love, you may, one day, be born-white!” I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly: “But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?” Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen! Now what is the effect on a man or a nation when it comes passionately to believe such an extraordinary dictum as this?…

LINK: <https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Du_Bois_White_Folk.pdf>

Economist: The Kremlin Has Isolated Russia’s Economy: ‘Since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin has commanded the economy like a fortress under siege, building up reserves, decoupling from the world economy, and preparing for the potential impact of Western sanctions or fluctuations in oil prices…. Russia’s economy remains highly dependent on hydrocarbons. Despite years of promises, no meaningful diversification has taken place. Hydrocarbons still account for more than 60% of exports…. Russia’s covid–19-related stimulus measures amounted to just 4% of gdp, according to the World Bank. The pandemic, in Mr Putin’s eyes, is not the proverbial rainy day the nwf was intended for…

LINK: <https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/04/24/the-kremlin-has-isolated-russias-economy>

M.G. Siegler: In(tel) Command: ‘Might Gelsinger pull it off…. I finally got around to watching the “Intel Unleashed” presentation from March. While I’m far from an expert on Intel, like a lot of folks in tech, I’m fascinated…. The good news seems to be that new CEO Pat Gelsinger clearly gets this. And perhaps just as importantly, he clearly cares about this, as someone who worked at Intel for 30 years and has now returned to right the ship. And most important still, he seems to have a plan. And to be in command of the situation…. Gelsinger’s… is an actual presentation and not a Q&A. Still, the same thing is conveyed: just how in command he is. And perhaps even more so than Jobs, just how enthusiastic he is about the opportunity…

LINK: <https://5ish.org/p/intel-command>

Cosma Shalizi: In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You: ‘There is a passage in Red Plenty which is central to describing both the nightmare from which we are trying to awake, and vision we are trying to awake into. Henry [Farrell] has quoted it already, but it bears repeating:

Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded…. The motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on.…

And what would be the alternative? The consciously arranged alternative? A dance of another nature, Emil presumed. A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all…

There is a fundamental level at which Marx’s nightmare vision is right: capitalism, the market system, whatever you want to call it, is a product of humanity, but each and every one of us confronts it as an autonomous and deeply alien force. Its ends, to the limited and debatable extent that it can even be understood as having them, are simply inhuman. The ideology of the market tell us that we face not something inhuman but superhuman, tells us to embrace our inner zombie cyborg and loose ourselves in the dance. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry or running screaming.

But, and this is I think something Marx did not sufficiently appreciate, human beings confront all the structures which emerge from our massed interactions in this way. A bureaucracy, or even a thoroughly democratic polity of which one is a citizen, can feel, can be, just as much of a cold monster as the market. We have no choice but to live among these alien powers which we create, and to try to direct them to human ends. It is beyond us, it is even beyond all of us, to find “a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all”, which says how everyone should go. What we can do is try to find the specific ways in which these powers we have conjured up are hurting us, and use them to check each other, or deflect them into better paths.

Sometimes this will mean more use of market mechanisms, sometimes it will mean removing some goods and services from market allocation, either through public provision or through other institutional arrangements. Sometimes it will mean expanding the scope of democratic decision-making (for instance, into the insides of firms), and sometimes it will mean narrowing its scope (for instance, not allowing the demos to censor speech it finds objectionable). Sometimes it will mean leaving some tasks to experts, deferring to the internal norms of their professions, and sometimes it will mean recognizing claims of expertise to be mere assertions of authority, to be resisted or countered.

These are all going to be complex problems, full of messy compromises. Attaining even second best solutions is going to demand “bold, persistent experimentation”, coupled with a frank recognition that many experiments will just fail, and that even long-settled compromises can, with the passage of time, become confining obstacles. We will not be able to turn everything over to the wise academicians, or even to their computers, but we may, if we are lucky and smart, be able, bit by bit, make a world fit for human beings to live in…

LINK: <https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/>

From the Archives:

Brad DeLong (1999): An Appalling Article on Graduate Student Unionization by Yale Historian Paul Kennedy: I don’t know what I find more appalling: The open snobbery with which Paul Kennedy ridicules the idea that lower-class union leaders and members might have something to teach about or some concern over conditions of employment of graduate students…. The casual mendacity in his implication that the typical humanities graduate student at a private university gets his or her tuition paid and $12,000 a year with no strings attached…. The sneer at humanities graduate student section leaders at his own university—paid I believe, about $10 an hour… with little prospects for ever getting a tenured professorship like Paul Kennedy’s—for “imagin[ing themselves] as an aggrieved member of an exploited academic proletariat.”… The claim that the UAW’s paying its lead organizer at Yale (a more than full-time job) some $10 an hour is an extraordinarily generous subsidy that will lead to a “new career track for Ph.D.s who find all this campaigning much more exciting than their work on Milton or Freud”…

LINK: <https://delong.typepad.com/delong_long_form/1999/04/paul-kennedy-on-graduate-student-unionization.html>

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MacFarquhar's final prediction turned out to be true: "Communism in China... end[ed] not with a bang but a whimper"

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Roderick MacFarquhar (1992–12–17): Deng’s Last Campaign: ‘China had its own form of grueling political campaign this year, which ended when the Fourteenth Congress of the Communist Party (CCP) took place in October. There, too, the issue was “change” and the main concern the economy. But in China the economy has been in good shape: it was the aged incumbent who wanted ever more change to keep it that way, and he won.

Of course, Deng Xiaoping is a very peculiar sort of “incumbent.” The “patriarch,” as some Hong Kong papers like to call him, no longer has any formal post. At eighty-eight, he reportedly spends much of his time amusing his grandchildren and playing bridge with his cronies, leaving the daily conduct of affairs to the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang Zemin, the premier, Li Peng, and their colleagues in the Politburo standing committee (PSC). It is only on major matters of national policy, such as voting in the UN on the use of force against Saddam Hussein, that the PSC consults Deng and does what he “advises.”

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Trevon D Logan: ’This is actually a deep point DeLong is making: we have not recognized the single largest market failure in the economy. And we rarely talk about it as a market failure at all. The answer: that’s how they wanted it when they sold it to you! Anyone who has seriously thought about equilibrium theory knows that the lack of attention to endowments is pretty shameful. DeLong extends that here to thinking of the weights we apply and why it should encourage, not discourage, redistribution. But we never quite get there…

Ben Boehlert: ’I’m consistently shocked in my undergrad Econ classes how inequality of opportunity almost never comes up. In a world where everyone is perfectly rational, it seems like pretty big deal!…

Brad DeLong: I remember back in the… spring of 1981, I think it was. I asked my professor, William Thomson, visiting from Rochester, roughly this: 

The utilitarian social welfare function is Ωu = U(1) + U(2) + U(3)… The competitive market economy maximizes a market social welfare function Ωm = ω(1)U(1) + ω(2)U(2) + ω(3)U(3)…, where the ω(i)s are Negishi weights that are increasing functions of your lifetime wealth W(i)—indeed, if lifetime utility is log wealth, then ω(i)=W(i). Market failures drive wedges between what the economy achieves and what it could achieve. There are massive, massive differences between the Ωu that is the true social welfare function and the function Ωm that the well-working market maximizes.

Why isn’t the unequal distribution of ex ante expected lifetime income—inequality of opportunity—conceptualized by us economists as the greatest of all market failures? And why isn’t the distribution of political power that creates & preserves a property order of unequal wealth seen as the greatest of all “regulatory capture by a special interest group” flaws in the working of society, economy, and the state?" 

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Thomson did not have a good answer. My other teacher Joe Kalt, however, did. “These Chicago Boys are all right-wing Marxists,” he said:

They buy the Marxian proposition that the state is an executive committee for rigging the economy in the interest of the ruling class. But they think that that is a good thing as long as the ruling class is based on wealth, however previously acquired. All their objections are to those who use some form of societal power other than wealth to try to rig the economy in their interest. And while there is an argument that a wealth-based ruling class is in general best, it is a weak argument.

And do remember that I learned much of my political economy from Richard Musgrave and his TA Manuel Trajtenberg, who explicitly conceptualized public finance as having 3 branches: (1) repairing Pigovian externalities, (2) fiscal policy for full employment, (3) redistribution to shrink all the Negishi weights in the market’s SWF toward one.

The Chicago School underwent an enormous change between the Midwestern Populist days of Henry Simons, for whom private monopoly was the big foe and large inequalities an enormous menace, & the monopoly-tolerant fundraising paradise that Stigler & co. created. This transformation from Simons to Stigler was possible only by “othering” the non-rich by every means possible, so that their low weight in the market’s Negishi-weighted SWF could be dismissed as deserved.

I put it to you that taking the Murray Rothbard Road in race relations—trying to bring to life their anti-New Deal monopoly-tolerant union-busting economic policy agenda by white racism and supremacy, as Frankenstein’s monster was brought to life by the lightning—was a very important part and remains a very important part of that shift away from economics understood as a policy science that attempts to implement a Benthamite or a Millian utilitiarianism that seeks the greatest good of the greatest number.

LINK: 

Dr. Trevon D Logan @TrevonDLogan

This is actually a deep point @delong is making— we have not recognized the single largest market failure in the economy. And we rarely talk about it as a market failure at all. The answer: that’s how they wanted it when they sold it to you!

Brad DeLong: 'Live long, & prosper!' @delong

@Undercoverhist @Econ_Marshall I remember back in the... spring of 1981, I think it was. I asked my professor, William Thomson, visiting from Rochester, roughly this: "The utilitarian social welfare function is Ω = U(1) + U(2) + U(3)... The competitive market economy maximizes a market social welfare 1/

June 12th 2020

34 Retweets159 Likes

(This has been a rhetorical question: I think we all know why almost all neoliberal and further-right economists ignore the greatest of all market failures. I think we know that well.)

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Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

LECTURE: Seven Sects of Macroeconomic Error: Wrong Models of the Great Recession
<https://www.icloud.com/pages/0zwSkfmRDPILOSmiq0_91g5nw>
<https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/seven-sects-of-macroeconomic-error-2011-03-14.pdf>
<https://www.bradford-delong.com/2021/04/seven.html>
2011-03-14

<https://www.icloud.com/keynote/07BWpG9_RQeOtbw70JvbJQ3KQ>
<https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-210a-background-2021-05-05.pptx>
<https://www.bradford-delong.com/2021/04/the-great-depression-background-slides-econ-210aintroduction-to-economic-history-spring-2021.html>
2021-04-29

PODCAST: Crimson Connections: Shleifer & DeLong
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/crimson-connections-shleifer-and> 2021-04-22 Th

READING: John Stuart Mill: Of the Stationary State
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/reading-john-stuart-mill-of-the-stationary> 2021-04-22 Th

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-04-22 Th
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-for-2021-04-19-mo> 2021-04-22 Th

Background: Macro Inequality: On the Shape & Meaning of the Income Distribution
Econ 210a :: Introduction to Economic History :: For April 28.
<https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-210a-2021-04-22-background.pptx
<https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0616ZvSr8nEGd0pSpq53lvgoA> 2021-04-22

PODCAST: Hexapodia XI: China: Its Industrial Policy, & Its Striving for Deweaponized Autarchy
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-xi-china-its-industrial> 2021-04-21

Econ 135: Zoom: Review…
<https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0cb0_2rURsaHJknmrnFrFOcZg#econ-135-zoom-review>
<https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/0lh08h5dRocbWsTaqntyt8JSA> 
<https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-135-zoom-review.pptx> 2021-04-20

Budgeting & Macro Policy: 2021 Update
<https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/budgeting-%26-macro-policy-TICKLER.pptx><https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0cyNGY5Ekcze_Vf392iDInwCA> 2021-04-20

Touring The Continents: Lectures: Africa, Asia South of Siberia, & Middle East
Econ 135 :: History of Economic Growth 5.[6–8].3.<https://www.icloud.com/keynote/07G4SQVjHYedJdHfnFundVJ4w>
<https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-135-5.%5B6-8%5D.3-lectures-africa-asia-me.pptx><https://www.bradford-delong.com/2021/04/touring-the-continents-lectures-africa-asia-south-of-siberia-middle-east-econ-135-history-of-economi.html> 2021–04–19 Mo

Touring The Continents: Lectures: Africa, Asia South of Siberia, & Middle East
Econ 135 :: History of Economic Growth 5.[6–8].3.<https://www.icloud.com/keynote/07G4SQVjHYedJdHfnFundVJ4w>
<https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-135-5.%5B6-8%5D.3-lectures-africa-asia-me.pptx><https://www.bradford-delong.com/2021/04/touring-the-continents-lectures-africa-asia-south-of-siberia-middle-east-econ-135-history-of-economi.html> 2021–04–19 Mo

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-04-18 Su
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-for-2021-04-18-su> 2021-04-18 Su

READING: Carl von Clausewitz: "On War": Friction
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/carl-von-clausewitz-on-war-friction> 2021-04-18 Su

READING: Eisenhower: “Their Number Is Negligible & They Are Stupid…”
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/reading> 2021-04-17 Sa

I Do Not See "Overheating" This Year…
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/i-do-not-see-overheating-this-year> 2021-04-15 Th

<https://www.icloud.com/keynote/07G4SQVjHYedJdHfnFundVJ4w>
<https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-135-5.%5B6-8%5D.3-lectures-africa-asia-me.pptx>

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-04-18 Su
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-for-2021-04-18-su>
2021-04-18 Su

READING: Carl von Clausewitz: "On War": Friction
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/carl-von-clausewitz-on-war-friction>
2021-04-18 Su

READING: Eisenhower: “Their Number Is Negligible & They Are Stupid…”
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/reading>
2021-04-17 Sa

WORÞY READS: For 2021-04-16 Fr
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/wory-reads-for-2021-04-16>
2021-04-16 Fr

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-04-15 Th
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-for-2021-04-15-th>
2021-04-15 Th

I Do Not See "Overheating" This Year…
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/i-do-not-see-overheating-this-year>
2021-04-15 Th

PODCAST: Hexapodia X: Global Warming
<https://braddelong.substack.com/publish/post/35135269>
2021-04-14 We

BRIEFLY NOTED: for 2021-04-13 Tu
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/first-in-person-office-hours-since>
2021-04-13 Ti

In-Person Office Hours: for 2021-04-13 Tu
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/first-in-person-office-hours-since>
2021-04-13 Tu

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-04-12 Mo
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-for-2021-04-12-mo> 
2021-04-12 Mo

Our Economists' Letter on þe Need for Public Investment
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/our-economists-letter-on-the-need>
2021-04-12

East Asian Miracles: Intro Video

Econ 135 :: History of Economic Growth: 5.5.1.

https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-135-5.5.1-intro-video-east-asian-miracles.pptx
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0-9SzNAsadTQvyyG-YtYPiOfA
https://youtu.be/W1-cZ6pANzM
2021-04-11

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0XMVrM2I4wSkvRh1sJyypONhQ
2021-04-09

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0_92_e-wt2Y3mXNtUWDE1i_hQ 2021-04-07

• HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Barry J. Eichengreen & J. Bradford DeLong (2013): Introduction to Kindleberger: The World in Depression <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-the-archives-2013-introduction> 2021-04-05 Mo

• BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-04-03 Sa: ‘Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember… LINK: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-for-2021-04-03-sa> 2021-04-03 Sa

• READING: Seneca vs. Posidonius on Wheþer Technology Is Philosophy - Grasping Reality Newsletter, by Brad DeLong: ‘Posidonius for, Seneca against; it is a pity that the monks erased all the surviving manuscripts of Posidonius: he sounds like somebody it would have been good to get to know, virtually—an urban Greek polymath would almost surely have been better company than a Roman aristocrat… LINK: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/reading-seneca-vs-posidonius-on-whether> 2021-04-03 Sa

• READING: Lucius Annaeus Seneca Minor (64): Moral Letters to Lucilius 90: On þe Part Played by Philosophy in þe Progress of Man: ‘Technological advance the business of the lowest grade of slaves; desire for technological advance the result of making your body your master rather than your servant; and other topics… LINK: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/lucius-annaeus-seneca-minor-64-moral> 2021-04-03 Su

• READING: From Peter S. Beagle: Þe Folk of þe Air: ‘The literary character Emperor Kankan Musa of Mali… LINK: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/reading-from-peter-s-beagle-the-folk> 2021-04-02 Fr

• BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-04-01 Th: ‘Things that went briefly whizzing by that I want to remember… 2021-04-01 Th

• APRIL FOOL: David Graeber Deserves to Be Remembered...: ‘I mean, Apple Computer was founded in 1976, not the 1980s; and none of its three founders had ever worked for, let alone split from, IBM—they had worked for Atari & HP… LINK: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/on-april-fools-day-we-remember-david> 2021-04-01 Th

• PODCAST: Hexapodia VIII: Þe China Syndrome!: ‘Five key insights: Hexapodia!, of course. Also: listen to Dan Wang & to Barry Eichengreen, China's slowing migration to the coast looks like a significant error, & China looks not that different… LINK: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-viii-the-china> 2021-03-30 Tu

• BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-03-29 Mo: ‘Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember… LINK: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-2021-03-29-mo> 2021-03-29 Mo

• JUPYTER NOTEBOOK: Econ 135 :: F2021 :: Problem Set 5.1.5. Failing to “Converge” or Catch Up to America (& þe Rest of þe Global North): ‘History of Economic Growth course "convergence" python exercise… LINK: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/econ-135-f2021-problem-set-515-failing> 2021-03-28 Su

• HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Musings on the Episteme of the Federal Reserve...: ‘From 2015: What was the Federal Reserve thinking when it decided to tighten policy? And what does that tell us about economists and their models?… LINK: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-the-archives-musings> 2021-03-27 Sa

• BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-03-27 Sa: ‘Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...… LINK: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-for-2021-03-27-sa> 2021-03-27 Sa

https://youtu.be/kYmmDsxChJc https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-135-5.4.1-intro%20video.pptx https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0KbognLKGTC2bSdA5_Z0SIJug :: 2020-12-06

What Is the Rate of Ideas Growth? & Why Is It What It Is? :: Background Lecture :: Econ 210a :: Introduction to Economic History :: 2021-04-07

<https://www.icloud.com/keynote/08vSAzKv95qbedf-j_DFYvzAA>
<https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/econ-210a-2021-04-01-background-slow-ideas-growth.pptx>
2021-04-01

Things that went whizzing by I want to remember...

5) This strikes me as very, very good news indeed. Now all we have to do is teach people how to do this, and also construct truth sandwiches:

Anna Funk: Scientists Can Implant False Memories—& Reverse Them: ‘Two key methods [that] helped participants differentiate their own real recollections from the false ones: Asking them to recall the source of the memory. Explaining to them that being pressured to recall something multiple times can induce false memories. WHY THIS MATTERS—Ultimately, the team found rich, false memories can mostly be undone. And they can be undone relatively easily. “If you can bring people to this point where they are aware of that, you can empower them to stay closer to their own memories and recollections, and rule out the suggestion from other sources,” Oeberst says. “You don’t need to know what the truth of the matter is, which is why they’re nice strategies,” false memory expert Elizabeth Loftus, who was not involved in the study, tells Inverse…

LINK: <https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/how-to-reverse-false-memories-study>

with Claudia Sahm, Noah Smith, & Brad DeLong

Listen in podcast app

In the last resort, the the way the government budget constraint balances itself is through the fiscal theory of the price level: levying this inflation tax on holders of money balances, redistributing wealth away from those who have nominal assets to nominal debts, and imposing a large cognitive-load tax on doing your economic calculation arithmetic. That makes this a lousy tax to impose. Larry and Olivier think we are heading down the road toward a world in which, because Republicans will not allow taxes to be raised, this lousy inflation tax will be levied unless Democrats gird their loins and prepare for an eventuality in which they sober-eyed recognize the costs to real people of letting the government budget constraint balance itself via the inflation tax…

with the erudite, witty, & highly influential Claudia Sahm

Background:

References

Olivier Blanchard: In Defense of Concerns Over the $1.9 Trillion Relief Plan <https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/defense-concerns-over-19-trillion-relief-plan>

Wendy Edelberg & Louise Sheiner: The Macroeconomic Implications of Biden’s $1.9 Trillion Fiscal Package <https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/01/28/the-macroeconomic-implications-of-bidens-1-9-trillion-fiscal-package/>

Neil Irwin: Move Over, Nerds. It’s the Politicians’ Economy Now<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/upshot/politicians-not-central-bankers-economy-policy.html>

Lawrence H. Summers & Paul Krugman: A Conversation with Lawrence H. Summers & Paul Krugman <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbZ3_LZxs54>

Claudia Sahm: A Big Fiscal Push Is Urgent, The Risk of Overheating Is Small<https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/a-big-fiscal-push-is-urgent-the-risk-of-overheating-is-small>

Larry Summers: The Biden Stimulus Is Admirably Ambitious. But It Brings Some Big Risks, too <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/04/larry-summers-biden-covid-stimulus/>

&:

Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://books.google.com/books?id=fCCWWgZ7d6UC>

<https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/delong-very-short-bio-%26-headshot.key.pdf>
<https://www.bradford-delong.com/2021/03/delong-vsb.html>
<https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0SxYlLm3WxWF5MO1Cav12ZTrw>
2021-03-23

<https://www.bradford-delong.com/about_brad_delong.html>

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

Very Briefly Noted:

• Brad DeLong (2019): Carville-Hunt “Two Old White Guys” Podcast: I said ‘pass the baton’, not ’bend the knee’… LINK: <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/carville-hunt-two-old-white-guys-podcast.html>

Paragraphs

1) Ben Thompsen's idea that writers have "value" seems to me to be simply wrong. What has value is "easiest way to tap into this element of the zeitgeist". That usually gets attached to a single writer because we are social network animals hotel and listen to stories. But that is a matter of time, chance, opportunity, and market structure—as well as insight, fluency with prose, and ability to produce regularly and to meet deadlines. Ben Thompsen has the last four and happened to hit the sweet spot with respect to the first floor, plus adding a lot of sweat equity and taking a big gamble. More power to him. But he should not think that he has unique or large “value”. To see the business of the sovereign writer as being to sift gold nuggets out of the sand fundamentally mistakes what is going on:

Ben Thompson: Sovereign Writers & Substack: ‘Media has reason to fear Substack… not that Substack will compete with existing publications for their best writers, but rather that Substack makes it easy for the best writers to discover their actual market value…. The media’s revenue problems are a function of the Internet unbundling editorial and advertising…. Media’s impending cost problem—as in they will no longer be able to afford writers that can command a paying audience—is a function of the Internet making it possible to go direct… Substack is [just] one of many tools competing to make this easier….

This explains three other Substack realities….Substack is going to have a serious problem retaining its most profitable writers unless it substantially reduces its 10%…. Substack is… [not] threatened by Twitter and Facebook…. Social networks… want to own the reader, but the entire point of the sovereign writer is that they own their audience. Substack’s real threat will be lower-priced competitors…. It would be suicidal for Substack to kick any successful writers off of its platform for anything other than gross violations of the law or its terms of service….

Substack Pro is a good idea…. What would be truly valuable is helping the next great writer build a business…. Ideally these writers would be the sort of folks who would have never gotten a shot in traditional media…. I am by no means an impartial observer here; obviously I believe in the viability of the sovereign writer. I would also like to believe that Stratechery is an example of how this model can make for a better world: I went the independent publishing route because I had no other choice (believe me, I tried). At the same time, I suspect we have only begun to appreciate how destructive this new reality will be for many media organizations….

Substack is not in control of this process. The sovereign writer is another product of the Internet, and Substack will succeed to the extent it serves their interests, and be discarded if it does not.

LINK: <https://stratechery.com/2021/sovereign-writers-and-substack/>

2) a very large number of journalists who want to know better, and their bosses, very much want Biden to say good things about Trump which are (a) false, (b) ludicrous, and (c) never anything they would ask Trump to do if positions were reversed. I wonder why:

Kate Riga & Josh Kovensky: No, Trump Doesn’t Deserve Credit For Planning Vaccine Distribution: ‘With the COVID–19 vaccines starting to bring the pandemic to an end, former President Trump has stepped in to take credit for the feat. What’s surprising is that he’s been aided in this by the Washington Post and New York Times, both of which have run articles this week arguing that the speed-up in the vaccine rollout under President Biden only builds off of a plan put into place by Trump…. That’s flat wrong…. Trump… lacked a plan for the “last mile” of distribution, leaving that to the states while lobbying Congress not to pass much-needed funding that would spur state and local governments to get the vaccine into arms….

The Trump… plan to distribute the vaccine… [was] “let the states figure it out.”… Trump… left the country with… a partnership with pharmacies to vaccinate nursing homes—the only real footprint of a federal plan to deliver vaccine into people’s arms. And even that foundered…. What’s more is that that one plan only covered the first phase of distribution: nursing home residents and hospital workers, who received inoculations from the medical facilities at which they worked…

LINK: <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-covid-vaccination-distribution-biden>

3) For “high quality voters” read “white voters”:

Jonathan Chait: ‘Everybody Shouldn’t Be Voting,’ Republican Blurts Out: ‘Representative John Kavanagh, a Republican legislator who chairs Arizona’s Government and Elections Committee and is shepherding through a bill to make voting more cumbersome and therefore rare, described his party’s motives with blundering candor; “There’s a fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans,” he told CNN. “Democrats value as many people as possible voting, and they’re willing to risk fraud. Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote — but everybody shouldn’t be voting … Not everybody wants to vote, and if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they’re totally uninformed on the issues. Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well”…

LINK: <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/everybody-shouldnt-be-voting-republican-vote-suppression-national-review-history.html>

4) Those who always thought J.D. Vance was a con artist, come down and collect your chips!:

Steve M.: The Worst Senate Race: ‘J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy… Ohio Senate seat…. Peter Thiel has given $10 million to a Vance super PAC… Newsweek op-ed… “Nno one seems to care that many migrants test positive for COVID every day and will directly compete with our struggling service sector workers…. Why are we promising amnesty… when… vicious transnational drug cartels use that promise to sell desperate people on the promise of crossing the border?… Scott Lemieux writes….

If you’re wondering why J.D. Vance was throwing out some preemptive racisms, well here you go: ‘Josh Mandel, a candidate in the 2022 Republican primary in the U.S. Senate, had a post removed by Twitter on Thursday…

Of the various types of illegals flooding across the border, will more crimes be committed by… Muslim Terrorists or Mexican Gangbangers….

However, there’ll be a third major candidate in the primary… Jane Timken… describes herself as the ”one candidate in this race who was hand-picked by President Trump to run the Ohio Republican Party."… The first words in her first campaign ad are: “President Trump won Ohio twice because he stood up and fought for hard-working Americans. I’m Jane Timken, and I’m running for the U.S. Senate to defend the Trump agenda….”

It’ll be a three-person race… all be trying to out-MAGA, out-meme, and out-xenophobe one another. It wll be a race to the bottom, the worst Senate primary in America…

LINK: <https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-worst-senate-race.html>

5) Scott Lemieux: Rich Lowry upholds National Review’s Longstanding Policy on Voting Rights: ‘Verbatim Rich Lowry: “That many Democrats say that the filibuster should fall for this bill is a symptom of the fevered state of the party, which despite holding or winning every elected branch of the federal government has conjured out of nothing a vast conspiracy to stop people from voting that allegedly justifies one of the most blatant federal power grabs in memory.” Arizona Rep. John Kavanaugh, defending propose Republican vote suppression measures: “There’s a fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans…Democrats value as many people as possible voting, and they’re willing to risk fraud. Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote — but everybody shouldn’t be voting”…

LINK: <https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/03/rich-lowry-upholds-longstanding-national-reviews-longstanding-policy-on-voting-rights>

6) John Ganz: Some Thoughts on Free Speech & Cancel Culture: ‘One of the many ironies of the interminable debates over cancel culture and free speech is that cancel culture is not a phenomenon of censorship so much as one of unrestricted free speech. The fear is not that one will be censored, so much as one will be denounced…. Social media allows anybody a platform for accusation and calumny and allows anyone to join with them to form associations. I think most people agree open criticism of others and freedom of association is just part of having a free society. But who, then, decides when criticism is unfair or even calumnious? Or when associations are mobs and seditious conspiracies rather than public-spirited groups?…

We have a long tradition in this country of free, even raucous, criticism and attacks on public figures…. We’ve now seen very ordinary attacks on politicians branded as “cancel culture,” which is an attempt to make alien and new a very old tradition in our democratic society. It’s attempting to “cancel” criticism in advance, if you will…. We have entered a kind of state of universal hypocrisy on these subjects. Everyone is glad to see their enemies skewered: no one really comes to the defense of principle. Or maybe they feel that principle is best defended through a faction, to which allowances must be made for the sake of political expediency…

LINK: <https://johnganz.substack.com/p/some-thoughts-on-free-speech-and>

7) Charles I. Jones: Time Series Tests of Endogenous Growth Models: ‘According to endogenous growth theory, permanent changes in certain policy variables have permanent effects on the rate of economic growth. Empirically, however, U. S. growth rates exhibit no large persistent changes. Therefore, the determinants of long-run growth highlighted by a specific growth model must similarly exhibit no large persistent changes, or the persistent movement in these variables must be offsetting. Otherwise, the growth model is inconsistent with time series evidence. This paper argues that many AK-style models and R&D-based models of endogenous growth are rejected by this criterion. The rejection of the R&D-based models is particularly strong… LINK: <https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6016/78f3aecbbeac6be9d2154b593376e12b12c7.pdf?_ga=2.165174207.1051621454.1616040529-2146537243.1615524750>

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

Very Briefly Noted:

• Closer to time travel than I thought I would ever get: Ancient Athens 3D<https://www.youtube.com/c/AncientAthens3D/videos>

• University libraries recommend not <strike>getting thrown into this briar patch</strike> using this website: Sci-Hub: Removing Barriers in the Way of Science <https://sci-hub.se/>

• Still the beat Start Tek movie: SciFi scripts: Galaxy Quest<http://www.scifiscripts.com/scripts/galaxyquest_trans.htm>

• Remarkably good: HBO Max: Superintelligence<https://www.hbomax.com/grw-si?utm_source=twitter>

• Trying to figure out how to have a chance when I teach this fall: Educational Technology Services: Classroom Database<https://www.ets.berkeley.edu/classroom-database>

• Still trying to figure out how to have a chance when I teach this fall: Educational Technology Services: Instructors Getting Started: ‘A select number of classrooms… seamlessly… Zoom… Schedulers: Search for “15: AV-Video Conference Capable”…. Classrooms with newly installed cameras… preset… Course Capture… or Zoom…. Search for “14: AV-Camera without Operator”…. Nearly doubled our Course Capture capable room… to around 110…. Schedulers: Search for “06: Course Capture”… LINK: <https://www.ets.berkeley.edu/services-facilities/classroom-tech-support/instructors-getting-started>

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Six Paragraphs:

Of all the things I understand least well, it is that we dare not aim to have production hit potential output and thus hit the inflation target because we cannot handle even a small overshoot because… of what, exactly? This kind of thinking perhaps avoids some risk of a bumpy future by creating an eternal very bumpy present:

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Larry Summers Versus the Biden Administration’s Coronavirus-Stimulus Plan: ‘The Biden rescue package will pour out enough sand to fill a hole, and then keep pouring. In Summers’s view, this is economically risky, because it means that the Federal Reserve will probably eventually need to manage inflation, a recipe for a bumpy future. “My reading is that there are roughly zero historical examples where we got inflation to the point where the Fed got nervous and had to tighten and the whole thing happened smoothly,” Summers told me last week. He also sees the stimulus as politically risky, in that there are only so many times the Biden Administration can ask Congress to spend huge amounts of money without raising taxes to offset it, and fewer still if they spend this round inefficiently…

LINK: <https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-populism/larry-summers-versus-the-stimulus>

The Malthusian picture, the 1870-1914 escape, and fears that World War I had permanently deranged the economic growth process in such a way as to raise the specter of the return of the Devil of Malthus:

John Maynard Keynes (1919): The Economic Consequences of the Peace: ‘[Their] view of the world… filled with deep-seated melancholy the founders of our Political Economy. Before the eighteenth century mankind entertained no false hopes. To lay the illusions which grew popular at that age’s latter end, Malthus disclosed a Devil. For half a century all serious economical writings held that Devil in clear prospect. For the next half century he was chained up and out of sight. Now perhaps [with World War I] we have loosed him again…

LINK: <https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/keynes-the-economic-consequences-of-the-peace#preview>

Ummm… You target asset bubbles by reducing leverage, not by raising interest rates. I have a bad feeling about this:

Ruchir Sharma: By Targeting House Prices, New Zealand Shows the Way: ‘While consumer prices have been held in check by globalisation and automation, easy money pouring out of central banks has been driving up the price of assets from stocks to bonds and housing…. A global political celebrity, the liberal Ardern was elected on a promise of affordable housing. Fed up, her government has ordered the central bank to add stabilising home prices to its remit, starting March 1. It is novel and healthy for a politician to recognise the unintended consequences of easy money. If this idea catches on, it could lead to greater financial and social stability worldwide…. Ardern’s move may not slow the housing boom soon, because supply-and-demand dynamics are too strong. But ordering the central bank to make housing price stability a higher priority is a start, and could inspire others to rethink the role easy money has played in driving financial instability…

LINK: <https://www.ft.com/content/c8959502-7dae-43b1-b993-3bf85fb4325a>

I confess hope that Facebook dies rapidly. Silicon Valley needs a very obvious and pointed lesson that treating your users like cattle to be exploited and misled leads to your bankruptcy and to your permanent exclusion from all polite society. Feeding your users to the likes of Alex Jones for the Luz & the advertising dollars is despicable.

This applies to you to, Google, for the current state of Youtube:

Justin Bariso: Tim Cook May Have Just Ended Facebook: ‘Cook aptly points out, “advertising existed and thrived for decades” without using data that was collected in less than transparent ways. And as customers are offered more choice when it comes to how apps and websites track their data, experts predict that more and more people will opt out of said tracking. If you’re an advertiser, you’ll need to adapt. Or die.But there’s also a bigger lesson at stake. Now is the time to ask yourself: Which philosophy do I want to pursue? Do I want a business that serves my customers? Or one that takes advantage of customers to serve my business? Because in the end, only one of these philosophies is sustainable for the long-term. The other will lead you to crash and burn. And while the long-term solution may initially prove more challenging, remember: “The path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom”…

LINK: <https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/tim-cook-may-have-just-ended-facebook.html>

But, Scott, the ARP is not “a bloated, stealth, and wholly partisan vehicle”. If it were, Republicans would be running against it rather than trumpeting its accomplishments and hoping to make voters think they voted for rather than against it, capisce?:

Scott Lincicome: While You Were Seussing: ‘While Republicans fight the culture war on TV, Democrats enact progressive priorities into law…. Republicans are only now scrambling to define the ARP and are left to hope that it doesn’t work, while Democrats are on the attack. A big reason for that is that instead of mounting an effective messaging campaign to highlight these provisions—ones almost entirely unrelated to the pandemic—and others (such as that ridiculous union pension bailout or the $60 billion in tax hikes), and to define the ARP as a bloated, stealth, and wholly partisan vehicle to achieve progressive social change under the cover of Covid, Republicans were on TV yelling about children’s books and cancel culture…

LINK: <https://capitolism.thedispatch.com/p/while-you-were-seussing>

The huge gap between the performance of the biomedical establishment and the performance of the Trump administration is truly remarkable:

Jason Kottke: How Were the Covid–19 Vaccines Developed So Quickly?: ‘1. The need was urgent…. 2. Funding & focus. Companies and governments threw billions and billions of dollars at this… 3. Availability of volunteers & high incidence of disease…. 4. International & corporate collaboration. Countries and companies shared research, data, and resources…. 5. We knew a lot about coronaviruses from previous work…. 6. Scientific and technological capability…. Humanity’s general scientific and technological abilities have never been stronger or more powerful…. Bloomberg: “Remember also that technology has evolved rapidly—for example, we’re now about able to sequence the genomes of every mutant version of the virus in less than a day. That helps in speeding up vaccine development.” Dr. Mark Toshner sums up the effort: “However we have collectively now shown that with money no object, some clever and highly motivated people, an unlimited pool of altruistic volunteers, and sensible regulators that we can do amazing things”…

LINK: <https://kottke.org/21/03/how-were-the-covid-19-vaccines-developed-so-quickly>

Why is it, anyhow, that a “measurement” is a self-adjoint operator? A measurement is entangling the quantum wave function of the experiment with that of a measuring device that has a macro-visible pointer. What does that have to do with a self-adjoint operator?

Sydney Coleman: Quantum Mechanics in Your Face: ‘The state of a physical system at a fixed time is a vector in Hilbert space… ѱ…. It evolves in time according to the Schrödinger equation i∂ѱ/dt = Hѱ, where the Hamiltonian H is some self-adjoint linear operator…. Some, maybe all, self-adjoint operators are “observables”. If the state is an eigenstate of an observable A, with eigenvalue a, then we say the value of A is a, is certain to be observed to be a.... There’s an implicit promise in here that, when you put the whole theory together and start calculating things, that the words “observes” and “observable” will correspond to entities that act in the same way as those entities do in the language of everyday speech under the circumstances in which the language of everyday speech is applicable. Now to show that is a long story. It’s not something I’m going to focus on here, involving things like the WKB approximation and von Neumann’s analysis of an ideal measuring device8, but I just wanted to point out that that’s there…

LINK: <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.12671.pdf>

I would say that Zack has it slightly wrong here. There is not one core reason for passing the baton. There are three reasons: a political reason, a policy-implementation reason, and a we've-learned-about-the-world reason:

Here's Zack Beauchamp: Zack Beauchamp: A Clinton-era Centrist Democrat Explains Why It’s Time to Give Democratic Socialists a Chance: “The Baton Rightly Passes To Our Colleagues On Our Left”: "DeLong believes that the time of people like him running the Democratic Party has passed.... It’s not often that someone in this policy debate — or, frankly, any policy debate — suggests that their side should lose. So I reached out to DeLong to dig into the reasons for his position: Why does he believe that neoliberals’ time in the sun has come to an end?...

...The core reason, DeLong argues, is political. The policies he supports depend on a responsible center-right partner to succeed. They’re premised on the understanding that at least a faction of the Republican Party would be willing to support market-friendly ideas like Obamacare or a cap-and-trade system for climate change. This is no longer the case, if it ever were.... The result, he argues, is the nature of the Democratic Party needs to shift. Rather than being a center-left coalition dominated by market-friendly ideas designed to attract conservative support, the energy of the coalition should come from the left and its broad, sweeping ideas. Market-friendly neoliberals, rather than pushing their own ideology, should work to improve ideas on the left. This, he believes, is the most effective and sustainable basis for Democratic politics and policy for the foreseeable future....

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Here's me: We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.... Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy. And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they f---ing did not.... While I would like to be part of a political coalition in the cat seat, able to call for bids from the left and the right about who wants to be part of the governing coalition to actually get things done, that’s simply not possible...

And: Our current bunch of leftists are wonderful people.... They’re social democrats, they’re very strong believers in democracy. They’re very strong believers in fair distribution of wealth. They could use a little more education about what is likely to work and what is not. But they’re people who we’re very, very lucky to have on our side. That’s especially opposed to the people on the other side, who are very, very strange indeed. You listen to [Never Trump conservatives]... about all the people they had been with in meetings, biting their tongues over the past 25 years, and your reaction can only be, “Why didn’t you run away screaming into the night long ago?”...

And: We learned more about the world. I could be confident in 2005 that [recession] stabilization should be the responsibility of the Federal Reserve. That you look at something like laser-eye surgery or rapid technological progress in hearing aids, you can kind of think that keeping a market in the most innovative parts of health care would be a good thing. So something like an insurance-plus-exchange system would be a good thing to have in America as a whole. It’s much harder to believe in those things now. That’s one part of it. The world appears to be more like what lefties thought it was than what I thought it was for the last 10 or 15 years…

LINK: <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/passing-the-baton-the-interview.html>

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A Clinton-era centrist Democrat explains why it’s time to give democratic socialists a chance

“The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left.” By Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchamp[email protected]  Mar 4, 2019, 8:30am EST

Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

The rise of the Democratic left, personified by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), has raised a serious question: Should Democrats lean away from market-friendly stances and get comfortable with big government again? Should they embrace an ambitious 2020 candidate like Sanders and policies like the Green New Deal, or stick with incrementalists like former Vice President Joe Biden and more market-oriented ideas like Obamacare?

One of the most interesting takes I’ve seen on this debate came from Brad DeLong, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley. DeLong, who served as deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy in the Clinton administration, who is one of the market-friendly, “neoliberal” Democrats who have dominated the party for the last 20 years. The term he uses for himself is “Rubin Democrat” — referring to followers of finance industry-friendly Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

Yet DeLong believes that the time of people like him running the Democratic Party has passed. “The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left,” DeLong wrote. “We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.”

It’s not often that someone in this policy debate — or, frankly, any policy debate — suggests that their side should lose. So I reached out to DeLong to dig into the reasons for his position: Why does he believe that neoliberals’ time in the sun has come to an end?

The core reason, DeLong argues, is political. The policies he supports depend on a responsible center-right partner to succeed. They’re premised on the understanding that at least a faction of the Republican Party would be willing to support market-friendly ideas like Obamacare or a cap-and-trade system for climate change. This is no longer the case, if it ever were. 

I now wish that I had said "possible" rather than "plausible", but alea iacta est...

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Larry Summers Versus the Biden Administration’s Coronavirus-Stimulus Plan: ‘“It seems plausible,” Brad DeLong, an economic historian at Berkeley and a Clinton Treasury official, said, that “the neoliberal era is over”…. [He] guessed that about half of the leftward turn within this universe [of economists] was… [because] “there is not nearly so much trust in the ability of the market to heal itself”…. The other half, he said, was the part that tended to isolate Summers. DeLong ascribed it to politics, and to the general feeling (“in my view, twenty-seven years too late”) that Republicans would never be willing partners for expansive economic intervention.

There was little disagreement among liberal economists, he emphasized, over how the Biden Administration ought to spend the money in an ideal world: “Most of us would say infrastructure rather than checks—if we had that option. Only Larry believes we have that option.” DeLong’s own view is that if the Biden Administration had pared back the stimulus in the hopes of building a bipartisan consensus for infrastructure, it would find that no such consensus existed. “In the absence of Republican negotiating partners, center-left Democrats have got to look to the left,” DeLong said. “This is an example of that actually happening”… 

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LINK: <https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-populism/larry-summers-versus-the-stimulus>

The original twitter rant. (Note that it is, mostly, advice to the (few) honorable among Republicans. "Passing the Baton" is a preliminary aside...

Brad DeLong (2019–02–25): Passing the Baton: David Walsh went to the Niskanen Center conference. He got hives: <https://bradford-delong.com/2019/02/david-walsh-went-to-the-niskanen-center-conference-he-got-hives.html>. I think it is fair to say that the already-broken American political public sphere has become significantly more broken since November 8, 2016. On the center and to the left, those like me in what used to proudly call itself the Rubin Wing of the Democratic Party—so-called after former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, and consisting of those of us hoping to use market means to social democratic ends in bipartisan coalition with Republicans seeking technocratic win-wins—have passed the baton to our left. Over the past 25 years, we failed to attract Republican coalition partners, we failed to energize our own base, and we failed to produce enough large-scale obvious policy wins to cement the center into a durable governing coalition. 

We blame cynical Republican politicians. We blame corrupt and craven media bosses and princelings. We are right to blame them. But shared responsibility is not diminished responsibility: We ourselves cannot escape all blame. And so the baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left.

We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.

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On the right, however, things are much worse. Looking to the right of the Rubin Wing of the Democratic Party, we see rubble. Then we see more rubble. And more rubble. Beyond that, rubble. And then, at the far end of the political spectrum, what former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright can only call [the American version of a twenty-first century neo-fascism <https://books.google.com/books?isbn=006293127X>, devoted to entrenching plutocracy and stoking ethnic and religious hatreds, with which a great many people who ought to know better are making accommodation.

Two recent straws in the wind in this space: former Republican CEA Chair Martin Feldstein egging the Trump administration on to an intellectual-property trade war with China <https://project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-china-trade-deal-capitulation-by-martin-feldstein-2019-02> without even a whisper of acknowledgement that the Trump administration cannot competently conduct this negotiation; former Republican CEA Chair Michael Boskin claiming that Trump is reaching [“for bipartisan compromise on important issues” <https://project-syndicate.org/commentary/2020-democratic-presidential-candidates-policies-by-michael-boskin-2019-02>.

Pitching their flags in the rubble and hoping to rebuild—in a stunning triumph of optimism of the will over rational pessimism of the intellect that I cannot view with anything other than awe—are The Bulwark <https://thebulwark.com> and the [Niskanen Center <https://niskanencenter.org> (on whose Advisory Board I sit).

What can those of us who sit to the left of the Niskanen Center and who do wish for a healthy public sphere—i.e., those of us who are not interested in concern trolling for the moment, as much fun as concern trolling is—do to be genuinely helpful? 

I could use some help here, people of twitter! 

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I think that the first piece of advice to give is: restrict yourself to #nevertrump. Trumpists are either morons, grifters, or deluded. Those who have made accomodation with neo-fascism to any substantial degree are not people you want around—they will, for one reason or another, stab you in the back the first moment that it seems opportune. Failing to require a #nevertrump litmus test seems wise. Admittedly, it is unlikely to lead to power and Fox News. But it is the right thing to do. And I urge you to Do the Right Thing.

Second, I at least regard your cultural-historical task as being to wean Republicans away from Trumpist neo-fascism as an orienting frame. Trumpist neo-fascism is, I think, a version of Kentucky-style American nationalism. Kentucky-style American nationalism is a species of standard blood-and-soil nationalism. People have moved to Kentucky because they want elbow room and do not like being forced by government and society to conform, and once people are in Kentucky they become the kinds of people who can build a log cabin with their bare hands in 48 hours, and bring down a squirrel for squirrel stew at 300 yards. Thus heredity and environment—blood and soil—produce a special kind of person. And those who come to the U.S. hoping to live in, say, a little Mogadishu or a little Kishinev or a little Cuzco cannot fit.

This blood-and-soil Kentucky neo-fascist Trumpist nationalism is, I believe, highly destructive, pernicious, and positively un-American. It needs to be fought against. In the center and on the left we fight it with the opposed “Massachusetts” picture of American nationalism—a community engaged in an Errand Unto the Wilderness to build a Utopia that will be a City Upon a Hill, and we are all in this together with no special authorities or leaders because of the Priesthood of All Believers. Never mind that John Winthrop would run screaming from us: we are his children. The Massachusetts-style American nationalism of election—that America really consists of those of us who have come here to build a common Utopia—is very powerful, much more correct, sociologically healthy, and something we all can be proud of in a sense that is simply not possible for the Kentucky-style neo-fascist Trumpist blood-and-soil nationalism. 

The question is whether the Niskanen Center and the Bulwark can take this Errand-Unto-the-Wildnerness narrative and make it sing for the center-right in anything like the way it sings for the center-left. So your task is to build up your own version of the Errand-Unto-the-Wilderness narrative of American nationalism. 

Third, the Niskanen Center and The Bulwark need to build up distinctive center-right policy positions on important issues—to stake out positions in the rubble that center-right #nevertrumpers can rally around. I see five issue areas as key. (a) the public sphere. (b) global warming. (c) income and wealth distribution at the top. (d) the social safety net. (e) the economic growth agenda. Far be it from me to say what those should be—I have enough on my plate figuring out what my position on these issue areas should be, let alone what the position of others should be. I will confine myself to saying that simple opposition to whatever actual policies wind up under the umbrella of GND is not sufficient—not if you want me and people like me to think you belong in the public sphere. And no, Elaine Kamarck, “shut up and adapt to global warming” is not sufficient either, and—if that is your position because you are too scared to endorse George Shultz’s carbon-tax-plus-UBI proposal—you should be ashamed of yourself. Go for the crash space program to build a giant sun umbrella and park it at Lagrange Point 1 if you wish. (And eat the costs as reduced insolation devastates agriculture.) At the very least, it will make us a figure of fun to aliens everywhere:

You know the earthlings? They couldn’t get their act together to stop burning coal before it started to cook their planet! So do you know what they did? You won’t believe it! Rather than cheaply transitioning to green energy THEY TRIED TO BUILD A GIANT SUN UMBRELLA AND PARK IT AT L1!! HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!! Spent a fortune!…

But be for something. 

And be brave. I know you find it hard. But you are camped there in the rubble, and if you won’t Do the Right Thing, then you have decided to go and become a Kentucky-nationalist blood-and-soil neo-fascist Trumpist. If you have, then go to your master the Devil, and stop wasting our time. 

LINK: <https://twitter.com/delong/status/1100166150845939712>

The European edge in the Imperial-Commercial Age 1500-1770: Priests, merchants, soldiers, sailors, & shipwrights all working together under a king for gold, glory, & God...

David Abernethy (2000): The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires 1415–1980: ‘Beijing… was the capital city of a powerful state lacking both an expansionist foreign policy and an expansionist religion. Mecca was the central city of an expansionist religion but not of a state. Lisbon was the capital city of a state with an expansionist foreign policy and a strong commitment to spread an expansionist religion.

As Muslim merchants predicted, the Portuguese launched a triple assault on Malacca. The city was captured in 1511 by an armada of ships carrying fifteen hundred soldiers whose commander, Vicery Afonso d’Albuquerque, saw himself as an extension agent of the Portuguese state. That the invaders intended to assert permanent political control soon became clear. Albuquereue allegedly cried out to his men in the heat of battle that:

We [should] build fortress iin this city… and sustain it, and… this land [should] be brought under the dominion of the Portuguese, and the King D[om] Manuel be styled true king thereof.

Construction of a stone fortress was begun as soon as the battle was won, and it was kept well supplied with soldiers and cannon. The city was a Portuguese possession until the Dutch took it in the seventeenth century. Once secured, Malacca became a vital outpost used to establish other Portuguese enclaves in the Moluccas and on the China coast.

The conquest of Malacca, in turn, was an integral part of a grand scheme to capture gains from Indian Ocean trade. Political control of enclaves throughout the ocean basin was considered a necessary as well as desirable mans to an economic end. Albuquerque appealed to the profit motive as explicitly as one could: “If we take this trade of Malacca out of [the Moors’] hands, Cairo and Mecca are entirely ruined, and to Venice will no spiceries go except that which her merchants go and buy in Portugal.”

Portuguese actions also reveal the religious dimension of their drive for dominance. Albuquerque waited to launch his attack until the day of Saint James, the patron saint of the Iberian crusaders. That the crusading mentality was alive and well can be seen in his reference to “the great service which we shall perform to our Lord in casting the Moors out of the country, and quenching the fire of this sect of Mohamed so that it may never burst out again hereafter.” Non-Muslims were spared following the battle. But “of the Moors, [including] women and children, there died by the sword an infinite number, for no quarter was given to any of them.” A church was constructed, and in 1557 it became the Cathedral of the Bishop of Malacca. Priests working among non-Muslims in the local fishing community made many converts. The famous Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier visited the city in 1545 on his way from India to Japan.

By one estimate between half a million and a million people, from Mozambique to Japan, converted to Roman Catholicism by the end of the sixteenth century. Malacca’s history and its role as missionary way station to other parts of Asia illustrate the strong expansionist impulses of Euro-Christianity.

By examining actions, motivations, and institutions at a critical juncture of world history when representatives of the three leading candidates for global dominance were present at the same place and time, the case study of Malacca in 1511 tests—and supports—the book’s central proposition. The Portuguese were unlike the Chinese and Arabs in the number and variety of sectoral institutions at their dsposal, in the stretch of these institutions far from their home base, and in the way agents of different sectors worked together for mutually beneficial ends. The Malaccan case highlights not only the contrast between Europeans and others who might have formed equivalent empires, but also the empowering effects when cross-sectoral coalitions were assembled….

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The case study also helps answer a secondary question…. why Europeans concentrated phase 1 settlement and conquest activities on the New World…. Portugal’s grand strategy in the Indian Ocean was to capture gains from a lucrative seaborne trade that had functioned for a long time. Malacca was valued as an enclave… profits literally floated past in the form of ships carrying spices, precious stones, textiles, chinaware, carvings, and so on through a narrow strait. There was no economic or strategic reason for Albuquerque to invade the Malayan interior….

In contrast, the Spaniards in the New World encountered no preexisting maritime trade. The wealth they sought would have to be captured at its source, deep in central and south American hinterlands. Vera Cruz… was seen not as an enclave facing the sea but as the staging area for an arduous march inland…. Spain could attain wealth in the New World only by conquering and settling… revolutionize the New World economies…. 

Portugal, having an essentially conservative economic agenda, felt no need to send settlers to Malacca or to set up plantations or prospect for minerals…. Spain, facing both the necessity and the opportunity in the Americas to design radically new patterns of extraction, production, and trade, exported its people… fostered large-scale, labor-intensive agricultural and mining operations…. Portuguese in Malacca… could prosper without altering indigenous political structures in the city’s immediate environs. Not so Cortes… who could not prosper unless state structures run by Europeans were in place to coerce indigenous peoples to labor long and hard for minimal reward…. A minimalist colonial strategy that worked well in phase 1 Malaya was not sufficient for New Spain.

Not until the nineteenth century did Europeans consider the Malayan interior worthy of their attention. Under British direction, exports from rich tin mines were increased and rubber plantations laid out… a plant Europeans had found in the New [World]… a mode of production perfected earlier in the Americas…. Europe’s concentration on transforming the New World in [European imperalism] phase 1 facilitated conquest and transformation of much of the Old World in [European imperalism] phase 3… LINK: <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2008/03/the-european--1.html>

<http://delongtoday.com>
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v1pEjikOuMe31K62EHojlHXi37Hv64iu/view?usp=sharing>
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIBa1abY6ME>
<https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/delongtoday-2021-03-11.pptx>
<https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0Td2okG4-n-z59HeH8UYMjdHA>
<https://www.bradford-delong.com/2021/03/how-did-the-global-south-become-so-underdeveloped.html>

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

First:

Figuring out how to do antitrust in the age of the attention economy is really, really hard:

Ben Thompson: The FTC’s Google Documents, the Staff Memo, the Economists Memo: ‘The fundamental premise of the Politico article, along with much of the antitrust chatter in Washington, misses the point: Google is dominant because consumers like it. That doesn’t mean the company didn’t act anticompetitively, or that we shouldn’t think seriously about acquisitions or contracts or advertising. Such thinking, though, has to start with a certain degree of humility about the fundamentally different nature of the Internet and how it is leading to these Aggregator-type outcomes. It really might be different this time.…

LINK: <https://stratechery.com/2021/the-ftcs-google-documents-the-staff-memo-the-economists-memo/>

Very Briefly Noted:

• Gretchen Kell: UC’s Deal with Elsevier: ‘What it took, what it means, why it matters… LINK: <https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/03/16/ucs-deal-with-elsevier-what-it-took-what-it-means-why-it-matters/>

• Masahisa Fujita, Paul Krugman, & Anthony J. Venables (1999): The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, & International Trade<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/spatial-economy>

• American Economic Association: Best Practices for Economists: ‘Building a More Diverse, Inclusive, and Productive Profession… LINK: <https://www.aeaweb.org/resources/best-practices>

• Robert Skidelsky: Sequencing the Post-COVID Recovery <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/keynes-criticism-of-new-deal-relevant-to-covid19-by-robert-skidelsky-2021-03>

• Patrick Wyman: The Afroasiatic Languages & the Green Sahara, 10,000 Years Ago: ‘Eventually, of course, the Sahara got much drier. It’s hard for us to imagine it as anything other than an inhospitable desert, but 10,000 or so years ago, it would’ve been one of the best places on the planet to live. Anyway, this is just my theory… LINK: <https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/the-afroasiatic-languages-and-the>

• Yegor Gaidar (2007): The Soviet Collapse: Grain & Oil: ‘In 1985 the idea that the Soviet Union would begin bargaining for money in exchange for political concessions would have sounded absolutely preposterous to the Soviet leadership. In 1989 it became a reality, and Gorbachev understood the need for at least $100 billion from the West to prop up the oil-dependent Soviet economy… LINK: <https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/20070419_Gaidar.pdf>

• Laura Tyson & Susan Lund: The Post-Pandemic Labor Market’s Long-Term Scars: ‘Even before the COVID–19 crisis, African-Americans, Hispanics, women, and workers without a post-secondary education faced dimming prospects as a result of automation and other trends. Now, these forces have been strengthened, creating an even bigger mismatch between worker qualifications and available jobs… LINK: <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/pandemic-permanent-job-losses-need-worker-retraining-by-laura-tyson-and-susan-lund-2021-03>

• John Maynard Keynes (1919): The Economic Consequences of the Peace: ‘[Their] view of the world… filled with deep-seated melancholy the founders of our Political Economy. Before the eighteenth century mankind entertained no false hopes. To lay the illusions which grew popular at that age’s latter end, Malthus disclosed a Devil. For half a century all serious economical writings held that Devil in clear prospect. For the next half century he was chained up and out of sight. Now perhaps [with World War I] we have loosed him again… LINK: <https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/keynes-the-economic-consequences-of-the-peace#preview>

Six Paragraphs:

Martin Sandbu: US Stimulus Package Leaves Europe Standing in the Dust: ‘Europe and the US will loom less large in the global economy as emerging countries outperform their growth. That is inevitable. What we do not know is how fast that US and European dominance will be whittled away…. US president Joe Biden has delayed his country’s relative decline. EU leaders, however, look set to accelerate theirs. Biden’s $1.9tn fiscal stimulus package, passed last week, may not be literally visible from space, but it is certainly of planetary scale. In the OECD’s March update to its forecasts, the organisation estimated that the US stimulus will add one whole percentage point to projected global growth. It more than doubled its 2021 growth forecast for the US itself, from 3.3 to 6.5 per cent. Biden’s own administration foresees US output returning to its potential three to four years faster because of the stimulus…

LINK: <https://amp.ft.com/content/20096b0a-8a94-453d-8788-c3b15dc1704c>

Neil Irwin: Move Over, Nerds. It’s the Politicians’ Economy Now: ‘“This legislation has everything to do with restoring the confidence of the American people in democracy and in their government, and if we can’t respond to the pain of working families today, we don’t deserve to be here,” said Senator Bernie Sanders of the Biden bill, known as the American Rescue Plan Act. Republicans unanimously opposed the Biden legislation, but it has not been quite the scorched-earth opposition to deficit-widening action seen during the Obama administration…. f the concerns described by Mr. Summers and Mr. Blanchard about the size of the new relief bill materialize, and the result is excessive inflation or some type of crisis, Democrats will pay a price for their actions… 

LINK: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/upshot/politicians-not-central-bankers-economy-policy.html>

Duncan Black: I’m Gonna Tell You How It’s Gonna Be: ‘Yes he’ll fade away: “Ex-president Donald Trump finds himself adrift while in political exile. And Republicans, and even some allies, say he is disorganized, torn between playing the role of antagonist and party leader. ‘There is no apparatus, no structure and part of that is due to a lack of political understanding on Trump’s behalf’, said a person close to the former president, noting that Trump has struggled to learn the ropes of post-presidential politicking.” He’s lazy, stupid, and a micromanager, and at least somewhat radioactive at the moment. Also it isn’t a secret that he stiffs everybody. Not a magnet for the best people… LINK:

<https://www.eschatonblog.com/2021/03/im-gonna-tell-you-how-its-gonna-be.html?>

John Paul Koning: Hacksilver: ‘The first coins were invented in Lydia… in the 7th Century B.C.E…. Belief among some archaeologists that a form of proto-coinage had been invented prior to the Lydians and their electrum coins. This proto-coinage came in the form of sealed and regulated bags of hacksilver…. Morris Silver, an economist who researches ancient economies, describes Mesopotamian texts of the middle of the second half of the third millennium that show silver being used by street vendors, to pay rent, purchase dates, oil, barley, animals, slaves, and real estate…. Assyrian economic texts from the 7th C B.C. show that the majority of all types of payments were already being made in silver, including those for tribute, craftsmen obligations, and for conscription and labor commutations…. 6 minas (c. 3 kg) of silver are owed by two men to the merchant Ashur-idi. One third of the loan must be paid by the next harvest and the rest at a later date. If it is not repaid by that time it will accrue interest charged at a monthly rate….

Hacksilver… silver ingots, hacked pieces of ingot, silver scrap, and cut up bits of silver jewellery…. One reason for the hacking or cutting-up of silver may have been to make small change…. Another less obvious reason for hacking… is that it may have been a way for merchants to check for quality…. For over a thousand years, silver circulated as a medium of exchange, in hacked form. The big innovation with coins is the stamp. Because we trust the issuer’s brand, we needn’t weigh out or assay (i.e. smash/hack) silver prior to engaging in trade. So trade was much more fluid…. Proto-coiners… suggest that bagged and sealed hacksilver was already circulating in a way similar to coins. Some authority, perhaps a government administrator or a merchant, pre-weighed a certain amount of good hacksilver, bagged it, and affixed their seal…. If the proto-coiners are right, that… pushes the effective date of coinage technology back by 500 or so years….

One of the key hoards around which the debate revolves is the Tel Dor hoard… north of Haifa… excavated in the 1990s by Ephraim Stern…. The Tel Dor hoard dates to somewhere between 1000 B.C.E and 900 B.C.E. The hoard consists of a jug containing 17 bundles of hacksilver wrapped up by linen cloth (see photo of one of the bundles below)…. The silver weighs 8.5 kilograms… the equivalent of forty-six years of labour…. The bundles were closed with bullae, or clay seals. But these seals do not contain a name, just a pattern…. One of these bundles… registered at 490.5 grams…. The Babylonian shekel… each shekel weighed 8.3g, and 60 shekels was worth 1 mina. Thus a mina would have weighed 500 grams… as if the bundle was a very large denomination mina coin… 

LINK: <http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2021/03/hacksilver.html>

Michael R. Gordon & Dustin Volz: Russian Disinformation Campaign Aims to Undermine Confidence in Pfizer, Other Covid–19 Vaccines, U.S. Officials Say: ‘Russian intelligence agencies have mounted a campaign to undermine confidence in Pfizer Inc.’s and other Western vaccines, using online publications that in recent months have questioned the vaccines’ development and safety, U.S. officials said…. Websites played up the vaccines’ risk of side effects, questioned their efficacy, and said the U.S. had rushed the Pfizer vaccine through the approval process, among other false or misleading claims…. “We can say these outlets are directly linked to Russian intelligence services,” the Global Engagement Center official said of the sites behind the disinformation campaign. “They’re all foreign-owned, based outside of the United States. They vary a lot in their reach, their tone, their audience, but they’re all part of the Russian propaganda and disinformation ecosystem.” In addition, Russian state media and Russian government Twitter accounts have made overt efforts to raise concerns about the cost and safety of the Pfizer vaccine in what experts outside the U.S. government say is an effort to promote the sale of Russia’s rival Sputnik V vaccine…

LINK: <https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-disinformation-campaign-aims-to-undermine-confidence-in-pfizer-other-covid-19-vaccines-u-s-officials-say-11615129200>

Holman Christian Standard Bible: Leviticus 16: ‘The LORD spoke to Moses…. “Aaron will present the bull for his sin offering and make atonement for himself and his household. Next he will take the two goats and place them before the LORD at the entrance to the tent of meeting. After Aaron casts lotsm for the two goats, one lot for the LORD and the other for azazel, he is to present the goat chosen by lot for the LORD and sacrifice it as a sin offering.p 10But the goat chosen by lot for azazel is to be presented alive before the LORD to make purification with it by sending it into the wilderness for azazel…. When he has finished purifying the most holy place, the tent of meeting, and the altar, he is to present the live male goat. Aaron will lay both his hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the Israelites’ wrongdoings and rebellious acts—all their sins. He is to put them on the goat’s head and send it away into the wildernessa by the man appointed for the task.ah The goat will carry on it all their wrongdoings into a desolate land, and he will release it there…. The man who released the goat for azazel is to wash his clothes and bathe his body with water; afterward he may reenter the camp…

LINK: <https://biblehub.com/hcsb/leviticus/16.htm>

The talk that made me a many-worlds Everettian; plus things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

First:

I have long loved Sidney Coleman’s 1994 Quantum Mechanics in Your Facelecture. Now it has been published, for real, with well-drawn versions of the slides:

Sidney Coleman: Quantum Mechanics in Your Face: Transcript and slides edited by Martin Greiter: ’This is a write-up of Sidney Coleman’s classic lecture first given as a Dirac Lecture at Cambridge University and later recorded when repeated at the New England sectional meeting of the American Physical Society (April 9, 1994). My sources have been this recording and a copy of the slides Sidney send to me after he gave the lecture as a Physics Colloquium at Stanford University some time between 1995 and 1998. To preserve both the scientific content and most of the charm, I have kept the editing to a minimum, but did add a bibliography containing the references Sidney mentioned.—MG…

LINK: <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.12671.pdf>

And, of course, there still is the video: Sidney Coleman (1994): Quantum Mechanics in Your Face <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtyNMlXN-sw>:

Plus there is the essential reading:

• N. David Mermin: What’s Wrong with These Elements of Reality?<https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3d27/ad8d1cee3a12b35b4e424b9c36ec424ecc6e.pdf>

• N. David Mermin: Is the Moon There When Nobody Looks?: Reality & the Quantum Theory <https://physics.csuchico.edu/kagan/435B/problems/Mermin.pdf>

• N. David Mermin (1990): Quantum Mysteries Revisited <http://www.physics.smu.edu/scalise/P5382fa15/Mermin1990a.pdf>

• Daniel M. Greenberger, Michael A. Horne, & Anton Zeilinger: Going Beyond Bell’s Theorem <https://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.0921.pdf>

• Wojciech H. Zurek: Decoherence & the Transition from Quantum to Classical—Revisited <https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0306072.pdf>

You know, i used to think that I would—someday—understand electron spin.

I used to think that I would—someday—understand why Stern-Gerlach magnets arranged along the x-axis would knock an electron that was in the <↑| state in the z-basis into the z-basis <↓| . And I used to think I would—someday—understand why if we rotated the magnets into the y-direction the little square-root-of-minus-one i’s would start appearing in the math…

Now I know that it is hopeless.

And, similarly, it is hopeless to ask why the triple measurement σ(1x)σ(2y)σ(3z) applied to the three electrons 1, 2, and 3 that are in Coleman’s entangled (<↑↑↑| - <↓↓↓|) state always produce the answer +1.

It is the Pauli matrices that are the underlying reality—or, at least, are our only through-a-glass-darkly shadowy and illusory simulacrum of understanding. They are not the things that can be explained in terms of more fundamental principles. They are, rather, our feeble monkey-brain grasp of what the fundamental data are.

All of which is to say that Sydney Coleman’s Quantum Mechanics in Your Facelecture—the title of which, I am told in good authority, is incomprehensible to Britishers, save that they suspect and fear that it is in some way obscene—is the best thing on the interpretation of quantum mechanics I have seen.

And if it does not convince you to be a root-and-branch Everettian many-worlder—well, then I think that, back in The Day, there would have been nothing to convince you to be a non-Ptolemaic Copernican either. The Copernican points would have whizzed by: In the Copernican model there is no unmotivated sharp division between the behavior of the inferior and the superior planets as there is in the Ptolemaic model? You would have shrugged. The peculiar coincidence in the Ptolemaic model that all of the planets have at least one epicycle that is the same as the main cycle of the sun, which lacks an epicycle? You would have stared blank-eyed.

If Coleman doesn’t convince you now. Copernicus would not have convinced you then…

Very Briefly Noted:

• Arun Venkatesan: The Iconic Watches That Inspired Apple Watch Faces <https://www.arun.is/blog/apple-watch-faces/>

• Econ 135: 4.3.3., 4.4.3., & 4.5.3. Zoom Session: Globalization, Convergence, & Underdevelopment :: Slides <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2021/03/econ-135-433-443-453-zoom-session-globalization-convergence-underdevelopment-slides.html>

Six Paragraphs:

Steve M.: We’re Living in a Post-Trump World, & Republicans Are Still Awful: ‘If you’ve been waiting for the moment when Republicans will start acting abashed, or begin examining their own behavior over the past several years, or acknowledge that their critics have a point about… well, anything, you’re going to have a long wait, because that moment will never come. It might come if Democrats beat Republicans mercilessly in several consecutive election cycles—but Democrats trounced Republicans in 2006 and 2008 and the GOP only got worse. Trumpism hasn’t supplanted old-school Republicanism. Trumpism has simply been added to all the other toxic strains of Republicanism. And we’re getting them all again, full strength…

LINK: <https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2021/03/were-living-in-post-trump-world-and.html>

David Atkins: Could Democrats Finally Be Taking on the Filibuster?: ‘Most crucial at this inflection point in history, the Republican Party has set itself in fierce opposition to democracy itself. All across America, Republicans are pushing state-based legislation that would dramatically suppress voting rights and limit the ability of marginalized communities to have a voice in government. Republicans know they cannot persuade majorities with their current platform, so they plan instead to legally cheat their way into permanent minority power, reinstituting a new era of Jim Crow and apartheid at the ballot box. Given the current hyperconservative composition of the Supreme Court, The only way to stop it is by a federal act of Congress. But Congressional action will not take place as long as the filibuster remains standing in its current form. Everything, then, comes back to the filibuster…. Even Joe Manchin, the most famous holdout in favor of the filibuster in the Senate Democratic caucus, seems open to a talking filibuster reform…. My Washington Monthly colleague Bill Sher has been taking a contrary stand on this, hoping for compromise legislation between reasonable legislators in both parties and a de-escalation of partisan tensions. But it’s deeply unlikely that the authoritarian white supremacist fever on the right will be broken without destroying the possibility of their taking power through minority rule. Mitt Romney is not going to win the battle for the soul of the GOP–at least, not until the GOP is forced to acknowledge that their only path to legitimate power lies in persuading actual majorities of voters…

LINK: <https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/03/13/could-democrats-finally-be-taking-on-the-filibuster/>

David Atkins: How Facebook Is Killing Journalism and Democracy | Washington Monthly: ‘It’s high time the federal government do something about It: At the heart of much of this bedlam are the deliberate actions of social media companies in general, which have broadly destroyed the revenue model for journalism–often through deliberate lies–and created engagement algorithms that incentivize hateful polarization and outright disinformation. And no social media has been more guilty of both than Facebook. Two big stories dropped this week highlighting Facebook’s ongoing role in sabotaging both journalism and democracy in the pursuit of profit. The first is a devastating story by Karen Hao at the MIT Technology Review on how Facebook’s artificial intelligence unit learned how to efficiently drive engagement on the platform by recommending increasingly inciteful and extremist content and groups. Then, when the teams involved in creating this monster began to realize what they had unleashed and took steps to curtail it, the company (largely at the direction of Mark Zuckerberg himself) refused to do anything significant about it–choosing instead to deflect the problem toward issues of bias rather than polarization and disinformation…. Worse, Facebook’s efforts at controlling bias were manipulated by Trump and the conservative media’s endless factory treadmill of self-pitying victimhood into specially privileging the very conservative disinformation that was the biggest offender for asymmetric polarization…. Facebook is not, of course, the only social media organization that has contributed to this. Youtube (now a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet) in particular is famous for leading users down a primrose path to radicalization, guiding the unsuspecting down a pipeline from videos on anything from Star Wars to fitness to economics, straight to Jordan Peterson, Prager University or Ben Shapiro in just minutes. But Facebook’s algorithms have been particularly aggressive, and its consequences especially devastating…. As if that were not bad enough, Facebook has also been responsible for lying to journalists about what would provide more of the paltry revenue they were still allowed to keep. Most striking was the “pivot to video” era, in which Facebook allegedly dramatically overstated the potential for revenue from video content…

LINK: <https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/03/13/facebook-is-killing-journalism-and-democracy-we-should-do-something-about-it/>

David Atkins: Facebook’s Vaccine Disinformation Study Shows the Problem with Facebook: ‘Facebook can’t do anything about the fact that there are large pockets of angry, low-trust conspiracy theorists online. But Facebook could do something about the fact that those pockets have disproportionate impact on a larger universe, because Facebook tailors its engagement algorithms to promote the most controversial voices. It is no surprise at all that a small number of obnoxious people on Facebook are impacting the opinions of much larger groups on Facebook…

LINK: <https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/03/14/facebooks-vaccine-misinformation-study-shows-the-problem-with-facebook/>

Financial Times Editorial Board: The Unhappy Consequences of Lula’s Return: ‘Latin America’s most famous politician has made a triumphant return to centre stage after a supreme court judge unexpectedly quashed his convictions for corruption. No matter that the ruling favouring former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was based on a mere technicality; his supporters hailed the decision as a vindication of their long-held belief that Lula was the victim of a politically motivated vendetta. The consequences of the ruling, assuming that it is upheld by the full court, are immense. At a stroke, it redraws the electoral map for next year’s presidential election by allowing Lula to run again. Hard-right President Jair Bolsonaro had been in a strong position to win re-election against a divided opposition; now he is likely to face a strong challenge from the left. Bolsonaro has a woeful record in power, which has included repeatedly praising dictatorship, allowing Amazon deforestation to surge to 12-year highs and dangerously mismanaging the pandemic, while disappointing investor hopes for big economic reforms. That might invite the conclusion that a ruling allowing Lula’s return can only be good for Brazil. Yet the judge’s decision has unhappy consequences. It strikes a heavy blow against the credibility of Latin America’s biggest and most successful corruption investigation. It raises disturbing questions about Brazil’s justice system. And it increases the chances that the country’s notoriously venal politicians can get back to business as usual…. In their zeal to bring the powerful to book, prosecutors made serious mistakes. Leaked messages between a judge trying the cases, Sergio Moro, and prosecutors discussing what evidence to use against Lula suggested corners were being cut to secure convictions. Moro’s subsequent decision to accept a cabinet post in Bolsonaro’s government only fuelled accusations of political bias…. Brazil now faces the ominous prospect of impunity for the corrupt: the “Lava Jato” investigation was quietly wound up last month after seven years. Almost as unappealing is the promise of a polarised election next year between candidates of the hard right and the old-fashioned left… LINK: <https://www.ft.com/content/90556eda-a658-4849-be51-fff7c0a99a23>

Noah Smith: Checking in on the Global South: ‘To some, the idea of a Global South means that history is destiny—that the dead hand of colonialism, or the living hand of neocolonialism, is holding down the developing world. To others, it’s an expression of the idea that poor countries just don’t have what it takes to get rich. Either way, it’s a form of implicit defeatism—a belief that historical and/or cultural forces are stronger than economic forces. Southeast Asia hasn’t yet broken these ideas on the wheel of hard data, but it might not take much longer to do so. Bangladesh’s similar performance, meanwhile, suggests that South Asia might not be far behind…

LINK: <https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/checking-in-on-the-global-south>

Kieran Healy: America’s Ur-Choropleths: ‘Maps of the U.S. for whatever variable in effect show population density more than anything else…. The other big variable… is Percent Black. Between the two of them, population density and percent black will do a lot to obliterate many a suggestively-patterned map of the United States… LINK: <https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/06/12/americas-ur-choropleths/>

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

Not just Mexico but all of Latin America is "so close to the United States..."

 

The past three months in the United States have been both shocking and hopeful. 

They have sen the end of a 220 year tradition: the end of an unbroken chain in which the transfer of political power at the national (although not the state: not in the South) level is _peaceful_—a tradition that began in 1800 when president John Adams acceded to Thomas Jefferson’s electoral college victory without choosing violence. We lost that on January 6th, 2021. 

Many who wish to make excuses for Donald Trump say that it was not really an attempt by Trump (while preserving plausible deniability that the attempt was his own action and at his behest) to have his goons and fans shoot dead the Speaker of the House, hang the Vice President, and prevent the counting of electoral votes—that it had been, rather, a spontaneous popular outburst. Nevertheless, we came remarkably close to watching the Speaker of the House shot dead and the Vice President hanged. The counting of the electoral votes was delayed. Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader McConnell made it a point to finish the counting that day, so that the delay was short. But there was a delay. 

However, we did get our transfer of power, albeit not peacefully.

Now we have a $1.9 trillion program—10% of a year's national income—devoted to rescue, relief, support and recovery. This is a remarkably large package. It is the result of a remarkable degree of agreement within the Democratic legislative caucuses. In the past, in both 1993 and 2009, senior Democratic legislators have been very, very interested in demonstrating that they are independent actors rather than loyal members of the party. They have been interested in demonstrating that they think for themselves rather than serve the party leader.. They have been interested in using their control of veto points to shape policy to their personal liking. Even more so, I think, they have been interested in demonstrating that they can require policy must be to their liking. 

That is much less the case this time.

I think this shift is produced by a common view of the mistakes of 2009, and probably of 1994. The legislators, I think now understand that, if they want to govern in the public interest, they have to demonstrate that the president of their party is a successful manager, and that he has their support, and that he deserves to have their support because his policies are good policies.

Here I must insert an asterisk: Senators Manchin and Sinema appear to still be playing the game by the old rules—demonstrating that they are independent voices, and hence can be trusted to do what their constituents and they believe is in the national interest on each and every issue, no matter how the party tries to corral them. Thus they hope to convince centrists, plus Republicans who are unhappy with the neo-fascist notes currently being sung by the soloists and chorus of the Republican party, to vote for them. But note that even Sinema and Manchin are only taking on this role and pose in a very moderate degree. They cheerfully voted for $1.9 trillion, even if not for changing the rules of the Senate to also include an increase in the minimum wage to $15/hour.

Why $1.9 trillion? Is that the right size? The U S government right now does have exorbitant privilege. Rich people and state actors with large amounts of money all around the globe believe that their assets held in dollars in the United States are safe assets. I do not have time to go into why they believe this. But they do. In this environment the near-consensus among the Democratic policy intellectuals is that it is appropriate to take advantage of this extraordinary demand for U.S. assets. When investor expectations and confidence shift, and when interest rates rise, then will be time to deal with the problems thus created: sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. We bet that our successors will be intelligent and farsighted enough to deal with the economic problems of tomorrow when they arise. We do not let the fact that we are unsure about how to deal with the economic problems of tomorrow keep us from solving the economic problems of today.

Perhaps this is the end of the neoliberal intellectual hegemony established in the 1970s, when a critical mass of thinkers came to fear that the market had its own logic that could not be resisted but that could only be accommodated. The market giveth; the market takeeth away. And the only possible response, to those who became the neoliberals, was then to say: blessed be the name of the market. 

The view today is different. It is: the market was made for man, not man for the market. 

One indication of this is that those of us who are still thinking in a more neoliberal the-market-has-its-reasons logic—most prominently now my long-time friend, teacher, and patron Larry Summers and my longtime teacher Olivier Blanchard, both of whom I love dearly—have gotten very little traction in their attempts to issue warnings that perhaps $1.9 trillion is too large, and we should be prepared to recognize that it is—if it turns out to be so—and then rapidly act to reverse course. Those warnings have gotten almost no traction despite all their intellect and influence. That is an interesting signpost to the shifting intellectual climate. 

Thus I forecast that the United States is in a position to have a rapid recovery from the coronavirus plague depression. I forecast a high-pressure U.S. economy for at least a while. That will be a marvelous thing. That will be a good thing for Latin America and others who export to the United States. A United States that becomes once again the world’s importer of last resort may become a locomotive for the world, or at least for the Americas.

Now there are deeper issues, 

A generation ago there was a very effective right-wing political tactician, Lee Atwater. He used to argue that American conservatives were no longer committed to white supremacy—that their arguments, instead, really were economic arguments about the best economic policy, and bourgeois cultural-order arguments about the best forms of social order. How could you tell that these surface rationales were not masks for positions truly rooted in white supremacy? You knew, Atwater said, because no significant fraction of Republicans was calling for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act and the mass disenfranchisement of African Americans. You knew, Atwater said, because no significant fraction of Republicans were calling for the state to sanction open discrimination. 

Well, guess what.

John Roberts and his Supreme Court majority have constructively repealed the Voting Rights Act, and Republicans hope that they can now disenfranchise 20% of African-American voters in states they control. It’s not an attempt to disenfranchise 100%. But 20% is a thing. What do we call this open and notorious embrace of what I think is generally acknowledged to be white supremacy-light? 

And state-sponsored discrimination? As I understand it, there has been one trans-female high school athlete in all of South Dakota in the past decade. Yet banning such is the highest priority of one of the Republican Party’s stars, South Dakota Governor Noem. The Republican Party’s position is clear: where we can—wherever we can construct phony religious or phony national-security rationales for discrimination, and wherever the center of the electorate does not have a strong revulsion that would put us in electoral jeopardy—we will discriminate! Is this “we can no longer openly discriminate against African-Americans, yet here is earnest money that we hope to be able to do in the future”?

This white supremacy-light is so very much softer than the white supremacy of even two generations ago, let alone four, or six when the twenty-five million white citizens of the United States held five of the six million African-Americans in the bondage of slavery. That it is so very much softer is a mercy. And for that we give thanks.

Nevertheless, I believe that Lee Atwater’s deathbed hopes that his Republican Party was no longer anchored on white supremacy—that the real message intended for the base was not “Ni—er! Ni—er! Ni—er!”—have been proven wrong.

And once you start shrinking the electorate, you do damage to the prospects for a recovery of democracy that may be permanent.

Which brings us to the issue of countering voter suppression at this moment, when the Democratic Party has control over the all the major political veto points except for the Supreme Court. And this brings us to the so-called “filibuster” in the U.S. Senate.

First, it is called the “filibuster”. A filibuster is an extraordinary, a contrary to normal procedure, a contrary to morality, raw use of power. I think none of the U.S. reporters covering the filibuster in the United States know the origins of the term in things like William Walker's 1856-1857 expedition to make himself President of Nicaragua in the middle of that country's then-civil war—an office from which he was expelled by a coalition of Central American armies in 1857, and then—IIRC—executed by the government of Honduras in 1860. That was the original “filibuster”: to take over a country by force, and loot it.

That procedural requirements for supermajorities in the U.S. Senate for legislation are called the “filibuster” suggests that there is something wrong with them. We have been seeing such procedural requirements erode. It used to be that a state’s senators’ acquiescence, at least, was required for federal judge confirmations. Reconciliation was supposed to be immune from the filibuster because it was an unimportant, technical procedure that needed to be done and that should not be allowed to become a pressure point that groups of senators could use to get their way by threatening obstruction. But Reconciliation has now become the way that business gets done in the Senate: either by or under threat of Reconciliation.

Erosions of the power of the filibuster have, with the exception of BidenRescue now, ObamaCare in 2010, and the very successful Clinton federal financial rebalancing in 1993, been overwhelmingly used to advance Republican policy priorities: tax cuts for the rich and right-wing judges. Voting rights and perhaps minimum wage expansion are equally strong Democratic legislative priorities right now. Perhaps a procedural move to carve out some more exceptions to the general legislation-requires-60-votes will win the acquiescence of Sinema and Manchin. I think the prospects for that are good. But only the senators know what the senators are thinking. It is often to their political advantage to make their thinking opaque. After all, we still do not know whether the Republicans failed to repeal Obamacare during the Trump administration—was it simply because Senator McCain had decided he had had enough, or were there ten senators who did not want it repealed who were happy to let McCain be the hero, but who would have stepped up to fill his role had it been necessary?

This is related to the question of the missing middle in American politics. Structurally, the 20 most centrist senators have the power to drive legislation and governance according to their priorities. And there are stories of how it used to be so back in the 1980s and before—how centrists of that day like Bentsen of Texas and Danforth of Missouri were setters of national agendas whom presidents found themselves lobbying more often than the reverse. But over the past two generations that pattern has disappeared completely.

Republican centrist senators have turned out, since 1992, to have much more allegiance to whatever the current priorities of their party leaders are than to the norms of centrist governance. Now all the Democratic centrists senators—with the partial exceptions of Sinema and Manchin—appear to have reached the same conclusion: that their job is to support their party leaders to the extent they can without risking their reelection, rather than to be a centrist vote block that drives policy to what it wishes.

This is something that I would like some very smart political scientists to explain to me. I am puzzled. And let me close with that puzzlement.

2075 words

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0m1Ser_mPMUYJ2H2EvS8ydlTw
https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/ECON-135-4.%5B3-5%5D.3-zoom-session-slides.pptx
2021-03-16 Tu

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCgUkfhB8Uk>:

Slides: <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/2017-10-22-inet-edinburgh-ricardos-big-idea.pptx> <https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0QMFGpAUFCjqhdfLULfDbLE4g>

Notes: <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/12/gains-from-trade-is-comparative-advantage-the-ideology-of-the-comparatively-advantaged.html>

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0Td2okG4-n-z59HeH8UYMjdHA

Selections from my comments at an N2PE panel; plus things that went whizzing by that I want to be sure to try to remember...

First:

Brad DeLong: Network for a New Political Economy Teaching Panel: 2021-30-05:

Selections: What are we doing when we do political economy?…

Political economy is social theory in… this [Modern Economic Growth Age of the] extraordinary transformation of technology, understood as human powers to transform nature—not always in a good way—and to organize humans—not always in a good way at all. It is not that economists or political scientists have any special expertise in figuring out what the social theory for this age of extraordinary transformation of technology  is. I was having a discussion with two other economist [in which]…. I… Noah… Arin… found that… [we had all] been profoundly influenced… by the course[s we]… took from Mark Granovetter….

Mike Konczal: Freedom From the Market: America’s FIght to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand <https://books.google.com/books?id=0aDLDwAAQBAJ>

Konczal says that it is only today that “glib libertarians” purveying “fantasies” are trying to make us forget “that free programs and keeping things free from the market are as American as apple pie…” One of the best passages in the book is where he notes the connection between the Fight for $15 minimum wage campaign and human freedom: “Service sector workers demanding a $15 minimum wage and a union… have already won huge victories [with] ideas about how low-wage, precarious work is a form of unfreedom…. The Rev. William Barber noted that ‘it took 400 years from slavery to now to get from zero to $7.25 [an hour]. We can’t wait another 400 years’ to get to $15… Ultimately, if all you can say in response to the ills of society is “the market giveth,  the market taketh away, blessed be the name of the market…” you have very little to say indeed. Konczal quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes’s fear and alarm that his fellow justices on the Lochner Supreme Court were, in their “willingness to use a very specific understanding of economics to override law, writ[ing] a preferential understanding of economics into the constitution itself…” in a fundamentally illegitimate and societally-disruptive way. But a better maxim is: “The market was made for man, not man for the market”.

Thinking about what the U.S. economy might look like after May; plus things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

 

First:

Recovering (Economically) from COVID: Scenarios for After May

I see three scenarios with substantial probability mass associated with them for what happens after after May:

1) People conclude that we are living in a much more uncertain world than they thought before March 2020, so they sharply raise their long-term wealth-to-income ratios, and bank rather than spend—and then without 10 Republican senators for infrastructure, which we do not have, we repeat 2010-2015 in the absence of the $1.9T...

2) A giant Mardi Gras commences in June 2021, as people react to the final scotching of the virus as a large systemic worry in a way that they reacted to the ending of rationing after WWII. (Cf.: Gillian Brunet:

Gillian Brunet @gillian_brunet

This past year I've thought a lot about WWII in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is net private saving by HH and institutions (% of GDP) annually 1929-2020. 2020 looks a lot like WWII...

March 2nd 2021

32 Retweets74 Likes

<https://www.vox.com/2020/4/10/21214980/coronavirus-economy-jobs-ppe>.) We get one-time sharp rises in wages in previously shutdown sectors, but it is a healthy and warranted jump in relative prices that does not feed through to inflation expectations—again, as after WWII. And we are very glad we did the $1.9T...

3) The multiplier from the $1.9% turns out to be significantly greater than Edelberg & Sheiner project, and the Fed needs to raise 10-year rates by 2-3%-points in order to keep the U.S. economy from overheating significantly. And that's fine, because that normalizes interest rates, and then monetary policy has traction, and normal stabilization-policy governance can resume.

There is also a fourth scenario that some people give a considerable probability to:

4) Either Jay Powell turns out to be Arthur Burns, and we get into a hell of a mess, or the increases in interest rates required to keep the economy from overheating trigger a major financial crisis, and we get into a hell of a mess. That seems to be underpinned by a belief that the Fed cannot push the unemployment rate up by 0.5% ever—that whenever it tries, unemployment rises by 3%—but I see that pattern as driven by the Federal Reserve's unwillingness since 1980 to tolerate anything that at all smells of a high-pressure economy.

I don't think (4) is very likely at all—it seems to me to be a significant outlier scenario. I see the issue as: who do you trust to run policy if things go south? Jay Powell or 10 Republican senators. And the answer to that question seems obvious to me...