Vastly superior to Tom Holland—and vastly, vastly superior to the likes of Niall Ferguson—on the decline and fall of the Roman Republic: Edward J. Watts: Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0465093825: "If the early and middle centuries of Rome’s republic show how effective this system could be, the last century of the Roman Republic reveals the tremendous dangers that result when political leaders cynically misuse these consensus-building mechanisms to obstruct a republic’s functions. Like politicians in modern republics, Romans could use vetoes to block votes on laws, they could claim the presence of unfavorable religious conditions to annul votes they disliked, and they could deploy other parliamentary tools to slow down or shut down the political process if it seemed to be moving too quickly toward an outcome they disliked...
Politics
This Post Got Lost Somehow: Why Next to No Political Reaction to the Second Gilded Age?: Hoisted from 2012
Hoisted from 2012: Brad DeLong: Why Next to No Political Reaction to the Second Gilded Age?: Oh dear, that's a really tough question. So let me make it tougher by sharpening it and give it historical context. During the Gilded Age of the 1890s and 1900s you had strong political movements saying "something is going remarkably wrong with this, this isn’t the country we thought we were going to live in". The way that the historian—I'm blanking—Ray Ginger? Harley Shaiken: Yes, Ray Ginger. Brad DeLong: Ray Ginger put it in two absolutely brilliant books—Altgeld’s America and The Age of Excess—even the Republicans thought that they wanted to live in Abe Lincoln’s America, where when you are young you split wood into fence rails and go to law school at night and when you are middle-aged you become a lawyer and get rich and when you are old you enter politics and save the Union and free the slaves. They wanted to live in that kind of world, of upward mobility, in which opportunity is wide open even to the son of a penniless and not very successful rural farmer. But by 1890 they discovered that they weren’t living in Abe Lincoln's America at all...
An Unrealistic, Impractical, Utopian Plan for Dealing with the Health Care Opportunity of 2007: Hoisted from the Archives
Of historical interest only: Hoisted from the Archives: An Unrealistic, Impractical, Utopian Plan for Dealing with the Health Care Opportunity: First, it's definitely not a plan, and it's certainly not a proposal for the current or any forseeable future policy and political environment. Think of it as a utopia—and think of it as a utopia coming from a guy who is not a real health economist but has an undeserved reputation because he was good at translating the economese spoken by real health economists like David Cutler, Sherry Glied, Ken Thorpe, Len Nichols, et cetera in a way that made it intelligible to senior Bentsen aides like Marina Weiss and Michael Levy.
So here it is:
Fama's Fallacy: Hoisted from Ten Years Ago
I was profoundly embarrassed by and ashamed of the Swedish Nobel Committee and of being an economist when they awarded the Nobel Prize to Eugene Fama.
You see, the economists who cheerled for the Trump-McConnell-Ryan tax cut and claimed it would rapidly and permanently boost annual investment in America by 800 billion had arguments—bad arguments. The economists who condemned Benanke's quantitative easing and claimed it would soon lead to high inflation and a debased dollar had arguments—bad arguments. I do not think any of them made those bad arguments in good faith: the failure of those in either group to acknowledge that they got a big one wrong and to engage in Bayeisan updating is interesting: that silence speaks volumes.
But Fama and the others who claimed a decade ago that, while private decision to spend more boosted employment and production, public decisions to spend more—fiscal stimulus—not only would not, but could not possibly ever boost employment and production... they had no argument at all.
What do I mean? This. This is why I am embarrassed and ashamed: Hoisted from Ten Years Ago: Fama's Fallacy, Take I: Eugene Fama Rederives the "Treasury View": A Guestpost from Montagu Norman, former Governor of the Bank of England:
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Some Disconnected Thoughts Over the Years About Legal Realism and the Man Whom Judge Posner Calls "Disreputable": Chief Justice John Roberts
Today: The dirty little secret is that serious legal arguments are those that lawyers pretend to take seriously. If enough Republican hacks decide to pretend that Judge Reed O'Connor is serious, he becomes serious. My forecast? The Fifth Circuit narrowly upholds O'Connor, and then it goes down 8-1 in the Supreme Court—unless one of the Democratic justices dies or retires before the decision is announced, it which case O'Connor is upheld 5-3.
Jack Balkin wants to maintain two positions at once:
"The lesson of Sebelius is that if you give enough very smart lawyers enough time to work on a legal problem, they can come up with creditable arguments for many (but not all) legal positions, even if, when the task started, the position seemed hopeless..."
"I am most certainly not saying that legal argument and legal craft are mere disguises for political ideology or that they have no independent significance. I have been trained as a lawyer and I express opinions about the quality of legal arguments all the time. It is my job to do so. Thus, whether lawyers are willing to support a given claim depends on their perception of the quality of the legal reasoning and the quality of the legal arguments that can be advanced for it..."
But the second means almost nothing if "creditable" arguments can be constructed for nearly everything, and the task of law professors is then to retrospectively justify whatever the judges pick. The first means little if the legal community does have strong standards for what is a strong argument. How to resolve this? By noting that whatever gets five votes on the Supreme Court is retrospectively turned into the strongest arguments. And Supreme Court justices are very good at convincing themselves that what upholds their ideology and partisan position is in fact the best-argued and best-crafted.
Jack Balkin: Texas v. U.S: Off the Wall and On the Wall in the Age of Trump: "The judge's arguments are not even close to being persuasive given existing legal precedents. Does that mean that the position is 'off-the-wall'?... Asking whether a legal claim is 'off-the-wall' is a question of whether it is a reasonable claim, or at least one on which reasonable minds can differ.... But the perceived quality of legal reasoning and legal arguments are not exogenous from social influence...
Daniel Donner: Requiem for a California Dream: "It is especially delicious, then, to watch the real-time collapse of the Republican Dream in California—and specifically Orange County—as the state party’s power shrivels into a desiccated lump of greenish oatmeal. Meanwhile, California as a whole enjoys its status as one of the most diverse and dynamic states in the country, with a thriving combination of culture and creativity—and, yes, taco stands on many corners, if not every one—making it one of the most desired regions in the world in which to live, work, or play...
Note to Self: Watching Niskanen Center Live Stream: Starting Over: The Center-Right After Trump. People seem to be dividing among four positions:
- It is Hillary Clinton's fault for being such a lousy candidate, and Barack Obama's for not squelching Middle Eastern terrorism...
- We here on the center-right have lost confidence in our base, and so we need to dissolve the base and elect another...
- If only the butterfly's wings had flapped differently, we would not be here...
- We are doomed by the Curse of Goldwater and Gingrich that have led to the Southern Captivity of the Republican Party...
Unfortunately, none of these are a plan, or even an ask...
This is something that is not getting enough airplay: if Democrats do not win the House vote by more than 4%-points in 2020, they lose the House. Things, of course, will change in 2022, but that is the map America faces in 2020. And that is without additional voter suppression: Paul Krugman: We Had a Narrow Escape. We're Still Very Much at Risk of Being Hungary Writ Large: "I've been doing some electoral math using the Cook House popular vote tracker, and it's kind of disturbing. Before the election, it was widely asserted that Dems had a big structural disadvantage due to gerrymandering and geographical concentration of minority voters. In the end, though, they turned an 8.6% lead in the popular vote into a roughly 8 percent lead in seats.... But Dems won the median seat by 4.1%—i.e., they probably would have failed to take control if their margin had been less than that. That's a couple of points lower than most pre-election analyses suggested, but still a lot...
Hoisted from the Archives from 2004: Mark Kleiman: Avodim Hayyinu l’pharoh b’Mitzrayim
Mark Kleiman: Avodim Hayyinu l’pharoh b’Mitzrayim: "So the Bush Administration is supporting the anti-gay marriage FMA.... And the right-wing media are loudly cheering for Gibson’s Passion, with its blatantly anti-Semitic retelling of the Crucifixion wrapped in a pornography-of-violence package. I wonder whether, now that their own oxen are being gored to right-wing applause, conservative Jews and conservative gays will reflect on the extent to which 'conservatism' as a political practice in American (as opposed to the conservative strand in political thought represented by Burke, Hayek, and Oakeshott) turns out to embody a willingness—and sometimes a gloating eagerness—to stomp on the out-groups...
...The willingness of Jews to stand up for vulnerable non-Jews, which I had always attributed to centuries of being the out-group, turns out on closer examination to be quite deeply rooted in the religion. Last week in the faculty Torah study group at UCLA—which has been fighting its way through Deuteronomy at the rate of about four verses a week for the past decade—we were examining Deut. 24:17-18:
Thou shalt not pervert the justice due to the stranger, or to the fatherless; nor take the widow’s raiment to pledge. But thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee thence; therefore I command thee to do this thing.
Monday Smackdown: Ezra Klein Smacks Down Paul Ryan as a Grifter, and Himself for a Griftee...
Very welcome to see: Remember: Fool me once, shame on you; fool my twice, shame on me: Ezra Klein: Speaker Paul Ryan Retires: His Legacy Is Debt and Disappointment: "Ryan says that debt reduction is one of those things 'I wish we could have gotten done'. Ryan, the man with the single most power over the federal budget in recent years, sounds like a bystander.... To understand the irony and duplicity of that statement, you need to understand Ryan’s career. After the profligacy of the George W. Bush years and the rise of the Tea Party, Ryan rocketed to the top ranks of his party by warning that mounting deficits under President Obama threatened the 'most predictable economic crisis we have ever had in this country'. Absent the fiscal responsibility that would accompany Republican rule, we were facing nothing less than 'the end of the American dream'. Ryan’s reputation was built on the back of his budgets: draconian documents that gutted social spending, privatized Medicare, and showed the Republican Party had embraced the kinds of hard fiscal choices that Bush had sloughed off. And Ryan presented himself as the wonkish apostle of this new GOP...
I used to think that the fact that the Senate is an institution that has lost its purpose and now gives rural residents grossly excessive and illegitimate political power was no biggie.
Yes, the constituents of a Senate majority would have to be bought-off in any significant piece of legislation. But rural populations were poor, relatively speaking, and becoming poorer. Thus their excessive political voice partially cushioned them from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune was not the worst thing in the world. But that would require that they be rational and somewhat public-spirited actors—not the easily-grifted victims of racist neo-fascist clowns.
We need Senate reform. It should start with Senate committee chairships automatically going to the senators from the most populous states. It should continue from there: Paul Krugman: The New Economy and the Trump Rump: "Why we went from regional divide to political chasm: ... A little over a year ago, Amazon invited cities and states to offer bids for a proposed second headquarters. This set off a mad scramble over who would gain the dubious privilege of paying large subsidies in return for worsened traffic congestion and higher housing prices. (Answer: New York and greater D.C.) But not everyone was in the running. From the beginning, Amazon specified that it would put the new facility only in a Democratic congressional district. O.K., that’s not literally what Amazon said. It only limited the competition to 'metropolitan areas with more than one million people' and 'urban or suburban locations with the potential to attract and retain strong technical talent'...
Margaret Thatcher Against Friedrich von Hayek's Pleas for a Lykourgan Dictatorship in Britain: Hoisted from the Archives
Hoisted: Margaret Thatcher Against Friedrich von Hayek's Pleas for a Lykourgan Dictatorship: "My dear Professor Hayek, Thank you for your letter of 5 February. I was very glad that you were able to attend the dinner so thoughtfully organised by Walter Salomon. It was not only a great pleasure for me, it was, as always, instructive and rewarding to hear your views on the great issues of our time...
Is there any chance for a revival of the California Republican Party? Not as long as the national party is Trumpist—or rather, Pete Wilsonesque. This is what Pete Wilson wrought, after all: Carla Marinucci: RIP, California GOP: Republicans Lash Out After Midterm Election Debacle: "‘There is no message. There is no messenger. There is no money. And there is no infrastructure,' says one top Republican.... even longtime conservative stronghold Orange County bereft of a single Republican in the House of Representatives, a growing chorus of GOP loyalists here say there’s only one hope for reviving the flatlining party: Blow it up and start again from scratch...
One interesting thing here is that Jonathan Swift was one of the biggest political liars of his generation—the anti-Whig Breitbart of his day, in some respects: Jonathan Swift (2010): Political Lying: "A political liar... ought to have but a short memory.... The superiority of his genius consists in nothing else but an inexhaustible fund of political lies, which he plentifully distributes every minute he speaks, and by an unparalleled generosity forgets, and consequently contradicts, the next half hour. He never yet considered whether any proposition were true or false, but whether it were convenient for the present minute or company.... You... will find yourself equally deceived whether you believe or not: the only remedy is to suppose, that you have heard some inarticulate sounds, without any meaning at all...
Why Next to No Political Reaction to the Second Gilded Age?: Hoisted from 2012
Hoisted from 2012: Brad DeLong: Why Next to No Political Reaction to the Second Gilded Age?: Oh dear, that's a really tough question. So let me make it tougher by sharpening it and give it historical context. During the Gilded Age of the 1890s and 1900s you had strong political movements saying "something is going remarkably wrong with this, this isn’t the country we thought we were going to live in". The way that the historian—I'm blanking—Ray Ginger? Harley Shaiken: Yes, Ray Ginger. Brad DeLong: Ray Ginger put it in two absolutely brilliant books—Altgeld’s America and The Age of Excess—even the Republicans thought that they wanted to live in Abe Lincoln’s America, where when you are young you split wood into fence rails and go to law school at night and when you are middle-aged you become a lawyer and get rich and when you are old you enter politics and save the Union and free the slaves. They wanted to live in that kind of world, of upward mobility, in which opportunity is wide open even to the son of a penniless and not very successful rural farmer. But by 1890 they discovered that they weren’t living in Abe Lincoln's America at all...
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I Want a FiveThirtyEight Post-Mortem!
Across the Wide Missouri: I would like Nate Silver and company to give an explanation for this:
I suspect that three things went on:
Around 8 PM EST the model took the behavior of white southerners as indicative of the behavior of whites elsewhere in the country—and that was a mistake, for white southerners really are a different ethnicity.
It really was a knife-edge situation: if the Democrats had only won the popular vote by 7 percentage points instead of 9, they would not now control the House.
The left-hand graph is miscalibrated: an 85% probability should not swing up to a 95% and then down to 40% before settling at 60% and then converging to 100% with the actual Democraic seat gain being equal to the original expected value...
#acrossthewidemissouri #politics #statistics
And, of course, in 2016 three million more voters cast their votes for Democratic than for Republican Senate candidates. And the 2018 House vote went Democratic by 9.2 percentage point:: FiveThirtyEight: Significant Digits For Wednesday, November 7, 2018l: "Voters cast 44.7 million votes for Democratic Senate candidates and 32.9 million votes for Republican Senate candidates... 57 percent of Senate votes went for Democrats...
The first news: FiveThirtyEight's forecast goes from H+36 S-1 to H+42 S+0: FiveThirtyEight: 2018 Election: Live Coverage And Results:
Lyndon Johnson: "I can think of nothing more dangerous, more divisive, or more self-destructive than the effort to prey on what is called 'white backlash.' I thought it was a mistake to pump this issue up in the 1964 campaign, and I do not think it served the purpose of those who did. I think it is dangerous because it threatens to vest power in the hands of second-rate men whose only qualification is their ability to pander to other men's fears. I think it divides this nation at a very critical time—and therefore it weakens us as a united country...
Nathaniel Rakich: How To Watch The Midterms: An Hour-By-Hour Guide: "6 p.m.: Polls close in: most of Indiana, eastern Kentucky. As the first polls close, we’ll start to see results in two districts that could hold clues for how the rest of the night will unfold: the Kentucky 6th and Indiana 9th. The Kentucky 6th is rated1 as Toss-Up in the Classic version of our model. If Democratic challenger Amy McGrath is able to oust GOP Rep. Andy Barr, it will be an early sign of a Democratic wave, as the Kentucky 6th is about 10.5 points more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole, according to FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean metric. On the other hand, our model rates the Indiana 9th as Likely Republican, so if Democrat Liz Watson somehow pulls off an upset against Republican Rep. Trey Hollingsworth, it may point to a very long night for Republicans. The 6 p.m. poll-closing hour will also yield early returns in the Indiana U.S. Senate race, a seat that Democrats must hold in order to have any hope of capturing the Senate. Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly currently has a 7 in 10 chance there...
Note to Self: yes the American right wing is strongly anti-semitic. Any questions? The NRA on the phone: "...We must fight them with the iron fist of truth!.. Now, who is the greatest threat to gun rights in America: George Soros, Charles Schumer, or Michael Bloomberg?"
Barry Ritholtz: Trump the Revealer: "President Trump... has revealed (or reminded) many great truths to us.... We can learn a great deal about many things simply from watching his effects on the world. There is no guile, just a super-natural tendency to appeal to people’s basest instincts–supporters, opponents, media, everyone.... Racism is not even well-hidden or contained.... my naïveté assumed it was only insane people shooting up black churches in the deep south.... We learned thanks to Trump–that White Supremicists/Nationalism is a real thing across America, and full equality is still years or decades away for people of color...
...Deficit (Chicken) Hawk... care about only one thing: using debt as a cudgel to hurt their political opponents and help themselves. The US could have used a giant stimulus in 2009, but that might have helped their political opponent.... If you think “Party First, Nation Second” sounds like misplaced priorities, well you are right. Its border-line treason. Trump revealed the deficit hawks as full of chickenshit, but only to those who missed the George W. Bush administration’s unfunded tax cuts and war time spending. And that Paul Ryan does not give a rat’s ass about the federal deficit....
America is Anti-Semitic: As a Jew, I should have known this. But I hardly experience antisemitism personally in and around NYC or when I travel within the US or to Europe.[iii]...
#shouldread #orangehairedbaboon #politics
Five-Thirty-Eight: Geoffrey Skelley: House Update: Keeping An Eye On Democratic ‘Reach’ Districts: "the battleground for the House is quite large: In the Classic version of our House forecast, there are 111 districts where both parties have at least a 5 percent chance of winning, as of 8 p.m. Eastern on Nov. 3. But Republicans are defending most of these districts — 102 of them, in fact. So one possibility on Election Day is that Democrats end up winning a few “reach” districts (in which their odds of winning are greater than 5 percent but less than 35 percent). Under those conditions, Democrats are underdogs in 63 of the 102 districts Republicans are defending...
(Late) Monday Smackdown: Why Does Clive Crook Think the EU Has a Duty to Sacrifice the Interests Rights of Its Constituents in Brexit Negotiations?
I did not punish this a year ago because it seemed... intemperate. Now it seems not extreme enough. Perhaps if Clive Crook and his colleagues had dared to say: "The Brexiters are bad people pursuing bad policies. They need to be stopped." Instead he and his ilk talked about how important it was that the U.K . have "a fundamentally new relationship" with the E.U., and that the E.U. should bend over backward to make the Brexiters look as good as possible. Not a good look:
Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Across my desk this morning comes this. And it makes me ask: Whatever happened to the sharp, thoughtful, and witty Clive Crook of 2000? Brexiteers lied, and said that Brexit would bring £350 million a week to boost Britain's National Health Service, that Britons would still be able to live in Europe at will while kicking undesirable continentals out, and that Briton would have a hard border with the EU while still having a soft border with the Irish Republic. It was always a grift. Clive Crook now seems to want... what? For the EU to work hard to make Brexit as small a catastrophe as possible? For the EU sacrifice the rights and interests of its citizens to promote the careers of a bunch of neo-fascist nativist grifter politicians in Westminster? Crook seems to think that the EU should be negotiating as if this were an "on what terms will Britain remain in the EU?" deal. But Brexit means Brexit: Clive Crook: The Harder Brexit Gets, the More Necessary It Seems: "The U.K. has been an ill-fitting member of the EU all along...
Note to Self: Alan Greenspan and the Bush Tax Cut: Was Alan Greenspan in 2001 playing a subtle reputation-enhancing game—anxious to give testimony that the administration and its press lapdogs would spin as a green-light endorsement, but in which economists like me and financiers like Robert Rubin would be unable to find any sentence that was truly objectionable? Perhaps... Perhaps not...
Let's give the mike to Alan Greenspan, p. 220 ff.:
Bob Rubin phoned.... With a big tax cut, said Bob, "the risk is, you lose the fiscal discipline."... "Bob, where in my testimony do you disagree?"
I don't know why Paul Krugman is tweeting about Marvin Goodfriend's stalled Federal Reserve nomination again, but his main point is worth highlighting: Rand Paul's opposition to Goodfriend is not a bad thing for the country in itself But it is a very bad thing as a sign of the craziness of the Republicans because of the reasons that Rand Paul objects: Paul Krugman: Characteristic: "[Marvin] Goodfriend['s Federal Reserve nomination] is in trouble, not for constantly predicting inflation that never materialized, but because of what he got right: acknowledging that the zero lower bound on interest rates can be a problem...
Why Is Donald Trump Waging a Trade War? DeLong FAQ
DeLong FAQ: Why Is Donald Trump Waging a Trade War? You ask: who are the people who would want to see this U.S.-China trade war happen? We have been unable to find any. Usually pressure to wage a trade war bubbles up from powerful economic groups that are or that believe they are being gravely injured by imports. Usually there are large advertisements in the New York Times and the Washington Post saying that it is time for the country to get behind the president, who is trying to keep other countries from taking unfair advantage of Americans.
We have not had any of that this time. There has been no mobilization of economic interests that favor a trade war.
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