Note to Self: A not atypical tankie: Paul M. Sweezy: An Obituary (2004): Marxist Economist Paul Sweezy Is Dead: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: I would like Paul Sweezy to be remembered for the following passage: "The publication in 1952 of Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR would make possible today a more satisfactory reply.…In the light of [Stalin’s] explanation…I would like to amend the statement which Mr. Kazahaya criticizes.…[The amended statement] conveys my meaning more accurately than the original wording and is, I think entirely in accord with Stalin’s view." (Paul Sweezy (1953): The Present as History (New York: Monthly Review Press), p. 352.) Paul Sweezy called himself an intellectual. Paul Sweezy publicly revised his opinion on an analytical issue in order to agree with the position taken by a genocidal tyrant. Fill in the blank: Paul Sweezy was a: _...
Monday Smackdown/Hoisted from 2015: John Cochrane Prostitutes Himself to Republican Politicians Department
An Outtake: The Cold War https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/06/the-cold-war-an-outtake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history-of-the-long-twentieth-century-1870-2016.html 2019-06-03
An Intake: Refinding the Path Toward Utopia https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/06/refinding-the-path-toward-utopia-an-outtake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history-of-the-long-twentieth-centu.html 2019-06-03
An Outtake: From Total Industrial to Limited War https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/05/from-total-industrial-to-limited-war-an-outtake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history-of-the-long-twentieth-c.html 2019-05-28
An Intake: The Knot of War 1870-1914 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/04/the-knot-of-war-an-intake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history-of-the-long-twentieth-century-1870-1914.html 2019-04-28
An Intake: The Great Depression 2019-05-04
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The Lighting Budget of Thomas Jefferson: "For this substantial expenditure—7% of his Secretary-of-State salary—Jefferson received as much illumination as is delivered by a 60-watt incandescent light bulb run for 30 minutes a day... #economichistory #economicgrowth teachingeconomichistory slouchingtowardsutopia 2019-02-28
Modern Economic Growth Lecture Slides #berkeley #economicgrowth #teachinggrowth teachingeconomichistory slouchingtowardsutopia 2019-02-27
Why Next to No Political Reaction to the Second Gilded Age?: Hoisted from 2012: But the political economy of Gilded Ages? Why the first Gilded age produces a Populist and a Progressive reaction and the second, so far, does not? There I throw up my hands and say that my economic historian training betrays me. I have no clue as to what is going on here... #history #gildedage #secondgildedage
It's not "everything you know about cross-country convergence is (now) wrong": Estimated β over the entire period since 1960 is still -0.2. It's "catastrophic policy failure in the Global North since 2008...
An Unfinished Note: The Vexed Question of Prussia in World History... II: Looking backward we can see Friedrich II as the culmination of a line of military-political development through Friedrich Willem and Friedrich I back to Friedrich Willem ("the Great Elector"). But there appears to be a century-long near-hiatus in anything that could be called a distinctive Prussian military-political-sociological pattern in the society as a whole, outside of the military, the bureaucracy, and their service nobility, which continued their Friedrichian traditions to some extent...
Review of "Capitalism in America: A History" by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge: Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge’s “Capitalism in America: A History” argues that it is the American love and embrace of capitalism, the resulting entrepreneurial business culture, and the creative destruction inherent in the capitalist-market system that have given America its special, unique edge in economic wealth... 2018-11-16
Hoisted from 2012: Why Next to No Political Reaction to the Second Gilded Age?: : Populist[s]... Progressive[s]... desperately eager to change America, to repair the flaws of the Gilded Age.... Someone like Republican President Theodore Roosevelt—as aggressively a partisan an animal as you would ever see—would place his loyalty to the Republican cause second to his loyalty to his progressive principles... and... blow up the Republican Party and hand the presidency to Woodrow Wilson from 1912-1920.... We haven’t had anything like that over the past thirty years... 2018-11-13
Hoisted from the Archives: Robert Skidelsky vs. Niall Ferguson: John Maynard Keynes Is Not Ke$ha (Also, the U.S. Is Not Greece, and 2013 Is Not 1923): Larry Summers and I would go considerably further than Skidelsky: in our view, those who think there are any long-run benefits from further steps toward austerity today simply have not done their arithmetic, which they could easily do by plugging current interest rates and the impact of austerity on human and physical capital on long-run economic potential into their formulae. And I, at least, would not say that Keynes cared "little" for the long run. You cannot read his "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" or, indeed, Skidelsky's Keynes biography without recognizing how desperately he wished to help make a world in which the progressive Edwardian civilization of pre-1914 could be restored and persist down the age... 2018-11-08
Hoisted from the Archives: Niall Ferguson Is Wrong to Say That He Is Doubly Stupid: Why Did Keynes Write "In the Long Run We Are All Dead"? Weblogging: In Keynes's extended discussion of how to use the quantity theory of money, the sentence "In the long run we are all dead" performs an important rhetorical role. It wakes up the reader, and gets him or her to reset an attention that may well be flagging. But it has absolutely nothing to do with attitudes toward the future, or with rates of time discount, or with a heedless pursuit of present pleasure. So why do people think it does? Note that we are speaking not just of Ferguson here, but of Mankiw and Hayek and Schumpeter and Himmelfarb and Peter Drucker and McCraw and even Heilbroner—along with many others... 2018-11-08
