Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Note to Self: Feeling sad that Berkeley is not giving me access to: The Tocqueville Review: Vol 39, No 2: "Thinking with Raymond Aron and Stanley Hoffmann...

Note to Self: Watching Niskanen Center Live Stream: Starting Over: The Center-Right After Trump. People seem to be dividing among four positions:

1. It is Hillary Clinton's fault for being such a lousy candidate, and Barack Obama's for not squelching Middle Eastern terrorism...
2. We here on the center-right have lost confidence in our base, and so we need to dissolve the base and elect another...
3. If only the butterfly's wings had flapped differently, we would not be here...
4. 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...

Note to Self: Should I be the first person to see if I can get an airplane book entitled The Impeachment of Individual-1 on the shelves?

Note to Self: Coffee with Brink Lindsey, co-author of The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0190627778: "Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles identify a common factor behind... breakdowns in democratic governance that allow wealthy special interests to capture the policymaking process for their own benefit...

Alfred lost. But a very good anti-NIMBY set of posters...

Brink Lindsey and Steve Teles: The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0190627778

#books #NIMBYism

New show premiering on FOX tomorrow: BE THE NEXT WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF!

#orangehairedbaboons #journamalism

Across the Wide Missouri: FiveThirtyEight's ultimate Thanksgiving dinner menu is: Tofurky... Frog eye salad... Jell-O salad... Yorkshire pudding... Snickers salad: Walt Hickey*: The Ultimate Thanksgiving Dinner Menu

The most both-sidesee bothsidism ever is in—where else?—the New York Times!

And it is Ross Douthat!

#journamalism

Note to Self: I had thought that the question of where the sun will be in the sky so you know where to erect the sunshades was a solved problem—a problem solved in 3000 BC by the Babylonians. Apparently not:

Email [email protected] for an appointment outside of office hours...

View at: https://www.icloud.com/numbers/0fSxKotxqSU27JCPbCUVOXLdg

Across the Wide Missouri: I would like Nate Silver and company to give an explanation for this:

I suspect that three things went on:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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:

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?"

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...

Scam o Rama: Quit While You're Ahead: "Another missive from Thomas Mallory, last heard from in The Flying Savimbi Brothers. Note: Just so you know: Mr. Mallory's attorney, Melanie Rourke, is possibly meaner than Lonslo Tossov. We actually edited some of her dialogue. We just felt the need. Mr. Mallory was very nice about it. Call us politically correct if you like. Just don't call us late for dinner...

Note to Self: Griqua's Prayer https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/06/what-is-griguas-prayer.html

At Versailles, South African Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts wrote about how he and Keynes sat up night after night and:

rail[ed] against the world and the coming flood. And I tell him that this is the time for Grigua’s Prayer (the Lord to come himself and not to send his Son, as this is not a time for children). And then we laugh, and behind the laughter is [Herbert] Hoover’s horrible picture of thirty million people who must die unless there is some great intervention. But then again we think that things are never really as bad as that; and something will turn up, and the worst will never be. And somehow all these phases of feeling are true and right in some sense… (Robert Skidelsky, Hopes Betrayed, page 373, quoting J.C. Smuts).

Note to Self: machine learning is no better than the people it is learning from:

I said “Jan Christian Smuts”, Google, not ”young Christian sluts”!

No, Google! No! No!

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?"

Note to Self: I am once again teaching the origin of business cycles and "general gluts" via John Stuart Mill's 1829 "excess demand for money is excess supply of everything else", and in an economy of sticky prices, wages, and debts produces the recessions and depressions that we all know and love so well. It is a quick way to get into the subject. It is a convincing way. But is it a correct way?

Smart people say: "no"!:

• Daniel Kuehn: Nick Rowe, Brad DeLong, and Me on Whack-A-Mole General Gluts and Money: "The interest rate is really one price functioning in two markets: the bond market and the money market. People want loanable funds and people want liquidity.... This is a major problem.... You can arbitrage your way out of whack-a-mole gluts. You cannot arbitrage your way out of an overdetermined system...
• Nick Rowe: Walras' Law vs Monetary Disequilibrium Theory: "Walras' Law says that a general glut (excess supply) of newly-produced goods (and services) has to be matched by an excess demand for some other good. But it could be matched by an excess demand of anything that is not a newly-produced good. It could be an excess demand for money. Or it could be an excess demand for: bonds; land; old masters; used furniture; unobtainium; whatever. Daniel Kuehn calls this the 'whack-a-mole' theory of general gluts. The excess demand that matches the excess supply of newly-produced goods could pop up anywhere. Monetary Disequilibrium Theory says that a general glut of newly-produced goods can only be matched by an excess demand for money. There's only one mole to whack. Money is special. A general glut is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon...
• Paul Krugman: There's Something About Macro: "The idea of treating money as an ordinary good begs many questions: surely money plays a special sort of role in the economy. Second, almost all the decisions... involve choices over time:.... So there is something not quite right about pretending that prices and interest rates are determined by a static equilibrium problem.... Finally, sticky prices play a crucial role.... While I regard the evidence for such stickiness as overwhelming, the assumption of at least temporarily rigid nominal prices is one of those things that works beautifully in practice but very badly in theory...

• Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge: Capitalism in America: A History https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0735222452
• Aliette de Bodard: Master of the House of Darts https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1625671628
• Miguel Leon-Portillo: The Broken Spears: Aztec Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0807055018
• Tristram Hunt: Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1429983558
• Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer: A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0691184925
• Martha Wells: Exit Strategy: The Murderbot diaries https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1250185467
• Garett Stefan Jones: Karl Marx https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0674974808
• Whit Stillman: Love and Friendship: In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon Is Entirely Vindicated https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0316294152
• Ashoka Mody: Eurotragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0199351392
• James Shapiro: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0061840904
• Gary Gorton and Ellis Tallman: Fighting Financial Crises: Learning from the Past https://books.google.com/books?isbn=022647951X
• Maury Klein: The Genesis of Industrial America: 1870 to 1920 https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1139465988
• Mark Kurlansky: Salt: A World History https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0698139151

Cedar Brook Notes: As C.S. Lewis said: “I pray, my Lord, that I never believe I see my own face on the one seated on the judgment throne”. American religion, at least white Protestant and Catholic religion, is overwhelmingly a self-righteousness multiplier—not an independent influence. You could perhaps make an exception for Jewish and African-American religion, with their focus on _ avadim hayinu l’pharo b’mitzrayim_ and thus our need to succor the orphan and the stranger and be the hands of The One Who Is in the liberation of others. But those are minor currents in what is called “American religion”.

Note to Self: Optional Readings by This Year's Note Prize Winners:

1. Paul Romer (1989): Endogenous Technological Change: "Growth in this model is driven by technological change that arises from intentional investment decisions made by profit maximizing agents. The distinguishing feature of the technology as an input is that it is neither a conventional good nor a public good; it is a nonrival, partially excludable good...

2. Paul Romer (2015): Economic Growth: "Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas...

3. William D. Nordhaus (1996): Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not: "During periods of major technological change, the construction of accurate price indexes that capture the impact of new technologies on living standards is beyond the practical capability of official statistical agencies. The essential difficulty arises for the obvious but usually overlooked reason that most of the goods we consume today were not produced a century ago...

4. William D. Nordhaus (2007): A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change: "How much and how fast should we react to the threat of global warming? The Stern Review argues that the damages from climate change are large, and that nations should undertake sharp and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions...