J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 101

Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-21:David Frum: Can Brexit S...

Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-21:

David Frum: Can Brexit Survive a Second Referendum? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/can-brexit-survive-second-referendum/600382/: "[Alexander Boris de Pfeffle Johnson���s hope is to get a withdrawal agreement in place before October 31, exit by that date, and only then force an election. With Brexit then irrevocable, British voters would confront the stark single-issue choice: Johnson or Corbyn? Johnson could expect to win a five-year mandate to repair the damage he himself inflicted by Brexit...

Pierre Briant (2002): _ From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire_ https://delong.typepad.com/files/briant-cyrus.pdf

Susan M. Sherwin-White and Am��lie Kuhrt (1993): From Samarkhand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid Empire https://delong.typepad.com/files/samarkhand.pdf

Wayne E. Lee (2016): Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History https://books.google.com/?id=hbyYCgAAQBAJ: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/wayne-e-lee-2016-_waging-war-conflict-culture-and-innovation-in-world-history_-excerpts-when-in-1996-lawrence.html...

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (2012): Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty https://books.google.com/?id=2dlnBoX4licC...

#noted #verybrieflynoted #2019-10-21

ProGrowthLiberal: Robert Barro���s Misstated Case for Fed...

ProGrowthLiberal: Robert Barro���s Misstated Case for Federal Reserve Independence http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2019/08/barros-misstated-case-for-federal.html: "There are two aspects of his case that strike me as silly to say the least starting with his opening sentence: 'In the early 1980s, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, was able to choke off runaway inflation because he was afforded the autonomy necessary to implement steep interest-rate hikes.' This statement glosses over the fact that we had a macroeconomic mess in 1982... an ill-advised fiscal stimulus initiated the moment St. Reagan took office.... To be fair���Barro continues his magical history tour in a reasonable way until we get this absurdity: 'One could infer the normal rate from the average federal funds rate over time. Between January 1986 and August 2008, it was 4.9%, and the average inflation rate was 2.5% (based on the deflator for personal consumption expenditure), meaning that the average real rate was 2.4%'.... Barro seems to be saying the long-run real interest rate has been the same for the last 23 years. There has been a lot of research to suggest otherwise...

#noted #2019-10-20

Wayne E. Lee (2016): Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and I...

Wayne E. Lee (2016): Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History https://books.google.com/?id=hbyYCgAAQBAJ, excerpts: "When in 1996 Lawrence Keeley published War Before Civilization. Keeley made an impassioned plea for reimagining the role of violence in human experience, and he made the striking claim that prestate societies experienced extreme male fatality rates. Keeley's work and additional studies have settled on the somewhat shocking estimates... [that] between 15 and 25% of males and about 5% of females" in human forager societies died from warfare. This per capita rate far exceeds those of later state-based societies. Since Keeley's work, archaeologists and anthropologists have renewed the debate begun by Hobbes and Rousseau. To use the simplest terms, as suggested in a recent review, there are the 'deep rooters', who believe in the long evolutionary history of intergroup violence, and the "inventors", who argue that human conflict emerged more recently because of changes in human social organization...

Some key traits in chimpanzee group conflicts seem to recur in prestate human conflict. First, conflict is not endemic but episodic. Being a neighbor does not guarantee conflict, but territories are clearly marked, patrolled, and defended, and usually a dangerous buffer zone develops between those territories. Chimpanzees in one community avoided the border area of their territory, spending 75 percent of their time in the central 35 percent of their range, suggesting an awareness of the threat of conflict even when conflict was not constant. Second, casualty rates can be very high (in Goodall's Gombe community, 30 percent of the original male population was killed by other chimps after the group fissioned) but are accrued over time, not in single attacks. Third, conflict begins not through simple "aggression" but rather in response to ecological pressures and perceptions of advantage. Specifically, conflicts begin when one group enjoys an overall numerical advantage. Attacks are launched only when a local numerical edge exists....

From about 125,000 to 70,000 yearsago, modern humans in Africa began to display more creative behaviors, including some indicating conscious ness, complex problem solving, early language formation, and ritual. Almost simultaneously, and almost certainly related, about 125,000 years ago H. sapiens began to migrate out of Africa, into the Middle East, and, as recently discovered at Jebel Faya, across the Arabian Peninsula to the Persian Gulf. A recent find in Israel confirms the simultaneous existence there of both Neandertals and modern humans at least 55,000 years ago, but H. sapiens' migrations further north stalled, perhaps due to competition with resident Homo populations there, as well as continued glacial conditions. Genetic studies, however, suggest that modern humans continued to move east into South Asia and beyond. The recent discovery of the oldest examples of human art in Indonesia (roughly forty thousand years old) probably reflects this migration.

Second, around 70,000 to 40,000 years ago, human cognitive development accelerated further, marked by a diversification of tool types and of materials used, distant sourcing for materials, art and ornamentation, and likely a new stage in language development. There is certainly no doubt that one conse quence was a rapid population expansion that saw H. sapiens spread across

H. sapiens's enhanced social capability and new technologies (notably the atlatl spear thrower developed at least 30,000 to 40,000 years ago) gave them a competitive advantage as they expanded into territories inhabited by other archaic humans. In some theories, the larger group size may itself have promoted technological experimentation and knowledge retention. It has long been theorized or suggested that the in-migration of modern humans pres sured, isolated, and eventually eliminated the Neandertal population, if not through actual genocide, then by pushing them into more and more marginal zones where their reproduction rates suffered. There is little physical evidence that suggests that this competition was violent, but some evidence does exist both of intra-Neandertal violence and violence between Neandertals and modern humans. And given what we know about the role of women as victims in much of human warfare, the recent discovery of Neandertal DNA surviving in present day non-African humans does not necessarily suggest a peaceful process of interbreeding....

As in later periods, the evidence for violence is artistic, skeletal, and technological. There are several examples of early cave art (ca. 20,000-12,000 BP) depict ing human figures pierced by spears or arrows. And there is skeletal evidence from the Neandertal period in Europe of violent death and cannibalism, argu ably for dietary (rather than ritual) purposes. One of the most dramatic examples has emerged relatively recently from the El Sidr��n site in Asturias, Spain, dated to approximately 50,000 years ago. At least twelve Neandertal individuals were found in the deposit (six adults, three adolescents, two juveniles, and one infant three of the adults can be identified as female and three adults and the three adolescents as male). Many (if not all) of the remains possessed cut marks and other signs of butchering, and recent genetic analysis has revealed that all three adult men had the same mitochondrial DNA, suggesting that they were brothers, cousins, or uncles, as did four other individuals, while all three adult females came from different lineages. In short, this was a family group, probably massacred in one incident, by a neighboring separate group of Neandertals, and then butchered by them for food....

The best evidence for warfare prior to the development of settled agricultural communities comes from the skeletal evidence of massacres. Sedentism based on intensive local foraging emerged in the Near East approximately 13,000 BCE, with agriculture following at around 9000 BCE. In Central Europe sedentism emerged around 10,500 BCE, with agriculture arriving from the Near East by around 5500 BCE. Right on the cusp of the emergence of agriculture in Europe, and thus undermining the contention that early farmers enjoyed a period of peace as a result of their relative prosperity, is the massacre site at Talheim, near Heilbronn in Germany, dating from 5000 BCE. The site is a mass burial of thirty-four individuals (eighteen adults and sixteen children). The bodies were piled indiscriminately on top of each other, apparently simply dumped, all the victims having died violently. Careful study of the injuries has determined that:

the majority of the victims were attacked from behind as they were standing, presumably as they tried to protect themselves or flee. Having already been struck, many individuals were then hit again as they knelt or even lay on the ground.... In addition to the majority of the skulls being smashed, serious injuries were also inflicted upon other parts of the body���the arms, legs, and pelvis.

Recent studies have gone further and suggest that the massacre was committed by outside aggressors seeking to completely destroy the settlement and take over their territory and resources....

Sedentism and agriculture represented an increase in subsistence carrying capacity, initially reducing the impulse for conflict between similar peoples, But sedentism, and especially agriculture and the domestication of animals, increased the reward for foragers of raiding sedentary villages. There was now "stuff" to be taken, and mobile domesticated animals, present in the Middle East after about 8500 BCE, were the easiest thing to steal. Such raids by small foraging bands against larger nucleated towns would have been risky, however....

The archaeological evidence for prestate warfare in the agricultural Neolithic (fortification, settlement destruction, paintings, and weapons development) seems at least as undeniable as that for the era of states. Indeed, we can jump backwards right to the very beginning of the Neolithic to two of the earliest agricultural communities, one at Jericho, founded about 9000 BCE near the Jordan River in the modern West Bank, and the other at ��atalh��y��k, occupied roughly from 7500 BCE to 5700 BCE in what is now southern Turkey. Both sites are critical to our understanding of human development since both were among the first "towns" in human history, and both were associated with the earliest phases in the invention of agriculture.

Jericho seems to have been a nucleated town first, fortified later, with agriculture arriving somewhat before the wall, but this sequence is still unclear. What is undeniable, however, is that by around 8000 BCE Jericho's inhabitants had surrounded themselves with an extensive elliptical wall, nearly four meters tall, two meters thick at the base, and incorporating a massive circular tower eight and half meters tall, with an interior circular stair case.... ��atalh��y��k is not precisely "walled," but was built much like the cliff dwellings of the American southwest, in which many individual dwellings are conjoined, lack ground-level exterior....

Evolution of cooperative altruism within human groups, suggesting that "for many groups and for substantial periods of human prehistory, lethal group conflict may have been frequent enough to support the proliferation of quite costly forms of altruism." In this way, as much of the rest of this chapter will show, cooperation and conflict proved to be two sides of the same coin, each reinforcing the other, as one group enhanced cooperation to succeed at conflict, and the persistence of conflict necessitated ever more complex forms of cooperation.
Therefore, competition and its most dramatic form, violent conflict, acted as a selection pressure on human biological evolution, favoring the selection of group behaviors like male solidarity, a "shoot on sight" attitude toward intrusive strangers, the ability to incorporate the defeated remnants of other groups, risk calculation in assessing the threat of other groups, and, most importantly, greater social complexity to sustain larger group sizes which provided an important advantage in violent conflict.

It is this last characteristic that points us to the other side of the conflict coin: cooperation. For humans, being "good" at conflict depends on more than physical size, keen eyesight, or other physical attributes. It also means being good at cooperating. Recent studies of infants suggest that the ability and desire to reward cooperators exists at the genetic level, and ethnographic work among bands of foragers frequently shows that not only do they depend on cooperation within the group, but the group actively controls aggressive, dominance-seeking individuals���although they never fully eliminate dominant males nor their quest for dominance.31 Summarized another way by anthropologist Bruce Knauft, "Collective socialization in gregarious groups ... pro vided a distinctive evolutionary niche for the genus Homo"....

Flipping the coin back to conflict, however, humans have tended to fill up the landscape quickly. From at least the rapid human migrations around Eurasia from about 40,000 to 60,000 years ago they have spread rapidly across the entire globe, moving as foragers and presumably impelled by more than simple curiosity. The most reasonable model for most of human biological history is one of small kin groups existing in a universe of similarly equipped and similarly subsisting kin groups, bouncing off each other, fissioning as they grew too large, probably mostly in a watchful kind of "peace," since rarely would any single group possess a sustained advantage over an other. But compete they did, and that competition would continuously refine the intragroup dynamics discussed above. Furthermore, given the small size of the group during the evolutionary period of human prehistory, accident or chance encounters that killed one or more males would render that group vulnerable to a nearby group that had not been reduced in that way. The size of the group was critical, and it is in this context that we must understand the huge selective advantage conveyed by the ability, perhaps first biological, and then cultural, to enlarge the group size. It is also important to emphasize that the advantage of a larger group was not just about winning a "battle." Group size enhanced group survival because it represented their ability to retaliate against any other group that attacked it....

Some caveats are necessary to all this. To claim a role for biological evolution in producing potentially violent ethnocentrism is not to claim that we are trapped in these behaviors. Culture can overrule biology, especially in group behaviors, but this argument does suggest the power behind such behavior. And asserting that this process of cultural evolution has occurred does not entail that there was only one track of human experience, or that one track was "better" than another, or more progressive, or even inevitable. Nevertheless, I argue, as anthropologist Bruce Trigger has written, that there has been "a strong tendency" for sociocultural evolution to move in the general direction of greater complexity." Put simply, as described above, more complex societies compete more successfully with less complex ones for control of territory and other resources. "As a result of such competition, in all but the poorest and most marginal environments and increasingly even in these) smaller-scale societies must either acquire the key attributes of more complex societies or be displaced or absorbed by them." Human cooperation and social complexity evolved both biologically and culturally in the face of human conflict. They were and remain two sides of the same coin....

This narrative of expansion from the origin point of agriculture in the Middle East northwestward into Europe has been supported by genetic studies of early farmers in Europe as well as by other forms of archaeological
analysis. Farming peoples, not just the idea of farming, migrated into Europe from the Near East-although some hunter-gatherer populations in Europe successfully retreated and survived and/or adopted farming and greater social complexity. Furthermore, the archaeological evidence regard ing the expansion of these farmers, some of it reviewed above with respect to Talheim and Ofnet, clearly indicates that not only was the expansion not always peaceful, but, after pushing back the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, the new farming arrivals turned on each other in increasingly lethal competition....

A Lord among Lords and the Rise of the State: This process of socially stratified societies expanding and competing for territory in turn created more complex societies, as each sought competitive advantage. These evolved through subtly differentiated stages including petty chiefdoms, chiefdoms, inchoate states, petty states, and eventually states. This process was not unilinear. Imagine, for example, a regional cluster of linguistically related agricultural villages, politically autonomous, each partially socially stratified, and each more or less controlled by a single kin network, with a "head-of-kin" figure. A talented (or lucky) kin leader, seeking to cement his local control, perhaps especially in the face of declining local resources relative to population growth, might successfully mobilize his village to attack a neighboring village, subordinating the defeated population, further stratifying this now expanded and more complex society, with himself more firmly ensconced at the top-now someone we might call a "petty chief". Further luck and further success in using his now-expanded manpower against the other remaining single villages might elevate him (and his original village) further, the village becoming the capital of a chiefdom and he a "paramount chief." Bad luck, or an alliance by individual villages against him, however, might destroy or devastate his original village after his first successful attack, and that incipient chiefdom would "cycle" back down to a simple village....

Once the enemy's village, town, or city had been taken and held, since the enemy sedentary population was already stratified, "subordination" actually meant the replacement or co-option of the local elite, who would then con tinue to exercise their control over the local laboring (or enslaved) population, now at the behest of a more distant center, In this way the successful ruler of the emergent state was actually a lord among lords. Every regional center had its own "lord" and its own regional elite. The regions were nominally obedient to the state center, but, as any historian can tell you, the relationship actually was riddled by power games and strategies ranging from self-interested cooperation (perhaps the norm), to truculence, to tax skimming, to collusion with other state rulers, to outright rebellion. Such competition among elites is the usual stuff of history...

#noted #2019-10-20

Bret Devereaux: War Elephants https://acoup.blog/2019/07/...

Bret Devereaux: War Elephants https://acoup.blog/2019/07/26/collections-war-elephants-part-i-battle-pachyderms/: "Part I (this one) is going to look at how the elephant functioned in battle: how did it work as a weapon-system and why would anyone want to have it? Part II (next week) will then turn and ask the question: if elephants are such awesome weapon systems, why did the Romans defeat and then abandon them (and why did the Chinese never meaningfully adopt them)? Part III (the week after that) turns this question on its head: if elephants were as useless as the Romans thought, why did Indian kings keep using them?...

#noted #2019-10-20

Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-20:Zamzar: File Conversion M...

Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-20:

Zamzar: File Conversion Made Easy https://www.zamzar.com/...

Josiah Ober (2009): Epistemic democracy in Classical Athens: Sophistication, Diversity, and Innovation https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/ober/080901.pdf: "Analysis of democracy in Athens as an 'epistemic' (knowledge-based) form of political and social organization. Adapted from Ober, Democracy and Knowledge, chapters 1-4...

William Morris: The Fostering of Aslaug https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/morris/ep3/ep304.htm: "ASLAUG, the daughter of Sigurd who slew the Dragon, and of Brynhild whom he loved, lost all her friends and kin, and was nourished amid great misery; yet in the end her fortune, her glory, and her beauty prevailed, and she came to mighty estate...

Wikipedia: The Last Kingdom (TV series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Kingdom_(TV_series)...

Wikipedia: Vikings (2013 TV series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikings_(2013_TV_series)...

Wikipedia: Tale of Ragnar's Sons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_of_Ragnar%27s_Sons: "Ragnarssona ����ttr...

Wikipedia: Tale of Ragnar Lodbrok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_of_Ragnar_Lodbrok...

Wikipedia: V��lsunga Saga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lsunga_saga...

Wikipedia: Nibelungenlied https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibelungenlied...

Wikipedia: Guthrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guthrum...

Wikipedia: Kingdom of the Burgundians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_the_Burgundians...

Wikipedia: Brunhilda of Austrasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunhilda_of_Austrasia...

Domain: 234 Crown Street, Darlinghurst NSW 2010: Terrace Property For Sale https://www.domain.com.au/234-crown-street-darlinghurst-nsw-2010-2015695303: "Completely rebuilt in 2004, this 3-level mixed use terrace.... An ideal mixed use investment opportunity in highly sought- after Darlinghurst.... Ground floor retail.... First floor modern and spacious office space plus lock-up garage. Generous enclosed veranda & lock up garage. Modern kitchen & bathroom.... Top floor spacious & modern light filled split level 1 bedroom apartment.... Magnificent open plan.... All whilst being a short stroll to Sydney's CBD, Hyde Park and Stanley Street's famed cafes & eateries...

Domain: 364 Crown Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010: Terrace Property For Sale https://www.domain.com.au/364-crown-street-surry-hills-nsw-2010-2015246221: "FOR SALE 3,950,000 6 Beds 4 Baths 291m��.... Fireplace(s)
Formal Lounge
Garden
Separate Dining
Terrace-Balcony.... Grand & gracious 2 level victorian terrace on 291 sqm of land...

Stephen Pulvirent: A Week On The Wrist: The Apple Watch Series 5 Edition In Titanium https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/apple-watch-series-5-review: "Apple Watch... is still a relatively young product and one that���s still maturing at a relatively quick clip. Each year doesn't just mean a faster chip set or more battery life���it means a reimagining of the scope and purpose of the Apple Watch and the way it can fit into customers' lives...

Joe Thompson: Business News: U.S. Smartwatch Sales Are Soaring https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/us-smartwatch-sales-are-soaring-2019: "Apple, Fitbit, and Samsung have joined Rolex and Patek Philippe as America's five best-selling watch brands...

Robin Swithinbank: Apple Watch Hasn���t Crushed the Swiss. Not Yet https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/29/fashion/smartwatches-apple-tag-heuer.html

Franz de Waal: Primates and Philosophers : How Morality Evolved https://archive.org/details/primatesphilosop00waal...

Jim Butcher: Storm Front https://books.google.com/?isbn=0356500276...

Michael Hiltzik: Medicaid Work Requirements Cost Millions, Achieve Nothing���And May Be Illegal https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-14/hiltzik-medicaid-work-requirements-cost: "This may have been overlooked in the torrent of recent news about the Trump administration���s assault on government norms, but its initiative to impose work requirements on Medicaid enrollees has had a tough couple of weeks...

#noted #verybrieflynoted #2019-10-20

For the Weekend: Putting on the Ritz

������������ �� Puttin` �������������� ���� �������������������� ���������� https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgoapkOo4vg:

#fortheweekend #2019-10-19

Arthur Eckstein: Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, a...

Arthur Eckstein: Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome: "Thus Rome went to war for a city that no longer existed, and Carthage went to war for a political figure whom many Punic aristocrats distrusted. But beneath this apparently irrational conduct on both sides lay deep issues of pride, honor, and security. The Romans wanted their will obeyed, as had happened in 238/237���and the Carthaginians were adamant in refusing to obey another state���s will, in good part because of previous incidents with Rome, probably mixed now with new confidence from their Spanish conquests and resources (Polyb. 3.14.9���10: explicit). We must, of course, leave room for badly judged, vacillating, and even incoherent human decision making in the course of the crisis of 220���218. The purpose of the new Punic empire in Spain was to enhance the military and financial capability of Carthage and thus change the balance of power���but this need not have led to war with Rome. If Hannibal had agreed to leave Saguntum alone���and it was a small place���the Punic conquest of Spain might have continued unimpeded in other directions for years, with the balance of power continuing to shift, and Rome ever less able to impose her will. That was Polybius���s impression...

#noted #2019-10-19

It is a very curious thing that pre-industrial societies ...

It is a very curious thing that pre-industrial societies were, by and large, about as unequal in terms of relative income as we are today. It does suggest that something like Vilfredo Pareto's Iron Law is operating, although how it could operate is beyond me. And it does suggest that Piketty was correct in his fear that the post-WWII trentes glorieuses age of social democracy was a fragile anomaly. This, however, fits less well with Piketty's current argument that our current second gilded age was generated by the descent of the center-right into neofascism and the descent of the center-left into cultural liberalism as it took its eye off the important ball that is the distribution of wealth and hence of social power. It is also worthy noting that pre-industrial inequality was much more vicious than modern inequality: push pre-industrial inequality up by an additional fifth or more, and large numbers of people start dying from malnutrition: Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson: Pre-Industrial Inequality https://delong.typepad.com/pre-industrial-inequality.pdf: "Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes as unequal as they are today? This article infers inequality across individuals within each of the 28 pre-industrial societies, for which data were available, using what are known as social tables. It applies two new concepts: the inequality possibility frontier and the inequality extraction ratio. They compare the observed income inequality to the maximum feasible inequality that, at a given level of income, might have been 'extracted' by those in power. The results give new insights into the connection between inequality and economic development in the very long run...

#noted #economichistory #2019-09-20

There have been many disruptions of the functioning of th...

There have been many disruptions of the functioning of the discursive public sphere by new communications technologies. The most recent significant one was the early-twentieth century disruption by radio. The very sharp and witty Maciej Ceglowski provides us with a brief introduction:

Maciej Ceglowski: Legends of the Ancient Web: "It doesn't take long for politically talented people to discover how to use radio for their own ends. One of these early pioneers in the United States is Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest and early religious broadcaster who notices that his angry rants on political topics net him a much bigger audience than his discourses on religion. By the middle of the 1930's, Coughlin has an active audience of ten million tuning in to hear him rail against against bankers and international conspiracies, in a way that sounds uncomfortably familiar in 2017. Here's Father Coughlin at the top of his game, yelling about banks...

...The other great political radio talent in America is the new President, Franklin Roosevelt. Facing a hostile press controlled by his opponents, Roosevelt decides to speak directly to the people in a series of what he terms "fireside chats". These are not delivered in the bombastic style of political speeches, or in the angry right-wing talk radio style pioneered by Father Coughlin, but conversationally, as if the President were at home with you in your parlor. Roosevelt exploits the intimacy of radio, speaking to people gathered in their homes, in the evening, in the company of friends and loved ones. Here's what his first fireside chat sounded like. You wouldn't think that a lecture about the banking system could be very appealing. But in an atmosphere of crisis, people listen. For the first time, they can directly hear their leader discuss an issue of enormous consequence to their lives, in their own homes. These fireside chats help win Roosevelt a lasting popularity that will confound his enemies over the years. He will go on to win re-election three times.

Saul Bellow wrote about what it was like to experience one of Roosevelt's broadcasts:

drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper, and turned on their radios to hear Roosevelt. They had rolled down the windows and opened the car doors. Everywhere the same voice, its odd Eastern accent, which in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners. You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the President's words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it.

Right there, in that Saul Bellow quote, we also find a warning about the danger of this intimate new medium. "Not considering but affirming." This is the power that radio has to persuade through emotion, repetition, familiarity, and tone, rather than facts or argument. A good radio broadcast makes you feel like a part of something bigger, even as you listen alone.

>Europe also finds a first-class radio genius, in the person of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister. One of Goebbels's first acts after the Nazis seize power in 1933 is to start the production of cheap radios, the Volksempf��nger, or "people's receiver". Goebbels believes it essential to the success of National Socialism that there be a radio in every home, and a loudspeaker at the workplace...

#noted

This catches the wise David Adler's attention. Indeed, Wo...

This catches the wise David Adler's attention. Indeed, Wolfgang Streeck's socialism is a very particular and grinchy and, indeed, nationalsocialism. I first saw this back in 1993-1994 in the NAFTA wars, when too many on the left seemed to think they could mobilize white supremacy and fear of hispanics to the service of social-democratic equitable-growth goals. Back then I thought "it really does not work that way". Indeed it does not. But people keep trying:

David Adler: But Jesus Christ Wolfgang Streeck Really Hates Migrants:

Wolfgang Streeck: Progressive Regression: "As governed by 'European' or international law, immigration may also function in essence as social policy. The arrival of unskilled workers may undermine collective bargaining in low-wage sectors, to the extent that it still exists; it may also increase income inequality. In the process, it may furthermore weaken public perceptions of poverty and inequality as a problem���and, indeed, allow opponents of social protection to declare acceptance of domestic inequality a commandment of global solidarity with the 'really poor'. Immigration may also exert pressure on social-assistance budgets while weakening the willingness of citizens to be taxed for them, as a growing share of the expenditure may be going to newly arriving non-citizens. There is some evidence from Sweden that immigration can give rise to local educational segregation, as middle- and upper-class parents extract their offspring from schools that educate the children of immigrants and send them to more selective institutions...

#noted #2019-10-19