J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 104

On Twitter: Week of October 15, 2019

#noted #ontwitter #2019-10-15

What return does John Tamny get for shilling for Elizabet...

What return does John Tamny get for shilling for Elizabeth Holmes, and why is he so eager to do so?: John Tamny: Elizabeth Holmes Is a Visionary, and We Need More Like Her https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2019/10/14/elizabeth_holmes_is_a_visionary_and_we_need_more_like_her_103946.html: "The analysis that you���re about to read, it's mine.... No interviews were conducted.... I live in the same apartment building as Holmes���s parents, and consider them friends. I've also briefly spoken with Elizabeth Holmes a few times.... I venerate the risk takers whose intrepid ways vastly improve our living standards.... The Wright brothers owned a bike shop as opposed to college degrees from some well-regarded school of engineering, Thomas Edison had no formal education beyond the 8th��grade, and then Steve Jobs was a Reed College dropout. But the arguably more important truth is that most advances are hatched by people outside the industry about to be transformed.... Holmes���s hiring of the best she could find was an explicit admission by the entrepreneur that there were limits to her knowledge that she would strive to make up for through brilliant recruitment.... A popular narrative that���s taken hold about a 'fraudulent' Theranos having made false claims about its technology. Not so fast.... She was willing to fail publicly.... Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither were cars, airplanes or internet-capable computers. Theranos, like any other corporation aiming to do something truly different, was going to have to fail a lot to get to success..... While Holmes was plainly and understandably not eager to shout the initial shortcomings of Theranos technology to all who would listen, it���s not as though she was going out of her way to bury mistakes without addressing them. Quite the opposite. Some will point to Theranos���s utilization of third party equipment, along with actual needles on occasion in order to complete blood tests, but this too was yet further evidence that accuracy of testing mattered; that Theranos would make up for the initial shortcomings of the Edison and miniLab analyzers until they could stand on their own.... So much of��Bad Blood��struck this reader as innuendo.... That the technology 'didn���t always work' means it��sometimes did.... It���s quite simply not news that Thernanos technology was buggy.... Which brings us to Theranos not making it. Carreyrou comes to the not-terribly-novel conclusion that 'Holmes and her company had overpromised and then cut corners when they couldn���t deliver'.... Stressing average doesn���t work when raising funds for a technology company.... Some will respond that the responsible thing for Holmes et al to have done would have been to tap the brakes as it were, to moderate expectations in consideration of the company���s audacious vision,��to underpromise. Much easier said than done.... One senses that some of Holmes���s biggest critics have never run a start-up, let alone a business.... Which brings us to Elizabeth Holmes.... Seemingly forgotten by the eternally smug is that per serial business founder and investor Carl Schramm, capitalistic progress is 'messy', and it���s the stuff of individuals willing to energetically pursue that which is roundly rejected by the existing order. Crucial is that these people are very necessary.... It���s time to end the witch hunts meant to quiet the minds and actions of those who want to force the change without which there is no progress...

#noted #2019-10-15

Comment of the Day: Ebenezer Scrooge https://www.bradford...

Comment of the Day: Ebenezer Scrooge https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/09/hoisted-from-teh-archives-from-2006-tightwad-hill.html?cid=6a00e551f0800388340240a4d96d9c200b#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a4d96d9c200b in Stanford Week: "The formula for succeeding as an undergrad at an enormous state university is to pretend you're a grad student, and dive into a department full time. You're likely to get a decent mentor and adequate support, so you can ignore the bureaucratic madness. Of course, they also say that about Harvard. On a personal note, the only smart decision I made as an adolescent was to attend Brown to study physics, rather than MIT. Life was a lot easier at Brown when I realized I was not one of the people to whom physics was always "intuitively obvious." My parents were a bit disappointed, since they had heard of MIT but not Brown. But, as wise parents, they deferred to me...

#commentoftheday #2019-10-15

Perhaps. And Sometimes: Hoisted from the Archives from 2010

Hoisted from the Archives: Perhaps. And Sometimes https://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/09/16/j-bradford-delong/perhaps-sometimes: In 542 AD the late Roman (early Byzantine?) Emperor Justinian I wrote to his Praetorian Prefect concerning the army ��� trained and equipped and paid for by the Roman State to control the barbarians and to ���increase the state.��� Justinian was, Peter Sarris reports in his Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian, upset��that:

certain individuals had been daring to draw away soldiers and foederati from their duties, occupying such troops entirely with their own private business���. The emperor��� prohibit[ed] such individuals from drawing to themselves or diverting troops��� having them in their household��� on their property or estates���. [A]ny individual who, after thirty days, continues to employ soldiers to meet his private needs and does not return them to their units will face con���scation of property��� ���and those soldiers and foederati who remain in paramonar attendance upon them��� will not only be deprived of their rank, but also undergo punishments up to and including capital��punishment.

Justinian is worried because what is going on in the country he rules is not legible to him. Soldiers ��� soldiers whom he has trained, equipped, and paid for ��� have been hired away from their frontier duties by the great landlords of the Empire and employed on their estates and in the areas they dominate as bully-boys. One such great landlord was Justinian���s own sometime Praefectus Praetorio per Orientem Flavius Apion, to whom one of Flavius���s tenants and debtors, one Anoup,��wrote:

No injustice or wickedness has ever attached to the glorious household of my kind lord, but it is ever full of mercy and overflowing to supply the needs of others. On account of this I, the wretched slave of my good lord, wish to bring it to your lordship���s knowledge by this present entreaty for mercy that I serve my kind lord as my fathers and forefathers did before me and pay the taxes every year. And by the will of God��� my cattle died, and I borrowed the not inconsiderable amount of 15 solidi���. Yet when I approached my kind lord and asked for pity in my straits, those belonging to my lord refused to do my lord���s bidding. For unless your pity extends to me, my lord, I cannot stay on my ktema and fulfill my services with regard to the properties of the estate. But I beseech and urge your lordship to command that mercy be shown to me because of the disaster that has overtaken��me���

The late Roman Empire as Justinian wished it to be would consist of (a) slaves, (b) free Roman citizens (some of whom owned a lot of land), (c) soldiers, (d) bureaucrats, and (e) an emperor. The slaves would work for their masters. Slaves along with their citizen masters and non-slaveholding citizens would farm the empire (some of the citizens owning their land, some renting it). All would be prosperous and pay their taxes. And the emperor would use the taxes to pay the soldiers who dealt with the Persians, the Huns, the Goths, and the Vandals; to fund the building of Hagia Sophia and other works of architecture in Constantinople; and to promote the true faith and extirpate heresy. If the countryside were legible to him, that is how things would be���slaves and citizens in their places, landlords and tenants in their mutually beneficial contractual relationships, all prosperous and all paying their taxes to support the��empire.

But Justinian knows very well that the countryside is not legible to him. The contracts that Flavius Apion makes with his tenants are made under the shadow of the threat that if Flavius Apion does not like the way things are going he will send a bucellarius to beat you up. Anoup is not pointing out to Flavius Apion that their landlord-tenant relationship is a good thing and that keeping him as a tenant rather than throwing him off the land for failure to pay the rent is in both their interests. Instead, Anoup is calling himself a slave (which he is not). Anoup is calling Flavius Apion a lord (which he is not supposed to be). Anoup is appealing to a long family history of dependence of himself and his ancestors on the various Flavii Apionoi and Flavii Strategioi of past generations. Justinian thinks that things would be better served if the countryside were properly legible to him and he could force reality to correspond to the legal order of slaves and citizens, tenants and landlords interacting through contract, and taxpayers. Flavius Apion would prefer that the order be one of proto-feudalism: that all the Anoups know and understand that they are at his mercy, and that the emperor is far, far away. And we don���t know what Anoup thinks. We do know that it does not sound as though he experiences the lack of legibility of the countryside to the emperor and his state as a full and complete liberation. And we do know that the Emperor Justinian was gravely concerned about the transformation of his soldiers into bucellarii, into the dependent bully-boys of the landlords���both because it meant that they were not on the borders where they belonged and because it disturbed what he saw as the proper balance of power in the countryside and what he saw as the emperor���s��justice.

Justinian���s big (and to him insoluble) problem was that the Flavius Apion whose bully-boys beat up his tenants when they displeased was the same Flavius Apion who headed Justinian���s own��bureaucracy.

Thus when James C. Scott speaks of how local knowledge and local arrangements having the ability to protect the people of civil society from an overmighty, blundering state, I say ���perhaps��� and I say�����sometimes.���

It is certainly the case that the fact that Sherwood Forest is illegible to the Sheriff of Nottingham allows Robin of Locksley and Maid Marian to survive. But that is just a stopgap. In the final reel of Ivanhoe the fair Rebecca must be rescued from the unworthy rogue Templar Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert (and packed offstage to marry some young banker or rabbi), the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisborne must receive their comeuppance, the proper property order of Nottinghamshire must be restored, and Wilfred must marry the fair Rowena���and all this is accomplished by making Sherwood Forest and Nottinghamshire legible to the true king, Richard I ���Lionheart��� Plantagenet, and then through his justice and good��lordship.

A state that makes civil society legible to itself cannot protect us from its own fits of ideological terror, or even clumsy thumb-fingeredness. A state to which civil society is illegible cannot help curb roving bandits or local notables. And neither type of state has proved terribly effective at constraining its own��functionaries.

In some ways, the ���night watchman��� state���the state that enables civil society to develop and function without distortions imposed by roving bandits, local notables, and its own functionaries, but that also is content to simply sit back and watch civil society���is the most powerful and unlikely state of��all...

#economichistory #highlighted #hoistedfromthearchives #politicaleconomy #2019-10-15

Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-15:Astro 3D: Not Long Ago, ...

Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-15:

Astro 3D: Not Long Ago, the Center of the Milky Way Exploded https://phys.org/news/2019-10-center-milky.html: "A titanic, expanding beam of energy sprang from close to the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way just 3.5 million years ago, sending a cone-shaped burst of radiation through both poles of the Galaxy and out into deep space.... The phenomenon, known as a Seyfert flare, created two enormous 'ionisation cones' that sliced through the Milky Way���beginning with a relatively small diameter close to the black hole, and expanding vastly as they exited the Galaxy. So powerful was the flare that it impacted on the Magellanic Stream���a long trail of gas extending from nearby dwarf galaxies called the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds...

Henry Fielding (1749(: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6593/6593-h/6593-h.htm...

Aaron Carroll: Five Reasons the Diet Soda Myth Won���t Die https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/upshot/diet-soda-health-myths.html?te=1&nl=the-upshot&emc=edit_up_20191014?campaign_id=29&instance_id=13061&segment_id=17867&user_id=744e123caca9fa6942a2af37a0645716&regi_id=1775010: "Repeated studies on a health bogeyman help explain wider problems with food research.... It would probably be a public service if we stopped repeating a lot of this research���and stopped reporting on it breathlessly. If that���s impossible, the best people can do is stop paying so much attention...

Wikipedia: Aldo Raimondi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Raimondi...

Wikipedia: Castel dell'Ovo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castel_dell%27Ovo...

What to see and what to do in the Gulf of Naples https://www.visitnaples.eu/en/neapolitanity/discover-naples/what-to-see-and-what-to-do-in-the-gulf-of-naples...

#noted #verybrieflynoted #2019-10-15

Comment of the Day: Harold Carmel https://www.bradford-de...

Comment of the Day: Harold Carmel https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/09/march-of-the-peacocks-the-new-york-times.html?cid=6a00e551f0800388340240a4b269b1200d#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a4b269b1200d in Paul Krugman: March of the Peacocks: "As Prof. DeLong has often pointed out, Obama's turn toward austerity in that SOTU was a very dumb policy idea. Obama's negotiating style was to split the difference with the GOP in his initial offer, assuming the Republicans were bargaining in good faith. Of course, they weren't. Obama presented himself as post-partisan and thought the Republicans would reciprocate. How did that work out? An important lesson for the current Democratic presidential race....

#commentoftheday #2019-10-14

Why am I hearing "very fine people on both sides!"? here:...

Why am I hearing "very fine people on both sides!"? here: Robert Knight: Letters �� LRB: Globalists: "Alexander Zevin writes that Friedrich Hayek opposed the use of sanctions against apartheid, and ���confided to his secretary that he liked blacks no better than Jews��� (LRB, 15 August). The antisemitic antecedents of National Socialism are conspicuous by their absence in The Road to Serfdom; if we assume the manuscript was completed in 1943, it almost completely ignores a decade of antisemitic persecution and four years of Nazi war crimes and atrocities. In the Spectator in January 1947 Hayek attacked the ���blunders��� of denazification in Austria, including the suspension of violinists from the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra because they had been Nazi party members. It was, he wrote, ���scarcely easier to justify the prevention of a person from fiddling because he was a Nazi than the prevention because he is a Jew���...

#noted #2019-10-14

Jennifer Ouellette: New research on Tunguska finds such e...

Jennifer Ouellette: New research on Tunguska finds such events happen less often than we thought: "Eyewitness: 'Suddenly the sky appeared like it was split in two, high above the forest.'... scientists deduced that the��Chelyabinsk object was most likely a stony asteroid the size of a five-story building that broke apart 15 miles (24km) above the ground. The resulting shock wave was as powerful as a 550 kiloton nuclear explosion���and the Tunguska object was probably much larger. Based on the Chelyabinsk models���augmented with survey records from the Tunguska region shortly after the event���the scientists concluded the Tunguska object was probably stony (rather than icy), and measured between 164 and 262 feet in diameter (about 50 to 80 meters). It whipped through the atmosphere at 34,000 miles per hour (about 54,700km/h), and produced an amount of energy equivalent to the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens. Those models, plus current data on the asteroid population, also enabled researchers to calculate how frequently such impact events are likely to occur.��The good news is that this research suggests mid-size rocky bodies like the one that likely caused the damage at Tunguska occur less frequently than previously thought���on the order of millennia, rather than centuries...

#noted #2019-10-14

Very few of those who read this weblog would be attracted...

Very few of those who read this weblog would be attracted to this, or, indeed, find it anything other than a very hard slog. But those who do tackle it will, I think, be very well rewarded. Adam Kotsko is a smart, honorable, very insightful person who thinks very differently from us���and that is the kind of person we can potentially learn the most from: Adam Kotsko: Neoliberalism's Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1503607135: "Neoliberalism makes demons of us all, confronting us with forced choices that serve to redirect the blame for social problems onto the ostensible poor decision-making of individuals...

#noted #2019-10-14

Miles Kimball: Adding a Variable Measured with Error to a...

Miles Kimball: Adding a Variable Measured with Error to a Regression Only Partially Controls for that Variable https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2019/10/10/adding-a-variable-measured-with-error-to-a-regression-only-partially-controls-for-that-variable: "Compare the coefficient estimates in a large-sample, ordinary-least-squares, multiple regression with (a) an accurately measured statistical control variable, (b) instead only that statistical control variable measured with error and (c) without the statistical control variable at all. Then all coefficient estimates with the statistical control variable measured with error (b) will be a weighted average of (a) the coefficient estimates with that statistical control variable measured accurately and (c) that statistical control variable excluded. The weight showing how far inclusion of the error-ridden statistical control variable moves the results toward what they would be with an accurate measure of that variable is equal to the fraction of signal in (signal + noise), where ���signal��� is the variance of the accurately measured control variable that is not explained by variables that were already in the regression, and ���noise��� is the variance of the measurement error....

#noted #2019-10-14