J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 11

La Mission Haut Brion 2020 & 1650

Samuel Pepys: Diary https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1663/04/10/:

���Friday 10 April 1663: Up very betimes and to my office, where most hard at business alone all the morning. At noon to the Exchange, where I hear that after great expectation from Ireland, and long stop of letters, there is good news come, that all is quiett after our great noise of troubles there, though some stir hath been as was reported...

...Off the Exchange with Sir J. Cutler and Mr. Grant to the Royall Oak Tavern, in Lumbard Street, where Alexander Broome the poet was, a merry and witty man, I believe, if he be not a little conceited, and here drank a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan,1 that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with.

Home to dinner, and then by water abroad to Whitehall, my wife to see Mrs. Ferrers, I to Whitehall and the Park, doing no business. Then to my Lord���s lodgings, met my wife, and walked to the New Exchange. There laid out 10s. upon pendents and painted leather gloves, very pretty and all the mode. So by coach home and to my office till late, and so to supper and to bed���

.#notetoself #wine #2020-12-25

Best Read of 2020: Thomas Orlik:��China: The Bubble That Never Pops���Project Syndicate

Brad DeLong: Project Syndicate Commentators��� Best Reads in 2020 https://forbes.kz/life/observation/project_syndicate_commentators_best_reads_in_2020: Thomas Orlik (2020):��China: The Bubble That Never Pops: I have always thought that China���s development strategy has only ten more years to run before it ends in tears. In his new book,��Bloomberg���s Chief Economist Tom Orlik explains why I have always been wrong ��� at least about this particular question. Through striking examples and insightful explanations of institutional patterns, he shows how China has managed to turn all four of the great economic cycles since Mao���s death to its own advantage. In spite of ���ghost cities,��� high levels of bad debt, a great deal of corruption, ���white elephant��� infrastructure boondoggles, and the rest, China���s government has proved that it has the tools to keep the bicycle upright and moving forward rapidly. And now, thanks to Orlik, we can all see how it works���

.#books #china #politicaleconomy #projectsyndicate #202012-24

What Lifted Trump Could Sink Biden���Project Syndicate

J. Bradford DeLong: What Lifted Trump Could Sink Biden https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/austerity-will-kill-the-income-growth-that-helped-trump-by-j-bradford-delong-2020-12?referral=8420da: ���Donald Trump managed to receive 74 million votes despite countless failures for the simple reason that he presided over three years of a high-pressure economy in which wages grew rapidly. If the Democrats ignore this lesson or listen to fiscal hawks already pushing for austerity, they will face a painful reckoning in 2024. Very few of the people who voted for US President Donald Trump in the 2020 election are plutocrats who benefited from his and congressional Republicans��� tax cut, or even wannabe plutocrats who can hope to benefit from it in the future. Some Trump voters doubtless are very focused on the installation of right-wing judges on the federal bench. But many among the 74 million who voted for Trump did so for other reasons���

.#highlighted #macro #orangehairedbaboons #politicaleconomy #2020-12-24

Briefly Noted for 2020-12-23

Paul Campos: The Last Days of Donald https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/12/the-last-days-of-donald: ���This report from Jonathan Swan reminds us that the presidency is still in the hands of a mentally ill aspiring despot who is decompensating quickly���

Wikipedia: New Atlantis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atlantis: ���[Francis Bacon] portrayed a vision of the future of human discovery and knowledge. The plan and organisation of his ideal college, "Salomon's House", envisioned the modern research university in both applied and pure science. The end of their foundation is thus described: "The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible"���

Scott Lemieux: Our Grifter Problem https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/12/our-grifter-problem: ���As you are hopefully unaware of, a bunch of Twitter/YouTube grifters on the broad anti-anti-Trump ���left��� are ginning up a hate campaign against AOC because she won���t go along with their incredibly dumb campaign to ���force a vote��� on M4A, a tactic which (as AOC points out) has zero chance of making the enactment of M4A or any roughly equivalent program more likely on any time horizon. As Eric Levitz explains, this is very bad.��� The idea that structural barriers can be easily overcome by individual politicians who just want it badly enough���like politics is a bad sports movie���is incredibly pernicious���

James McGrath: Teaching Cyborg Students https://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2020/12/teaching-cyborg-students.html: ���Rather than prohibiting students from using technology, we need to realize how many ways they already are that we take for granted, and how many they ought to be yet are not or at least are not doing so wisely, efficiently, or effectively. We need to design activities and assessments that teach them and then evaluate them on their ability to do the things we have always been trying to train them to do���write, read, research���in a manner that does not rely on technology to tell them whether they write well or how to format a reference, but teaches them what they need to know in order to create a bibliography using Word���s built-in function, discern which search results are relevant and credible, and whether the words they have strung together make good sense regardless whether their word processing software has things underlined or not. Currently they are like Joey Tribbiani using the thesaurus function writing a letter���

2005: The Lowest Deep on Hoxby-Rothstein https://web.archive.org/web/20050419010702/http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000735.html: ���Rothstein makes a convincing case that Hoxby doesn't satisfy (3), if his definition of "small tweaks" is correct���

Paul Campos: If the Rule You Followed Has Brought You to This, of What Use Was the Rule? https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/12/if-the-rule-you-followed-has-brought-you-to-this-of-what-use-was-the-rule: ���I was talking yesterday to a prominent person about potential steps that might be taken to deal with the fact that the president of the United States is a delusional autocrat, who has no intention of leaving office just because he lost an election he has apparently now sincerely���or ���sincerely������convinced himself he didn���t lose.... Trump and his enablers were, to use the relevant wrestling terminology, engaging in a ���work��� that was likely to morph into a ���shoot��� eventually. This does seems to have happened in Trump���s case specifically, with one result being that the vast majority of Republicans now believe that the election was in fact stolen.... Neither Trump nor much more important the tens of millions of Americans who now actually do believe the election was stolen are going anywhere for the foreseeable future.... The person I was speaking with... pitched the following idea to me: Trump should be impeached again, immediately.... Trump is still president, and what Trump has been doing to attempt to overturn and discredit the election makes him as much or more deserving of impeachment and removal as anything any president of the United States has ever done, including, remarkably enough, himself. So why not do it?... This will not, of course, ���work��� in the sense that Trump will be removed from office, but it will emphasize that what Trump has been doing for the past several weeks is or rather should be utterly beyond the pale.... What, my correspondent pressed me, is the argument against doing this? It���s a good question���

.#brieflynoted #noted #2020-12-23

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/12/briefly-noted-for-2020-12-23.htm2

MOAR Right-Wing Animus Against Einstein���Note to Self

I was browsing through Friedrich von Hayek's The Fatal Conceit���although it is not clear to me how much of this very late (1988) Hayek is Hayek, and how much is ���editor��� William Warren Bartley https://web.archive.org/web/20050308180246/http://libertyunbound.com/archive/2005_03/ebenstein-deceit.html. Why? Because Hayek is playing a larger part in my history of the Long 20th Century, Slouching Towards Utopia?, as it moves toward finality, and I am concerned that I be fair to him. And I ran across his claim that the ���socialists��� felt:

an urgent need to construct a new, rationally revised and justified morality which��� will not be a crippling burden, be alienating, oppressive, or`unjust', or be associated with trade. Moreover, this is only part of the great task that these new lawgivers���socialists such as Einstein, Monod and Russell, and self-proclaimed 'immoralists' such as Keynes���set for themselves. A new rational language and law must be constructed too, for existing language and law also fail to meet these requirements���. This awesome task may seem the more urgent to them in that they themselves no longer believe in any supernatural sanction for morality (let alone for language, law, and science) and yet remain convinced that some justification is necessary���.

The aim of socialism is no less than to effect a complete redesigning of our traditional morals, law, and language, and on this basis to stamp out the old order and the supposedly inexorable, unjustifiable conditions that prevent the institution of reason, fulfilment, true freedom, and justice. The rationalist standards on which this whole argument, indeed this whole programme, rest, are however at best counsels of perfection and at worst the discredited rules of an ancient methodology which may have been incorporated into some of what is thought of as science, but which has nothing to do with real investigation���

Who are these Mephistophelean demons seeking to destroy human morality? Keynes, Russell, Monod, and��� Einstein? Let���s leave John Maynard Keynes to one side���even though the paragraph in his essay My Early Beliefs where Keynes calls himself an ���immoralist��� is, in context, a declaration that when he was young he was foolish, that he is not yet fully wise, and that as a result people regard him with justified suspicion as someone who is ���not aware that civilization was a precarious crust erected bythe personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rule and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved������ Let���s leave Bertrand Russell to one side, even though there was nobody more skeptical of idealist thinkers suffering from ���the fatal conceit��� and more willing to seek truth from facts.

But let���s focus for a moment on Jacques Monod. What seems to have incited Hayek���s (or Bartley���s) ire? It is Monod���s short book Chance and Necessity. For Monod, we���indeed, all life���are completely and purely the result of chance and necessity working together through the process of variation and evolution by natural selection. And what is a choice or a chance decision at one level���the cell can choose to admit or not admit a virus, the antibody can choose to grab onto and tag the virus or let the virus pass by���is at a lower level the result of necessity as the molecules do or do not fit together so that the key can turn the lock or not. Science has taught us this, and in so teaching has ���outrage[d] values��� subvert[ed] every one of the mythical or philosophical ontogenies upon which the animist tradition, from the Australian aborigines to the dialectical materialists, has made all ethics rest: values, duties, rights, prohibitions������ Monod���s belief is that as the scientific pursuit of knowledge has brought us to this wisdom, we should response by wisely taking the further advance of scientific knowledge as our ethical touchstone, and accept that our purpose is���we are made���to be Francis Bacon���s Salomon���s House, for which ���the end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible������

Now I would have thought that Monod���s ideas would have been attractive to the Hayek who sees the people���s god as ���just a personification of that tradition of morals or values that keeps their community alive���. So I cannot but believe that Hayek���s (or Bartley���s) real beef with Monod is that he says what are supposed to be the quiet parts too loudly���that it is good for other people to believe that their god is more than just a personification of their moral tradition.

And then we come to��� Einstein. Einstein? Einstein���s Theory of Relativity is not opinion or doctrine, but fact: When you measure the clocks and yardsticks of others who are moving rapidly relative to yourself, you do measure that their clocks tick more slowly than yours and their yardsticks are contracted in the direction of motion and so measure smaller distances than yours. That is simply a fact. GPS satellites are so programmed that if that were not a fact, they would not work.

Why this animus against Einstein? It is true that he did say something like: ���I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.��� But how does that translate into Einstein being a crusader ���to effect a complete redesigning of our traditional morals, law, and language���?

This is actually not uncommon���to view a prominent Jew, any prominent Jew, as an Enemy of the People (George Soros today, anyone?). It is what right-wing nuts do. In the same era as The Fatal Conceit was published, you could read the right-wing American Spectator sating as fact that: ���the constancy of the speed of light, irrespective of the observer's movement, has not been demonstrated experimentally���. Never mind that that constancy was what had been tested and demonstrated in the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment that the American Spectator had just referred to on the previous page. And you could read stated as fact that even though it is false professional physicists ���shrug and accept relativity theory���theirs is not to quarrel with the sainted genius of the twentieth century���, while ���among intellectuals in general, the theory has been much admired: so abstruse, so deliciously disrespectful of the eternal verities, so marvelously baffling to the bourgeoisie. It doesn't interfere with the daily routine, makes no practical difference to the Newtonian world. But it does upset its theoretical underpinnings. Wonderful!��� https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/bethel-einstein-i.pdf

.#notetoself #orangehairedbaboons #physics #2020-12-23

I Should Launch My Substack, Shouldn't I?

Grasping Reality Wednesday Newsletter: On My Mind Right Now: The Current State of the Coronavirus Plague https://braddelong.substack.com/p/on-my-mind-right-now-the-current: ���We do need to pick a day for this. Let���s pick Wednesday��� And what is on my mind right now is the scale and economic impact of the coronavirus plague: Reported case numbers for the coronavirus plague are worth little. Deaths���as long as the health-care system is not in collapse���tell us that there were between 100 and 200 times as many new cases three to four weeks before. It is perhaps fantastical to take Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, and the United Kingdom���the non-continental Europe nations of the ���global north������as our ���yardstick��� nations. But if we do, we must be profoundly depressed both at the situation, and at how badly we have fallen short of what nations with competent governance have managed to accomplish���

.#highighted #substack #2020-12-23

Brad DeLong & Om Malik: Is America in Decline?

Pairagraph: Is America in Decline? https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/fc2f8d46f10040d080d551c945e7a363/4

I confess I think that this came out very well as an intellectual exercise. I am, however, as I say in it, depressed that Om Malik���for whom I have enormous respect, and whose judgment is very, very good���does not have stronger arguments on his side that America is not "in decline". I had very much hoped to end this debate at least half-convinced to his side. But I am not. Sigh.

I see in my twitter feed right now���the morning of 2020-12-22���that more than 40% of Americans surveyed still "approve" of the job that Donald Trump is doing as president. With the U.S. having had 330,000 coronavirus plague deaths���1 in a thousand people���while Australia has had 908 total���one thirtieth the death rate���with a thousand children kidnapped and permanently separated from their parents, with him and his family trying to steal everything that isn't nailed down, what is to approve? Yet 40%. And 74 million people voted for him.

Om wants to say things like "The sheer number of Americans who participated in our November election should be a source of national pride and renewed optimism" and "it is about taking the steps necessary for moving forward, which we will never do if we insist on dragging our feet while a cloud of gloom swirls above us" and "America has always managed to invent a better tomorrow, even on its most difficult days" and "this is not about pretending".

I say: Yes, America has vast strengths. But we also have 73 million fascists, grifters, asshole racists, assholes, and easily-grifted morons whom the rest of us must carry on our backs as we try to make things better. It would be one thing if they just sat on their hands. But they are trying, actively, to break stuff that we must then fix.

Sisyphus just had to role the rock uphill. He did not have a raving violent madman on his back whom he had to carry while doing so:

Brad DeLong & Om Malik: Pairagraph: Is America in Decline? https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/fc2f8d46f10040d080d551c945e7a363/4: Brad DeLong 2020-09-10: Life expectancy at birth in the United States today is 78.6 years. Life expectancy at birth in Japan today is 84.5; in Singapore, 85.1; in Switzerland, 84.3; France, 83.1; in Germany, 80.9. U.S. life expectancy is on a par with Poland, Tunisia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Albania; below Peru, Colombia, Chile, Jordan, and Sri Lanka; and only a year greater than China...

...The United States currently has ~300 deaths per hundred million people per day from the coronavirus plague. The United Kingdom, Japan, Italy, Germany, and Canada each have less than 10.

The United States has the amazing spectacle not just of Donald Trump as president, but of a huge number of American worthies���from Mitch McConnell in the Senate and Kevin McCarthy in the House, from Paul Ryan to Chris Christie, from Dean Baquet and Maureen Dowd and James Bennet to James Comey, all of them deciding that rather than do their proper jobs they would work to raise the odds that Trump would obtain and maintain power and increase the likelihood that he would do major damage in order to boost their personal positions in various ways.

As one of my friends from a not-rich part of East Asia says: "Students from my country come to the U.S. these days. They see dirty cities, lousy infrastructure, and the political clown show on TV, and an insular people clinging to their guns and their gods who boast about how they are the greatest people in the world without knowing anything about what is going on outside. They come back and tell me: 'We have nothing to learn from those people! Why did you send me there?���"

This is a very different vibe from what we had twenty years ago, at the end of the Clinton-Gore years, when the U.S. was victorious in the Cold War, trying to build a freer, more integrated, more peaceful, and more prosperous world; riding the wave of the great internet boom; and had���for the first time in a generation���seen eight years in which typical Americans' wages and salaries were rising rapidly. And now it has been another generation since we have seen typical Americans' wages and salaries rise rapidly.

This is a very different vibe from 70 years ago, when we had the U.S. of the great post-WWII boom and the Marshall Plan that was also, finally, turning its attention to advancing Civil Rights.

This is a very different vibe from 100 years ago, when Leon Trotsky would talk about how he regretted leaving New York for Petrograd, for he was "leaving the furnace where the future was being forged.���

This is a very different vibe from 180 yeas ago, when Alexis de Tocqueville was preaching to one and all that everyone needed to closely examine America, for understanding it was the key to understanding the world's democratic future.

The only argument that America is not in decline is that other countries have worse problems. That may well be true. But that strikes me as too low a bar.

====

Om Malik 2020-10-07: It has been a strange year for the planet, and a particularly challenging one for America. It is as if the universe held up a giant mirror to the country and made us look directly at our most severe and festering troubles. A virus has undone our broken healthcare system, made our upside-down economy even more fragile, and exacerbated our political and social divisions. Recognizing all that, readers might assume I am pessimistic about the prospects of our great country.

But humans, unlike mirrors, can see beyond the surface. Even the most beautiful glimpse the ugliness in themselves. And the imperfect can recognize their own potential.

Let me tell you my own story. Over a decade ago, I was an overworked reporter with a three-packs-a-day smoking habit. I didn���t work out and practiced atrocious eating habits. Not surprisingly, I ended up in the hospital fighting for my life. Forced to take a hard look at myself, I didn���t like what I saw. I made a commitment to turn things around ��� and I followed through.

Our country and its citizens are at a similar point of reckoning. Given the historical arc of a nation���s life, we should not rush to judge a nation���s prospects based on a single (and so far, single-term) administration ��� or even a bungled response to one specific crisis. America is an ongoing project. As a society, we are fighting tooth and nail to protect our democratic traditions from attacks both internal and external. Is our performance perfect? No. But we are a long way from Belarus.

In college, I read about the American industry���s decline and the offshoring of jobs to other countries. In the twilight of the last century, it seemed the end was near. And yet, we saw the birth of companies such as Amazon, Google, and Netflix. About a dozen of these large American companies have since become part of the global society and economy.

As other American industries have in the past, the modern tech industry provides an ecosystem in which people throughout the world desire to participate and thrive. Even China, our country���s greatest economic rival, takes its technology cues (and intellectual property) from America. What was a little search engine now employs hundreds of thousands. This is also where Elon Musk, whether you like him or not, willed a commercial electric vehicle industry into existence through a combination of chutzpah, capital, and yes, government support. Tesla may sell fewer cars than its German rivals, but it has convinced the world to adopt this new approach to transportation. It is true that Tesla, Google, and Amazon are not perfect. Capitalism never is.

Our planet is facing an arduous future due to our changing climate. The answers to the myriad problems this creates will emanate from American minds and in the same freethinking, entrepreneurial tradition that allowed Google to be born here. Though we certainly don���t have a monopoly on innovation, we have a track record of doing it better and more frequently than anywhere else. While it is fashionable to be bemused by America, nobody overseas should forget that this is where the necessary ingredients for global prosperity are most likely to be found.

There is no shame in admitting that we are in need of self-improvement. We must begin by addressing the horror of this year, which has exposed a range of problems. I am confident that long-term and even permanent solutions to many of these problems exist. We can and will be better. Maybe it is my day job, or perhaps it is the delusion of an immigrant���s mind, but I believe the tradition of dreaming up something from nothing is still alive in this country. And that is what keeps me betting on America.

====

Brad DeLong 2020-10-07: When this was pitched to me, I jumped at the chance: It seemed to me that ranting about American decadence might get it off my chest and improve morale, which was low. And then when I learned that Om Malik was on the other side I was really excited. I have long thought that Om was great. That he was willing to take the non-decline side made me confident there were much stronger arguments for it than I had recognized. I looked forward to ending this debate heartened, encouraged, and much more than half-convinced.

But after reading Om's response, I find myself worried that his heart is not in it. My pr��cis of it would be: We must imagine that America is not in decline. Why? Because if we recognize that it is in decline we will lose all hope of being able to turn things around.

It is an argument along the lines of Camus's "we must imagine Sisyphus happy". Why must we imagine Sisyphus happy? Because we are in his situation, and if we cannot imagine���i.e., "imagine" in the sense of "pretend", not in the sense of entering into his thought-processes���Sisyphus happy, we despair and cannot do our own work, pointless and futile as that own work may be. It is an argument along the lines of Antonio Gramsci, dying of mistreatment in Mussolini's jails, recognizing that the intellect told him to be pessimistic, but that he needed to overcome that with "optimism of the will���.

Sisyphus happy, we despair and cannot do our own work, pointless and futile as that own work may be. It is an argument along the lines of Antonio Gramsci, dying of mistreatment in Mussolini's jails, recognizing that the intellect told him to be pessimistic, but that he needed to overcome that with "optimism of the will���.

Om's message is that America is not in decline because we might still "take a hard look at [our]sel[ves]... not like what [we] saw... ma[ke] a commitment to turn things around���and... follow... through". Perhaps we will.

This is not helping my morale.

The facts that America has astonishing land, abundant natural resources, and a long history of welcoming immigrants who feel cramped and constrained and unappreciated elsewhere���all these should make America's greatness a slam-dunk and America's future bright. But right now, in the world in which we live, I read my friend Dan Wang writing "I���ve spent the past month in Shanghai, which I think is the best place in the world right now: It���s always been the most fun and livable city in China; and there has been no transmission of the virus since April, with restaurants, bars, and museums all open for months..." I think that America has 150,000 new coronavirus cases and 1,000 deaths a day, that that amount of virus risk puts a serious crimp in day-to-day activities, that there is no plan for dealing with it, and that at this caseload we are still... three years from likely herd immunity, which we will reach after 1,000,000 more deaths.

It is certainly true we have a long way to fall. Things can still be very comfortable on the way down for a long time. "There is", Adam Smith said in 1776, "much ruin in a nation���.

But I had hoped Om would change my mind.

====

Om Malik 2020-12-22: I have had a long time to noodle on Professor Delong���s response to my continued optimism in America. He certainly didn���t share that hopefulness, and he may have missed the nuance of my argument. So, I will reiterate: If we recognize our problems, we can fix them.

This is not about pretending. It is about taking the steps necessary for moving forward, which we will never do if we insist on dragging our feet while a cloud of gloom swirls above us. I���m happy to report that the forecast calls for better conditions ahead.

In a matter of months, if not sooner, Professor Delong will (I hope) be administered a vaccine that will prevent infection from a novel coronavirus. It may come from a company called Moderna, a venture-backed, American biotech company that is redefining the next frontier of medicine.

Our handling of COVID-19 is emblematic of what makes America a very unique place. Though we absolutely botched our response to the pandemic, this country has also produced one of the vaccines to fight it. Our country has many problems, and we are uniquely capable of solving them.

In his response, the good professor points to a friend���s comments about Shanghai and how livable it feels. If that friend were a Uighur or a Mongolian, they might think differently. It���s a futuristic place, sure, but one with little room for intellectual freedom and debate. For example, Alibaba founder and CEO Jack Ma paid the price when he spoke bluntly about certain things the ruling party didn���t care to have discussed. The initial public offering of his extremely successful company, Ant Financial, was canceled. It���s also worth noting, as ProPublica recently pointed out, that China���s government-controlled Internet was behind the censorship of coronavirus-related information.

Here at home, we currently have politicians making wild and embarrassing claims about our elections. I suppose in places like Shanghai, where voting for the country���s leader isn���t an option, people are spared such unpleasantness ��� but that hardly seems preferable. The sheer number of Americans who participated in our November election should be a source of national pride and renewed optimism.

Soon, we will transition to a new administration. Vaccines will be administered. We will move forward. But we must not forget the failures of 2020 or ignore our many other issues. America needs to rebuild its infrastructure, prepare for a changed climate, address its healthcare crisis, and take a hard look at its education system.

Neither self-flagellation nor looking enviously at other countries will solve these problems. Many entrepreneurs I get to interact with are working on solutions. They acknowledge our many shortcomings, rather than wallowing in them, and then they move on to designing and implementing better policies.

America has always managed to invent a better tomorrow, even on its most difficult days. Reality is complex. Where there is struggle, there can also be transcendence. In order to experience the latter, we must first convince ourselves that it is possible.

.#americanexceptionalism #highlighted #orangehairedbaboons #politicaleconomy #2020-12-22

Briefly Noted for 2020-12-22

Matthew Yglesias: The Real Economic Challenge in 2021 https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-real-economic-challenge-in-2021: ���Back in 2018, there were a lot of articles with headlines like ���6 reasons that pay has lagged behind US job growth��� and ���7 reasons why wage growth is so slow.��� In retrospect, this wasn���t that mysterious. The labor market recovery had simply been very slow and 2018 turned out to be a year of accelerating wage growth. Then in 2019, things accelerated further. But the existence of articles puzzling over slow pre-2018 wage growth underscores the dangers of a sluggish recovery. Not only does sluggishness directly reduce wages, it generates complicated explanations for the sluggishness which distract policy attention from the urgent need to simply keep on keeping on with job creation���

Duncan Black: The Good Doctor https://www.eschatonblog.com/2020/12/the-good-doctor.html: ���Birx has had some pals in the media all along, desperate to keep her reputation intact, so this won't hurt at all: "WASHINGTON (AP) ��� As COVID-19 cases skyrocketed before the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus response, warned Americans to ���be vigilant��� and limit celebrations to ���your immediate household.��� For many Americans that guidance has been difficult to abide, including for Birx herself. The day after Thanksgiving, she traveled to one of her vacation properties on Fenwick Island in Delaware. She was accompanied by three generations of her family from two households. Birx, her husband Paige Reffe, a daughter, son-in-law and two young grandchildren were present..." Lives are complicated, but the people who rule us should at least try to pretend to set an example���

Tim Miller: This Is Your Brain on Newsmax https://thebulwark.com/this-is-your-brain-on-newsmax/: ���I would guess with a high level of confidence that all of these gentlemen know that Donald Trump lost. Spicer said as much on November 5 before Newsmax realized just how much juice they could get out of the scam. Ruddy openly told the New Yorker���s Isaac Chotiner that he saw a business opportunity in providing wall-to-wall election fraud fanfic. What these characters are doing is exploiting Trump Nation���s need to believe that their great, nectarine idol is unbreakable and that the only way he could ���lose��� is if people whom they hate���the Deep State, Big Tech, Antifa, the media, black people���are conspiring against him. So here is the dangerous story they are being told���minute by agonizing minute: Monday, November 30, 11:20 a.m.���National Report: For reference, I am working from bed and live streaming Newsmax via the YouTube TV app. I am armed only with my computer and a pour over coffee in an Ellen Show mug. I���m bracing for pain. First up it���s Trump campaign lawyers, Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, together in what appears to be their fancy Washington, D.C. home (Drain the Swamp!). They are praising Jared Kushner���s Middle East genius. The first commercial I see is a Newsmax promo that has Donald Trump saying ���Newsmax, you like Newsmax, I like it too��� twice in 10 seconds. The next ad is Pat Boone pushing silver. I did not know that Pat Boone was still alive���

.#brieflynoted #noted #2020-12-22

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/12/briefly-noted-for-2020-12-21.htm2

Briefly Noted for 2020-12-21

NASA: The ���Great��� Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn https://www.nasa.gov/feature/the-great-conjunction-of-jupiter-and-saturn: ���What makes this year���s spectacle so rare, then? It���s been nearly 400 years since the planets passed this close to each other in the sky, and nearly 800 years since the alignment of Saturn and Jupiter occurred at night���

Origins of the Drill Sergeant trope in western literature, and in history: William Shakespeare: Henry V, Act III, Scene 6 https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=henry5&Act=3&Scene=6&Scope=scene&LineHighlight=1554#1554...

Wikimedia Commons: File:Dishing-the-Whigs-1867.jpeg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dishing-the-Whigs-1867.jpeg���

Wikipedia: Anton Cermak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Cermak: ���44th Mayor of Chicago. In office: April 7, 1931����� March 6, 1933���

Clarence Darrow: Darrow -The Story of My Life http://clarkcunningham.org/PR/Darrow-Strike.htm: ���The Railroad Strike...

Luke A. L. Reynolds: Who Owned Waterloo? Wellington���s Veterans and the Battle for Relevance https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4392&context=gc_etds���

Jason Furman & Lawrence Summers: A Reconsideration of Fiscal Policy in the Era of Low Interest Rates https://www.piie.com/system/files/documents/furman-summers2020-12-01paper.pdf���

Aristotle_: Politics http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.1.one.html: ���Book I���

Jules Verne & Michel Verne: In the Year 2889 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19362/19362-h/19362-h.htm���

Wikipedia: In the Year 2889 (Short Story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Year_2889_(short_story)���

Christine McCloud: How To Use A Shuttle On A Loom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O98vJ8VEF4: ���How To Use A Shuttle On A Loom���

Anton Howes: Is Innovation in Human Nature? https://www.antonhowes.com/blog/is-innovation-in-human-nature: ���John Kay���s flying shuttle... an improvement to the loom, which radically increased the productivity of weaving.... Weavers would lift every other warp thread and pass the shuttle from hand to hand, hence passing the weft under the warp threads that were lifted, and over the ones that were not lifted. Under and over, under and over. Kay���s innovation was to use two wooden boxes on either side to catch the shuttle. And he attached a string, with a little handle called a picker, so that the shuttle could be jerked across the loom, at great speed. Here���s a��video��of it in action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O98vJ8VEF4. Kay���s innovation was extraordinary in its simplicity. As the inventor Bennet Woodcroft put it, weaving with an ordinary shuttle had been ���performed for upwards of five thousand years, by millions of skilled workmen, without any improvement being made to expedite the operation, until the year 1733���. All Kay added was some wood and some string. And he applied it to weaving wool, which had been England���s main industry since the middle ages. He had no special skill, he required no special understanding of science for it, and he faced no special incentive to do it���

.#brieflynoted #noted #2020-12-21

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/12/briefly-noted-for-2020-12-21.html

Smith: Why I'm so Excited About Solar & Batteries���Noted

Noah Smith: Why I'm so Excited About Solar & Batteries https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-im-so-excited-about-solar-and: ���In the 19th century we switched to coal... in the 20th century we upgraded to oil.... After World War 2, a global extraction regime and price controls allowed us to keep cheap oil flowing. That ended with the Oil Shocks of the 70s. And though oil became cheaper again in the 80s and 90s, it never attained its former lows, or its low volatility. Then in the 00s it got expensive again.... We didn���t get anything better than oil during this time.... More expensive energy makes physical innovation harder in every way.... This stagnation in energy technology almost certainly contributed to the productivity slowdown of the 1970s.... Why didn���t bits fill the gap?... IT did drive the re-acceleration of productivity that began in the late 80s and continued through the early 00s.... But around 2005... that productivity growth faded.... Some have argued that digital services are substantially undervalued in our economic production statistics.... Physical technology is less ���skill-biased��� than IT, meaning that pretty much anyone can be a factory worker but only a few people can use computers productively and effectively... [or] IT simply touches less of our lives than energy does.... ���Bits��� innovation sometimes drives fast productivity growth, and sometimes doesn���t.��� The cost declines in solar and batteries ��� and to a lesser extent, in wind and other storage technologies���comprise a true technological revolution.... And there���s no end in sight to this revolution. New fundamental advances like solid state lithium-ion batteries and next-generation solar cells seem within reach, which will kick off another virtuous cycle of deployment, learning curves, and cost decreases���

.#noted #2020-12-21