J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 111

October 6, 2019

The Shadow: An Outtake from "Slouching Toward Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century"

Inf 13 10 dore harpies 450 jpg 450��550 pixels

15.5: The Shadow: Populist Nationalism and Social Darwinism

15.5.1: Max Weber as German Chauvinist

The coming of social and political equality��or at least pressures toward that end��in the North Atlantic had a consequence. People were no longer primarily identifying themselves as (western) Christians or Calvinists or nobles or farriers but as Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, or Germans. This meant that they were definitely not Poles or Italians or Catalans(well, maybe they were still identifying themselves as Catalans), or even Auvernais. The drawing tight of the bonds of national identity meant the exclusion of those not identified with the ethno-nation from the ekumene��or worse: the rise of German nationality meant that Polish-speaking citizens of the traditional Hohenzollern lands, people whose ancestors had paid taxes and built roads for and died in the armies of the ruling dynasty of Prussia since the days of the Great Elector in the 1600s were now viewed as an alien excrescence in the body politic, human pus to be somehow treated to make the ethno-nation healthy...

...German academic Max Weber, for example, was a German liberal. He was a believer in one-man, one-vote rather than gerrymandered electorates and noble estates, a believer in responsible government by ministers responsible to elected legislatures rather than the whim of hereditary princes, a believer in progress and peace. Yet Max Weber was terrified of the threat to the German nation posed by barefoot hungry Poles. He said, completely seriously:

The German character of the East[ern provinces of Prussia]... should be protected... [by] the economic policy of the state��. Under the semblance of ��peace�� German peasants and day-labourers�� are getting the worst of it in the silent and dreary struggle of everyday economic existence... abandoning their homeland to a race... on a lower level... a dark future in which they will sink without trace.

To Weber, the real name for ��peace�� was ��race war��--and there could be no true peace, not ever: ��There can be no truce... the vulgar conception of political economy is that it consists in working out recipes for making the world happy��. We do not want to train up feelings of well-being in people��. Our successors will... hold us responsible... for the amount of elbow-room we conquer for them.�� When you think that this is a pre-WWI establishment German liberal, it makes you want to cry. When you think that this is supposed to be the smartest and most learned pre-WWI German social scientist, it really makes you want to cry.

Start with the questions of morality, which in most people��s minds is the command to: ��be excellent to one another!�� Max Weber disagrees: for him, the moral thing to do is to be un-excellent to as many people as possible in order to gain as much elbow-room��as much lebensraum��as possible for future generations of Germans. To march hundreds of miles to kill people you have never met so that the children of other people you have never met but who speak your language can have more elbow-room��this is raising up the great and noble characteristics of human nature. And this is not just during times of declared war, for what the na��ve call ��peace�� is simply the continuation of war by other means.

15.5.2: Nationalist Social Darwinism as Idiocy

This social Darwinist orientation is not only immoral but profoundly stupid.

It is simply insane as a matter of fact to claim substantial differences of any sort between human sub-populations. Homo Sapiens Sapiens appears to have emerged in a speciation event between 50 and 200 thousand years ago involving somewhere between 2,000 and 20,000 individuals, who thereafter interbred overwhelmingly with each other. We are all, in a selfish-gene sense, the equivalent of what third cousins would be among baboons, or any other two-sex animal with a healthy gene pool. A competent geneticist who happened to be a eugenicist would look at every single other person in the world and think: a valuable potential addition of variability to a human gene pool that has too little such.

And to claim differences in valuable genes between the German-speakers and the Polish-speakers living between the Elbe and the Vistula? Over the past two-thousand years, in the lands between the Elbe and the Vistula, the descendents of German-speakers began speaking Polish; Slavic-speakers moved in and their language evolved into Polish; Slavic-speakers moved in and their descendents began speaking German; German-speakers from further west moved in and their descendents kept speaking German; German-speakers from further west moved in and their descendents began speaking Polish; and everybody intermarried. ��A Prussian?�� said Konrad Adenauer, post-World War II West German Chancellor and a Rhinelander with a certain contempt for those of his fellow-countrymen from west of the Elbe, ��that��s a Pole who has forgotten who his grandfather was.�� The Poles and Germans whom Max Weber sees as engaged in a race war for domination on the Polish-German plain are, in all respects save the language that they are speaking at the moment, the same people.

We don��t even have the excuse of the Star Trek episode: ��But I am white on the left and black on the right, and he is white on the right and black on the left!��

World War I did not change Weber's mind: ��We have to be a world power, and in order to have a say in the future of the world we had to risk the war.... [It was our] responsibility before the bar of history...�� And it was during the war that he said:

Future generations, our own descendants above all, will not hold the Danes, Swiss, Dutch, and Norwegians responsible if world power��and that means ultimately control over the nature of culture in the future��is divided without a battle between the regulations of Russian officials on the one hand and the conventions of Anglo-Saxon ��society�� on the other, with perhaps a dash of Latin ��reason .��... Future generations will hold us responsible... and rightly so, for we are a nation of seventy and not seven millions.

15.5.3: Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century

One of the things that has characterized the entire twentieth century, on all six inhabited continents, has been nationalist ethnic cleansing.

Turkish governments decide that people identifying themselves as Armenians, Kurds, or Greeks need to be Turks, be gone, or be dead. Indonesian generals decide that people identifying themselves as Timorese need to stop doing so--or be gone. When you think of the benefits flowing from increased social equality and the rise of the ethno-nation state, remember to think of the costs as well as these imagined communities have provided many excuses to kill and destroy.

It may be that nationalist wars fought by citizens are inherently more difficult to stop and turn into peace than other kinds of wars. Mercenaries fight for pay. Plunderers fight for loot. Political and military leaders who see the war effort going pear-shaped can make peace, tell their mercenaries and plunderers that continuing the war would get them no more pay and no more loot but that they can keep what they have got. Gentlemen can look back on their service in a war��even an unsuccessful war��as an episode in which they won honor. Believers can think that they served their god.

But what can a citizen who is fought in an unsuccessful war look back on? They have sacrificed at the behest of their political and military leaders: what have they gained? Thus once the nationalist wars of the twentieth century were started, the leaders who had started them did not dare stop, as long as there was any chance of avoiding defeat at all.

15.5.4: Could These Demons Have Been Kept Leashed?

Suppose that the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Habsburg Monarchy that ruled what by 1914 was called the Austro-Hungarian Empire and that incorporated all or part of what is now the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ruthenia, Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria��suppose that Franz Ferdinand had not been assassinated, but had lived to ascend the throne as Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary in 1916��then World War I as we know it would not have happened. Would we then have seen the demons that were unleashed in 1914 and after controlled? Would the (relatively) peaceful world of 1870-1913 with growing and shared prosperity have kept politics softer?

Before World War I, Orthodox Easter Sunday in 1903 saw a pogrom in Kishinev: 50 Jews killed, about the same number of Jewish women raped, 1500 houses destroyed or damaged. It was seen as a big deal in the world journalism of the time.

After World War I, the Greco-Turkish War wound up with 50000 dead and 2 million people driven from their homes. It had about the same footprint in the world journalism of the time. It was a different, bloodier, world. Would this have been avoided.

After World War I, Acting-Brigadier General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to massacre 1000 at Amritsar. There were no British soldier casualties. In spite of former British Prime Minister Asquith calling it ��one of the worst outrages in the whole of our history�� and Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill calling it ��monstrous�� absolutely foreign to the British way of doing things��. And he called it terrorism: ��governments who have seized upon power by violence and by usurpation have often resorted to terrorism�� but the august and venerable structure of the British Empire�� does not need such aid��. And yet the House of Lords vogued to support Dyer. And in the House of Commons Churchill and companied were condemned as: ��sitting in Oriental aloofness in Whitehall, a year after, and 6,000 miles away�� pleased to measure the less or more of the severity applied by that gallant soldier��. If a gallant officer in the exercise of his discretion use a little more or less severity�� he is broken on the wheel��no trial, no possibility of defending himself.��

It was a different world.

Political historians (and assassins) tend to answer that this shift would have been avoided, that things would have kept going as they were going, that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and what followed switched world history onto different tracks. They tend to think that how events happen can be very important, and that determining and understanding the causal chains running from event to event are the purposes of history.

In their view human history is near-chaotic, at least at key times and places, and small changes can have very large long-run effects, just as the presence or absence of a hurricane can be determined by the flap of a butterfly��s wings a year before and three thousand miles away.

Economic and social historians have a very different presumption: if Franz Ferdinand had not been assassinated in the summer of 1914, he might have been assassinated somewhere else; if he had not been assassinated, the Austrian government would have found some other excuse for an attempt to chastise the Serbian government through what it had hoped would be a small, limited war. Key individuals, luck, and chaos may determine exactly how things happen, but for the most part what happens is the result of stronger, deeper currents of ideas and interests that cannot be diverted or transformed even by key events.

I follow my discipline. I see the demons as likely to have been unleashed, somehow, somewhere, in some form, and spread over the globe...

#ethniccleansing #fascism #genocide #highlighted slouching #2019-10-06

View more on J. Bradford DeLong's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 06, 2019 09:44

My Job as the Economist Here Is to Do the Numbers...

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0aOjZYHb_NKIojtbIPFDbptTg

Council on Foreign Relations: The Future of Democracy Symposium: Session Two: Economics, Identity, and the Democratic Recession: My job as the economist here is to do the numbers.

Over the past forty, fifty years we��ve seen some alleviation of��call them gender hierarchies. Women, even women who are high school dropouts are making more money adjusted for inflation now than women were back in 1981. And that progress spreads up the distribution, so that the group that��s done at least as well as anyone else are women with advanced degrees in America. For them, America is fulfilling the promise that people thought or expect to have of it...

..By contrast, men who do not have advanced degrees have been getting it in the neck over the past forty or fifty years��that their incomes now are barely above or are substantially below the incomes of their counterparts back in 1980. What they expected their lives would be like their lives aren��t like, and this strikes them as a substantial disappointment of rising expectations. And so it might not be economic anxiety but it��s that somehow some promise was taken away.

And it��s not in any sense that, you know, racial and ethnic hierarchies have been overturned. If you kind of look across the racial ethnicity groups, you don��t really see any one group that��s doing significantly better than one would have expected, given patterns of and differences of forty or fifty years ago, say, for black women with B.A.s. Black women with B.A.s are doing significantly better, it looks like, than pretty much any slice you have.

It��s not that things are being overturned in terms of the gap between black and white unemployment becoming less with the exception of the gender kind of thing. We, basically, are where we were forty or fifty years ago at least in terms of the economics, not in terms of a sociology. The economics may be less important.

But the fact that people��look, I mean, people believe that they have rights to a good life. People believe they have rights to stable communities that support them and that don��t disrupt and overturn their lives. You know, look at my neighbors south of Berkeley who are horrified at the idea that they might want to tear down a single-family house and build an apartment building for students.

People think that they have the right to the income that corresponds to the profession or the occupation that they have worked hard to become part of and people believe that they have a right to continuity of employment��that their job shouldn��t suddenly vanish because some financier three thousand miles away decided it doesn��t make a cost-benefit test. And, look, the only rights the market respects are property rights and the only property rights that are worth anything are those that help you make things for which rich people have a serious and unsatiated jones.

The fact that the American economy over the past forty years has not been delivering substantially rising living standards for everybody��that means that the market��s failure to deliver these other forms of nonproperty rights becomes the source of��call it economic anxiety��a big potential problem...

#equitablegrwoth #highlighted #history #inequality #politicaleconomy #2019-10-06

View more on J. Bradford DeLong's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 06, 2019 08:40

Will Wilkinson: Why an Assault Weapons Ban Hits Such a Ne...

Will Wilkinson: Why an Assault Weapons Ban Hits Such a Nerve With Many Conservatives https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/opinion/assault-rifle-ban.html: "They��ll tell you their foreboding 'predictions' of lethal resistance are really about preserving the means to protect the republic against an overweening, rights-stomping state. Don��t believe that, either. It��s really about the imagined peril of a multicultural majority running the show. Many countries that do more to protect their citizens against gun violence are more, not less, free than we are. According to the libertarian Cato Institute, 16 countries enjoy a higher level of overall freedom than the United States, and most of them ban or severely restrict ownership of assault weapons. The freedom to have your head blown off in an Applebee��s, to flee in terror from the bang of a backfiring engine, might not be freedom at all...

...I��m not too proud to admit that in my misspent libertarian youth, I embraced the idea that a well-armed populace is a bulwark against tyranny. I imagined us a vast Switzerland, hived with rifles to defend our inviolable rights against�� Michael Dukakis? What I slowly came to see is that freedom is inseparable from political disagreement and that holding to a trove of weapons as your last line of defense in a losing debate makes normal ideological opposition look like nascent tyranny and readies you to suppress it.

So it��s no surprise that the most authoritarian American president in living memory, elected by a paltry minority, is not threatened in the least by citizen militias bristling with military firepower. He knows they��re on his side...

#noted #2019-10-06

View more on J. Bradford DeLong's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 06, 2019 08:27

Cristobal Kay (2002): Why East Asia Overtook Latin Americ...

Cristobal Kay (2002): Why East Asia Overtook Latin America: Agrarian Reform, Industrialisation, and Development https://delong.typepad.com/asia-latin.pdf: "Scholars and policy makers have long debated the causes of the spectacular economic success achieved by the East Asian newly industrialising countries (NICs) as well as the lessons that other developing countries can learn from this development experience...

...Latin America started to industrialise many decades before the East Asian NICs and yet was quickly overtaken by them in the last few decades. This article explores the agrarian roots that may explain the different development trajectory and performance of the East Asian NICs, particularly South Korea and Taiwan, and Latin America. The analysis focuses mainly on three interconnected factors in seeking to understand why the East Asian NICs outperformed Latin America: 1) state capacity and policy performance or 'state-craft'; 2) character of agrarian reform and its impact on equity and growth; 3) interactions between agriculture and industry in development strategies...

The World Bank and neoliberal economists... argued... the main lesson... from the East Asian NICs [is]... thatf ree markets, free trade and an export-orientated development strategy are the key to economic success (Krueger, 1985; Balassa, 1988; Harberger,1988). Thus countries which had pursued protectionism and import substitution industrialisation (ISI) policies came in for heavy criticisms by the World Bank and advocates of neoliberal economic policies (Krueger, 1978; Balassa, 1982; Lal, 1983; Corbo et al, 1985)...
The success of the NICs was largely a result of the crucial role played by the state, which also at times involved selective protectionist policies (Wade,1988; Gore,1996).... The state was heavily involved in the NICs' development process...
It still argues against a developmentalist state and for a minimalist role of the state in economic affairs. Many developing countries influenced by the experience of the NICS have attempted to emulate their dramatic industrial export performance with varying degrees of success...
I first explore to what extent South Korea's and Taiwan's comprehensive agrarian reform... was a significant factor... compared with Latin America, where agrarian reforms were implemented, if at all, only after its industrialisation was well underway. I then discuss South Korea's andTaiwan's agrarian transformation.... I compare South Korea's and Taiwan's development strategy and experience with that of Latin America... on three key issues: state capacity and policies, agrarian structure and class relations, and the significance of certain forms of intersectoral resource flows in development...
Agriculture should not be squeezed to such an extent that farmers no longer have the resources or the incentives to invest.... The advantage of peasant farming, as shown in South Korea and Taiwan, is that it has a great capacity for self-exploitation...
In Taiwan and South Korea, government policy left sufficient economic incentives for peasant farmers significantly to raise agricultural productivity and output...
South Korea's and Taiwan's superior state capacity and policy performance.... Latin America's failure to create an agrarian structure more conducive to growth with equity.... South Korea's andTaiwan's greater ability to design an appropriate industrial policy as well as to bring about a more positive interaction between agriculture and industry...

#noted #2019-10-06

View more on J. Bradford DeLong's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 06, 2019 08:25

October 5, 2019

Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-05:

David Epstein: Range: Wh...

Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-05:

David Epstein: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized Worlds https://books.google.com/books?id=ma1sDwAAQBA...

Binyamin Appelbaum: The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society https://books.google.com/books?id=8sWCDwAAQBAJ...

Electric Sheep Comix: Apocamon: The Book of Revelation in Manga Format, as God Intended https://www.electricsheepcomix.com/apocamon/...

#noted #verybrieflynoted

View more on J. Bradford DeLong's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 05, 2019 06:36

Weekend Reading: Monica Potts: In the Land of Self-Defeat

Opinion In the Land of Self Defeat The New York Times

Weekend Reading: I saw this in Kansas City, of all places��where, IIRC, one firm dropped out of funding the Chamber of Commerce because it was going on roadshows outside trying to attract jobs to the region. It thought more mployers might force it to pay higher wages: Monica Potts: In the Land of Self-Defeat https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/opinion/sunday/trump-arkansas.html: "What a fight over the local library in my hometown in rural Arkansas taught me about my neighbors�� go-it-alone mythology��and Donald Trump��s unbeatable appeal.... I returned to Van Buren County at the end of 2017 after 20 years.... I��ve realized that it is true that people here think life here has taken a turn for the worse. What��s also true, though, is that many here seem determined to get rid of the last institutions trying to help them, to keep people with educations out, and to retreat from community life and concentrate on taking care of themselves and their own families. It��s an attitude that is against taxes, immigrants and government, but also against helping your neighbor.... I realized this after a fight over, of all things, our local library.... The library board wanted to increase the pay it could offer a new head librarian, who would be combining her new job with an older one, to 25 an hour.... The library has historically provided a variety of services for this community. It has offered summer reading camps for children and services like high-speed internet, sewing classes and academic help. I grew up going to the library and visited it often when I returned. It was always busy. I thought people would be supportive. Instead, they started a fight.... The first comment came from Amie Hamilton, who reiterated her point when I interviewed her several months later. 'If you want to make 25 an hour, please go to a city that can afford it', she wrote. 'We the people are not here to pay your excessive salaries through taxation or in any other way'. There was general agreement among the Facebook commenters that no one in the area was paid that much... and the people who do actually earn incomes that are similar��teachers and many county officials��largely remained quiet.... When a few of us, including me, pointed out that the candidate for the library job had a master��s degree, more people commented on the uselessness of education. 'Call me narrow-minded but I��ve never understood why a librarian needs a four-year degree', someone wrote. 'We were taught Dewey decimal system in grade school. Never sounded like anything too tough'.... The library fight was, itself, a fight over the future of rural America, what it meant to choose to live in a county like mine, what my neighbors were willing to do for one another, what they were willing to sacrifice to foster a sense of community here. The answer was, for the most part, not very much...

...Van Buren gave Mr. Trump 73 percent of its vote.... People are leaving rural areas for cities because that��s where the jobs are.... Many rural counties are also experiencing declines in whatever industries were once the major employers. In Appalachia, this is coal; in much of the Midwest, it is heavy manufacturing; and in my county, and many other counties, it��s natural gas and other extractive industries. This part of Arkansas sits on the Fayetteville Shale, which brought in natural gas exploration in the early 2000s. For about a decade, the gas companies paid local taxes on their property, equipment and the money they made from extracting natural gas, and landowners paid property taxes on the royalties they earned. It was a boom. Many people at the time, here and elsewhere, expected that the money would last longer than it did. Instead, the price of natural gas plummeted in 2009 and profits declined. Production slowed. One of the biggest natural gas companies in the area, Houston-based Southwestern Energy, stopped paying taxes to the counties here, arguing that the rates were unfair. The company and five Arkansas counties, including mine, are still locked in litigation over some of the money it owes (it recently paid a portion of it).... When local economies are flagging, state governments don��t step in to help as much as they once did....

The fight over the pay for the new head librarian had a larger context: The library moved into a new building, with new services, in 2016. Construction began during the natural gas boom years, and ended after the bust, just as the county budget was being squeezed and services were being cut. During the boom, the new building had seemed necessary, but with the revenue decreases, the county knew it was going to have a hard time paying the 2.1 million still owed on it. (Disclosure: My mother was on the library board when some of the decisions about the new building were made.) The library made its own budget cuts, but the savings weren��t enough to cover the shortfall in paying for the building, and there was a real danger of the library closing, leaving its new, hulking brick building empty. The people who didn��t frequent the library argued that the community didn��t really need it anymore, anyway. After all, if you have internet, you can get whatever you want in a day. Such was the situation when the pay raise showed up on the Quorum Court agenda. Why give one person a raise when the county was slashing its budget, when we were going without so much else? The head librarian candidate, Andrea Singleton, eventually took the job at the old salary, just over $19 an hour, although at first the fight made her upset enough to consider leaving. ��It was enough to make me want to run away,�� Ms. Singleton, who had been on the library��s staff for four years when she was offered the promotion, told me. ��But I got over it.��...

Ms. Hamilton, the Facebook commenter, told me that the voters fixed the county��s problems by electing Republicans to countywide offices in 2018, including Mr. James, who replaced a Democrat who��d held the office for four terms. ��Some people are more fiscally responsible than others,�� she said. Ms. Hamilton, who is 52, had moved to the county during the natural gas boom, in 2008, and continued working with that industry even after it left. She commutes each week to work in... Midland-Odessa.... She noted that Clinton is a small town and simply couldn��t afford the luxury of government services. ��If you��re looking for a handout, this is not the place; we can��t support that,�� Ms. Hamilton said. Mr. Widener... was born in... Conway, home to the University of Central Arkansas. He commutes there for work in the university��s information technology department. He told me the idea of paying the librarian $25 an hour was ��typical government waste.�� He added, ��It��s the same thing in Washington.�� The typical private-sector wage in Van Buren, $10 to $13 an hour, was right for the county, many people said. Anything more than that was wasteful, or evidence of government corruption....

Almost everyone I spoke with feels that the county overspent during the gas boom years, and that the bill is coming due. ��We got wasteful and stupid, and now we have to go back to common sense,�� Corrine Weatherly, who owns a dress- and costume-making shop, Sew What, told me. Ms. Weatherly also runs the county fair, and so she shows up to almost every Quorum Court meeting.... Ms. Hamilton told me she��d witnessed, in Texas, a hospital being practically bankrupted by the cost of caring for immigrants and said, ��I don��t want my tax dollars to be used to pay for people that are coming here just to sit on a government ticket.�� Mr. Widener, who described himself as ��more libertarian�� than anything else, told me his heart goes out to migrant children who are held in detention centers at the border, but he blames the parents who brought them to this country. Where I see needless cruelty, my neighbors see necessary reality....

Many of those who want to live in a place with better schools, better roads and bigger public libraries have taken Ms. Hamilton��s suggestion��they��ve moved to places that can afford to offer them. This includes many of my peers from high school.... Phillip Ellis, who was chosen to be chairman of the library board right before the controversies began, thought the outrage about the potential tax increase was more about philosophy than actual numbers. ��I think it��s just anti-tax anything,�� he said. He recounted some of the complaints people in the county had made to him about the proposed increase. ��They��d say, ��So-and-so has a big farm and they may not even use the library,�� he recalled. He would tell them, ��Well, I don��t have children and never use the school.�� With that sort of mentality, he said, ��no one will do anything.��... Many other counties have turned to sales taxes as property taxes dwindle: It means that people who stop to shop when they��re passing through pay it as well, but it��s also a tax that tends to fall harder on lower-income households....

Economic appeals are not going to sway any Trump voters, who view anyone who is trying to increase government spending, especially to help other people, with disdain, even if it ultimately helps them, too. And Trump voters are carrying the day here in Van Buren County.... As long as Democrats make promises to make their lives better with free college and Medicare for all sound like they include government spending, these voters will turn to Trump again��and it won��t matter how many scandals he��s been tarnished by...

#orangehairedbaboons #weekendreading #2019-10-05

View more on J. Bradford DeLong's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 05, 2019 06:32

October 4, 2019

Comment of the Day: Phil Koop https://www.bradford-delong...

Comment of the Day: Phil Koop https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/superintelligence-the-idea-that-eats-smart-people.html#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a4da5242200b: "There are many good arguments there, but you just know that The Argument From Slavic Pessimism is the one nearest and dearest to his heart. Not that I disagree-it's a good argument! I'm convinced...

#commentoftheday

View more on J. Bradford DeLong's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 04, 2019 17:36

Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (October 4 , 2019)

6a00e551f080038834022ad3b05124200d

Musts of the Musts:

Podcast: Trump's Impact on the Economy https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/09/cottogottfried-_what-happens-to-americas-economy-if-trump-is-reelected-brad-delong-explains_-donald-trump-if-he.html: Cotto/Gottfried: What Happens to America's Economy If Trump Is Reelected? Brad DeLong Explains: "Donald Trump... if he manages to secure a second term, what would four more years of his presidency mean for America's economy? Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Brad DeLong, who now is an economics professor at UC Berkeley, addresses this hugely important question��and much more��on 'Cotto/Gottfried.'... See more episodes here: https://wtcgcottogottfried.blogspot.com/. San Francisco Review of Books main page: http://www.sanfranciscoreviewofbooks.com...

Steve M.: We Might Have Impeachment Now Because They Found a Way to Make It Centrist https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2019/09/we-might-have-impeachment-now-because.html: "A couple of days ago I predicted that the Ukraine whistleblower story wouldn't amount to anything, because of Nancy Pelosi's fear of a left-centrist voter backlash against impeachment and because rank-and-file voters aren't likely to understand what the fuss is about. And yet now we're being told that impeachment seems 'almost inevitabl'. What changed? There's no polling evidence I know of.... There's no reason to believe that even a single Republican in Congress will support impeachment or vote to convict in the Senate. (Mitt Romney's words are characteristically mealy-mouthed: "If the President asked or pressured Ukraine's president to investigate his political rival, either directly or through his personal attorney, it would be troubling in the extreme." And I swear I can hear Susan Collins quietly wringing her hands somewhere off in the distance.) Yet impeachment is on the table now. Why? Nancy Pelosi is still the same person she was a week ago, when impeachment was being slow-walked at her insistence. Pelosi still fears Republicans and Reagan Democrat, Obama/Trump voters in Michigan diners. But she's accepting this because now she can sell the pursuit as centrist. It's about global stability and international alliances. If you want to use the term, Trump is being accused of high crimes and misdemeanors in a neoliberal way...

Berkeley Social Science: Authors Meet Critics: The Populist Temptation _ http://matrix.berkeley.edu/event/authors-meet-critics-populist-temptation: "Please join us on October 3, 2019 at 4pm for a book talk featuring: Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics & Political Science, UC Berkeley; Paul Pierson, Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley; Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley. Barry Eichengreen��s book, _The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era, places the global resurgence of populism in a deep historical context. It argues that populists tend to thrive in the wake of economic downturns, when it is easy to convince the masses of elite malfeasance. While bankers, financiers, and ��bought�� politicians are partly responsible, populists�� own solutions tend to be simplistic and economically counterproductive. By arguing that ordinary people are at the mercy of extra-national forces beyond their control, populists often degenerate into demagoguery and xenophobia. Eichengreen posits that interventions must begin with shoring up and improving the welfare state so that it is better able to act as a buffer for those who suffer most during economic slumps. In discussing his book, Eichengreen will be engaging two eminent colleagues: Paul Pierson, a renowned specialist in populism, social theory, and political economy, and Brad DeLong, a distinguished economist who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Clinton Administration and is currently a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. This talk is presented as part of Social Science Matrix's new "Authors Meet Critics" book series, which features lively discussions about recently published books by social scientists at UC Berkeley...

Kevin Drum: Remember What Ukrainegate Is About https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/09/remember-what-ukrainegate-is-about/: "Ukrainegate is about Donald Trump holding military assistance hostage unless a foreign leader agreed to help him win an election. To the best of anyone��s knowledge, this has never happened before.... Nothing that was said��or yelled or tweeted��over the weekend has changed this...

Duncan Black: Just Like Any Other President https://www.eschatonblog.com/2019/09/just-like-any-other-president.html: "I can imagine the conversations in newsrooms when Trump became president. They aren't all that stupid. "How are we supposed to cover this freak show of a man?" And the answer they came to is "we cover it like we cover any other presidency." But that's not what they've done, even if they think it is. They aren't covering Trump as they would've covered Obama or even George W. Bush. Pretending everything is normal is not normal coverage. Normally "tan suits" are enough to cause a freakout....

And so the cruelty of U.S. immigration policy has now touched me personally. Maria Isabel Bueso is the sister of one of my daughter's friends from high school. It appears to have taken the personal intervention of at least on U.S. senator to get INS to at least reconsider whether it really wants to be pointlessly cruel. And, after watching this story unfold, I can no longer push back against those who claim that, as far as current U.S. immmigration policy is concerned, the cruelty is the point. I had been pushing back, but no more: Farida Jhabvala Romero: Feds to Reconsider Case of Bay Area Woman Getting Lifesaving Treatment Who Faces Deportation https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/09/feds-to-reconsider-case-of-bay-area-woman-getting-lifesaving-treatment-who-faces-deportation-the-california-report-kqed-n.html: "Maria Isabel Bueso has overcome many challenges as a result of the debilitating genetic disease she was born with that eventually left her confined to a wheelchair, breathing through a device and��reliant upon weekly treatments to survive. She trained to become a dance teacher and now is an instructor, and she graduated��summa cum laude from California State University, East Bay��where she set up a scholarship fund for students with disabilities. She also advocates for people with her disease and other rare illnesses, traveling to Washington, D.C., to lobby for medical research. Now, Bueso��is fighting for her life once more. Immigration authorities previously told her and her family to leave the U.S. by mid-September��or face deportation to her home country of Guatemala...

Barry Eichengreen: The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era http://books.google.com/?isbn=0190866284: "In the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe... the reaction of voters against the political establishment, nationalist and racialist sentiment directed against foreigners and minorities, and a yearning for forceful, charismatic leadership, this something, whatever we call it, is not new...

Ana Lucia Araujo: No, Confederate Monuments Don't Preserve History. They Manipulate It: "Fort Monroe.... The creation of Jefferson Davis Memorial Park and installation of the controversial archway bearing his name did not occur until the 1950s��not coincidentally when African Americans were fighting for equal legal and civil rights...

Abraham Gutman: When Moving to Opportunity Offers No Opportunity at All: A Lesson from the Great Migration: "Ellora Derenoncourt.... Historically, Northern cities offered much more upward mobility to both white and black children.... But at some point something changed. 'That pattern [of upward mobility] persists for white families', Derenoncourt says, '[but] it��s completely not true for black families anymore'. For black children, growing up in Northern cities like Philadelphia doesn��t offer any more opportunity in terms of upward mobility than growing up in the South...

Shelly Banjo and Sarah Frier: Twitter Helps Beijing Push Agenda Abroad Despite Ban in China: "Twitter employees train Chinese officials to amplify message. Push persists despite recent ban on paid ads from state media...

Notice anybody kissing from this list of Nazi victims?: UK University and College Union: Holocaust Memorial Day https://ucu.org.uk/hmd: "UCU commemorates Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) observed annually on 27 January. It does so in memory of the millions who were murdered in the Holocaust and subsequent genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, Darfur and Rwanda in order to challenge hatred and persecution in the UK today. The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2020 is 'Stand Together'. It explores how genocidal regimes throughout history have deliberately fractured societies by marginalising certain groups, and how these tactics can be challenged by individuals standing together with their neighbours, and speaking out against oppression.... Trade unions, including social democrats and communists, were the first among many groups who were persecuted by the Nazi following Hitler's rise to power in 1933. Other groups persecuted included: * Europe's Roma and Sinti people * 'asocials' which included beggars, alcoholics, drug addicts, * prostitutes and pacifists * black people * disabled people-those with physical as well as mental illness * freemasons * gay and lesbian people * Jehovah's Witnesses * non-Jewish Poles and Slavic POWs. Please continue to let us know how your branch will be commemorating the day by emailing us at eqadmin@ucu.org.uk. Below we outline a few ideas for planning an event and please do use our resources...

Duncan Black: This Is Excellent News For John McCain https://www.eschatonblog.com/2019/09/this-is-excellent-news-for-john-mccain.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/bRuz+(Eschaton): "It always is: "Executive Director of the McCain Institute Kurt Volker resigned from his position as the U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine Friday, following reports he collaborated with Ukraine and President Donald Trump. An ASU official confirmed Volker's resignation Friday, and said the University could not speak about his future at ASU because the University does not comment on personnel matters...

Dan Froomkin: _ "The AP_ https://twitter.com/froomkin/status/1178643473387462657?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1178643473387462657&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eschatonblog.com%2F2019%2F09%2Fjust-like-any-other-president.html simply ignores Trump��s civil war threat and his call for Schiff to be tried for treason...

Ben Thompson: What Is a Tech Company?: "Note the centrality of software in all of these characteristics: (1) Software creates ecosystems. (2) Software has zero marginal costs. (3) Software improves over time. (4) Software offers infinite leverage. (5) Software enables zero transaction costs. The question of whether companies are tech companies, then, depends on how much of their business is governed by software��s unique characteristics, and how much is limited by real world factors. Consider Netflix, a company that both competes with traditional television and movie companies yet is also considered a tech company: (1) There is no real software-created ecosystem. (2) Netflix shows are delivered at zero marginal costs without the need to pay distributors (although bandwidth bills are significant). (3) Netflix��s product improves over time. (4) Netflix is able to serve the entire world because of software, giving them far more leverage than much of their competition. (5) Netflix can transact with anyone with a self-serve model. Netflix checks four of the five boxes. Airbnb, which has yet to go public, is also often thought of as a tech company, even though they deal with lodging.... Uber, meanwhile, has long been mentioned in the same breath as Airbnb, and for good reason: it checks most of the same boxes.... WeWork... is hard to see how... is a tech company in any way.... Peloton is also iffy as far these five factors go, but then again, so is Apple: software-differentiated hardware is in many respects its own category...

I do not see this as a "silver lining" at all. To say that there are now trends for factories to locate close to demand is not an alternative source of regional comparative advantage and disadvantage but rather an amplifier of other sources. Ultimately, customers are located in regions that have regional exports. A region that does not have large regional exports��and the prospect of growing more��will not be attractive to firms making long-run decisions and attempting to locate where their customers will be. It is likely to be a very uphill climb: Rana Foroohar: The Silver Lining for Labour Markets | Financial Times: "The McKinsey Global Institute found that globalisation was actually bottom of the list of the top five reasons that labour��s share of national income has declined since the turn of the 21st century.... The biggest reason... supercycles in areas such as commodities and real estate have made those sectors, which favour capital over labour, a larger part of the overall economy.... Reason number two��a rise in the importance of intangible assets... Automation and the speeding up of capital substitution because of technological shifts have hurt traditional industrial areas disproportionately.... But in the future it will also radically favour a few regions... a mere 25 cities and regions could account for 60 per cent of US job growth by 2030.... Tech hubs will benefit, of course, as will commodity-rich areas and tourism centres catering to the wealthy. But so will... regions... capitalis[ing] on a silver lining.... When labour makes up less of the overall cost of producing goods and services, then offshoring jobs starts to make less sense. What does make sense is being closer to customer demand.... Companies such as Nike and Adidas have built highly automated 'speed-factories' in the US, Mexico and Germany to roll out the latest styles faster and more cheaply.... The solution: shift policy to support human capital investment.... If we continue to subsidise software without supporting people, the future looks grim.

I do not understand this alternative. Tapping into global markets is great��if you have something to sell. But if low-wage labor is no longer a powerful source of potential comparative advantage, what then do poor countries have to sell that could jump-start development? There is labor, there is capital, there is expertise, there is your natural resource base. Poor counties are poor because they lack capital and expertise. And as for natural resources��well, "resource curse" is a phrase often heard for good reasons: Michael Spence: The ��Digital Revolution�� of Wellbeing: "In the early stages of development... labor-intensive process-oriented manufacturing and assembly has played an indispensable role.... Advances in robotics and automation are now eroding the developing world��s traditional source of comparative advantage.... E-commerce platforms... the real prize is the global marketplace. Only if digital platforms could be extended to tap into global demand would they suggest an alternative growth model (provided that tariffs and regulatory barriers do not get in the way)...

Sparking a slave revolt as a way of undermining an opposing polis in classical Greece. Here the Spartans do it to the Athenians. Later on the Thebans would do it to the Spartans in spades. Hard to maintain that classical Athens, at least did not heavily rely on slavery: Thucydides: Harming the Athenians https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2019/09/18/harming-the-athenians/: "Decelea was first invested by the whole enemy army in that summer and later was held by the garrisons coming from different cities coming in turn to ravage the land, it was causing great harm to the Athenians. Indeed, this undermined Athenian affairs first by loss of property and then by the death of men. Previous attacks were brief and did not keep the Athenians from deriving benefit from their land the rest of the time. But once they were continually invested in Attica and they were sometimes attacking in force and at other times using a single garrison attacking the country and pillaging to supply itself. The Spartan king Agis was also present and he was no slacker in prosecuting the war. The Athenians were greatly harmed; they were deprived of their whole land. More than twenty thousand slaves freed themselves and a great number of these were craftspeople. All of the sheep and pack animals perished. And the Athenian horses, because the cavalry was deploying every day to attack Decelea and guard the land, either went lame because of working on rocky ground or they were wounded...

As I have said, I have swung around to the point of view that the New York Times's bending over backwards to soft-pedal Trumps cruelty, lunacy, and mendacity is because the Sulzburgers like their tax cut. As one person said to me last week: "you have no idea how many rich old- and middle-aged men have said to me: 'Don't tell my wife, but I'm voting for Trump again'": XLProfessor: "It's really bad that @nytimes still hasn't changed their characterization of Trump's 9/11 story from "exaggerated," to "false," considering how many people have pointed out their error. They need to make a point of getting this right before the election...

Charles Johnson: "[Trumpists] owning the libs by laughing about how openly corrupt they are https://t.co/XY3iZglKV5: Mark Knoller: 'Beginning speech to Concerned Women of America, Secretary Pompeo "this is such a beautiful hotel. The guy who owns it must gonna be successful along the way," he says, without mentioning [Trump] by name. "That was for the Washington Post," he says of his remark...

Maciej Ceglowski: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People: "I was delighted some years later to come across an essay by Scott Alexander about what he calls epistemic learned helplessness. Epistemology is one of those big words, but all it means is 'how do you know what you know is true?'. Alexander noticed that when he was a young man, he would be taken in by 'alternative' histories he read by various crackpots. He would read the history and be utterly convinced, then read the rebuttal and be convinced by that, and so on. At some point he noticed was these alternative histories were mutually contradictory, so they could not possibly all be true. And from that he reasoned that he was simply somebody who could not trust his judgement. He was too easily persuaded. People who believe in superintelligence present an interesting case, because many of them are freakishly smart. They can argue you into the ground. But are their arguments right, or is there just something about very smart minds that leaves them vulnerable to religious conversion about AI risk, and makes them particularly persuasive? Is the idea of 'superintelligence' just a memetic hazard?...

This puzzles me: at least semi-stable schedules are relatively easy to provide for employers, and are worth a lot to workers. I do kinda wonder if these trends are the result of now two decades of slack labor markets in which workers are and employers want to remind workers that they ought to be grateful for any jobs at all: Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett: For Job Quality, Time Is More than Money: "What we found is striking: Working in the service sector doesn��t only mean low pay and few fringe benefits, it also means turning over the reins to your employer when it comes to when and how much you will work. This so-called 'just-in-time' scheduling approach has consequences for millions of American workers. People with unstable work schedules are markedly less happy. They sleep less well and are more likely to report feeling distressed. This pattern plays out consistently whether we look at short notice, last-minute changes or routine ups and downs in work hours. For instance, employees who worked ��on-call�� shifts were less likely by half to report good sleep quality than their co-workers who didn��t work on-call...

Michael V. White: Retrospectives: Who Said "Debauch the Currency": Keynes or Lenin?: "One frequently quoted passage from the work of John Maynard Keynes is that 'the best way to destroy the capitalist system [is] to debauch the cur'r cy." The passage, attributed to Vladimir Illyich Lenin, appears in Keynes' book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which became an international bestseller when it was published in 1919. Economic historian Frank W. Fetter and others have expressed doubt that Keynes was really quoting Lenin because they found no such statement in Lenin's collected published writings. Fetter suggested that Keynes based his remark on stories about what the Soviets were supposed to be saying that he heard at the Paris peace conference of 1919. It is now possible to show that Keynes based his remark on a report of an interview with Lenin published by London and New York newspapers in April 1919. Keynes' discussion of inflation in the Economic Consequences can then be read as an extended commentary on the remarks attributed to Lenin in the interview. While the report of the interview was not reprinted after 1919, it will be also shown here that Lenin responded to Keynes in a speech that was reprinted in his Collected Works...

I wish to once again that there is something very wrong with the New YorK Times's news judgment, and has been since at least... do we date it Judy Miller or to the start to Whitewater, or earlier?. This is a problem: Scott Lemieux: Say What You Will About Both Sides Do It, It's an Ethos http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/09/say-what-you-will-about-both-sides-do-it-its-an-ethos: "On May 1, the New York Times published a story that contained the most important facets of the Ukraine story. The Times reported that President Trump, through his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was pressing Ukraine��s government to investigate Joe Biden. And yet, having uncovered a massive scandal, the Times buried its own scoop. The revelation, which many people now see an an impeachable offense, was buried in the middle of a story that was primarily devoted to carrying Trump��s water. Headlined 'Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies', the story spun out a version of the narrative Giuliani has been trying to implant in the media... [that] Joe Biden took untoward action to help his son Hunter��s business in Ukraine by demanding the firing of a prosecutor who was investigating him. The news about Trump��s role arrived only after nine paragraphs of insinuations against Biden. And then, after a brief detour that casually reveals that the Biden story is the product of an extraordinary abuse of power by the president, it returns to a long unspooling of the Biden-Ukraine narrative. Even at the the time, and especially in retrospect, it was an example of extremely bizarre journalistic judgment.... Were does the Hunter Biden story come from? Why, none other that Peter 'Clinton Cash' Schweizer. No matter how many times they come up empty these people will never stop chasing Steve Bannon��s snipe hunts...

Chad P. Bown: "Trump administration officials decided the best way to deal with recession risk which they of course aren��t personally worried about, was through a show of force on TV: Catherine Rampell: Move Over, Illuminati. The Conspiracy Against Trump��s Economy Is Massive: "Trump, aided by his economic brain trust of cranks and sycophants, believes any indicator showing the U.S. economy could be in trouble must be fabricated. It��s all part of an anti-Trump conspiracy, he rants, according to reports in The Post, the Associated Press and the New York Times. And move over, Illuminati, because this particular conspiracy is massive. It��s led by the Federal Reserve, Democrats and the media, of course, or so say Trump and his Fox News minions. But it also includes the entire U.S. bond market, which flashed a warning sign last week when the Treasury yield curve inverted (meaning long-term bonds had lower interest rates than short-term ones, which usually predates a downturn). Also colluding are the many farmers, retailers, manufacturers and economists who have been warning for more than a year that the burden of Trump��s tariffs is mainly borne by Americans, not China or other trading partners, and also that uncertainty over trade tensions can paralyze hiring, investment and purchasing decisions, which we need to keep the economy expanding.... The White House has reportedly declined to develop contingency plans for a downturn because it doesn��t want to validate this 'negative narrative'. This is, in a word, idiotic. As others have analogized, it��s like refusing to buy a fire extinguisher because you��re afraid of feeding a ��negative narrative�� that you might someday��face��a fire.��Administration officials decided the best way to deal with recession risk, which they of course aren��t personally worried about, was through a show of force on TV.... Peter Navarro��s strategy was to deny that the data show Americans are paying higher prices on tariffed goods (though we are) and also that the yield curve had recently inverted (though it did).... Larry Kudlow... bizarrely pretended other troubling economic data (in this case, on consumer sentiment) didn��t exist.... It��s hard to imagine nervous Americans are really this credulous. Then again, perhaps we were��never the intended audience for such performances. Sure, maybe White House aides��are trying to fool the public into believing recession warning��signs don��t exist. But maybe they��re��actually just trying to fool their boss...

We still do not really know why the factor-terms distribution of income has shifted against labor so much in the past generation: Mark Thoma sends us to: Tim Taylor: Why Did the US Labor Share of Income Fall So Quickly?: "The��McKinsey Global Institute... James Manyika,��Jan Mischke,��Jacques Bughin,��Jonathan Woetzel,��Mekala Krishnan, and Samuel Cudre (May 2019)..... From 1947-2000, the labor share of income fell from 65.4% to 62.3%. There already seemed to be a pattern of decline in the 1980s and 1990s in particular, which was then reversed for a short time at the tail end of the dot-com boom. But since 2000, the labor share has sunk to 56.7% in 2016.... 'We find that that the main drivers for the decline in the labor share of income since 1999 are��as follows, starting with the most important: supercycles and boom-bust (33 percent), rising depreciation and shift to IPP capital (26 percent), superstar effects and consolidation��(18 percent), capital substitution and technology (12 percent), and globalization and labor bargaining power (11 percent).... One possible interpretation is that sharp drop in labor income from 1999-2016 was a little deceptive, because in part it was based on cyclical factors, but a number of the factors underlying a longer-term decline in labor share continue to operate...

Doug Jones: The World at 1000 BCE https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2019/10/01/the-world-at-1000-bce-5/: "The world population is about 50 million. The Bantu expansion is just beginning, from a homeland on the present Nigeria/Cameroon border. It will eventually cover most of Africa south of the equator.... Seafarers with roots in��the Lapita culture��have already reached Western Polynesian.... The Olmec are flourishing in Meso-America.... In China, the Mandate of Heaven has passed from the Shang Dynasty to the Zhou. In the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, the Late Bronze Age collapse has opened up space for smaller states. Tyre and other Phoenician city-states are sailing the Mediterranean. Phoenicians are using an alphabet that Greeks will eventually adapt.... Further south, Philistines and Israelites have been duking it out, with Israelites gaining the upper hand under David* (king from 1010 to 970 BCE). The Iron Age conventionally begins now.... On the steppe, horses have long been domesticated, but people are now learning to make effective use of cavalry��fighting in formation and firing volleys from horseback. This is the beginning of 2500 years in which the division between Steppe and Sown will be central to Eurasian history...

For the Weekend: Johnny Cash: The Man Comes Around https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/johnny-cash-the-man-comes-around-for-the-weekend.html...

Weekend Reading: 2005 Comments on and Discussion of Raghu Rajan: "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?" https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/weekend-reading-2005-comments-on-and-discussion-of-raghu-rajan-has-financial-development-made-the-world-riskier.html: "Mr. Blinder: 'I��d like to defend Raghu a little bit against the unremitting attack he is getting here for not being a sufficiently good Chicago economist...

Note to Self: Lessons from East Asian Development: Japanese Industrial Policy: Readings https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/note-to-self-lessons-from-east-asian-development-japanese-industrial-policy-readings-oriol-pons-benaiges-2017.html...

Equitable Growth: Worthy Reads from October 4, 2018 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/reopen-fifteen-worthy-reads-for-october-4.html...

Very Briefly Noted: 2019-10-04 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/very-briefly-noted-2019-10-04-1-raghu-rajan-2005-_has-financial-development-made-the-world-riskier_-2-f.html...

Very Briefly Noted: 2019-10-03 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/very-briefly-noted-2019-10-03-1-josiah-ober-_rationality-interests-and-choice-in-greek-thought-and-practice_.html...

Very Briefly Noted: 2019-10-02 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/very-briefly-noted-2019-10-02-1-cal-peternell-_a-recipe-for-cooking_-2-harry-brighouse-_becoming-a-bet.html...

Comment of the Day: Kaleberg https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/comment-of-the-day-_kaleberg_-theres-a-reason-david-lodge-in-his-_changing-places_-set-up-euphoric-state-universit.html: "There's a reason David Lodge, in his Changing Places, set up Euphoric State University to contrast against the University of Rummidge, a thinly disguised University of Birmingham...

Twitter: Week of October 1 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/twitter-week-of-october-1.html...

Very Briefly Noted: 2019-10-01 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/very-briefly-noted-2019-10-01-1-alain-naef-_cv_-2-alain-naef-_blowing-against-the-wind-a-narrative-appro.html...

Hoisted from the Archives from 2006: Tightwad Hill https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/09/hoisted-from-teh-archives-from-2006-tightwad-hill.html: "Cal/Stanford is the only great rivalry that's fundamentally about ideology.... The ideology at play here is authoritarianism...

Very Briefly Noted: 2019-09-30 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/09/very-briefly-noted-2019-09-30-1-natalie-abrams-_xena-warrior-princess-an-oral-herstoryhttpsewcomarticle.html...

Weekend Reading: Herodotus: De��okes's Ultimatum https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/09/weekend-reading-herodotus-de%C3%AFokess-ultimatum.html: "The Mede... returned again to despotic rule as follows: There appeared among the Medes a man of great ability whose name was De��okes, and this man was the son of Phraortes. This De��okes, having formed a desire for despotic power, did thus...

For the Weekend: The New Colossus https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/09/the-new-colossus-wikipedia.html: Emma Lazarus: "Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,/With conquering limbs astride from land to land;/Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand/A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame/Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles./From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome;/her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame...

Weekend Reading: Lin Zexu (1839): To Queen Victoria https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/09/lin-zexu-wikipedia.html: "They may not intend to harm others on purpose, but the fact remains that they are so obsessed with material gain that they have no concern whatever for the harm they can cause to others. Have they no conscience? I have heard that you strictly prohibit opium in your own country, indicating unmistakably that you know how harmful opium is. You do not wish opium to harm your own country, but you choose to bring that harm to other countries such as China. Why?...

#noted #weblogs

View more on J. Bradford DeLong's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 04, 2019 17:06