J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 118

Heather Boushey: In Conversation with Gabriel Zucman: Zuc...

Heather Boushey: In Conversation with Gabriel Zucman: Zucman: "Even this mediocre growth performance is much more than what���s been experienced by most of the population. Almost 90 percent of the population has seen its income grow by less than that. And for half of the U.S. population���about 120 million adults today���there���s been zero growth in average pretax income since 1980. This means that in 1980, for the bottom 50 percent, average income before government intervention was $16,000 a year, adjusted for inflation. Today, it���s still 16,000 a year. That���s a generation-long stagnation in income for half of the population...

#noted

Information is valuable. But are our information overlord...

Information is valuable. But are our information overlords creating value for them out of the information they collect about us by figuring out what goods and services they can offer to sell us that will make us happy and advance our purposes? Or are they creating value for them out of the information they collect about us by figuring out how to manipulate and deceive us into giving them money and taking actions that benefit them but that do not make us happy or advance our purposes? In the case of Fox News, it is clear that the well-being and informed orientation to the world of its viewership is the last thing it cares about. In the case of Facebook, its eagerness to cheaply sell indicators of which of its customers are easily grifted is sobering, and contemptible. But are the others much better���the New York Times and Washington Post reporters and editors who work for their insider sources rather than their readers, the financial pundits seeking to tell viewers about the latest unicorn pump-and-dump scheme? These are the questions about the interaction of the public sphere with the market that we should be talking about:

Idle Words: The New Wilderness: "To what extent is living in a surveillance-saturated world compatible with pluralism and democracy? What are the consequences of raising a generation of children whose every action feeds into a corporate database? What does it mean to be manipulated from an early age by machine learning algorithms that adaptively learn to shape our behavior? That is not the conversation Facebook or Google want us to have. Their totalizing vision is of a world with no ambient privacy and strong data protections, dominated by the few companies that can manage to hoard information at a planetary scale...

#noted

For the Weekend: Fred Clark: The Duty of Speaking Ill of the Dead

Weekend Reading: Very wise from the very wise Fred Clark: The Duty of Speaking Ill of the Dead: "From Charles Dickens��� A Christmas Carol, 'The Last of the Spirits': 'The Spirit stopped beside one little knot of business men. Observing that the hand was pointed to them, Scrooge advanced to listen to their talk. ���No,��� said a great fat man with a monstrous chin, ���I don���t know much about it, either way. I only know he���s dead.��� ���When did he die?��� inquired another. ���Last night, I believe.��� ���Why, what was the matter with him?��� asked a third, taking a vast quantity of snuff out of a very large snuff-box. ���I thought he���d never die.��� ���God knows,��� said the first, with a yawn. ���What has he done with his money?��� asked a red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock. ���I haven���t heard,��� said the man with the large chin, yawning again. ���Left it to his company, perhaps. He hasn���t left it to��me. That���s all I know.��� This pleasantry was received with a general laugh. ���It���s likely to be a very cheap funeral,��� said the same speaker; ���for upon my life I don���t know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?���...

...���I don���t mind going if a lunch is provided,��� observed the gentleman with the excrescence on his nose. ���But I must be fed, if I make one.��� Another laugh. ���Well, I am the most disinterested among you, after all,��� said the first speaker, ���for I never wear black gloves, and I never eat lunch. But I���ll offer to go, if anybody else will. When I come to think of it, I���m not at all sure that I wasn���t his most particular friend; for we used to stop and speak whenever we met. Bye, bye!���

The Spirit takes Scrooge off to hear another conversation between businessmen Scrooge knew personally. They are glibly unperturbed by news of his death. Then there���s the scene with the petty thieves fencing items stolen from his deathbed, and then this:

���If there is any person in the town, who feels emotion caused by this man���s death,��� said Scrooge quite agonised, ���show that person to me, Spirit, I beseech you!��� The Phantom spread its dark robe before him for a moment, like a wing; and withdrawing it, revealed a room by daylight, where a mother and her children were. She was expecting some one, and with anxious eagerness; for she walked up and down the room; started at every sound; looked out from the window; glanced at the clock; tried, but in vain, to work with her needle; and could hardly bear the voices of the children in their play.

At length the long-expected knock was heard. She hurried to the door, and met her husband; a man whose face was careworn and depressed, though he was young. There was a remarkable expression in it now; a kind of serious delight of which he felt ashamed, and which he struggled to repress. He sat down to the dinner that had been hoarding for him by the fire; and when she asked him faintly what news (which was not until after a long silence), he appeared embarrassed how to answer. ���Is it good?��� she said, ���or bad?������to help him. ���Bad,��� he answered. ���We are quite ruined?��� ���No. There is hope yet, Caroline.��� ���If��he��relents,��� she said, amazed, ���there is! Nothing is past hope, if such a miracle has happened.��� ���He is past relenting,��� said her husband. ���He is dead.���

She was a mild and patient creature if her face spoke truth; but she was thankful in her soul to hear it, and she said so, with clasped hands. She prayed forgiveness the next moment, and was sorry; but the first was the emotion of her heart. ���What the half-drunken woman whom I told you of last night, said to me, when I tried to see him and obtain a week���s delay; and what I thought was a mere excuse to avoid me; turns out to have been quite true. He was not only very ill, but dying, then.��� ���To whom will our debt be transferred?��� ���I don���t know. But before that time we shall be ready with the money; and even though we were not, it would be a bad fortune indeed to find so merciless a creditor in his successor. We may sleep to-night with light hearts, Caroline!���

Yes. Soften it as they would, their hearts were lighter. The children���s faces, hushed and clustered round to hear what they so little understood, were brighter; and it was a happier house for this man���s death! The only emotion that the Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of pleasure.

Finally, the last of the Spirits, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, whisks Ebenezer Scrooge off to the graveyard to confirm what he has suspected with growing dread: This was his death that prompted all those callous, indifferent remarks. He was, himself, going to die one day and the only emotion caused by that event would be ���one of pleasure.���

Dickens believed it was better���kinder perhaps���that the pleasure and relief brought about by the death of the wicked miser should be expressed in a ���softened��� form. But he does not disapprove of the indifference or even the sneering mockery expressed by the businessmen earlier. Dickens saw that as necessary.

Speaking ill of the dead after a selfish, harmful life, Dickens saw, was essential because it was true and because it demonstrated to those still living such lives the urgency of their need for repentance. It was only because he was granted the grace of hearing the harsh words spoken about him after his own death that Ebenezer Scrooge found a path to redemption.

This is not a minor point in Dickens��� story. And if you like that story���if you think it has anything meaningful to say or that it deserves to be retold as often as it is and deserves to be as widely beloved and respected as it is���then you have no business wringing your hands over the supposed ���incivility��� of speaking ill of the dead.

The enforcers of a stunted ���civility��� fretted and lamented the relief and pleasure that greeted the recent deaths of Jeffrey Epstein and David Koch. Dickens knew that such civility was not merely dishonest, but dangerous. It invites moral hazard.

Yes, David Koch may be ���past relenting,��� but Charles Koch is not. Time is running out for him as well, but he still has time enough to follow the example of Ebenezer Scrooge or Zacchaeus and transform his life.

U>nlikely, perhaps, but possible. Yet far less likely and far less possible if we all decide to discourage him from doing so by filling his ears with pleasant lies, reassuring him that his reputation will be restored in death. Pretending that he���s already heading toward a happy ending helps to ensure that he���ll never get there.

#moralresponsibiilty #publicsphere #weekendreading

Unstructured Procrastination: Hoisted from the Archives

Hoisted from the Archives (2005): Unstructured Procrastination https://www.bradford-delong.com/2005/08/unstructured_pr.html: I usually am quite good at structured procrastination���working not on the thing that is most immediate and imminent on my calendar, but on the priority #3 or #4 that is actually more important in the long run and that excites me at the moment. But today this system has broken down. I have done something nobody should ever do: I have spent an hour thinking about Louis Althusser.

It's all Michael Berube's fault, but its worth it, for (highlighted below) he has the best paragraph on Louis Althusser ever written. The rest is (or ought to be) silence:

Michael Berube: "The otherwise incomprehensible question of why anyone would think it necessary to devise a 'structuralist Marxism'. Structuralism is so antipathetic to all questions of hermeneutics and historicity that one might imagine the desire for a structuralist Marxism to be something like a hankering for really spicy ice cream. And yet, in the work of Louis Althusser, spicy ice cream is exactly what we have. I don���t like it myself. But because it���s an important byway in the history of ice cream...

...er, I mean the history of Marxist theory���-I still find it necessary to tell students about it, partly in order to warn them that it will very likely leave a bad taste in their mouths.... Let���s not jump ahead just yet; let���s work to get that bad taste in our mouths first.... As Tony Judt pointed out in a devastating review of Althusser���s career (in the March 7, 1994 issue of The New Republic), Althusserian Marxism was, for a brief period, a lingua franca spoken widely on the Continent:

When I arrived in Paris as a graduate student in the late ���60s, I was skeptically curious to see and to hear Louis Althusser. In charge of the teaching of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure, the French elite academy for future teachers and leaders, Althusser was touted by everyone I met as a man of extraordinary gifts, who was transforming our understanding of Marx and reshaping revolutionary theory. His name, his ideas, his books were everywhere....

In the past, I���ve directed my students to Judt���s review as well as to various accounts (including Althusser���s) of Althusser���s late ���confessions������that he was poorly read in Marx, that he suffered from lifelong mental illness, that his so-called ���symptomatic��� readings in Marxism were little more than an elaborate way of making shit up. I���ve done this... [in part] to complicate the view of Althusser one gets in the Norton, where the headnote tells us that ���Althusser���s major concepts������ideological state apparatuses,��� ���interpellation,��� ���imaginary relations,��� and ���overdetermination������permeate the discourse of contemporary literary and cultural theory, and his theory of ideology has influenced virtually all subsequent serious work on the topic���.... [Presume] Althusser was speaking the truth about his lack of familiarity with the Marxist canon, and that his mental illness played a large role in his life and work. (Hardcore Althusserians have tried to set aside his ���confessions��� precisely by appealing to his history of mental illness, but this merely produces a Marxist-theory version of the Cretan liar���s paradox: of course you can���t believe a madman who tells you he���s mad.)...

Let nobody mistake me: I do not have a single good word to say for Louis Althusser. But at least one of Karl Marx's own Marxisms was a "structuralist Marxism" from the very beginning. Let's let German Charlie from Trier speak for himself:

To prevent possible misunderstanding, a word: I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense with rosy colors. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.

What Marx is saying here is that capitalists and landlords act as they do in large part because the process by which they have been raised, educated, and socialized makes it almost impossible for them to think that they should act otherwise. And, to the extent that they do wonder whether they should act otherwise, they cannot do so���not without losing their fortunes, their businesses, and their jobs, and being replaced by those who do act in a manner consistent with maintaining their economic roles. The immorality of capitalism, for Marx, lies not in the evil acts of individuals (who for the most part think that they are dealing "fairly"���buying and selling at market prices) but in the workings of the system in which they are embedded. In short:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living.

That's "structuralism." (Now that's not all of Marx, and things like the Eighteenth Brumaire (1) are most interesting where they deviate from and build on the technology-economics-class interests-class politics structuralism that is at the bottom of the mature Marx's analysis. But that structuralism of the "base" does exist, and the more subtle analysis of the "superstructure" is built on top of and conditioned by it in a perturbation-theory way.)

I think that the attraction of Althusser lay in a very different core: Althusser's Marxism was attractive not because it was "structuralist" but because it was, as E.P. Thompson put it, "idealist."

Let me explain.

In the 1930s the Great Depression made it very easy to be a Communist: no matter what the criticism, you could answer it with, "Oh yeah? And you'd rather have the system that gave us the Great Depression." In the 1940s the extraordinary suffering of Russia during World War II and the great victories won by the Red Army made it easy to be a Communist: no matter what the criticism, you could answer it with, "Oh yeah? Without the factories of Magnitogorsk that Stalin built, Hitler would still be in Paris." (And it is certainly true that the world owes an enormous debt to the soldiers of the Red Army and the workers of Magnitogorsk that it has never honored.)

By the 1960s, it was much harder to be a Communist. The workers' uprisings were all east of the Iron Curtain���Hungary 1956, East Germany 1953. The living standard gap between the democratic industrial west and the dictatorial centrally-planned east was growing. Khrushchev was saying that Stalin was not as bad as right-wing propaganda had imagined: he was worse. Mao had starved tens of millions of people to death, did not fear nuclear war, and was launching the Cultural Revolution. And relations between the Soviet Union and China were very bad: Khrushchev and Brezhnev had more fear of (and had more reason to have fear of) Mao's atomic bombs than Johnson or Nixon did. The Marxist-Leninist theory of historical development had gone off the rails. Where was the increasing immiserization of the working class? Where was the increasingly violent struggle between imperialists for colonies whose markets they could dominate? Where was the increasing domestic political repression as working-class parties gained grass-roots strength? Where were the increasingly-violent political crises?

The easiest way, in the 1960s, to deal with all these criticisms that the Marxian framework did not explain what was going on in world politics and economics was to throw out the belief that Marxism was a set of ideas to help one understand the world, and to replace it with the belief that Marxism was the study of certain texts���that it was a logical and philosophical mistake to even ask the question of whether Marx's ideal types were a close match to actual historical developments. That's the key thing that Althusser did: he gave his students and acolytes an excuse to ignore the real economics and politics of the world, and to burrow into their own self-contained warrens of discourse.

(1) It is really unfair not to talk about the Eighteenth Brumaire here, and how Marx's attempt to understand the rise of Napoleon III is an analysis of ideological "hegemony" and "false consciousness" that provides at least as useful a pattern as one can get out of Gramsci and far more useful than one can get out of Althusser, but I've wasted too much time on this already...

#books #highlighted #hoistedfromthearchives #moralresponsibility #publicsphere

On the 'use of 'scare quotes': Edward P. Thompson (1978):...

On the 'use of 'scare quotes': Edward P. Thompson (1978): The Poverty of Theory, or, an Orrery of Errors https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1978/pot/essay.htm: "Althusser... patiently explains it thus: 'The critique of Stalinist "dogmatism" was generally "lived" by Communist intellectuals as a "liberation". This 'liberation' gave birth to a profound ideological reaction, "liberal" and "ethical" in tendency, which spontaneously rediscovered the old philosophical themes of "freedom", "man", the "human person" and "alienation"' (F.Af. 10). (It must be difficult to ���speak��� a theory like this, when at every second word, one must ���contort��� one���s features into a knowing ���leer���, to ���signify��� to the reader that one ���knows��� the true meaning of these words behind their apparent ���meaning���).... In 1972 he had become more blunt; he had only one recourse to inverted commas; ���after the Twentieth Congress an openly rightist wave carried off... many Marxist and Communist ���intellectuals���.... This, then, is the missing protagonist with whom Althusser wrestles in For Marx and Reading Capital: the anti-Stalinist revolt... ���socialist humanism.���... This, if anywhere, is where all these critiques and actions converged. This is the object of Althusser���s police action, the unnamed ghost at whom his arguments are directed...

Dylan Riley (2011): Tony Judt: A Cooler Look https://newleftreview.org/issues/II71/articles/dylan-riley-tony-judt-a-cooler-look: "Marxism and the French Left���s discussion of the post-war intellectual scene... fails the elementary test of chronology: The two greatest products of post-war French Marxism, Sartre���s Critique of Dialectical Reason and Althusser���s Reading Capital, were published in 1960 and 1968.... In the late 1980s, apparently bored by French history (and by his wife), Judt followed the trail blazed by Timothy Garton Ash and numerous others to Eastern Europe. Gorbachev���s diplomacy had removed any obstacles to humanitarian tourism.... A crash course in Czech, and meetings with Michnik, Havel and Kis, equipped Judt to present his credentials to Washington in the form of a paper given at the Wilson Center in 1987, ���The Politics of Impotence?���... Freed���as the interrogative ironization of the title tried to indicate���from any concrete political engagement by the force of circumstance, intellectuals like Havel answered to a higher ���moral responsibility���, just as Judt had told French socialists to do.... ���The Politics of Impotence?��� reported that, since 1968, oppositional Marxism in Eastern Europe had been replaced by a healthy focus on ���rights���...

#noted

Notes and References for: Lecture Notes: Introduction to Economic History: The Ancient Economy

Lecture Notes: Introduction to Economic History: The Ancient Economy

1: The Biggest-Picture Perspective

Doug Jones (2014-2019): Logarithmic History https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/
Doug Jones (2019): Puttin' on the Ritz https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2019/07/21/
David Kaplan (2000): The Darker Side of the "Original Affluent Society" https://delong.typepad.com/files/kaplan-darker.pdf
Marshall Sahlins (1972): The Original Affluent Society https://delong.typepad.com/files/original-affluent-society.pdf
Marshall Sahlins (1972): Stone Age Economics https://delong.typepad.com/files/stone-age-economics.pdf
Richard Wrangham (2019): The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution http://books.google.com/?isbn=1101870907

1.1: The Old and Middle Stone Ages Notes:

1.2:

John Maynard Keynes (1936): The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Solow-Malthus Growth Model Notebook: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/braddelong/LS2019/blob/master/2019-09-06-210a-ancient-intro.ipynb




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There are many things desperately wrong with people who w...

There are many things desperately wrong with people who write for the New York Times. Here we have Jack Nicas, boy mocking girl for crying, which is a not-good and very middle-school look: Jack Nicas: "What's strange about Apple events https://twitter.com/elcush/status/1171863358137454593: Many Apple bloggers act as fans, not journalists. One person in the media section literally gave Tim Cook a standing ovation; another cried during an Apple Watch ad...

Ellen Cushing: i was the crying reporter sitting next to Jack. I was crying because it���s a video about people with disabilities overcoming challenges and also sometimes my face makes water whether I want it to or not??

#noted #journamalism

As I say, there are many things deeply wrong with the cul...

As I say, there are many things deeply wrong with the culture of the New York Times:

John Gruber: Let���s Go Further and Hope for Every Last Drop of Joy to Be Drained From the World https://daringfireball.net/2019/09/drain_all_the_joy: "Charlie Warzel... column for The New York Times... is a bluff. If there���s even a whiff of seriousness to Warzel���s proposal, it���s that���what?���the tens of millions of people interested in learning about Apple���s new products would be better served reading about it in publications like, oh, say, The New York Times? Filtered by writers like Warzel, who is so jaded he���s already deemed the new phones 'a commodity', and his colleague Jack Nicas, who mocked a woman wearing a media badge at the event for crying 'during an Apple Watch ad'. That was good for a 'we���re above any sense of emotion' laugh until the woman in question, Ellen Cushing of The Atlantic, piped into the thread.... What Warzel has written���not on his personal blog, mind you, but in a column in the goddamn New York Times���has nothing to do with Apple, nothing to do with iPhone users, and nothing to do with society or culture at large. It is not an honest attempt to persuade anyone about anything. It���s all about Charlie Warzel. Warzel wrote an entire column in The New York Times to let the world know that even though he writes about technology, he���s so far above getting excited about any of it that he thinks Apple should stop holding events to introduce new products. To quote my favorite spiritual leader, 'Well, isn���t that special?'...

#noted

Relationships between user and supplier firms were never ...

Relationships between user and supplier firms were never arms-length. But while the assumption that they were may have been a minor error three generations ago, it is a major error today. We need more people like Susan Helper thinking about the consequences of the information and technology flows generated in today's value-chain economy. Such flows are a very important piece of our community of engineering practice:

Susan Helper: Building High-Road Supply Networks in the United States: "A different kind of outsourcing is possible���'high-road' supply networks that benefit firms, workers, and consumers... collaboration between management and workers and along the length of the supply chain, sharing of skills and ideas, new and innovative processes, and, ultimately, better products that can deliver higher profits to firms and higher wages to workers. Firms could take a key step by themselves, since it could improve profits. Collaboration among firms along a supply chain can lead to greater productivity and innovation. Lead firms can raise the capabilities of supplier firms and their workers such that even routine operations can benefit from collaboration for continuous improvement...

#noted

I missed this when it came out three years ago: Melany De...

I missed this when it came out three years ago: Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, Zhenxiang Chen, Paul M. Ong, Darrick Hamilton, and William A. Darity Jr.: The Color of Wealth in Los Angeles: "White households in Los Angeles have a median net worth of 355,000.... Mexicans and U.S. blacks have a median wealth of 3,500 and 4,000, respectively.... Japanese (592,000), Asian Indian (460,000), and Chinese (408,200) households had higher median wealth than whites.... African blacks (72,000), other Latinos (42,500), Koreans (23,400), Vietnamese (61,500), and Filipinos (243,000).... The median value of liquid assets for Mexicans and other Latinos is striking, zero dollars and only 7, respectively, whereas, the median value of liquid assets for white households was 110,000...

#noted