J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 126

Note to Self: A not atypical tankie: Paul M. Sweezy:An ...

Note to Self: A not atypical tankie: Paul M. Sweezy:

An Obituary (2004): Marxist Economist Paul Sweezy Is Dead: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: I would like Paul Sweezy to be remembered for the following passage: "The publication in 1952 of Stalin���s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR would make possible today a more satisfactory reply.���In the light of [Stalin���s] explanation���I would like to amend the statement which Mr. Kazahaya criticizes.���[The amended statement] conveys my meaning more accurately than the original wording and is, I think entirely in accord with Stalin���s view." (Paul Sweezy (1953): The Present as History��(New York: Monthly Review Press), p. 352.) Paul Sweezy called himself an intellectual. Paul Sweezy publicly revised his opinion on an analytical issue in order to agree with the position taken by a genocidal tyrant. Fill in the blank: Paul Sweezy was a ...

Note to Self: Paul Sweezy in the 1950s, getting increasingly disturbed at news of the GULAG and yet also willing to stand up and say in public that:

The political leadership in the Soviet Union is acting as the agent of the working class.... [T]he working class is the ruling class in the Soviet Union���. [There is] more genuine democracy in the economic and social spheres in the Soviet Union than anywhere else in the world���

And willing to accept correction on matters of technical economic theory from Josef Stalin:

The publication in 1952 of Stalin���s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR would make possible today a more satisfactory reply.��� In the light of [Stalin���s] explanation���I would like to amend the statement which Mr. Kazahaya criticizes.��� [The amended statement] conveys my meaning more accurately than the original wording and is, I think entirely in accord with Stalin���s view���

Paul Sweezy: The Present as History��(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1953).���
pp. 50-1: "Burnham alleges that[for] a society [to be] socialistit must be. fully democraticWithout entering into a discussion of the precise meaning of the term democracy', we may agree that socialism has been historically thought of asfully democraticin all spheres'. We may also agree that this does not apply to the Soviet Unioni in the political sphere, where there is a single-party system and certain restrictions on civil liberty. At the same timethere is more genuine democracy in the economic and social spheres in the Soviet Union than anywhere else in the world..."������p. 62: "From the standpoint of economic science, the political leadership in the Soviet Union is acting as the agent of the working class. No relation of exploitation exists between controllers and workers.The real issue is one of general interests and objectives, which are prescribed by the structure and form of social relations as a whole. In this sense the objective of those who direct the Soviet economy can only be production of use values which corresponds in every way to the interests of the working class. We might, therefore, say that the working class is the ruling class in the Soviet Union..."������p. 76: "those who understand that in essence Marxism is a method of analysis and a guide to action will be in little doubt that Schwartz has mistaken the enrichment of Marxism by the two great twentieth-century revolutions [of Lenin and Mao] for its decomposition..."������p. 286: "[Hayek] even goes so far as to compare Nazi anti-semitism with the liquidation of the kulak in the USSR. The two things, of course, have absolutely nothing in common. The Jew remains a Jew; the kulak could, and most of them did, become a collective farmer on exactly the same terms as his fellows..."������p. 352: "The publication in 1952 of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR would make possible today a more satisfactory reply. In the light of [Stalin's] explanation I would like to amend the statement which Mr. Kazahaya criticizes.[The amended statement] conveys my meaning more accurately than the original wording and is, I think entirely in accord with Stalin's view..."

 

Hoisted from the Archives (2004): What Do I Think of Paul Sweezy?: People are asking me what I think about Paul Sweezy...

What do I think about Paul Sweezy?

I think...

Well, first I think it's annoying to have to spend time figuring out whether a paragraph Sweezy writes is (a) what Sweezy believed, (b) what Sweezy thought would be good for the Movement to believe, or (c) what Sweezy did not believe and did not think it would be good for the Movement to believe but that he felt he had to pretend to believe because it was the Party Line.

Going roughly in chronological order...

I think that the Theory of Capitalist Development (1942) is mostly what Sweezy thought. He's still young enough, convinced enough, and bold enough to (largely) say what he thinks. It is clear that--for example--when he argues that after World War II ends those nations that wind up in the socialist camp will develop much more rapidly and successfully than those that wind up in the capitalist camp, this is something he really believes.

But even in TCD there are some passages that I, at least, find it hard to believe that Sweezy believed them. For example, on p. 191 there is Sweezy's dismissal of Marx's "The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production.... Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at lat reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.... The knell of private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated" as "not so much a prediction as a vivid description of a tendency." Sweezy cannot say, under Party discipline as he is, that there is a jot or tittle of the Apocalypse of St. Karl of Trier that is wrong, but he can redefine Marx's prediction as a mere tendency that can be overwhelmed for centuries if not millennia by counter-tendencies that somehow Marx doesn't find space to talk about.

Nevertheless, TCD is valuable in two dimensions. It is valuable as an explication and updating of Marx. It is valuable as the record of the intellectual position a very smart man takes up as he tries to wrestle with the world under the assumption that the Apocalypse of St. Karl of Trier is gospel. I think TCD is the most valuable of Sweezy's books.

Sweezy's contribution to the intra-Marxist Dobb-Sweezy debate on the origin of capitalism is also quite valuable. Sweezy has a powerful advantage over his intellectual adversaries: they are trying to prove that Marx was right, while he is trying to figure out what happened. And Sweezy was right: urban commerce was a principal knife in the prying-open of the feudal oyster.

Later on Sweezy--to my mind at least--deterioriates. In Sweezy's 1953 essay collection, The Present as History, it is hard to avoid seeing the Party hack. For example, consider claims that the "political leadership in the Soviet Union is acting as the agent of the working class.... [T]he working class is the ruling class in the Soviet Union," or that there is "more genuine democracy in the economic and social spheres in the Soviet Union than anywhere else in the world." These simply cannot be taken seriously as attempted descriptions and analyses of the state of the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s by anybody who has made any attempt to inform themselves. They are party-line bilge.

The mid-1960s book, Monopoly Capital I find harder to classify. Very interesting (and I think valuable) in MC is the neo-Galbraithian neo-Veblenesque critique of consumer society: capitalism's problem is not that it is less productive than socialism but that its productivity is directed toward useless, counterproductive, and happiness-destroying ends. This critique does, I think, have a lot of truth in it, and I have always found it quite valuable. It does, however, lead me to places I do not want to go: "One need not have a specific idea of a reasonably constructed automobile, a well planned neighborhood, a beautiful musical composition, to recognize that the model changes that are incessantly imposed upon us, the slums that surround us, and the rock-and-roll that blares at us exemplify a pattern of utilization of human and material resources which is inimical to human welfare...." Sweezy would have been very happy indeed as the Commissar for Culture who banned Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company.

In MC Sweezy (and Baran) have the potential for freedom. By the mid-1960s there is no longer a serious Party to be a hack for, no longer a Stalin for a stooge to follow. But they don't take advantage of it. The health of the Movement takes a certain priority over the intellect, in the same way that the Party line had done in previous decades. There is a bait-and-switch on foreign policy going on in the book: On one page the Communist Bloc is peaceful and subject to brutal attack by the likes of Dean Acheson who is "organiz[ing] counterrevolutions in Eastern Europe" (never mind that Acheson was a believer in containment, not rollback. Hell! Dulles was a believer in containment, not rollback, save when he wanted to appear otherwise for domestic political purpose). On another page we have "the revolutionary peoples have achieved a series of historic victories... Vietnam, China, Korea, Cuba, and Algeria.... It is no longer mere rhetoric to speak of a world revolution: the term describes... the dominant characteristic of the historical epoch." It's as if Sweezy (and Baran) expect their readers to be stupid: not to recognize that the World Communist Movement cannot at the same time be peaceful and defensive and also expansionist and militant.

Moreover, there are statements in MC about the U.S. domestic economy in the mid-1960s that are extremely hard to credit as attempts at analysis. To argue in the mid-1960s boom that "capitalism���s basic law of motion, temporarily thwarted [during World War II] soon resumed its sway. Unemployment kept steadily upward, and the character of the new technologies of the postwar period sharply accentuated the disadvantages of unskilled and semi-skilled workers.... By the end of the 1950s the real state of affairs could no longer be concealed: it was impossible to continue to believe in the existence of a meliorative trend..." Such passages are things it would be helpful for the Movement to believe. They are not conclusions reached through serious analysis." The failure to theorize about just why the U.S. and Britain wound up on the USSR's side in World War II similarly strikes me as a place where Sweezy (and Baran) dare not go, because the conclusions they will reach will be unhelpful to the movement.

As for Sweezy's other and later writings.... I always found anything cowritten with Magdoff to be worth reading.... I always found anything cowritten with Huberman to be not worth reading.... I always wondered how much of the stuff about the revolutionary economic and political potential of third-world socialism was meant to be taken as serious analysis, and how much just to keep up the spirits of the Movement by telling them earnestly that somewhere socialism was advancing and utopia was being constructed...

Christopher Phelps (1999): An interview with Paul M. Sweezy: "Q: Do you regret any of those positions in the early days of the magazine? The editorial after Stalin died in 1953, for instance, called him one of the greatest men in history, I believe...

...SWEEZY: Something like that. Well, in some ways he was, but he had his underside, too. I guess one should have been more cautious, but I think you had to take positions which were pretty much unambiguous. Either you were for or against the regimes, the actually existing socialist countries. I should have been, of course, much more perceptive, selective, and better informed. No doubt about that. I'm sure I wouldn't write anything the same now as I would have at any given time in the past. I wouldn't want to go back and try to rewrite those articles.

Q: Did you ever respond to Irving Howe's famous article "New Styles in Leftism" in Dissent, where he referred to you as a leading authoritarian leftist?

SWEEZY: No, but I did one time appear on a program someplace with Irving Howe. What I remember is Howe taking the position that I was the most dangerous of all, because I knew what was going on, and still kept supporting these horrors. See, the rest of the left were just dupes, who believed the nonsense. Pretty early on, there was a position like the Webbs's - that the Soviet Union was an ideal new society. Gradually one had to get over that. But not by turning around, becoming an enemy, joining the other side. That's always a difficult line to follow, I think, but it's absolutely essential.

Q: And in some way it involved defense of those states?

SWEEZY: Yes, yes, indeed...

[...]

Q: Then again, by the sixties, your criticisms of the Soviet Union were quite penetrating, of a very fundamental nature, calling it a new class society.

SWEEZY: Yes, to my way of thinking, the problem of the revolutions of the twentieth century is that they did not bring to power the proletariat organized as a class. What they did bring to power is tightly organized revolutionary parties drawn from elements of various sections of society. Those parties expropriated the traditional bourgeoisie but did not do away with the capital-labor relation as such. They substituted the state for the private capitalists as the employer of labor, unifying the many capitals which had grown up independent of each other in the course of capitalist history. That is not to say that all units of capital were put under one management, of course - only that all the separate managements became subject to the same ultimate authority, which now assumed the life-and-death powers that had previously been exercised by the impersonal forces of the market.

The question then arose of what we should call these states. They weren't socialist, but were they capitalist? Charles Bettelheim and I had an exchange on this point, among others, that lasted a period of some years. Bettelheim thought that we should call the Soviet Union a capitalist society, but I thought that would introduce into our analysis preconceptions, expectations, and biases which would inevitably influence our findings and cause much confusion. To my way of thinking, the power, prestige, and privileges of the Soviet rulers did not derive from the ownership of private wealth but from unmediated control over the state apparatus and hence over total social capital. The Soviet Union, though a class society and not the socialist society it claimed to be, had none of the economic laws of motion comparable to those of capitalism. For example, there was nothing like the chronic unemployment typical of the West.

To me, the precise terminology made no great practical difference, so I called the Soviet Union, rather indeterminately, a post-revolutionary society. I held that most of the distortions in post-revolutionary societies could be traced to the conditions of capitalist hostility, that the behavior and ideology of the Soviet ruling class was the result of its long struggle against an economically and militarily more powerful enemy...

Sweezy Obituary Update: Hoisted from the Archives (2004): Paul Sweezy Obituary Update](http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movabletype/2004_archives/000386.html): You will note that my description above of Sweezy's writings in _The Present as History are value-neutral (for surely calling Stalin a genocidal tyrant is a value-neutral description of who and what he was). I apply no evaluation words to Sweezy himself. I invite readers to apply their own valuation words (and what those words should be is, I think, easy to ascertain: res ipsa loquitur, after all).

So note that every single negative evaluation of Sweezy attributed to me by people writing in the comment thread is in fact generated inside their own brains, and then ascribed to me for no other reason than what their own (bad) conscience tells them (correctly) that I must be thinking about Sweezy's morals.

I admit I did not expect such a large number of people to react by saying, essentially, that (a) what Sweezy did in compromising with Stalin was horrible, and (b) because it is horrible, what DeLong did in bringing it up is (c) blackening the memory of a great and good man. There's a certain problem of logic here.

Yet here they are: old (and new) leftists wrestling with (and losing to) their own bad consciences:

What is this crap? I generally like to tone of this weblog, but to choose the occasion of Paul Sweezy's death for a series of snide remarks and cheap insults, especially given that nothing here is based on more than one paragraph of his work, is really tasteless. I am surprised and disappointed.

Tom Slee, you should not be surprised or disappointed. So Brad does your assertion mean that every economic adviser during the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administration endorsed the slaughtering of millions of Vietnamese? And if they didn't why did they accept the appointments? Was it the patriotic opportunity to serve the country that made them overlook the fact that their policy prescriptions would aid the militarization of the economy and the slaughter of innocents? Your sanctimoniousness is as childish as it is pathetic.

It's hard to imagine Brad Delong accumulating a resume like this one. http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/sweezy.htm People still discuss Sweezy's work, even those who disagree with him (I mean, just think of the huge debates on the Sweezy-Dobb debate--Paul Sweezy unknown??? wow!). It's odd that someone whose work really does not receive much serious discussion, and most certainly won't receive much attention after his passing, would take this occasion to attack a fellow scholar.

Fifty years from now people will still be reading Sweezy's work. Fifty years from now NO ONE will know who Brad DeLong was. Some of the people making comments here really need to get beyond this childish "Marxism has been shown to have failed" and, so, anything associated with Marx must be rejected. This is anti-intellectualism at its worst.

The only time delong could touch sweezy is after his death...nota bene the timing...

it's obvious that approximately 90% of the posts here (including the one from delong) are from people that haven't read anything of sweezy. this whole thread is a bad joke. the fact that sweezy cited stalin is to his credit in my boo���-and i don't care whether he was right or wrong on the point in question (whatever it was, since delong made sure not to tell us). you don't think people were using the mere mention of "stalin" to discredit people back in 1953? It was worse then than now. sweezy was saying "fuck you" to mccarthyites and pious liberals, because he knew that he was practicing an altogether different sort of economics than the system modeling of those supportin the capitalism. now, I'M a capitalist. but there need to be analyses that don't take the entire system for GRANTED, that try to imagine it from OUTSIDE. that's part of what a marxian perspective allows for. you can use the perspective and not be an avowed supporter of stalin's crimes. the problem is that people like delong will respond to a critical analyis of capitalism as a whole as equivalent to a call for terrorist violence. but there's a difference between theoretical critique and practical politics. (a difference that stalinist and capitalist ideologues both deny.)

What a cowardly obituary on Sweezy you give. If you think his life and work add up only to those times he accommodated himself to Stalin, then you're still living in the Cold War.

I don't understand what Brad's point is. Is it that Stalin was wrong about everything and, so, no one could ever agree with Stalin? For instance, if Stalin (properly) corrected Sweezy's grammar then Stalin would necessarily be wrong and Sweezy would be a dupe by correcting his grammar? Brad is simply engaging in good old fashioned red-bating: Sweezy once thought Stalin's explanation for some economic situation was correct and, so, Sweezy was some sort of monster. In Brad's eyes, what else do you possibly need to know about Sweezy. This mean-spirited, illogical attack on a honorable man���Sweezy���really puts Brad's intellectual standing in question...

John Cochrane Prostitutes Himself to Republican Politicians Department: Monday Smackdown/Hoisted from 2015

Noah Smith: John Cochrane Smackdown: "John writes: 'My surprise in reading Noah is that he provided no alternative numbers. If you don't think Free Market Nirvana will have 4% growth, at least for a decade as we remove all the level inefficiencies, how much do you think it will produce, and how solid is that evidence?...' I don't really feel I need to produce an alternative to a number that was made up as a political talking point. Why 4 percent? Why not 5? Why not 8? Why not 782 percent? Where do we get the number for how good we can expect Free Market Nirvana to be? Is it from the sum of point estimates from a bunch of different meta-analyses of research on various free-market policies? No. It was something Jeb Bush tossed out in a conference call because it was 'a nice round number', after James Glassman had suggested '3 or 3.5'. You want me to give you an alternative number, using the same rigorous methodology? Sure, how about 3.1. Wait, no. 3.3. There we go. 3.3 sounds good. Rolls off the tongue..."

I must say, Cochrane here reminds me of one of my most favorite quotes from tank economist Paul M. Sweezy:

The publication in 1952 of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR would make possible today a more satisfactory reply to Mr. Kazahaya on the law of value under socialism.... Stalin's position is that... certain features of capitalism, particularly the operation of the price mechanism in the agricultural sector of the economy, have not yet been eliminated.... I should like to amend the statement which Mr. Kazahaya criticizes, by substituting "communist" for "socialist" and "communism" or "socialism." It would then read as follows: "In the economics of a communist society the theory of planning should hold the same basic position as the theory of value in the economics of a capitalist society. Value and planning are as much opposed, and for the same reasons, as capitalism and communism." This conveys my meaning more accurately than the original wording and is, I think entirely in accord with Stalin's view...

The point at issue was whether in a proper "socialist" economy���like the post-WWII Soviet Union claimed itself to be���the peasants were still enslaved to necessity in the form of the market (the "law of value") or, instead, free people collectively deciding what to produce in order to fulfill a societally-rational plan.

Sweezy had been claiming that the USSR was such���and that, in this dimension at least, was a better society than the USA.

Josef Stalin says: "Not so fast! Frog, hop!"

And Sweezy hops.

Now John Cochrane is not Paul M. Sneezy. J.E.B. Bush is not J.V. Djugashvili. But J.E.B. Bush decides to trump James "Dow 36000" Glassman in optimism, says in a conference call "why not 4%?" for the target economic growth rate, and then says: "Frog, hop!"

And John Cochrane hops, as high and as fast as he can.

This is not a dignified or an appropriate position for a university professor to place himself in. The point is to speak truth to power, not power to truth.

#notetoself


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John Cochrane Prostitutes Himself to Republican Politicians Department: Monday Smackdown/Hoisted from 2015

Noah Smith: John Cochrane Smackdown: "John writes: 'My surprise in reading Noah is that he provided no alternative numbers. If you don't think Free Market Nirvana will have 4% growth, at least for a decade as we remove all the level inefficiencies, how much do you think it will produce, and how solid is that evidence?...' I don't really feel I need to produce an alternative to a number that was made up as a political talking point. Why 4 percent? Why not 5? Why not 8? Why not 782 percent? Where do we get the number for how good we can expect Free Market Nirvana to be? Is it from the sum of point estimates from a bunch of different meta-analyses of research on various free-market policies? No. It was something Jeb Bush tossed out in a conference call because it was 'a nice round number', after James Glassman had suggested '3 or 3.5'. You want me to give you an alternative number, using the same rigorous methodology? Sure, how about 3.1. Wait, no. 3.3. There we go. 3.3 sounds good. Rolls off the tongue..."

I must say, Cochrane here reminds me of one of my most favorite quotes from tank economist Paul M. Sweezy:

The publication in 1952 of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR would make possible today a more satisfactory reply to Mr. Kazahaya on the law of value under socialism.... Stalin's position is that... certain features of capitalism, particularly the operation of the price mechanism in the agricultural sector of the economy, have not yet been eliminated.... I should like to amend the statement which Mr. Kazahaya criticizes, by substituting "communist" for "socialist" and "communism" or "socialism." It would then read as follows: "In the economics of a communist society the theory of planning should hold the same basic position as the theory of value in the economics of a capitalist society. Value and planning are as much opposed, and for the same reasons, as capitalism and communism." This conveys my meaning more accurately than the original wording and is, I think entirely in accord with Stalin's view...

The point at issue was whether in a proper "socialist" economy���like the post-WWII Soviet Union claimed itself to be���the peasants were still enslaved to necessity in the form of the market (the "law of value") or, instead, free people collectively deciding what to produce in order to fulfill a societally-rational plan.

Sweezy had been claiming that the USSR was such���and that, in this dimension at least, was a better society than the USA.

Josef Stalin says: "Not so fast! Frog, hop!"

And Sweezy hops.

Now John Cochrane is not Paul M. Sneezy. J.E.B. Bush is not J.V. Djugashvili. But J.E.B. Bush decides to trump James "Dow 36000" Glassman in optimism, says in a conference call "why not 4%?" for the target economic growth rate, and then says: "Frog, hop!"

And John Cochrane hops, as high and as fast as he can.

This is not a dignified or an appropriate position for a university professor to place himself in. The point is to speak truth to power, not power to truth.

#economicsgonewrong #highlighted #hoistedfromthearchives #moralresponsibility #orangehairedbaboons #slougchingtowardsutopia #smackdown


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Who Are the Tankies, and Why Do They Fight for Dystopia?

Note to Self: And, of course, the curious thing is that when the chips are down it is the authoritarianism rather than the aolition of private property that is the key: Urban Dictionary: Tankie: "The term derives from the fact that the divisions within the communist movement first arose when the Soviet Union sent tanks into communist Hungary in 1956, to crush an attempt to establish an alternative version of communism which was not embraced by the Russians. Most communists outside the eastern bloc opposed this action and criticised the Soviet Union. The 'tankies' were those who said 'send the tanks in'. The epithet has stuck because tankies also supported 'sending the tanks in' in cases such as Czechoslovakia 1968, Afghanistan 1979, Bosnia and Kosovo/a (in the case of the Serbian state)...

German classical liberal Max Weber... saw that [really existing] socialism could become nothing but a synonym for bureaucratic despotism. For:
��

History shows that wherever bureaucracy gained the upper hand, as in China, Egypt, it did not disappear. A progressive elimination of private capitalism is theoretically conceivable. What would be the practical result? The destruction of the [dehumanizing] steel frame of modern industrial work? No! Simply that also the top management of the socialized enterprises would become bureaucratic. There is even less freedom, since every power struggle with a state bureaucracy is hopeless.

State bureaucracy would rule alone if private capitalism were eliminated. The private and public bureaucracies, which now check one another to a degree, would be merged into a single hierarchy. This would be similar to the situation in ancient Egypt, but it would occur in a much more rational[ized]���and hence unbreakable-form.

[Bureaucracy together with the machine is busy fabricating the shell of bondage which men will perhaps be forced to inhabit as powerless as the fellahs of ancient Egypt. Who would want to deny that such a potentiality lies in the womb of the future?...
��
This was written in 1917. Weber was right. From today's perspective of 1990 there is little to add. One slogan of the late 1800s American labor movements was "one big union." The slogan of twentieth-century really existing socialism might as well have been "one big bureaucracy."

Weber did not note the corruption (and the related economic disruption and waste) that would come to dominate "socialist" economies, and Weber had no inkling of the periodic waves of mass terror required to preserve Communist Party power in the face of the enormous gap between the party's official ideology and its actual practice. In fact, socialism turned out in the direction that but much worse than Weber had anticipated beforehand.

The principal reason that Marx feared market economies turned out to be false: they did not have a powerful inner dynamic necessarily leading to a polarization of the distribution of wealth. This had become clear by 1883, or at least by 1900, even though it had not been clear in 1848. The appropriate reaction to the fact that growing material wealth was trickling down should have been enthusiasm. Markets are powerful instrumentalities for controlling and guiding persons and organizations. They generate a rapid pace of innovation, provide for efficient recombinations of factors of production into new enterprises, and pressure large organizations toward effective fulfillment of their productive missions. To the extent that markets can be harnessed for the purpose of building Utopia, scarce public administrative capacities and competencies can be redirected to other uses. A society that can harness markets uses a form of sociological judo, applying small amounts of pressure at key points to make inertia push results in desired directions.

But the response of those who had positioned themselves left of social democracy was not enthusiasm that it would be easier to approach utopia than Marx had expected. Instead, the response was the continued denigration of systems that assigned a prominent role to either private production or market exchange, and a worship of hierarchical administration and bureaucracy-under the name of "conscious social control and administration of production for use"-as the answer to all problems. Whatever utopia is, it does not consist of one big corrupt bureaucracy. And so the left has had little constructive to offer social democrats and others trying to manage and reform the "mixed economies" of the twentieth century...

#communism #highlighted #slouchingtowardsutopia #moralresponsibility #orangehairedbaboons #politicaleconomy


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Migration 1870-1925 and International Economic InequalityOuttake from "Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016

What did matter for inequality and upward mobility in the pre-World War I era was not trade but migration. The descendants of those who lived in Ireland at the start of the nineteenth century are, today, one of the richest groups in the world: less than half of the descendants of the Irish of 1800 live in Ireland today; instead, they are spread throughout America, Britain, and Australia, and they have prospered.

The half century before 1925 saw perhaps one hundred million people moved from one continent to another in search of a better life. About fifty million left Europe, largely eastern and southern Europe, for Australia, and the Americas. Perhaps fifty million (although we are not really sure) left China, India, and other Asian countries for destinations in the Americas, in lands surrounding the South China Sea, and in east Africa. Peru in the late twentieth century could have a President surnamed Fujimori. The author V.S. Naipaul was born not in India but in the Caribbean. The redwood forests of northern California contain shrines to the boddhisatva Guan-Yin.

Tension between descendants of peoples whose ancestors had resided in the areas for somewhat longer (after all, ultimately all humans are indigenous to Africa) and descendants of migrants from China and India has dominated the politics of many countries in the twentieth century. And since World War I migration has been tightly restricted by national governments, and population flows have been much smaller as proportions of the total world population.

But the roughly one hundred million migrants of 1870-1925 made up one-twelfth of the world���s population in 1870. Because the migration stream contained relatively few children and few old people, the 1870-1925 intercontinental migration stream amounted to perhaps one one out of every seven people of working age.

One of the most popular causes in late nineteenth century America was the restriction of immigration from China and Japan. Railroad barons wished to continue the expansion of the Asian-born population in America. Workers and populists wanted the Chinese, Japanese, and (Asian) Indians kept out of California and on the other side of the Pacific. The plutocrats like Leland Stanford (the railroad baron and governor of California who founded and endowed Stanford University in memory of his son) favored immigration; the populists favored exclusion���and ���Chinaman go home.���

By and large, the populists won before World War I in one narrow aspect: with respect to making and keeping settler colonies ���European���. Asian immigrants were largely kept out of what Arthur Lewis calls the ���temperate countries of European settlement������the United States, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Australia, and New Zealand. The flow of migrants out of China and India was directed elsewhere, to the tea plantations of Ceylon or the rubber plantations of Malaysia. Arthur Lewis believes that this redirection of the migration stream had enormous consequences for the distribution of income in the twentieth century world. Europe had escaped the Malthusian trap of low living standards and populations high relative to agricultural resources and technology at perhaps the end of the eighteenth century. The availability of resource-rich settlement areas like Canada and Argentina with Europe-like climates provided a further boost to European living standards: industrializing European countries at the turn of the twentieth century found their land/labor and capital/labor ratios, and thus their productivity levels and living standards, rising as migrants left for America.

India and China, through ill-luck and bad government, had not escaped the Malthusian regime. Technology had advanced: the population of China in the late nineteenth century was some three times what it had been at the start of the second millennium, and living standards were no (or not much) lower. But improvements in productive potential had been absorbed in rising populations, and not in rising living standards. So potential migrants from China and India were willing to move for what seemed to Europeans to be starvation wages.

Thus the large populations and low levels of material wealth and agricultural productivity in China and India put downward pressure on wages in any of the areas���Malaysia, Indonesia, the Caribbean, or east Africa���open to the Asian migration stream. Workers could be cheaply imported and employed at wages little above the physical subsistence level. These workers would be very happy with their jobs: their opportunities and living standards in Malaysian or African plantations would be far above what they could expect if they returned to India or China. Low wage costs meant that commodities produced in countries open to Asian immigration were cheap. And competition from the Malaysian rubber plantations pushed down wages in the Brazilian rubber plantations as well. The late nineteenth century saw living standards and wage rates become and remain low (although higher than in China and India) throughout the regions that were to come to be called the third world.

Conversely, the restriction of migration to temperate latitudes to European natives meant that the prices of temperate agricultural commodities���like wheat, beef, and wool���would be relatively high because wages had to be high enough to lure Europeans, with agricultural productivity levels three or four times those of China or India, off the farm and across the ocean. Save for cotton (grown by African-American sharecroppers living at standards closer to physical subsistence than the rest of America cared to know about or cares to remember), temperate economies simply did not produce any of the commodities that could be produced in regions open to Asian migration: they could not compete. Instead, the temperate settler economies concentrated on the resource- and technology-intensive agricultural and mineral products that could not be produced closer to the equator.

The politically-set pattern of migration ensured that one set of countries would be relatively rich, and another set relatively poor, as of the beginning of World War I. Since 1900 destinies have diverged further. In most vicious and virtuous circles have acted to push them further toward the nearest edge of the world���s relative income distribution. But some have followed aberrant and surprising trajectories through the world income distribution. The countries in the southern half of South America were first world nations in 1900. They are not so today. Japan, with in 1900 a relatively poor developing economy, is now one of the leading industrial powers.

If there had not been substantial restrictions on poor people���Asians���moving to rich countries���Europe and its overseas settler colonies���throughout the twentieth century, California would certainly be very, very different. It might have been easier for poor people to move to rich economies than it has proven to be to transfer the political institutions and economic technologies from rich to poor economies in the twentieth century. If so, the world would today be a more equal and a richer place if not for the white Australia and analogous policies of the pre-World War I era, and for the tight restrictions on all kinds of immigration imposed from the 1920's on. Alternatively, the institutions of political democracy and the capitalist economy in the rich settler countries might have collapsed under the strain of coping with more massive immigration flows, and the resulting increased degree of internal inequality���or so has always been the argument of those favoring immigration restrictions.

Migration also made the British Empire a second-class power by 1850.

British salesmen saw what was coming. In the case of Britain and the United States, after 1815 the British government followed a durable policy that was rather odd for 19th Century Britain, whose SOP was usually: "we burn your fleet, and perhaps your capital, first, and negotiate later".

Britain acceded to the Monroe Doctrine in 1823; accepted a line of demarcation in the Oregon Territory that left the British-settler majority region that is now the state of Washington in American hands; did not intervene on the side of free trade in 1862; accepted American mediation on the Venezuelan border; supported American annexation of the Philippines; relinquished rights and interests in what became the Panama Canal zone; and acquiesced to the American position on where the boundary between Alaska and the Yuko actually was.

Britain, instead, gave scholarships to American wannabe aristocrats who wanted to study at Oxford and Cambridge; gleefully married off its own aristocrats with titles to American heiresses���Winston Churchill's parents became engaged three days after meeting at a sailing regatta on the Isle of Wight���and stressed common lineage, cultural, and economic ties; and, as the young Harold Macmillan unwisely, because too publicly, put it when he was seconded to Eisenhower's staff in North Africa in late 1942, became "the Greeks to the American Romans".

The result was that the United States became Britain's wired aces in the hole in teh game of seven-card stud that was twentieth-century geopolitics.

The fundamentals tolled against Britain. One island cannot, they said, in the long run "Half a continent will, said economic historian J.H. Clapham speaking of the United States, in the end raise more coal and melt more steel than one small densely-populated island".

Yet perhaps Britain's supersession by America was not inevitable, or rather, such a rapid supersession was not inevitable. In 1860 the United States had a full-citizen population of 25 million, and Britain and its dominions had a full-citizen population of 32 million. By 1940 the full-citizen numbers were 117 and 76 million. But the pro-rated descendents of the full citizens as of 1860 were 50 and 65 million, advantage Britain and the Dominions.

As the Financial Times's Martin Wolf points out, his ancestors were some of the very few who made the much cheaper migration from the Ashkenazi Pale of Settlement to London than to New York.

Up to 1924 New York welcomed all comers from Europe and the Middle East, while London and the Dominions were only welcoming to northern European Protestants.

A Britain more interested in turning Jews, Poles, Italians, Romanians, and even Turks who do not happen to be named Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson���who bears Turkish Minister of the Interior Ali Kemal's Y and five other chromosomes, and hence is, by all the rules of conservative patriarchy, a Turk���at turning them into Britons or Australians or Canadians would have been much stronger throughout the twentieth century.

Perhaps it would not be in its current highly undignified position.

#slouchingtowardsdsutopia #highlighted #outtake #economichistory

Bruce Springsteen: You Never Can Tell: For the Weekend

Bruce Springsteen: You Never Can Tell (Leipzig 7/7/13) - YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-Ds-...

#fortheweekend

John Maynard Keynes (1919): The Economic Consequences of ...

John Maynard Keynes (1919): The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by : "What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914!...

The greater part of the population, it is true, worked hard and lived at a low standard of comfort, yet were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with this lot. But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.

But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice...

#noted

Twenty Worthy Reads at Equitable Growth and Elsewhere... August 23

Worthy Reads at Equitable Growth:

Antitrust law and policy is probably the most "relatively autonomous" piece of our whole legal system. The laws as enacted by Congress and signed by the President change rarely and slowly. How those laws are enforced���and how business is then conducted in the shadow of the possibility of resort to the courts for antitrust cases���changes much more radically and substantially. It is a dance of intellectual fashion, some serious benefit-cost analysis, and a great deal of lobbying and lobbying-funded motivated reasoning. My view is that the answers to the three questions Michael Kades suggests the FTC examine are: yes, no, and no, respectively. But it is very good that the FTC is thinking about this: Michael Kades: In re: Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century: "Equitable Growth suggests that the hearings include the following three topics: 1. Is monopoly power prevalent in the U.S. economy?...

Paul Krugman writes: "As Greg Leiserson of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth points out, 'every month in which wage rates are not sharply higher than they would have been absent the legislation, and investment returns are not sharply lower, is a month in which the benefits of those corporate tax cuts accrue primarily to shareholders'. A tax cut that might significantly raise wages during, say, Cynthia Nixon���s second term in the White House, but yields big windfalls for stock owners with only trivial wage gains for the next five or 10 years, is not what we were promised..." See Greg Leiserson: Assessing the economic effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: "Key takeaways: An assessment... should focus on the impact... on wage rates... [on] the return on business investment, and... [on] future federal budget deficits, as these will determine the impact... and the fiscal sustainability of the law....

Very much worth listening to: Heather Boushey, Helaine Olen, and Katie Denis: Americans vs. vacation: "Half of American workers didn���t take all the paid vacation days they were entitled to in 2017. Why are so many of us unwilling or unable to take the vacation days that we���ve earned?...

This was the first working paper the WCEG published. It did not get the attention it deserved then. So why not hoist it?: Arindrajit Dube and Ben Zipperer: Pooling multiple case studies using synthetic controls: An application to minimum wage policiesh: "We assess the employment and wage effects minimum wage increases between 1979 and 2013 by pooling 29 synthetic control case studies...

Darrick Hamilton is asking the right questions. And he might have the right answers. But I suspect not. Yes, there is something very deep in America's culture that discourages public responsibility for the conditions of poor and especially poor black Americans, to the country's shame. Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that: "no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity... that they who feed, clothe, and lodge... the people, should... be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged..." We today can replace his "greater part" with "substantial part", and it is still true. But I suspect that the health gaps between high-status, high-income, and high-wealth African Americans and their white peers have other origins���not that I know what those other origins are, mind you: Darrick Hamilton: Post-racial rhetoric, racial health disparities, and health disparity consequences of stigma, stress, and racism: "High achieving black Americans, as measured by education, still exhibit large health disparities...

Elsewhere than Equitable Growth:

Encyclopedia of Chicago (1899): Mr. Dooley Explains Our "Common Hurtage": "In the late 1890s, Finley Peter Dunne's newspaper columns in Irish dialect brought to life a fictional Bridgeport bartender, Mr. Dooley...

Economist: Why is macroeconomics so hard to teach?: "Mr Rowe remained... 'fairly low down the totem pole' as a researcher. But he became a thunderbird at conveying macroeconomic intuition...

Noah Smith wonders if he can make a supply-and-demand argument to people who are allergic to "supply and demand" with a spoonful of sugar. He has three types of housing: newly-built yuppie fishtanks, old housing that can switch between working-class and yuppie, and newly-built "affordable housing" unattractive to yuppies: Noah Smith: YIMBYism explained without "supply and demand": "YIMBYism is the idea that cities need to build more housing in order to relieve upward pressure on rents...

Dick Schmalensee: Handicapping the Highstakes Race to Net-Zero: "Economists argue that a broadly applicable incentive-based system... could reduce emissions at a much lower total cost than any alternative regime. Incentives to reduce emissions could be produced directly by a tax on emissions or through... cap-and-trade system. But the argument for relying primarily on financial incentives has historically not been very persuasive.... Even in California and the European Union, where cap-and-trade systems for CO��� have been established, so-called ���ancillary��� or ���belt-and-suspenders��� policies that target particular sectors or sources have also been deployed...

EG: Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Debora Revoltella, Jan Svejnar, Christoph Weiss: Dispersion in productivity among European firms: "This column uses firm-level data from all EU countries to explore how the dispersion of resources affects macroeconomic performance...

Scott Jaschik: Author discusses his new book on anti-intellectualism and fascism: "A country that is not fascist may still experience fascist politics... efforts to divide society and demonize groups.... How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley...

This is the most hopeful take on American productivity growth relative stagnation I have seen. I thought it was coherent and might well be right 20 years ago. I think it is coherent and might possibly be right today. But is that just a vain hope?: Michael van Biema and Bruce Greenwald (1997): Managing Our Way to Higher Service-Sector Productivity: "What electricity, railroads, and gasoline power did for the U.S. economy between roughly 1850 and 1970, computer power is widely expected to do for today���s information-based service economy...

Potsdam this year is 7F warmer than it averaged in the century before 1980. Berkeley is now Santa Barbara: Stefan Rahmstorf: Europe���s freak weather, explained: "Naive.... The smoothed curve shows... global warming... the scattering of the grey bars... random variations of the weather.... Slightly more than half of the 4.3 degrees would be due to global warming, the rest to weather. That... likely underestimates the contribution of climate change...

Thiemo Fetzer: Did Austerity Cause Brexit?: "The rise of popular support for... UKIP... strongly
and causally associated with an individual���s or an area���s exposure to austerity since 2010...

Interesting. The question is always: do you make money by devoting effort to selling them things they will be happy they bought, or do you make money by devoting effort to selling them things they will be unhappy they bought���by grifting them? And what determines the balance of providing value vs. deception in selling commodities aimed at different income classes? I am not sure they have it right here. I am sure that this is very important: James T. Hamilton and Fiona Morgan: Poor Information: How Economics Affects the Information Lives of Low-Income Individuals: "How information is produced for, acquired by, and utilized by low-income individuals...

I concur with Noah Smith here that the biggest dangers of machine learning, etc., are not on the labor but on the consumer side. They won't make us obsolete as producers. They could make us easier to grift as customers: Noah Smith: Artificial Intelligence Still Isn���t All That Smart: "Machine learning will revolutionize white-collar jobs in much the same way that engines, electricity and machine tools revolutionized blue-collar jobs...

We keep looking for thoughtful intellectual voices on political economy and equitable growth to the right of the intellectual center of gravity of our organization. But they turn out to be remarkably hard to find, as we are learning again this week. Suggestions for interlocutors are very welcome: John Holbo: Do The Nordic Codetermination Moonwalk: "Amused: 'Matthew Yglesias: 'Every conservative institution in America appears to be simultaneously maintaining that @SenWarren���s codetermination proposal is economically ruinous but that Nordic countries, which have codetermination, are free market success stories'...

Claudia Sahm: Alice in Wonderland: "One year ago today, Alice Wu���s research about sexism at an online economics forum made the news...

Kimberly Adams: The disturbing parallels between modern accounting and the business of slavery: "The common narrative is that today's modern management techniques were developed in the factories in England and the industrialized North.... According to... Caitlin Rosenthal, that narrative is wrong...

Really surprised that there is no evidence of boom-bust asymmetry here. I am going to have to dig into what reasonable alternatives are and how much power they have here: Adam M. Guren, Alisdair McKay, Emi Nakamura, and Jon Steinsson: Housing Wealth Effects: The long View: "We exploit systematic differences in city-level exposure to regional house price cycles...

Duncan Black: But 100% Of Trump Supporters Who Say They S...

Duncan Black: But 100% Of Trump Supporters Who Say They Still Support Trump Still Support Trump: "The bizarre coverage of the electorate in the age of Trump-and all reporters are quite aware of this criticism and they do it anyway-is that the only voters who matter are the people who support Trump. Weirdly if you focus on them, it seems like Trump has 100% support!... Trump has never been popular.... But Obummer was always treated as a fairly unpopular president-with his critics dominating the narrative-and Trump has been treated as a popular one. Again, reporters know this.... They are not too stupid to be aware that this is what they have been doing.... 'Trump's low approval provides a unique challenge for Democrats' will be a NYT headline soon. And the sad thing is, Democrats will believe it...

#noted

Liveblogging: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: The Founding of Medhamsted

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (J.A. Giles and J. Ingram trans.): Medhamsted: "A.D. 656. This year was Peada slain; and Wulfhere, son of Penda, succeeded to the kingdom of the Mercians. In his time waxed the abbey of Medhamsted very rich, which his brother had begun. The king loved it much, for the love of his brother Peada, and for the love of his wed-brother Oswy, and for the love of Saxulf the abbot. He said, therefore, that he would dignify and honour it by the counsel of his brothers, Ethelred and Merwal; and by the counsel of his sisters, Kyneburga and Kyneswitha; and by the counsel of the archbishop, who was called Deus-dedit; and by the counsel of all his peers, learned and lewd, that in his kingdom were. And he so did...

...Then sent the king after the abbot, that he should immediately come to him. And he so did. Then said the king to the abbot:

Beloved Saxulf, I have sent after thee for the good of my soul; and I will plainly tell thee for why. My brother Peada and my beloved friend Oswy began a minster, for the love of Christ and St. Peter: but my brother, as Christ willed, is departed from this life; I will therefore intreat thee, beloved friend, that they earnestly proceed on their work; and I will find thee thereto gold and silver, land and possessions, and all that thereto behoveth.

Then went the abbot home, and began to work. So he sped, as Christ permitted him; so that in a few years was that minster ready.

Then, when the king heard say that, he was very glad; and bade men send through all the nation, after all his thanes; after the archbishop, and after bishops: and after his earls; and after all those that loved God; that they should come to him. And he fixed the day when men should hallow the minster. And when they were hallowing the minster, there was the king, Wulfere, and his brother Ethelred, and his sisters, Kyneburga and Kyneswitha. And the minster was hallowed by Archbishop Deusdedit of Canterbury; and the Bishop of Rochester, Ithamar; and the Bishop of London, who was called Wina; and the Bishop of the Mercians, whose name was Jeruman; and Bishop Tuda. And there was Wilfrid, priest, that after was bishop; and there were all his thanes that were in his kingdom.

When the minster was hallowed, in the name of St. Peter, and St. Paul, and St. Andrew, then stood up the king before all his thanes, and said with a loud voice:

Thanks be to the high almighty God for this worship that here is done; and I will this day glorify Christ and St. Peter, and I will that you all confirm my words:

I Wulfere give to-day to St. Peter, and the Abbot Saxulf, and the monks of the minster, these lands, and these waters, and meres, and fens, and weirs, and all the lands that thereabout lye, that are of my kingdom, freely, so that no man have there any ingress, but the abbot and the monks.

This is the gift: From Medhamsted to Northborough; and so to the place that is called Foleys; and so all the fen, right to Ashdike; and from Ashdike to the place called Fethermouth; and so in a right line ten miles long to Ugdike; and so to Ragwell; and from Ragwell five miles to the main river that goeth to Elm and to Wisbeach; and so about three miles to Trokenholt; and from Trokenholt right through all the fen to Derworth; that is twenty miles long; and so to Great Cross; and from Great Cross through a clear water called Bradney; and thence six miles to Paxlade; and so forth through all the meres and fens that lye toward Huntingdon-port; and the meres and lakes Shelfermere and Wittlesey mere, and all the others that thereabout lye; with land and with houses that are on the east side of Shelfermere; thence all the fens to Medhamsted; from Medhamsted all to Welmsford; from Welmsford to Clive; thence to Easton; from Easton to Stamford; from Stamford as the water runneth to the aforesaid Northborough.

These are the lands and the fens that the king gave unto St. Peter's minster.���Then quoth the king:

It is little���this gift���but I will that they hold it so royally and so freely, that there be taken there from neither gild nor gable, but for the monks alone. Thus I will free this minster; that it be not subject except to Rome alone; and hither I will that we seek St. Peter, all that to Rome cannot go.

During these words the abbot desired that he would grant him his request. And the king granted it:

I have here (said he) some good monks that would lead their life in retirement, if they wist where. Now here is an island, that is called Ankerig; and I will request, that we may there build a minster to the honour of St. Mary; that they may dwell there who will lead their lives in peace and tranquillity.

Then answered the king, and quoth thus:

Beloved Saxulf, not that only which thou desirest, but all things that I know thou desirest in our Lord's behalf, so I approve, and grant. And I bid thee, brother Ethelred, and my sisters, Kyneburga and Kyneswitha, for the release of your souls, that you be witnesses, and that you subscribe it with your fingers. And I pray all that come after me, be they my sons, be they my brethren, or kings that come after me, that our gift may stand; as they would be partakers of the life everlasting, and as they would avoid everlasting punishment. Whoso lesseneth our gift, or the gift of other good men, may the heavenly porter lessen him in the kingdom of heaven; and whoso advanceth it, may the heavenly porter advance him in the kingdom of heaven.

These are the witnesses that were there, and that subscribed it with their fingers on the cross of Christ, and confirmed it with their tongues.

That was, first the king, Wulfere, who confirmed it first with his word, and afterwards wrote with his finger on the cross of Christ, saying thus:

I Wulfere, king, in the presence of kings, and of earls, and of captains, and of thanes, the witnesses of my gift, before the Archbishop Deus-dedit, I confirm it with the cross of Christ. (+)

And I Oswy, king of the Northumbrians, the friend of this minster, and o[oe] the Abbot Saxulf, commend it with the cross of Christ. (+)

And I Sighere, king, ratify it with the cross of Christ. (+)

And I Sibbi, king, subscribe it with the cross of Christ. (+)

And I Ethelred, the king's brother, granted the same with the cross of Christ." (+)

And we, the king's sisters, Kyneburga and Kyneswitha, approve it.

And I Archbishop of Canterbury, Deus-dedit, ratify it.

Then confirmed it all the others that were there with the cross of Christ (+): namely, Ithamar, Bishop of Rochester; Wina, Bishop of London; Jeruman, Bishop of the Mercians; and Tuda, bishop; and Wilfrid, priest, who was afterwards bishop; and Eoppa, priest, whom the king, Wulfere, sent to preach christianity in the Isle of Wight; and Saxulf, abbot; and Immine, alderman, and Edbert, alderman, and Herefrith, alderman, and Wilbert, alderman, and Abo, alderman; Ethelbald, Brord, Wilbert, Elmund, Frethegis. These, and many others that were there, the king's most loyal subjects, confirmed it all.

This charter was written after our Lord's Nativity 664���the seventh year of King Wulfere���the ninth year of Archbishop Deus-dedir. Then they laid God's curse, and the curse of all saints, and all christian folks, on whosoever undid anything that there was done. "So be it," saith all. "Amen."

When this thing was done, then sent the king to Rome to the Pope Vitalianus that then was, and desired, that he would ratify with his writ and with his blessing, all this aforesaid thing. And the pope then sent his writ, thus saying:

I Vitalianus, pope, grant thee, King Wulfere, and Deus-dedit, archbishop, and Abbot Saxulf, all the things that you desire. And I forbid, that any king, or any man, have any ingress, but the abbot alone; nor shall he be Subject to any man, except the Pope of Rome and the Archbishop of Canterbury. If any one breaketh anything of this, St. Peter with his sword destroy him. Whosoever holdeth it, St. Peter with heaven's key undo him the kingdom of heaven.

Thus was the minster of Medhamsted begun, that was afterwards called Peter-borough.

Afterwards came another archbishop to Canterbury, who was called Theodorus; a very good man and wise; and held his synod with his bishops and with his clerk. There was Wilfrid, bishop of the Mercians, deprived of his bishopric; and Saxulf, abbot, was there chosen bishop; and Cuthbald, monk of the same minster, was chosen abbot. This synod was holden after our Lord's Nativity six hundred and seventy-three winters...

#liveblogging #history #anglosaxonchronicle

Note to Self: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents: "Since t...

Note to Self: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents: "Since the recession a decade ago,��free-market economics (also known as neoliberalism) has been questioned on multiple fronts. As the dominant governing strategy for the past 40 years���including the Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama���the Left today is increasingly challenging neoliberalism. Indeed, as the primaries approach, many former Clinton and Obama officials are even openly challenging the 'power of markets' belief. In his new book,��A Crisis Wasted, Reed Hundt, chair of the Federal Communications Commission under Clinton and a member of Obama���s transition team, makes the argument that Obama missed an opportunity to push for a new progressive era of governance, a miscalculation that ultimately hobbled his administration. Hundt is not alone on this score. In a viral��Vox��article earlier this year, former Clinton administration��economist Brad DeLong��said that the Democratic Party has and should move past��market friendly neoliberals like himself.��Please join us for a very special conversation between Hundt and DeLong��about the limits of, and challenges to, free-market economics��with Joshua Cohen, co-editor of Boston Review. WHERE: Outdoor Art Club, One West Blithedale, Mill Valley, CA 94941. WHEN: Monday, September 9, 2019, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm (PST)...

#equitablegrowth #notetoself #politicaleconomy