J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 127

I Want My Country Back!

Note to Self: I Want My Country Back!: It is a really strange situation. It has a lot of "if he were nots":

If he were not president, Trump���s family would already have moved for a guardianship ad litem...

If he were not so authoritarian, we would be profoundly sad that someone���hate him, love him, simply be amused by him���has been such an entertaining celebrity...

And if he were not so deranged, we would be in the streets demanding the constitutional order be observed and wondering just what we should do when someone begins taking him seriously and literally when he says that the Washington Post and Catherine Rampell are the enemies of the people, when he says what we really need to do is get rid of the judges, when he says we should let the guys in the mirrored sunglasses in the security agencies do their thing.

It is not an America I ever thought that I would live in, I must say...

#notetoself #orangehariebaboons

John Haltiwanger: @jchaltiwanger: "In the past 24 hours T...

John Haltiwanger: @jchaltiwanger: "In the past 24 hours Trump cancelled a trip to Denmark because it wouldn���t sell him Greenland, referred to American Jews who vote Democratic as disloyal, and tweeted Israeli Jews view him as the 'second coming of God' and the 'King of Israel'...

#noted

Kevin Drum: Donald Trump Is Not Well: "Prime Minister Met...

Kevin Drum: Donald Trump Is Not Well: "Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark said today that talk of selling Greenland to the US was an ���absurd discussion,��� adding that Greenland Premier ���Kim Kielsen has of course made it clear that Greenland is not for sale. That���s where the conversation ends.��� Donald Trump responded by canceling his upcoming visit to Copenhagen: Donald J. Trump: 'Denmark is a very special country with incredible people, but based on Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen���s comments, that she would have no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland, I will be postponing our meeting scheduled in two weeks for another time...' Can we finally start talking publicly about Trump���s mental state? This is the action of a child, not an adult in full control of his faculties. Everyone aside from Trump understood that his Greenland compulsion was a sign of cognitive regression in the first place, and this episode demonstrates that it was no passing fantasy. Trump took it seriously enough to treat Frederiksen���s comments as just another incitement to a feud with a political enemy. The man is not well. I don���t care what you want to call his condition, but he���s not well. I can only shiver at the thought of what the folks who work regularly with Trump really think of him these days...

#noted

What Is This "White" You Speak of, Kemosabe?: Hoisted from the Archives

Hoisted from the Archives: _What Is This "White" You Speak of, Kemosabe?: One way to look at Nixon's 'Silent Majority' strategy was that it involved the redefinition of lots of people as 'white'���people who wouldn't have been 'white' even thirty years before, back when they were seen as not-quite-real-American ethnic immigrants living in ghettos and serving the corrupt Democratic political machines against which the Republicans fought���probably entangled in organized crime, too.

And of these the champion example is, of course, Mark Krikorian and his defenses of 'white' American culture against the Hispanic Pizza Menace. Think of colonial Massachusetts, and my Bradford, Anderson, Lord, Winthrop, Sewall, Usher, etc. ancestors, I tell you���back in the Days when Benjamin Franklin was worried about an excessive number of immigrants to America from alien and culturally unsympatico Germany. How many Krikorians then? The Nixon 'Silent Majority' strategy was, in a sense, that everyone who is not Black is white���and should join us in our crusade to deprive the welfare queens of their free booze. Which is why the form of the Republican attack on Sonia Sotomayor was very interesting indeed...

Rick Perlstein once said:

It comes out in the endless discussions [Richard Nixon] would have on the tapes to come up with an Italian or a Pole to slot for assistant deputy secretary for thus-and-such. As the memo from Buchanan demonstrates, they were absolutely obsessed with affirmative action for non-WASP (and, implicitly, non-Hebrew) 'whites.' Obsessed. I mean, approaching 1972, and in talks about staffing up the second term, it was one of their top five topics for discussion. And that relates to something David Frum said in a big conference on the future of conservatism in '05, that the big question for political demography was whether ten years from then Hispanics would end up as Jews or Italians���which is to say, permanently in the Democratic or permanently in the Republican coalition.

In '05, to Frum, that seemed up in the air. I guess recent history suggests that the decision has been made easy for them, by the people who ended up in charge of the Republican Party. Bush II and Rove COULD have been like Nixon and Colson: i.e., appointing Hispanics to every other job, Tammany Hall style. Their party's politics prevented it...

The above came from 23009. A decade down the road, I confess that I find myself amazed: Henry Cabot Lodge more than a century ago realized that he could not afford to demonize Irish-Americans, for too many of them voted in elections. Eighty years ago Republicans were happy taking the side of WASPs and WASP-wannabees against unionized and suspiciously socialistic "white ethnics". Fifty years ago Nixon (and Buchanan!, who has just been given another platform at NPR) decided taht the fault line along which to try to break the country put hardscrabble upwardly-mobile white ethnics on their side against Negroes, a liberal WASP establishment that wanted to honor the check Martin Luther King, Jr., was presenting, and���cough cough���"Hollywood and the media". Yet, somehow, a decade and a half ago Republican politicians plus Rupert Murdoch���Fox News���decided to upend this everyone-against-African-Americans-and-their-sympathizers strategy for an anti-Hispanic immigrants one.

Somebody please explain this to me: the base would be as happy to watch heartwarming stories of upwardly-mobile Hispanics on Fox News as to watch manufactured "chaos on the border"...

#globalization #hoistedfromthearchives #neofascism #orangehairedbaboons

Ben Thompson: The WeWork IPO: "The 'unsavoriness'... is h...

Ben Thompson: The WeWork IPO: "The 'unsavoriness'... is hardly limited to the fact that WeWork can stiff its landlords in an emergency. The tech industry generally speaking is hardly a model for good corporate governance, but WeWork takes the absurdity an entirely different level. For example: WeWork paid its own CEO, Adam Neumann, $5.9 million for the 'We' trademark.... WeWork previously gave Neumann loans to buy properties that WeWork then rented. WeWork has hired several of Neumann���s relatives, and Neumann���s wife would be one of three members of a committee tasked to replace Neumann if he were to die or become permanently disabled over the next decade. Neumann has three different types of shares that guarantee him majority voting power.... Neumann has already reportedly cashed out 700 million of his holdings via sales and loans. Everything taken together hints at a completely unaccountable executive looting a company that is running as quickly as it can from massive losses that may very well be fatal whenever the next recession hits.... The WeWork bull case and bear case... both are the logical conclusion of effectively unlimited capital. The bull case is that WeWork has seized the opportunity presented by that capital to make a credible play to be the office of choice for companies all over the world, effectively intermediating and commoditizing traditional landlords. It is utterly audacious, and for that reason free of competition. The bear case, meanwhile, is that unlimited capital has resulted in a complete lack of accountability and a predictable litany of abuses, both in terms of corporate risk-taking and personal rent-seeking...

#noted

Harry Brighouse: Advice for New College Students: "Bear i...

Harry Brighouse: Advice for New College Students: "Bear in mind that while there���s such a thing as getting into too much debt, there���s also such a thing as working too many hours. Seek balance (Finding it is easier said than done). Choose classes on the following bases: does the subject interest you?; how big is the class? (seek out small classes even if you are shy; especially if you are shy, because that���s how you���ll learn not to be); how good is the professor? How do you know who���s a good professor?... Do they engage?... Are they open to a full range?... Do they make you write a lot? (if so, that���s a positive, not a negative) Do they seem to enjoy teaching?... Find out from your friends. Or from your enemies if that���s the best you can do!...

Most people have to find what they���re interested in. Beyond taking good classes, and really engaging with the material, to discover how interesting you find it, I don���t have lots of advice about this. But, don���t major in something you find uninteresting���you���ll be wasting time. If you choose a professionally-oriented major... take classes in the liberal arts that will challenge and interest you.... Conversely, if you choose a liberal arts major... take some professionally oriented classes to learn about professional fields....

The key skills you need coming out of college are to be able to communicate effectively orally and in writing, and to be able to work on solving problems with people you have not chosen to work with.... Go to office hours. Talk to the professor. Students say ���but I won���t know what to say���. So here���s what to say. If the material is easy for you go and ask the professor for suggestions of a couple of other things you should be reading. If it is difficult for you, find one or two specific questions to ask about the material. Most professors actually want to talk to students in their office hours.... For every hour in class spend two hours studying, when you are awake and alert. Take classes with your friends, and if you���re in a class without friends, make friends in class, and talk to them (and your family) about the material.... The point is to make learning feel like leisure: doing schoolwork without feeling that you are doing it, which is what happens when you talk about the material with people you want to spend time with anyway...

#noted #berkeley

Donald Trump: That is why we need strong, sound, and stea...

Donald Trump: That is why we need strong, sound, and steady [pause] leadership, at the United States Federal Reserve. I have nominated Jay to be our next Federal Chairman. [pause] And so important, because he will provide exactly that type of leadership. He's strong. He's committed. He's smart. And, if he is confirmed by the Senate, Jay will put his considerable talents to work, leading our nation's independent central bank. Jay has learned the respect and admiration of his colleagues for his hard work, expertise, and judgment. Based on his record, I am confident Jay has the wisdom and leadership to guide our economy through any challenges that our great economy may face...

Donald Trump: Our Economy is very strong, despite the horrendous lack of vision by Jay Powell and the Fed, but the Democrats are trying to ���will��� the Economy to be bad for purposes of the 2020 Election. Very Selfish! Our dollar is so strong that it is sadly hurting other parts of the world. The Fed Rate, over a fairly short period of time, should be reduced by at least 100 basis points, with perhaps some quantitative easing as well. If that happened, our Economy would be even better, and the World Economy would be greatly and quickly enhanced-good for everyone!..

#noted

Introducing Partha Dasgupta: Economics: A Very Short Introduction

Introducing Partha Dasgupta: Economics: A Very Short Introduction

http://amzn.to/2gR2jH3

Back in 1800, nearly the entire world lived in dire poverty���what we today see as the dire poverty line of $1.90 a day, a level at which you are spending more than half your income on bare calories and essential nutrients, the minimum of heat and shelter, and the minimum of clothing. Below that line, certainly your health and perhaps your life is impacted: women become too skinny to reliably ovulate, and children become too malnourished to have healthy and effective immune systems. Back in 1800, there were only a few economies where the median household had a standard of living of more than $3 a day: Germany, France, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, the U.K., the U.S., and that was it.

Today the median household's standard of living in the United States, Switzerland, or Singapore is 55 times that dire poverty line of $1.90 a day. That is all due to advances since 1800: advances in science and technology that give us powers to manipulate nature beyond those attributed to gods in earlier centuries; advances in business, property, and market organization that allow us to organize production and distribution much more efficiently; and advances in government provision of educational, physical, and institutional infrastructure that underpin the advances in science, technology, and organization.

Yet 9% of humanity today lives at a standard of living of less than $1.90 a day. Half the world's population lives at less than $7 a day. 20% of humanity lives at less than $3 a day���including more than half of the people in each of Ethiopia, Uganda, Haiti, Burkina Faso, Gambia, Comoros, Timor Leste, North Korea, Madagascar, Togo, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Guinea, Mozambique, Malawi, Niger, Liberia, the DRC, Burundi, the CAR, and���currently the poorest of the poor���Somalia.

At most 8% of the world's population has a standard of living more than half of today's U.S. median.

Rejoice: the world today is so much fabulously richer than it was in 1800. That is a miracle. Recoil: our knowledge���of how to run governments; of how to organize markets, firms, and property; and of how to apply science and technology���is so sketchily and unevenly distributed around the world, leaving only a small part of it as what we would see as rich and huge chunks of it as what we do see as desperately poor, is a scandal, and a crime against humanity.

But what is to be done about this crime against humanity?

One place to start is with economics, which is, as its revered ancestral founder wrote, "an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations". One wishes one's own national economy to be wealthy and prosperous���one wants all national economies to be wealthy and prosperous���but how is this to be accomplished.

One road into economics a a discipline begins with Partha Dasgupta: Economics: A Very Short Introduction http://amzn.to/2gR2jH3 https://delong.typepad.com/dasgupta.pdf. This book is a game theorist's short���very short���introduction to economics. It focus on: individual goals, individual opportunities and constraints, individual incentives, strategies, exchange, trust, and equilibrium outcomes. You won't find lots of practice at using quantitative models to figure out how price and quantity change in response to demand shocks, or calculating macroeconomic multipliers to use in macroeconomic stabilization policy exercises.. What you will find is the logic and rationale for why figuring out how price and quantity change in response to demand shocks or calculating multipliers is a worthwhile thing to do.

Most introductory economics books begin with the highly stylized world of rational individuals and profit-seeking firms trading goods and labor in abstract markets. Instead, Dasgupta starts with two families���one in the upper middle class in the American Midwest, the other in a rural village in Ethiopia���describing how the members of each family live their lives and support themselves. The central concern of economics, he writes, is ���to uncover the processes that influence how people���s lives come to be what they are.��� Economists use models to answer that question, but the models only come later���after understanding the material conditions that people face and the choices they make under those conditions.

There is one single key thread in Dasgupta's Very Short Introduction: trust. Trust in others is essential to inducing people to make the investments���in making capital improvements, in developing skills and knowledges, in developing production and exchange networks���necessary to take advantage of the possibilities of technology, organization, and the division of labor in order to have full wealth and prosperity. Most of prosperity, in Dasgupta's view, rests on creating social institutions to enable large-scale networks of trust:

The coffee farmer on the volcanic hillsides of Nicaragua five years ago could plant coffee trusting that the planting would be socially useful because today I or somebody like me would drink a drink made from their plant's beans, and would be, in exchange for the drink, willing and able to reward all those in the value chain back to the coffee farmer.


Back in 456 B.C., the archons of Athens, Greece could commission the sculptor Pheidias to assemble a team to make a 30-foot-tall bronze statue of their patron goddess Athena-Fighting-in-Front trusting that 1500 miles away (as the owl flies) there were Keltic miners in Cornwall who would dig out of the earth the 7 tons of tin needed to turn the copper into bronze and send it by ship and wagon to Athens.

Normally, however, one has deep trust in only a few people: one trusts one's close kin, one's immediate neighbors, and one's closest friends to have your back. Outside of your core group, if you do somebody a favor and provide them with something of use and value, they may or may not reciprocate, depending. The size of the group of people you can normally trust to respect your stuff, or to reciprocate the favors you do in gift-exchange relationships, is about 50. That is not enough on which to build even a minimally efficient division of labor and scale of organization.

Economics is thus, according to Dasgupta, the study of the institutions, norms, and patterns that allow for the generalization of deep trust needed to transform bands of 50 or so East African Plains Apes quarreling with their neighbors into our current 7.5 billion-strong global division of productive labor and system of technological development and advance. How does these underpinnings function and how does our global market economy work���and, in may places and for many purposes, fail to work well? These are the questions Dasgupta asks and tries to answer. And he has a lot to say.

For a taste, let me turn the mic over to Partha http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4307:

The earliest class of explanations... [in the] 1950s... [were] that a worker in the United States, for example, would be producing a lot more per hour than a worker in Ethiopia... [because] he has many, many instruments to work with.... The last 20 years... [have seen] explanation[s] ... founded on institutions.... I've found that to be unsatisfactory as well, because you could establish the same institution in various parts of the world, and in some places will work, and in others it won't.... It's a rather banal observation... institutions per se don't deliver. What's at the heart of well functioning institutions is the creation of trust among people... buying and selling, borrowing and lending, investing, and so forth.... Economic life involves exchanges, transactions.... And for them to be fruitful requires a strong element of trust....

Exchange takes place everywhere. Economic life is all pervasive, whether it's in the highlands of Ethiopia or whether in Midwestern United States. No matter where you go, people are making deals, exchanging.... If the trust is maintained within small groups only, then you're not going to be able to propel yourself far, because your transactions are going to be limited.... What you need is to be able to trust the mechanisms, the institutions, in such a way that you can indirectly transact with people in the event we'll never meet.... "How do you build trust?"... is a big thing.... Rumors can cause a society to flip from a state of cooperation to a state where everybody is looting every store on site. We've seen that happen, and we've seen that happening within hours in a day.... Getting locked into a non-trust state... you can even say a society is trapped....

[In] every country there's a great deal of trust within small groups. Villages everywhere, they trust one another, they exchange, they swap insurance, they borrow from each other. Without that, they would of course be dead.... [But] the reach of that trust is so limited...

Notes:

Why We Read Partha Dasgupta https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/10/econ-2-spring-2014-why-we-read-partha-dasgupta.html
Reading Notes on Partha Dasgupta, Economics: A Very Short Introduction https://www.bradford-delong.com/econ-1-partha-dasgupta-very-short-introduction-page.html
Trust, Law and Social Norms: Fundamentals of Economic Progress: Partha Dasgupta Interviewed by Romesh Vaitilingam http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4307
Notebook: Discussion of: Partha Dasgupta (2007): Economics: A Very Short Introduction https://www.bradford-delong.com/notebook-discussion-of-partha-dasgupta-2007-economics-a-very-short-introduction.html




#economics #economicgrowth #globalization #highlighted #moralphilosophy #politicaleconomy




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Guido Alfani and Cormac �� Gr��da: The Timing and Causes ...

Guido Alfani and Cormac �� Gr��da: The Timing and Causes of Famines in Europe: "Studies of modern famines tend to consider them ���man-made���, resulting from war or from adverse shocks to food entitlements. This view has increasingly been applied to historical famines, against the earlier Malthusian orthodoxy. We use a novel dataset and temporal scan analysis to identify periods when famines were particularly frequent in Europe, from ca. 1250 to the present. Up to 1710, the main clusters of famines occurred in periods of historically high population density. This relationship disappears after 1710. We analyse in detail the famines in England, France and Italy during 1300���1850, and find strong evidence that before 1710 high population pressure on resources was by far the most frequent remote cause of famines (while the proximate cause was almost invariably meteorological). We conclude, in contrast with the currently prevailing view, that most preindustrial famines were the result of production, not distribution issues. Only after 1710 did man-made famines become prevalent...

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Project Syndicate: Brad DeLong for PS Say More: "Welcome ...

Project Syndicate: Brad DeLong for PS Say More: "Welcome to Say More, a new weekly newsletter that brings Project Syndicate's renowned contributors closer to readers. Each issue invites a selected contributor to expand on topics covered in their commentaries, delve into new ones, and share recommendations, offering readers exclusive insights into the ideas, interests, and personalities of the world's leading thinkers. This week,��Project Syndicate��catches up with Brad DeLong...

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