J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 140

Halving child poverty is attainable, and remarkably cheap...

Halving child poverty is attainable, and remarkably cheap: Janet Currie: We Can Cut Child Poverty in the United States in Half in 10 Years: "Means-tested supports and work incentives.... More universal benefits... a combination of work incentives, economic security programs, and social inclusion initiatives.... Expand the Earned Income and Child and Dependent Care tax credits, while adding a $2,000 child allowance to replace the current Child Tax Credit.... 'Work-oriented' programs (the Earned Income and Child and Dependent Care tax credits, an increase in the minimum wage, and a nationwide roll-out of a promising demonstration program called ���Work Advance���).... Far too many full-time jobs... without other assistance, leave parents and children in poverty...

#noted

Note to Self: "Consider Alasdair Macintyre... In the begi...

Note to Self: "Consider Alasdair Macintyre... In the beginning: boring naive and jejune Marxisant socialist... Today: boring, naive, and jejune neo-Thomist... But in the middle, along the trajectory, Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic through Against the Self-Images of the Age to Hegel and After Virtue... what a thinker! what a powerful awareness of the attractiveness of different positions! what deep insights generated by position and opposition���even if he never gets to aufhebung���composition!...

#noted #moralphilosophy #publicsphere

Monday Smackdown/Hoisted from the Archives: Four Huge Mistakes in One Short Piece by John Taylor

Hoisted from the Archives: Four huge mistakes in this here by John Taylor:

That the low-interest rate economy of 2004-2007 was in an inflationary boom, rather than an economy that barely managed to reach any definition of "full employment" even though supercharged boy three things���low interest rates, expansionary fiscal policy, plus a huge irrationally-exuberant asset-price bubble.

That low interest rates since 2007 represent a discretionary choice by central banks, rather than reflecting the fact that any central bank wanting to avoid permanent depression must accommodate itself to the low level fo the Wicksellian neutral interest rate.

That as of 2017 interest rates were about to normalize.

$. That the Republican policy package of regulatory rollback and tax cuts for the rich would provide a large boost to investment spending and, through that channel, productivity growth.

None of those have panned out as intellectual bets.

Yet John Taylor today exhibits no visible curiosity as to why they did not.

This strongly suggests to me that none of them were meant seriously in the first place���that it was always disinformation, and never an analytical judgment, and thus subject to revision as knowledge advanced:

John Taylor (March 2017): Sluggish Future: Policy Is The Problem: "Secular stagnation... raises inconsistencies and doubts. Low policy interest rates set by monetary authorities... before the financial crisis were associated with a boom characterized by rising inflation and declining unemployment���not by the slack economic conditions and high unemployment of secular stagnation. The evidence runs contrary to the view that the equilibrium real interest rate���that is, the real rate of return required to keep the economy���s output equal to potential output���was low prior to the crisis. And the fact that central banks have chosen low policy rates since the crisis casts doubt on the notion that the equilibrium real interest rate just happened to be low. Indeed, in recent months, long-term interest rates have increased with expectations of normalization of monetary policy.... The United States needs another dose of structural reform���including regulatory, tax, budget, and monetary���to provide incentives to increase capital investment and bring new ideas into practice.... There is hope for yet another convincing swing in the policy-performance cycle to add to the empirical database...

#economicsgonewrong #highlighted #hoistedfromthearchives #mondaysmackdown #orangehairedbaboons

There are lots and lots of business practices that could ...

There are lots and lots of business practices that could and should be ruled illegal restrains on trade: Colleen Cunningham, Florian Ederer, and Song Ma: Killer Acquisitions: "This paper argues incumbent firms may acquire innovative targets solely to discontinue the target���s innovation projects and preempt future competition. We call such acquisitions ���killer acquisitions.��� We develop a parsimonious model illustrating this phenomenon. Using pharmaceutical industry data, we show that acquired drug projects are less likely to be developed when they overlap with the acquirer���s existing product portfolio, especially when the acquirer���s market power is large due to weak competition or distant patent expiration. Conservative estimates indicate about 6% of acquisitions in our sample are killer acquisitions. These acquisitions disproportionately occur just below thresholds for antitrust scrutiny...

#noted

Note to Self: A historical question I want answered: What...

Note to Self: A historical question I want answered: What difference did it make for medieval economies���and for the relative prosperity of the Muslim world in the middle ages���that Muhammed was a merchant?

#economichistory #notetoself

Quinn Slobodian: Perfect Capitalism, Imperfect Humans: Ra...

Quinn Slobodian: Perfect Capitalism, Imperfect Humans: Race, Migration and the Limits of Ludwig von Mises���s Globalism: "The Habsburg Empire... was a silent and open partner in the writings of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises on international order, especially on questions of migration and the management of a polyglot population. After 1918 Mises conceived of robust forms of multinational governance capable of protecting a world of what he called ���perfect capitalism��� with total global mobility of labour, capital and commodities. Yet, by 1945 he had scaled back his proposals to the effective recreation of the Habsburg Empire.... Mises���s international theory was cleft by a faultline between a normative theory of an open borders world and the empirical reality of a closed borders world, underwritten by what he saw as the stubborn obstacles of human ignorance and racial animus. "How can we expect that the Hindus, the worshipers of the cow, should grasp the theories of Ricardo and of Bentham?" ���Ludwig von Mises, 1944...

...Ludwig von Mises, the mentor to Hayek, Gottfried Haberler and Fritz Machlup.... As with his prote��ge�� Hayek, Mises came to see a model of ���double government��� inspired by the Habsburg example delinking cultural and economic administration as paradigmatic for managing the uneasy settlement between mass democracy and capitalism.... In contrast to Hayek, who came to see ignorance as an asset for the functioning of the market order, Mises concluded that perfect capitalism could not be built by imperfect humans.12 Unable to transcend the horizon of his own origins, Mises scaled back his proposals for supranational order to a plan for the effective recreation of the Habsburg Empire. Mises���s globalism���and its limits���offers a case of the challenges faced by economic liberals in the twentieth century as they sought to bring their dreams of global capitalism down to earth.

Far from mere antiquarian concern, Mises���s early musings are at the heart of a dispute in the late 2010s between feuding proponents of the radical free market in Germany and the United States. Since the arrival of over one million asylum seekers to Germany since 2015 and the ongoing political agitation against undocumented migrants in the United States, self-described libertarians have split over whether open or closed borders for people best capture the free market ideal.... Right-wing libertarians have claimed support in his writings for their cause, including one leading ���Austrian��� economist, who cited Mises on national self-determination alongside Malcolm X in support of the goal of culturally homogeneous secession in 2017. Other libertarians have insisted, by contrast, on the seamless adherence of Mises to open borders for humans as well as capital and goods.... The network of institutes named for Mises and Hayek in the Unites States and Europe have become platforms for exclusionary strains of libertarianism opposing free migration.

A final appraisal of Mises���s stance on borders remains elusive. This article shows that the interpretation of his views depends on whether one follows Mises���s norm of perfect capitalism or his diagnosis of imperfect humanity. What is beyond question is that the coeval development of ever greater mobility for goods and capital and ever tighter regulation for migrants has been one of the defining features of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries...

#noted

Reed Hunt, Brad DeLong, and Joshua Cohen: Neoliberalism a...

Reed Hunt, Brad DeLong, and Joshua Cohen: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents | Commonwealth Club: "MON, SEP 9 / 7:00 PM: Outdoor Art Club, One West Blithedale, Mill Valley, 94941...

...Reed Hundt: Chairman from 1993���1997, Federal Communications Commission; Founder and CEO, Coalition for Green Capital

Brad DeLong: Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley; Former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy Under President Bill Clinton

Joshua Cohen: Editor, Boston Review; Distinguished Senior Fellow, UC Berkeley; Faculty, Apple University

7 p.m. check-in and complimentary light hors d'oeuvres. 7:30���9 p.m. program

At the end of the Carter administration and throughout the Reagan Revolution, belief in the power of markets became America's preferred economic policy doctrine. President Bill Clinton all but announced the triumph of free markets when he declared that ���the era of big government is over.��� President Barack Obama faced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and pushed a recovery plan that was more limited than many had hoped, seeming to protect the very sectors that had created it. By 2016, the economy was still uneven enough to play a role in Donald Trump���s election.��

Over the past decade, free-market economics (also known as neoliberalism) has been challenged and questioned on multiple fronts, particularly by the Democratic Party. With the Left making its voice heard as the primaries approach, many former Clinton and Obama officials are openly questioning a governing approach dominated by free-market economics.��

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. Former Clinton administration economist Brad DeLong, who is one of the market friendly neoliberal Democrats who has dominated the party for the last 20 years, believes that the time of people like himself running the Democratic Party has passed. ���The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left,��� DeLong wrote in a much-discussed Vox piece earlier this year.��

Please join us for a very special conversation between Hundt and DeLong about the limits of, and challenges to, free-market economics. These two former Clinton administration officials will be in conversation with Joshua Cohen, co-editor of Boston Review.

#noted

War and Peace: "The unfortunate General Mack...#noted

War and Peace: "The unfortunate General Mack...

#noted

I want more about this. I want to know what I should read...

I want more about this. I want to know what I should read in order to understand what cognitive narratologists think. Clearly, Comeuppancer, but what else? Arkady Martine: The Mysterious Discipline of Narratologists: Why We Need Stories to Make Sense: "That is the power of the mysterious discipline of narratologists: it tells us why stories make sense, and why we want them to so very desperately...

#noted #books #cognition

Annual Celebration of the John Bell Hood-Max von Gallwitz Society!

Hoisted from the Archives: The John Bell Hood-Max von Gallwitz Society!: Dedicated to celebrating the memory of two field commanders who may well have been the worst in history. Drink a toast to John Bell Hood on the 7/28 anniversary of his defeat at Ezra Church:

Hood... moved his troops out to oppose the Union army... planned to intercept them and catch them completely by surprise.... Unfortunately for Hood... Howard had predicted such a maneuver based on his knowledge of Hood from their time together.... His troops were already waiting in their trenches when Hood reached them. The Confederate army also had not done enough reconnaisance... and made an uncoordinated attack.... In all, about 3,642 men were casualties; 3,000 on the Confederate side and 642 on the Union side...

And drink a toast as well to Max von Gallwitz���perhaps the only Imperial German commander who could have turned the Somme into a draw!...

#highlighted #hoistedfromthearchives #strategy




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