J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 167

David French: President Trump & Sohrab Ahmari:The Cruelty...

David French: President Trump & Sohrab Ahmari:The Cruelty Is the Point: "Sohrab Ahmari... made three core points: Politics is 'war and enmity', 'civility and decency are secondary values', and the right should fight the culture war 'with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good'.... People asked, 'But what does that look like. What do you mean when you make the case for enmity and against civility?'... It looks a lot like what Sohrab did to me in his essay and what Trump���s supporters did to me in response. A man committed to 'enmity' and who believes decency is secondary repeatedly misrepresented my approach to politics and my role in critical public controversies... created a fictional version of me.... a signal flare, calling a truly enormous number of committed Trump supporters to spend day after day attacking me in the most vicious of terms, including by spreading many of the same falsehoods in the original piece.... Allow the falsehoods to issue unchallenged, and you can see your reputation... left in tatters.... Respond, and the attackers... thrill to their ability to trouble you enough to trigger an answer... [which] triggers swarms of additional personal attacks often made in steadily darker terms, culminating in zombie elements of the alt-right lurching up to take their shots.... In this brave new political world, personal attacks are indispensable. A discussion of only ideas represents exactly the kind of politics the pugilists now abhor.... But it���s all for the sake of the 'Highest Good', right?...

#noted

Charles Sykes: Donald Trump and the New Cruelty: "The chi...

Charles Sykes: Donald Trump and the New Cruelty: "The children were not collateral damage of Trump���s policy: They were the entire point. Removing them from their parents was designed to be shocking because their trauma was intended as a deterrent. Under the New Cruelty, the pitiless separation of young children from their mothers was supposed to send a chilling message to anyone foolish enough to seek asylum here... supposed to project strength, or at least the bully���s imitation of strength. Perhaps more than any other trait, it is this that motivates Trump: his need to appear strong and his fear of looking weak. Lewandowski... is a bit player... another of the menagerie of misfit toys... feed[ing] off Trump���s sundry insecurities...

#noted

Nick Kapur: "Grover Cleveland Had One of the The Sketchie...

Nick Kapur: "Grover Cleveland Had One of the The Sketchiest Marriages.: "A bachelor upon entering office in 1883, in 1886 the 49-year-old president married 21-year-old Frances Folsom, who was 28 years his junior.... So far there's a massive age difference, but otherwise it sounds okay. But... It turns out that Grover had known Frances since birth. He was a very close family friend and had actually gifted her family with her first baby carriage...

...Even worse, when Frances's father died in 1875 without heirs or a will, a court declared Grover the executor of the estate. This put Grover in charge of supervising Frances's upbringing and education. Frances was just 11 years old at that time.... Cleveland had been grooming his court-appointed ward perhaps since age 11 or even earlier. As soon as Frances graduated from Wells College at age 21, Grover immediately wrote her a letter proposing to her and she accepted. He had not seen her in several years, on account of being President. Grover said nothing about Frances while campaigning to be president, and kept their engagement secret until five days before their surprise White House wedding. Even by the misogynistic standards of the time, what he was doing was pretty sketchy. Grover later made a big deal about having asked Frances's mother for permission in advance. But given that Grover had controlled the family's finances for years, and was by then, you know, President of the United States, one wonders how much choice Frances or her mother really had...

#noted

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Yield Curve: Hoisted from the Archives from 2006

Ooh boy. Was I wrong in 2006. I am not betting against the yield curve again:

From 2006: DeLong Smackdown Watch: Yield Curve: Worthwhile Canadian Initiative thinks I'm wrong when I write: Yes, we should be worrying about the US yield curve: This inversion of the yield curve, however, is generated not by domestic investors' thinking that a recession is on the way, but by foreign central banks' desires to keep buying lots of dollar-denominated bonds in order to keep their currencies from appreciating. Thus while an inverted yield curve is usually a sign that a bunch of people are trading bonds on their belief that a recession is likely, that is not what is going on in this case...

It writes that I have a:

plausible story, but I don't think it's correct. If bond markets thought that there was little chance of a US recession in the near future, then the term structure of Canadian interest rates wouldn't be following US patterns. No-one's going to make any particular effort to prevent their currency from appreciating against the CAD, and since Canadian macroeconomic fundamentals are so strong, the only major thing that we have to worry about is the possibility of a US recession. Here's a graph of the Canadian and US yield curves from December 2005 and December 2004.... It looks as though bond traders in both markets are expecting the same thing: a slowdown (or worse) in the US - and therefore Canada - for 2007. And it also seems as though they're expecting the CAD to appreciate even further against the USD.

#smackdown #hoistedfromtehardchives #yieldcurve #recession #forecasting #macro #finance

I am not sure that it is right to say that advocate of "M...

I am not sure that it is right to say that advocate of "Mothers' Pensions" believed that "the woman���s sphere was in the home". They certainly believed that women's work was important, and beieved that the first and most dire need for social insurance was to make sure that mothers of children had the resources they needed to raise the next generation. But they���and here I am generalizing from my own family history: my great-grandmother Fonnie and my great-great-grandmother Florence���also recognized that their generations were having four pregnancies on average while their grandmothers had had eight, and that they were assisted in the home by an increasing amount of modern technology in the form of consumer durables. And my mother-in-law Barbara maintains to this day that the thing that most changed her life was the clothes-washing machine. Half the number of pregnancies plus consumer durables meant that a lot of female energy could be���and was���directed outside the home:

Alix Gould-Werth: After Mother���s Day: Changes in Mothers��� Social Programs Over Time: "As Anna Jarvis was crusading to get Mother���s Day a place on the nation���s calendar, her peers���wealthy, white women who shared her progressive, reform-minded impulses���were laying foundation for our modern social safety net. Though most of these women chose to pursue social change rather than traditional family life, as architects of Mothers��� Pensions, they sided firmly with the view that the woman���s sphere was in the home. Mothers��� Pensions���which were passed into law state by state from 1911 to 1920���were targeted at widows and provided cash payments designed to simultaneously keep children out of orphanages and mothers out of the workplace...

#noted

In a way, America in the twenty-first century has hit a t...

In a way, America in the twenty-first century has hit a trifecta, with respect to proving to everybody else in the world that America is not a good model���that ������������America now has a dysfunctional government, and behind it a dysfunctional society which appears incapable of reform. The George W. Bush administration's foreign policy demonstrated that America���or, at least, the bipartisan foreign policy establishment to whom America had given the keys���could not assess its own or the global interest in avoiding pointless war. the blocking of policies to guarantee rapid economic recovery under the Obama administration���and the Obama administration's fair to pull the levers it had���demonstrated that Republican elites, at least, had no concerns about getting to full employment and rapid growth if it might somehow redound to the benefit of their political adversaries.

And now the Trump administration has demonstrated that when the chips are down a very large proportion of America simply does not care about freedom or democracy: is very happy putting children in cages, disenfranchising legitimate voters, and appointing stunningly incompetent officials all to own the libs. Hitting this trifecta was self-inflicted.

But until we have a diagnosis and have implemented a cure, Xi Jinping can rightly say to China that we are not a superior model:

Gideon Rachman: Why Donald Trump Is Great News for Xi Jinping: "Trump... likes to create a crisis, let it run a while and then announce that he has solved it... striking an agreement that he self-certifies as 'tremendous'... [but is] superficial and the underlying issues will remain largely unaddressed. This is the model that the Trump administration has followed with North Korea, as well as with Mexico and Canada. And it is the model that is pretty clearly going to emerge in Mr Trump���s 'trade war' with China.... But calling off the trade war will not be the only gift from Mr Trump to Chinese president Xi Jinping. For Mr Trump has already disarmed America in an even more important battle���the battle of ideas.... America���s most potent weapon in its emerging contest for supremacy with China is... its ideas... 'freedom' and 'democracy' are powerful.... Sadly, that has now changed. As a candidate, Mr Trump gave a very ambiguous reply when asked about the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, stating: 'they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength'. As president, he has made it clear that he is an admirer of authoritarian strongmen around the world...

#noted

Duncan Black: Public Accommodation: "Once and not all tha...

Duncan Black: Public Accommodation: "Once and not all that long ago I went on a trip with some friends. A lesbian couple. We were going hiking. I am a dumb person so it did not occur to me that checking into a hotel could be problem. It was not a problem! The lovely woman at the checkout desk was a trans woman and she was very happy to see us. But I am dumb and until that moment it did not occur to me that getting a hotel room in Pennsyltucky could be a problem. And the problem isn't that someone might not rent to you. It's not knowing if they will. Not knowing that when you walk into a store if you will be served. It is a concern and holy crap what a concern. Maggie Haberman once told us that Donald Trump was a friend to LGTB. This is why I tell you to cancel your New York Times subscriptions. Donald Trump has turned trans people into unpersons. I am not as dumb as I used to be...

#noted

The Myth of Kevin��Williamson: Weekend Reading

Danielle Tcholakian: The Myth of Kevin��Williamson: "After a week or so of mostly women questioning The Atlantic���s hiring of Kevin Williamson, a conservative columnist who has advocated for hanging women who have had abortions, the magazine���s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg announced Williamson is no longer in his employ. Goldberg had justified hiring Williamson on the grounds that he���s a talented writer, and his assertion that women who have abortions should be hanged was an errant tweet, not to be taken seriously. But��Media Matters dug up a 2014 podcast��for the National Review in which Williamson talked at length about how much he likes this idea. 'I���m kind of squishy about capital punishment in general, but I���ve got a soft spot for hanging as a form of capital punishment'...

...Williamson���s writing on women makes one wonder if he���s ever actually spoken to one. He once asserted that ���the ladies��� (his words) should all vote for Mitt Romney because ���the ladies do tend to flock to successful executives and entrepreneurs.��� In the same piece, he declared that Romney ���in another time and place would have the option of maintaining��� a harem, seeming to lament that this isn���t something Americans ���do.���

Women, in Williamson���s world, have two settings: sexy yet ���maddening��� playthings or ���sexually repugnant��� untamed whores. From a 2008��essay for the National Review:

Every female police officer knows there is something maddeningly sexy about a woman enforcing rules, and something sexually repugnant about a woman without any rules at all�����Miss Manners is sexy for the same reason that librarians and teachers and nurses can be sexy: she is an authority ��� it���s fun to play with authority.�����

In 2008, Hillary Clinton assembling political power was�����getting in touch with her inner dominatrix (which does not seem to have been much of a reach for her.)��� On Sandra Fluke, a respected lawyer who was labeled a ���slut��� and a ���prostitute��� by Rush Limbaugh after she advocated that the insurance policies should cover contraception, he wrote,�����whatever Sandra Fluke is up to, you can be sure she���s looking for somebody else to pay for it.��� Just like a prostitute, get it?

This kind of mealy-mouthed writing is Williamson���s bread-and-butter. He called Lena Dunham ���distinctly unappealing,��� but no doubt would claim that descriptor had nothing to do with her appearance. He referred to a 9-year-old black child as a ���primate��� and a ���three-fifth-scale Snoop Dogg,��� later denying that the reference had anything to do with slavery and the period in U.S. history in which black people were considered three-fifths of a person. Sure, Kevin.

Goldberg took issue with the ���callous and violent��� language Williamson used in the podcast, saying it ���runs contrary to The Atlantic���s tradition of respectful, well-reasoned debate.��� This is a weird form of respectability politics.

Typically, respectability politics is foisted on marginalized communities���black people are told to ���walk a little straighter and write a little neater and speak a little clearer��� so that white people might be more accepting of them. But it���s also used as a cover for indulging toxic ideology. As the writer Tess Mendola pointed out on Twitter, ���Horrible ideas have a long history of advancement through ���respectful debate��� among folks whose bodies those ideas do not affect.���

Remember Williamson likening a 9-year-old black boy to a primate? Pseudosciences like phrenology were used to politely assert the inferiority of black people. For decades if not centuries, polite people made polite justifications of slavery, of racism, of the inferiority of women.

Circulating these ideas in the media has a history of harmful consequences. Before World War II, denigrating and hyperbolic news was disseminated about Jewish people with the goal of conditioning the larger population to see them as less than human. Before the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Hutus referred to Tutsis systematically as ���cockroaches��� in a similar effort to dehumanize, making people more amenable to future violence against people they were conditioned to view as less than human.

Advocating for people who have or perform abortions to be murdered is an extremist position, even if abortion itself is a politically controversial matter. Doctors have been murdered because rhetoric that advocates doing so was given mainstream airtime. It���s not unbelievable that someone might be emboldened by Williamson���s words to actually murder a woman who has had an abortion. It follows, logically, that people given to extreme actions are susceptible to extreme rhetoric.

The demographics that Williamson chooses to denigrate are vulnerable ones. His comments about abortion and black people have been paramount in complaints against him, but he has also written, in relation to a black transgender woman, that identifying as transgender is a ���delusional tendency.����� Trans women, and particularly trans women of color, are murdered at alarming rates, when the raw number is considered as a ratio of their overall population.

Despite all of this, liberals and conservatives alike continue to insist that Williamson is a talented writer, just like convicted Stanford rapist Brock Turner was a ���talented swimmer.��� Even Ta-Nehisi Coates praised his craft��in 2014. Setting aside the question of whether such talent should or does trump all else, a look at Williamson���s work doesn���t really support that assertion.

Slate���s Jordan Weissmann highlighted a piece in which Williamson argued that poor communities in America ���deserve to die.��� In the piece, Williamson argues that the white working class hasn���t been victimized by outside forces, and boohoos the closing of factories and industries on which generations of rural families have been dependent for work. Reading this, I remembered talking to young people in Maine who grew up believing they would work in the mills that employed their parents, only to come of age as the mills shuttered and the job prospects for which they had prepared no longer existed.

The idea that these communities weren���t left behind is simply wrong. Over the past half-century, industry and technology sped ahead without a glance back at them. Money that came from those industrial and technological advances went into the pockets of a select few, instead of into a public education system that could have prepared these people for the jobs that would be available to them. Our fascination with an improbable minority of self-made geniuses blinded us to the ills befalling segments of our society, and now we���re aggrieved to learn that when segments of society are infected, that means the whole of society is infected.

Williamson���s advice to these people is to move. Where? To overcrowded cities with skyrocketing rents and tenuous employment opportunities? This isn���t a solution. Williamson���s original wording was correct: It���s a death sentence. Setting aside the question of whether Williamson���s writing is harmful or offensive, the question arises of whether it has any value. His aversion to nuance undermines that.

Williamson���s stated aversion to capital punishment is consistently paired with a belief that if we���re going to have state-sanctioned murder, it ought to be as brutal as possible���hence his love of hanging. Lethal injection is ���antiseptic,��� he says, though anyone who has witnessed an execution would likely tell you the way those injections work is horrific to observe. Sex reassignment surgery, to Williamson, is ���brutal and lamentable��� because it is ���surgical mutilation basically for cosmetic purposes.���

He opposes exceptions for rape and incest in anti-abortion restrictions because ���if we are going to protect unborn human lives, then we are going to protect them regardless of the circumstances of their conception.��� This has been praised as being indicative of some level of ideological consistency, which is a bizarre way to measure intellect. How does an editor not interrogate a valuation of life that is hierarchical in this way? In Williamson���s world, an ���unborn��� life is more valuable than that of one that is not only born, but lived. What logic decrees that we humans become less valuable the longer we spend on this earth?

During the week or so of Williamson controversy, Mother Jones��� Kevin Drum posited a sort of defense of Williamson. ���Nearly every conservative believes that abortion is murder,��� Drum wrote. ���Williamson was willing to take this publicly to its logical endpoint���that women who get abortions should be prosecuted for murder one���but that act of folly is the only difference between him and every other right-wing pundit.���

I couldn���t stop thinking about that assertion. Does every conservative want women who have abortions to die? The question was stuck in my brain. It seemed unreasonable, but then I wondered if I was being naive. I thought there must be conservatives who oppose abortion, who see it as murder, but don���t want to kill women who don���t carry their pregnancies to term. There must be conservatives who would push for advancements in contraception as a way to lessen the number of abortions, or who would want to see the state of healthcare in this country improve so that giving birth doesn���t put women at serious risk of death. There must be conservatives who understand that women fear stigma, fear the prospect of depression and other mental illness during and after pregnancy, fear an inability to cover the financial burdens of raising a child in a country with a poor public education and healthcare systems. There must be conservatives who are looking at the whole picture, not just the piece of it that they find abhorrent.

But the reaction of high-profile conservatives to Williamson���s firing belied that conviction. Erick Erickson tweeted, ���Kevin Williamson���s firing is a reminder that there are two Americas and one side will stop at nothing to silence the other. This is not about a bad tweet or a bad view. It is about the left wanting on a monopoly on the public square so none can be exposed to competing ideas.��� Noah Rothman, associate editor at Commentary tweeted, ���I don���t think it is outside the remit for gatekeepers like the Atlantic to suppress certain ideas: eugenics, racial superiority, etc. But believing that abortion is violence and should be treated like that, while I disagree, is not an uncommon view. Is that beyond the arena of ideas?��� Myriad other conservatives spoke of Williamson in the past tense, as though he himself had been murdered or imprisoned or exiled, rather than simply denied a job.

This is a common phenomenon among conservatives of late, as Moira Donegan noted on Twitter and as I���ve written before. Criticism, or one���s words or actions having consequences, is seen as an infringement on some fundamental right. But the right to free speech is not a right to speech free of consequences. It is not a right to say what you wish, unquestioned. That belief is a strange entitlement found among those who prefer the status quo, who are cozy with those who have long held power, and resent that power today is unusually dynamic, that people who have long been marginalized are increasingly changing the game. The power brokers feel that the goalposts are being moved on them. They can���t accept that the others have the ability to decline to play the game according to rules that have always favored those who are already ahead.

#weekendreading

Moral fault attaches to anybody who pays money to or work...

Moral fault attaches to anybody who pays money to or works for the New York Times. You need to do better. Just saying: Jeet Heer: "They should publish two editions of the New York Times: one made up just of beat sweetener to please Trump & his staff and another that publishes just, you know, the news." Daniel Radosh: These two articles were posted to @nytimes within an hour of each other. Seems like one of them has to be incorrect, right?:

#noted

John Holbo: Twitter Thread: "Let's start at the start. 'L...

John Holbo: Twitter Thread: "Let's start at the start. 'Liberty... as formerly understood' under pressure. That is very exact and correct. But consider:... Women's rights resisted because it felt like denial of liberty (men's former liberties). African-Americans: Civil rights, a gross affront to white liberty. Anti-slavery = vicious assault on liberty.... Saying that 'liberty... as it was formerly understood' coming under felt pressure is something that is true of the BEST fights for freedom and rights. It is not a danger sign...

...Next, it is weird to point out that some of these changing attitudes might be due to changes in-weaknesses in-the church-rather than symptoms of some monstrous cancer-growth of liberalism beyond its healthy bounds. But then NOT to point out, as well, that a HUGE amount of the shift is due to basic, widespread shifts in beliefs and attitudes about homosexuality.... The reason why religious institutions���and religious individuals���are under moral pressure... At this point it gets more complicated. It's quite clear that churches and institutions and individuals do and should have rights to believe what they believe. Catholic priests should not be forced to perform gay weddings���nor will they be, obviously.

But it is equally clear that, in a world where people increasingly regard discrimination against gays as unreasonable, and (reasonably!) as a sign of animus, the zone of privilege (a.k.a. liberty) around these religious zones is going to contract a bit. The more religious people kind of lean on others���using some institutional leverage point, say-and the more we see the others stopped from doing something basically reasonable (like getting gay married), the more we are inclined to say the leaning is illegitimate....

Brad DeLong: What I find most interesting is that MBD has chosen to die on the hill of contraception. He knows, as sure as the sun rises in the east most of the time, that the Catholic teaching of no-birth-control-or-anything-weird-and-non-missionary-smacking-of-the-sins-of-Onan-or-Sodom-and-Gomorrah will not be sustained. Just like 90+% of Catholics and the 80+% of antedeluvian Catholic pundits who have less than six children, at some time some Pope will say "oops" and retract Humanae Vitae. It may not happen for 500 years. It may happen in 50, or 5, or 5 months, or perhaps even 5 days.

Indeed, in the nunc stans it has already���no: that's wrong: it has not already happened, it has always been. Simon Peter with the Big Keys always has, is now, and always will be asking those who show up at the gate who beat the anti-contraception drum why they sinned against the family and against their fellow men and women by trying to degrade and disrupt the proper roles of marriage "for the mutuall societie, helpe, and coumfort" and the "ordeined... remedie agaynst sinne, and... fornicacion". An antediluvian serious about the contraception doctrine would be calling for church courts to investigate and interrogate those with fewer than 6 children, inquiring in detail how they do it. But perhaps that is what MBD is calling for. Perhaps that is the form that his inward focus on Believers would take.

I mean, are they expecting the frequency of lovemaking to go way down?

Are they expecting infant and maternal mortality to return to pre-industrial levels?

Are they expecting magic space travel to allow the human population to grow three-fold every generation with no Malthusian consequences?

Are they expecting to continue to die on the hill of society-needs-to-disrespect-and-ban-contraception in the public square while in nearly every private bedroom there are a lot of non-missionary-Sodom-and-Gomorrah activities going on, of which we do not speak?

Or are they all secret atheists���view their religion as Gibbon's cynical magistrate did: useful as Durkheimian mortar to cement the hierarchy from which they benefit?

Or maybe MBD is sacrificing himself for others? Others' belief is shaky, and needs to be reinforced...

John Holbo: These are all good questions. In a weird way, I think they expect other people to somehow bear the logical cost at this embarrassment of unanswerables, because, after all, they are 'sincere'. (You, for example, are being slightly rude, asking such questions of religious people!)

Brad DeLong But... it is not usually taken as rude in religious circles to ask of people: Will you be on the left or the right "when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats"? Usually that is taken as a friendly and brotherly question, helpfully concentrate attention on one's place in the World's Last Night, as Jack Chick would...

John Holbo: Oh absolutely. Rude to challenge people about their religious beliefs. Because that's religious liberty. But it's not rude for religious people to challenge non-religious people abut their beliefs. Because that's religious liberty. Purest proof of 'liberty' = 'privilege' here!

#noted #twitterthreaed