J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 169

"Linden Tree" from the Fellowship of the Ring: For the Weekend

The leaves were long, the grass was green,

The hemlock-umbels tall and fair,

And in the glade a light was seen

Of stars in shadow shimmering.

Tin��viel was dancing there

To music of a pipe unseen,

And light of stars was in her hair,

And in her raiment glimmering.

There Beren came from mountains cold,

And lost he wandered under leaves,

And where the Elven-river rolled

He walked alone and sorrowing.

He peered between the hemlock-leaves

And saw in wonder flowers of gold

Upon her mantle and her sleeves,

And her hair like shadow following.

Enchantment healed his weary feet

That over hills were doomed to roam;

And forth he hastened, strong and fleet,

And grasped at moonbeams glistening.

Through woven woods in Elvenhome

She lightly fled on dancing feet,

And left him lonely still to roam

In the silent forest listening.

He heard there oft the flying sound

Of feet as light as linden-leaves,

Or music welling underground,

In hidden hollows quavering.

Now withered lay the hemlock-sheaves,

And one by one with sighing sound

Whispering fell the beechen leaves

In the wintry woodland wavering.

He sought her ever, wandering far

Where leaves of years were thickly strewn,

By light of moon and ray of star

In frosty heavens shivering.

Her mantle glinted in the moon,

As on a hill-top high and far

She danced, and at her feet was strewn

A mist of silver quivering.

When winter passed, she came again,

And her song released the sudden spring,

Like rising lark, and falling rain,

And melting water bubbling.

He saw the elven-flowers spring

About her feet, and healed again

He longed by her to dance and sing

Upon the grass untroubling.

Again she fled, but swiftly he came.

Tin��viel! Tin��viel!

He called her by her Elvish name;

And there she halted listening.

One moment stood she, and a spell

His voice laid on her: Beren came,

And doom fell on Tin��viel

That in his arms lay glistening.

As Beren looked into her eyes

Within the shadows of her hair

The trembling starlight of the skies

He saw there mirrored shimmering.

Tin��viel the elven-fair,

Immortal maiden elven-wise,

About him cast her shadowy hair

And arms like silver glimmering.

Long was the way that fate them bore,

O'er stony mountains cold and grey

Through halls of iron and darkling door

And woods of nightshade morrowless.

The Sundering Seas between them lay,

And yet at last they met once more,

And long ago they passed away

In the forest singing sorrow less

Strider sighed and paused before he spoke again. ���That is a song,��� he said, ���in the mode that is called ann-thennath among the Elves, but is hard to render in our Common Speech, and this is but a rough echo of it. It tells of the meeting of Beren son of Barahir and L��thien Tin��viel.

Beren was a mortal man, but L��thien was the daughter of Thingol, a King of Elves upon Middle-earth when the world was young; and she was the fairest maiden that has ever been among all the children of this world. As the stars above the mists of the Northern lands was her loveliness, and in her face was a shining light.

In those days the Great Enemy, of whom Sauron of Mordor was but a servant, dwealt in Angband in the North, and the Elves of the West coming back to Middle-earth made war upon him to regain the Silmarils which he had stolen; and the fathers of Men aided the Elves.

But the Enemy was victorious and Barahir was slain, and Beren escaping through great peril came over the Mountains of Terror into the hidden Kingdom of Thingol in the forest of Neldoreth. There he beheld L��thien singing and dancing in a glade beside the enchanted river Esgalduin; and he named her Tin��viel, that is Nightingale in the language of old.

Many sorrows befell them afterwards, and they were parted long. Tin��viel rescued Beren from the dungeons of Sauron, and together they passed through great dangers, and cast down even the Great Enemy from his throne, and took from his iron crown one of the three Silmarils, brightest of all jewels, to be the bride price of L��thien to Things her father.

Yet at the last Beren was slain by the Wolf that came from the gates of Angband, and he died in the arms of Tin��viel. But she chose mortality, and to die from the world, so that she might follow him; and it is sung that they met again beyond the Sundering Seas, and after a brief time walking alive once more in the green woods, together they passed, long ago, beyond the confines of this world.

So it is that L��thien Tin��viel alone of the Elf-kindred has died indeed and left the world, and they have lost her whom they most loved. But from her the lineage of the Elf-lords of old descended among Men. There live still those of whom L��thien was the foremother, and it is said that her line shall never fail.

Elrond of Rivendell is of that Kin. For of Beren and L��thien was born Dior Thingol���s heir; and of him Elwing the White whom E��rendil wedded, he that sailed his ship out of the mists of he world into the seas of heaven with the Silmaril upon his brow. And of E��rendil came the Kings of Numenor, that is Westernesse...

#sciencefiction #fortheweekend

Friend of Equitable Growth Elise Gould on how minimum wag...

Friend of Equitable Growth Elise Gould on how minimum wage increases are having powerful positive while���so far at least���no negative impacts: Elise Gould: "Look! In states with a minimum wage increase between 2013 and 2018, the 10th percentile wage grew 50% faster than in states without any increase. On the other hand, median wage growth was similar in states that did and did not increase their minimum wage in that same period...

#noted

Joseph Schumpeter on "Liquidationism": Hoisted from the Archives

Hoisted from the Archives: Joseph Schumpeter on "Liquidationism": Hoisted from the Archives: "The problems presented by periods of depression may be grouped as follows: First, removal of extra economic injuries to the economic mechanism: Mostly impossible on political grounds. Second, relief: Not only imperative on moral and social grounds, but also an important means to keep up the current of economic life and to steady demand, although no cure for fundamental cases. Third, remedies: The chief difficulty of which lies in the fact that depressions are not simply evils, which we might attempt to suppress, but���perhaps undesirable���forms of something which has to be done, namely, adjustment to previous economic change. Most of what would be effective in remedying a depression would be equally effective in preventing this adjustment. This is especially true of inflation, which would, if pushed far enough, undoubtedly turn depression in to the sham prosperity so familiar from European postwar [i.e., World War I] experience, but which, if it be carried to that point, would, in the end, lead to a collapse worse than the one it was called in to remedy...

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...Fourth, reforms of institutions intended to remedy the situation but suggested by the moral and economic evils of both booms and depressions: The crucial point of these reforms lies in the coincidence of a political atmosphere exceptionally favorable, and an economic situation exceptionally unfavorable to their success. No doubt they will always be carried amidst enthusiastic clapping of hands. But they will also be stigmatized in the future by their tendency to prevent or retard recovery. This should not blind to us to any merits they may have, but it is a plain and undeniable fact...

������

The Atmosphere of Periods of Depression: 'We have seen that the course of events in all periods of depression presents a significant family likeness. So do the attitudes of the people. Defeat on the battlefield destroys the prestige of military rulers and their confidence in themselves; crises destroy whatever of both these things business leaders may enjoy. Their cry for help is the more damaging for them the more they disapproved of government interference before...

...For the time being, the majority of people grows out of humor with the economic system under which they live, and becomes inclined to favor what in some cases we call reaction and in others radicalism. In fact, it makes astonishingly little difference which way they more politically. The consequences are much the same in both cases.... The Upshot: There is no reason to despair���this is the first lesson to be derived from our story. Fundamentally the same thing has happened in the past, and it has���in the only two cases which are comparable to the present one���lasted just as long. We are more keenly alive now to human suffering, and we are dealing with the situation under political pressure by political methods, but substantially we are confronted only with problems which the world was confronted with before.

In all cases, not only the two which we have analyzed, recovery came of itself. There is certainly this much of truth in the talk about the recuperative powers of our industrial system. But this is not all: our analysis leads us to believe that recovery is sound only if it does com of itself. For any revival which is merely due to artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone and adds, to an undigested remnant of maladjustment, new maladjustment of its own which has to be liquidated in turn, thus threatending business with another crisis ahead. Particularly, our story provides a presumption against remedial measures which work through money and credit. For the trouble is fundamentally not with money and credit, and policie of this class are particularly apt to keep up, and add to, maladjustment, and to produce additional trouble in the future......

������

#hoistedfromthearchvies #macro #economicsgonewrong

Stacey Perman: No, Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg Was N...

Stacey Perman: No, Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg Was Not Misquoted: "Goldberg was... quoted.... 'It���s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males.'... Twitter was not amused.... Goldberg took to Twitter to suggest that he���d been misquoted and that the magazine had asked for a correction:

...Tim Dickinson: How did these words cross your mind, much less escape your mouth?

Jeffrey Goldberg: They didn���t. I told the reporter that many women haven���t been given the chance to write the 10,000 word stories. That���s what I���m trying to change.

Christy Karras: So you are saying they completely misquoted you? Have you asked for a correction?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Laura Hazard Owen, the Nieman Lab deputy editor who conducted the interview, fired back, saying Goldberg was not misquoted and that she had recorded the conversation. Hazard Owen told The Times that Goldberg had neither reached out to her directly nor asked for a correction. According to Hazard Owen, a press representative from The Atlantic contacted her to say that she thought Goldberg had ���misspoken,��� but did not ask for a correction.

Goldberg and a representative for The Atlantic declined to comment; the representative referred us to Goldberg���s tweets. Meanwhile, Twitter threads continued to fester, asking whether Goldberg had indeed been misquoted. By late afternoon, Goldberg���s position appeared to shift. On Twitter he clarified, saying,

Re: That @NiemanReports interview: I was trying to explain (and obviously failed to explain) that white males dominate cover-story writing because they���ve had all the opportunities. We���re trying to change that at @TheAtlantic...

#noted

And, yes, Dean Baquet is a horrible, horrible, horrible e...

And, yes, Dean Baquet is a horrible, horrible, horrible editor for The New York Times: Jay Rosen: Twitter Thread: "@farhio writes about a 'late-dawning recognition by mainstream news organizations, which until fairly recently shied away...' The recognition? The president is a chronic liar and does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. 'The Times���s executive editor, Dean Baquet, has said his newsroom strives to use the word [lie] "judiciously" because using it repeatedly "could feed the mistaken notion that we���re taking political sides." Alt reasoning: if Trump lies repeatedly, then you use the word repeatedly.... This was never a question of 'is it accurate to say he lies?' It was never about truthtelling at all. The entire debate was how about how to... APPEAR innocent, unbiased, unaligned.... Taking four years to wake up to his chronic lying means that recognition of this fact is dim, as well: His refusal to be briefed, the undermining of climate science, his contempt for intelligence agencies, the put down of diplomacy, attacks on the press, his lying��� all one thing. That the press got hung up on intent���'how can we know his intent?'���was striking to me because in the savvy style of analysis nothing is more quotidian than journalists at the capital confidently revealing a politician's intent during some run-of-the-mill strategy discussion...

#noted

I would have thought that the honchos who run the Atlanti...

I would have thought that the honchos who run the Atlantic Monthly would have recognized that Jeffrey Goldberg was a bad choice for editor before they hired him.

I would have thought that the honchos who run the Atlantic Monthly would have recognized that Jeffrey Goldberg was a bad choice for editor when he tried to hire Kevin "let's hang women who have had abortions" Williamson as somebody whose "whose force of intellect and acuity of insight" was just what the Atlantic needed.

Let's see if they recognize that Jeffrey Goldberg was a bad choice for editor now:

Duncan Black: Twitter Thread: "Jeffrey Goldberg is a monster. tTe editors who paid him at the New Yorker are monsters and the Atlantic is horrible..." Doug J.: "Some of the stuff Conor writes there must be among the worst writing ever to appear in a commercial magazine..." Scott Gosnell: "What is it now???..." Ms. Informed: "Jeffrey Goldberg doesn't think women can write long form journalism. I think he meant he doesn't want to read writers that are women..." Jeffrey Goldberg: "It's really, really hard to write a 10,000 word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males..." Helen Rosner: "Imagine not only saying this but actually believing it..." Scott Lemieux: "Oh, look, here's the editor of the f---ing Atlantic Monthly asserting that the people writing longform articles are 'almost exclusively white males'. Like saying it out loud.��It's just astounding that he would say that..." Karen Cox: "Doesn���t he know that there are quite a few women who have written entire books?..." Ostrich Jacket: "Obviously females don't write long form���their muscle structure and bone density means that they will konk out at 4500 words every time..."

#noted

American Conservative fusionism was always weird: anti-Co...

American Conservative fusionism was always weird: anti-Communists, those who saw Israel as the spearhead of the U.S.'s Cold War panoply, plutocrats, anti-unionists, low-taxers, racists who wanted the federal government to stop interfering with white supremacy, gay-bashers, patriarchs, and those desperate to keep women in their previous place���it was always a group much, much, much, much less attractive to anyone than even, say, George Orwell's parody of the left as composed of "every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ���Nature Cure��� quack, pacifist, and feminist in England".

But the current war that those social conservatives who want Blacks, women, and gays to get back in their place are waging against their soi-disant small-government regulatory-rollback allies is quite something. This puts it best: Forrest Chump: "Being into Christendom for the racism and the hierarchy is a heck of a take".

Read Jane Coasten to get a sense of what is going on, but be sure to recognize that most of it is a bunch of people trying to figure out how they can still support Trump 100% and still think of themselves as good people:

Jane Coasten: David French vs. Sohrab Ahmari and the Battle Dividing��Conservatives, Explained: "First Things... a broadside against 'fusionism'... for... 'severing of the link between sex and gender' and... olding 'investors and "job creators" above workers and citizens'... fail[ing] to retard... the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity, and much else... surrender[ing] to the pornographization of daily life, to the culture of death, to the cult of competitiveness... bow[ing] to a poisonous and censorious multiculturalism'.... What kind of moral compromises should conservatives make to win a cultural or political battle? Should conservatism aim to persuade liberals or inoculate conservatives against liberalism? Should conservatism care what private citizens do in their bedrooms or boardrooms or places of worship? The debate over libertarianism and conservatism, and over Ahmari and French, isn���t just about what conservatives believe. It���s about what conservatism is...

#noted

American Finance: Perceptions, Prospects, and Policies

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/00XLwIpxn9pEFcM34iM-ggyqQ 2018-10-17

#forecasting #finance #highlighted

Adam Server: Conservatives Bend the Knee to Trump and Neo...

Adam Server: Conservatives Bend the Knee to Trump and Neofascism: "Ross Douthat gets political/moral problem with 'post fusionist' US conservatism: it relies upon ginning up racial resentment to win elections. But he misses this: Euro con populists accepts social democracy that US pop right can���t imagine. My problem with this is that it doesn't engage with the possibility that Trump's ethnonationalism might not be some kind of subsequent aberration that Trump stapled to his 'populism' once that won him the election, but rather the actual reason his populism helped win GOP primary... Richard Yeselson: "It was both���it was white, social democratic gerontocracy SS/Medicare) + racial/nativist/anti-feminist resentment... Greg Sargent: "Yes, I agree. There was a real economic populism buried in all of it. But that turned out to be as 'weak as straw' compared to the ethnonationalism, as Orwell put it in a somewhat different context... Adam Serwer: "The real debate here is over whether to pursue a one party illiberal 'democracy' where the state crushes its political critics and polices cultural expressions deemed ���degenerate,��� or whether to adhere to small-l liberal democracy. Everyone is too ashamed to say this directly)...

#noted

Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (June 5, 2019)

Live at Project Syndicate: What to Do About China?: "It is entirely foreseeable that America���s attempt to ���get tough��� with China could accelerate its own relative decline, effectively handing China the semi-hegemony it is already approaching.... So, what should the US do to shore up its position vis-��-vis China?...

Weekly Forecasting Update: May 31, 2019: No Significant Changes: "About the only news these past three weeks is an 0.7%-point decrease in our estimate in what production will be over April-June, driven by a reduction in estimated durable goods orders and capacity utilization. This might be an impact o Trump's trade war, plus Trump's attempts to add a trade war with Mexico to the mix...

An Intake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016": Refinding the Path Toward Utopia: From 1938 to 1973 growth in the G-7 jerked forward again: not at the 0.76%/year pace of 1913-1938 or even the 1.42%/year pace of 1870-1913, but at an average pace of 3.0%/year. That is a material wealth doubling time of not the 90 years or so of 1913-1938 or even the 50 years of 1870-1913, but 24 years: less than a generation. Thus the G-7 was three times as well-off in 1973 as it had been in 1938...

An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016": The Cold War: There was one other fact about post-World War II that cemented the social-democratic mixed-economy Keynesian order that drove a generation of the fastest economic growth and the greatest advance in human prosperity and liberty the world had hitherto seen: it was the Cold War...

Note to Self: Lecture: African Retardation: https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0O8TxLOzM1gvGwSZYkWBV97rw

Note to Self: G-7 national income per capita growth since 1800, according to Hans Rosling's http://gapminder.org: https://www.icloud.com/numbers/07Q5v0jKa1sohBHiO8l3Np9Gw...

Hoisted from the Archives from 2017: Interview: "NAFTA Is Just Not a Big Deal for the U.S.": "In a typical year we sell exports that we could get 2 trillion for if we had to sell them here at home and get imports that would cost us 4 trillion. That makes us 2 trillion per year���25,000 per family each year���richer and more prosperous. That is a big deal...

A Year Ago on Equitable Growth: Twenty Must- and Should-Reads from the Week of May 31, 2018...

Weekend Reading: Belle Waring: Uses and Abuses of Tarps: : "Such creativity! And the need to give Gorky one slender reed on which to lean for his glowing reviews of the labor re-education camps! Even his choice of fiancee seemed to augur his judgments: 'The famous writer embarked from the steamer in Prosperity Gulf. Next to him was his fiancee dressed all in leather���a black leather service cap, a leather jacket, leather riding breeches, and high narrow boots���a living symbol of the OGPU shoulder to shoulder with Russian literature'...

Weekend Reading: Henry Farrell: The American Right's Torquemada Option: "When anti-modern conservatives decide that the liberal world is depraved... cleanse it of the corruption of tolerance. Call it the Torquemada Option https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_the_Warlock. And the moderate success that some modern figures-such as Orban-have enjoyed in taking over the university system and forcibly purging it of those who would pollute our youth with gender studies and the like give old time reactionaries like Kimball some hope it can be done...

Weekend Reading: Jeremiah: 22 KJV: "'Do no wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, nor the widow, neither shed innocent blood in this place. For if.. ye will not hear these words, I swear by myself', saith the Lord, 'that this house shall become a desolation'...

Weekend Reading: Into the Abyss: James David Nicoll on Heinlein's "Starship Troopers": "Heinlein... convinced himself he intended 'veterans' to include people whose public service included non-military organizations but there is no textual evidence of this.... 'Youngster, do I look that silly? I���m a civilian employee'. 'Oh. Sorry, sir'. 'No offense. But military service is for ants'. The doctor clearly sees service as military��service...

Comment of the Day: As Dan Davies says, finance works with criminal penalties for material misrepresentations, and works better. Would not politics also work better with such?: Graydon: "Remember that in this case, Boris made the public lie in an official capacity, was told by the relevant governmental body that it was a lie���the statistics authority officially informed the official persona of the officeholder that no, no, that's not correct; that is not close to correct���and the official persona went right on making the lie in public in ways the court refuses to find obviously immaterial...

Gershem Gorenberg: "The actions of a leader desperate to hold power and stay out of jail are utterly beyond prediction...

Paul Krugman: Robot Geometry: "Imagine an economy that produces only one good... using two techniques, A and B, one capital-intensive, one labor-intensive.... Technical progress in A, perhaps also making A even more capital-intensive... will lead to a fall in the real wage, because 1/w must rise. GDP and hence productivity does rise, but maybe not by much if the economy was mostly using the labor-intensive technique. And what about allocation of labor between sectors?... Capital-using technical progress in A actually leads to a higher share of the work force being employed in labor-intensive B...

Nadiezda Kizenko (2000): A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People https://books.google.com/books?isbn=027101976X: "Three introductory comments.... While I have tried to do justice to a figure as complex as Father John, this is not a hagiography.... Because I intend this book... for readers... interest[ed] in the history of Russia and... of Christianity, I have included background material.... I am well aware that Father John still sparks intense reactions...

Mark Thoma (May 29, 2019): Your Daily digest for Economist's View

Chris Patten: Unforgettable Tiananmen: "It's not surprising that the Communist Party of China has worked so hard to eradicate the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre from public memory. History���including the horrors of Mao Zedong���s rule���is too volatile a substance for the Chinese dictatorship...

David Evans: New Findings in Global Education: "Want better test scores? Lower the heat....Parents make school choices based not only on test scores but also on a school's contribution to reduced crime or teen pregnancies.... Education reform ��� education gains.... It���s hard to teach what you don���t know...

Erin Blakemore: The Korean War Hasn't Officially Ended. One Reason: POWs: "And then there were the POWs who were not returned at all. About 80,000 South Koreans were in North Korea when a ceasefire ended the war. Most are thought to have been put to work as laborers, 're-educated', and integrated into North Korean society. In 2010, South Korea estimated that 560 were still alive. Their ordeals in repressive North Korea were unknown until a small group of defectors told their stories...

Chris Duckett: AMD 3rd-Gen Ryzen Series Coming in July LedbyBy 12-Core Ryzen 9 Beast: "Range of chips beginning at 330 and topping out at 500 for the 12-core Ryzen 9... 7 nanometre technology... 12 cores, can handle 24 threads, has 2.8GHz base frequency with 4.6GHz boost, and has 70MB of cache. 'That's half the price of our competition with much, much more performance', AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su said...

HathiTrust Digital Library

Mihir Sharma: Modi's Election Win Sends a Populist Warning to the World: "From Trump to Brexit, don���t bet against voters making the same choice again...

Hoisted from 2010: How an Economy Can Live Beyond Its Means on Its Wits: P.J. Grigg: "I distrust utterly those economists who have with great but deplorable ingenuity taught that it is not only possible but praiseworthy for a whole country to live beyond its mens on its wits and who in Mr. Shaw's description tech that it is possible to make a community rich by calling a penny two pence, in short who have sought to make economics a vade mecum for political spivs..." Confront economists' theories of depressions... and you find yourself immediately confronted with... seven... Monetarism... Wicksellianism... Minskyism... Austrianism... Vulgar Keynsianism... Hickianism... Post-Keynesianism...

Hoisted from 2009: Fama's Fallacy II: Predecessors: Fama, actually, is much worse than the British Treasury economists of the 1920s. They acknowledged that monetary policy could affect the level of employment--could do more than shift resources from one use to another. Fama's argument based on his misinterpretation of the NIPA savings-investment identity has the implication that monetary policy cannot affect the unemployment rate either...

Paul Krugman: "Back in the USA and thinking about what it must be like for conservative economists who weren���t always total hacks but have sold their souls-eg backing crazy claims about tax cuts or declaring that Bernanke was debasing the dollar to help Obama. All that self-abatement to curry favor with the right-and then Art fricking Laffer gets a presidential medal while they get nothing. Self abasement. If I could do self abasement I probably would...

Neil McInnes: The Great Doomsayer: Oswald Spengler Reconsidered

George Kennan (1947): The Sources of Soviet Conduct

U.S. National Security Council (1950): NSC-68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security

Live from the Republicans' Self-Made Gehenna: Irving Kristol: "This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems. The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority-so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government...

Gideon Rachman: Beijing, Berlin and the Two 1989s: "Fear for democracy often has more to do with events in the west itself���in particular the election of Donald Trump���than developments in China. But the change in intellectual mood also represents a tacit acknowledgment that China has achieved what seemed impossible to most western intellectuals back in 1989.... China has... remained a one-party state... continued to surge economically.... The Communist party has always argued that the key to growth and prosperity in China was not democracy but stability.... The Chinese political system has become more, not less, autocratic. Meanwhile, a horrible realisation has grown that the internet and social media may not be the tools of political liberation that were envisaged during the Clinton and Obama years...

As Dan Davies says, finance works with criminal penalties for material misrepresentations, and works better. Would not politics also work better with such?: Sarah Provan: Boris Johnson Faces Trial over Brexit Campaign Claim: "Johnson must attend court for a preliminary hearing, District Judge Margot Coleman has ruled. Mr Johnson behaved in an 'irresponsible and dishonest' way when he claimed during the 2016 Brexit vote that the UK sent ��350m a week to the EU, a London court was told last week by lawyers representing a campaigner who wants to pursue a private criminal prosecution against the former foreign secretary. 'The allegations which have been made are unproven accusations and I do not make any findings of fact', wrote Judge Coleman. 'Having considered all the relevant factors I am satisfied that this is a proper case to issue the summons as requested for the three offences as drafted.'... Marcus Ball is pursuing a criminal charge of misconduct in a public office against the Conservative MP over the ��350m figure emblazoned on a red bus used by the Vote Leave campaign. He has raised almost ��200,000 by crowdfunding the legal action and last Thursday his lawyers asked Westminster Magistrates��� Court to issue a summons that Mr Johnson should appear in court to answer the allegation.... Lewis Power QC, acting for Mr Ball, told the court that the proposed prosecution was not a 'political stunt' or about Brexit but was about the behaviour of those in public office. Adrian Darbishire QC, acting for Mr Johnson, has previously told the court that his client 'absolutely denied' that he had acted in an improper or dishonest manner at any time. He argued that the proposed prosecution would be a misapplication of the law because the criminal offence of misconduct in public office is 'confined to serious abuse of state power'...

Michael Hiltzik: A Devastating Analysis of the Tax Cut Shows It���s Done Virtually No Economic Good: "You may remember all the glowing predictions made for the December 2017 tax cuts by congressional Republicans and the Trump administration: Wages would soar for the rank-and-file, corporate investments would surge, and the cuts would pay for themselves. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has just published a deep dive into the economic impact of the cuts in their first year, and emerges from the water with a different picture. The CRS finds that the cuts have had virtually no effect on wages, haven���t contributed to a surge in investment, and haven���t come close to paying for themselves. Nor have they delivered a cut to the average taxpayer...

The��McKinsey Global Institute takes "A new look at��the declining labor share of income in the United States"��in a report by James Manyika,��Jan Mischke,��Jacques Bughin,��Jonathan Woetzel,��Mekala Krishnan, and Samuel Cudre (May 2019).... Why did this happen?.... Five main causes... supercycles... rising depreciation and shift to IPP capital... superstar effects and consolidation... capital substitution and technology... and globalization and labor bargaining power...

Unsalted Sinner: @unsaltedsinner: "Sulzberger has said that the New York Times doesn't need a public editor anymore, because their readers will use social media to act as a watchdog. And when that watchdog actually shows up...

Joshua Gans: An Old Result on Automation and Wages: "Herbert Simon... The Shape of Automation for Men and Management.... Simon starts wondering what happened to the horses and the jobs they held. He argues that the problem with horses was that their existence depended on market forces. In other words, when the demand for horses fell, soon after supply went down���that is something that doesn���t necessarily happen for labour.... If a production technique is employed in equilibrium, the value of output will equal the sum of labour and capital costs. If the price of the good is 1 then: w * a + (1 + r) * b = 1.... Now suppose there was a new production process with coefficients (a���, b���) such that w * a��� + (1 + r) * b��� < 1.... Producers would expand their production.... The pie will be increased but who will get what?... Suppose a��� < a but b��� = b. Then it must be that w��� > w. In other words, reduce the labour requirement in production and labour captures more and, indeed, all of the value arising from this technological change.... Second, suppose that a��� = a but b��� < b. So capital is more productively efficient. So long as the rate of interest does not change (which it won���t if it is set by consumption level savings preferences), then once again w��� > w!... To quote Simon, 'so long as the rate of interest remains constant, an advance in technology can only produce a rising level of real wages. The only route through which technological advance could lower real wages would be by increasing the capital coefficient (the added cost being compensated by a larger decline in the labor coefficient), thereby creating a scarcity of capital and pushing interest rates sharply upward'...

Graydon Saunders: Some Assumptions About Cars: "Honda is leaving the UK for manufacturing purposes.... Cost scales with parts count, and the drive train parts count in electric drops a couple orders of magnitude.... Honda (and everybody else making cars) is sharply aware of this.... Given current Chinese policy (fairly close to 'electric or death'), the distance from Japan to China, and the fundamental impracticality of shipping anything but Veblen-good luxury vehicles globally in an electric car world, of course Honda is pulling out of Europe. Overall, this is a good thing; that's a good hint we're getting closer to the electric transition for personal vehicles...

The Quarterly Journal of Economics puts its stamp of approval on Cengiz, Dube, Linder, and Zipperer. This makes me even more surprised that the minimum-wage effects wars are till going on. At least for minimum wages near current U.S. levels, there literally is no downside to raising the minimum wage: Arindrajit Dube: On Twitter: "Pleased to announce that our paper quantifying the overall effect of US minimum wages on low-wage jobs is now forthcoming at the Quarterly Journal of Economics...

David G. Blanchflower: Recessions Elude Economic Forecasters: "I served on the MPC from 2006 to 2009.... From around October 2007 onward, for many months in a row I started to vote for interest rate cuts, mostly on my own.... Eight people on the MPC had the same opinion, and I had a different one, so there were only two opinions. I felt as if I had the weight of the British people on my shoulders. As the famous Liverpool football club battle cry from the Kop End that sang out loudly the other day in the 4-0 defeat of Barcelona, from the old Gerry and the Pacemakers song, 'Walk on with hope in your heart and you���ll never walk alone'.��Some years later, Gordon Brown... apologized for appointing me 'to that awful job'. I still believe Gordon Brown and Ben Bernanke saved the world...

There is lots that seems to me to be smart in this piece by Mervyn King, and a lot that seems to me to be not smart at all. The claim that a second referendum would not work because "it is no longer possible to confine the options, as in 2016, to a binary choice" is simply ludicrous: there was no "binary choice" on offer in 2016; there never was a "binary choice". Britain could seek a relationship like Norway's, like Switzerland's, like Ukraine's, like Turkey's, or like Korea's���or it could just confront the EU as a standard WTO member. The right path, IMHO, is to say that the first referendum result was corrupted by Boris Johnson's criminal or near-criminal misrepresentation and by the absence of a definition of "Brexit", and to rerun the referendum as a binary choice between remain on the one hand and the May plan on the other. And, indeed, Mervyn King's hope for a general election in which the "two main parties... [present] clear opposing positions on Brexit" would be that���if Labour would admit that it prefers remain, and if the Conservatives would get behind the May plan. But neither party will. The May plan, with the backstop, deprives Britain of its voice in Brussels's decisions and in return gives Britain the power to kick Poles out of the country at will. That is what the Conservative membership wants���probably because what they really want is to kick the Pakistanis out, and gaining the theoretical power to kick Poles out has been sold to them by right-wing neo-fascist demagogues as a good substitute. But the right-wing neo-fascist demagogues objected to the May plan because it put Britain in the position of being a dependent supplicant relative to Brussels���like Canada is to the U.S. What they want is both the power to kick Poles out and the power to veto decisions being made in Brussels���and that is not on offer. I suspect that what King really wishes���but cannot say, even to himself���is that he really wishes he and his ilk had all supported Blair and Brown rather than Cameron-Osborne-Clegg in 2010, and so had a governing party with competent technocrats who sought a better Britain rather than one populated entirely by grifters and spivs. But he ought to have checked those three dogs for fleas before he lay down with them: Mervyn King: How Brexit Broke British Politics: "The test of any political system is how it copes with an issue that divides the nation.... There are two requirements for major change in Britain. The first is a public mandate. And the second is a working majority in the House of Commons to implement that mandate. In normal circumstances, a general election is the mechanism by which one party obtains both a public mandate and a majority of seats in the Commons.... In June 2015, the House of Commons voted for a referendum on EU membership.... Voters were told the choice was theirs, and they voted to leave. But there was no parliamentary majority to deliver Brexit, and no vision of what Brexit even meant.... The best way forward would be for the two main parties to develop clear opposing positions on Brexit, and put the disagreement to voters at another general election.... Why not a second referendum?... It is no longer possible to confine the options, as in 2016, to a binary choice on the fundamental issue���in or out...

Franklin M. Fisher (1989): Games Economists Play: A Noncooperative View: "As a teacher of mine (probably Carl Kaysen) once remarked some thirty years ago, it may very well be the case that one cannot understand the history of the American rubber tire industry without knowing that Harvey Firestone was an aggressive guy who believed in cutting prices. Maybe so. But then, as someone else (probably Mordecai Kurz or Kenneth Arrow) remarked to me a few years ago, the job of theory is to discover what characteristics of the rubber tire industry made such aggressive behavior a likely successful strategy. Absolutely right. That question would be answered if we had a generalizing theory of oligopoly. As it stands, we are a long way from an answer...

Richard Feynman: Math and Science: "How am I going to explain to you the things I don���t explain to my students until they are third-year graduate students? Let me explain it by analogy: The Maya Indians were interested in the rising and setting of Venus as a morning ���star��� and as an evening ���star������they were very interested in when it would appear. After some years of observation, they noted that five cycles of Venus were very nearly equal to eight of their ���nominal years��� of 365 days (they were aware that the true year of seasons was different and they made calculations of that also). To make calculations, the Maya had invented a system of bars and dots to represent numbers (including zero), and had rules by which to calculate and predict not only the risings and settings of Venus, but other celestial phenomena, such as lunar eclipses. In those days, only a few Maya priests could do such elaborate calculations. Now, suppose we were to ask one of them how to do just one step in the process of predicting when Venus will next rise as a morning star���subtracting two numbers. And let���s assume that, unlike today, we had not gone to school and did not know how to subtract. How would the priest explain to us what subtraction is?...

Brahma Chellaney: China���s Tiananmen Reckoning: "In a night of carnage on June 3-4, 1989, the Chinese authorities crushed the pro-democracy protests with tanks and machine guns. In Eastern Europe, the democratization push led to the fall of the Berlin Wall just five months later, heralding the end of the Cold War. But the West recoiled from sustaining its post-Tiananmen sanctions against China.... After a long post-massacre boom, China���the world���s largest, strongest, wealthiest, and most technologically advanced autocracy���is entering a period of uncertainty.... The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 were inspired by the watershed May 4, 1919, student demonstrations against Western colonialism at the same site. But whereas Xi recently extolled the May Fourth Movement in a speech marking the centenary of that event, he and the CPC are edgy about the Tiananmen anniversary. This year also marks the 60th anniversary of a failed uprising in Tibet against Chinese occupation. And it is ten years since a Uighur revolt killed hundreds in the Xinjiang region, where more than one million Muslims have now been incarcerated as part of a Xi-initiated effort to 'cleanse' their minds of extremist thoughts. Then, on October 1, the People���s Republic of China will celebrate its 70th birthday...

Moreover, who says that workers are paid anything like their marginal products? Luck and market power seem to me to be much more important than anything that could be called net social value of the work. As I often say, a skilled worker is an unskilled worker with a strong union: Paul Campos: Talent Is Not Scarce: "Existing social hierarchies, and especially the compensation structures that undergird them, require the constant denial of the fact that almost everyone is easily replaceable at any time.�� After all, if there are 500 people standing at the ready who could do just as good or better a job than Chairman Smith or President Jones or Senior Executive Vice President for West Coast Promotion Johnson or Distinguished Professor of the Newly Endowed Chair for the Worship of Capitalism Cowan, then why do these people get treated and most of all paid as if they were as unique as unicorns, as precious as Vermeer portraits, as irreplaceable as Billy Shakespeare or Willie Mays? Because if we didn���t treat them (us) in that way, that would mean the entire structure of our society is radically unjust, root and branch.�� And that can���t be true, obviously...

Harry Brighouse: A Game-Changer in Accountability: Using Online Discussion Boards (Even in Face-to-Face Classes): "My first lecture of the week is on a Tuesday, and most of the reading is assigned for that class. Thirty-six hours before class, the students must respond to a prompt about the reading���one that is impossible to respond to coherently without having done the reading. Settings allow you to prevent them from seeing other students��� responses until after they post. Then, they have until the beginning of class to respond to a classmate. If students post, they get credit; if not, they don���t.... In smaller classes, the effect has been astonishing. Almost all my students do almost all the reading for almost every class...

Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie: On the Meaning of the Monty Hall Problem: "Even today, many people seeing the puzzle for the first time find the result hard to believe. Why? What intuitive nerve is jangled?... Causeless correlation violates our common sense. Thus, the Monty Hall paradox is just like an optical illusion or a magic trick: it uses our own cognitive machinery to deceive us.... on the Meaning of the Monty Hall problem.... Our brains are not wired to do probability problems, but they are wired to do causal problems. And this causal wiring produces systematic probabilistic mistakes, like optical illusions. Because there is no causal connection between My Door and Location of Car... we find it utterly incomprehensible that there is a probabilistic association... [because] our brains are not prepared to accept causeless correlations, and we need special training���through examples like the Monty Hall paradox or the ones discussed in Chapter 3���to identify situations where they can arise...

Michael Gelman, Shachar Kariv, Matthew D. Shapiro, Dan Silverman: Rational Illiquidity and Excess Sensitivity: Theory and Evidence from Income Tax Withholding and Refunds: "There is a tight relationship between having low liquidity and a high marginal propensity to consume both in theoretical models and in econometric evidence about behavior. This paper analyzes the theory and behavior surrounding income tax withholding and refunds. It develops a model where rational cash management with asymmetric cost of increasing or decreasing liquidity endogenizes the relationship between illiquidity and excess sensitivity. The analysis accounts for the finding that households tend to spend tax refunds as if they were liquidity constrained despite the fact that they could increase liquidity by reducing withholding. The model���s predictions are supported by evidence from a large panel of individuals...

So far the paid leave proposals I have seen out of the Republican side are not really "paid leave": they are "drain your 401(k) without a tax penalty" leave. But at least there is bipartisan acknowledgement that there is a problem, and there should be some congressional fix: Equitable Growth: On Twitter: "The @SenateFinance Committee has formed a bipartisan working group on #paidleave���a great chance to consider the evidence and establish a paid leave program that protects everyone. See our resources...

Oya Aktas (2015): Intellectual History of the Minimum Wage and Overtime: " This debate dates back to the early 20th century, before the minimum wage even existed in the United States and when overtime pay was unheard of.... Rapid industrialization created the Gilded Age of American wealth, and people credited the free market with their increased prosperity. But along with increasing growth, industrialization also sharpened economic inequalities.... Debates over hour and wage limits focused on which groups required labor protections and the best mechanisms for protecting these groups. Labor regulations began in the 1890s as state-level maximum hour and minimum wage protections, which the U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly struck down. Federal standards were not created until four decades later, when president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, guided the Federal Labor Standards Act into law.... This issue brief details the arguments that shaped hour and wage limits in the early 20th century...

Martin Wolf: The Looming 100-year US-China Conflict: "China���s ideology is not a threat to liberal democracy in the way the Soviet Union���s was. Rightwing demagogues are far more dangerous. An effort to halt China���s economic and technological rise is almost certain to fail. Worse, it will foment deep hostility in the Chinese people. In the long run, the demands of an increasingly prosperous and well-educated people for control over their lives might still win out. But that is far less likely if China���s natural rise is threatened.... Managing China���s rise must include co-operating closely with like-minded allies and treating China with respect.... The administration is simultaneously launching a conflict between the two powers, attacking its allies and destroying the institutions of the postwar US-led order... the wrong war, fought in the wrong way, on the wrong terrain...

This has become a classic for all wishing to think clearly about progressive income taxation. Note that their conclusions in favor of a high top marginal rate do rest on strong and proper state actions to close loopholes and shut down tax havens: Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva (2011): Optimal Taxation of Top Labor Incomes: A Tale of Three Elasticities: "A model where top incomes respond to marginal tax rates through... (1) the standard supply-side channel... the tax avoidance channel, [and] (3) the compensation-bargaining channel through efforts in influencing own-pay setting.... The first elasticity (supply side) is the sole real factor limiting optimal top tax rates. The optimal tax system should be designed to minimize the second elasticity (avoidance) through tax enforcement and tax neutrality... in which case the second elasticity becomes irrelevant. The optimal top tax rate increases with the third elasticity (bargaining) as bargaining efforts are zero-sum in aggregate..... There is a strong correlation between cuts in top tax rates and increases in top 1% income shares since 1975, implying that the overall elasticity is large. But top income share increases have not translated into higher economic growth, consistent with the zero-sum bargaining model. This suggests that the first elasticity is modest in size and that the overall effect comes mostly from the third elasticity. Consequently, socially optimal top tax rates might possibly be much higher than what is commonly assumed...

Wikipedia: Iron Triangle (Korea): "The area was located 20 to 30 miles (30 to 50 kilometres) above the 38th parallel in the diagonal corridor dividing the Taebaek Mountains into northern and southern ranges and contained the major road and rail links between the port of Wonsan in the northeast and Seoul in the southwest...

Murray Gell-Mann (1964): A Schematic Model of Baryons and Mesons

Wikipedia: Eightfold Way (Physics)

Nadieszda Kizenko: Russia's Orthodox Awakening: "The Fraying of Russia's Church-State Alliance...

Wikipedia: Classic Maya Collapse: "Anthropologist Joseph Tainter wrote extensively about the collapse of the Southern Lowland Maya in his 1988 study The Collapse of Complex Societies. His theory about Maya collapse encompasses some of the above explanations, but focuses specifically on the development of and the declining marginal returns from the increasing social complexity of the competing Maya city-states...

Wikipedia: Spiv: "In the United Kingdom, the word spiv is slang for a type of petty criminal who deals in illicit, typically black market, goods...

20 European Flags

Michel Barnier: Slide Presented to the Heads of State and Government at the European Council (Article 50) on 15 December 2017

James Davis Nicoll: Outside of That: "This is the Heinlein novel in which he dismisses fluoridation as a dead��end: 'They were perfectly right and biologically quite wrong, for an advantage is no good to a race unless it can be inherited.' Forget those light-bulbs, chums! Learn to grow luminescent antennae (like angler��fish).... I had completely forgotten the whole Yellow Peril backstory...

Wikipedia: William Adams (Sailor, born 1564)

Wikipedia: World War II casualties of the Soviet Union

Wikipedia: We will bury you

Stuart Birkby: "We Will Bury You": How Mistranslation Heightened Cold War Tensions

John Winthrop (1630): Arabella Sermon: "Follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one... keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, 'may the Lord make it like that of New England'...

Wikipedia: List of ethnic cleansing campaigns

Wikipedia: Iran Air Flight 655

Wikipedia: Korean Air Lines Flight 007

Wikipedia: List of nuclear close calls

Wikipedia: Bandung Conference

Wikipedia: Non-Aligned Movement

UCB DS Educ Workshop

Journal Refereeing Practices and Polynomial Regression: Threat or Menace?

Alwyn Young: Consistency without Inference: Instrumental Variables in Practical Application

Kieran Healy: Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction

Kieran Healy: America's Ur-Choropleths

Raj Chetty et al.: The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up: How Your Area Compares

Mike Monteiro: 13 Ways Designers Screw Up Client Presentations: "1. Seeing the client as someone they have to��please.... 2. Not getting off your��ass.... 3. Starting with an��apology.... 4. Not setting the stage��properly.... 5. Giving the real estate��tour.... 6. Taking��notes.... 7. Reading a��script.... 8. Getting defensive.... 9. Mentioning typefaces.... 10. Talking about how hard you��worked.... 11. Reacting to questions as change��requests.... 12. Not guiding the feedback��loop.... 13. Asking 'Do you like��it?'.... And one weird trick that you won���t believe works every��time: Learn the client���s goddamn name...

Rachael Meager: Public Speaking for Academic Economists

Duncan Black: Eschaton: America's Worst Editorial Page Editor: "Fred Hiatt Has apparently been very sad.... 'We knew he would grab'em by the pussy when we voted for him, so the multiple on camera rapes are just not grounds for impeachment'-Fred Hiatt, basically...

William Stanley Jevons (1865): The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-Mines

#noted #weblogs