J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 189
April 30, 2019
The extremely sharp Josh Bevins correctly calls out as "r...
The extremely sharp Josh Bevins correctly calls out as "remarkably stupid, even relative to my expectations baseline" a piece by former Trump Federal Reserve nominee Herman Cain. The 1980s and 1990s simply did not see a "stable dollar" in any sense those words might ever possibly mean:
https://delong.typepad.com/.a/6a00e551f0800388340240a4a39f6a200b-pi: Herman Cain: The Fed and the Professor Standard: "The 1980s and 1990s brought prosperity across the board. This success was driven by a voting bloc of Fed governors, such as Wayne Angell and Manley Johnson, who favored a stable dollar and were able to swing the consensus. The dollar is a unit of measure���like the foot or the ounce���and keeping units of measure stable is critical to the functioning of a complex economy. The result of their stable-dollar policy was prosperity...
#noted
It is very common to attribute the collapse of Roman Repu...
It is very common to attribute the collapse of Roman Republican institutions and the rise of Imperial dictatorship to a loss of moral virtue on behalf of the Roman electorate���who are supposed to have fallen prey to demagogues and voted for bread-and-circuses as the underlying foundations of liberty collapsed underneath them. That story is not true. Here Sean Elling sends us to Edward Watts on the real story���recently enriched plutocracy breaking political norm after political norm in an attempt to disrupt what had been the normal grievance-redressing operation of the system:
Sean Illing: Mortal Republic: Edward Watts on what America can learn from Rome���s collapse - Vox: "The Roman republic destroyed itself. Are we on a similar path?... Edward Watts, a historian at the University of California San Diego, has just published a new book titled Mortal Republic that carefully lays out what went wrong in ancient Rome ��� and how the lessons of its decline might help save fledgling republics like the United States today...
#noted
It is difficult to understand Uber's prospectus as anythi...
It is difficult to understand Uber's prospectus as anything other than "if we release information, we will scare off more potential buyers than we will attract". That makes us wonder what such information would reveal. And it leads to a class-action of Uber's IPO as a���in all likelihood very successful���attempt at affinity fraud: Rett Wallace: Uber���s Enormous, Vague IPO Prospectus Is an Outrage: "The 431-page updated prospectus was filled with lawyerly phrases and volumes of information on potential risks, but it left many serious professional investors wondering why a company that loses $3bn annually would be worth that much. The information that financial analysts would need simply wasn���t in there. A solicitation for so much money with so little information is an outrage, and a sign that something of central importance has gone wrong in US public markets in recent years...
#noted
An event coming on May 16: Preparing for the next recessi...
An event coming on May 16: Preparing for the next recession is perhaps the most productive and urgent policy-analysis task op[en today: Equitable Growth: Preparing for the Next Recession: Policies to Reduce the Impact on the U.S. Economy - : "A Hamilton Project and Washington Center for Equitable Growth Policy Forum.... Historically, the U.S. has responded to recent recessions with a mix of monetary policy action and discretionary fiscal stimulus. However, since monetary policy options may be limited during the next recession, policymakers should consider adopting a range of fiscal policy measures now to help stabilize the economy when a future downturn inevitably occurs. This can be achieved with a range of fiscal policy responses aimed at expediting the next recovery through strengthening job creation and restoring confidence to businesses and households...
#noted
April 29, 2019
From Carole Cadwalladr as she uses TED to try to hold Sil...
From Carole Cadwalladr as she uses TED to try to hold Silicon Valley to account���to get the social media companies to thin of themselves as informaiton utilities rather than misinformation utilities: Carole Cadwalladr: My TED Talk: How I Took on the Tech Titans in Their Lair: "Facebook had been 'warned' beforehand. And within minutes of stepping off stage, I was told that its press team had already lodged an official complaint... raised a serious challenge to the talk to claim 'factual inaccuracies'.... What factual inaccuracies, we both wondered. 'Let���s see what they come back with in the morning', she said. Spoiler: they never did. That night, though, there was what was described to me as 'an emergency dinner' between Anderson and a cadre of senior Facebook executives. They were very angry, my spies told me. But Anderson, one of the most thoughtful people in tech, seemed unruffled. 'There���s always been a strict church and state separation between sponsors and editorial', he said. 'And these are important conversations we need to have. There���s a lot of people here who are very upset about what has happened to the internet. They want to take it back and we have to start figuring out how'. At the end of my talk, he invited Zuckerberg or anyone else at Facebook to come and respond. Spoiler: they never did...
#noted
This is... not right. Prospectively, Barro was modeling a...
This is... not right. Prospectively, Barro was modeling a permanent supply-side boost to the level of GDP driven by higher investment to the tune of an extra 800 billion dollars annually. Barro's prospective model conclusion was not of a temporary demand-side boost. His shift to the demand side in his paper with Jason was a six-month-later climb-down. I know this. He knows this. I know he knows this. He knows I know he knows this. Why bother saying this? I think the point is to fuzz the issue: Barro made three assessments���one that the TCJA would boost output by 4% and it might achieve its full effect in 10 years, one that the TCJA would boost output by 7% with an 0.4% first-year effect, and a third with Jason Furman hat was not so much a model-based forecast of the impact but a reduced-form claim that if pst correlations held. It is this last that he now focuses on: Robert Barro: My Best Growth Forecast Ever: "America���s real GDP growth rate of 3.2% for the first quarter of this year is impressive, as was the 3% average growth in 2018 (measured from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the fourth quarter of 2018). Since the end of the Great Recession���from 2011 to 2017���the US economy grew by only 2.1% per year, on average. What accounts for the recent acceleration?...
#noted
April 28, 2019
Note to Self: Confirmed dead: Melisandre, Jorah, Dolorous...
Note to Self: Confirmed dead: Melisandre, Jorah, Dolorous Edd, Theon, Lyanna, Beric
#notetoself #sciencefiction
Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (April 28, 2019)
Weekend Reading: Edmund Wilson (1940): Trotsky, History, and Providence
Weekend Reading: Sean Jones: Brexiters, Elites and the Death of the Irish Joke
Adam Schiff: The Barr S---show: "Russians were engaged in a systemic effort to interfere in our election; the Trump campaign welcomed it, embraced it, built it into their plan, made full use of it, lied about it, covered it up, and then obstructed the investigation into it...
Alan Rappeport: Stung by Trump���s Trade Wars, Wisconsin���s Milk Farmers Face Extinction: "The Voelker dairy farm in Wisconsin sold off most of its cows this year as economic and technological forces, including President Trump���s trade war, take a toll on the dairy industry.... The flagship industry in a pivotal swing state faces an economic crisis.
Paul Krugman: The Great Republican Abdication: "The modern G.O.P. is perfectly willing to sell out America if that���s what it takes to get tax cuts for the wealthy...
Abigail Disney: "Let me very clear. I like Bob Iger. I do NOT speak for my family but only for myself. Other than owning shares (not that many) I have no more say in what happens there than anyone else. But by any objective measure a pay ratio over a thousand is insane...
Emma Newburger: Steve Schwarzman: Raise Minimum Wage, Eliminate Taxes for Teachers: "Blackstone CEO and Chairman Steve Schwarzman outlines a 'Marshall Plan' for the middle class to address increasing income inequality in America. The billionaire private equity titan and supporter of President Donald Trump pointed to three main pillars of the plan: a higher minimum wage, more resources for technical training programs in schools and the elimination of taxes for teachers. 'What we have is less an issue of income inequality than income insufficiency for the bottom 50% of the society', he says...
Ray Dalio: Why and How Capitalism Needs to Be Reformed)
Bloomberg: Quadriga���s Downfall Began When Founder Abruptly Fired All The Exchange���s ���Law And Order�����Folks, Former Lawyer Says: "Christine Duhaime says Gerald Cotten decided one day in 2016 he no longer wanted the crypto exchange to be a listed company...
Dan Margolies and Celia Llopis-Jepsen: Kansas Supreme Court Rules State Constitution Protects Right To Abortion
Wikipedia: More Cowbell
Walter Laquer: On Thomas Mann's "Reflections on a Non-Political Man: "The war was totally justified, a genuine popular cause... Germany had been driven into the war by its envious adversaries. But it was also a necessity ('fate'), for the prewar world had been deeply corrupt, not worth preserving. War was a tremendous creative event, it brought about national unity and moral elevation. These basic ideas (of the early war years) were coupled with violent attacks against the decadent West: against France which had a democratic civilization but no culture; against the British who wanted to re-educate Germany using Gurkhas and Hottentots...
Gwern: Spaced Repetition
Branko Milanovic: Shadows and Lights of Globalization: "Today���s globalization and its effects, positive and negative, as in many ways a mirror-replay�� of the first globalization that took place from the mid-19th century to the First World War...
Michael Nielsen: Augmenting Long-Term Memory
Wikipedia: Ian Richardson
Lawrence F. Katz: Alan B. Krueger (1960���2019): "Alan's scholarship revealed the operation of real-world labor markets, the impacts of the minimum wage and school resources, the measurement of subjective well-being, and the plight of the unemployed. He pushed the field of economics toward a more evidence-based and scientific approach to research and policy analysis...
Cryptocurrency! It would appear that TETHER is now being looted to prop up BITFINEX, which has been defrauded, as routinely happens in this space. Anybody seen the principals of Quadriga SX recently?: Izabella Kaminska: We All Become Mf Global Eventually, Tether Edition: "The New York attorney-general's office... obtained a court order directing Bitfinex's parent company to suspend making transactions from Tether accounts into Bitfinex accounts for the purpose of masking a loss somewhere in the order of a 850m due to a suspected fraud by a partner processor. The documentation... contains... stuff... from a Bitfinex employee���codename Merlin���on August 15th last year, to... a Panama-based entity called Crypto Capital... which also... just happened to provide payment processing for Quadriga XS, the Canadian exchange whose founder 'died' with the keys to about 140m of customer money): 'Please understand this could be extremely dangerous for everybody, the entire crypto community. BTC could tank to below $1k if we don't act quickly.'... Opacity offers huge temptation with respect to wrongly taking advantage of customer flow information for prop trading purposes or for dipping into customer deposits for proprietary purposes without customer approval. Or just losing funds in other careless ways.... The key points are as follows...
Jonathan Portes: Scruton Is Part of an Intellectual Culture Giving Respectability to Racism: "Scruton's essay... is a defence, of sorts, of Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech. The direct political peg for Powell's speech was his opposition to the 1968 Race Relations Act, which outlawed direct discrimination in housing or employment, as exemplified by signs saying 'No blacks, no dogs, no Irish'.... Scruton's... final point... more extreme.... Immigrant integration... is logically impossible, even for the British-born children of immigrants. 'Like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, they [liberal politicians] practiced the art of believing six impossible propositions before breakfast, including the proposition that pious Muslims from the hinterlands of Asia would produce children loyal to a secular European state.'... Scruton's writings from the 2000s could have come straight from the BNP manifesto of the time, and legitimised those who made such claims...
Rosa Luxemburg: Library: "Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party ��� however numerous they may be ��� is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ���justice��� but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ���freedom��� becomes a special privilege...
Jason Furman and Lawrence H. Summers: Further Thinking on the Costs and Benefits of Deficits: "1. IS THE POLITICAL SYSTEM SO BIASED TOWARDS DEFICIT INCREASES THAT ECONOMISTS HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO OVEREMPHASIZE THE COSTS OF DEFICITS?... The political system can be biased towards greater deficits. But the opposite is often the case as well.... The fiscal stimulus was too small in the wake of the Great Recession.... Deficit reduction in the late 1990s was probably excessive, especially in light of the license it gave for unproductive tax cuts. Germany is one of many countries that has also shown that politicians can generate excessive fiscal prudence. Japan has done the same at many points.... With interest rates so low that they could limit central banks��� ability to respond in a downturn everywhere in the industrial world, the dangers posed by anti-deficit dogma in the next recession could be enormous.... The role of economists is to analyze the economy and not to lean one way or the other to counteract some presumed bias of politicians.... 2. DO THE CHANGING ECONOMICS OF DEFICITS MEAN THAT ANYTHING GOES AND WE DO NOT NEED TO PAY ANY ATTENTION TO FISCAL CONSTRAINTS?... No. The costs and benefits of deficits have changed, but we still need a limiting principle in order to conduct fiscal policy.... YOU ADVOCATE DOING NO HARM, BUT IS THAT ENOUGH TO STABILIZE THE DEBT AT A REASONABLE LEVEL? Yes, it likely is enough,��if��we also do what is widely agreed, which is to eventually close the shortfalls in both Social Security and Medicare hospital insurance and not use the savings to pay for other priorities.... 4. ISN���T ACTION ON THE DEFICIT URGENT IN ORDER TO REDUCE THE RISK OF A FISCAL CRISIS? No.... 5. DO YOU THINK ANYTHING ABOUT FISCAL POLICY IS URGENT? Yes. We should be making contingency plans for the next recession...
How and why did they corrupt Wharton's Jeremy Siegel?: Cardiff Garcia: "'But his presence would serve to remind Fed governors that there are many ways to interpret economic data'. Gotta say "let's start putting incompetent people on important committees to remind other committee members that some people are incompetent" is multiverse-level thinking... 'Sujeet Indap: "This is embarrassing, Jeremy Siegel: 'Jeremy Siegel: A Professor for Stephen Moore: "I am not a fan of a gold or even a strict commodity standard, but analyzing sensitive commodity markets��� price signals should be an important input.... As for Mr. Moore���s earlier warnings that former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke���s quantitative easing would lead to rapid inflation, recall that some well-respected monetary economists echoed them...
Wikipedia: Adalbert von Bredow
Wikipedia: Battle of Mars-la-Tour
Christian P. Potholm: Understanding War: An Annotated Bibliography: "Citino's final emphasis ofn the German tradition of Tottenritt...
Wikipedia: List of Particles | Quark | Fermion | Lepton | Boson | Hadron | Baryon | Meson
Wikipedia: Children of Jacob
Wikipedia: Fugitive Slave Clause
Wikiquote: Rosa Luxemburg
Wikipedia: Rosa Luxemburg
Max Shachtman (1938): Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg (1938)
Rosa Luxemburg: The Russian Revolution: "Chapter 8: Democracy and Dictatorship...
Rosa Luxemburg: The Russian Revolution: "Chapter 6: The Problem of Dictatorship: Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously ��� at bottom, then, a clique affair ��� a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins (the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month periods!) Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc....
Rosa Luxemburg: Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy
Hal Draper (1987): The 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' in Marx and Engels
Wikipedia: Dictatorship of the proletariat
5-Minute History: 10 Fascinating Facts About the Belle ��poque
Wikipedia: Belle ��poque
Review of Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed and The Economist as Saviour
Author: Review of: Robert Skidelsky (2000), "John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain"
#noted #weblogs
How and why did they corrupt Wharton's Jeremy Siegel?: Ca...
How and why did they corrupt Wharton's Jeremy Siegel?: Cardiff Garcia: "'But his presence would serve to remind Fed governors that there are many ways to interpret economic data'. Gotta say "let's start putting incompetent people on important committees to remind other committee members that some people are incompetent" is multiverse-level thinking... 'Sujeet Indap: "This is embarrassing, Jeremy Siegel: 'Jeremy Siegel: A Professor for Stephen Moore: "I am not a fan of a gold or even a strict commodity standard, but analyzing sensitive commodity markets��� price signals should be an important input.... As for Mr. Moore���s earlier warnings that former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke���s quantitative easing would lead to rapid inflation, recall that some well-respected monetary economists echoed them...
#noted
It is not 95 theses nailed to a church door, but it is fi...
It is not 95 theses nailed to a church door, but it is five these that make a good deal of sense: Jason Furman and Lawrence H. Summers: Further Thinking on the Costs and Benefits of Deficits: "1. IS THE POLITICAL SYSTEM SO BIASED TOWARDS DEFICIT INCREASES THAT ECONOMISTS HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO OVEREMPHASIZE THE COSTS OF DEFICITS?... The political system can be biased towards greater deficits. But the opposite is often the case as well.... The fiscal stimulus was too small in the wake of the Great Recession.... Deficit reduction in the late 1990s was probably excessive, especially in light of the license it gave for unproductive tax cuts. Germany is one of many countries that has also shown that politicians can generate excessive fiscal prudence. Japan has done the same at many points.... With interest rates so low that they could limit central banks��� ability to respond in a downturn everywhere in the industrial world, the dangers posed by anti-deficit dogma in the next recession could be enormous.... The role of economists is to analyze the economy and not to lean one way or the other to counteract some presumed bias of politicians.... 2. DO THE CHANGING ECONOMICS OF DEFICITS MEAN THAT ANYTHING GOES AND WE DO NOT NEED TO PAY ANY ATTENTION TO FISCAL CONSTRAINTS?... No. The costs and benefits of deficits have changed, but we still need a limiting principle in order to conduct fiscal policy.... YOU ADVOCATE DOING NO HARM, BUT IS THAT ENOUGH TO STABILIZE THE DEBT AT A REASONABLE LEVEL? Yes, it likely is enough,��if��we also do what is widely agreed, which is to eventually close the shortfalls in both Social Security and Medicare hospital insurance and not use the savings to pay for other priorities.... 4. ISN���T ACTION ON THE DEFICIT URGENT IN ORDER TO REDUCE THE RISK OF A FISCAL CRISIS? No.... 5. DO YOU THINK ANYTHING ABOUT FISCAL POLICY IS URGENT? Yes. We should be making contingency plans for the next recession...
#noted
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