J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 199

Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (April 10, 2019)

Economics, Identity, and the Democratic Recession: Talking Points

_Do We Have Any Republican Remedies for the Diseases of Republican Government?

Does Inbox Zero count if one has snozzed 245 emails? Asking for a friend...

No, I do not understand Netflix's valuation. And I do not understand what it was doing in "FAANG" in the first place. I suspect it was just Jim Cramer looking for a cute acronym, which is a hell of a way to run an porftfolio-assessment business: Tara Lachapelle: Netflix Valuation Tested by Disney, AT&T, Apple Apps: "Disney, AT&T and Apple are coming, and this time they are really bringing the heat...

Sarah Halzack: Amazon Risks Missing Out on $35 Billion Click-and-Collect Market: "Big-box retailers are leading��in click-and-collect services such as grocery pickup, and the gap may only widen...

Command-Tab Plus: Application and Window Switching Done Right: "Hold Command and press Tab to display the active applications and then use the Tab key to cycle through your open apps...

Olivier Blanchard: Public Debt and Low Interest Rates: "Seminar 237/281: 291 Departmental Seminar.... April��10 | 4-6 p.m. | 648��Evans Hall...

Jeff Weintraub: Afterthoughts on the Communist Manifesto

Max Nisen: Walgreens Earnings: Retail Apocalypse Now Threatens Drug Stores: "Prescription medications aren't as profitable as they used to be, leaving��chains like Walgreens more��exposed to��industry headwinds...

Ceteris Numquam Paribus: "This blog is for young economists, who want advice on how to proceed on their chosen path. Every week or so I'll bring you a short interview with an economist, giving suggestions on what to read, what to learn, and how to become an economist...

Scott Lemieux: Our Green Lantern: "It���s getting hard to avoid the conclusion that Bernie is actually high on his own ���our revolution will force Republican senators to vote for my agenda��� supply...

Joshua M. Brown: Is Economic Inequality a ���National Emergency���?

Robert Waldmann (2016): Dynamic Inefficiency

CPPC: Senate Finance Committee Examines How PBMs Cause Higher Drug Prices: "Senator Wyden told the CEOs that 'you see there are not a lot of Democrats or Republicans holding rallies for spread pricing. Spread pricing is a rip off, plain and simple.' He asked them: if Congress proposes to ban spread pricing, will they support it? Three of the CEOs said yes they would, and the other two said they would remain neutral. For the first time, the Senate Finance Committee investigated PBMs and how they promote higher drug costs...

Gramercy Park Hotel

L'Express

Sheisha Kulkarni

John Le Carre: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Novel) | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Miniseries) | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Film)

Wikipedia: Ian Richardson

Wikipedia: Colin Firth

John Hatcher: Unreal Wages: Long-Run Living Standards and the ���Golden Age��� of the Fifteenth Century: "The renowned ���Golden Age��� of the fifteenth century has been exaggerated. The surge in the prosperity of the lower orders resulting from high wages, low food prices and easier access to cheap land was undoubtedly extraordinary. But not as prodigious as has customarily been assumed. Furthermore, contrary to the common belief that the economic fortunes of the labouring classes can be taken as a proxy for the living standards of the population as a whole, the scale of improvement in their good fortune was not widely shared by the rest of society who did not derive their incomes solely from wages or their subsistence solely from the market. Argument and evidence are also provided that the criticisms made in this chapter of the compilation, interpretation and application of real wage indices have implications that stretch far beyond the fifteenth century...

Gavin Wright: Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Revisited: "Eric Williams... links the slave trade and slave-based commerce with early British industrial development. Long-distance markets were crucial supports for technological progress and for the infrastructure of financial markets and the shipping sector.... The eighteenth century Atlantic economy was dominated by sugar, and sugar was dominated by slavery. The role of the slave trade was central.... Adherents of an insurgency known as the New History of Capitalism have extended this line of analysis to nineteenth century America.... Such analyses overlook the second part of the Williams thesis, which held that industrial capitalism abandoned slavery because it was no longer needed for continued economic expansion...

Dylan Matthews: Child Poverty Report: Food, Housing, and Money, Not Work Requirements, Work Best - Vox: "The most important report on child poverty in years is finally out.... The result of pressure from California Democratic Representatives Barbara Lee and Lucille Roybal-Allard, the provision called for the National Academy of Sciences to convene a group of experts to produce 'a nonpartisan, evidence-based report that would provide its assessment of the most effective means for reducing child poverty by half in the next 10 years'.... A 'work-based package'.... A 'work-based and universal support package'.... A 'means-tested supports and work package'...

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: How Democracies Die https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1524762938: "Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves.... Ch��vez in Venezuela... Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Ukraine. Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box...

Alexander Hamilton (1787): The Federalist #9: The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection: "It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. If they exhibit occasional calms, these only serve as short-lived contrast to the furious storms that are to succeed. If now and then intervals of felicity open to view, we behold them with a mixture of regret, arising from the reflection that the pleasing scenes before us are soon to be overwhelmed by the tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage...

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! We in the Clinton administration established the norm that Governors of the Federal Reserve should be people capable of going toe-to-toe in argument with the Fed Chair, on the grounds that the Fed Chair needed competent intellectual sparring partners if he or she, and the staff that did his or her bidding, was not to fall victim to groupthink. One of those who personally benefitted most from this norm was Larry Lindsey, who was chosen as and was quite an effective Fed Governor under George W. Bush. But now, for some short-term advantage or other, Larry is trying to blow up this norm and outdo others in obsequious toadying to Trump. Neither Steve Moore nor Herman Cain can make a coherent forecast. Both are for lower interest rates when Republicans and higher interest rates when Democrats are President. Neither will have the slightest impact on the thinking of the Chair or of the staff���instead, the staff will start playing the pre-Clinton administration game of, as one friend of mine who worked for the Fed called it, "Look! Here's a Governor! Let's see if we can make him say something really stupid!" I wonder what Larry Lindsey says to himself in the morning when he looks in the mirror, and the mirror looks back and says: "You benefitted from this norm of professionalism required for Fed Governors. Now you are trying to break it. What kind of a person are you?" Larry Lindsey: Defending Trump's Likely Fed Nominees: "Steve Moore has a master's in economics from George Mason..... Herman Cain was chairman of the board of the Kansas City Federal Reserve. He is obviously aware of how the Federal Reserve operates and how monetary policy is made.... I am a firm believer in having a variety of views, including those I do not necessarily agree with...

Martin Wolf: Xi Jinping���s China Seeks to be Rich and Communist: "President���s ambitions rely on avoiding ���middle-income trap��� and placating a more demanding populace.... If... China... succeed[ed] in becoming rich, while its political system stayed much the same....Sustained growth of real GDP per head at 4 per cent a year over another generation.... Its economy would then be far bigger than those of the US and EU combined. This would be a new world. Yet is it a plausible one?...

This annoys me. Moore and Cain have given no explanation of their switch because there is no explanation fo their switch other than that they are kowtowing to their political masters. I find David Beckworth's Scott Sumner's claim that he is "in no position to judge motives" is itself disingenuous: he is in a position to judge their motives. And that he claims not to be... erodes his credibility on all issues: Scott Sumner: Who Should Serve on the Federal Reserve Board?: "Moore and Cain were both quite hawkish when a more dovish policy was needed, and have recently become more dovish when there is far less need for monetary stimulus. Why?... President Trump is the only other person I can recall whose views on monetary policy switched from hawkish when President Obama was presiding over a weak economy, to dovish when Trump is presiding over a stronger economy.... I���m in no position to judge motives.... If their change of heart was motivated by political considerations, that would be inconsistent with the Fed���s traditional independence from the rest of the government. When politics influences Fed decisions, it can destabilize the economy...

#noted #weblogs

This annoys me. Moore and Cain have given no explanation ...

This annoys me. Moore and Cain have given no explanation of their switch because there is no explanation fo their switch other than that they are kowtowing to their political masters. I find David Beckworth's Scott Sumner's claim that he is "in no position to judge motives" is itself disingenuous: he is in a position to judge their motives. And that he claims not to be... erodes his credibility on all issues: Scott Sumner: Who Should Serve on the Federal Reserve Board?: "Moore and Cain were both quite hawkish when a more dovish policy was needed, and have recently become more dovish when there is far less need for monetary stimulus. Why?... President Trump is the only other person I can recall whose views on monetary policy switched from hawkish when President Obama was presiding over a weak economy, to dovish when Trump is presiding over a stronger economy.... I���m in no position to judge motives.... If their change of heart was motivated by political considerations, that would be inconsistent with the Fed���s traditional independence from the rest of the government. When politics influences Fed decisions, it can destabilize the economy...

#noted

Martin Wolf: Xi Jinping���s China Seeks to be Rich and Co...

Martin Wolf: Xi Jinping���s China Seeks to be Rich and Communist: "President���s ambitions rely on avoiding ���middle-income trap��� and placating a more demanding populace.... If... China... succeed[ed] in becoming rich, while its political system stayed much the same....Sustained growth of real GDP per head at 4 per cent a year over another generation.... Its economy would then be far bigger than those of the US and EU combined. This would be a new world. Yet is it a plausible one?...

...South Korea is, after all, the only sizeable country to have moved from low-income to high-income status over two generations. To achieve this, China���s party-state must prove able to reach high levels of government performance and the Chinese economy able to attain high-income levels of prosperity, without succumbing to demands for greater accountability from a population that would, by then, be prosperous, urbanised, highly educated and demanding. Moreover, this must also happen without the unmanageable splits in the party elite that destroyed the Soviet Union....

>[Could] Chinese communism succeed?... The party-state has proved astonishingly flexible and pragmatic... the deep roots of bureaucratic absolutism... the party���s claim to have redeemed the nation from poverty and victimhood.... The marriage of party to nationalism is a potent fount of legitimacy.... The drive towards education and entrepreneurship... greatly increases the likelihood of achieving prosperity.... Transform[ing] modern technology into a system of comprehensive surveillance.... Recent economic and political failures of the high-income democracies: the global financial crisis; declining productivity growth; the tendency to choose incompetent leaders (such as US president Donald Trump) and doomed causes (such as Brexit). For a huge number of Chinese... to risk domestic political stability for today���s versions of democracy, not least the west���s rejection of the pragmatic competence on which China���s progress is based, will seem foolhardy...

#noted

Do We Have Any Republican Remedies for the Diseases of Republican Government?

Note to Self: It was 80 blocks south of here that Alexander Hamilton wrote to the middle class of New York that:

The history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy... feeling sensations of horror and disgust... intervals of felicity... overwhelmed by the tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage...

That is how the rest of the world views Britain and the United States in this age, the age of Brexit and Trump. And I haven���t even raised the strange spectacle of our modern-day Earl of Warwick, Rupert the Kingmaker. Few among middle classes abroad today think that the Anglo-Saxon democracies have it right, deliver the goods.

Hamilton and Madison had plans for republican remedies to the diseases of republican government. What would your remedies be?

#politics #history #notetoself

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! We in the Clinton administration establ...

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!

We in the Clinton administration established the norm that Governors of the Federal Reserve should be people capable of going toe-to-toe in argument with the Fed Chair, on the grounds that the Fed Chair needed competent intellectual sparring partners if he or she, and the staff that did his or her bidding, was not to fall victim to groupthink. One of those who personally benefitted most from this norm was Larry Lindsey, who was chosen as and was quite an effective Fed Governor under George W. Bush.

But now, for some short-term advantage or other, Larry is trying to blow up this norm and outdo others in obsequious toadying to Trump.

Neither Steve Moore nor Herman Cain can make a coherent forecast. Both are for lower interest rates when Republicans and higher interest rates when Democrats are President. Neither will have the slightest impact on the thinking of the Chair or of the staff���instead, the staff will start playing the pre-Clinton administration game of, as one friend of mine who worked for the Fed called it, "Look! Here's a Governor! Let's see if we can make him say something really stupid!"

I wonder what Larry Lindsey says to himself in the morning when he looks in the mirror, and the mirror looks back and says: "You benefitted from this norm of professionalism required for Fed Governors. Now you are trying to break it. What kind of a person are you?":

Larry Lindsey: Defending Trump's Likely Fed Nominees: "Steve Moore has a master's in economics from George Mason..... Herman Cain was chairman of the board of the Kansas City Federal Reserve. He is obviously aware of how the Federal Reserve operates and how monetary policy is made.... I am a firm believer in having a variety of views, including those I do not necessarily agree with, expressed. Diversity of thought, not credentialism, is what the board needs...

#noted

Alexander Hamilton (1787): The Federalist #9: The Union a...

Alexander Hamilton (1787): The Federalist #9: The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection: "It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. If they exhibit occasional calms, these only serve as short-lived contrast to the furious storms that are to succeed. If now and then intervals of felicity open to view, we behold them with a mixture of regret, arising from the reflection that the pleasing scenes before us are soon to be overwhelmed by the tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage...

...If momentary rays of glory break forth from the gloom, while they dazzle us with a transient and fleeting brilliancy, they at the same time admonish us to lament that the vices of government should pervert the direction and tarnish the lustre of those bright talents and exalted endowments for which the favored soils that produced them have been so justly celebrated.

From the disorders that disfigure the annals of those republics the advocates of despotism have drawn arguments, not only against the forms of republican government, but against the very principles of civil liberty. They have decried all free government as inconsistent with the order of society, and have indulged themselves in malicious exultation over its friends and partisans.... It is not to be denied that the portraits they have sketched of republican government were too just copies of the originals from which they were taken. If it had been found impracticable to have devised models of a more perfect structure, the enlightened friends to liberty would have been obliged to abandon the cause of that species of government as indefensible.

The science of politics, however, like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients. The regular distribution of power into distinct departments; the introduction of legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election: these are wholly new discoveries, or have made their principal progress towards perfection in modern times. They are means, and powerful means, by which the excellences of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided...

#noted

http://fold.cm

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: How Democracies Die h...

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: How Democracies Die https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1524762938: "Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves.... Ch��vez in Venezuela... Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Ukraine. Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box...

...The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. With a classic coup d�����tat, as in Pinochet���s Chile, the death of a democracy is immediate and evident to all. The presidential palace burns. The president is killed, imprisoned, or shipped off into exile. The constitution is suspended or scrapped. On the electoral road, none of these things happen. There are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ���legal,��� in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy���making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process. Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles.

This sows public confusion. People do not immediately realize what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy. In 2011, when a Latinobar��metro survey asked Venezuelans to rate their own country from 1 (���not at all democratic���) to 10 (���completely democratic���), 51��percent of respondents gave their country a score of 8 or higher. Because there is no single moment���no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution���in which the regime obviously ���crosses the line��� into dictatorship, nothing may set off society���s alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy���s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible...

#noted

Dylan Matthews: Child Poverty Report: Food, Housing, and ...

Dylan Matthews: Child Poverty Report: Food, Housing, and Money, Not Work Requirements, Work Best - Vox: "The most important report on child poverty in years is finally out.... The result of pressure from California Democratic Representatives Barbara Lee and Lucille Roybal-Allard, the provision called for the National Academy of Sciences to convene a group of experts to produce 'a nonpartisan, evidence-based report that would provide its assessment of the most effective means for reducing child poverty by half in the next 10 years'.... A 'work-based package'.... A 'work-based and universal support package'.... A 'means-tested supports and work package'...

#noted

Gavin Wright: Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Revis...

Gavin Wright: Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Revisited: "Eric Williams... links the slave trade and slave-based commerce with early British industrial development. Long-distance markets were crucial supports for technological progress and for the infrastructure of financial markets and the shipping sector.... The eighteenth century Atlantic economy was dominated by sugar, and sugar was dominated by slavery. The role of the slave trade was central.... Adherents of an insurgency known as the New History of Capitalism have extended this line of analysis to nineteenth century America.... Such analyses overlook the second part of the Williams thesis, which held that industrial capitalism abandoned slavery because it was no longer needed for continued economic expansion...

...To be sure, southern slavery was highly profitable to the owners, and the slave economy experienced considerable growth in the antebellum period.... My study asserts that on balance the persistence of slavery actually reduced the growth of cotton supply compared with a free-labour alternative... the expansion of production after the Civil War and emancipation, and the return of world cotton prices to their pre-war levels...

Oxford EH: "Gavin Wright (@Stanford) delivers the @EcHistSoc Tawney Lecture on Part 2 of the Williams Thesis: did industrial sectors destroy (or have no need for) slavery by the C19?.... Indentured servitude could not have supplied enough labor for the Caribbean sugar economy.... Big changes to the global economy 1775-1815, esp. industrial revolution technology, meant that slavery became less necessary.... 'Cotton was not sugar', different work conditions, less fixed capital needed, lower efficient scale of production, 'cotton would have expanded without slavery'.... Marx was right about colonial trade in the C18, wrong about cotton in the C19.... High cotton prices, not Eli Whitney���s cotton gin, were the incentive to expand cotton cultivation in the early US in the late C18...

...Small farmers could have been as efficient as farms with many slaves (in TFP) for cotton production if they didn���t need to diversify their planting into e.g. food crops.... There could have been a wheat-based slave economy in the North if the politics had been different.... Did slavery advance the geographical frontier of cotton production? Wright says slavery retarded developments in, for example, transport infrastructure that would have further extended production.... US cotton production did not support broader development in America.... Wright: South had poorly developed capital markets and bad infrastructure. Slave south also didn���t recruit free settlers who could have extended cotton production over and above that produced by slavery....

���Second slavery��� was not necessary for Anglo-American capitalism, partly due to adaptation to abolition as well as other factors. Slavery was a drag on economic development...

#noted

http://fold.cm

John Hatcher: Unreal Wages: Long-Run Living Standards and...

John Hatcher: Unreal Wages: Long-Run Living Standards and the ���Golden Age��� of the Fifteenth Century: "The renowned ���Golden Age��� of the fifteenth century has been exaggerated. The surge in the prosperity of the lower orders resulting from high wages, low food prices and easier access to cheap land was undoubtedly extraordinary. But not as prodigious as has customarily been assumed. Furthermore, contrary to the common belief that the economic fortunes of the labouring classes can be taken as a proxy for the living standards of the population as a whole, the scale of improvement in their good fortune was not widely shared by the rest of society who did not derive their incomes solely from wages or their subsistence solely from the market. Argument and evidence are also provided that the criticisms made in this chapter of the compilation, interpretation and application of real wage indices have implications that stretch far beyond the fifteenth century...

#noted