J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2

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Published on May 16, 2021 16:42

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-05-09 Su

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

First:

Best-case��i.e., most optimistic scenario for employment��is employment corresponding to a ��true�� unemployment rate of 2.5% in 2023 with core inflation at 2.75%/year. That is enough to get inflation expectations up to the Fed��s target of 2.5%/year on a CPI basis. That is not enough for anyone reasonable to claim that an ever-upward inflationary spiral is on the way. The definition of ��stagflation�� is a world in which expectations are anchored on the belief that inflation is going to rise over time, hence an unemployment rate greater than the natural rate is required in order to hold inflation steady. That does not seem to be the world we are headed for in the optimistic scenario. And that stagflation equilibrium is much further away in the non-optimistic scenarios:

Laurence Ball & al.: US Inflation: Set for Take-Off?: ��How high is the ongoing US fiscal expansion likely to push inflation? This column presents new evidence that underlying (weighted median) CPI inflation has so far steadily declined since the start of the COVID��19 crisis, broadly as predicted by its historical Phillips curve relation. If the ongoing fiscal expansion reduces unemployment to 1.5��3.5%, as some predict, underlying inflation could rise to about 2.5��3% by 2023. If the fiscal expansion is temporary and monetary policy remains clearly communicated and decisive, there is little risk of a 1960s-type inflationary spiral��

LINK: <https://voxeu.org/article/us-inflation-set-take>

Very Briefly Noted:

Joseph Michael Newhard: The Stock Market Speaks: How Dr. Alchian Learned to Build the Bomb <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/article-alchian-bomb.pdf>

Jemima Kelly: You Can Now Build a ��Mini Media Empire�� on Substack<https://www.ft.com/content/7b9fea53-db83-4cd4-a9bd-10af24aebfea>

Ian Cuttress: TechTechPotato <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1r0DG-KEPyqOeW6o79PByw>

Nina L. Khrushcheva: Stalin��s War & Peace <https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/stalin-putin-russia-relations-book-review-by-nina-l-khrushcheva-2021-05>

Kathleen McCook: Jumi��ges Abbey: ��Most beautiful ruins in France: Jumi��ges Abbey was one of the largest monasteries in France prior to the wars of religion in the 16th century. During the Middle Ages, it was particularly known for the books produced in the scriptorium. In 1562 numerous libraries of religious establishments were put to the sack by Huguenots in this part of France. Jumi��ges Abbey was sacked by Montmorency��s soldiers�� <https://kathleenmccook.substack.com/p/jumieges-abbey>

<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-for-2021-05-09-su>

One Video

Marques Brownlee: Apple vs The Paradox of Choice!<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNAo0UdYF6g>

Paragraphs:

It��s not that ��the dynamics of identity politics are strong��, Matt. It��s that right-wing populism is concerned not with making people��s lives better, but rather with making the Volk believe that they have better lives than the non-Volk.The right-wing populist thinks that people who want to live in Austin should be prevented from doing so, because they are coded Black, Jewish, educated, ��woke��, and the purpose of a right-wing populist government is to make them unhappy:

Matthew Yglesias: Conservative Populists Should Embrace Housing Deregulation: ��While the leftist case against zoning reform is mistaken, the rightist case tends to be nonsensical��. Zoning reform proposal is�� right-wing�� let people do what they want with their property�� people should decide for themselves��. But the dynamics of identity politics are strong, and Edward Ring in American Greatness tries to make a right-populist take where housing abundance is good but density is also bad��. There��s no reason Texas shouldn��t keep building more homes in the suburbs of Austin. But that said, if some people would rather live in Austin proper, why shouldn��t that be allowed, too?��

LINK: <https://www.slowboring.com/p/populists-housing>

On David Brooks��s wishy-washy half-recognition that he has spent his life working for grifters and thugs, and that FDR might have been a relatively good guy after all:

Yastreblyansky: Distrust Doom Loop: ��Hear me out here, maybe Roosevelt and the Brain Trust weren��t thinking about the coming war at all. Maybe they were actually thinking about rescuing millions of Americans from hunger, homelessness, and despair just because they thought that was their job. Maybe the trust in government that largely lasted for the next 40 or 50 years had to do with the fact that the government installed in 1933 actually was trustworthy. And maybe instead of deploying just enough New Deal to get you through the specific context of that Distrust Doom Loop you could use moderately massive government spending (the kind of thing the Lincoln administration meant by suggesting that the people should be governed by the people on behalf of the people and then proceeding to a massive expansion of public education and transportation infrastructure in the middle of a civil war) all the time, even when it seems inconvenient, with the idea that if the government was trustworthy all the time those unpredictable Distrust Doom Loops would never arise. Just a thought��

LINK: <https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2021/05/distrust-doom-loop.html>

Drew Austin: Paid in Full: ��As with Web 2.0, third-party applications will mediate most Web3 activity for ordinary users. These decentralized apps will not necessarily look and feel altogether different than traditional web apps but will likely incorporate functionality�� like crowdfunding to be incorporated directly��. Interactions will become transactions��. Web 2.0 has already demonstrated that information can��t be free; it can only be subsidized, most likely by entities with deep pockets and nefarious interests��

LINK: <https://reallifemag.com/paid-in-full/>

John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: ��The only radical cure for the crises of confidence which afflict the economic life of the modern world would be to allow the individual no choice between consuming his income and ordering the production of the specific capital-asset which, even though it be on precarious evidence, impresses him as the most promising investment available to him. It might be that, at times when he was more than usually assailed by doubts concerning the future, he would turn in his perplexity towards more consumption and less new investment. But that would avoid the disastrous, cumulative and far-reaching repercussions of its being open to him, when thus assailed by doubts, to spend his income neither on the one nor on the other. Those who have emphasised the social dangers of the hoarding of money have, of course, had something similar to the above in mind. But they have overlooked the possibility that the phenomenon can occur without any change, or at least any commensurate change, in the hoarding of money��

LINK: <https://cruel.org/econthought/texts/generaltheory/chap12.html>

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Published on May 16, 2021 16:40

May 5, 2021

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-05-05 We

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember... <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-for-2021-05-05-we>

First:

Ian Leslie: Biden's Bet: ��Biden... is... hinting at... ��I think they��re going to write about this point in history�� about whether or not democracy can function in the 21st century. Not a joke. Whether autocracy is the answe��these were my debates I��d have in the many times I met with Xi.��... Biden believes that technology and science are moving so fast that they pose an existential challenge to democracy itself. The consensus used to be that if China wanted to catch with the West it would have to democratise��become more free, and more diverse, with power less centralised. But Xi has doubled down on autocracy and centralisation, partly by deploying new technologies. China is still growing. For Biden, it��s up to America to show the rest of the world that democracy is still the best platform��

LINK: <https://ianleslie.substack.com/p/bidens-bet>

Very Briefly Noted:

World Time Buddy: _Time Converter and World Clock: Conversion at a Glance <https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/>

Rod van Meer: Understanding Quantum Computers<https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/intro-to-quantum-computing>

W.E.B. Du Bois (1910): The Souls of White Folk <https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Du_Bois_White_Folk.pdf>

Ezra Klein: Interviews Chuck Schumer<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-chuck-schumer-transcript.html>

LINK: <https://warontherocks.com/2021/05/metus-hostilis-sallust-american-grand-strategy-and-the-disciplining-effects-of-peer-competition-with-china/>

Paragraphs:

Paul McLeary (2007): Is Perry Bacon Serious?: ��Perry Bacon Jr. wrote what may be the single worst campaign ��08 piece to appear in any American newspaper so far this election cycle. In the front-page piece, Bacon muses over how the chances of Barack Obama getting elected president might be affected by the fact that he��s not Muslim. Seriously. To build his case, Bacon stumbles artlessly through all manner of rumor, innuendo, and xenophobic smear��never bothering to refute any of it, even though there is plenty of well-documented evidence to knock down much of this stuff. Bacon kicks the whole sorry mess off with the unsubstantiated statement that: ��In his speeches and often on the Internet, the part of Sen. Barack Obama��s biography that gets the most attention is not his race but his connections to the Muslim world.�� Who, exactly, gives this the most attention?�� This habit of reporters��perpetuating untruths by writing stories about the ��phenomenon�� of those untruths��drives us nuts. Was LexisNexis broken in the scant few minutes it must have taken him to write this story? If so, Bacon must have taken to Internet message boards to troll for xenophobic posts��. Bacon then wraps up by tossing in a quote from an Obama adviser telling us that all��s fine, there��s nothing to worry about. Oh, well, with that tidbit at the end Bacon achieved the all-important Balance, so all��s well in newspaper-land.

LINK: <https://archives.cjr.org/campaign_desk/post_75.php>

Iskander Rehman: Metus Hostilis: Sallust, American Grand Strategy, & the Disciplining Effects of Peer Competition with China=: ��Sallust��s theory remains starkly unforgiving, almost uncomfortably so, for a modern reader. As political scientist Daniel Kapust notes, this creates a dilemma whereby ��the coherence of a community may become linked to the existence of a dangerous foreign enemy.�� Healthy democracies should be able to guarantee the conditions of their own success without fear of a great-power competitor, and no sensible individual would argue in favor of cultivating foreign enmity for its own sake. And yet, Sallust��s grim insights, however unsettling, may hold some truth��. An unwelcome new strategic dispensation�� may paradoxically provide a clarifying and restorative sense of purpose to a deeply fractious American democracy��. Intense domestic polarization has rendered U.S. foreign policy more volatile, unpredictable and��in the eyes of international observers��unreliable��

Adam Ozimek: Future Workforce: ��Companies continue to be remote: Nine months into the pandemic, 41.8 percent of the American workforce remains fully remote. Companies say remote work is getting easier, not harder, as time goes on: 68 percent of hiring managers say remote work is going more smoothly now than when their company first made the shift to at the start of the pandemic. Remote work will continue through 2021: Managers believe that 26.7 percent of the workforce will be fully remote in one year suggesting that individuals will gradually continue to return to the office, but a significant share will remain remote in the near future. The number of remote workers in the next five years is expected to be nearly double what it was before COVID��19: By 2025, 36.2 million Americans will be remote, an increase of 16.8 million people from pre-pandemic rates. Increased productivity and flexibility continue to be key benefits of remote work: Hiring managers cite reduction of non-essential meetings, increased schedule flexibility, and no commute as aspects of remote work that have worked better than expected��

LINK: <https://www.upwork.com/press/releases/economist-report-future-workforce>

Nancy Qian: The Two Sides of Chinese GDP: ��In 2019�� China��s per capita GDP in 2019 was $8,242, placing the country between Montenegro ($8,591) and Botswana ($8,093). Its per capita GDP in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms��with income adjusted to take account of the cost of living��was $16,804�� between Suriname ($17,256) and Bosnia and Herzegovina ($16,289)��. GDP per capita in PPP terms in the US and the European Union is $65,298 and $47,828, respectively��. China��s current level of income inequality�� is similar to that found in the US and India��. 600 million people have�� an annual income of $1,860��. The Chinese government�� will be preoccupied for at least another generation by the need to increase domestic incomes. But�� governments can also bolster their popular support in ways that do not foster economic growth�� defending�� against�� earthquakes or the COVID��19 pandemic�� territorial disputes in the South China Sea and along the Chinese-Indian border��. The backlash effect��. Many Chinese think the West is seeking to reassert political dominance and feel painful reminders of colonialism and World War II��. Behind the world��s second-highest GDP are hundreds of millions of people who just want to stop being poor��

LINK: <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-poverty-aggregate-per-capita-gdp-by-nancy-qian-1-2021-04>

Jeet Heer: Can We Bring Back Blogging?: ��The golden age of blogging was�� a digital party, where bouncing around through hyperlinks was always bringing in new writers and new perspectives�� fresh voices and also of changing minds��. The blogosphere opened up debate, especially in the 21st century revival of feminist, anti-racist, and socialist politics��. There were a lot of factors that led to the decline of blogging�� ads�� Google and Facebook ate up that revenue. Social media like Twitter and Facebook also provided a new way to micro-blog��. I��m still finding my sea legs as a Substacker. I want to know what works and what doesn��t��

LINK: <https://jeetheer.substack.com/p/can-we-bring-back-blogging>

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Published on May 05, 2021 19:39

PROJECT SYNDICATE: Is ��e US Economy Recovering or Overheating?

The fact that core inflation is rising on the back of substantial GDP growth and declining unemployment should not come as a surprise. Those who are wringing their hands about economic "overheating" should remember that an absence of price increases would reflect an economy that is still struggling. <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-inflation-shows-economy-is-reshuffling-and-recovering-by-j-bradford-delong-2021-05>

BERKELEY �� The financial and economic news in the United States lately has been dominated by concerns about inflation. ��Runaway inflation is the biggest risk facing investors, Leuthold��s Jim Paulsen warns,�� according to the cable news channel CNBC. As a potential hedge against inflation, ��Bitcoin��s time to shine is fast approaching,�� reportsFortune��s Robert Hackett. According to US News and World Report, ��There is a lot of talk about inflation in 2021 as fears of high government spending creep in and the recent rebound in prices from pandemic-related levels has some investors worried that the trend will continue for some time.��

And yet, one also reads that ��US Treasury yields hold ground even as inflation picks up.�� After growing at an annualized rate of 33.4% in the third quarter of 2020, 4.3% in the fourth quarter, and 6.4% in the first quarter of this year, the US economy is on track for a full recovery. The second-quarter growth rate is expected to be at least 8%, and perhaps significantly higher, which means that the US economy, in aggregate, will have fully returned to its pre-pandemic production level by the third or fourth quarter of this year.

In this context, it is no surprise that core inflation (which excludes food and energy prices) rose 0.4 percentage points over the past month. That rate implies nearly a 5% annual inflation rate. But looking back over the past 12 months, the core inflation rate (as measured by the consumer price index) was 2.3%, which is in keeping with the US Federal Reserve��s 2-2.5% target.

The question is not whether there will be some inflation this year, but whether it will represent ��overheating�� of the economy as a whole. Most likely, it will not. The amount by which economic output in 2021 exceeds potential output will be less than zero. And as the Fed makes clear with every statement it issues, it will not allow a transient wage-price spiral to become embedded in inflation expectations. The outlook for 2021 and beyond is that inflation will hover around the Fed��s target, rather than consistently falling short, as it has for the past 13 years.

Moreover, the US economy is emerging from the pandemic recession with a fundamentally altered inter-sectoral balance. Spending on durable goodscurrently accounts for an additional 1.7 percentage points of GDP, relative to its 2019 level, and spending on housing construction is running at 0.5 points above its 2019 share. At the same time, business spending on structures and consumer spending on energy are both running at 0.5 points below their 2019 shares, and spending on services (hospitality, recreation, and transportation) is 2.2 points below its 2019 share.

These sectoral dynamics will be the most important determinants of inflation this year. By the end of 2021, some 4% of all workers will have moved not only to new jobs but to entirely different sectors. In an economy where businesses very rarely cut nominal wages, the pull of workers from sectors where demand is relatively slack to sectors where it is more intense will require firms to offer wage increases to encourage workers to make the jump.

But we cannot know how much inflation this reshuffling will cause, because we have not really seen anything like it before. Economists will have a lot to learn this year about the short-term intersectoral elasticity of employment supply.

One thing that should be clear, however, is that an uptick of inflation this year is nothing to be upset about. After all, wage and price increases are an essential part of rebalancing the economy. Real production, real wages, and real asset values will all be higher as a result of this year��s inflation, whereas the price level will remain far below what it would have been had the Fed managed to hit its inflation targets in the years since the Great Recession following the 2008 global financial crisis.

While some commentators worry that we may be returning to the 1970s, this is highly unlikely. That decade��s stagflationary conditions followed from a perfect storm of shocks, and were exacerbated by the Fed��s conflicted and confused response under then-Chair Arthur Burns. Today��s Fed leadership is very different, and there is no perfect storm of repeated shocks to match the effects of the Yom Kippur War, Iran��s Islamic Revolution, the 1970s productivity-growth slowdown, and so forth.

Burning rubber to rejoin highway traffic is not the same thing as overheating the engine.

(Remember: You can subscribe to this�� weblog-like newsletter�� here:

There��s a free email list. There��s a paid-subscription list with (at the moment, only a few) extras too.)

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Published on May 05, 2021 11:41

PODCAST: Hexapodia XIII: "Mandated Interoperability": We Can't Make It Work, or Can We?

With Cory Doctorow; Noah Smith & Brad DeLong's 30:00 < Weekly Podcast < 60:00 <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-xiii-mandated-interoperability>

Listen in podcast app

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Key Insights:

Cory Doctorow is AWESOME!

It is depressing. We once, with the creation of the market economy, got interoperability right. But now the political economy blocks us from there being any obvious path to an equivalent lucky historical accident in our future.

The problems in our society are not diametrically opposed: Addressing the problems of one thing doesn't necessarily create equal and opposite problems on the other side��but it does change the trade-offs, and so things become very complex and very difficult to solve.

Always keep a trash bag in your car.

Hexapodia!

References:

Books:

Cory Doctorow: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism <https://www.google.com/books/edition/How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism/W20NzgEACAAJ>

Cory Doctorow: Attack Surface <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Attack_Surface/rFfEDwAAQBAJ>

Cory Doctorow: Walkaway <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Walkaway/MKMsDAAAQBAJ>

Cory Doctorow: Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom/h8DvDwAAQBA>

Cory Doctorow: Little Brother <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Little_Brother/r1zne2mZDW8C>

William Flesch:Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Comeuppance/JSRWPYp1nNUC>

Daniel L. Rubinfeld: A Retrospective on U.S. v. Microsoft: Why Does It Resonate Today? <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003603X20950227>

Louis Galambos & Peter Temin: The Fall of the Bell System: A Study in Prices & Politics <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Fall_of_the_Bell_System/CXNPVjdxfAEC>

Websites:

Electronic Frontier Foundation: <http://www.eff.org>

Adversarial Interop Case Studies: <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability>

Privacy without Monopoly: <https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy>

Cory Doctorow: Craphound <http://craphound.net>

Cory Doctorow: Pluralistic <https://pluralistic.net>

&, of course:

Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://books.google.com/books?id=fCCWWgZ7d6UC>

(Remember: You can subscribe to this�� weblog-like newsletter�� here:

There��s a free email list. There��s a paid-subscription list with (at the moment, only a few) extras too.)

...

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Published on May 05, 2021 11:31

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-05-02 Su

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

First:

Zeynep Tufekci: Sunday Open Thread for Subscribers: ��The one big part of the tragedy here is that we had most of the science we needed really early on��. There was more to learn, for sure, but the basics were there. There have been very few scientific surprises�� outside of how vaccinable this (luckily!) turned out to be (we didn��t know partly because we didn��t really try for the others exactly because we didn��t care). But sociologically, I am shaken. I knew about all of this, because I teach and study it. The group-think, the institutional resistance and inertia, the cognitive biases, the social dynamics�� I know about them all! But I��ve been truly surprised most is how much stronger than I thought these dynamics were, even in a crisis. Perhaps because of the crisis. I��ve learned a lot about viruses last year, but I did not really need that much beyond an introductory textbook to write the policy oriented pieces I��ve published. I think we need to update our social science textbooks and assumptions, though. The dynamics that have dominated our world aren��t novel in the sense that we were new to them, but they are clearly so much stronger than we usually acknowledge��

LINK: <https://www.theinsight.org/p/sunday-open-thread-for-subscribers-d93>

Very Briefly Noted:

John Maynard Keynes: Isaac Newton <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/essay-keynes-newton.pdf>

Google Arts & Culture <https://artsandculture.google.com/>

Google Arts & Culture: Carousel in the Courtyard of Palazzo Barberini in Honor of Christina of Sweden <https://artsandculture.google.com/story/iALyQdAzbCmaKg>

Zeke Hausfather: Explainer: Why the Sun Is Not Responsible for Recent Climate Change <https://www.carbonbrief.org/why-the-sun-is-not-responsible-for-recent-climate-change>

Ivan Werning: Taming a Minsky Cycle <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_pJsPXUVMs>

Charles Goodhart: Less Lower for Longer; More Higher and Sooner <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFGQ_4msKUA>

Charlie Munger: ��I think the whole damn development [BitCoin] is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization�� a currency that is so useful to kidnappers and extortionists�� <https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1388590114218053634>

Katie Peek: Flu Has Disappeared Worldwide during the COVID Pandemic: ��The public health measures that slow the spread of the novel coronavirus work really well on influenza�� <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flu-has-disappeared-worldwide-during-the-covid-pandemic/>

Tren Griffin: ��Munger: ��We are not getting to big to manage. We are so decentralized that we can keep doing what we do at our scale for a very long time.�� Greg will keep the culture.�� Buffett��s successor has never been more apparent. It��s Greg. Ajit is more focused on insurance�� <https://twitter.com/trengriffin/status/1388596668480647169>

Scott Lemieux: Outflankened Again: ��the New Republican Populism, explained: ��we need to stop these liberal attempts to rob us of our freedom by their totalitarian drive to provide assistance with child care and get back to the base values of conservative freedom like allowing people to run over protesters with cars in order to protect Confederate statues��El Cid (@EnBuenora) May 1, 2021�� <https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/05/outflankened-again>

Paragraphs:

Jeet Heer: The Reactionary International: ��Sixty years ago�� the Algiers putsch, a failed coup d��tat�� [to overthrow] President Charles de Gaulle��. On April 21, 2021, a date obviously picked to echo the events of 1961�� an open letter warning that France was on the verge of civil war and that military should prepare to seize power�� Christian Piquemal, former head of the French Foreign Legion, along with 20 retired generals, 80 officers��. In National Review in 1985��. General Raoul Salan, one of the leaders of the 1961 putsch. Molnar wrote�� "to this day half of the French regard Salan��s rebellion as legitimate, but would question de Gaulle��s. It was de Gaulle who tore up the unwritten law of army solidarity��. De Gaulle himself revolted against Petain��s lawful government.�� In other words, fascist collaboration was legitimate and the 1961 coup plotters were more justified than de Gaulle��s decision to join the Western allies in the war against Nazism. The Reactionary International, as should be clear, is a proto-fascist movement. For the sake of democracy, it��s urgent that people of this orientation be rooted out of the military in France, the United States, and wherever else they may be found. In late 2020 and early 2021, I took comfort in the fact that Trump seemed to have limited support in the officer class of the American military. This led me to think that for all Trump��s bluster about a coup, he wouldn��t have the crucial military support he needed. I was right to the extent that the January 6 insurrection was, as The American MindT writes, a ��shambolic�� farce. But it looks like the Trumpists are thinking about how a future coup might succeed. The are starting to realize that they need to cultivate a mutinous cadre in the officer class. That��s a development pregnant with dangers�� LINK: <https://jeetheer.substack.com/p/the-reactionary-international>

Ed Luce: The Rise & Rise Of Tucker Carlson Conservatism: ��His reaction to Wednesday��s verdict on Derek Chauvin for killing George Floyd crossed even his own thinly drawn lines. The jury��s triple guilty verdict, reached after 10 hours of deliberation, amounted to ��an attack on civilisation��, said Carlson��. The true cause of Floyd��s death, Carlson has repeatedly said, was a drug overdose��not the nine-minute asphyxiation that jurors saw over and over. Carlson��s outburst is notable for two reasons. First, he is the most popular conservative TV anchor in the country, with a nightly audience of 3m. Since Donald Trump lost his Twitter account, Carlson has become the most influential voice of aggrieved white conservatism��. Second, Carlson��s outburst illustrated that US racial injustice is not close to having turned the corner. Shortly before the jurors announced their verdict, police in Columbus, Ohio, shot dead a 16-year-old black girl who was allegedly wielding a knife. During the trial, police shot and killed an average of three Americans a day, the majority non-white, including a 13-year-old unarmed black boy. Unlike Floyd��s death, these were not recorded on the mobile phones of passers-by. That footage meant Chauvin��s case was almost unique. Even then, Carlson wants viewers to believe that Chauvin was the real victim. As Groucho Marx might have asked: who should Americans believe, Tucker Carlson or their own lying eyes? For some people believing is seeing, rather than the other way round�� LINK: <https://www.ft.com/content/cc2a46cf-4392-44db-b911-f883e2f46539>

(Remember: You can subscribe to this�� weblog-like newsletter�� here:

There��s a free email list. There��s a paid-subscription list with (at the moment, only a few) extras too.)

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Published on May 05, 2021 11:27

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-04-30 Fr

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

First:

Free speech advocates who care about the functioning of their community have never thought it appropriate for the free-speech principle to empower chaos monkeys who seek to destroy their society and replace it with something with speech that would be less free:

John Milton: Areopagitica: ��Yet if all cannot be of one mind��as who looks they should be?��this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and the misled: that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or manners no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw itself: but those neighbouring differences, or rather indifferences, are what I speak of, whether in some point of doctrine or of discipline, which, though they may be many, yet need not interrupt THE UNITY OF SPIRIT, if we could but find among us THE BOND OF PEACE��

LINK: <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/608/608-h/608-h.htm>

Very Briefly Noted:

Crash Course: Black American History Preview<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPx5aRuWCtc>

Charles Goodhart: Less Lower for Longer; More Higher and Sooner<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFGQ_4msKUA>

Harry Enten: Voters Used to See Moderation in Trump. Not Anymore<https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/voters-think-trump-has-moved-to-the-right/>

German Lopez: Biden��s First 100 Days, Explained in 600 Words: ��Biden is drawing on the lessons of FDR and the New Deal to try to revitalize American democracy�� <https://www.vox.com/2021/4/30/22412137/biden-congress-speech-100-days-fdr-new-deal>

Dylan Matthews: US Covid��19 Response: How Stimulus Checks, Unemployment Insurance, & Tax Credits Sped Up Economic Recovery: ��I looked for a country that got the economic response to Covid��19 right. I found the US�� <https://www.vox.com/22348364/united-states-stimulus-covid-coronavirus>

Alex Abad-Santos: Can Fully Vaccinated People Return to Indoor Dining? It��s Complicated: ��Even if you��re vaccinated, indoor dining is still complicated Epidemiologists want the US vaccination rate to get a little bit higher before resuming eating indoors at restaurants�� <https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22406332/indoor-dining-restaurants-vaccinated-risk-covid-19>

Lynn Parramore: America Hasn��t Reckoned with the Coup That Blasted the Black Middle Class: ��In 1898, upwardly mobile Blacks in Wilmington, NC were terrorized and slaughtered in a violent insurrection�� <https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/america-hasnt-reckoned-with-the-coup-that-blasted-the-black-middle-class>

Scott Lemieux: The Counter-Majoritarian Atrocity: ��As we saw in [Senator] Scott��s response speech last night, the stock response of Republican elites and their most shameless supporters and apologists is now to claim that one-person-one-vote, fair access to the ballot, and a majority of voters being allowed to choose their representatives is ACTUALLY the election-rigging�� <https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/04/the-counter-majoritarian-atrocity>

Michael Lee & Antoine Martin: Hey, Economist! What��s the Case for Central Bank Digital Currencies?: ��Bitcoin is not a claim on anything or anyone. By contrast, a CBDC would be a central bank liability��. Offering a payment method that has a stable value is one of the reasons central banks were created in the first place. The exchange mechanism is also very different. The central ethos of cryptocurrencies is the idea that transactions can take place without a trusted intermediary��. By contrast, a CBDC embraces the involvement of a trusted intermediary, namely a central bank�� <https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2021/04/hey-economist-whats-the-case-for-central-bank-digital-currencies.html>

Ed Zitron: Why We Continue To Have Awful Meetings: ��Meetings exist, in my mind, for a reason. If it��s a weekly call with a client, you��re there to give updates, get updates on things, make plans, or follow up on loose threads��. Meetings also exist to put faces to names, and potentially hash out any issues��. There are good reasons for meetings to happen, even in brief, especially if you��re working remote��. I am encouraging you to take a minute and realize that someone talking a lot does not mean they��re actually doing anything�� <https://ez.substack.com/p/why-we-continue-to-have-awful-meetings>

LINK: <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-29/markets-give-powell-a-break-on-inflation-it-may-be-transitory>

Paragraphs:

John Authers: Markets Give Powell a Break on Inflation. It May Be Transitory: ��The latest Federal Open Market Committee meeting still left us with a few more clues on how the Fed intends to navigate through an exceptionally dangerous environment��. Virtually every data release for the last month has suggested a very strong recovery. The Fed wants great improvement in unemployment, which is still running at a 6% rate, compared to 3.5% before the pandemic��. So there are two questions. Do we see any signs of rising prices caused by anything more than a transitory bottleneck? And, are inflation expectations showing signs of settling ��materially above 2%��? If there is any clear sign of a possible bottleneck, it is in�� industrial metals��. Markets give us nice and precise measures of inflation expectations, via the breakevens between inflation-protected bonds, or TIPS, and conventional fixed-income Treasuries. The prediction this generates for average inflation over the next five years is just under 2.5%��. Ten-year expectations are slightly lower��. The best measure to justify continued lenience is the so-called 5-year, 5-year breakeven��

Patrick Wyman: Ancient South Asia: ��If we were to touch down in South Asia at the end of the Younger Dryas and the beginning of the Holocene around 12,000 years ago, however, we wouldn��t have seen many people. Archaeological traces of a human presence are few and far between at the end of the Pleistocene. Much of the region wasn��t particularly welcoming to people at that time; the Deccan Plateau, which makes up much of South Asia, would have been exceptionally arid. That is largely because the monsoon, which brings torrential but life-giving rain every summer, was either much weaker or altogether absent. The rain-fed seasonal rivers that make much of South Asia welcoming to people wouldn��t have flowed, leaving only the river valleys of the Indus and Ganges as particularly viable spots for people to live. As the Pleistocene gave way to the Holocene, the monsoon began to take on something more like its current form. As was the case elsewhere in the world at that time, the number of people living in South Asia dramatically expanded with improving climatic conditions. Many of these new residents were the descendants of long-established hunter-gatherers. Some of them kept foraging; others experimented with new ways of life. But others were new arrivals who set themselves up on the edges of the Indus Valley, bringing with them an agricultural package first developed far to the west in the Fertile Crescent��

LINK: <https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/ancient-south-asia>

Joseph A. Francis: King Cotton, the Munificent Slavery & (Under)development in the United States, 1789��1865: ��Slaves were necessary for the country��s cotton boom because cotton was not sufficiently remunerative to attract yeoman farmers. Cotton exports then balanced the imports that the Federal Government taxed to obtain most of its revenues. Those revenues were used to fund westward expansion, both directly through the acquisition and conquest of new territory, and indirectly through the policy of retiring the national debt, which pumped liquidity into the country��s nascent capital markets and bolstered the reputation of American bonds among foreign investors. State government could then borrow to finance the transportation infrastructure that connected the new lands to markets, allowing them to be serrled. Westward expansion tended to weaken slaveholders�� position in Congress because they were excluded from the rapidly growing Midwest. They therefore seceded. The North would not let the South leave the Union, however, because secession threatened to take away the Federal Government��s main source of revenues. As a result, the Civil War began, leading to emancipation. Slavery had thus financed the development of the settler society that would eventually abolish it, while the slaves themselves became an underdeveloped nation within a nation��

LINK: <https://joefrancis.info/pdfs/FrancisUS_slavery.pdf>

Aswath Damodaran: Equity Risk Premiums (ERP): Determinants, Estimation, and Implications��The 2021 Edition: ��The equity risk premium is the price of risk in equity markets, and it is not just a key input in estimating costs of equity and capital in both corporate finance and valuation, but it is also a key metric in assessing the overall market. Given its importance, it is surprising how haphazard the estimation of equity risk premiums remains in practice. We begin this paper by looking at the economic determinants of equity risk premiums, including investor risk aversion, information uncertainty and perceptions of macroeconomic risk. In the standard approach to estimating the equity risk premium, historical returns are used, with the difference in annual returns on stocks versus bonds, over a long period, comprising the expected risk premium. We note the limitations of this approach, even in markets like the United States, which have long periods of historical data available, and its complete failure in emerging markets, where the historical data tends to be limited and volatile. We look at two other approaches to estimating equity risk premiums �� the survey approach, where investors and managers are asked to assess the risk premium and the implied approach, where a forward-looking estimate of the premium is estimated using either current equity prices or risk premiums in non-equity markets. In the next section, we look at the relationship between the equity risk premium and risk premiums in the bond market (default spreads) and in real estate (cap rates) and how that relationship can be mined to generate expected equity risk premiums. We close the paper by examining why different approaches yield different values for the equity risk premium, and how to choose the ��right�� number to use in analysis��

LINK: <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3825823>

Gary Gorton: Recent Changes & the Future of the US Financial System: ��The financial crisis has not been solved because financial crises are inherent in market economics. A financial crisis is always about runs on short-term debt, e.g. in the repo market. The general trend in the past couple decades has been a decline in deposits replaced with other short-term debt instruments like repo contracts��. Stablecoin is essentially unregulated free banking that issues deposits. However, free banking never worked in the past, even in cases whether the government required backing. There needs to be credible backing for Stablecoin as they are now runnable without any entity overseeing them��. The fundamental theorem of bank regulation stipulates that bank regulators can only decide the location of the banking system. Without carrots��or incentives��to keep a bank, they can move, as evidenced by the rise of mortgage and loan origination outside of the banking system given the high costs of staying a bank��

LINK: <https://bcf.princeton.edu/events/gary-gorton-on-recent-changes-and-the-future-of-the-us-financial-system/>

Anton Troianovski: ��We Know How to Defend Our Interests��: Putin��s Emerging Hard Line: ��KYIV, Ukraine �� The world according to President Vladimir V. Putin looks like this: Russia is on the rise while the West is in chaos. The West, spurred on by a new American president who is more anti-Russian than his predecessor, seeks Russia��s��and Mr. Putin��s��destruction. And it is time for Russia, imbued with a moral authority and a thinning supply of patience, to hit back. ��They may think that we are like them, but we are different, with a different genetic, cultural and moral code,�� Mr. Putin said last month, excoriating the United States. ��We know how to defend our interests��

LINK: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/world/europe/putin-biden-ukraine-navalny.html?searchResultPosition=3>

James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson: Identification & Estimation of Dynamic Causal Effects in Macroeconomics Using External Instruments: ��The increasing use of external sources of as-if randomness to identify the dynamic causal effects of macroeconomic shocks�� the time series counterpart of the highly successful strategy in microeconometrics of using external as-if randomness to provide instruments��. This lecture exposits this approach and provides conditions on instruments and control variables under which external instrument methods produce valid inference on dynamic causal effects��. We consider two methods, a one-step instrumental variables regression and a two-step method that entails estimation of a vector autoregression��

LINK: <https://www.princeton.edu/~mwatson/papers/Sargan_Lecture_Stock_Watson_20180104.pdf>

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There��s a free email list. There��s a paid-subscription list with (at the moment, only a few) extras too.)

John Scalzi @scalzi
I'm a dude with the usual amount of bullshit on his karma; I try to imagine the better version of me, and then cosplay that in public until hopefully it sticks. Or to quote Vonnegut: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

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Published on May 05, 2021 11:16

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-04-29 Th

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

John Scalzi: ��I��m a dude with the usual amount of bullshit on his karma; I try to imagine the better version of me, and then cosplay that in public until hopefully it sticks. Or to quote Vonnegut: ��We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be��

Jeffrey Skarski @JeffreySkarski

@scalzi You seem like a really nice guy, and you write really good books.

January 29th 2021

64 Retweets599 Likes

Very Briefly Noted:

Wikipedia: Emanuel Derman <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Derman>

PIIE: Jacob Funk Kirkegaard <https://www.piie.com/experts/senior-research-staff/jacob-funk-kirkegaard>

Eyepatch Wolf: Buying a PC with Dell: My Journey Into Hell

Eyepatch Wolf @EyePatchWolf
Buying a PC with Dell: My Journey Into Hell

April 14th 2021

1,543 Retweets6,507 Likes

Travis Gettys: Trump-loving lawyer Lin Wood Bizarrely Claims He Roamed White House��& Found Ex-President Still There <https://www.rawstory.com/l-lin-wood-2652826035/>

Financial Times: Empire of Pain: The story of the Sacklers & OxyContin<https://www.ft.com/content/1db7800f-78d5-474e-9b1e-744b1c1a837c>

2015: The ��Hangover Theory�� of the 2008��2009 Crash Fails Because of Timing: ��"We should have a recession,�� Cochrane said in November, speaking to students and investors in a conference room that looks out on Lake Michigan. ��People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do�� <https://equitablegrowth.org/hangover-theory-2008-2009-crash-fails-timing/>

Matthew Yglesias: If You Want to Talk About Racism, Talk About Racism: ��From the 2007 launch of his presidential campaign through to his successful re-election in 2012, I think the best way to characterize Obama��s treatment of racial issues in his rhetoric was massive, largely justified paranoia about white backlash�� <https://www.slowboring.com/p/english-kalla>

LINK: <https://crookedtimber.org/2021/04/26/republicans-and-the-end-of-hard-neoliberalism/>

Paragraphs:

John Quiggin: Republicans & the End of Hard Neoliberalism: ��After four years of the Trump Administration, and a few months of post-election madness, the Republican Party has completed a transition that has been going on for decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Republicans were a hard neoliberal party��. Now the situation is reversed. The Republicans are a white grievance party�� [that] still attempt to attract support from corporations by advocating tax cuts��.

Think of the Eisenhower-era Republican party as a complicated mixture of many dissolved ingredients, in which the dominant element was the business establishment, and the Trump era party as a crystalised mass of plutocratic economics, racism and all-round craziness. The development over the 60 years between the two has consisted of keeping the mixture simmering, while adding more and more appeals to racial animus and magical thinking (supply-side economics, climate denial, the Iraq war and so on). In this process various elements of the original mix have boiled off or precipitated out and discarded as dregs.

Boiling off is the process by which various groups (Blacks and Northeastern liberal Republicans in C20, liberaltarians more recently) have left the Republican coalition in response to its racism and know-nothingism. The dregs that have precipitated out are ideas that were supposed to be important to Republicans (free trade, scientific truth, classical liberalism, moral character and so on) that turned out not to matter at all. Trump��s arrival is the catalyst seed crystal that produces the phase change. The final product of the reaction emerges in its crystallised form.

Matthew Zeitlin: Personnel Isn��t Policy, Policy Is Personnel: ��Janet Yellen is a fiscal and monetary hawk. Or at least she was. Sorta. But no longer��. The Biden administration, as might be expected, has many of the same figures from the Obama years and even the Clinton years��. Yellen herself was Obama��s choice to run the Federal Reserve and the chair of Bill Clinton��s Council of Economic Advisors after some time on the Fed Board. While on the Fed and in the Clinton White House, she supported policies that would be anathema to the current administration, she was affiliated with deficit hawk groups that, for now, have no particular hold over current Democratic Party thinking. And yet I have no doubt that Yellen will be an effective advocate and architect of exactly what the Biden administration and Democratic congress wants to do right: spend money on families, Covid relief, the environment, and not get too stressed about the deficit��.

It wasn��t Larry Summers who allegedly told Romer that monetary policy had ��shot its wad,�� or tried to explain high unemployment with reference to bank tellers and ATMs. It was Barack Obama��. We are attuned to a model where advisors influence and shape the thinking of their ��principal,�� but it seems just as likely that the principal shapes the advisors, or essentially farms out different ��modules�� of thinking to different people (a deficit hawk here, a stimulus advocate there, a health care reformer over there) and then shifts the degree to which she takes their input in accordance with what she already wants to do. Inasmuch as the advisors differ, they differ within a fairly narrow band set by the principal��. [Summers] is as on board for more spending as anyone in Greater Bidenberg��but will remain at least somewhat estranged, even if the winds of change blow from the same direction both within and without it��

LINK: <https://zeitlin.substack.com/p/personnel-isnt-policy-policy-is-personnel>

Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks III: ��That facet of today��s crisis which is lamented as a ��wave of materialism�� is related to the so-called ��crisis of authority��. The ruling class has lost its coordination��is not leading but merely dominant solely by force. The overwhelming majority no longer believe what they used to believe, and so have become unmoored from the ideologies of tradition. This, precisely, is the crisis: The old order is dying. The new order cannot be born. There is an interregnum. It is a time of monsters��.

Can a gap between the popular majority and the ideologies of the rulers as serious as that since World War I ended be bridged by simple force, which attempts to stop the ideologies of the future from coming to organize society. Will the current interregnum end not in the normal-history process, which naked force blocks, but rather in a restoration? The shape of the ideologies is such that that can be ruled out in any practical if not absolute sense. he character of the ideologies, that can be ruled out-yet not in an absolute sense. In the meantime depression will lead eventually to wide scepticism, and a new accommodation��catholicism will even more become simply Jesuitism, and so forth.

These are highly favorable conditions for an unprecedented expansion of Marxism��s influence. Marxism��s oversimplicity and inadequacy when it takes its popular form will help it spread. Dead old ideologies turn into skepticism with respect to all theories and frameworks, to a focus on economic fact and money, and to politics that is either fantastical or cynical��. But this reduction to economic money and to political power means exactly the disappearance of established frameworks of ideas as anything other than rationalizations. That opens up the possibility��and creates the necessity��of creating the new culture��

Hoisted From the Archives:
From 2011: LECTURE: Seven Sects of Macroeconomic Error: Wrong Models of the Great Recession

<https://www.icloud.com/pages/0zwSkfmRDPILOSmiq0_91g5nw><https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/seven-sects-of-macroeconomic-error-2011-03-14.pdf> <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2021/04/seven.html> 2011-03-14

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There��s a free email list. There��s a paid-subscription list with (at the moment, only a few) extras too.)

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Published on May 05, 2021 11:15

PODCAST: Hexapodia XII: ��e Cambridge Capital Controversy

By Noah Smith & Brad DeLong: Joan Robinson to Bob Solow: "I would not be unkind if you would not be pig-headed..."

Listen in podcast app

<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-xii-the-cambridge>

Key Insights:

Getting the rate of profit��the sums that are charged businesses for renting machines and renting space, and for access to the generalized social power to deploy resources that is finance��right is a very, very important thing to do. Why? Because the market economy is a complicated institutional calculating machine for determining how to promote societal wellbeing. It cannot do its job if it cannot see the the constraints imposed on us by nature and current technology. And having the market get the profit rate right is a very important part of that. To say ��it��s all ideology�� or ��it��s all power�� or ��it��s all distribution�� and go the full Sraffa production-of-commodities-by-means-of-commodities is to miss a truly powerful, relevant, and important insight. That��s the strongest statement of what the Cambridge, Massachusetts-MIT side was really getting at��or ought to have been getting at, although they phrased it badly and inaccurately.

If we attempt to use toy mathematical models applied to macro aggregates to say anything quantitative about whether business owners are getting paid ��too much�� or ��too little��, we will fail embarrassingly. Therefore we should never use toy models to do that.

To say that the market-equilibrium profit rate is the optimal one from the perspective of societal well-being is to commit the pseudo-pharisaical mistake of reversing the order of importance. Rather, recognize: the market was made for man, not man for the market.

The particular language in which the economists of the 1960s carried out this debate was extremely poorly suited to shed light. They cared deeply, they wrote angrily, and most of what they wrote was drivel. So: whenever you are having a discussion, if you want to learn or teach anything, first do this: try hard to figure out what issues really are, and then try hard to figure out what is the right language to talk about these issues.

As always, the key insight is: ��Hexapodia��.

LINK: <https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other>

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Published on May 05, 2021 11:14

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-04-27 Tu

FIRST:

Robert P Baird: The Invention of Whiteness: The Long History of a Dangerous Idea: ��By the time The Bell Curve appeared, Du Bois��s assertion that racial categories were not biologically grounded was widely accepted. In the years since, the scientific evidence for that understanding has only become more overwhelming. A 2017 study examined the DNA of nearly 6,000 people from around the world and found that while that while some genetic differences among humans can be traced to various ancestral lineages��for example, eastern African, southern European or circumpolar��none of those lineages correspond to traditional ideas about race��. During the second half of the 20th century a number of historians demonstrated that�� Du Bois�� was correct that it was only in the modern period that people started to think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race.��

Very Briefly Noted:

Wikipedia: Deng Xiaoping��s Southern Tour <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping%27s_southern_tour>

Wikipedia: Great Helmsman <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Helmsman>

CMP: A Brief History of the Helmsmen<>

Wikipedia: Wei Jingsheng <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei_Jingsheng>

Zhao Ziyang: Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang<https://books.google.com/books?id=_3WTqOaAOWkC>

Wikipedia: Miracle on the Han River<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_the_Han_River#1948%E21960:_The_First_Republic_and_Korean_War>

Global Demographics: China��s Labour Force is, and is not, Growing: ��The total employed labour force of China is projected to decline from 759 million to 661 million between 2017 and 2037. A drop of 13% or 1 in 8 workers leaves today��s workforce. However, the urban component of it increases from 398 million to 485 million, a 22% increase�� LINK: <https://www.globaldemographics.com/china-labour-force>

Scott Lemieux: Tucker Carlson Celebrated the Murderer of Harvey Milk & George Moscone <https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/04/tucker-carlson-celebrated-the-murderer-of-harvey-milk-and-george-moscone>

Steven Perlberg: The New York Times Responds to the Substack Boom: ��The New York Times is readying a big newsletter push as Substack tries to poach its top writers with advances worth hundreds of thousands�� <https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-times-responds-to-the-substack-boom-2021-4>

Charles Q. Choi: Brain Signals Can Drive Exoskeleton Parts Better With Therapy: ��Training patients to use muscle electrodes for robotic limb control works better than previously thought possible�� <https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/biomedical/devices/brain-computer-interface-exoskeleton-neural-link#disqus_thread>

Molly Jong-Fast: Why The U.S. Should Be Shipping Its Vaccines to the Rest of the World��Right Now <https://www.vogue.com/article/export-covid-vaccine>

LINK: <https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/04/24/the-kremlin-has-isolated-russias-economy>

Paragraphs:

Dietz Vollrath: Who Are You Calling Malthusian?: ��I recently had a student ask me if I was a ��Malthusian��. It��s always asked in a way that implies it is a belief system, similar to ��Christian��, ��Muslim��, or ��Packer Fan��. I��m not a Malthusian ��believer��, because that isn��t a thing. But I do think that several of Malthus�� assumptions about how economies function, in particular prior to the onset of sustained growth during the 1800��s, are well founded. And those assumptions have implications that help make sense of the world��

LINK: <https://growthecon.com/blog/Malthus/>

W.E.B. Du Bois: The Souls of White Folk: ��The Middle Age regarded skin color with mild curiosity; and even up into the eighteenth century we were hammering our national manikins into one, great, Universal Man, with fine frenzy which ignored color and race even more than birth. Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful! This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts; even the sweeter souls of the dominant world as they discourse with me on weather, weal, and woe are continually playing above their actual words an obligato of tune and tone, saying ��My poor, un-white thing! Weep not nor rage. I know, too well, that the curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to say, but be brave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the good Lord that into heaven above, where all is love, you may, one day, be born-white!�� I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly: ��But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?�� Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen! Now what is the effect on a man or a nation when it comes passionately to believe such an extraordinary dictum as this?��

LINK: <https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Du_Bois_White_Folk.pdf>

Economist: The Kremlin Has Isolated Russia��s Economy: ��Since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin has commanded the economy like a fortress under siege, building up reserves, decoupling from the world economy, and preparing for the potential impact of Western sanctions or fluctuations in oil prices��. Russia��s economy remains highly dependent on hydrocarbons. Despite years of promises, no meaningful diversification has taken place. Hydrocarbons still account for more than 60% of exports��. Russia��s covid��19-related stimulus measures amounted to just 4% of gdp, according to the World Bank. The pandemic, in Mr Putin��s eyes, is not the proverbial rainy day the nwf was intended for��

M.G. Siegler: In(tel) Command: ��Might Gelsinger pull it off��. I finally got around to watching the ��Intel Unleashed�� presentation from March. While I��m far from an expert on Intel, like a lot of folks in tech, I��m fascinated��. The good news seems to be that new CEO Pat Gelsinger clearly gets this. And perhaps just as importantly, he clearly cares about this, as someone who worked at Intel for 30 years and has now returned to right the ship. And most important still, he seems to have a plan. And to be in command of the situation��. Gelsinger��s�� is an actual presentation and not a Q&A. Still, the same thing is conveyed: just how in command he is. And perhaps even more so than Jobs, just how enthusiastic he is about the opportunity��

LINK: <https://5ish.org/p/intel-command>

Cosma Shalizi: In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You: ��There is a passage in Red Plenty which is central to describing both the nightmare from which we are trying to awake, and vision we are trying to awake into. Henry [Farrell] has quoted it already, but it bears repeating:

Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded��. The motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on.��

And what would be the alternative? The consciously arranged alternative? A dance of another nature, Emil presumed. A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all��

There is a fundamental level at which Marx��s nightmare vision is right: capitalism, the market system, whatever you want to call it, is a product of humanity, but each and every one of us confronts it as an autonomous and deeply alien force. Its ends, to the limited and debatable extent that it can even be understood as having them, are simply inhuman. The ideology of the market tell us that we face not something inhuman but superhuman, tells us to embrace our inner zombie cyborg and loose ourselves in the dance. One doesn��t know whether to laugh or cry or running screaming.

But, and this is I think something Marx did not sufficiently appreciate, human beings confront all the structures which emerge from our massed interactions in this way. A bureaucracy, or even a thoroughly democratic polity of which one is a citizen, can feel, can be, just as much of a cold monster as the market. We have no choice but to live among these alien powers which we create, and to try to direct them to human ends. It is beyond us, it is even beyond all of us, to find ��a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all��, which says how everyone should go. What we can do is try to find the specific ways in which these powers we have conjured up are hurting us, and use them to check each other, or deflect them into better paths.

Sometimes this will mean more use of market mechanisms, sometimes it will mean removing some goods and services from market allocation, either through public provision or through other institutional arrangements. Sometimes it will mean expanding the scope of democratic decision-making (for instance, into the insides of firms), and sometimes it will mean narrowing its scope (for instance, not allowing the demos to censor speech it finds objectionable). Sometimes it will mean leaving some tasks to experts, deferring to the internal norms of their professions, and sometimes it will mean recognizing claims of expertise to be mere assertions of authority, to be resisted or countered.

These are all going to be complex problems, full of messy compromises. Attaining even second best solutions is going to demand ��bold, persistent experimentation��, coupled with a frank recognition that many experiments will just fail, and that even long-settled compromises can, with the passage of time, become confining obstacles. We will not be able to turn everything over to the wise academicians, or even to their computers, but we may, if we are lucky and smart, be able, bit by bit, make a world fit for human beings to live in��

LINK: <https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/>

From the Archives:

Brad DeLong (1999): An Appalling Article on Graduate Student Unionization by Yale Historian Paul Kennedy: I don��t know what I find more appalling: The open snobbery with which Paul Kennedy ridicules the idea that lower-class union leaders and members might have something to teach about or some concern over conditions of employment of graduate students��. The casual mendacity in his implication that the typical humanities graduate student at a private university gets his or her tuition paid and $12,000 a year with no strings attached��. The sneer at humanities graduate student section leaders at his own university��paid I believe, about $10 an hour�� with little prospects for ever getting a tenured professorship like Paul Kennedy��s��for ��imagin[ing themselves] as an aggrieved member of an exploited academic proletariat.�� The claim that the UAW��s paying its lead organizer at Yale (a more than full-time job) some $10 an hour is an extraordinarily generous subsidy that will lead to a ��new career track for Ph.D.s who find all this campaigning much more exciting than their work on Milton or Freud��

LINK: <https://delong.typepad.com/delong_long_form/1999/04/paul-kennedy-on-graduate-student-unionization.html>

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