J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 201

John Harwood: @JohnJHarwood: "Trump/GOP promised lasting ...

John Harwood: @JohnJHarwood: "Trump/GOP promised lasting 3+% growth from self-financing tax-cuts. Mainstream economists predicted brief deficit-fueled growth burst. The record so far: 2018 Q2 4.2%, 2018 Q3 3.4%, 2018 Q4 2.6%, deficit way up. Fed forecasts: 2019 2.3%, 2020 2.0%, 2021 1.8%...

#noted

Guy bar-Oz et al.: Ancient Trash Mounds Unravel Urban Col...

Guy bar-Oz et al.: Ancient Trash Mounds Unravel Urban Collapse a Century Before he End of Byzantine Hegemony in the Southern Levant | PNAS: "The Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was recently identified... proposed as a major cause for pandemic and extensive societal upheavals in the sixth���seventh centuries.... Archaeological evidence for the magnitude of societal response to this event is sparse.... This study uses ancient trash mounds... to establish the terminal date of organized trash collection and high-level municipal functioning on a city-wide scale...

...Survey, excavation, sediment analysis, and geographic information system assessment of mound volume were conducted on a series of mounds surrounding the Byzantine urban settlement of Elusa in the Negev Desert. These reveal the massive collection and dumping of domestic and construction waste over time on the city edges. Carbon dating of charred seeds and charcoal fragments combined with ceramic analysis establish the end date of orchestrated trash removal near the mid-sixth century, coinciding closely with the beginning of the LALIA event and outbreak of the Justinian Plague in the year 541. This evidence for societal decline during the sixth century ties with other arguments for urban dysfunction across the Byzantine Levant at this time. We demonstrate the utility of trash mounds as sensitive proxies of social response and unravel the time���space dynamics of urban collapse, suggesting diminished resilience to rapid climate change in the frontier Negev region of the empire....

#noted

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

Economics, Identity, and the Democratic Recession: Talking Points

A Historical View of Trump

Weekend Viewing: Matt Parker: What Happens When Maths Goes Wrong?

Books for Thinking About President Donald Trump in Context

Collecting Talking Points...

Charlotte Edwardes: Sam Gyimah: I���m Still a Tory���It���s the Party I Joined That���s Changed: "He���s faced repeated deselections and a no-confidence vote���but Sam Gyimah won���t give up. Here, the MP talks about being ���thrown to the wolves��� and how toxic Brexiteer infighting is threatening to tear the Conservatives apart...

Brooke Masters: Want to Write a Piece for the Financial Times Opinion Page?: "Think about our readers.... Write what you know.... Write clearly and accessibly.... Use specific examples.... Be pithy and sharp...

Paige Harden: "Pietro is being generous, when in fact I���m just trying to articulate something that���s been percolating for awhile... Let���s take genetics AND egalitarianism seriously. Begin there, and see where it takes us...

Bart Demandt: China Car Sales Analysis January & February 2019: "The market for domestic passenger car sales in China continues its decline in 2019 with 8 consecutive months of declines from July 2018 to February 2019. With two months of double digit declines in January (-16,7%) and February (-17,6%), the market doesn���t seem able to recover soon...

FOLD: What is FOLD?

Read Irin Carmon at New York Magazine on how Baron, Wallsten, and Barr handled the pieces of her story about CBS honcho Jeff Fager's internal defense of Charlie Rose http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/what-was-the-washington-post-afraid-of.html. After reading it, if you read it as I read it, you will conclude that newspaper managers as easily bullied as Baron, Wallsten, and Barr are not useful in their current. I wrote so to Jeff Bezos. If you wind up agreeing with me, I urge you to write Bezos as well...

Steve Moore: ���I���m kind of new to this game, frankly, so I���m going to be on a steep learning curve myself about how the Fed operates...

James LaPorta: Top Marine General Let Emails Leak Amid Border Funding Fight so Service Families Would Not Be Forgotten: Sources: "When asked why Neller would allow internal memorandums to leak to press outlets, one Defense Department source expressed bluntly, 'Because he didn���t want the Marines and families at Camp Lejeune [in North Carolina] to get f---ed.' Six months after Hurricane Florence first made landfall at Wrightsville Beach in North Carolina, roughly an hour southwest of Camp Lejeune, the base is still waiting on funding for repairs...

Friedrich A. von Hayek: Hayek the Ethnic Bigot and the Perils of the Ad Hominem Fallacy: "I have no racial prejudices in general���but there were certain types, and conspicuous among them the Near Eastern populations, which I still dislike because they are fundamentally dishonest... a type which, in my childhood in Austria, was described as Levantine, typical of the people of the eastern Mediterranean.... I have a profound dislike for the typical Indian students at the London School of Economics, which I admit are all one type���Bengali moneylender sons. They are to me a detestable type, I admit, but not with any racial feeling. I have found a little of the same amongst the Egyptians���basically a lack of honesty in them...

Matthew Buckley: "Back when America wasn���t a fascist ethnostate, this statement alone would have been grounds for impeachment. But that was when we were a nation of laws: Aaron Rupar: TRUMP threatens to close border with Mexico as soon as this weekend, then rants about immigration during Oval Office meeting with NATO secretary general: "What we have to do is Congress has to meet quickly & make a deal... to be honest with you, we have to get rid of judges...

Jonathan Chait: My Article Saying Trump Was Compromised by Russia Was Right: During the campaign, Trump was pursuing a building deal in Russia worth several hundred million dollars.... This deal created two forms of secret leverage for Vladimir Putin...

Can you tell us how to get to Sesame Street? Our immensely powerful mass and segmented media could be used for much good���if we could figure out how to keep them from hacking our brains to glue our eyeballs to the screen so they could sell ads from people who often do not wish us well: Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine: Early Childhood Education by Television: Lessons from Sesame Street: "We investigate whether preschool-age children exposed to Sesame Street when it aired in 1969 experienced improved educational and labor market outcomes. We exploit geographic variation in broadcast reception derived from technological factors, namely UHF versus VHF transmission...

Alexander Clarkson: "They could call it 'Freedom of Mobility': Adam Bienkov: 'Jeremy Corbyn���s spokesman on whether retaining free movement will be one of his demands in talks with May: ���Freedom of movement ends when we leave the EU and we will replace it with fair management of migration...���' The attempt to scrap the UK's involvement in the EU's 'Freedom of Movement' structure is already falling apart at a glacial pace. It is heading to the point Switzerland has landed where cosmetic tweaks to keep cultural conservatives happy are a facade behind which nothing changes...

According to the 2011 Census,, 140,000 people living in the United Kingdom had been born in France, with half of them���70,000���among the 8,000,000 people living in London. Of course, many more have French ancestry: The richest person under 30 in the world, Hugh Richard Louis Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, has prominent French ancestor���he is descended from Hugh the Fat Hunter, _gros veneur in France. And Elizabeth Windsor, the occupant of the most impressive house in London���a veritable palace���is herself descended from a French-Danish thug named Guillaume le Batard���"the bastard". But why is Tom Friedman such an idiot?: Tom Friedman: The United Kingdom Has Gone Mad: "The grievances of... of those who voted to leave... swamped by E.U. immigrants.... 300,000 French citizens living in London.... I had a drink with a member of Parliament in the bar in the House of Commons on Tuesday, and as we sat down he whispered to me that 'not a single person working in this whole building is British'...

Now we are up to four professional Republicans saying that Steve Moore is unqualified for the Fed: Greg Mankiw, Ross Douthat, Steve Moore himself, and now James Pethokoukis: James Pethokoukis: Don't let Trump blow up the Fed: "It is important that the Fed be independent both in practice and perception. We know what happens when it isn't.... While we don't know for sure why Burns decided to run a loose monetary policy in an already inflationary environment, his actions 'helped to trigger an extremely costly inflationary boom���bust cycle', concludes economist Burton Abrams in How Richard Nixon Pressured Arthur Burns: Evidence from the Nixon Tapes...

Martin Wolf: A Long Brexit Extension Offers a Chance To Think Again: "The withdrawal agreement does not command the needed support in parliament or country.... The UK economy is already some 2.5 per cent smaller than it would have been if Britain had not decided on Brexit. The knock-on effect on the public finances is, it argues, ��360m a week, almost exactly the sum that the fount of economic wisdom, Boris Johnson, promised would be available after Brexit.... Philip Hammond, chancellor of exchequer, used to say that the British people 'did not vote to be poorer'. But they did. Alas, it could get far worse.... The view that the British people are enslaved by the EU is laughable. But the analogy is better than Mr Johnson knew. The freed Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. That was not the promise of the Brexit campaign. But it is probably accurate. A no-deal Brexit is likely to deliver a large negative shock, followed by decades of weaker growth in an economy with reduced access to its natural markets and shorn of global confidence. The prime minister is absolutely right to reject this option, though that has come far too late...

Paul Krugman (2013): Milton Friedman, Unperson: "[It] is really interesting is the way Friedman has virtually vanished from policy discourse. Keynes is very much back.... Hayek is back in some sense.... But Friedman is pretty much absent. This is hardly what you would have expected not that long ago, when Friedman���s reputation bestrode the economic world like a colossus, when Greg Mankiw declared Friedman, not Keynes, the greatest economist of the 20th century...

Equitable Growth's Kate Bahn sends us to what she rightly describes as "a really heartbreaking and inspiring and important thread" treating to the death of Alan Krueger: Kate Bahn: @LipstickEcon: Liz Ananat: @LizAnanat: "I have some things to say about the death from depression of Alan Krueger.... Alan was unfailingly and unnecessarily kind to me. He also made many of the things I love about economics possible. But others e.g. @dynarski @arindube can speak better to these aspects of his life. What I can speak to is living with depression as an economist. Economics is not a gentle profession, and I think that many economists are afraid to say they experience depression because it might be seen as weakness. So we say things like 'Someone close to me' or 'Many struggle with'. But I now see how otherizing it is. It says economists can care about suffering and still be successful, but they can���t suffer THEMSELVES���that would make them too weak to be good at what they do. And part of why I wasn���t 'out' about my depression was I feared this was true. Here���s the thing: if your theory has been that experiencing depression makes you not a good economist, then your theory fails to account for the empirical reality of Alan Krueger...

Matt Bruenig: Various Job Guarantee Quotes: "Despite the long-standing JG promise of a program featuring shit jobs at s--- wages with the intent of undermining the regular welfare state and private sector workers, people have recently become very confused into thinking it is something else. Some of that confusion is just the result of clever messaging...

Louis Brandeis believed that bigness is bad per se���thus failing to see that since, well, at least 1870 value chains and the division of the labor had become sufficiently complicated that efficient production required a great deal of central planning on the level of the large firm. Toyota sells 250 billion dollars worth of cars each year���that is 0.2 percent of global GDP���and roughly 2/3 of that value flow is under the centrally-planned direction of the Toyota design and production management teams, not the result of arms-length market-price deals between truly independent producers. Bork believed that any bigness was good if could be colorably or uncolorably claimed to be the result of some clever economy of scale that a lawyer who was part of the judge's social circle could think up was never credible as anything other than an excuse for rent-seeking corruption. To find the true path, look, and Jonathan Baker says, to FDR antitrust guru Thurman Arnold: Jonathan Baker: Revitalizing U.S. Antitrust Enforcement Is Not Simply a Contest Between Brandeis and Bork���Look First to Thurman Arnold: "Growing market power in the United States today puts a spotlight on our nation���s antitrust laws���the critical policy tool for restoring competition where it is lacking���from airlines and brewing to hospitals and dominant online platforms. But how can these laws be made more effective in this environment? The best guide from the past is Thurman Arnold, President Franklin D. Roosevelt���s longest-serving antitrust enforcer. Arnold helped shape a political consensus for effective antitrust enforcement. Yet his singular contribution is often overlooked in the present-day debate over antitrust���s future. That achievement���the embrace of an antitrust enforcement playbook for supervising large firms that is competition-promoting and economic growth-enhancing���is endangered today...

Janet Yellen: Former Fed Chair Janet Yellen: Far from Retired, Nowhere Near Done: Ryssdal: Do you think the president has a grasp of macroeconomic policy? Yellen:��No, I do not...

Ken Rogoff has picked up the goal posts and moved them five miles down the field! Recall his (and Carmen Reinhart's) austerity line from 2011: Too Much Debt Means the Economy Can���t Grow: "Current debt trajectories are a risk to long-term growth and stability.... [Debt] burdens above 90 percent are associated with 1 percent lower median growth..." But it turns out "austerity" does not mean "move heaven and earth to keep debt-to-annual GDP less than 90%, no matter how high current unemployment". Instead, all "austerity" means is: Kenneth Rogoff: The Austerity Chronicles: "Alesina, Favero, and Giavazzi find that their main conclusions are valid even at the zero bound.... Expenditure-based austerity programs tend to impose lower costs on output than do programs based on tax hikes... [A] politician who tries to adopt an austerity program will [not necessarily] be kicked out of office.... The nature of any pathbreaking scholarship is that it sets the agenda for further research. Alesina, Favero, and Giavazzi have written a fundamentally non-ideological book that raises the bar for future studies of fiscal retrenchment policies. No doubt it will continue to set the standard for such research for many years to come, however much left-leaning polemicists try to dismiss it as blasphemy...

Migration���temporary and permanent���is turning out to be one of the magic bullets for global economic growth: Ricardo Hausmann (2013): The Tacit-Knowledge Economy: "Know how resides in brains, and emerging and developing countries should focus on attracting them.... Tacit knowledge flows through amazingly slow and narrow channels. The productivity of Nuevo Le��n, Mexico, is higher than in South Korea, but that of Guerrero, another Mexican state, resembles levels in Honduras. Moving knowledge across Mexican states has been difficult and slow. It is easier to move brains than it is to move tacit knowledge into brains.... Knowledge moves when people do...

George Magnus: China Leadership Monitor: "China���s TFP surged in the 1980s following the agricultural and ownership reforms, in the 1990s following the state enterprise reforms and the creation of a modern housing market, and in the 2000s as China prepared for and was then able to exploit WTO membership.... China���s one-party system deservedly has won plaudits when it has been most ambitious with regard to economic reforms and experimentation with market mechanisms. But this is not the case, for example, before the 1980s and again since 2012, when reforms were suppressed or stifled and inputs were boosted, but without any improvements...

This Federal Reserve interest-raising cycle: not just an ex-post but an ex-ante mistake: Adam Ozimek and Michael Ferlez: The Fed���s Mistake: "WWhen the Fed faces similar uncertainty in the future, looks back at the deci- sion to start raising rates in 2015, and judges that the path of monetary policy turned out to be optimal, such an assessment will offer support for raising rates. If instead the Fed looks back and sees that the path was sub-optimal, such an assessment will offer a cautionary tale.... The current Fed estimate of the long-run unemployment rate implies that in December 2015 the gap was 0.55 percentage point instead of 0.1.... The assumption that the LRU will continue to be revised downward is consistent with the pattern over the past few years, and is further supported by recent statements from Powell that indicate a strong possibility that LRU will continue to fall. As the best estimates of the long-run unemployment rate fall, the magnitude of the Fed���s ex ante error will continue to grow.... the Fed made a numerically significant error in underestimating the amount of labor market slack...

Pharmaceutical pricing appears to be one of the very few areas in which an equitable growth agenda can be advanced at the federal level over the next two years: CPPC: How Rebate Walls Block Access to Affordable Drugs: "The company that manufacturers the older drug can "bundle" its rebates for all those prescriptions and use it as a weapon. Some drug companies are using the large group of rebates, also known as a 'rebate wall', as a negotiating tactic-they demand that health plans not favor or exclude newer medicines from their formularies, even if the newer medicines lead to better outcomes. One example of this problem are when Johnson & Johnson used rebate walls to protect its drug Remicade and stifle competition from Pfizer's Inflectra, a lower cost biosimilar drug.... How can this be fixed? One possible solution: the Trump administration has announced a proposed rebate rule that eliminate the anti-kickback safe harbor that is currently applied to rebates. Another idea would be indication-based pricing, which is requiring prices and rebates to be negotiated for each drug and not bundled together. And as we mentioned earlier, the Federal Trade Commission could and should forbid drug manufacturers from erecting rebate walls...

#noted #weblogs

Pharmaceutical pricing appears to be one of the very few ...

Pharmaceutical pricing appears to be one of the very few areas in which an equitable growth agenda can be advanced at the federal level over the next two years: CPPC: How Rebate Walls Block Access to Affordable Drugs: "The company that manufacturers the older drug can "bundle" its rebates for all those prescriptions and use it as a weapon. Some drug companies are using the large group of rebates, also known as a 'rebate wall', as a negotiating tactic-they demand that health plans not favor or exclude newer medicines from their formularies, even if the newer medicines lead to better outcomes. One example of this problem are when Johnson & Johnson used rebate walls to protect its drug Remicade and stifle competition from Pfizer's Inflectra, a lower cost biosimilar drug.... How can this be fixed? One possible solution: the Trump administration has announced a proposed rebate rule that eliminate the anti-kickback safe harbor that is currently applied to rebates. Another idea would be indication-based pricing, which is requiring prices and rebates to be negotiated for each drug and not bundled together. And as we mentioned earlier, the Federal Trade Commission could and should forbid drug manufacturers from erecting rebate walls...

#noted

Janet Yellen: Former Fed Chair Janet Yellen: Far from Ret...

Janet Yellen: Former Fed Chair Janet Yellen: Far from Retired, Nowhere Near Done:

Ryssdal: Do you think the president has a grasp of macroeconomic policy?

Yellen:��No, I do not.

Ryssdal: Tell me more.

Yellen:��Well, I doubt that he would even be able to say that the Fed's goals are maximum employment and price stability, which is the goals that Congress have assigned to the Fed. He's made comments about the Fed having an exchange rate objective in order to support his trade plans, or possibly targeting the U.S. balance of trade. And, you know, I think comments like that shows a lack of understanding of the impact of the Fed on the economy, and appropriate policy goals.

Ryssdal: More broadly, then, his understanding of the effect of his trade tariffs and his withdrawal from, say, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Yellen: Well, I think that's creating a lot of uncertainty for businesses, and I think my own view is that those shifts are likely to be adverse for the U.S. economy, to the extent that some of these things are bargaining chips, with the hope of lowering trade barriers generally. I suppose the outcome of that, if it's successful, could be positive ���

Ryssdal: It���s a big ���if.���

Yellen: It is as a big ���if.��� And when I continually hear focus by the president and some of his advisers on remedying bilateral trade deficits with other trade partners, I think almost any economist would tell you that there's no real meaning to bilateral trade deficits, and it's not an appropriate objective of policy.

Ryssdal: And the president, of course, China specifically, focuses on that quite a bit.

Yellen: He has focused on that quite a bit, especially with respect to China....

#noted

Louis Brandeis believed that bigness is bad per se���thus...

Louis Brandeis believed that bigness is bad per se���thus failing to see that since, well, at least 1870 value chains and the division of the labor had become sufficiently complicated that efficient production required a great deal of central planning on the level of the large firm. Toyota sells 250 billion dollars worth of cars each year���that is 0.2 percent of global GDP���and roughly 2/3 of that value flow is under the centrally-planned direction of the Toyota design and production management teams, not the result of arms-length market-price deals between truly independent producers. Bork believed that any bigness was good if could be colorably or uncolorably claimed to be the result of some clever economy of scale that a lawyer who was part of the judge's social circle could think up was never credible as anything other than an excuse for rent-seeking corruption. To find the true path, look, and Jonathan Baker says, to FDR antitrust guru Thurman Arnold:

Jonathan Baker: Revitalizing U.S. Antitrust Enforcement Is Not Simply a Contest Between Brandeis and Bork���Look First to Thurman Arnold: "Growing market power in the United States today puts a spotlight on our nation���s antitrust laws���the critical policy tool for restoring competition where it is lacking���from airlines and brewing to hospitals and dominant online platforms. But how can these laws be made more effective in this environment? The best guide from the past is Thurman Arnold...

...President Franklin D. Roosevelt���s longest-serving antitrust enforcer. Arnold helped shape a political consensus for effective antitrust enforcement. Yet his singular contribution is often overlooked in the present-day debate over antitrust���s future. That achievement���the embrace of an antitrust enforcement playbook for supervising large firms that is competition-promoting and economic growth-enhancing���is endangered today...

#noted

Matt Bruenig: Various Job Guarantee Quotes: "Despite the ...

Matt Bruenig: Various Job Guarantee Quotes: "Despite the long-standing JG promise of a program featuring shit jobs at s--- wages with the intent of undermining the regular welfare state and private sector workers, people have recently become very confused into thinking it is something else. Some of that confusion is just the result of clever messaging...

...For instance, nowadays JG proponents say the program eliminates the ���reserve army��� of the unemployed even though Wray clearly said in 1997 that it does not eliminate the reserve army. It���s the same program, but the exact opposite messaging. The left in particular seems especially vulnerable to people tricking them via adopting their rhetorical, aesthetic, and symbolic affinities.

The other source of confusion is that the most recent JG proposals have used 15 as the JG wage. This confuses people because they don���t realize that the 15 wage has been selected because it is intended to be the US minimum wage. So it still is a minimum-wage make-work job program like always, but because the JG program is being implemented alongside a minimum wage hike, they are able to cloud the issue and get people focused on the wage hike, not the program itself, which again remains a minimum-wage, dead-end make-work program.

As you can probably tell, I don���t find this agenda at all interesting. In regular countries, unemployed people get a welfare income (aka unemployment benefits) and help from active labor market policies. That���s a better life than toiling under workfare...

#noted

Equitable Growth's Kate Bahn sends us to what she rightly...

Equitable Growth's Kate Bahn sends us to what she rightly describes as "a really heartbreaking and inspiring and important thread" treating to the death of Alan Krueger:

Kate Bahn: @LipstickEcon:

Liz Ananat: @LizAnanat: "I have some things to say about the death from depression of Alan Krueger.... Alan was unfailingly and unnecessarily kind to me. He also made many of the things I love about economics possible. But others e.g. @dynarski @arindube can speak better to these aspects of his life. What I can speak to is living with depression as an economist...

...Economics is not a gentle profession, and I think that many economists are afraid to say they experience depression because it might be seen as weakness. So we say things like 'Someone close to me' or 'Many struggle with'. But I now see how otherizing it is. It says economists can care about suffering and still be successful, but they can���t suffer THEMSELVES���that would make them too weak to be good at what they do. And part of why I wasn���t 'out' about my depression was I feared this was true. Here���s the thing: if your theory has been that experiencing depression makes you not a good economist, then your theory fails to account for the empirical reality of Alan Krueger...

#noted

Paul Krugman (2013): Milton Friedman, Unperson: "[It] is ...

Paul Krugman (2013): Milton Friedman, Unperson: "[It] is really interesting is the way Friedman has virtually vanished from policy discourse. Keynes is very much back.... Hayek is back in some sense.... But Friedman is pretty much absent. This is hardly what you would have expected not that long ago, when Friedman���s reputation bestrode the economic world like a colossus, when Greg Mankiw declared Friedman, not Keynes, the greatest economist of the 20th century...

...Part of the answer is that at this point both of Friedman���s key contributions to macroeconomics look hard to defend....

Even if you give him a pass on the 3 percent growth in M2 thing, which was abandoned by almost everyone long ago, Friedman was still very much associated with the notion that the Fed can control the money supply, and controlling the money supply is all you need to stabilize the economy. In the wake of the 2008 crisis, this looks wrong from soup to nuts....

Friedman���s success, with Phelps, in predicting stagflation was what really pushed his influence over the top; his notion of a natural rate of unemployment, of a vertical Phillips curve in the long run, became part of every textbook exposition. But it���s now very clear that at low rates of inflation the Phillips curve isn���t vertical at all, that there���s an underlying downward nominal rigidity to wages and perhaps many prices too that makes the natural rate hypothesis a very bad guide under depression conditions. So Friedman���s economic analysis has taken a serious hit.

But that���s not the whole story behind his disappearance; after all, all those economists who have been predicting runaway inflation still have a constituency after being wrong year after year. Friedman���s larger problem, I���d argue, is that he was, when all is said and done, a man trying to straddle two competing world views���and our political environment no longer has room for that kind of straddle.... Friedman was an avid free-market advocate.... Yet he was also a macroeconomic realist, who recognized that the market definitely did not solve the problem of recessions and depressions. So he tried to wall off macroeconomics from everything else, and make it as inoffensive to laissez-faire sensibilities as possible. Yes, he in effect admitted, we do need stabilization policy���but we can minimize the government���s role by relying only on monetary policy, none of that nasty fiscal stuff, and then not even allowing the monetary authority any discretion.

At a fundamental level, however, this was an inconsistent position: if markets can go so wrong that they cause Great Depressions, how can you be a free-market true believer on everything except macro? And as American conservatism moved ever further right, it had no room for any kind of interventionism, not even the sterilized, clean-room interventionism of Friedman���s monetarism. So Friedman has vanished from the policy scene���so much so that I suspect that a few decades from now, historians of economic thought will regard him as little more than an extended footnote.

#noted

Books for Thinking About President Donald Trump in Context

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/007ATNJnmjuQn6ot5tmenwFXw

Where to Start? Four books worth reading on their own, as offering perspectives on Trump and Trumpism and what they might become���

Karl Marx (1852): The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte http://amzn.to/2Fk3E0E
Ronald Syme (1939): The Roman Revolution http://amzn.to/2BuQSKA
Thomas Piketty (2013): Capital in the Twenty-First Century http://amzn.to/2DCIBGp
Michael Wolff (2018): Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House http://amzn.to/2GlFxQr

 

Marx: 18th Brumaire

Karl Marx (1852): The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte http://amzn.to/2Fk3E0E

Marx in transition from German Idealist philosopher to French-style political activist to British political economist���

Expects ���normal��� politics:

Overthrow of entrenched hierarchies that hold back prosperity in the interests of a parasitic few���
Growing democracy���
Growing equality���
Growing prosperity���
And it all goes horribly wrong...

Napoleon I���s nephew wins election to the presidency of the French 2nd Republic...

Establishes himself as the Emperor Napoleon III���

Marx tries to understand how things went wrong...

Does not really succeed, but gives it a good try���

 

Syme: Roman Revolution

Ronald Syme (1939): The Roman Revolution http://amzn.to/2BuQSKA

Extremely cranky, contrarian, and cynical: unwilling to take anything that smacks in any way of government propaganda or obsequious flattery at face value���

Writing a history of the rise of the Roman Empire���of Augustus���s Principate���in Italy between World Wars I & II���

Writes the story of Augustus-as-if-he-had-been-Mussolini:

Like in Jurassic Park: filling in the missing parts of dinosaur DNA with that of other organisms���
How a republic���a broken republic, but still a republic���surrenders itself to one man, and those who please him���

 

Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Piketty (2013): Capital in the Twenty-First Century http://amzn.to/2DCIBGp

The ���normal��� state of an advanced market economy is not the social democracy we got used to between Roosevelt���s New Deal and the Reagan Revolution���

The normal state has the rich using their ability to buy speech in the public sphere in order to distract attention from the concentration of income���

The normal state has the rich working the lobbying machine and the revolving door to keep the average rate of profit at 5%/year���

If you are more than so rich, it is very difficult to spend 5% of your wealth every year���

And the rate of economic growth is something less than 3%/year���
All this has consequences���

 

Wolff: Fire and Fury

Michael Wolff (2018): Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House http://amzn.to/2GlFxQr

Whatever you heard? That seemed unbelievable? It probably is true.

Wolff���s working title: ���The Great Transition: The First 100 Days of the Trump Administration���

JMM: ���sycophancy journalism under the guise of access journalism��� buttering up the highest level Trump insiders��� publicly lambasting reporters��� pos[ing] as the only reporter who got the true nature of Trump���s greatness���not just publicly, but far more importantly in his private presentation and pitch. If the Trumpers were aggrieved with the ���fake news��� ���lying��� press, here was a prestige journalist who got it and could help���.
���Trump got the biographer he deserved. Wolff is shamelessly manipulative and hasn���t the slightest hesitation about deceiving his sources to ���get the story���, as he puts it���

 

Catch Our Breath���

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