J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 212
March 20, 2019
Six Migrants and Their Descendants Who Made History: Yet Another Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century, 1870-2016"
MOAR DARLINGS MUST DIE!!!!!
Six migrants and their descendants who made a lot of our history:
One whose move proceeded the great 1870-1914 wave as migration became really cheap���was Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), immigrated to America from Scotland in 1848. He was perhaps the champion of upward mobility: his father was a subsistence-level handloom weaver, and he become the world���s premier steelmaster and perhaps the second richest person in the world. The United States���s openness to those who might become Andrew Carnegies (as long as they came from Europe and not Asia or Africa) and the United States���s standing���then���as an economy of very easy massive upward mobility were key preconditions for the twentieth century to become a truly American Century.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), who migrated from India to Britain to study at the Inner Temple from 1888-1891 and then to South Africa in 1893, where he stayed for 21 years. Only then did he return to lead the movement to win independence from the British Empire for India. The claim is that he sailed to South Africa thinking of himself as a British Empire citizen first and an Indian second. He returned���impelled both by what he had seen of gathering apartheid in South Africa and what he had learned about the rights and dignity of humanity in England���convinced that the British Empire must end. And Gandhi was willing to do something about it.
David Leontyevich Bronstein (1847���1922), who with his wife Anna Lvovna Zhivotovskaya (1850-1910) crossed the the greatest river he had ever seen and moved 200 miles out of the forest and into the grasslands���which had been horse-nomad lands within historical memory���to pioneer one of the richest agriculture soils in the world: it was fifteen miles from his farm in Yanovka to the nearest post office. David and Anna���s fifth child, Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879-1940), called Trotsky, was truly to shake history into a previously inconceivable course.
Jennie Jerome (1854-1921), who made a reverse migration: from Brooklyn, New York, United States to Westminster, England to marry Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill, becoming engaged in 1873 three days after their first meeting at a sailing regatta on the Isle of Wight. Their marriage was then delayed for seven months while her father Leonard the financier and speculator and his father John Winston the seventh Duke of Marlborough argued over how much money she would bring to the marriage, and how it would be safeguarded. The Duke of Marlborough in the end offered to the couple ��1000���5000 then, the equivalent perhaps of ���a year; financier-speculator Leonard Jerome in the end offered to the couple ��3000���15000 dollars���a year, one third of which would be under Jennie Jerome���s control. The total commitment of ��4000 a year back then was the same multiple of average American income per capita as 6,000,000 dollars a year would be today���roughly at the bottom of the richest 2000 couples in America, or the richest 200 in Greater New York, or the richest 100 in Greater San Francisco or Los Angeles.
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), who left Croatia and his wished-for parental destiny as a Serbian Orthodox priest to Graz, Austria, Budapest, Paris, and then New York to become the most brilliant electrical engineer ever.
ixth was Herbert Hoover (1874-1967). Born in 1874 in Iowa, orphaned at 10, in 1885 he started moving west���first to Oregon to live with an uncle; second to California as the first student to attend Stanford University (then free) where he became a mining engineer, graduating in 1895 in the distressed aftermath of the Panic of 1893. His first job was as a mine laborer in Grass Valley at 600 dollars a year, his next as an intern and special assistant to mining engineer Louis Janin at 2400 dollars a year. Then in 1897 he crossed the Pacific to first Australia, working for Bewick, Moreing for 7000 dollars a year, and then China at 20,000 a year and up to make his fortune. From 1901 to 1917 his base was London, as he worked in and managed investments in Australia, China, Russia, Burma, Italy, and Central America in addition to the United States. In 1917 he moved back to America.
#economichistory #slouchingtowardsutopia
"A 'period'... could be three years, or it could be 20": ...
"A 'period'... could be three years, or it could be 20": Paul Krugman (May 1998): Japan's Trap: "The basic premise-that even a zero nominal interest rate is not enough to produce sufficient aggregate demand-is not hypothetical: it is a simple fact about Japan right now. Unless one can make a convincing case that structural reform or fiscal expansion will provide the necessary demand, the only way to expand the economy is to reduce the real interest rate; and the only way to do that is to create expectations of inflation...
...Of course, it is not necessary that Japan do anything. In the quasi-static IS-LM version of the liquidity trap, it appears as if the slump could go on forever. A dynamic analysis makes it clear that it is a temporary phenomenon-in the model it only lasts one period, although the length of a 'period' is unclear (it could be three years, or it could be 20). Even without any policy action, price adjustment or spontaneous structural change will eventually solve the problem. In the long run Japan will work its way out of the trap, whatever the policy response. But on the other hand, in the long run...
#noted
Wise from Simon: a "Green New Deal" needs to be not just ...
Wise from Simon: a "Green New Deal" needs to be not just technocratically efficient but politically popular: Simon Wren-Lewis: How to Pay for the Green New Deal: "Tackling climate change is resisted by powerful political forces that have in the past prevented the appropriate taxes, subsidies and regulations being applied. Which is a major reason why the world has failed to do enough to mitigate climate change.... Just as proponents of a Green New Deal are savvy about the need to overcome the resistance of, for example, the oil and gas industry, they also realise that the Green New Deal needs to be politically popular. So the New Deal package has to include current benefits for the many, perhaps at the expense of the few.... If you cannot make the polluter pay, it is still better to take action to stop climate change even if future generations have to pay the cost of that action...
#noted
Jacob Levy: Democracy for Republicans: "American conserva...
Jacob Levy: Democracy for Republicans: "American conservatism and market liberalism... overlook the deep relationship between democratic government and modern commercial capitalism.... The kind of positive-sum market economy that has transformed the world since 1800 through compounding productivity increases and economic growth is very different from the ancient Rome riven by class conflicts over zero-sum land distribution, but the Founders understood the Roman precedents better than they understood the world that was about to emerge. And that economic world emerged with, not against, the development of a kind of democratic government they also did not foresee, government by contending, permanent political parties alternating in power by competing for votes in a mass-suffrage society...
#noted
Excellent insight into police-community relations in Amer...
Excellent insight into police-community relations in America from a very observant and thoughtful peace officer: Patrick Skinner: "One of the questions I ask every class: When was the last time you had a positive encounter with a cop who didn���t know you were a cop in which she wasn���t telling you to do something (Traffic) or you weren���t asking something. The answer 100% has been ���never���. That���s an issue.... I���m speaking to literally the most cop supportive group-other cops-and they can���t think of a positive voluntary encounter with a cop. The problem isn���t our neighbors. It���s us the cops. It doesn���t have to be this way. So, that���s my whole 1 day course kinda.... We need to train cops entirely as if they didn���t have a badge and a gun. And only at the end say ���by the way, you have this authority, use it as a parachute.��� The badge gets you in the door. The rest is anti-drama. Act accordingly...
#noted
Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (March 20, 2019)
Note to Self: South Australia
DeLong's Morning Coffee: The Lighting Budget of Thomas Jefferson
Weekend Reading: Mark Bauerlein (2006): On Michael B��rub��
Weekend Reading: William Freehling: Secessionists at Bay: "Monticello...
Weekend Reading: Garry Wills (1974): Uncle Thomas���s Cabin: "It should be clear, by now, what fuels the tremendous industry [Fawn Brodie] poured into her work���her obsession with all the things she can find or invent about Jefferson���s sex life...
Jennifer Jensen Wallach (2002): The Vindication of Fawn Brodie: "Julian Bond... articulated the feelings of many black Americans when he said: 'Through all my life, as long as I have known there was a Thomas Jefferson, I have known there was a Sally Hemings. And I have known, not in a... scholarly way... I know this relationship existed and while, I cannot prove it, I don't find it at all odd that it might have, or could have, or actually did happen. A man who owns slaves is not far away from one who will sleep with his slave.... Brodie noted that: /The unanimity with which Jefferson male biographers deny him even one richly intimate love affair after his wife's death suggests that something is at work here that has little to do with scholarship, especially since they are so gifted in writing about every other aspect of his life'...
Fawn M. Brodie (1971): Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization: "The women who have written about Jefferson in Paris see neither inhibitions nor 'hangups', nor an absurd preoccupation with the god of reason; they also read the Cosway letters without preconceptions about Jefferson's lack of masculinity.... One could continue, in describing the varied biographical treatment ofJefferson's intimate life, by discussing the ancient, controversial story of Sally Hemings. The documentation is so scattered and complicated, however, that it deserves a small volume in itself, and simply cannot be adequately reported in this essay.... Malone, who finds the story even more abhorrent than does Peterson, devotes a whole appendix in his new volume to a discussion of the evidence. He holds that the father of Sally Hemings's children may have been Peter Carr, but that it was more likely to have been his dissolute brother Samuel. 'It is virtually inconceivable', he writes ofJefferson, 'that this fastidious gentleman whose devotion to his dead wife's memory and to the happiness of his daughters and grandchildren bordered on the excessive could have carried on through a period of years a vulgar liaison which his own family could not have failed to detect'....
The unanimity with which Jefferson male biographers deny him even one richly intimate love affair after his wife's death suggests that something is at work here that has little to do with scholarship, especially since they are so gifted in writing about every other aspect of his life...
E. M. Halliday (2001): Understanding Thomas Jefferson https://books.google.com/books?isbn=006175546X
The very sharp John Lukacs on what I call "fascism"���proletarian ethnoi that need to fight enemies foreign and domestic with economic cleavages within the ethnoi papered over, rather than proletarian classes that need the economic system unrigged. For some reason he calls it "nationalism", which I think is properly something different: there may well be elective affinity between belief in the nation-state as a political and sociological community and fascism, but it is certainly not an identity: John Lukacs: The Duel: The Eighty Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler: "The principal force of the twentieth century is nationalism...
Brilliant from my freshman roommate Robert Waldmann: Robert Waldmann: The Transformation of Left Neoliberalism: " We should want a small state, but the key is a small surface area not a small volume. Shrinking the state by drilling so there are private-sector salients worsens the problem...
David Brooks: The Case for Reparations: "Sitting, for example, with an elderly black woman in South Carolina shaking in rage because the kids in her neighborhood face greater challenges than she did growing up in 1953...
Brishen Rogers: Beyond Automation: The Law & Political Economy of Workplace Technological Change: "Companies are, however, using new information technologies to exercise power over workers in other ways, all of which are enabled by existing employment laws...
Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman: Screenplay: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo (2007): The Economic Lives of the Poor
Wikipedia: Greek to me: "It may have been a direct translation of a similar phrase in Latin: 'Graecum est; non legitur'...
Daniel Davies: One-Minute MBA
David Leonhardt: Trump���s Trade Grade: "'He set out to fix a non-problem (a trade deficit) and created real ones including international conflict, higher consumer prices and gross inefficiency'...
George Magnus: China Leadership Monitor: "Before the 1980s and again since 2012, when reforms were suppressed or stifled and inputs were boosted, but without any improvements...
Jonathan Bernstein: 2020 Elections: Far Left Won���t Take Over the Democratic Party: "It lost five of six presidential elections through 1988.��The Democratic Leadership Council of that era was split...
SF Eater: Ginto Izakaya Japonaise
*Gregory Travis *: 737 MAX Article
Juliane Stockman: @JulianeStockman: "If you haven't subscribed to @tressiemcphd https://thefirstand15th.substack.com, you need to.... I'm gonna have to journal about this months' essay. Hell, I'm probably gonna take it into therapy to process it. It packs a wallop...
John Harwood: @JohnJHarwood: "Trump/GOP promised lasting 3+% growth from self-financing tax-cuts. Mainstream economists predicted brief deficit-fueled growth burst...
For all the Trumpists, language and argument is not an attempt to understand the world and persuade others but rather an attempt to destroy understandings of what is and to dominate others: Gabriel Schoenfeld: Trump Supporters Say the Darndest Things: "Readers may not be aware but before Roger Kimball became a fanatical acolyte of Donald Trump, he was a fanatical hater... bitterly complaining of the rallies where Trump 'encouraged a whipped up crowd to extend their right arms in Nazi-like salute while pledging allegiance to the Great Leader'.��� Many more such depictions of our 45th president as an aspiring f��hrer can be found in the prolific output of this eminent conservative intellectual.... To judge by his response to my review of Hanson���s book, Kimball seems to have forgotten that he specialized in such Nazi references... right up until the moment he abruptly switched from worrying about the impending Trump Third Reich to hailing Trump for his 'salubrious and morally uplifting' presidency. I don���t believe it is an ad hominem argument to raise questions about the quality of a mind that would produce such extraordinary gyrations...
One of my hobbyhorses: a "semi-skilled" worker is an unskilled worker with a union: Kate Bahn sends us to: Byron Auguste: Low Wage, Not Low Skill: Why Devaluing Our Workers Matters: "Such jobs require optimizing time tradeoffs, quality control, emotional intelligence and project management. They are not low skill, but they are low wage. Why does this matter? When we stereotype or lazily assume low-wage workers to be �����low skill,��� it reinforces an often unspoken and pernicious view that they lack intelligence and ambition, maybe even the potential to master ���higher-order��� skilled work. In an economy that is supposed to operate as a meritocracy���but rarely does���too often, we see low wages and assume both the work and workers are low-value...
Alan Krueger's suicide is horrible and tragic news. All sympathy to his family. He was a light that shone very brightly for good into many dark corners. �������������� ����������: Noah Smith: Alan Krueger Led a Quiet Economics Revolution: "Nor did Krueger restrict himself to the academy... chief economist at the Department of Labor... assistant Treasury secretary... chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers later in the Obama administration.... Krueger���s work defined what a modern economist should look like. He relentlessly focused on issues of practical, immediate importance. He constantly concerned himself with the betterment of the lives of poor and working people, but refused to naively assume that programs designed to help these people always had the intended effect. He was always aware of relevant economic theories, but never let himself be bound by them. This eclectic, humble, humanistic but practical approach has set the tone for an entire generation of young economists. He was taken from us far too soon, but his impact on economics, and on the world, will last for a very long time to come...
Benjamin Wittes: ���Speaking Indictments��� by Robert S. Mueller III: "Bob Mueller has already told a remarkable story. He���s told it scattered through different court filings in a variety of cases, indictments, plea agreements, stipulations of fact. We decided to distill it, to organize it, to put it all in one place, to tell the story of the Russia investigation orally, to let a remarkable group of speakers read the speaking indictments that Mueller has issued. So here���s the story of the Russia conspiracy, distilled to a brief audiobook in seven chapters. What you���re about to hear is all taken nearly verbatim from actual Bob Mueller filings. We���ve cut a lot, moved stuff around, and changed a few words here and there to make it sound more like a narrative. We have changed the meaning not at all...
I am the view that a surprisingly large chunk of American (and British) political history from 1990-2020 may well turn out in historians' future judgments to revolve around Rupert the Kingmaker, in a role analogous���but in a really weird way���to the role of the Earl of Warwick in the Wars of the Roses. As David Frum once put it: "We thought that Fox News worked for us, but then we learned that we worked for Fox News". Thus the Murdoch succession���the transition from Rupert the Decider to Lachlan the Decider may well be a key moment. Rupert thinks it is a huge joke to boost his fortune by scaring the piss out of his viewers and so glueing their eyeballs to the screen so they can be sold fake diabetes cures and overpriced gold funds. Rupert thinks this is a huge joke even though���or, rather, especially because���it leads to him getting lots of side-eye from his peers. Lachlan is likely to value the side-eye less, if it all, and value being one of the great-and-good in good standing more: Steve M.: Is This Why Fox Suspended Jeanine Pirro?: "I don't believe there'll really be major changes at Fox. I think the hope is that small, insignificant steps will bamboozle investors and advertisers. But we'll see...
"The... value of names... was changed into arbitrary.... Inconsiderate boldness, was counted true���hearted manliness: provident deliberation, a handsome fear: modesty, the cloak of cowardice: to be wise in every thing, to be lazy in every thing. A furious suddenness was reputed a point of valour. To re���advise for the better security, was held for a fair pretext of tergiversation. He that was fierce, was always trusty; and he that contraried such a one, was suspected. He that did insidiate, if it took, was a wise man; but he that could smell out a trap laid, a more dangerous man than he. But he that had been so provident as not to need to do the one or the other, was said to be a dissolver of society, and one that stood in fear of his adversary. In brief, he that could outstrip another in the doing of an evil act, or that could persuade another thereto that never meant it, was commended.... To be revenged was in more request than never to have received injury. And for oaths (when any were) of reconcilement, being administered in the present for necessity, were of force to such as had otherwise no power; but upon opportunity, he that first durst thought his revenge sweeter by the trust, than if he had taken the open way. For they did not only put to account the safeness of that course, but having circumvented their adversary by fraud, assumed to themselves withal a mastery in point of wit. And dishonest men for the most part are sooner called able, than simple men honest: and men are ashamed of this title, but take a pride in the other...": Neville Morley: Lawful Neutral?: "Victor Davis Hanson, and the use of ���consensual��� to describe attempts at doing without the active consent of the governed is a neat trick.... Hanson['s]... first chapter explicitly presents The Two Americas as an echo of Athens v Sparta, sophisticated coastal elites versus rough unlettered rural folk, with the majority of Greek poleis rooting for the later. Hanson presents himself as the detached observer, who lives among the real people of the countryside on his ancestral estate but knows his way around the world of the city���and so his choice to side with the ���Spartans��� is based on full knowledge and understanding of both sides, not the ignorance of knowing no other way of life (a fault of the clever Californian and Beltway elites as well).... His depiction of a divided America is Thucydidean not only in its chosen tropes but in authorial self-conception: he... recognises, even as he recoils from... the charisma and power of a Cleon, despising and desiring at the same time his rough anti-aristocratic manliness; Cleon���s methods are not those of Thucydides��� class, but they promise to have the desired effect on the corrupt status quo, simultaneously too democratic and anti-populist. This Thucydides is Chaotic Evil: dedicated (even if just as cheer-leader) to... the triumph of individualism and naked self-interest.... As Thucydides described and this modern Thucydides exemplifies, every action is praiseworthy insofar as it benefits one���s own faction and hurts the enemy, and reckless vulgarity and self-interest are redefined as the traits of an off-putting Homeric hero...
#noted #weblogs
March 19, 2019
Benjamin Wittes: ���Speaking Indictments��� by Robert S. ...
Benjamin Wittes: ���Speaking Indictments��� by Robert S. Mueller III: "Bob Mueller has already told a remarkable story. He���s told it scattered through different court filings in a variety of cases, indictments, plea agreements, stipulations of fact. We decided to distill it, to organize it, to put it all in one place, to tell the story of the Russia investigation orally, to let a remarkable group of speakers read the speaking indictments that Mueller has issued. So here���s the story of the Russia conspiracy, distilled to a brief audiobook in seven chapters. What you���re about to hear is all taken nearly verbatim from actual Bob Mueller filings. We���ve cut a lot, moved stuff around, and changed a few words here and there to make it sound more like a narrative. We have changed the meaning not at all...
#noted
The Disjunction Between Production and Distribution: An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016
KILLING YET MORE OF MY DARLINGS! (sob!)
In the world as it stood in 1870���and even more so in 1914���there was a huge disjunction between the growing effective economic power of the human race and the proper distribution of this potential wealth. Science, technology, and organization were clearly wreaking miracles. The rewards, however, were not going to the scientists and the engineers and the workers, but to the landlords and the financiers and to the organizer-entrepreneurs. The sociological contribution of this latter group in creating organizations and setting them in motion was mighty. Best friends Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels probably put it best in 1848:
The business class, during��� scarce 100 years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature���s forces to [hu]man[ity], machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground���what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?���
However, the benefits of greater human power to harvest fruits from nature and organize persons did not trickle down. There were, broadly speaking, as of 1870 three views about why it did not trickle down; and about what, if anything, ought to be done about it:
First, we have already noted John Stuart Mill���s view: The problem was a Malthusian one���people, especially ���the unproductive���, had too much freedom to have children and to draw on the public for support. The solution was to ���the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight������ with workers��� prisons for those bankrupt and broke: ���support��� accompanied with��� restraints on their freedom... restricted indulgence, and enforced rigidity of discipline������
Opposed to this was Karl Marx���s view: that human liberation understood in a German-style idealist philosophical mode would inevitably be attained in the broadly prosperous society made possible by technology after that society had been developed by being run on British-style classical-political economy Ricardian-socialist lines and had then been transformed by a French-style political revolutionary overthrow of the old r��gime. What would produce the revolution? Aroused and self-organized humanity outraged by the enormous disjunction between the tremendous wealth of society and the increasing poverty of the typical worker:
The forest of outstretched arms begging for work grows ever thicker and thicker, while the arms themselves grow ever leaner and leaner���
And this would, Marx believed, inevitably trigger a political-societal reaction:
Further socialisation of labour��� takes a new form���. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this��� develop��� the cooperative��� labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common���. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital��� grows��� misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class��� disciplined, united, organised by��� capitalist production itself���. Centralisation of capital and socialisation of labour��� become incompatible with their capitalist exterior shell. This shell is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated���
There was a third view, however: the view that there was nothing wrong with human society as it stood toward the end of the 19th century. This was the view of, say, Herbert Spencer and his Social Statics���that what appeared to be the defects of society has it then stood were actually necessary forms of social discipline in order to guide the upward evolution of the human race. Andrew Carnegie���by then no longer the hungry child of a penniless handloom weaver but a plutocratic steelmaster���put it in a nutshell in 1889:
What were��� luxuries have become��� necessaries of life. The laborer has now more comforts than the landlord had���. The landlord has books and pictures rarer, and appointments more artistic, than the King could then obtain. The price we pay for this��� is, no doubt, great���. The employer of thousands is forced into the strictest economies��� [in] the rates paid to labor��� friction between the employer and the employed, between capital and labor, between rich and poor���. The law of competition��� is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department���
The theorists of the 18th Century Enlightenment had rejected justifications of inequality based on right derived from the inheritance of caste���fictionalized descent from the Norman knights who had conquered England for William the Bastard in 1066, or fictionalized descent from the Frankish warriors who had conquered Gaul for King Clovis the supposed grandson of Merovech���for the equality of all before the law, and careers open to the talented. But they held the line at what one had gained via one's own hands and one's own talents in the societal system in which one was embedded: that one had a clear right to. 19th Century utilitarians abandoned that: they had argued that the distribution of even property should be calculated by a benevolent government so as to produce the maximum sum of utility���achieve the greatest good of the greatest number���and that one had no rights that contravened that principle. Along with diminishing marginal utility of wealth, that utilitiarian principle entails the sharp rejection the idea that property rights and equality under the law were in any sense sacred, inasmuch as ���the majestic equality of the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread������
But then the pendulum swung back again.
The social darwinists came up with new justifications of inequality, based on privation and poverty as Lamarckian and Darwinian sorting mechanisms that were necessary to drive the upward evolution of the human race. Hence all was in fact for the best in this the best of all possible worlds���and the more it appeared in the surface to be not the best, the more it was.
Few social darwinists indeed were ever willing to take their logic to the end of the streetcar line. Few were willing to conclude that although the privation of the fit poor was useful as spurring them to self improvement and enterprise and the privation of the unfit poor was useful as improving the Race, the luxury and the dissipation of the rich were not useful. Andrew Carnegie was willing to ride to the end of the streetcar line: once one had demonstrated one���s fitness by becoming rich the only appropriate use of wealth was to give it away to advance the public good rather than to either consume it or bequeath it, for ���he who dies rich dies disgraced���.
For most of the rich, however, the justifications were another cycle in the ideological justification that those who are rich should hold what they have: what John Kenneth Galbraith described as ���the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness���.
The contest between these three views���and diluted and blended variants of them���is a principal part of the history of political economy and economic policy. Marx���s belief that History would bring a superior social system and allow the productivity made possible by the advance of knowledge and investment to be distributed to create a truly human world is no longer credible. Mill���s fear that humanity would be unable to organize itself to master its destiny because of resource scarcity proved false with respect to population, but may prove true with respect to energy use and global warming. And there are still many���or at least a few with very loud voices���who hold that if the world of today has a problem, it is that distribution is not unequal enough.
the business class: This is in French in the German original: ���bourgeoisie��� and ���bourgeoisie���. These words are invariably but not too usefully left translated in English editions. Marx and Engels did not have a great German word for the concept. Originally���most prominently in his essay ���On the Jewish Question������Marx followed his then-friends Moses Hess and Heinrich Heine in labeling this as ���Jewishness���. (Cf., Heinrich Heine���s denunciation of his own city of Hamburg as a city of hagglers populated entirely by Jews: ���baptized and un-baptized Jews (I call all Hamburg���s inhabitants Jews)���.) Jonathan Sperber (2013): Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0871403544 (p. 133). That was unfortunate. Marx and Engels attributed a heroic and Promethean as well as a degrading and destructive historical role to this class.
lap of social labor: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848): Manifesto of the Communist Party https://books.google.com/books?isbn=9387944204
restricted indulgence, and enforced rigidity of discipline: John Stuart Mill (1871): Principles of Political Economy
Karl Marx���s view: The view of Marx-the-intellectual-thinker, not of Marxism-the-revealed-creed. The best very short summary of what Marx thought and why is���I think���mine: J. Bradford DeLong (2009): Understanding Karl Marx http://delong.typepad.com/20090420_stanford-talk_karl-marx.pdf. The best biography of Karl-Marx-the-person���a very different animal from Karl-Marx-the-idol���is, I think, Jonathan Sperber (2013): Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life (New York: W.W. Norton: 0871404672) http://books.google.com/books/?isbn=0871404672
ever leaner and leaner: Karl Marx (1847): Wage Labour and Capital https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/
expropriators are expropriated: Karl Marx (1867): Capital https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/
Herbert Spencer and his Social Statics: Herbert Spencer (1851): Social Statics: Or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (London: John Chapman) https://books.google.com/books/id=ph4RAAAAYAAJ
insures the survival of the fittest in every department: Andrew Carnegie (1889): ���Wealth���, North American Review 391 (June) http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/02/andrew-carnegie-1889-wealth-an-historical-document.html
the majestic equality of the law: Anatole France (1894): The Red Lily (London: J. Lane) https://books.google.com/books/?id=2-YLAAAAIAAJ
this the best of all possible worlds Voltaire (1759): Candide, or, All for the Best (Paris: Lambert) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19942/19942-h/19942-h.htm
a superior moral justification for selfishness: John Kenneth Galbraith (2002): Interview with Rupert Cornwell: Stop the Madness, Toronto Globe and Mail (July 6) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith. As quoted by Daniel Davies (2003): Hypocrisy as a Virtue https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/02/the-financial-times-says-daniel-davies-told-us-so.html
#slouchingtowardsutopia #outtake #highlighted
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March 18, 2019
Erik Tarloff Reads from "The Woman in Black" March 19 @ 7 PM @ 1491 Shattuck Ave....
Be there or be square: Erik Tarloff: The Woman in Black https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1947856979: Reading: March 19, 2019, Book Inc, 1491 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA, 7 PM
#noted
Alan Krueger's suicide is horrible and tragic news. All s...
Alan Krueger's suicide is horrible and tragic news. All sympathy to his family. He was a light that shone very brightly for good into many dark corners. �������������� ����������: Noah Smith: Alan Krueger Led a Quiet Economics Revolution: "Nor did Krueger restrict himself to the academy... chief economist at the Department of Labor... assistant Treasury secretary... chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers later in the Obama administration.... Krueger���s work defined what a modern economist should look like. He relentlessly focused on issues of practical, immediate importance. He constantly concerned himself with the betterment of the lives of poor and working people, but refused to naively assume that programs designed to help these people always had the intended effect. He was always aware of relevant economic theories, but never let himself be bound by them. This eclectic, humble, humanistic but practical approach has set the tone for an entire generation of young economists. He was taken from us far too soon, but his impact on economics, and on the world, will last for a very long time to come...
#noted
J. Bradford DeLong's Blog
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