J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2133

Origins of the American Civil War

Prometheus Six sends us to Edward Ball:

Gone With the Myths: ON Dec. 20, 1860, 169 men — politicians and people of property — met in the ballroom of St. Andrew’s Hall in Charleston, S.C. After hours of debate, they issued the 158-word “Ordinance of Secession,” which repealed the consent of South Carolina to the Constitution and declared the state to be an independent country. Four days later, the same group drafted a seven-page “Declaration of the Immediate Causes,” explaining why they had decided to split the Union.

The authors of these papers flattered themselves that they’d conjured up a second American Revolution. Instead, the Secession Convention was the beginning of the Civil War, which killed some 620,000 Americans; an equivalent war today would send home more than six million body bags.

The next five years will include an all-you-can-eat special of national remembrance. Yet even after 150 years full of grief and pride and anger, we greet the sesquicentennial wondering, why did the South secede?

I can testify about the South under oath. I was born and raised there, and 12 men in my family fought for the Confederacy; two of them were killed. And since I was a boy, the answer I’ve heard to this question, from Virginia to Louisiana (from whites, never from blacks), is this: “The War Between the States was about states’ rights. It was not about slavery.”

I’ve heard it from women and from men, from sober people and from people liquored up on anti-Washington talk. The North wouldn’t let us govern ourselves, they say, and Congress laid on tariffs that hurt the South. So we rebelled. Secession and the Civil War, in other words, were about small government, limited federal powers and states’ rights.

But a look through the declaration of causes written by South Carolina and four of the 10 states that followed it out of the Union — which, taken together, paint a kind of self-portrait of the Confederacy — reveals a different story. From Georgia to Texas, each state said the reason it was getting out was that the awful Northern states were threatening to do away with slavery.

South Carolina: “The non-slaveholding states ... have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery” and “have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes.”

Mississippi: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world. ... There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union.”

Georgia: “A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia.”

Several states single out a special culprit, Abraham Lincoln, “an obscure and illiterate man” whose “opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.” Lincoln’s election to the White House meant, for South Carolina, that “the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”

In other words, the only state right the Confederate founders were interested in was the rich man’s “right” to own slaves.

It’s peculiar, because “states’ rights” has become a popular refrain in Republican circles lately. Last year Gov. Rick Perry of Texas wondered aloud whether secession was his state’s right in the aftermath of laws out of Congress that he disliked.

In part because of this renewed rhetoric, in the coming remembrances we will likely hear more from folks who cling to the whitewash explanation for secession and the Civil War. But you have only to look at the honest words of the secessionists to see why all those men put on uniforms.

George Orwell on Belonging to England's Lower Upper Middle Class in the 1920s

George Orwell:

George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier - Chapter 8: I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class. The upper-middle class... the layer of society lying between L2000 and L300 a year: my own family was not far from the bottom.... Before the war you were either a gentleman or not a gentleman, and if you were a gentleman you struggled to behave as such, whatever your income might be.... People in this class owned no land, but they felt that they were landowners in the sight of God and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook by going into the professions and the fighting services rather than into trade. Small boys used to count the plum stones on their plates and foretell their destiny by chanting, 'Army, Navy, Church, Medicine, Law'.... To belong to this class when you were at the L400 a year level was a queer business, for it meant that your gentility was almost purely theoretical. You lived, so to speak, at two levels simultaneously. Theoretically you knew all about servants and how to tip them, although in practice you had one, at most, two resident servants. Theoretically you knew how to wear your clothes and how to order a dinner, although in practice you could never afford to go to a decent tailor or a decent restaurant. Theoretically you knew how to shoot and ride, although in practice you had no horses to ride and not an inch of ground to shoot over. It was this that explained the attraction of India (more recently

Kenya, Nigeria, etc.) for the lower-upper-middle class. The people who went there as soldiers and officials did not go there to make money... they went there because in India, with cheap horses, free shooting, and hordes of black servants, it was so easy to play at being a gentleman.

In the kind of shabby-genteel family that I am talking about there is far more consciousness of poverty than in any working-class family above the level of the dole. Rent and clothes and school-bills are an unending nightmare, and every luxury, even a glass of beer, is an unwarrantable extravagance. Practically the whole family income goes in keeping up appearances.... The real bourgeoisie, those in the L2000 a year class and over, have their money as a thick layer of padding... in so far as they are aware of the Lower Orders at all they are aware of them as employees, servants, and tradesmen. But it is quite different for the poor devils lower down who are struggling to live genteel lives on what are virtually working-class incomes. These last are forced into close and, in a sense, intimate contact with the working class, and I suspect it is from them that the traditional upper-class attitude towards 'common' people is derived.

And what is this attitude? An attitude of sniggering superiority punctuated by bursts of vicious hatred. Look at any number of Punch during the past thirty years. You will find it everywhere taken for granted that a working-class person, as such, is a figure of fun, except at odd moments when he shows signs of being too prosperous, whereupon he ceases to be a figure of fun and becomes a demon. It is no use wasting breath in denouncing this attitude. It is better to consider how it has arisen, and to do that one has got to realize what the working classes look like to those who live among them but have different habits and traditions.... In such circumstances you have got to cling to your gentility because it is the only thing you have; and meanwhile you are hated for your stuck-up-ness and for the accent and manners which stamp you as one of the boss class...

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Nominal GDP Targeting Via Index Futures

Bill Woolsey writes:

Monetary Freedom: Sumner and DeLong on Index Futures Convertibility: Here DeLong begins to go wrong. He adds in 3 percent because he believes that is a proper target for the long run average nominal interest rate. His figure assumes a 3 percent average nominal interest rate between 2007 and 2011. Whether or not that would be desirable, it plays no role in determining what the Fed should be doing during either the 4th quarter of 2011 or the 4th quarter of 2010. He has effectively put NGDP on an 8 percent growth path. Neither $18.155 trillion nor its reciprocal should play any role in the system.

Why does DeLong make this error? It is because he understands the proposal as automatically changing the quantity of money when futures are purchased and sold. In DeLong's view, when the Fed buys these contracts, it is providing money now, in the fourth quarter of 2010 and will receives the money back in the fourth quarter of 2011. The Fed is making a type of loan when it buys contracts. It makes sense that the Fed would charge interest on these loans. If the Fed charges 3 percent interest on the loans per year, then it provides dollar deposits (makes a loan of a dollar now) in return for (1+.03) times 1/$17.455 trillion of 4th quarter NGDP to be paid in one year. That is 1/(17.455 trillion/ 1.03) or 1/16.947 trillion of 4th quarter 2011 NGDP. When the Fed sells the contracts, it is borrowing (accepting a deposit) of a dollar in exchange for paying 1/16.947 trillion of 4th quarter 2011 NGDP in one year. It pays 3 percent interest on these deposits, again, adjusted for any deviation of NGDP from target.

DeLong's error was to calculate the interest payment for 4 years compounded, and then multiplying when he should have divided. If the contract was defined based on the borrowers paying the Fed a dollar when the loan comes due, like a T-bill, then multiplication would have been appropriate. The appropriate adjustment, however, is 1.03 times $17.455 trillion, which is $17.979 trillion, not $18,155 trillion. More importantly, because the adjustment for the deviation of NGDP from target would not be known up front, this would be inappropriate. Division is really the only sensible approach...

Touche... I think.

Let me try to explain what we want to do...

Right now, in December 2010, we want to give people an incentive to take actions that expand the money supply if they think that nominal GDP at the end of 2011 is likely to be lower than $17.5 trillion and to contract the money supply if they think that nominal GDP at the end of 2011 is likely to be higher than $17.5 trillion.

So the Federal Reserve announces an open offer to buy and sell: $1 in cash now in exchange for... some fraction of nominal GDP at the end of 2011.

It seemed to me when I wrote that the fraction of nominal GDP should not be 1/17,500,000,000,000 because that gives people an incentive to take action to expand the money supply if they expect nominal GDP in a year to be $17.5 trillion because then the Federal Reserve is lending them money at 0% nominal. So if you want people to borrow from the Fed and so increase the money stock if they expect nominal GDP to be less than $17.5 trillion and lend and so shrink the money stock if they expect nominal GDP to be greater than $17.5 trillion, you need a different number than $17.5 trillion in the denominator.

So I accept the correction to $18.0 trillion. The rest of it I am still unsure about.

I have to think about this a lot more, which means I need to find the time to do so...

How About "RomneyCare"?

Megan McArdle gets up on her high horse:

Questions Asked and Answered: I will stop referring to it as ObamaCare when we stop calling them the Bush tax cuts for the rich.  It is an effective shorthand for a law that is otherwise unwieldy to describe...

"RomneyCare" is just as wieldy a description, and has the advantage of giving credit to the first politician to push the exchanges-plus-big-business-benefits system.

London Banker Is Back

London Banker

Why Paul Krugman Almost Welcomes the Frankness of Ron Paul

Paul:

Economics and Politics - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com: Springtime for Hypocrites
It has been a great week on the hypocrisy front. A couple of high points:

The hypocrisy of the apparatchiks: Joe Nocera amplifies some of the points I made in my column. The determination of the Republicans on the crisis commission to lay the blame on Fannie and Freddie flies right in the face of the evidence; and Nocera also adds some information on the curious switch of positions taking place. A few years ago the same people now attacking F&F for promoting loans to low-income borrowers were attacking F&F for … not promoting loans to low-income borrowers. Back then they castigated F&F by pointing to the fact that private lenders were making loans where the agencies refused to tread, now they say that it was F&F that lured the private sector into making those very same loans.

Whatever. It must be the government’s fault, because, you know, because.

The hypocrisy of the centrists: Just two weeks ago, the deficit was the great evil, and all the VSPs insisted that we needed fiscal austerity now now now. Then, magically, a big tax cut — increasing federal debt by more than the original Obama stimulus, and substantially raising the probability of making unaffordable tax cuts permanent — was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Why, it’s almost as if all the concern about the deficit was a front for opposing anything progressives might want, to be dropped as soon as debt was being run up on behalf of conservative goals. But that can’t be true, can it?

In a way, I almost welcome the frankness of someone like Ron Paul, who tells us that there’s no need for any kind of bank regulations. It’s crazy, of course — even Adam Smith called for bank regulations, comparing them to building regulations designed to prevent the spread of fires. But at least the guy’s consistent.

Yet Another Reason Why Nobody Has Any Business Voting for Republican Politicians

Jonathan Cohn:

The GOP's Strange Ideas About Helping the Poor: Rep. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana is not just a Republican. He's also a doctor. And that means he has not one but two reasons to dislike Medicaid. Not only does it cost the government a lot of money. It also serves a lot of its beneficiaries poorly. Cassidy explained in a Dec. 16 column for Politico that Medicaid is the stingiest payer in our health care system.... [P]eople who have Medicaid frequently end up at places like Earl P. Long hospital in Baton Rouge -- a public hospital where, I gather, Cassidy has worked. "The hospital has dedicated and caring doctors, nurses, technicians and support staff," Cassidy writes, "But its physical plant is in disrepair." Four patients to a room, asbestos in the structure, missing doors -- the people of Baton Rouge only go there if they have no other option, according to Cassidy. And that means people with Medicaid....

Cassidy tells us this story because the new health law is expected to increase Medicaid enrollment by about 16 million people. Cassidy thinks this is a terrible idea.... I don't actually disagree with the underlying assessment of Medicaid.... But I have a question for Cassidy, Perry and all the other state officials who oppose expanding Medicaid and, in some cases, support getting rid of it once and for all: What do you propose to do instead? The answer, as far as I can tell, is to do nothing....

Medicaid may not provide great access to care. But it does provide access -- access its recipients very much need.... Janet Currie and Jonathan Gruber found large expansions of Medicaid during the 1980s and early 1990s "significantly increased the utilization of medical care, particularly care delivered in physicians' offices," leading to "significant" reductions in both infant and child mortality....

Could the program be better? Absolutely.... But, by far, the best way to improve Medicaid would be to give it more money per beneficiary -- so that it pays providers something closer to what Medicare and private insurance pay.... Is this what Cassidy, Perry and the other Medicaid critics want to do -- to spend more money on the poor? It doesn't appear so. In general, the people attacking Medicaid want to spend less....

Sure enough, Cassidy's protest against expanding Medicaid includes no proposals for other ways to cover the 15 million people the program will take in under the new health law. And when Perry threatened to withdraw from Medicaid, he wasn't terribly specific about how Texas would provide health care to the roughly 4 million residents now on the program. Of course, we don't need them to tell us what the world would look like without government health care programs for the poor. We need only look at what happened before Medicaid came into existence...

Modern Celebrity Philanthropical Journalism Watch

Gordon's Notes:

Gordon's Notes: Jean-Louis Gassée on Cloud 2.0 – post of the month: Gassée has done many things, but he’s best known for having been Apple’s CEO for a time. These days he’s a VC “general partner”. It’s safe to assume he’s rich beyond my paltry dreams of avarice. Why does he bother writing a not-terribly-famous blog? I don’t think it’s for the adword revenue. My best guess is that he’s helping out the blog’s co-author, and that he writes for love. Alas for those who write to live, his free stuff is better than the best of the WSJ. Such is the curse of early 21st century journalism....

[W]hy is it that only cranks like me and outliers like Gassée ever point out where Google fails? It’s a bit hallucinatory. Gmail’s contacts function has been terrible for years.... Google Docs are still very weak.... [T]hings are worse when you look at the channel confusion around Blogger, Google Doc, Buzz and Google Sites. Really, I do love a lot about Google, but they have to give up on the idea that good design is emergent.

Go and read [Gassee's] Cloud 2.0 post.... Don’t forget to marvel at the strange age we live in, where some of the best journalism is done for love...

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Fear the Cloud!!

Hoisted from Comments: jfaughnan said:

Time to Think About the Stability of Web Services...: Brad,

Google has axed several web services with total data loss. They did in Pages (partial data save), Notebook (total loss), a failed pre-facebook social networking site and a few more.

They've also essentially killed several web services by abandoning development.

The problem with the cloud is much bigger than this. The real answer is SimpleNote -- completely portable data.

See my latest rant with abundant links:

http://notes.kateva.org/2010/12/yahoo-kills-delicious-don-say-you-weren.html

And:

Gordon's Notes: Yahoo kills Delicious - don't say you weren't warned about the Cloud: Not surprising ...

Michael Tsai - Blog - Yahoo Shuts Down Delicious: Delicious was a good service, and I’m sorry to see all the data and metadata that people have entered go away

Some fear Flickr is next - like Digital Railroad. I wrote about Yahoo's likely use of Flickr in 2008.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

I don't put anything "in the Cloud" I can't walk away from. One reason I use Simplenote is that I have completely usable and completely current local copies of all data. If they go away tomorrow I can switch to an alternative in minutes.

Google deserves credit for supporting "data freedom" -- which is the only thing that can make the Cloud tolerable. Most recently the data liberation front gave OS X users an easy way to download entire online albums.  Google has a spotty data history, but I give them credit for their data freedom team.

See also:

Dapocalypse now. Grab your data and run. RUN. (AOL xDrive, AOL photos, Google Lively, Yahoo User Profiles, MSN Groups, Digital Railroad)
Fear the Cloud: Microsoft Danger was well named (Remember danger?)
Should I trust (Simplenote) Simperium?
Cloud Lesson #72: The risk of letting Google own your web site
Jean-Louis Gassée on Cloud 2.0 – post of the month
Fear the Cloud - Blogger's unfixed 5000 post limit (months later they fixed this)
Nimbophobia: Why you should fear the cloud - Google's performance problems

The Exodus from Del.icio.us to Pinboard

Three days ago Maciej Ceglowski was running a small better-del.icio.us bookmarking service (for those who wanted (a) speed, (b) protection against linkrot, and (c) not to be embarrassed by what they had bookmarked) with perhaps 5K users and perhaps 5M bookmarks.

Then disgruntled ex-Yahoo employees leaked that Yahoo was "sunsetting" delicious, and John Gruber wrote:

Daring Fireball: Now’s Probably a Good Time to Link to Pinboard Again: I’ve previously linked to and recommended Pinboard, Maciej Ceglowski’s “antisocial” bookmarking service. It’s not a copy of Delicious, but rather more like a re-imagining of Delicious. If you use Delicious and regret its apparently imminent demise, Pinboard is probably what you want. Delicious-like features and interface (including a clone of its API), and Delicious importing. And, the sooner you sign up for Pinboard, the less you pay.

Selections from Maciej's twitter feed from that moment on:

it's nearly 2011. Why do I still have to ask my computer's permission to unplug an external drive?

@niels_k I understand the technical issue, but it's 2011. We have the technology

@cdoussin welcome aboard!

Apparently delicious is done: http://yfrog.com/f/h3z89p/ This sucks. Yahoo finishes the process of turning gold into lead.

@mlednor we should be able to grow by a factor of ten or so before there would need to be changes. I will pause signups if necessary.

@patbrumfield you should be able to import all your delicious stuff

we'll set up some tools to make migration easier for people from delicious (like being able to find people by their del username)

@zyrcster no, but I'll hack something up to make that possible now that everyone is migrating

if we weren't a paid service we'd be down by now...

@nathansmith mixed feelings, really. Also high stress as I try to manage the traffic

mirroring from twitter and other outside services is going to be off for a few hours so that things stay fast for everyone. Crazy traffic

people balking at the signup fee - please think about why delicious is being shut down

@Panicnfreakout we haven't crashed

RT @kb: Hey, y’all. Happy you’ve found a del alternative, but I’m trying to bookmark shit here. Ease up on the @pinboardIN servers, maybe?

@mormolyke I think I'll pass on taking scaling advice from @twitter :-)

@devrandom send us email if it doesn't complete soon. The poor importer is working like crazy this afternoon

there are worse things than being DDOS'ed by people trying to give you money

Sorry for the delay in imports - we're adding bookmarks as fast as we can consistent with not slowing down the site

we have added just short of one million bookmarks today

@anildash ha, thanks Anil! I will reveal myself to be a Yahoo! skunkworks operative in due time

@balaji_dutt yes sorry about that, we had to revive our poor mail server and it took a while to get outbound mail back up

@KenBavier yes a bunch of background services are disabled so the servers don't crash. Will bring them back up ASAP

@mark_philpot heh, thanks! I'm very proud that we kept the servers up and fast today through what was basically a redirect from Yahoo

I love you guys but I also can't wait for you all to go to sleep

@thanland thanks man! it's been an interesting adventure in systems administration

@kevadamson yeah we're actually Yahoo Bookmarks with a crappy stylesheet as disguise

@kopischke thanks, I really appreciate it. Astonished we stayed up

Import queue is still about eight hours long right now

@gfmorris thanks man! luckily I am well taken care of, and this is a fun way to pull an all-nighter

@martijnvdven it's going to be a few more hours before we start crawling outside services again

@digitalbdesigns my "office" is my desk and I am eating a bleary-eyed bowl of cereal after a luxurious 90 minutes of sleep

Alright, we have got the import queue down to four hours from eight. Continuing to attack it. Thanks to everyone for being so patient!

@JimRoepcke we're not set up yet for this high volume of writes (5 million bookmarks in a day). Otherwise the server is actually doing fine

Good luck today, @zootool - I feel your pain!

Added 6.7 million bookmarks in the last 24 hours. That's more than in the entire preceding year

okay, import has caught up and things are back to normal. Thanks to everyone for their patience, and welcome

The funny thing is, our import is really pretty peppy - just not when ten thousand people try it at once

@zenom_ thanks, I appreciate it. It was a nervous 24 hours over here

@ichilton mysql is perfectly fine for the kind of write traffic we're ever likely to get. The problem was my own bad code around it

@andydavies I'll do a technical post-mortem for curious people in a few days

Now that I've gotten some sleep I feel like I can use sudo again

And the status update:

Welcome! (Pinboard Blog): As you may have seen on Twitter, the last 30 hours or so have been hectic. Our new users brought with them over seven million bookmarks, more than we had collected over the entire lifetime of the service. Traffic to the site was over a hundred times normal for the best part of a day.

My priority during this surge in traffic was to keep the site up and responsive, so that new users could take a look around without locking our grizzled veterans out of their bookmarks. This meant suspending a lot of normal background tasks like search, archiving, and polling outside feeds, so that the database could concentrate on adding bookmarks. It also meant keeping a very long import queue - at times over eight hours long - in order not to bog down the site.

Longtime users of Pinboard know how much pride Peter and I have taken in being the fastest, lightest bookmarking service around. Now that we've digested that big meal of bookmarks, I hope our new users will get to see this side of the site as well. It's amazing how peppy things can get when you're not saving 78 bookmarks per second.

With the traffic calming down, I've been able to start bringing background services back up. Tag clouds should finish generating later tonight; search will be up-to-date in about a half hour, and tomorrow morning we'll start crawling links again for our archival users. I've started the various feed crawlers and users should start seeing items from Twitter, Instapaper, Google Reader, Read It Later and Delicious appear in their feeds within a few hours as well.

In the future we'll have a status page so that users have a clearer idea of what's going on behind the scenes. And we'll make a number of changes to the signup process based on what we noticed yesterday.

If there are any remaining signup issues, bad imports, or plain old bug reports, please email us at support@pinboard.in and we'll do our best to help.

And now I'm going to sleep.

Happy bookmarking!

—maciej on December 18, 2010