J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2159

Liveblogging World War II: November 11, 1940

Carrier vs. battleships: the "battle" of Taranto:

World War II Day-By-Day: Day 438 November 11, 1940: At 11 PM, 21 Fairey Swordfish (11 with torpedoes and 10 carrying bombs) attack the Italian fleet at Taranto, taking off from British carrier HMS Illustrious.... 6 Italian battleships and 3 cruisers lie at anchor in the outer harbour.... Torpedoes sink 1 battleship, the Conte di Cavour, and damage 2 others, Littorio and Caio Duilio.... [B]ombing of the inner harbour is ineffective. 2 Swordfish are shot down (1 crew of 2 killed, 1 crew of 2 taken prisoner). The remaining 19 Swordfish return safely to HMS Illustrious by 2.30 AM next morning...

The Fourth Online-Learning Revolution

We can only provide quality online and distance-learning experiences today if we understand that what we are living through is not the first but rather the fourth online-learning revolution.

Let me back up fifteen hundred years:

The best way to train intellectuals is, as the Phaedrus http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html of Aristocles son of Ariston called “Plato” claims that Socrates said, via discussion and apprenticeship to an excellent thinker. Compared to that any alternative—reading a book, say—was wanting. Books, Plato reports Socrates saying, are:

unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.... You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer.... [T]hey are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated... cannot protect or defend themselves.... [But] an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner... can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.... [H]e who knows the just and good and honourable... will not seriously incline to “write” his thoughts “in water” with pen and ink, sowing words which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth adequately to others.... [Rather] the dialectician, who, finding a congenial soul, by the help of science sows and plants therein words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them... making the possessors of it happy to the utmost extent of human happiness...

However, there are not that many excellent thinkers. And they have too few apprentices. It is possible to train intellectuals via apprenticeship to a not-so-excellent thinker, of whom there are many. But Plato at least thought that such an apprenticeship was a third-rate experience, vastly inferior to the second-rate experience that is reading a book of the teaching of a first-rate intellectual. We know that Plato thought this, for he wrote the Phaedrus and his other dialogues—and that is the only way we know of Socrates.

Thus the first online-learning revolution, the first adaptation of technology to higher education, came in 390 BC when to cut the costs of education and allow for more students Plato invented the philosophy book and substituted it for the in-person teacher, thus leveraging the words and thoughts of Socrates (or at least of Plato’s version of Socrates) over many more people and many more millennia than Socrates could himself teach in person.

Books, however, were very expensive back in the days of manuscript production. According to “The Secret History of the Industrial Revolution” by U.C. Davis’s Gregory Clark, the price of books in the early fourteenth century was perhaps 100 times their price today. We in the post-industrial North Atlantic today are perhaps 100 times better-off in material things than were our medieval predecessors. Thus a single book in 1300 cost as large a share of a typical person’s income then as $50,000 is today: acquiring a single book was as great a relative investment and expenditure as a full year of a private college—tuition, fees, room, and board—is today. Plato’s invention of the philosophy book was a technological advance in education, but it was not a large enough advance.

It was not a large enough advance because in medieval Europe bishops and kings found that they needed staffs. Bishops needed theologians and experts in canon law. Kings needed judges and administrators. How best to train all these additional intellectuals? Providing each would-be theologian and judge and canon lawyer and administrator with the books they needed to study was prohibitively expensive. They needed an alternative

The solution that mid-medieval Europe hit upon was the system of the western university, the system that originated in Bologna and Paris. Assemble all those who wished to learn a book in one place. Have somebody—a reader, in Latin a lector, in modern English a lecturer—read the book aloud to them as they sat before him in a group and took their notes. At 4000 words an hour for twenty hours a week a student could absorb about thirty books a year in his time at university. Admittedly the notes he took away and the memory of hearing the book were third-rate compared to the second-rate possession of the book of a first-rate thinker. But it was good enough. And so the western medieval universities grew and flourished. This was the second online-learning revolution.

Then came the third online-learning revolution: the printing press of Johann Gutenberg, and the seventy-year explosion of print culture that followed. By 1500 a book was no longer the same share of income as $50,000 is today but was rather more like the share of $2,000 today. The extraordinary expense of books that had provoked the foundation of the western university and the institution of the group lecture was over. Now everybody could have their own copy of the books they needed. The necessity for gathering all would-be intellectuals together in a few towns and having them sit in groups listening to a speaker had passed.

Yet the university survived. The lecture class survived. They survive to this day. And they have grown and flourished—even though their original reason for being, the tremendous expense of books, is now more than 500 years in the past.

Today we are in the middle of a fourth online-learning revolution. To properly understand and manage it, however, we need to understand something crucial about the third online-learning revolution. What is it about the institution of the university that allowed it to survive the third online-learning revolution? For the fourth will be a catastrophic bust and distance-learning will die—unless we figure out how to replicate online those features of the university which kept it alive in the post-Gutenberg years after the third online-learning revolution.

Felix Salmon Has the Number of Bowles-Simpson

What did Obama expect when he took a serial budget arsonist and put a fire chief's hat on his head?

It's not even that a single Republican legislator has signed on to this thing.

Felix Salmon:

The deficit commission’s plan: [D]epressing on both the big-picture and the little-picture level.... [G]rowth in health-care costs automagically is brought down to GDP + 1% “by establishing a process to regularly evaluate cost growth, and take additional steps as needed if projected savings do not materialize”. But healthcare inflation is a gruesomely difficult nut to crack, and if the CBO simply assumed that it could be solved so easily in 2020, its projections would look much rosier too. Beyond that, the biggest savings proposed by the commission are in various parts of the federal payroll. Nothing else remotely moves the needle: the next biggest saving, beyond the punt of the “cut-and-invest committee”, comes from a reduction in the rate of growth of foreign aid.... Meanwhile, some of the small savings have to be seen to be believed. The deficit commission, charged with coming up with a bold plan to bring the nation’s finances into order, really does propose:

Increasing the amount of time spent on instant messenger, to reduce travel costs;
“Reduce copying use by putting the default option on copiers to double-sided”;
Merging the Commerce Department with the Small Business Administration;
*Charging a fee to Smithsonian visitors.
Etc....

[B]On the other hand, bold ideas in terms of new taxes — carbon taxes, wealth taxes, Tobin taxes, consumption taxes, you name it — are nowhere to be seen.... [A] large dash of wishful thinking, a bunch of tax cuts (!), and even a cap on the amount of tax revenues that the government can bring in. How that’s meant to help reduce the deficit I have no idea.

Obama vs. Pelosi

Nancy Pelosi:

On the Proposal Released by Co-Chairs of the Fiscal Commission: Our nation is facing two challenges: the need to create jobs and address our budget deficit. Any viable proposal from the President’s Fiscal Commission must strengthen our economy, but it must do so in a fair way, focusing on how we can effectively promote economic growth.

This proposal is simply unacceptable. Any final proposal from the Commission should do what is right for our children and grandchildren’s economic security as well as for our nation’s fiscal security, and it must do what is right for our seniors, who are counting on the bedrock promises of Social Security and Medicare. And it must strengthen America’s middle class families–under siege for the last decade, and unable to withstand further encroachment on their economic security.

Barack Obama:

“The President will wait until the bipartisan fiscal commission finishes its work before commenting. He respects the challenging task that the Co-Chairs and the Commissioners are undertaking and wants to give them space to work on it. These ideas, however, are only a step in the process towards coming up with a set of recommendations and the President looks forward to reviewing their final product early next month.

I would be a happier camper if Obama (and Biden) resigned tonight.

Never thought I would think that, I must say...

Obama's Next NEC Director

At the moment the lead candidates to replace Larry Summers as NEC Director--big shoes to fill--appear to be Roger Altman and Gene Sperling. I think both of them would probably do very well. But there are other people who I think would also be very good. And the professional economist in me wants somebody who thinks more like an economist. I don't think the administration has enough economists in it's top ranks.

So let me throw out a few names of people who would, I think, be as good as Roger and Gene--and who also think more like economists:

Lael Brainard

Alan Blinder

Larry Meyer

Roger Ferguson

Laura Tyson

Jason Furman

And iI would add Farrell to the list of Altman and Sperling--those who would probably do very well at the job but who do not especially think like economists...

World Bank President Zoellick Clarifies That (a) He Did Not Mean What He Said, and (b) He Does Want to Become the Stupidest Man Alive

If you say on Tuesday that you are in favor of using:

gold as an international reference point of market expectations about... currency values...

you cannot then say on Wednesday that you are:

not proposing to judge whether currencies are undervalued or overvalued by looking at their price in gold...

You cannot say that, that is, unless you really are making a serious run for the crown of Stupidest Man Alive.

Robert Zoellick's Financial Times op-ed was composed of:

Two paragraphs of praise for his patron James Baker as the Greatest Policymaker of All Time (with not a mention of Baker's prime role as creator of the global imbalances with which we now struggle).

Five paragraphs of mush.

A call for a return to some gold-standard-ish international monetary system: "The system should also consider employing gold as an international reference point of market expectations about inflation, deflation and future currency values. Although textbooks may view gold as the old money, markets are using gold as an alternative monetary asset today."

Now he says that anybody who read him as meaning what he said was wrong.

Matthew Yglesias:

Yglesias » Zoellick Clarifies That He’s Not for a Gold Standard, He’s Just Mumbling Incoherently: We had a lot of excitement yesterday over World Bank President Robert Zoellick seeming to call for a return to a Bretton Woods-style global gold standard system. Today at the G-20 meeting, though, he clarifies that that’s not what he meant. However, he doesn’t seem to be able to explain what it is he is proposing:

Mr. Zoellick said he thinks the coming monetary system will include a number of reserve currencies, including the dollar, euro, yen and, increasingly, the yuan, though he says the dollar is likely to remain “dominant.” He’s deliberately sketchy on the role he envisions for gold, calling it a “reference point” and an “alternative monetary asset.”... His main point, he said, was to point out that the stupendous rise in gold is a signal that markets are uncertain about the stability of the current exchange system. But he said he wasn’t proposing to judge whether currencies are undervalued or overvalued by looking at their price in gold...

Yglesias comments:

I really don’t think Zoellick can blame outside observers for choosing to interpret him as making coherent, albeit misguided, comments rather than just offering up meaningless jibberish. What does this mean? Transitioning, over time, away from near-universal reliance on the dollar as a reserve currency is an important subject. But why mention gold in this context unless you have a real gold-related proposal?

Masters of Negative Five Dimensional Chess

About the Obama Entitlement Commission, starring budget arsonists wearing Fire Chief hats.

In my inbox right now:

I don't know if my favorite part is adding co-pays to the VA or cutting the schools for soldiers' kids. Or the 23% top tax rate.

Yes, the Entitlement Commission Was an Unforced Error by the Obama Administration

At the time I asked why you would take a budget arsonist like Alan Simpson and give him a Fire Chief hat. I never got a good answer.

Now they are throwing people out of their press conference:

Catfood Commission Presser: Update: Alex Lawson was thrown out of the press conference because he’s not “press”...

Yes, a hideous unforced error:

Commission Co-Chair Proposal:

Cap revenue at or below 21% of GDP...

It probably means nothing--it all depends on what "revenue" means. But if it means something it is going to be a disaster as health care costs rise. You cannot implement PPACA's health-insurance exchanges without a subsidy pool. And if the money to pay for that subsidy pool has to fit under a 21% of GDP revenue cap, it simply does not work.

[P]rojections assume health care spending growth is kept to GDP+1%...

Oh my God! Ration city, here we come!

What clowns vetted this thing?

A 23% top marginal tax rate?

Hoo boy!

Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson Are the Only Two Members of the Entitlement Commission Who Endorse Their Recommendations?

Can this be true? Two out of eighteen is a remarkably low score...

This commission seems to have been yet another unforced error by the Obama administration.

And what is this about Erskine Bowles calling for a reduction in the top marginal tax rate to 23%?

More Republicans Lying All the Time, About Everything

Ladonna Pavetti does the intellectual garbage cleanup:

Killing Expired Program Won’t Save Money: Yesterday, the Republican Study Committee issued a press release announcing one of its first ideas for tackling spending:  eliminating the TANF Emergency Fund, which the RSC says would save $25 billion over the next decade “by restoring welfare reform.”  There are so many problems with this proposal that it’s hard to know where to begin.   Here are the facts:

The TANF Emergency Fund no longer exists.  It expired on September 30.  You can’t achieve savings by ending a program that has already ended.

Nobody has ever proposed spending $25 billion on the fund.  Earlier this year the House passed a bill to extend it for one year, at a cost of $2.5 billion — one-tenth of the savings that the RSC claims.

The TANF Emergency Fund is welfare reform.  In fact, the fund represents welfare reform at its best:  it has enabled states to expand work-focused programs within TANF despite high unemployment and a weak economy.  Using the fund, states placed about 250,000 low-income parents and youth in subsidized jobs, mostly in the private sector.

As we’ve explained before, the RSC’s claim that the TANF Emergency Fund “incentivizes states to increase their welfare caseloads” is simply wrong.  States didn’t have to increase their caseloads to qualify for money from the fund.  In fact, some states whose caseloads had sharply declined despite the recession used money from the fund to help create subsidized jobs or provide one-time assistance to families in crisis (such as help paying a back rent or utility bill for a family facing eviction).

In addition, people receiving TANF assistance funded through the Emergency Fund had to meet the same stringent work requirements imposed on other TANF recipients. They had 12 weeks to find a job — an extremely difficult task in today’s labor market — after which they had to meet their work requirement through other work activities, such as unpaid work. A limited number of recipients were permitted to pursue short-term education and training.

The TANF Emergency Fund reduced unemployment in communities across the nation that were hard hit by the recession, and it brought businesses, non-profits, and government agencies together to provide jobs for people who were eager to work to support their families.  When it ended on September 30th, tens of thousands of people lost their jobs — and more will lose their jobs by the end of the year as states scale back or close down their subsidized jobs programs.  That, of course, is the exact opposite of what the economy needs right now.

Friends really do not let friends vote for, work for, or contribute to the Republican Party.