J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2171
October 22, 2010
Reenactors
Robert Citino:
On Being a Wiking » HistoryNet: Last week I was contacted by Joshua Green, Senior Editor at Atlantic Monthly. Seems there is a candidate running for Congress in northwestern Ohio who has been part of a Waffen-SS re-enactor group. Their aim, like that of re-enactors everywhere, was to "live history," in this case the history of the 5th SS Panzer Division, a multinational mechanized formation nicknamed "Wiking." Green wanted to know my thoughts about the Division and those who would re-enact it. I said some negative things, and I stick by them:
What you often hear is that the [Wiking] division was never formally accused of anything, but that's kind of a dodge. The entire German war effort in the East was a racial crusade to rid the world of 'subhumans,' Slavs were going to be enslaved in numbers of tens of millions. And of course the multimillion Jewish population of Eastern Europe was going to be exterminated altogether. That's what all these folks were doing in the East. It sends a shiver up my spine to think that people want to dress up and play SS on the weekend.
This story has "had legs."... In the manner of these things, some people have agreed, some have disagreed, and I've gotten eMails running the gamut. Hey, no surprise there. This is America. But there is one further thing I've noticed: the number of notes I've gotten from re-enactors protesting their innocence and accusing me of accusing them of–I don't know–all being Nazis, I guess. Such notes I consider to be completely unnecessary. In my line of work, I know somewhere between 100 and a bazillion re-enactors of all stripes. It seems like a neat hobby, and for those who really do the prep work involved in a good re-enactment, it can be a learning experience of the first order. They take their fair share of grief from outsiders, I suppose, but I say: Here's to the re-enactors!
I'd like to remind my re-enactor friends, though, to beware of the company they keep.... I really don't think it's good for the anyone in the "Living History" community to be dressing up in the uniform of a criminal organization. The war in the east was more than a mere military campaign, and the Waffen-SS wasn't just "soldiering." They were fighting a "war of extermination" (Vernichtungskrieg). The historical record of the Waffen-SS is as clear as you can get, it isn't a pretty one, and I think there are better ways to spend your free time.
PS: For a discussion of the "Wehrmacht problem" in the wargaming and scholarly community alike, take a look at the interesting recent book by Ronald M. Smelser and Edward J. Davies II, The Myth of the Eastern Front: the Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture. I don't agree with everything the authors have to say, but it was a fascinating book to read.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden: The return of the final serial comma's vital necessity
Patrick Nielsen Hayden::
Making Light: The return of the final serial comma's vital necessity: Via Bruce Baugh:
links for 2010-10-22
The British Conservatives Have No Theory - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
@delong answers my earlier query: The British Conservatives Have No Theory - Grasping Reality with Both Hands http://t.co/Mgslb2i
– Louis D. Johnston (LDJEconomics) http://twitter.com/LDJEconomics/statu...
(tags: from:LDJEconomics)
Dean Baker on the "Growth Through Austerity" argument. « Rortybomb
Yglesias » The Consumer Surplus Era
The New North, and a Map of Most Vulnerable Countries
Rob Shimer: The Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides contribution to Economics
tax.com: Measuring the Public Benefits From Taxes
October 21, 2010
The Berkeley EHL
The Institute for New Economic Thinking is giving Berkeley money for economic history:
http://ineteconomics.org/grant/berkeley-economics-history-lab: Project Leader: Barry Eichengreen: The Berkeley Economic History Laboratory, headed by Barry Eichengreen of University of California Berkeley, was awarded a grant by the Institute for New Economic Thinking to ramp up the production of historically literate economists capable of contributing to the policy debate.
The grant seeks to expand the supply of economic historians doing policy-relevant research, by doubling or tripling the annual output of Berkeley PhDs specializing in economic history. The grant offers fellowships to attract additional candidates to the field, expands seminar budgets to allow for additional presentation and discussion of work in progress, and provides grants for exploratory archival visits and digitization of historical data.
The larger purpose of the grant is to produce change in the field of economics by making it a more fundamentally historical, institutional, and empirical social science.
Standards of Living
Matthew Yglesias:
Yglesias » The Consumer Surplus Era: This seems like a good time to trot out Karl Smith’s handy demonstration of the difference between a given sector’s contribution to GDP and its sector to consumer welfare.... The gap between what a given sector contributes to measured GDP and what it contributes to human well-being has always been with us. But the ways in which digital technology makes the non-commercial production and dissemination of information goods viable opens up vast new horizons of consumer welfare. Whether or not someone would enjoy manufacturing automobiles in his spare time as a hobby and distributing them to hundreds of thousands of people for free, it’s not possible to do. The marginal cost of building a car is pretty high, distributing cars is difficult, and the start-up costs of building a car factory are enormous.
Producing information goods—software, text, music, etc.—and distributing it on the internet isn’t like that at all.
Consequently, the realm of activities with gigantic divergence between measured GDP and welfare value is vastly expanding in ways that I don’t think policymakers and civil society donors are yet responding to in fully appropriate ways. The case for finding ways to directly and indirectly subsidize the creation of such goods is extremely strong. But more generally, I think we should expect the significance of this kind of thing to expand in the future. After all, the most active and intense hobbyists are typically senior citizens who, thanks to being retired, have the time and inclination to indulge their passions and desire for recognition and community. But the current cohort of senior citizens in the developed world has very weak digital skills.
The British Conservatives Have No Theory
Shame on David Cameron. Shame on Nick Clegg. Shame on George Osborne.
Their shame would not be quite so great if they had a theory about what elements of spending will grow to offset their 9% of GDP planned fiscal contraction. Is the pound supposed to collapse and are exports than to surge? Is the prospect of rising unemployment in the U.K. supposed to greatly enhance business confidence and trigger a surge of private-sector investment? Is the 30-year gilt yield supposed to fall from 4% to 1% and that reduction in the cost of capital cause a surge of capital formation throughout Britain?
Cameron, Clegg, and Osborne don't tell us.
They don't tell us because they are clueless dorks.
They don't even have a theory about how the economy will avoid a double dip.
They hope that--somehow, some way--Mervyn King will save them from themselves.
But if they actually carry through with their policies, I don't see how he can.
Ryan Avent:
Austerity: Cut to the bone: A TIDE of austerity has swept over much of Europe since markets rebelled at high debt levels in Greece and elsewhere in the spring. Still, the world is watching in amazement as Britain's new government prepares to enact budget cuts that have not inaptly been called revolutionary. Yesterday, George Osborne, the government's chancellor of the exchequer, stood before Parliament and detailed the scope of the plan, which will slash government spending by £81 billion over four years in an aim to reduce Britain's deficit from its present 11% of GDP to 2%.
[T]he scale of the cuts is... breathtaking. The police budget will fall by 20%. Spending on social housing will fall by three-fifths.... Nor will the damage be confined to the public sector. The government is a significant buyer of goods and services from private firms, after all. PwC, a consultancy, said the other day that it thinks that another half a million private jobs could go over the coming five years as a direct consequence of public-sector austerity....
If the private sector does trim half a million jobs due to austerity, it will come on top of the half million public sector positions that will be done away with as part of the cuts. Buttonwood does a good job explaining why such austerity is unthinkable in much of the world, and especially America. And he notes:
The second lesson concerns the division between spending cuts and tax rises. History suggests that it is better to concentrate on the former if you want the plan to succeed. But there is no getting away from the fact that this will affect the poor most; since they are the chief recipients of benefit payments.... The package creates the understandable impression that the poor are paying the price for the folly of the bankers....
From an economic standpoint, the most pressing question is how this will affect the British economy. Mr Osborne is counting on the Bank of England to pick up the slack created by budget cutting, but the Bank has its work cut out for it. It will be very difficult to encourage private borrowing amid such substantial cutbacks.... For now, Mr Osborne and the ruling government are the heroes of deficit hawks and supporters of a small state the world over. But Britain's conservatives have gambled heavily. If deep budget cuts amid economic weakness send the economy plunging back into recession, the government may be unable to make the cuts stick, and austerity could be discredited around the world. If disaster is avoided, it will strengthen the hand of fiscal conservatives everywhere. It would be an exciting experiment to watch if so many livelihoods weren't caught in the balance.
They aren't even holding a King, Queen, 10, and 9, and drawing to an inside straight: they are holding a Deuce, a 5, an 8, and a Jack and claiming that they are drawing to an inside straight.
All Ur Stonehenge Photoz R B Long To Uz????
From /.:
All Your Stonehenge Photos Are Belong To England: Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 21, @12:32AM: from the we'll-take-that dept.: An anonymous reader writes
English Heritage, the organization that runs and manages various historical sites in the UK, such as Stonehenge, has apparently sent letters to various photo sharing and stock photo sites claiming that any photo of Stonehenge that is being sold violates its rights, and only English Heritage can get commercial benefit from such photos. In fact, they're asking for all money made from such photos, stating: 'all commercial interest to sell images must be directed to English Heritage.' As one recipient noted, this seems odd, given that English Heritage has only managed Stonehenge 'for 27 of the monument's 4,500 year old history.'
All Ocean Ports Are in the Same Place...
...as far as the costs of shipping non-spoilable non-urgent commodities, that is.
Ethan Zuckerman:
…My heart’s in Accra: [T]he cost of shipping water from a bottling plant in Yaqara, Fiji to Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was interested in unpacking the everyday mystery of container shipping – how is it possible that we can sell a product for a couple of dollars a bottle despite shipping it 8,000 miles around the world – and in the odd idea that atoms might be more mobile than bits, as we get lots more Fiji water in the US than Fijian music, movies or news.
My estimate then was that... it would cost $0.21 for a liter bottle of Fiji water to make the 8,000 mile journey.... a small fraction of the retail price of a bottle of “premium” imported bottled water....
I got a few details wrong.... That comes out to $0.18 per liter.... These new figures come from my new favorite toy, Maersk’s online shipping rates calculator.... To use Maersk’s calculator, you need to register with the site, download a client browser certificate and accept three server certificates from Maersk before you can access their secure site. But once you do, it’s just a few short clicks before you can calculate the cost of shipping a 20′ container of “umbrellas, sun umbrellas, walking-sticks, seat-sticks, whips, riding-crops and parts thereof” (yes, that’s one of the available categories, along with “bone and meal”, “ores, slag and ash” and “straw, esparto, other plaiting materials and articles of straw, esparto, other plaiting materials) from Auckland to Dubai: $2451.02.
The main thing I’ve found playing with Maersk’s calendar: distance doesn’t matter as much as demand. Americans buy a lot of atoms from China. The Chinese don’t buy nearly as many from the US. A 40′ container filled with household goods, shipped from Shanghai to Houston, TX costs $6169.93. Reverse the trip and ship the same container from Houston to Shanghai and the cost is $3631.07....
As I poke through these maps, schedules and tariffs, I feel like I’m glimpsing a secret world... the sense that these routes and rates, the infrastructure that supports an economy where transPacific bottled water is possible, are the ley lines of globalization, radiating a mysterious and sinister power.
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