J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2224
August 21, 2010
I Think Felix Salmon Misses the Issue
The lesson Felix draws is that off-the-record briefings are fine and on-the-record briefings may not be.
The lesson I draw from the incident Felix Salmon is thinking about is that off-the-record briefings are fine--if the people the senior government officials are talking to are people who understand the substantive policy issues and are not playing gotcha. If the people the senior government officials are talking to are people who either do not understand the substantive policy issues or...
Felix Salmon Misses the Issue
The lesson Felix draws is that off-the-record briefings are fine and on-the-record briefings may not be.
The lesson I draw from the incident Felix Salmon is thinking about is that off-the-record briefings are fine--if the people the senior government officials are talking to are people who understand the substantive policy issues and are not playing gotcha. If the people the senior government officials are talking to are people who either do not understand the substantive policy issues or...
Deep History
John Gordon, I think, badly mistakes the difficulty of hanging onto culture and technology and building it up if you cannot stay in one place and cannot write.
Still, very interesting:
Gordon's Notes: The new history is deep history: When we think about science, most of us think of dramatic breakthroughs. We think Darwin and Wallace, Einstein and Bohr, Copernicus and Curie and we imagine everything changed overnight. Most science, however, develops in bits and pieces, twisting and...
I Am Proud that Eboo Patel Is an American
Buce sends us to Eboo Patel:
Underbelly: In America, We Don't Do That: Patel on the "Mosque": The last thing I intended to do when I got up this morning was a pair of posts on the "Ground Zero Mosque."[1:] But Eboo Patel (via Glenn Greenwald) wraps it up with such pristine clarity that he gets 10 points for craftsmanship, whatever he gets for content. "Lemon" is CNN Anchor Don of that ilk:
Lemon: Don't you think it's a bit different considering what happened on 9/11? And the...
The Irrational Fad and Fashion That Is Belief in a Bond Bubble
Paul Krugman:
Bond Madness: Things are looking bleak for the economy; Goldman Sachs (no link) is predicting that 2nd quarter GDP growth will be revised down to 1.1%, and it’s downhill from here. Yet from late 2009 until just the other day, all the Very Serious People were mainly concerned about the possibility of surging interest rates. Why?
I was looking back at some of my own notes about what happened last fall. At the time, there was serious consideration among the Obama people...
Ricardo Caballero: There Is No Bond Bubble
Ricardo Caballero says there is no bond bubble because people really really want safe nominal assets and there are not very many of them--so naturally their price is very high:
Economics: No, there is a shortage of safe assets: Ricardo Caballero our guest wrote on Aug 20th 2010, 15:37 GMT:
IT IS not a bubble. It simply reflects a massive shortage of (what are perceived to be) safe assets.
This shortage was present before the crisis, which is largely what led to...
August 20, 2010
links for 2010-08-20
Obama Administration Defends Lackluster Foreclosure Programs; Says Interest Rates Will Remain Low To Help Housing Market
Can a Listserv Be Off the Record? - National - The Atlantic
@delong Re: Goldberg's complaints about email publication, recall when he threatened to publish Journolist emails...
The Economist Gets One Very Wrong
A beat sweetener so sweet as to send us all into hyperglycemic collapse:
Mitch Daniels: The right stuff: The right stuff: Indiana's governor is a likeable wonk. Can he save the Republicans from themselves and provide a pragmatic alternative to Barack Obama? THE governor does not like to keep people waiting. On a recent morning this small man leapt out of a trooper’s Toyota (Indiana-made) while it was still moving. He burst into a tiny chamber of commerce and began joking with...
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