J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2228

James J. Kilpatrick Is Dead

The press corps in the 1960s and 1970s was even worse than it is now.

Nationally syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick:

I did not say I was sorry for my former views on racial integration. I said, very carefully, that I was sorry I ever defended the practice of State-sanctioned segregation. There is a world of difference.  Neither did I ‘belatedly come to the conclusion that I was wrong about my former stand on equality of the races.’ As I tried to make clear, I belatedly came to the...

The Future of Education

Why does Matthew Yglesias use this picture:

rather than this one:

?

It is in a good cause, however, as he calls on the Ivy League alumni of the world to give to worthier causes than their several Almae Matres:

TED and Competition: [A:]s Brad DeLong likes to point out the “get a bunch of people in a room to listen to some guy talk” model of education was an organizational response to the high price of books. In principle, it would seem to have been made obsolete by the printing...

Four People Whom the Atlantic Could Hire to Replace Jeffrey Goldberg

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Four readers--any one of whom would improve the Atlantic's coverage significantly were Jeffrey "Al Qaeda Is Allied to Saddam Hussein!" Goldberg to be fired and were one of them to be hired as a replacement--write to James Fallows:

Zach Hensel:

My primary problems with Goldberg's piece are the omissions:

His citation of disgusting rhetoric from Iranian leaders is literally the only evidence presented suggesting that a...

First Draft of September 8 Principles of Economics Lecture: Financial Markets and Depression Economics

3.0. What We Hope You Will Learn



3.1. Recapitulation

Last time we saw how recessions and depressions could come to be. We took Jean-Baptiste Say's circular flow principle of 1803--the idea that because everybody's spending is somebody else's income there can be no depressions, no recessions, no "general gluts" but only sectoral shifts and readjustments--and we broke it. We broke it by pointing out that the normal process of adjustment, by which workers smoothly move from industries and...

Where Oh Where Are the Bond Market Vigilantes?

Floyd Norris:

Rates Fall as Market Fears Economic Weakness: As 2010 began, there was nearly unanimous agreement in financial circles on at least one thing: Interest rates were sure to rise during the year. That turn of events, which has shocked savers and stunned investors, appears to indicate that financial markets’ worries are turning in a very different direction from those of many governments. The governments are seeking ways to bring down budget deficits, fearing that without...

Dangers of Extrapolation...

Alison Schraeger writes in the Economist:

Pensions: The retirement solution: If equities continue to perform the same way they have the last ten years...

No, no, no, no no. No. NO!

Naive straight-line extrapolation is rarely your friend.

Over the past ten years...

Cyclically-adjusted real earnings have grown at a rate of 2.5% per year.

Stocks have paid dividends at a rate of 2.5% per year.

Price-to-cyclically-adjusted earnings ratios have collapsed at an average...

The Velocity of M2 in the United States

From 1959-1979 the velocity of M2 in the United States was never more than 5% away from its long-run trend...

Since 1979 the velocity of M2 in the United States has usually been more than 5% away from its long-run trend...

The first graph accounts, I think, for the rise of post-WWII monetarism in the United States. The mystery raised by the second graph is why there are still any monetarists--anyone using money stock movements to forecast spending movements--around at all...

...

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Yet Another "Opinions on Shape of Earth Differ" Edition

Josh Marshall explains why Mark Halperin would be more useful to society as a cosmetics testing subject than a reporter:

Talking to the Void: Mark Halperin has a highly unusual and painfully quaint column today imploring the GOP not to demagogue the Mosque issue for votes in the mid-term election. The reason simply being that it's not right. This is "your moment", he writes and commends Republicans for having "restricted yourself as much as possible to an economic message, eschewing...

Why Friends Don't Let Friends Read the Wall Street Journal

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

David Weigel complains, righly, that James Taranto has no business writing for any publication of reputation:

Weigel : Socialism With a Corporate Face: James Taranto spent the first section of yesterday's "Best of the Web" drilling me over this blog post, in which I asked why more Americans thought Obama had signed TARP than (correctly) thought Bush had. Taranto's point:

Whereas TARP was necessary but hateful in Obama's...

Liveblogging World War II: August 16, 1940

At Turnu Severin, Hungarian and Romanian officials begin negotiations about how to redivide Transylvania between the two countries, reducing Romania's share