J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 225

On this question, these days I tend to go the full MMT: t...

On this question, these days I tend to go the full MMT: the bond market will tell us when it is time to worry about the deficit and the debt, and that time is not now: Jason Furman and Larry Summers: Why Washington Should Worry Less About the Deficit: "As policymakers set budgets in the coming years, a lot will depend on what interest rates do. Financial markets do not expect the increases in interest rates that budget forecasters have priced in. If the markets prove right, that will strengthen the case against deficit reduction. If, on the other hand, interest rates start to rise well above what even the budget forecasters expect, then, as in the early 1990s, more active efforts to cut the deficit could make sense...

#noted

Equitable Growth's Heather Boushey schools our friend, sm...

Equitable Growth's Heather Boushey schools our friend, smart young whippersnapper Noah Smith formerly of Stoneybrook and now of Bloomberg: "There is a lot of evidence from political scientists as to how loudly money talks in political democracies, and it is very well laid out in Elisabeth Jacobs's contribution to our After Piketty": Elisabeth Jacobs (1017): Everywhere and Nowhere: Politics in _Capital��in the Twenty-First Century...

#noted

Mark Koyama: A Nationalism Untethered to History: "The no...

Mark Koyama: A Nationalism Untethered to History: "The novelty of The Virtue of Nationalism is twofold. First, Hazony���s positive vision of a national state is based on the biblical account for the early Israelite kingdom.... Second... the nationalism Hazony defends is essentially an ethnic nationalism.... In the current political environment, these views should not be ignored.... A frank conversation about national loyalty, and especially the history of the nation state and its role in the advances of the modern world, are needed now more than ever. Unfortunately, The Virtue of Nationalism has very little to offer to such a conversation...

#noted #books

Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (February 28, 2019)

The Lighting Budget of Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson: A Chronology of His Thoughts: "From candlelight to early bedtime, I read...

Max Roser: Light

Erik Loomis: "This Day in Labor History: February 27, 1869: The great workplace safety reformer Alice Hamilton is born. Let's talk about her amazing work and what workers faced in the early 20th century...

Thomas Jefferson: VI. Salary Account of the Department of State, [1 April 1791]

Measuring Worth

*The First Foot Guards Reenactment Group: The Cost of Living: "London, mid 1700s...

William Savage: The Cost of 18th-Century Lighting

Karl Marx (1853): The Future Results of British Rule in India: "All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?...

Thomas Jefferson: Statement of Debts, Expenses, and Income, 1 April 1823

Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson (2011): Pre-Industrial Inequality

Wikipedia: Pareto Distribution

Dev Patel, Justin Sandefur, and Arvind Subramanian: Everything You Know about Cross-Country Convergence Is (Now) Wrong | PIIE

David Roberts: Green New Deal Critics Are Missing The Bigger Picture: "Green New Deal critics are missing the bigger picture...

INET: Global Commission Discusses Tech + the Future of Work in San Francisco: "The latest meeting of INET���s Commission on Global Economic Transformation addressed the impact of technological change on jobs and society���and how best to harness the power of tech...

World Bank: Trouble in the Making? The Future of Manufacturing-Led Development

Joe Studwell: How Asia Works: Success and Failure In the World's Most Dynamic Region

Saveur: La Louisiane Cocktail

Paul Krugman: Running on MMT: "I was glad to see Stephanie Kelton responding.... The problem is that I don���t understand her arguments.... A key proposition of Abba Lerner���s doctrine of 'functional finance', which is in turn a large part of the MMT doctrine, is that the appropriate size of the budget deficit can be determined by how big it needs to be to ensure full employment.... [But] as long as monetary policy is available, there is a range of possible deficits consistent with that goal. The question then becomes one of tradeoffs...

Anthropologist Jason Hickel appears to be dedicated to destroying anthropologists' global reputation. You shouldn't let people put lies on top of your work as headlines���and if you do, you then have no standing to complain that others are in any sense telling the wrong truth. If someone "forces" a headline on you, it's still your headline���you endorse it, or you withdraw your article: Dylan Matthews: Bill Gates Tweeted Out a Chart and Sparked a Debate on Global Poverty: "Anthropologist Jason Hickel stood up to say: Not so fast. In a Guardian article titled 'Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn���t be more wrong'.... But... everyone agrees that since 1981, the incomes of the world���s poorest people have gone up.... Hickel has disavowed his Guardian headline, saying it was forced upon him by editors. Everyone agrees incomes for the poor haven���t gone up enough, and that $1.90 per day is hardly enough for a human being to live a decent life.... Hickel argues that focusing on data showing declines in global poverty does political work on behalf of global capitalism, defending an inherently unjust global system.... [Max] Roser, as he stressed repeatedly in messages to me, just wants to be clear on what the facts say ��� and what they say definitively is that living conditions for the world order have improved for decades and decades. Based on my read of the evidence, that���s certainly true...

I have been waiting for this from Piketty-Saez-Zucman to show up for a while, and here it is now in our WCEG working paper series. This is the simplified and streamlined version on their take on how we should do national income statistics for the twenty-first century���how we can and should take advantage of our data to go beyond averages and seriously track issues of distribution. READ IT! Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman: Simplified Distributional National Accounts: "This paper develops a simplified methodology that starts from the fiscal income top income share series and makes very basic assumptions on how each income component from national income that is not included in fiscal income is distributed.... It can be used to create distributional national income statistics in countries where fiscal income inequality statistics are available but where there is limited information to impute other income.... This simplified methodology can also be used to assess the plausibility of the Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018) assumptions. In particular, we will show that the simplified methodology can be used to show that the alternative assumptions proposed by Auten and Splinter (2018) imply a drastic equalization of income components not in fiscal income which does not seem realistic...

Kate Bahn sends us to Equitable Growth alumnus Nick Bunker. Nick continues his campaign to get people to look not at inflation but at wage growth���which has been slowly inching up since 2014���to gauge how close we are to that mysterious "full employment". Bottom line: we are not there yet: Nick Bunker: "Inflation-adjusted average hourly earnings up 1.7% over the past year. A friendly-reminder that real wage growth isn���t a good metric for assessing short-term health/slack of labor market. (Unless, of course, you think swings in energy prices are telling you something very important about the US labor market.) Far less volatility when you look at core inflation, but at this point why not just look at nominal wage growth?...

Equitable Growth's Heather Boushey engaged with Jonathan Ostry, Prakash Loungani, Andrew Berg, and Jason Furman at the Peterson Institute on Thursday January 31: Peterson Institute: Book discussion: Confronting Inequality: How Societies Can Choose Inclusive Growth: "Book discussion with Jonathan Ostry, @LounganiPrakash, and Andrew Berg of @IMFNews on Confronting Inequality: How Societies Can Choose Inclusive Growth with additional comments with @jasonfurman of PIIE & Heather Boushey of @equitablegrowth. January 31, 12:15 pm...

There is no Phillips Curve-breakdown puzzle in the behavior of infaltion over the past decade once one recognizes that (a) the employment-to-population ratio and not the unemployment rate is the right measure of how bad the job market is, and (b) that people have been���I think largely because of misinformation from the press���thinking that inflation is higher than it in fact is: Laurence M. Ball and Sandeep Mazumder: The Nonpuzzling Behavior of Median Inflation: "Inflation behavior is easier to understand if we divide headline inflation into core and transitory components, and if core inflation is measured by the weighted median of industry inflation rates... [that] filters out large price changes in all industries. We illustrate the usefulness of the weighted median with a case study of inflation in 2017 and early 2018. We also show that a Phillips curve relating the weighted median to unemployment appears clearly in the data for 1985-2017, with no sign of a breakdown in 2008...

Greg Leiserson has an excellent piece over at MarketWatch for everybody who wants to rapidly get up to speed on what a net-worth wealth tax might be and how it could work: Greg Leiserson: How a wealth tax would work in the United States - MarketWatch: "Policy makers looking for a highly progressive tax instrument that raises substantial revenue would find a net-worth tax appealing. Such a tax would impose burden primarily on the wealthiest families���reducing wealth inequality���and could raise substantial revenues. As noted above, the United States taxes wealth in several forms already. Thus, the policy debate is less about whether to tax wealth and more about the best ways to tax wealth and how much it should be taxed. A net-worth tax could be a useful complement to���or substitute for���other means of taxing wealth, as well as a tool for increasing overall taxation of wealth...

This came out last November 26. Is there anybody���anybody���who thinks that the Federal Reserve would be better prepared for the future and that the economic future would be brighter had the Fed taken Marty's advice and raised interest rates further faster? Anybody? Anyone? Bueller?: Martin Feldstein: Raise Rates Today to Fight a Recession Tomorrow: "A downturn is inevitable as asset prices fall. The Fed can prepare by continuing to raise rates now...

Jack Mclaughlin (1988): Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1429936797: "The young tutor Philip Fithian reported that during a holiday dinner, the dining room at Nomini Hall 'looked luminous and splendid; four very large candles burning on the table where we supp���d, three others in different parts of the room'. A total of seven candles could not have produced a great amount of light by our standards, but eighteenth-century eyes existed in quite another world of nighttime illumination. A single candle was enough to read by, and four candles could be 'luminous and splendid'...

#noted #weblogs

Jack Mclaughlin (1988): Jefferson and Monticello: The Bio...

Jack Mclaughlin (1988): Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1429936797: "The young tutor Philip Fithian reported that during a holiday dinner, the dining room at Nomini Hall 'looked luminous and splendid; four very large candles burning on the table where we supp���d, three others in different parts of the room'. A total of seven candles could not have produced a great amount of light by our standards, but eighteenth-century eyes existed in quite another world of nighttime illumination. A single candle was enough to read by, and four candles could be 'luminous and splendid'...

#noted #books

This came out last November 26. Is there anybody���anybod...

This came out last November 26. Is there anybody���anybody���who now thinks that the Federal Reserve would be better prepared for the future and that the economic future would be brighter had the Fed taken Marty's advice and raised interest rates further faster? Anybody? Anyone? Bueller?: Martin Feldstein: Raise Rates Today to Fight a Recession Tomorrow: "A downturn is inevitable as asset prices fall. The Fed can prepare by continuing to raise rates now...

...It is in the interest of the next recovery, I believe, that the Fed will continue its steady rate increases.... History does suggest that the current very low unemployment rate will cause inflation to rise.... As I have argued in these pages since 2013, the Fed should have begun raising the fed-funds rate several years earlier. Doing so would have prevented the recent sharp increases in the prices of equities and other assets, which will collapse when long-term interest rates rise. Declining asset prices could destroy a substantial amount of household wealth and push the economy into recession. Unfortunately it is not possible to turn back the clock and prevent the overvaluation of assets and the resulting risk of recession. But I believe that the Fed is raising rates today so that it will be in a better position to offset a future economic decline.... Though it would have been better for the Fed to start raising rates earlier, the Fed is right to increase the short-term rate now so that it will have as much ammunition as possible when the next downturn comes...

#shouldread

Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (February 27, 2019)

Modern Economic Growth Lecture Slides

Comment of the Day: PGL: "Your October 2006 take down of that Moore spin noted that Lancet II was not inconsistent with Lancet I (Moore tried to suggest otherwise). The Guardian story from October 11, 2006 is a must-read confirming your view and basically suggesting Moore is a lying idiot...

Weekend Reading: The Kentucky Strain of American Nationalism: From J. William Ward: "Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age": "'But Jackson he was wide awake/and wasn���t scared with trifles/For well he knew what aim we take/with our Kentucky rifles/So he marched us down to ���Cyprus Swamp���/The ground was low and mucky/There stood ���John Bull,��� in martial pomp/But here was old Kentucky...'

Comment of the Day: Robert Waldmann: "I will NOT give Elaine Kamarck credit for going after Obama for not going after Wall Street. This is the same Elaine Kamarck who wrote a paper advocating for Fannie Mae shareholders.... Now after serving as a hack and one of the vultures' vultures she is utterly shameless enough to accuse Obama of going easy on Wall Street. This woman has no integrity and not useful role...

The State of America's Political-Public Sphere

Note to Self: I am voting for: "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" #spiderverse...

Debt-Derangement Syndrome: No Longer Fresh at Project Syndicate���Long Version

Sean Illing: "Fascism: A Warning" from Madeleine Albright: "The former secretary of state is sounding the alarm about rising fascism around the world���and in America...

David Goldenberg: The Famous Photo of Chernobyl's Most Dangerous Radioactive Material Was a Selfie - Atlas Obscura: "at first glance, it���s hard to know what���s happening in this picture. A giant mushroom seems to have sprouted in a factory floor, where ghostly men in hardhats seem to be working. But there���s something undeniably eerie about the scene, for good reason. You���re looking at the largest agglomeration of one of the most toxic substances ever created: corium...

Neil Irwin: How America Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Deficits and Debt: "The old rules are being rejected, among liberals and conservatives, politicians and economists...

James Fallows: @jamesfallows: "If you have any experience in government, you will find these 78 seconds stupefying. And if you don���t, let me tell you: this is stupefying. (Lighthizer is right about how international trade agreements work): JM Rieger: @RiegerReport: 'TRUMP: I don���t like MOUs because they don���t mean anything. LIGHTHIZER: An MOU is a contract. TRUMP: I disagree. I think that a memorandum of understanding is not a contract to the extent that we want. CHINA���S VICE PREMIER: [Chuckles] Okay...

Jason Zengerle: The Series of Historical Mistakes That Led to Trump: "Tomasky proposes a raft of reforms to get us out of the polarized mess we find ourselves in. Some, like ending partisan gerrymandering and getting rid of the Senate filibuster, are familiar. Others, like reviving 'moderate Republicanism', are probably futile. But some of his proposals���including... exchange programs... so students from rural areas spend a semester at a high school in a city, and vice versa���are both realistic and novel. Indeed, the most helpful���if sobering���point Tomasky makes is that while our current troubles created the conditions that brought us a President Trump, those troubles would exist no matter who was in the White House. And it will take much more than a new occupant to fix them...

Wikipedia: The Act of Killing: "Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and co-directed by Christine Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian.... The Act of Killing won the 2013 European Film Award for Best Documentary, the Asia Pacific Screen Award, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 86th Academy Awards. It also won best documentary at the 67th BAFTA awards...

BWW: Review Roundup: Critics Weigh In On Berkeley Rep's Paradise Square: An American Musical

Yannay Spitzer: Research Papers

Yannay Spitzer: Bits and Pieces of My Work and Interests

Philip Klotzbach: @philklotzbach: "Supertyphoon #Wutip has now generated the most Accumulated Cyclone Energy for any Northwest Pacific #typhoon during February on record (since 1950), breaking old record set by Nancy (1970). #SuperTyphoonWutip...

Wikipedia: Supertyphoon Wutip: "Early on February 25, Wutip reached its peak intensity as a Category 5-equivalent super typhoon, with maximum 10-minute sustained winds of 195 km/h (120 mph), 1-minute sustained winds of 260 km/h (160 mph), and a minimum central pressure of 915 hPa (mbar). As of 12:00 UTC on February 25, Typhoon Wutip is located near 14.2��N 140.1��E, also about 280 nautical miles (520 km; 320 mi) north-northeast of Yap. Maximum 10-minute sustained winds are at 105 knots (195 km/h; 120 mph), while maximum 1-minute sustained winds are at 130 knots (240 km/h; 150 mph), with gusts up to 150 knots (280 km/h; 175 mph)...

Shushman Choudhury, Michelle Lee, and Andrey Kurenkov: In Favor of Developing Ethical Best Practices in AI Research

Miniver Cheevy: DeLong's Principles Of Neoliberalism

No s---: Economist: How Welfare Reform Has Had a Negative Effect on the Children of Single Mothers: "Any short-term gains from welfare reform may have come at a cost to the next generation, leading to more of the type of behaviour associated with a ���culture of poverty��� that the reform was meant to combat...

Simon Potter: Models Only Get You So Far: "My remarks will focus on some insights from the book Superforecasting by... Tetlock and... Gardner.... What are some of the underlying reasons individuals and organizations fail to predict? What should we change about our mindsets and practices to improve the chances that we 'notice it' next time, whenever that may be?... Be humble, always question, listen to alternative views, and���very comfortingly for Bayesians like me���always express your forecast as a distribution rather than a point forecast, and crucially update that forecast when new information arrives. Further, constantly assess why forecasts worked and didn't work...

Wikipedia: The Hunters of Kentucky

Charles Bramesco: War and Peace: Sergei Bondarchuk���s Adaptation Is One of Film���s Great Epics: "The biggest blockbuster in Soviet history is returning to movie screens in 2019. It���s compulsively watchable���and absolutely worth seeing.... In any serious, sober-minded discussion about what could be selected to exemplify the farthest reaches of cinema���s capabilities, War and Peace���Sergei Bondarchuk���s largely unseen adaptation of Tolstoy���s literary classic���would have to be on the table. The story of its production, of a man moving heaven and Earth to realize a staggering vision, boggles the mind to this day. The adaptation set a new standard for 'epic', capturing all the passion and tragedy of Napoleon���s clash against the Russian aristocracy in its seven-hour sprawl. Anyone who hears '431 minutes of War and Peace' and imagines an airless museum exhibit passing itself off as a film has another thing coming...

An excellent catch from Equitable Growth's Michael Kades here. The debate over hospital mergers was mostly about whether scale-driven improvements in quality and reductions in cost would or would not be outweighed by the harm done by greater monopoly-power margins in charges to insurance companies and to patients. But it is looking increasingly likely that there are no scale driven improvements in quality or reductions in costs. He sends us to the extremely sharp Austin Frakt: Michael Kades: "The hospital industry, perhaps more than any other, had argued that consolidation will improve quality. Data increasingly says no: Austin Frakt: Hospital Mergers Improve Health? Evidence Shows the Opposite: "The claim was that larger organizations would be able to harness economies of scale and offer better care...

Larry Kudlow (April 7, 2008): The Therapeutic Power of Recessions: "Let���s also remember that recessions are therapeutic. They���re even necessary to create the foundations for the next recovery. Economic excesses always occur in free-market capitalist economies, and from time to time they must be cleansed. Just think about the excessive risk-speculation, leverage, and housing prices of the current episode. If anything, recessions make for clean starts...

Matt Bruenig: What���s the Point of Modern Monetary Theory?: "I have only ever written about MMT one time way back in 2013... pondering whether MMT is really just a very roundabout way of arguing that we should manage the price level through the fiscal authority and the debt level through the monetary authority rather than the other way around.... In the six years after my 2013 post, it has become clear to me that the bulk of MMT discourse is not really about what the best policy instruments are for maintaining price stability and debt stability, but rather about using word games to make people believe that the US can have Northern European levels of government spending without Northern European levels of taxation...

Josh Barro: Modern Monetary Theory Doesn���t Make Single-payer Any Easier: "The government is not constrained by its ability to obtain dollars, but the economy is constrained by real limits on productive capacity. If the government prints and spends money when the economy is at or near full employment, MMT counsels (correctly) that this will lead to inflation, and prescribes deficit-reducing tax increases to reduce aggregate demand and thereby control inflation...

Again if you want to negotiate with China over IP, you start by joining and strengthening the TPP so that the TPP can then confront China about the rules of the globalization game in the Pacific. You do not blow up the TPP on day 1, then follow that by ginning up fake complaints about NAFTA that you then walk away from, and then think there is a chance you will win something substantive and valuable that is against China's interest. My problem with this whole line of columns from Marty is that it ignores the fact that Trump is Trump, and has a history and a practice of not understanding the issues and then folding: Martin Feldstein: Will the US Capitulate to China?: "It���s beginning to look like US President Donald Trump will yield to the Chinese in America���s trade conflict with China.... The most important problem... is that the Chinese are stealing US firms��� technology.... US firms that want to do business in China are required to have a Chinese partner and to share their technology.... That... is explicitly forbidden by World Trade Organization rules.... Second, the Chinese use the Internet to enter the computer systems of US firms and steal technology and blueprints.... Such cyber theft has resumed, presumably because state-owned companies and others have the ability to reach into the computer systems of US firms... The key issue is technology theft. Unless the Chinese agree to stop stealing technology, and the two sides devise a way to enforce that agreement, the US will not have achieved anything useful from Trump���s tariffs...

This is very sad: Mike Boskin goes into intellectual and moral bankruptcy. Chapter 7. no, Trump did not reach for bipartisan consensus on any important issues in his SoTU address. Call in the auctioneers: Michael J. Boskin: The Race to Challenge Trump: "The challenge for Trump in 2020 will be to persuade enough voters in the middle to give him another four years, despite their discomfort with some of his behavior. It remains to be seen whether Trump can tone down his tweeting to offend fewer potential voters and, as in his recent State of the Union address, reach for bipartisan compromise on important issues...

Very sorry that I am going to miss this: Sam Bowles: The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives are No Substitute for Good Citizens: "It is widely held today on grounds of prudence if not realism that in designing public policy and legal systems, we should assume that people are entirely self-interested and amoral. But it is anything but prudent to let homo economicus be the behavioral assumption that underpins public policy. Bowles will explain why this is so, using evidence from behavioral experiments mechanism design and other sources, and propose an alternative paradigm for policy making...

Also very sorry to miss: Niskanen Center: Beyond Left and Right: Reviving Moderation in an Era of Crisis and Extremism: "Welcoming Address from: David Brooks, New York Times columnist and author. Keynote speech by: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Panelists... Brink Lindsey, Frances Lee, Martin Gurri, Margaret Hoover, Will Wilkinson, Elaine Kamarck, Damon Linker, Yascha Mounk, Geoffrey Kabaservice, Aurelian Craiutu, Jacob Levy, Andrew Sullivan, Sam Tanenhaus...

The Kentucky Strain of American nationalism: J. William Ward (1962): Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age 0195006992 http://amzn.to/2jAbLvi: "IN the spring of 1822, Noah M. Ludlow, prominent in the beginnings of the theater in the western United States was in New Orleans. One day early in May he received, as was the custom in the early theater, a ���benefit��� night. Remembering the occasion some years later, Ludlow could not recollect what pieces had been acted on that evening but he did recall doing something that was as a rule ���entirely out of [his] line of business.��� As an added attraction he had sung a song he thought might please the people. The song was ���The Hunters of Kentucky���...

#noted #weblogs

Modern Economic Growth Lecture Slides

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0m1Ser_mPMUYJ2H2EvS8ydlTw

#berkeley #economicgrowth #teachinggrowth #highlighted

Comment of the Day: PGL: "Your October 2006 take down of ...

Comment of the Day: PGL: "Your October 2006 take down of that Moore spin noted that Lancet II was not inconsistent with Lancet I (Moore tried to suggest otherwise). The Guardian story from October 11, 2006 is a must read confirming your view and basically suggesting Moore is a lying idiot: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/oct/11/iraq.iraq

#commentoftheday

The Kentucky Strain of American Nationalism: From J. William Ward: "Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age"

J. William Ward (1962): Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age 0195006992 http://amzn.to/2jAbLvi: "IN the spring of 1822, Noah M. Ludlow, prominent in the beginnings of the theater in the western United States...

...was in New Orleans. One day early in May he received, as was the custom in the early theater, a ���benefit��� night. Remembering the occasion some years later, Ludlow could not recollect what pieces had been acted on that evening but he did recall doing something that was as a rule ���entirely out of [his] line of business.��� As an added attraction he had sung a song he thought might please the people. The song was ���The Hunters of Kentucky.���

The lyrics of ���The Hunters of Kentucky��� had been written by Samuel Woodworth, better known today for having written ���The Old Oaken Bucket.��� Noah claimed his brother had seen the poem and since it ���tickled his fancy��� had sent it along to New Orleans. Noah adapted the words to the tune ���Miss Baily,��� which was taken from the comic opera Love Laughs at Locksmiths, and decided to sing it for his New Orleans audience. When the night came [remembered Noah]:

I found the pit, or parquette, of the theatre crowded full of ���river men,������that is, keel-boat and flat-boat men. There were very few steamboat men. These men were easily known by their linsey-woolsey clothing and blanket coats. As soon as the comedy of the night was over, I dressed myself in a buckskin hunting-shirt and leggins, which I had borrowed of a river man, and with moccasins on my feet, and an old slouched hat on my head, and a rifle on my shoulder, I presented myself before the audience. I was saluted with loud applause of hands and feet, and a prolonged whoop, or howl, such as Indians give when they are especially pleased.

I sang the first verse, and these extraordinary manifestations of delight were louder and longer than before; but when I came to the following lines:

But Jackson he was wide awake,

and wasn���t scared with trifles,

For well he knew what aim we take

with our Kentucky rifles;

So he marched us down to ���Cyprus Swamp���;

The ground was low and mucky;

There stood ���John Bull,��� in martial pomp,

But here was old Kentucky.

As I delivered the last five words, I took my old hat off my head, threw it upon the ground, and brought my rifle to the position of taking aim. At that instant came a shout and an Indian yell from, the inmates of the pit, and a tremendous applause from other portions of the house, the whole lasting for nearly a minute, and, as Edmund Kean told his wife, after his first great success in London, ���the house rose to me!��� The whole pit was standing up and shouting. I had to sing the song three times that night before they would let me off.

Thus was launched one of America���s most popular songs.

Its popularity quickly became a source of annoyance to Ludlow since he was forced to sing it two or three times wherever he appeared. It plagued him so that he gave it to the local papers thinking to kill it but he achieved the opposite result; he simply created a wider audience for the song. ���The Hunters of Kentucky��� became so popular ���that you could hear it sung or whistled almost any day as you passed along the principal thoroughfares of the city.���

The widespread circulation of the song was helped along by friends of Andrew Jackson who recognized its use and printed and circulated large editions of it; Thomas Low Nichols remembered that in 1828 ���the land rang with ���The Hunters of Kentucky.������ At Jackson Day Dinners on the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans the song was rendered as part of the entertainment and sometimes sung by the whole company seated at dinner. As one anonymous student of campaign songs says, ������The Hunters of Kentucky��� had much to do with arousing sentiment [for Jackson in 1828].��� A contemporary of the period in which ���The Hunters of Kentucky��� had its greatest vogue remarked about campaign songs in general that ���it is not necessary that [a song] should possess much literary merit; if it condenses into some rhythmic form, a popular thought, emotion or purpose.���

The question then is: what popular thought or emotion is expressed in ���The Hunters of Kentucky���? Taken over almost immediately for political purposes, the song is the final expression given to a widely held assumption why Andrew Jackson was able to defeat the British at New Orleans. In ���The Hunters of Kentucky��� version of the battle, the terrible slaughter inflicted upon the British was the result of the skill of the frontier rifleman. As might be anticipated from the fact that it worked its way into a popular song, this version of the Battle of New Orleans was widely current from 1815 until it received its classic enunciation in Ludlow���s presentation in 1822.

Before we examine ���The Hunters of Kentucky��� version of the victory at New Orleans and its popular acceptance, it can be flatly asserted that Jackson���s overwhelming victory can in no way be attributed to the sharpshooting skill of the American frontiersman; further, that fact was recognized by those who took part in the battle and also in the immediate newspaper accounts of the battle. So what we have in ���The Hunters of Kentucky��� is the imputation to a historical event of a cause which has no basis except in the widespread desire of Americans to believe their own imaginative construction of the battle....

Although it is true that the British were sitting-ducks for the American army, the fact does not necessarily detract from the skill of the American riflemen, although skill would seem to be irrelevant in the circumstances. Two other considerations, however, clinch the case against the marksmanship brief. One is that the Americans simply could not see well enough to bring to bear any skill they may have possessed. A participant���s letter, although marked by a certain lack of critical balance, suggests this: ���The atmosphere was filled with sheets of fire and volumes of smoke��� Our men ��� took steady and deliberate aim, and almost every shot told.���

Not only was the field obscured by the smoke of battle, but the attack was made in the half-light of dawn and fine shooting was impossible. One of the actual riflemen recalled that:

it was so dark that little could be seen, until just about the time that the battle ceased��� the smoke was so thick that everything seemed to be covered up in it.

Contemporary accounts contained some ambiguous statements, such as the one in the letter to the National Intelligencer just quoted, but in general the first news of the battle correctly attributed the havoc done among the British to the American cannon, rather than to rifle fire. The National Intelligencer, Extra, the first eastern announcement of the battle, carried a letter from an American officer who referred to the terrible toll of British dead and wounded as ���being generally from our cannon.��� Another on the scene account said:

Our artillery was fired upon their whole columns, about an hour and a half, within good striking distance, whilst advancing and retreating, with grape & cannister; and the slaughter must have been great.

Andrew Jackson���s victory address to his troops on January 21, 1815, also recognized the prime importance of the American cannon fire. The condition of the British casualties testified further to the source of their wounds: ���their wounds are horrible���they are indeed mutilated���there is none of them who have less than three or four wounds, and some have even eight and ten; they have been thus crippled by our grape shot.��� Even when those on the scene attributed the American victory to ���sheer superiority in firing��� there was no mention of what kind of firing.

Despite available records as to what did happen at New Orleans, there gradually arose the legend that the British were slaughtered because of the sharpshooting skill of the American frontiersman. The first anecdotes which circulated through the nation were plausible, even if, as one suspects, apocryphal. One particularly went the rounds. It was copied from paper to paper, always under the same heading, ���Sharp Shooting.��� It told of the death of the British officer who led the attack on the American right flank and who was killed after taking possession of the isolated redoubt there. After the battle there was some argument among the American militia about who had been responsible for killing the officer, a Colonel Rennie:

One said if Rannie [sic] had been shot just below the left eye he would claim the merit, otherwise not���for that is where he had aimed the ball. On inspection, it was found that Rannie had been shot as predicted by the marksman!

Since Rennie had penetrated right to the American line there is a possibility that this anecdote might have been founded in truth and that such a feat of marksmanship had been executed. However, the British officer who conveyed the news of Rennie���s death to his relatives in England, and who had examined his body after the battle, reported that Rennie had died of two bullet wounds in the head which suggests that he fell under a hail of bullets and not by the act of a single marksman.

Similar to this story was the one about the ���Humane Rifleman.��� This concerned a Tennesseean who beckoned to an English officer reconnoitering the American line prior to the battle to come in and surrender, which the officer did. When asked why, the Englishman replied, ���I had no alternative; for I have been told these d���d Yankee riflemen can pick a squirrel���s eye out as far as they can see it.���

Neither of these anecdotes, be it observed, relates to the main battle area, although both obviously attest to the belief in the frontiersman as an excellent rifleman.

In 1820, two years before Noah Ludlow enshrined the legend of ���The Hunters of Kentucky��� in song, Marshal Count Bertrand Clausel, who at Salamanca had commanded the French division that had been defeated by Packenham, and Count Desnoettes, who had been with Napoleon at Moscow, visited the battlefield of New Orleans. These gallant and distinguished Frenchmen [relates Walker, the contemporary historian of the Battle of New Orleans]

���were greatly puzzled to know how such good soldiers as the English could be repulsed by so weak a force from such trifling fortifications. ���Ah!��� exclaimed Marshall Clausel, after some moments of reflection, ���I see how it all happened. When these Americans go into battle they forget they are not hunting deer or shooting turkeys and try never to throw away a shot.���

And there [remarks Walker] was the whole secret of the defeat, which the British have ascribed to so many different causes.

Thus the story grew until the author of An Epick Poem on the Battle of New Orleans could characterize Jackson���s fighting force in this fashion:

���Rude their sun-burnt men, In simple garb of foresters are seen��� But mark���they know with death the bead to sight, And draw the centre of the heart in fight.

And the account of the Battle of New Orleans in The Jackson Wreath could sum up the conflict with the statement that ���the fatal aim of the western marksmen was never so terribly exemplified.���

It would not be worth establishing the fact that contemporaries were mistaken in ascribing the cause of the victory at New Orleans to the skill of the western frontiersman, if there were nothing more to the matter than a mistake. But in singling out ���the western farmer,��� or ���the frontiersman,��� as the cause of the victory, the imagination of the American people was trying to make the account of the Battle of New Orleans buttress one of its favorite concepts; that, as I suggested in commenting on Representative Troup���s speech, ���The Hunters of Kentucky��� version of the Battle of New Orleans is an attempt to establish the empowering force of nature as the cause of the American victory over the disciplined soldiery of Europe. The point is not that frontier life did not create good marksmen, which it may have, but that a prevailing attitude toward nature caused Americans to ascribe the victory at New Orleans to the frontier farmer although the facts did not support such a version.

Jackson himself implicitly accepted the view that nature was somehow in the background of the American victory. In his address, ���To the Embodied Militia,��� on December 28, 1814, before the main engagement, Jackson complimented his ���fellow citizens and soldiers��� on their noble ardor:

Inhabitants of an opulent and commercial town [he went on to say], you have by a spontaneous effort shaken off the habits, which are created by wealth, and shewn that you are resolved to deserve the blessings of fortune by bravely defending them.

Jackson���s thought is here stated in terms of historical primitivism. It is assumed that the advance of wealth and material well-being saps moral and physical strength. Negatively there is the implication that the condition of man in a state of nature is somehow superior. One will notice, however, that Jackson is addressing the inhabitants of an opulent and commercial town; there would be no sense in making a statement such as this to farmers from the frontier regions of Kentucky.

We thus come to realize that ���The Hunters of Kentucky��� account of the Battle of New Orleans has drastically altered the facts to fit its particular version. Concentration on the marksmanship of the frontiersman has required the neglect of a large number of others who were also engaged in the defense of New Orleans. Thus, what is the most popular account of Jackson���s victory has no place for the part played by the French Creoles, the Free Men of Color, the regular troops, the Barratarian Pirates, or the citizens of the city of New Orleans. Of the 3,569 troops on the line on the morning of the eighth, only 2100, Coffee���s and Adair���s men, fit the frontiersman category. This means that ���The Hunters of Kentucky��� version has, by its focus, been forced to dismiss more than 41 per cent of the total from consideration, a considerable alteration of the facts. Of the Kentucky troops on hand, most were held in reserve, back of the main line of defense, for the very good reason that only 550 arrived with any arms. Jackson complained that ���hardly one-third of the Kentucky troops, so long expected, are armed, and the arms they have are not fit for use.���

The fact that no more than one-third of the Hunters of Kentucky had rifles in their hands during the battle further depreciates the legend of their sharpshooting at New Orleans.

It is almost too happy for present purposes that after the Battle of New Orleans had ended a controversy arose over the relative shooting ability of General Coffee���s famed mounted brigade of Tennessee Volunteers and Beale���s Rifle Company which was composed of ���leading merchants and professional characters of the city, who had formed themselves into a volunteer corps.��� To decide the issue a shooting match was held; against the frontiersmen, fresh from their plows, the inhabitants of an opulent city won the trial of skill.

The view that it was the special worth of the American frontiersman that accounts for Jackson���s victory was not only unhistorical, it was astigmatic. The assertion of the frontiersman not only dictated a cause of victory which simply did not pertain, it demanded the rejection of all who did not fit its particular version, who did not spring from frontier life...

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