J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2259

links for 2010-07-09

Julian Sanchez: The Mystery of Mary Rosh







Henry Farrell on the Odious Tom Donohue and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Markets in Everything: Political Deniability Edition

HF: "The Washington Monthly's piece on the US Chamber of Commerce has a killer quote. "It also established a branch of a front group, the Campaign for Responsible Health Reform, and hired a Little Rock Republican strategist to run it. The strategist...

Rudyard Kipling: The Grave of the Hundred Head

Kipling:

The Grave of the Hundred Head: There's a widow in sleepy Chester/Who weeps for her only son;


There's a grave on the Pabeng River,/A grave that the Burmans shun,


And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri/Who tells how the work was done.

A Snider squibbed in the jungle,/Somebody laughed and fled,


And the men of the First Shikaris/Picked up their Subaltern dead,


With a big blue mark in his forehead/And the back blown out of his head.

Subadar Prag...

Fiscal Policy, Logical Coherence, and Crowding Out Watch: Are There No Pencils?! Are There No Backs-of-Envelopes?!

Hoo boy! Would somebody please give Greg Mankiw an envelope, so that he can do arithmetic on the back of it before he writes again?

Greg Mankiw:

Greg Mankiw: Are stimulus skeptics logically incoherent?: Paul Krugman writes:

There’s now a lot of talk about the fact that U.S. corporations are sitting on a lot of cash, but not spending it. I don’t find that particularly puzzling: with huge excess capacity, why invest in building even more capacity. But almost everyone seems to...

Leon Trotsky Liveblogs World War II: July 9, 1940

Leon Trotsky:

On Conscription (1940): It is very important to understand that the war does not nullify or diminish the importance of our Transitional Program. Just the contrary is true. The Transitional Program is a bridge between the present situation and the proletarian revolution. The characteristic of war is that it accelerates the development....

We are absolutely in favor of compulsory military training and in the same way for conscription. Conscription? Yes. By the bourgeois...

Liveblogging World War II: July 11, 1940

About L.P.J. De Decker:

Lithuania Honours a Holocaust Rescuer: L.P.J. De Decker, the Dutch Ambassador to the Baltic states who was based in Riga, Latvia.... In July 1940 Pessla Lewin, a former Dutch citizen who was now a Polish refugee living in Lithuania with her husband Isaac and son Nathan, took the gamble of writing to De Decker, who was still the Dutch ambassador. She requested authorization to emigrate to the Dutch West Indies. She learned that no visa was required but that she...

links for 2010-07-08

Mark Thoma: Don't Expect Miracles from Monetary Policy







Paul Krugman: How Much Can The Fed Help?







Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: Why I'm still a sticky-price macroeconomist, despite everything

Methinks Nick Rowe suffers from Stockholm syndrome





http://fiziko.bureau42.com/classic_fail.pdf







Eric Alterman...

The Spartakist Uprising

From Sefton Delmer (1972), Weimar Germany: Democracy on Trial (MacDonald and Company), p. 32:

Karl Liebknecht... ordered... Petty Officer Lemmgen to occupy the... Ministry of War on behalf of the Revolutionary Council at the head of 300 armed soldiers from the People's Naval Division.... Lemmgen... at the Ministry, he found a young lieutenant, Bruno Hamburger... as duty officer. Lieutenant Hambuger challenged Lemmgen’s authority and demanded to be shown his credentials.... Lemmgen...

Duncan Black and Adam Blink Are More than Shrill...

Duncan Black writes:

Government Cannot Create Jobs : Back on Stimulus Anniversary day, Jared Bernstein expressed some discontent with the degree to which liberal media folks were selling the stimulus. The administration does not make it easy to do so.

And Adam Blink:

Open Left:: Mixed messaging:

This is... bewilderment at how the White House sometimes says two different things in its messaging.... BP... "we're in charge here, we will stop this" on one day, then "only...

Global Temperature Anomalies...

Menzie Chinn sends us to NOAA:

Econbrowser: May Global Surface Mean Temp Anomalies: Business Week on record temperatures on the East Coast; AOL on global climate change and the probabilities of record-setting temperature episodes. See also Christian Science Monitor:

Indeed, 2010 is set to be one of the world’s hottest years on record, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA). The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for...

General Internet Beg and Call for Help: Slouching Towards Utopia Chapter 15: The Knot of War

I have to have a chapter on World War I in a history of the twentieth century--even an economic history of the twentieth century.

But is this the chapter I want to have? Sometimes I think definitely yes, sometimes I think definitely not. I am having the hardest time settling on what this chapter should be--much harder than I am having with any of the other chapters...

Advice and suggestions generally wanted...

Slouching Towards Utopia?: The Economic History of the Twentieth Century...