J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 226

Comment of the Day: Robert Waldmann: "I will NOT give Ela...

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:

Take the paper by Shapiro and Elaine Kamarck, touted as the independent views of officials from both the Obama and Clinton administrations, that comes to the conclusion that the hedge funds ought to be paid dollars for the shares of Fannie Mae they bought for pennies... https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/vulture-fund-lobbying_us_57350001e4b077d4d6f2a374

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 in any discussion. Her dismal record of advocating welfare reform for purely partisan political reasons might not be enough to earn exclusion from polite society, but the gross, monstrous, appalling hypocrisy she recently displayed is too much. The Niskanen Center tainted itself by offering her a platform. If hacks who sell out can keep their ill gotten gains and their reputation, then the debate will continue to be contaminated by mercenaries...

#commentoftheday

The State of America's Political-Public Sphere

One of my twitter threads from yesterday: I think it is fair to say that the already-broken American political public sphere has become significantly more broken since November 8, 2018.

On the center and to the left, those like me in what used to proudly call itself the Rubin Wing of the Democratic Party���so-called after former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, and consisting of those of us hoping to use market means to social democratic ends in bipartisan coalition with Republicans seeking technocratic win-wins���have passed the baton to our left. Over the past 25 years, we failed to attract Republican coalition partners, we failed to energize our own base, and we failed to produce enough large-scale obvious policy wins to cement the center into a durable governing coalition.

We blame cynical Republican politicians. We blame corrupt and craven media bosses and princelings. We are right to blame them, but shared responsibility is not diminished responsibility. And so the baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left. We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.

On the right, however, things are much worse. Looking to the right of the Rubin Wing of the Democratic Party, we see rubble. Then we see more rubble. And more rubble. Beyond that, rubble. And then, at the far end of the political spectrum, what former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright can only call the American version of a twenty-first century neo-fascism, devoted to entrenching plutocracy and stoking ethnic and religious hatreds, with which a great many people who ought to know better are making accommodation.

Two recent straws in the wind in this space: former Republican CEA Chair Martin Feldstein egging the Trump administration on to an intellectual-property trade war with China without even a whisper of acknowledgement that the Trump administration cannot competently conduct this negotiation; former Republican CEA Chair Michael Boskin claiming tht Trump is reaching "for bipartisan compromise on important issues", plural.

Pitching their flags in the rubble and hoping to rebuild���in a stunning triumph of optimism of the will over rational pessimism of the intellect that I cannot view with anything other than awe���are The Bulwark and the Niskanen Center (on whose Advisory Board I sit).

What can those of us who sit to the left of the Niskanen Center and who do wish for a healthy public sphere���i.e., those of us who are not interested in concern trolling for the moment, as much fun as concern trolling is���do to be genuinely helpful?

We can only give advice.

I think that the first piece of advice to give is: restrict yourself to #nevertrump. Trumpists are either morons, grifters, or deluded. Those who have made accomodation with neo-fascism to any substantial degree are not people you want around���they will, for one reason or another, stab you in the back the first moment that it seems opportune. Failing to require a #nevertrump litmus test seems wise. Admittedly, it is unlikely to lead to power and Fox News. But it is the right thing to do. And I urge you to Do the Right Thing.

Second, I at least regard your cultural-historical task as being to wean Republicans away from Trumpist neo-fascism as an orienting frame. Trumpist neo-fascism is, I think, a version of Kentucky-style American nationalism' cf. J. William Ward: Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age. Kentucky-style American nationalism is a species of standard blood-and-soil nationalism: People have moved to Kentucky because they want elbow room and do not like being forced by government and society to conform, and once people are in Kentucky they become the kinds of people who can build a log cabin with their bare hands in 48 hours, and bring down a squirrel for squirrel stew at 300 yards. Thus heredity and environment���blood and soil���produce a special kind of person.

In the Trumpets neo-fascist version, there is a codicil: those who come to the U.S. hoping to live in, say, a little Mogadishu or a little Kishinev or a little Cuzco simply can never fit.

This Trumpist version of blood-and-soil Kentucky-style nationalism is, I believe, highly destructive, pernicious, and positively un-American. It needs to be fought against.

In the center and on the left we fight it with the opposed "Massachusetts" picture of American nationalism���a community engaged in an Errand Unto the Wilderness to build a Utopia that will be a City Upon a Hill, and we are all in this together with no special authorities or leaders because of the Priesthood of All Believers. Never mind that John Winthrop would run screaming from us: we are his children.

The Massachusetts-style American nationalism of election���that America really consists of those of us who have come here to build a common Utopia���is very powerful, much more correct, sociologically healthy, and something we all can be proud of in a sense that is simply not possible for the neo-fascist Trumpist version of Kentucky-style blood-and-soil nationalism. The question is whether the Niskanen Center and the Bulwark can take this Errand-Unto-the-Wildnerness narrative and make it sing for the center-right in anything like the way it sings for the center-left.

So, second, your task is to build up your own version of the Errand-Unto-the-Wilderness narrative of American nationalism.

Third, the Niskanen Center and The Bulwark need to build up distinctive center-right policy positions on important issues���to stake out positions in the rubble that center-right #nevertrumpers can rally around. I see five issue areas as key:

the public sphere.
global warming.
income and wealth distribution at the top.
the social safety net.
the economic growth agenda.

Far be it from me to say what those should be���I have enough on my plate figuring out what my position on these issue areas should be, let alone what the position of others should be. I will confine myself to saying that simple opposition to whatever actual policies wind up under the umbrella of GND is not sufficient���not if you want me and people like me to think you belong in the public sphere. And no, Elaine Kamarck, "shut up and adapt to global warming" is not sufficient either, and���if that is your position because you are too scared to endorse George Shultz's carbon-tax-plus-UBI proposal���you should be ashamed of yourself.

Go for the crash space program to build a giant sun umbrella and park it at Lagrange Point 1 if you wish. At the very least, it will make us a figure of fun to aliens everywhere:

You know the earthlings? They couldn't get their act together to stop burning coal before it started to cook their planet! So do you know what they did? You won't believe it! Rather than cheaply transitioning to green energy THEY TRIED TO BUILD A GIANT SUN UMBRELLA AND PARK IT AT L1!! HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!! Spent a fortune!...

But be for something. And be brave. I know you find it hard. But you are camped there in the rubble, and if you won't Do the Right Thing then go and become a Kentucky-nationalist blood-and-soil neo-fascist Trumpist and stop wasting our time....

#highlighted #publicsphere #politics #moralresponsibility

Marshall Steinbaum went to the Niskanen Center conference...

Marshall Steinbaum went to the Niskanen Center conference on Beyond Left and Right: Reviving Moderation in an Era of Crisis and Extremism. He got hives. Then his phone battery died: Marshall Steinbaum: https://twitter.com/Econ_Marshall/status/1100078529482575872 "Good open from Wilkinson: didn���t moderates get us into this mess in the first place?... Kamarck���s interpretation of the history of the Democratic Party is that New Dems successfully prevented worse outcomes. Certainly not true in antitrust. She���s lamenting that Clinton did not enact ���entitlement reform��� in his second term. ���And that was the end of the center.��� The problem with Bush and Obama was that both men did not have the ���capacity��� to be president. Obama was to weak to resist Wall Street, she says. That���s supposed to exculpate centrism?...

...Kamarck: 'what are we going to end up with in all the talk about Medicare for All? A 55-year-old Medicare buy-in. Because of all the power of the health insurance industry. That���s incrementalism. That���s not bad. That���s great!'....

Mounk points out that Medicare for all is totally internationally standard. Lauding incrementalism as an end to itself erodes democracy. Kamarck���s response is that the promise is what���s corroding democracy. Then she blames social media.... Yascha Mounk attacks ���people on Twitter.��� Apparently we got to him....

Linker is lamenting how the end of the Cold War enabled the rise of identity politics. Then social media ���handed a megaphone to each interest group.��� Wow this is bad.... Now Linker is giving a very ���this happened, then that happened��� theory of recent political history of the right, after Kamarck did the same for Democrats. Missing from both accounts: the right-wing billionaires who control the Republican Party and the larger concentration of corporate power in the economy & in politics. You don���t have those things, you���re recounting a fake history. I hate to say it, but these people aren���t doing justice to Wilkinson���s opening question.... Linker points out that the real center in this country is socially conservative, economically left���the opposite of this whole conference.....

So given that the consensus of the event was that carbon taxes and cap & trade have failed and that the GND is intolerable socialist planning, what is the sensible centrist neoliberal shill plan for climate change? "Adaptation," as Elaine Kamarck said?

#noted

David Walsh went to the Niskanen Center conference on Bey...

David Walsh went to the Niskanen Center conference on Beyond Left and Right: Reviving Moderation in an Era of Crisis and Extremism. He got hives. Then his phone battery died: David Walsh: https://twitter.com/DavidAstinWalsh/status/1100040738371502080: "Guys, this is like if Green Book founded a thinktank. I mean, sure, I can get on board with the basic principle that 'we should all love one another and take care of our children', but... c���mon. When the way you want to do that is an EITC, you���re out of ideas.... Margaret Hoover is now talking.... She did lose me, though, when she called Rick Perry a thoughtful, principled conservative who should have been the future of the movement.... One of the things that strikes me, as someone who is a pretty bad leftie but is at least engaged in the debates on the left... is that none of the speakers here actually know what���s going on on the left! Like, they know the Bush administration and the GOP, but the last time they thought critically about 'the left' was when they were making fun of hippies in college..... Also, they���re really talking up Charlie Baker and Larry Hogan, FWIW...

...Another stray thought: the panelists keep going back to the principled conservatism from the Buckley years without grappling with either how white resistance to integration was one of the key political factors in the ���rise of the right��� from the 1960s through the 1980s, ...or just how much the ���New Right��� was just repackaged anti-New Dealism from the 1930s, often from the sordid ���extremists��� whom Buckley sought to distance himself from!....

Okay, after about an hour and a half, we���re finally getting a conversation about the Civil Rights Act and the fracturing of the New Deal coalition, and the chair even acknowledges the dog whistling! ���We didn���t have to do it!��� Margaret Hoover, sounding flustered: ���Uh, well, I define myself as a Western conservative...��� She acknowledges the centrality of race to the story of the ���rise of the right��� but does not dwell on it....

Elaine Kamarck is now 3 minutes into a defense of everything the New Democrats did in the 1990s, including suggesting that entitlements need to be cut today. I will give her credit for going after Obama for not going after Wall Street, but whereas I���m pretty sure Kamarck means the stimulus wasn���t big enough I think just as big of a deal was that nobody went to jail. That a political party build around entitlement cuts is not going to be the vehicle to take on Wall Street seems to have escaped her notice...

#noted

February 25, 2018 Economic History Seminar: Yannay Spitze...

February 25, 2018 Economic History Seminar: Yannay Spitzer: Pale in Comparison: The Economic Ecology of the Jews as a Rural Service Minority: "The five million Jews who lived in the Pale of Settlement at the turn of the century were overwhelmingly over-represented in towns and in cities. They specialized in seemingly urban occupations, were relatively literate, and were almost absent in agriculture. This pattern persisted overseas where one-third of them would eventually immigrate. Hence, Jews were typically characterized as an urban minority. I argue that the opposite was true. The economic ecology of the Jews, the patterns of choices of occupation and location, are described in a model in which Jews were countryside workers with a comparative advantage in rural commerce, complementing agricultural workers, and without comparative advantage in denser urban settings...

...Using data from the 1897 census, I show that the cross-sectional patterns across districts and localities were consistent with all the predictions of this model. When the share of Jews in the population grew, Jews spilled across two margins���occupational, as manufacturing workers, and geographic, as rural frontier men. Non-Jews were imperfect substitute for Jews, rendering the latter indispensable to the countryside economy. No evidence of urban advantage is evident in the data. Turn of the century Pale of Settlement Jews ought to be understood as rural workers, in and of the countryside. In this light, the patterns exhibited in the US after immigration appear as a sharp break from, rather than a continuation of, old country economic tradition...

https://yannayspitzer.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/pic_main_150309.pdf

#noted

Also very sorry to be missing this morning: Niskanen Cent...

Also very sorry to be missing this morning: 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...

#noted

Very sorry that I am going to miss this: Sam Bowles: The ...

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...

#noted

This is very sad: Mike Boskin goes into intellectual and ...

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...

#noted

Again if you want to negotiate with China over IP, you st...

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 tha 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...

#noted

Charles Bramesco: War and Peace: Sergei Bondarchuk���s Ad...

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...

#noted