J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2278

Ezra Klein on Ross Doutaht

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

Ezra Klein:

ELiberals and Barack Obama: Ross Douthat writes that "technically, [liberals:] could be right" that deficit spending would accelerate job growth, but it doesn't matter because the votes don't exist for it.... I don't think it logically follows that the people who might have the right idea about how to solve the problem should stop pressuring politicians to support that idea....

Douthat's column is sort of an amused...

I Am in Shock...

I just deleted the seventeen paragraphs I liked the most from the ms. of Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the Twentieth Century. They just don't fit the book as a whole.

Now I need strong drink...

Now there were exceptions to this rule that even well into the age of the Industrial Revolution humans were by and large worse off than our hunter-gatherer ancestors--that post-hunter gatherer pre-industrial life was really nasty, brutish, and short. These exceptions are three...

Classical Roots of "Winter's Bone"?

Am I the only person who saw "Winter's Bone" as a riff on Antigone?

It has a different beginning, true--her heroine's quest is launched by the appearance of Hermes Diaktoros in the form of the local sheriff. It has a different ending, true--we have Apollo Apotropaeos in the form of A-1 Bail Bonds arriving at the end as the deus ex machina. And it has a journey to the underworld called for by her duty to the family at the heart of her heroine's quest, but so (in a sense) does Antigone.

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Felix Salmon on Edmund Andrews Scoring of Greenspan vs, Krugman as a Draw

Good to know that Felix agrees with me. Much better than "the lurkers agree with me in email." Felix Salmon:

How to avoid a fiscal panic: Edmund Andrews adjudicates dueling op-eds by Paul Krugman and Alan Greenspan on the subject of fiscal policy, and although he purports to come down somewhere in the middle, by the time he’s finished his prescriptions end up sounding very much like those of Krugman. Andrews is right to dismiss Greenspan’s weird focus on the 10-year swap spread as the...

Obama's Appointing Alan Simpson to Co-Chair the Long-Run Deficit Commission Was a Really Big Mistake

"He never met a budget-busting proposal by a Republican president that he did not work like a dog to pass, or a deficit-reducing proposal by a Democratic president that he would not move heaven and earth to try to stop," I would say. "Why, in the Name of the One Who Was, Is, and Is to Come, would you ever name a budget arsonist like Alan Simpson to run your budget fire department--your deficit commission?"

I would be assured that he had changed--that he had come face-to-face with reality on...

Liveblogging World War II: June 21, 1940

On the authorization of French Secretary of the Navy Darlan, the light cruiser Massilia departs Bordeaux for North Africa with senior French government officials who had just been replaced two days before--ex-Premier Edouard Daladier, ex-Secretary of the Navy Cesar Campinchi, ex-Secretary of the Interior Georges Mandel, and more than twenty others--to set up an alternative government in North Africa and perhaps to continue the war on behalf of the French Empire even after the surrender of...

Paul Krugman: Spend Now, Save Later

Paul Krugman:

Spend Now, Save Later: Spend now, while the economy remains depressed; save later, once it has recovered. How hard is that to understand? Very hard, if the current state of political debate is any indication....

At the moment, as you may have noticed, the U.S. government is running a large budget deficit. Much of this deficit, however, is the result of the ongoing economic crisis.... As the crisis abates, things will improve. The Congressional Budget Office... predicts...

Meth Culture in Missouri

Winter's Bone, highly recommended...

links for 2010-06-20

Ball and Romer: Real Rigidities and the Non-Neutrality of Money







Ball and Romer: Real Rigidities and the Non-Neutrality of Money







Andrew Leonard: In the hot tub time machine with Alan Greenspan: The "Maestro" tells Americans we can't afford our future. Ten years ago, he sang a different tune







Matthew Yglesias: The Unavoidability of Long-Term Austerity

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DeLong Smackdown Watch for June 20, 2010: Gavin Kennedy on Adam Smith and the Industrial Revolution

Gavin Kennedy:

Adam Smith's Lost Legacy: Brad Delong on Karl Marx and Adam Smith: Smart modern economists [like DeLong:], with the full panoply of research tools available to them on their desktops, blame Smith for not being aware, or worse, deliberately ignoring, the ‘many signs’ of what became known as the ‘industrial revolution’. They ignore the evident facts that a single local large manufacturer (Carron Iron, near Falkirk), mainly casting iron products using known technology, did not...