J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2288

Shame on Oxford University Press!

Ranald Michie should get a different publisher. Just saying:

The Global Securities Market: A History (9780199280629): Ranald Michie (Author).... Amazon Price... Kindle Edition $39.96  

Winston Churchill Liveblogs World War II: June 11, 1940

Churchill:

[O:]n June 3 [General Marshall:] approved the lists... half a million .30 caliber rifles... 250 cartridges apiece... 900 "soixante-quinze" field guns... a million rounds, 80,000 machine guns, various other items.... [O:]n June 3 all the American Army depots and arsenals started packing the material for shipment... six-hundred heavily-loaded freight cars... rollings towards... Raritan, New Jersey.... By June 11 a dozen British merchant ships moved into the bay and anchored, and...

links for 2010-06-10

Obama and Bill Clinton both pulled out the stops for Blanche Lincoln, only to have her vote for crazy #Murkowski EPA resolution. #somethanks 30 minutes ago from web







Matthew Yglesias: Move to the Center If and Only If the Center is Correct

MY: "The precedent of Bill Clinton's post-1994 repositioning comes up time and again, but Clinton's re-election can easily be explained in terms of the economic fundamentals. I want...

Yet Another Reason We Really Don't Need the Cato Institute in Our Political Discourse

Michael F. Cannon:

Twitter / Michael F. Cannon: I hear they're very absorb ...: I hear they're very absorbent. RT @nmkurokawa: Oil spills: bad. Illegal immigrants helping to clean up the oil: WORSE.

We would all be better off it it shut down. The (few) good people will be picked up elsewhere...

Aha! I Have Been Looking for This for Quite a While! Upsmanship Advice

From The Harvard Lampoon Big Book of College Life, pp. 126-7:

Pet Peeves: Arbitrarily pick one well-respected poet... and wage a personal vendetta against him. Whenever his work is mentioned, hurl your drink against the wall and scream, "The man's a fraud! A complete fake!" Should anyone have the temerity to challenge your opinion, smile condescendingly and say, "Oh, come on now. You just go back and reread one of his so-called pos. It's obvious!" You can establish a reputation and a...

Maybe the Democrats Won't Lose House Seats This November...

Steve Benen:

The Washington Monthly: Of course, congressional Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce are joined at the hip. Does the GOP agree with their buddy Donohue about taxpayers helping pay for the disaster? Actually, yes. Brian Beutler has this report.

In response to a question from TPMDC, House Minority Leader John Boehner backed Tom Donohue, President of the Chamber of Commerce, in saying taxpayers should help pick up the tab. "I think the people responsible in...

A Remarkable Business Opportunity!

Via John Hempton: Subject: BP Related Agreement Entitlement

Dear Friend

I am the private solicitor for Mr Tony Hayward, the esteemed Chairman and Chief executive of British Petroleum.  My client has various personal and family related holdings of BP stock and options. Due to his faithful long standing service to BP the total value of his holdings amounts to in excess of 100m pounds sterling.  Mr Heywood is a British citizen but it has been my sorrowful duty to advise him that his...

Unanticipated Consequences of Totalitarianism: China Demography Edition

Buce, in Poland blogging about China, in between bouts of speaking Plinglish and eating raraka (which I do not recommend making: it involves using a mandoline and hence has a likelihood of creating permanent scars):

Underbelly: Here's an anecdote about the girl shortage in China, culled from my friend Anna, an overseas Chinese who often goes back there. The starter point is that you'd think the girls would all be scooped up by the plutocrats who could afford (one way or the other) to...

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Paul Krugman Inveighs Against Rational Reconstructions of What Your Adversaries Ought to Have Said...

Paul Krugman watch:

Anti-Straw Men And Austerity: There should be a standard phrase for the construction of anti-straw-men — for attributing to your intellectual opponents sophisticated, reasonable positions they do not in fact hold, ignoring the nonsense they actually espouse. Whatever you call it, that’s what Brad DeLong is doing in his comment on a previous post of mine. Brad suggests a possible “confidence” argument for fiscal austerity, and also suggests that this must be what lies...

Demography, Savings Rates, and Optimum Currency Areas

Ed Hugh:

Cassandra Redeemed: The main argument about demography is that patterns of saving and borrowing are age-related... Franco Modigliani... Milton Friedman.... [S:]aving and borrowing patterns are (like most economic processes) nonlinear, that is they have a “U” or inverted “U” form (Joseph Rowntree was the first to notice this in his late 19th-century studies on poverty in the U.K.). So very, very young societies (like Niger or Uganda, with median population ages under 20) have a...