J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 234

Jemima Kelly: Niall Ferguson Joins Blockchain Project Amp...

Jemima Kelly: Niall Ferguson Joins Blockchain Project Ampleforth: "Ampleforth: not just an ideal school to send your kids if you're Catholic and can afford it, but also, 'an ideal money'. More specifically (and perplexingly): 'A decentralised store of value protocol that is volatile in price and supply at launch, but is strictly better than Bitcoin at steady state because it converges on a stable unit of account.' And Niall Ferguson, the rightwing British historian and who once called himself a 'fully paid-up member of the neo-imperialist gang', has joined its advisory board.... Here's Ferguson...

...The idea of reinventing money excites me. Bitcoin, currently, is incapable of being ���money��� that can be a means of payment. But at the same time, I am doubtful of fiat-pegged stablecoins. As someone who is deeply interested in financial innovation, I���m attracted by Ampleforth's mission to reinvent money in a way that protects individual freedom and to create a payments system that treats everyone equally...

But how does this free and equal system work, we hear you ask? Well, it's quite simple really:

Ampleforth is a digital asset protocol that moves volatility from unit price to unit count and achieves price stability by algorithmically expanding and contracting supply among holders based on demand... Ampleforth employs an algorithmic supply policy to democratise the issuance of money and create assets with independent value.

Capiche? Good. Essentially, the idea is that Ampleforth���named after the character in George Orwell's 1984 who is responsible for translating poetry into Newspeak���would be pegged to the dollar by means of a "smart contract" that would pump "Amples" into the system when its price topped a dollar, and withdraw them when the exchange rate fell below $1 per Ample.... If any of the Ampleforth stuff is sounding familiar to you, it might be because we wrote about a similar algorithmic stablecoin with academic backing last year: Basis, which was had John Taylor on its board. (Basis is now bygone, having returned what was left of the $133m it had raised from investors.) Ampleforth is a little different... is cleverly not pushing... idea[s]... [that] might make the SEC nervous. .... We asked Nicholas Weaver, computer science lecturer at Berkeley, for his thoughts, who told us:

The Basis concept, recapitulated here, is fundamentally flawed. This is a dumb central bank currency peg, which only lasts until someone figures out how to make money destroying the peg.

We're not sure how much time this advisory role requires, nor the nature or scale of the compensation (we have asked). But Ferguson probably has some time on his hands since resigning from a senior leadership role at a Stanford University free speech programme, Cardinal Conversations, last year. We wonder whether he has commissioned any "opposition research" on the host of stablecoin rivals that Ampleforth must try to compete with. Related links: The John Taylor-backed ���stablecoin��� that's backed by, um, stability - FT Alphaville It turns out ���bond tokens��� and ���share tokens��� might just be classed as securities...

#noted

Jill Abramson, Formerly of the New York Times, Has Both a Depraved Heart and a Social Intelligence Deficit

At one point, Jill Abramson formerly of the New York Times had something like this���the lead of an written by Jake Malooley���on her computer screen:

She then copied the text from "when..." to the second "...Darfur" and pasted the three sentences it into an editing window in her manuscript:

She then did not:

enclose it in quotation marks,
add "(quoted from Jake Maloolley: https://www.timeout.com/chicago/things-to-do/vice-cop)", or
move it to a "scratch-sources" part of the document.

Instead, she first deleted the word "Jason":

Then she replaced "a" with "the Jinx" in front of "caf��":

Then she capitalized the "c" in "caf��":

Next, she replaced "(Jinx and" with "called":

After that, she took the passage ", respectively); he even" and replaced it with ". He":

and then deleted "a few" and "for this magazine":

She thus made seven changes to Malooley's first sentence, in the process dividing it into two.

She then replaced the second "Mojica" with "he":

She thus made one change to Malooley's second sentence.

She then left Malooley's third sentence alone. Clearly the effort of making seven discrete changes to the first sentence had exhausted her.

Malooley interviewed her. She does not think that failing to add "(quoted from Jake Maloolley: https://www.timeout.com/chicago/things-to-do/vice-cop)" was in any sense a bad thing to do:

I had no intention to take anybody���s work without credit...

Even though she took Malooley's work, and as she did so then decided not to credit him.

She does not think that this is plagiarism:

Q: Isn���t inadvertent plagiarism still plagiarism?

A: No, it isn���t. I mean, you can consult your own experts. It may be that not all agree with me, but I���ve talked to a number of respected eminent scholars who have said that this is not a venal mistake. It���s a venial mistake, which is unintended. So, I don���t know, I feel like I���ve answered all of these questions. So what else do you need from me?

Q: Which experts did you consult?

A. I���m not gonna say. I���m not going to, you know, drag other people into this mess. No...

Perhaps Abramson got closer to what she really thinks when she was interviewed by Sean Illing Vox:

I���m not lifting original ideas. Again, I wish I had got the citation right, but it���s not an intentional theft or taking someone���s original ideas���it���s just the facts...

She has just enough social intelligence to realize that people think that working the way she does is wrong. But she has not enough social intelligence to understand why people think that working the way she does is wrong.

#highlighted #journamalism #moralresponsibility

Dylan Matthews (2009): : "It's instructive for people my ...

Dylan Matthews (2009): : "It's instructive for people my age who are thinking of careers in foreign policy to know that you can back death squads in Central America, deny mass atrocities, brazenly defy Congressional dictates, get convicted of withholding information from Congress, back a covert coup d'��tat, actively undermine the peace process in Israel, and be in charge of implementing the Bush administration's 'freedom agenda' and end up with a senior fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations and an offer to be CFR's president should Richard Haass leave. I believe the term for this is 'perverse incentive'...

#noted

I confess I do not understand columns like this from the ...

I confess I do not understand columns like this from the intelligent if not-always-reliable John Harwood.

"Congressional Republicans stepping away from President Trump" is constant and professional Washington access-journalist make-believe. "Congressional Republicans think Trump is a nut but are terrified to cross him because they fear a primary challenge" has been reality since January 21, 2017 and is still reality today.

The 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate and the 40-member Tea Party caucus in the House opposed on principle to governing meant and mean that, absent Reconciliation, any legislation required the approval of Ryan, Pelosi, McConnell, and Schumer before January 4���or at least their willingness to not make opposition a matter for caucus discipline���and requires the approval of Pelosi, McConnell, and Schumer today.

Trump's role with respect to Republican House Members and Senators was and is the same as Putin's role with respect to Trump: in each case, the first party has the second party on a leash because the second party knows that the first party, if enraged, could destroy their career. But because that threat can only be used once and has power only as long as it is not used, the leash is a long one:

John Harwood: Republican Leaders Are Breaking with Trump on Border Wall: "That soft, shuffling sound you hear is Congressional Republicans stepping away from President Trump.... GOP leaders signaled clearly that they, like Congressional Democrats, will no longer play border-wall make-believe with President Trump.... GOP leaders always understood that pledge as fanciful, even as they cautiously avoided saying so out loud. Last December, when Trump changed his mind and chose a government shutdown over a bipartisan spending compromise, they reluctantly went along. But 35 days of political pain, ending with Trump's initial surrender last month, changed their calculations.... The Democratic takeover of the House fundamentally altered Washington's power equation...

#noted

Peter Beinart���who has, I think, atoned sufficiently for...

Peter Beinart���who has, I think, atoned sufficiently for his time enabling and supporting the bigotries, prejudices, and ignorances of Marty Peretz and his Old New Republic���gets, I think, this one substantially wrong.

There are many Americans who feel a deep cultural and religious and political affinity with Israel. Israel is, after all, a fellow near-democracy, in some sense one of the foundations of North Atlantic civilization, and the image of Israel has always been an explicit model for America since the first days of Puritan settlement.

Conservative white Christians, however, support and seek a different Israel���a Likud-AIPAC Israel. They want an expansionist Israel for theological reasons: Israel's expansion���and the subsequent destruction by Gog and Magog of all who do not convert to Christianity���is a step on the road to the Second Coming of Jesus. Thus they seek not a secure, democratic, and peaceful Israel but rather a state with a firebase on every West Bank hilltop ruling from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan���or perhaps Euphrates.

Plus there are the bribes: I am told that Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave Jerry Falwell a Lear Jet:

Peter Beinart: The Sick Double Standard In The Ilhan Omar Controversy: "Omar���s tweet was inaccurate. Yes, of course, AIPAC���s influence rests partly on the money its members donate to politicians. But it also rests on a deep cultural and religious affinity for Israel among conservative white Christians, who see the Jewish state as an outpost of pro-American, ���Judeo-Christian��� values in a region they consider hostile to their country and faith...

#noted

Back when the Washington Post was trying to decide how to...

Back when the Washington Post was trying to decide how to deal with the internet���and had not yet doubled down on "access journalism", i.e. working for your sources rather than for your readers���Dan Froomkin lucked into the "White House Watch" column, doing explainer journalism on the White House press corps���telling us why the White House press corps was doing what it was doing that week. This was an extremely useful thing to do. Now he is starting it up again. Worth spending your money on: Dan Froomkin: A Case Study in Normalizing Trump, from the New York Times: "Disappointed in how normalizing NYT���s coverage of Trump interview was this morning. He was talking complete megalomaniacal gibberish, they make it sound like he was answering their questions.... I���m glad Sulzberger talked to Trump a bit about press freedom, but the NYT... can also confront him with reality...

#noted

Martin Wolf: The Libertarian Fantasies of Cryptocurrencie...

Martin Wolf: The Libertarian Fantasies of Cryptocurrencies: "the state can be a dangerous monster. But it is also essential: it is humanity���s ultimate insurance mechanism. The world of anarchy is one of competing bandits. It is far better to have just one, as the late Mancur Olson argued in Power and Prosperity. Moreover, he added, liberal democracy helps tame that bandit. States exist to provide essential public goods. Money is a public good par excellence. That is why dispensing with the role of governments in money is a fantasy. The history of the so-called cryptocurrencies demonstrates this.... The best way to view cryptocurrencies is as speculative tokens of no intrinsic value. One could have value if it became the currency of choice of a jurisdiction. Yet there is a compelling reason why, in normal circumstances, people use the currency of their own government.... As the Financial Times��� Izabella Kaminska and Martin Walker of the Center for Evidence-Based Management argued in evidence for the House of Commons Treasury committee, so far the cryptocurrency craze has made online criminality easier, created bubbles, fleeced naive investors, imposed grotesque waste in so-called 'mining', offered funding for malfeasance and facilitated tax evasion.... It is no longer enough to bleat in favour of 'innovation' or 'freedom'...

���Distributed ledger technology��� including ���blockchain��� might prove valuable in making activities dependent on safe record-keeping, notably finance, more efficient and secure.... Replacing cash with digital tokens of some kind would be relatively simple. It would mainly raise questions about the degree of anonymity of such replacements. Far more potentially revolutionary and destabilising possibilities would arise if the public at large were able to switch from deposits at commercial banks to absolutely safe accounts at the central bank. This radical idea has obvious attractions since it would remove the privileged access of one class of businesses, banks, to the monetary services of the state���s bank.... As everywhere else, innovation is transforming monetary possibilities. But not all changes are for the better. Some seem clearly for the worse. The right way forward is to reject libertarian fantasy, but not change itself: our monetary system is far too defective for that. We should adapt. But, history reminds us, we must do so carefully...

#noted

The long con, behavioral economics, and the mass- and soc...

The long con, behavioral economics, and the mass- and social-media nature of the modern public sphere collide in ways that I do not understand, but that I think may be very important: Neil Steinberg: What's next? 'Hi, This Is A Scam! Grab Your Wallet So We Can Cheat You!': "'Social Security numbers do not get suspended', the Federal Trade Commission points out on its web page devoted to this scam. 'Ever'. Are there people who don���t know this? Apparently so. Which raises the question: Why base your scam on something a halfway savvy person knows to be false? For exactly that reason.... Fraud is... about identifying the most credulous, the choicest marks, and going after them. It���s a manpower issue.... Scams fall into two categories: fear and greed.... Fear and/or greed already in the victims-to-be make them party to their own defrauding, but inspires an unspoken complicity that blunts their ability to realize they���ve been had. The resilience of the cheated is plain if we look at... those who supported Donald Trump...

...a certified con man who has paid out tens of millions of dollars in damages to his victims in the business world, for the most part support him still. His con is based on fear (the essential Wall) and greed (lost jobs coming back). People wonder when Trump supporters will wise up, and the answer is: Never. The cheated become invested in the fraud. They have given their trust, their money, or votes, or both. They have a dog in this race, and are actively rooting for the person who cheated them. Law enforcement investigators are familiar with the granddads who won���t believe it, even after the bank account is drained and the authorities brought in. The victims are indignant���at those telling them they���ve been had. They can���t believe it, literally. I have heard from many Trump supporters. They are aghast and outraged. They paint my carefully measured arguments as vein-pulsing-rage, or wonder why anybody would be so obsessed as to consider the words of the president of the United States.

Their responses range across everything except��letting��doubt crease their foreheads. And I do sympathize with them���empathy, the Dems��� glory and undoing. Because it���s hard to accept that you���ve been a fool. That you gave Timmy���s college fund to some con man pretending to be a Navy Seal. You let fear, or greed, or both, overwhelm you. If it���s any comfort, there���s a lot of that going around.

#noted #orangehairedbaboons

A very welcome shift from a central that two months ago l...

A very welcome shift from a central that two months ago looked hell-bent on a policy likely to cause recession. What explains the shift, however? I do not understand why their policy was what it was two months ago. While I understand their policy now, and while I approve of their shift, I do not understand the why: Frances Coppola: What Is The Real Reason For The Fed's Sudden Decision To Stop Raising Interest Rates?: "The Fed has put the brakes on. At its latest monetary policy meeting, the FOMC left interest rates unchanged and said it would be 'patient' about further interest rate rises. Furthermore, the FOMC���s forward guidance about the pace of balance sheet reduction says that it is 'prepared to adjust any of the details for completing balance sheet normalization in light of economic and financial developments', including reversing course and doing more QE if necessary. Yet only a month ago, the Fed was signaling two interest rate rises in 2019 and no change in the pace of balance sheet reduction. What has caused this sudden change of heart?...

#noted

Note to Self: Speaker: We are bursting at the seams! We h...

Note to Self: Speaker: We are bursting at the seams! We have more students than robots!

#noted