J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 279

FiveThirtyEight: Yes, It Was A Blue Wav | FiveThirtyEight...

FiveThirtyEight: Yes, It Was A Blue Wav | FiveThirtyEight: "natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): The arguments that it ISN���T a blue wave are dumb. Can we end the chat now and get lunch?...

...sarahf: Haha, no. We���re here to tell readers why it���s dumb ��� although Nathaniel did do a pretty good job of convincing me.

nrakich: People seem to be defining ���blue wave��� as, ���Did Democrats outperform expectations?��� They���re forgetting that expectations were already for a blue wave.

natesilver: What is the argument that it isn���t a blue wave? That Democrats didn���t win the Senate?

nrakich: Democrats largely matched expectations in the House but fell a little bit short of them in the Senate and governor races....

natesilver: I think they���re arguing it���s not a wave because (1) the ���split decision��� narrative is very attractive if you���re of a both-sides mentality, (2) it takes a little bit of work to figure out why Democrats didn���t win the Senate (i.e., you have to look at the fact that the contests were all held in really red states), (3) Democratic gains are larger than they looked like they���d be at say 10:30 p.m. on election night, when these narratives were established.

nrakich: I understand why Democrats are disappointed, Clare. They lost the Senate! You���d rather win than lose! But we should educate them that a loss of two, maybe one, seats in the Senate was actually a remarkable feat for Democrats in this Senate map.... Democrats were so overexposed that, in a different environment, Republicans could have taken 60 seats in the Senate and made it really hard for Democrats to take back the Senate in the next decade or more....

#shouldread

Review of "Capitalism in America: A History" by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge

Review of Capitalism in America: A History by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge: The world as a whole is much richer than it was three centuries ago. And the United States of America is the richest land of all. For nearly two centuries its unique dynamic of economic growth has made America, as Leon Trotsky put it after his brief residence in New York, ���the furnace where the future is being forged.��� Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge���s ���Capitalism in America: A History��� argues that it is the American love and embrace of capitalism, the resulting entrepreneurial business culture, and the creative destruction inherent in the capitalist-market system that have given America its special, unique edge in economic wealth. In America, successful entrepreneurs, innovators, organizers and promoters have become not just well-off but heroes.... While it is no surprise that Greenspan and Wooldridge have produced this book, they are, I think, broadly correct in their argument... Read MOAR at the Washington Post

#shouldread #books #economicgrowth #highlighted #entrepreneurship

Perhaps Facebook's Top Management Should Give Their Shares in the Company to the Open Society Foundationt?

Perhaps Facebook's top management should give their shares in the company to the Open Society Foundationt?: Patrick Gaspard: Letter to Sandberg:

11/14/18

Sheryl Sandberg

Chief Operating Officer

Facebook

1 Hacker Way

Menlo Park, CA 94025

Dear Ms. Sandberg:

I was shocked to learn from the New York Times that you and your colleagues at Facebook hired a Republican opposition research firm to stir up animus toward George Soros.

As you know, there is a concerted right-wing effort the world over to demonize Mr. Soros and his foundations, which I lead���an effort which has contributed to death threats and the delivery of a pipe bomb to Mr. Soros���s home. You are no doubt also aware that much of this hateful and blatantly false and anti-Semitic information is spread via Facebook.

The notion that your company, at your direction, actively engaged in the same behavior to try to discredit people exercising their First Amendment rights to protest Facebook���s role in disseminating vile propaganda is frankly astonishing to me.

It���s been disappointing to see how you have failed to monitor hate and misinformation on Facebook���s platform. To now learn that you are active in promoting these distortions is beyond the pale.

These efforts appear to have been part of a deliberate strategy to distract from the very real accountability problems your company continues to grapple with. This is reprehensible, and an offense to the core values Open Society seeks to advance. But at bottom, this is not about George Soros or the foundations. Your methods threaten the very values underpinning our democracy.

I would appreciate the opportunity to discuss this matter with you in person, and to hear what steps you might take to help remediate the damage done by this deeply misguided���and dangerous���effort carried out at Facebook���s behest.

Sincerely,

Patrick Gaspard

President

Open Society Foundations

#shouldread

Rafael Behr: The Brexit wreckers Are Slinking Away from t...

Rafael Behr: The Brexit wreckers Are Slinking Away from the Rancid Mess They���ve Made: "Dominic Raab and Esther McVey have resigned because they know Brexit is intrinsically dysfunctional.... There is now no Brexit true believer prepared to take an author���s credit on the deal that is about to come before parliament.... These resignations confirm a fundamental structural problem with the whole leave prospectus: it was a fantasy, and as such incompatible with the mundane fulfilment of ministerial responsibility. Raab has come to the same conclusion that David Davis and Boris Johnson reached earlier in the year: it is easier to be on the team that accuses the prime minister of failing to deliver majestic herds of unicorns than it is to be stuck with a portfolio that requires expertise in unicorn-breeding...

#shouldread

Adam Gopnik: Wine, War, Donald Trump, and Emmanuel Macron...

Adam Gopnik: Wine, War, Donald Trump, and Emmanuel Macron: "Macron made a speech... as clearly directed at and against Trump as any he could have made... distinguished between nationalism (bad) and patriotism (good)... in eloquent terms...

...���Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,��� he said. ���Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism,��� he added, ���In saying, ���Our interests first, whatever happens to the others,��� you erase the most precious thing a nation can have, that which makes it live, that which causes it to be great, and that which is most important: its moral values.��� To use a long-forgotten Howard Cosellism, I was doubly delighted by the invocation, in part because the same terms had seemed so relevant not long ago in discussing Macron���s great predecessor Charles de Gaulle. He, too, had drawn that distinction, at the risk of his own life. De Gaulle knew that the patriot loves his place and its people and its idiosyncrasies; while the nationalist, of whom, for him, Adolf Hitler was the clearest and worst example, has no particular sense of affection for the place he advocates for (he is often an outsider to it, as Hitler, an Austrian, was to Germany) but channels his obsessive grievances into acts of ethnic vengeance.

It isn���t clear who first made the distinction between nationalism and patriotism. Perhaps it���s one of those observations that rises naturally in several places at once. Certainly, no one has made more of it in his work than John Lukacs, the American historian of Hungarian origin. Lukacs, in fact, has made it foundational to his understanding of twentieth-century history, with nationalism as the deadly solvent of civilization, and patriotism as its (partially) restorative glue. His heroes, for that reason, are the conservative patriots, Winston Churchill highest among them, along with de Gaulle. (The conservative patriots rate highly in part because the temptation of nationalism on the right is so extreme; the parallel temptation on the left is a blind faith in rational planning, even at enormous human cost...

#shouldread #orangehairedbaboons #moralresponsibility #history

Why Next to No Political Reaction to the Second Gilded Age?: Hoisted from 2012

Hoisted from 2012: Brad DeLong: Why Next to No Political Reaction to the Second Gilded Age?: Oh dear, that's a really tough question. So let me make it tougher by sharpening it and give it historical context. During the Gilded Age of the 1890s and 1900s you had strong political movements saying "something is going remarkably wrong with this, this isn���t the country we thought we were going to live in". The way that the historian���I'm blanking���Ray Ginger? Harley Shaiken: Yes, Ray Ginger. Brad DeLong: Ray Ginger put it in two absolutely brilliant books���Altgeld���s America and The Age of Excess���even the Republicans thought that they wanted to live in Abe Lincoln���s America, where when you are young you split wood into fence rails and go to law school at night and when you are middle-aged you become a lawyer and get rich and when you are old you enter politics and save the Union and free the slaves. They wanted to live in that kind of world, of upward mobility, in which opportunity is wide open even to the son of a penniless and not very successful rural farmer. But by 1890 they discovered that they weren���t living in Abe Lincoln's America at all...<!���more���>

...As a result in the First Gilded Age you had two political movements. The Democratic, left, farmer, labor, semi-socialist, Populist Movement on the one hand. The mixed bipartisan Democratic and Republican, urban, Progressive Movement on the other. Both of them were desperately eager to change America, to repair the flaws of the Gilded Age, to reduce inequality, to make the economy work for everybody���or at least for every white guy���and even to grant women the vote.

They wanted this so much so that someone like Republican President Theodore Roosevelt���as aggressively a partisan an animal as you would ever see���would place his loyalty to the Republican cause second to his loyalty to his progressive principles for American reform. He was happy denouncing Democrats as communist anarchists, but equally happy denouncing rich republicans as "malefactors of great wealth" who desperately needed to be controlled.

Theodore Roosevelt wove his political career out of being head of the Republican party and head of the Progressive Movement. And at the end non-Progressive Republican President Taft simply offended him one time too many, and Roosevelt decided to blow up the Republican Party and hand the presidency to Woodrow Wilson from 1912-1920.

That was the history of America from 1880-1920 or so. After 1920 you do get a Republican Gilded Age resurgence under Harding, Coolidge, Hoover���very corrupt, especially under Harding. But by the late 1920s Progressivism is rising again���even Hoover is running as a Progressive. Then when the Great Depression comes Franklin Roosevelt comes in and he takes the entire progressive agenda off the shelf and promptly begins to implement it.

We haven���t had anything like that over the past thirty years.

And here I���m simply going to throw up my hands and say that I don't know why.

It���s in a great mystery to me. As an economic historian I like to look at political economic patterns from the past and to say we should learn from these and generalize them and take them as providing some insight into the present and the future. In general, we economic historians are extraordinarily successful. There are lots of lessons to be drawn from the first age of globalization for the second. There are lots of lessons to be drawn from the high school-ization of America for the college-ization of America and for education elsewhere in the world. There are lots and lots of lessons to be drawn from the Great Depression for today.

But the political economy of Gilded Ages? Why the first Gilded age produces a Populist and a Progressive reaction and the second, so far, does not? There I throw up my hands and say that my economic historian training betrays me. I have no clue as to what is going on here....

������

#shouldread #history #gildedage #secondgildedage

The chances for equitable growth in America over the next...

The chances for equitable growth in America over the next three years may or may not be crippled by the trade war that Donald Trump is now trying to launch. What should you be reading and watching to try to figure out what is going on? I believe that the Peterson Institute of International Economics is the place to go for up-to-date analysis on the trade war that Donald Trump is trying to launch, over the���not dead bodies, but���active opposition and passive resistance of pretty much everybody in his administration save Peter Navarro and Robert Lighthizer. This is not being driven by any interest groups outside the administration. It is being driven by three people inside the administration: Navarro, Lighthizer, and Trump:

Navarro... On the few occasions that I have interacted with Navarro he has seemed to me to be... not quite all there. The kindest thing I have heard said about him comes from Paul Krugman: "Peter Navarro predicted that nobody would retaliate.... Trump���s tariffs are badly designed even from the point of view of someone who shares his crude mercantilist view.... Unlike Trump, the Chinese and other targets of his trade wrath seem to have a clear idea of what they���re trying to accomplish. The key point is that the Navarro/Trump view, aside from its fixation on trade balances... seems to imagine that the world still looks the way it did in the 1960s, when trade was overwhelmingly in final goods like wheat and cars..."

Lighthizer... I do not understand at all. The policies that he is pushing forward are pretty much 180 degrees reversed from those he worked for in his previous stints in government. He is now too old���70���to be anything other than a rainmaker at his old law firm of Skadden Arps after he departs from government. And businesses with international trade legal needs will think that the guy who launched a trade war is not a rain but a drought maker. His actions do not compute on any rational-actor decision theory.

Trump... There is little to understand. Somehow he has become convinced that running a bilateral trade deficit with a country means that we are "losing" to them, and that this should stop. Why he believes this we do not know, and he cannot explain it. We do know that none of those working for him���not Priebus, not Mnuchin, not Kudlow, not Ross, nor any of the others���have been able to change his knee-jerk instincts.

Currently the best place to go to figure out what, concretely, has actually happened is to teh PIIE's trade-war timelines:

Chad P. Bown and Melina Kolb: Is Trump in a Trade War? An Up-to-Date Guide: "The timelines below track the development of the most pressing trade conflicts with links to the latest available data and PIIE analysis...

...BATTLE #1: SOLAR PANEL AND WASHING MACHINE IMPORTS INJURE US INDUSTRIES.... BATTLE #2: STEEL AND ALUMINUM AS NATIONAL SECURITY THREATS.... BATTLE #3: UNFAIR TRADE PRACTICES FOR TECHNOLOGY, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (IP).... BATTLE #4: AUTOS AS NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT...

#shouldread #orangehairedbaboons #globalization #tradewar

You should go see this, if you are in DC tomorrow: Equita...

You should go see this, if you are in DC tomorrow: Equitable Growth: Building a New Consensus on Antitrust Reform Tickets, Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 12:00 PM: "Please join the Washington Center for Equitable Growth on Wednesday, November 14, at noon for a conversation on reforming federal antitrust law.... Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Ranking Member of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, will deliver keynote remarks.... RSVP is required by Friday, November 9...

...Featured keynote: Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Presentation: Louis Brandeis: A Man for This Season: Jonathan Sallet.... Discussants: Renata Hesse... Michael Kades... John Kwoka... Sandeep Vaheesan...

#shouldread #monopoly

Pascal Michaillat and Emmanuel Saez: A New Keynesian Mode...

Pascal Michaillat and Emmanuel Saez: A New Keynesian Model with Wealth in the Utility Function: "Wealth... [in] the utility function. The extension modifies the Euler equation: in steady state the real interest rate is negatively related to consumption instead of being constant... Thus, when the marginal utility of wealth is large enough, the dynamical system representing the equilibrium is a source not only in normal times but also at the zero lower bound. This property eliminates the zero-lower-bound anomalies of the New Keynesian model, such as explosive output and inflation, and forward-guidance puzzle...

...There is no explosive slump if the ZLB is long-lasting, no explosive boom if forward guidance is long-lasting, and no reversal from slump to boom when the duration of forward guidance crosses some threshold. Hence in our model, the ZLB is not necessarily short-lived���it might last forever as a steady state���and forward-guidance policies have plausible, limited effects. At the same time, our model retains other ZLB properties: paradox of thrift, paradox of toil, and paradox of flexibility...

#shouldread #monetaryeconomics

New computer and communications technologies were suppose...

New computer and communications technologies were supposed to democratize information���route around corrupt media and data-centrer oligarchies, and allow a flourishing of the public sphere. Yes... and no...: Joi Ito: The Next Great (Digital) Extinction | WIRED: "SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 2 and 3 billion years ago, what scientists call the Great Oxidation Event, or GOE, took place, causing the mass extinction of ... the dominant life form at the time.... Cyanobacteria... had the photosynthetic ability to produce glucose and oxygen out of carbon dioxide and water using the power of the sun. Oxygen was toxic to many anaerobic cousins...

...In addition to being a massive extinction event, the oxygenation of the planet kicked off the evolution of multicellular organisms (620 to 550 million years ago), the Cambrian explosion of new species (540 million years ago).... I���ve been thinking about the GOE, the Cambrian Explosion, and the emergence of the mammals a lot lately, because I���m pretty sure we���re in the midst of a similarly disruptive and pivotal moment in history that I���m calling the Great Digitization Event, or GDE. And right now we���re in that period where the oxygen, or in this case the internet as used today, is rapidly and indifferently killing off many systems while allowing new types of organizations to emerge. As WIRED celebrates its 25th anniversary, the Whole Earth Catalog its 50th anniversary, and the Bauhaus its 100th anniversary, we���re in a modern Cambrian era, sorting through an explosion of technologies enabled by the internet that are the equivalent of the stunning evolutionary diversity that emerged some 500 million years ago. ...

As Fred Turner describes in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, we can trace all of this back to the hippies in the 1960s and 1970s in San Francisco. They were the evolutionary precursor to the advanced life forms observable in the aftermath at Stoneman Douglas High School. Let me give you a first-hand account of how the hippies set off the Great Digitization Event. FROM THE OUTSET, members of that movement embraced nascent technological change.... Whole Earth Catalog... the Whole Earth ���Lectronic Link, or WELL... High Frontiers... Mondo 2000... cyberpunk... Timothy Leary... bridges between the Japanese techno scene and the San Francisco rave scene....

In August 1992, Jane Metcalfe and Louis Rossetto rented a loft in the South Park area because they wanted to start a magazine to chronicle what had evolved from a counterculture into a powerful new culture built around hippie values, technology, and the new Libertarian movement... WIRED. Nicholas Negroponte, who had cofounded the MIT Media Lab in 1985, was backing Jane and Louis financially.... Kevin Kelly, who was formerly one of the editors of the Whole Earth Catalog.... WIRED came along just as the internet and the technology around it really began to morph into something much bigger than a science fiction fantasy, in other words, on the cusp of the GDE. The magazine tapped into the design talent around South Park.... Before long, vice president Al Gore started talking about the internet as the Next Big Thing....

The world also began to go through something like the Cambrian Explosion, as the internet lowered the cost of collaboration and invention to nearly zero, creating an explosion of new ideas and products.... This flourishing of technoculture had and continues to have a broad impact on business and society.... Legacy businesses have been disintermediated by the rise of companies built around the internet which have, within a very short period, exerted dominion over the world. This is the GDE, and it reminds me of nothing so much as the GOE in its impact and implications. As our modern dinosaurs crash down around us, I sometimes wonder what kind of humans will eventually walk out of this epic transformation....

The same tools of post-internet collective action that fueled Trump and #gamergate also gave the kids from Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the tools they needed to inspire students at some 3,800 schools across the country to walk out in protest over lax gun regulations, and to push stores like Dick���s Sporting Goods to stop selling guns. That sustains my hope.... The hippie culture that drove the rise of the GDE failed to completely fulfill the promise of new technology, but those anaerobic hippies did leave Gen Z a whole new set of tools.... My generation and the hippies are the anaerobic bacteria heading toward the mud....

#shouldread #riseoftherobots