J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 286

Per Kurowski: Self-Fulfilling Financial Crises: "The risk...

Per Kurowski: Self-Fulfilling Financial Crises: "The risk weighted capital requirements for banks guarantee: 1. Especially large exposures to what���s perceived as especially safe, against especially little capital, which dooms or bank system to especially severe crises. 2. Especially low exposures to what is perceived as risky, like loans to entrepreneurs and SMEs, which dooms our economy to weakness and not being able to reach its potential. And that has yet not even been discussed, much less learned
https://perkurowski.blogspot.com/2016/04/here-are-17-reasons-for-why-i-believe.html...

#shouldread
#commentoftheday
#finance

Monday DeLong Smackdown: Alan Kirman on Self-Fulfilling Financial Crises

Alan Kirman is wise. Listen to him: Monday DeLong Smackdown: Alan Kirman: Self-Fulfilling Financial Crises: For the first time I feel moved to disagree with your assessment here Brad. The behavioral approach proposed by the authors suffers from the same disease as many that have been proposed earlier. It is the idea that one particular "bias" will help to understand and explain the causes and consequences of economic crises. This seems to me to be at odds with what really goes on. Already in 1900 Poincar�� criticised Bachelier because he ignored the fact that people tend to behave like sheep. People do not simply receive their information independently and then act on it and in so doing reveal that information. Herd behaviour would suggest that people's beliefs change and are strongly influenced by those with whom they interact...

...Thus different biases will predominate periodically, think of chartists and fundamentalists.

What is more, in order for the market to be active at all there must be people on both sides so the idea that everybody shares a common bias cannot be completely true. What in fact would seem to be a reasonable explanation is that people have different biases and histories and form their expectations partly on the basis of these and partly on what they see to be the current trend. Lastly, one still has to explain why there was such a long lag between the downturn in house prices in the U.S and the collapse of the price of MBS. One possible explanation is that the information contained in the MBS was difficult to extract and people kept happily trading them believing that someone would buy them without checking, and finally this bubble burst when a few people broke away from the herd and started checking, and initiated a collapse.

None of this suggests that there was a single simple basic psychological bias which was the key. I will spare you Krugman's quote from Mencken on that point...

#shouldread
#commentoftheday
#behavioral
#finance
#mondaysmackdown

Lily Batchelder: The ���Silver Spoon��� Tax: How to Stren...

Lily Batchelder: The ���Silver Spoon��� Tax: How to Strengthen Wealth Transfer Taxation: "30 percent of the correlation between parent and child incomes���and more than 50 percent of the correlation between the wealth of parents and the wealth of their children���is attributable to financial inheritances. This is more than the impact of IQ, personality, and schooling combined...

...Increasing the progressivity of income and payroll taxes would go a long way toward addressing both of these types of inequality. But it would leave significant holes if not accompanied by stronger taxes on wealth transfers. Under current law, for example, if a wealthy individual bequeaths assets with $100 million in unrealized gains, neither the donor nor the heir ever has to pay income or payroll tax on that $100 million gain. In addition, the recipients of large inheritances never have to pay income or payroll tax on the value of inheritances they receive, whether attributable to unrealized gains or not.10
Some argue that any income or payroll tax previously paid by a wealthy individual on gifts and bequests they make should count as tax paid by the heir. But they are two separate people. When a wealthy individual pays his assistant���s wages out of after-tax funds, we don���t think the assistant has thereby paid tax on their own wages. In short, today the income and payroll taxes effectively tax unearned income in the form of inheritances at a zero rate.

Wealth transfer taxes play an important role in partially addressing this inequity of excluding inherited income from the income and payroll tax bases.11 But inherited income is still taxed at less than one-quarter of the rate on income from work and savings...

#shouldread
#equitablegrowth
#inequality
#plutocracy

Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads

Stagnant Real Wages and Secular Stagnation Are Not Closely Related: DeLong FAQ

Cosma Shalizi: Machine Learning: Data, Models, Intelligence: Weekend Reading

Rodney Brooks: The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions: Weekend Reading

The Federal Reserve Is Raising Interest Rates Again for Probably All The Wrong Reasons: Last Month Over at Equitable Growth

Groucho Marx in 1969: For the Weekend

How Confident Are We That Middle-Income Convergence to the Global Productivity Frontier Is Now the Rule? Not at All...

Nicholas Foulkes: Jony Ive on the Apple Watch and Big Tech���s Responsibilities: "The Apple Watch is the latest in the bloodline of the totemic Apple products.... Sales are now such that Apple claims to be the number-one watch brand���though I question whether a wrist-worn device of this type is really a watch... #riseoftherobots

Matthew Yglesias: Affordable Housing Is Just the Beginning of YIMBY: "high-cost metropolitan areas should revise their zoning rules to allow for more and denser construction, and that this will, among other things, improve the situation for low-income renters and reduce the displacement associated with gentrification. As a matter of tactical politics, adding affordable housing advocates to the YIMBY coalition is certainly a good idea... #NIMBYism #regionaleconomics

Kai Stinchcombe: Ten Years In, Nobody Has Come Up with a Use for Blockchain: "Everyone says the blockchain, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, is going to change EVERYTHING. And yet, after years of tireless effort and billions of dollars invested, nobody has actually come up with a use... besides currency speculation and illegal transactions... #grifters

Meg Benner, Erin Roth, Stephenie Johnson, and Kate Bahn: How to Give Teachers a $10,000 Raise: "While CAP believes that a new federal investment is necessary to dramatically improve teacher pay, other efforts at the federal, state, and local levels are essential to maximize compensation for all teachers...

Nicola Gennaioli and��Andrei Shleifer: Two Myths of the 2008 Meltdown: "The 2008 financial crisis was not the result only of moral hazard; nor was it unforeseeable. While too-big-to-fail banks believed���rightly, it turned out���that they would be bailed out, consumers, rating agencies, and policymakers all bet on housing as well, destabilizing the system.... Two misconceptions in the current retrospectives of the crisis. These misunderstandings may seem purely academic, but they are not. They have major consequences for the ability of policymakers to prevent future crises...

Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca: Universal Basic Income or Universal Living Wage?: "The challenge for the future of work is not really about the quantity of jobs, but their quality, and whether they pay enough to provide a decent standard of living.... A universal basic income (UBI) would be both regressive and prohibitively expensive. Yet the idea continues to attract a motley crew... #equitablegrowth #labormarket

Corey Husak: How Not To Help Distressed Mortgage Borrowers: Evidence From The Great Recession In The United States: "The federal government has been criticized by many for failing to provide adequate assistance to U.S. homeowners who were financially devastated by the housing crisis and subsequent Great Recession and its aftermath in the late 2000s. New evidence suggests that even when assistance was given, it was poorly designed... #greatrecession #finance

An insightful twitter thread from earlier this year on how too much of the discussion on marriage rates implicitly takes a male point of view, and so misses about half the subject: Kate Bahn: @LipstickEcon: "I'm having a lot of feelings about this article that summarizes AEI and Opportunity America on how men's declining economic stability has reduced marriage rates... #gender

Github: Licenses: "GNU LGPLv3: Permissions of this copyleft license are conditioned on making available complete source code of licensed works and modifications under the same license or the GNU GPLv3. Copyright and license notices must be preserved. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. However, a larger work using the licensed work through interfaces provided by the licensed work may be distributed under different terms and without source code for the larger work... #riseoftherobots #intellectualproperty #opensource

Interesting. The question is always: do you make money by devoting effort to selling them things they will be happy they bought, or do you make money by devoting effort to selling them things they will be unhappy they bought���by grifting them? And what determines the balance of providing value vs. deception in selling commodities aimed at different income classes? I am not sure they have it right here. I am sure that this is very important: James T. Hamilton and Fiona Morgan: Poor Information: How Economics Affects the Information Lives of Low-Income Individuals: "How information is produced for, acquired by, and utilized by low-income individuals... #behavioral #riseoftherobots

Reuters: CVS, Aetna Win U.S. Approval for $69 Billion Merger: "Pharmacy chain CVS Health Corp (CVS.N) won U.S. antitrust approval for its $69 billion acquisition of health insurer Aetna Inc (AET.N), the Justice Department said on Wednesday... #monopoly

Darrick Hamilton definitely is asking the right questions. And he might have the right answers. But I suspect not. Yes, there is something very deep in America's culture that discourages public responsibility for the conditions of poor and especially poor black Americans, to the country's shame. Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that: "no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity... that they who feed, clothe, and lodge... the people, should... be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged..." We today can replace his "greater part" with "substantial part", and it is still true. But I suspect that the health gaps between high-status, high-income, and high-wealth African Americans and their white peers have other origins���not that I know what those other origins are, mind you: Darrick Hamilton: Post-racial rhetoric, racial health disparities, and health disparity consequences of stigma, stress, and racism: "High achieving black Americans, as measured by education, still exhibit large health disparities... #racism

John Cole annoys me by directing me to Irwin Stelzer and his claim that under Trump economic growth is "around... 4%". It is not. GDP growth under Trump has been and is widely projected to be roughly 2.7% per year, not "around... 4%". Irwin Stelzer is a liar. Liars are not worth reading. The Weekly Standard needs to step up its game. Badly: Irwin Stelzer: National Debt Under Trump Rises to $21.7 Trillion: "The economy is growing at around a 4 percent rate in response to the tax cuts and to a revival of animal spirits as entrepreneurs and corporate chieftains wake up in the morning wondering not what the government is going to do to them, but what it might do for them... #economicsgonewrong #moralresponsibility #orangehairedbaboons

A Baker's Dozen of Fairly-Recent Links

Adam Rogers: How Hurricane Michael Got Super Big, Super Fast

Sandy Stachowiak: How to use Twitter Search like a pro

Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett: Consequences of Routine Work Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Wellbeing: "The rise in precarious work has also involved a major shift in the temporal dimension of work, a fundamental and under-appreciated manifestation of the risk shift from ���rms... #equitablegrowth #labormarket

Ellora Derenoncourt

(2006): Partha Dasgupta Makes a Mistake in His Critique of the Stern Review

(2006): Applied Utilitarianism and Global Climate Change

Wikipedia: List of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? Episodes

Madison Malone Kircher: How to Add Low-Power Mode to iPhone Control Center: "Your iPhone has a genuinely useful setting called ���low power mode.��� In low power mode, your phone���s brightness decreases, your emails stop fetching unless you refresh your inbox, your iCloud Photo Library stops automatically updating, and your phone defaults to an auto-lock after 30 seconds. Basically, it starts doing as many things as possible to save your battery life...

Yes, distributions have lower tails. But it still seems to me that the absence of clearly visible life out there is powerful evidence that there is a "Great Filter": that one of the parameters (or more than one of the parameters) in the Drake Equation is near zero. Sandberg et al. seem to me to be arguing not so much that the absence of visible life out there is likely even if none of the parameters are near zero, but that our uncertainty is so great that it is not surprising that the universe we live in has one or more parameters near zero even though the average value of each parameter across all universes we might live in is larger: Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord: Dissolving The Fermi Paradox: "The Fermi question is not a paradox, it just looks like one if one is overconfident in how well we know the Drake equation parameters. Doing a distribution model shows that even existing literature allows for a substantial probability of very little life, and a more cautious prior gives a significant probability for rare life. The Fermi observation makes the most uncertain priors move strongly, reinforcing the 'rare life' guess and an early 'Great Filter'.. https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/01/should-read-i-have-to-think-about-this-yes-distributions-have-lower-tails-but-it-still-seems-to-me-that-the-absence-o.html

Spencer Ackerman: There���s Been a George Soros for Every Era of Anti-Semitic Panic: "Other Jewish bogeymen may haunt the fever dreams of the vicious, but the scale and intensity of the attacks on Soros are unrivalled. They reveal what the global nationalist right believes is at stake in this present moment. We may one day look back on this era as the Soros Age of anti-Semitism...

Nouriel Roubini: Blockchain Isn't About Democracy and Decentralisation���It's About Greed: "A small group of companies���mostly located in such bastions of democracy as Russia, Georgia and China���control between two-thirds and three-quarters of all crypto-mining activity and all routinely jack up transaction costs to increase their fat profit margins. Apparently, blockchain fanatics would have us put our faith in an anonymous cartel subject to no rule of law, rather than trust central banks and regulated financial intermediaries. A similar pattern has emerged in cryptocurrency trading. Fully 99% of all transactions occur on centralised exchanges that are hacked on a regular basis...

C. J. Sansom: Tombland https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0316412457

Paul Romer: Nonrival Goods After 25 Years: "Rivalry and excludability map cleanly onto the mechanism design approach to aggregate theory, which starts with a specification of preferences and production possibilities and investigates the mapping from the rules that a society adopts into equilibrium outcomes. Here is the key: Rivalry and its opposite nonrivalry are assertions about production possibilities. Excludability depends on a policy choice about rules...

Yihui Xie, Amber Thomas, and Alison Presmanes Hill: blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown

Wall of Shame:

Morgan Gstalter: McConnell: Midterms could be 'a Category 3, 4 or 5' storm for GOP: "'We know the wind is going to be in our face. We don���t know whether it���s going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5'...

Matthew Yglesias: "The highbrow intellectual leaders of the modern conservative movement explicitly conceptualized it as a white nationalist undertaking. Trump is true to this legacy and his intra-movement critics are the innovators...

Eight years of Governor Sam Brownback has seen Kansas lose 8% of its jobs relative to the national average. Now Kansas is Ground Zero for Trump's trade war. Joshua Green: Chinese Sorghum Tariffs Will Hit Hard in Trump-friendly Kansas: "Trump���s Trade War Hits Another Red State: What���s the matter with Kansas? It���ll be hardest hit by new Chinese tariffs...

Will Wilkinson: The DACA and immigration debates are about whether Latinos are ���real Americans���: "Challenging the idea that Latino Americans can be truly American undercuts the very idea of America...

Just when you think the mainstream media could not sink any lower into misogyny and stupidity, it's the Atlantic Monthly!: Scott Lemieux: Are you provoked yet?: "Both James Bennet and Fred Hiatt have been asked to hold David Bradley���s beer...

Ezra Klein: @ezraklein on Twitter: "I don���t know what the [New York] Times should���ve done with Thrush. But I watched the efforts to plant oppo and smear @lkmcgann in the aftermath of her reporting. Anyone who thinks coming forward with these experiences is easy, even now, is wrong. I am beyond proud to be her colleague..."

Yes, this is as bad a violation of academic standards as it looks: Henry Farrell: The public choice of public choice: "Now this... 'financial ties to the Charles Koch Foundation... [but] George Mason University has cited its academic independence.

The Brexiters never had a plan for what they would do if they won the referendum. And they still do not have a plan. I do not see a road other than "transitional" arrangements that keep things as they are without the UK having any voice in Brussels���"transitional" arrangements that will keep getting indefinitely extended: Robert Hutton: Stuck In the Middle: These Are Theresa May's Four Brexit Options: "Her inner Brexit Cabinet has rejected her proposed customs relationship with the European Union...

Gabrielle Coppola: Trump���s TPP Pullout May Have Cost Missouri Its Harley Factory: "Harley-Davidson Inc.���s chief executive officer said he may have kept a plant open in Missouri if the U.S. had stayed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement that President Donald Trump withdrew from last year...

WTF happened to Brendan Nyhan? The braineater has eaten his brain: Josh Marshall: "There are several problems with this logic.: The first is that you are applying jury trial standards to what are political questions. You are also applying statutory standards where they do not exist. As a factual matter the obstruction question is not in doubt...

Shame on the Editors of Vanity Fair!: Highlighted/Hoisted from Two Years Ago

How Confident Are We That Middle-Income Convergence to the Global Productivity Frontier Is Now the Rule? Not at All...

Interesting from:

Paul Krugman: Notes on Global Convergence https://twitter.com/delong/status/1053754235362275328
Dev Patel, Justin Sandefur, and Arvind Subramanian: Everything You Know about Cross-Country Convergence Is (Now) Wrong
Paul Johnson and Chris Papageorgiou: What Remains of Cross-Country Convergence?

Paul Krugman: Notes on Global Convergence: "I take a short break from our national crisis. Political anxiety will resume shortly.... In the 1970s... development economics... was mostly non-development economics...

...True, we were already seeing a growth takeoff in smaller East Asian economies, but few saw this as a trend.... Something happened.... It���s a good guess that it has something to do with hyperglobalization.... But we don���t really know even that.... At any given time, not all countries have that mysterious ���IT��� that lets them make effective use of the backlog of advanced technology developed since the Industrial Revolution. Over time, however, the set of countries that have IT seems to be widening. Once a country acquires IT growth can be rapid... because best practice is so far ahead.... The frontier keeps moving out.... Japan���s postwar growth was vastly faster... countries catching up... in the late 19th century; Korea���s growth... faster than Japan���s had been; China���s growth faster still. The IT theory also... explains... middle-income countries grow [ing]faster than either poor or rich countries. Countries that are still very poor... haven���t got IT; countries that are already rich are already at the technological frontier.... In between are countries that acquired IT not too long ago.... The result is a world in which inequality among countries is declining if you look from the middle upward, but rising if you look from the middle down.... a story of diminishing Western exceptionalism, as the club of countries that can take full advantage of modern technology expands...

Hmmm... One of us, probably me. seems confused...

What does Patel, Sandefur, and Subramanian https://piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/everything-you-know-about-cross-country-convergence-now-wrong mean? I see their graph above graph as saying: since 2007 growth in the Global North has totally cratered.

Thus, if you run convergence regressions for which the past decade is a considerable share of the sample, you find unconditional convergence. Why? Because the Global North has had a horrendous business cycle. The Global North is was initially rich. And the computer is smart enough to use initial wealth as an indicator that cyclical performance since 2008 has been abysmal.

But for any regressions starting before 1990 even when they include 2008-2018 (and much more so when they do not), the divergence up until 2008 is larger than the convergence induced by the post-2007 cratering of the Global North.

The big fact for the entire period since World War II remains: Divergence, Bigtime���at least when observations are countries.

It's not "everything you know about cross-country convergence is (now) wrong". Estimated �� over the entire period since 1960 is still -0.2. It's "catastrophic policy failure in the Global North since 2008". (Of course, if your unit of observation is people rather than nations, that China & India have done very well and have 2.3 billion matters a lot).

#shouldread
#economicgrowth
#globalization
#highlighted

John Cole annoys me by directing me to Irwin Stelzer an...

John Cole annoys me by directing me to Irwin Stelzer and his claim that under Trump economic growth is "around... 4%". It is not. GDP growth under Trump has been and is widely projected to be roughly 2.7% per year, not "around... 4%". Irwin Stelzer is a liar. Liars are not worth reading. The Weekly Standard needs to step up its game. Badly: Irwin Stelzer: National Debt Under Trump Rises to $21.7 Trillion: "The economy is growing at around a 4 percent rate in response to the tax cuts and to a revival of animal spirits as entrepreneurs and corporate chieftains wake up in the morning wondering not what the government is going to do to them, but what it might do for them... <!--more--</p>

<hr />

<pre><code>#shouldread
#economicsgonewrong
#moralresponsibility
#orangehairdbaboons
</code></pre>
</div>

Darrick Hamilton definitely is asking the right questions...

Darrick Hamilton definitely is asking the right questions. And he might have the right answers. But I suspect not. Yes, there is something very deep in America's culture that discourages public responsibility for the conditions of poor and especially poor black Americans, to the country's shame. Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that: "no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity... that they who feed, clothe, and lodge... the people, should... be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged..." We today can replace his "greater part" with "substantial part", and it is still true. But I suspect that the health gaps between high-status, high-income, and high-wealth African Americans and their white peers have other origins���not that I know what those other origins are, mind you: Darrick Hamilton: Post-racial rhetoric, racial health disparities, and health disparity consequences of stigma, stress, and racism: "High achieving black Americans, as measured by education, still exhibit large health disparities...

...Post-racial, politics of personal responsibility and ���neoliberal paternalism��� troupes discourage a public responsibility for the conditions of the poor and black Americans, and, instead, encourage punitive measures to ���manage���surplus populations��� of the poor and black Americans. We introduce an alternative frame and integrate it with John Henryism as a link to better understand the paradox above���the added efforts and stigma imposed upon high achieving blacks that threaten the relative position of the dominant white group translates in deleterious health for high achieving blacks. Ultimately, we explore how the potential physical and psychological costs of stigma and, ironically, exerting individual agency, which in the context of racist or stigmatized environment, may explain the limited role of education and income as protective health factors for blacks relative to whites...

#shouldread
#racism

Matthew Yglesias: Affordable Housing Is Just the Beginnin...

Matthew Yglesias: Affordable Housing Is Just the Beginning of YIMBY: "high-cost metropolitan areas should revise their zoning rules to allow for more and denser construction, and that this will, among other things, improve the situation for low-income renters and reduce the displacement associated with gentrification. As a matter of tactical politics, adding affordable housing advocates to the YIMBY coalition is certainly a good idea...

...But the level of obsession with this goal seems unwarranted by cold-eyed politics. At the end of the day, if anti-gentrification activists had that much political clout, we wouldn���t see so much gentrification! The real issue seems to be that most YIMBY people have left-wing political commitments, and their feelings are sincerely hurt when affordable housing advocates and organizers in communities of color don���t agree with them. The views of other actors like labor unions, small-business owners, or simply people who aren���t super-political don���t seem as pressing. But I think this is both a tactical and a substantive mistake...

...Reducing housing scarcity also has a bunch of other benefits that should not be sacrificed on the altar of monomaniacally framing reform as a way to advance niche left goals.... It strikes me as perverse for a movement that���s largely composed of youngish middle-class professionals living in big cities to deny the obvious benefits of a YIMBY agenda for youngish middle-class professionals living in big cities. Lots of people moved to the city after college... realized sometime along the way that actually they���d rather not leave the city. But then they started doing the math and realized that the compromises they���d need to make in terms of physical space make them not want to stay in the city after all. Yet what they���d really like is for a bunch more houses to be built in the city, so a couple of 30-something college graduates could afford to buy a townhouse or condo with three bedrooms and a den in a safe neighborhood.... The genius of the YIMBY agenda is that ���build a bunch of big new places for yuppies to live��� doesn���t come at the expense of anyone else. On the contrary, building big new places for yuppies to live prevents the yuppies from doing what my wife and I did���buying an old house and renovating it so that it is now nicer but houses fewer people than it did pregentrification....

Market rate construction means the city���s property tax and income tax base both grow. That���s great news for firefighters, teachers, cops, and other public sector workers because it means the city will actually be able to meet its pension obligations and hire more workers, rather than laying them off.... In short, the idea that we should change the rules across a... whole region... isn���t a niche solution to the niche issue of housing low-income people. It���s a broad agenda for city-wide prosperity that has diverse benefits for a huge range of people. And advocates should say so....

#shouldread
#NIMBYism
#regionaleconomics

Neal Ascherson: Anna of All The Russians by Elaine Feinstein: Weekend Reading

Neal Ascherson: Observer Review: Anna of All The Russians by Elaine Feinstein: "Our lady of sorrows: Elaine Feinstein tells how poet Anna Akhmatova, whose son was in the Gulag, spoke for millions of Russians of their hell under Stalin...

When people remember Anna Akhmatova, they do so extravagantly. Josef Brodsky, one of the circle of young poets who adored her when she was old, said: 'In conversation with her, or simply drinking tea or vodka, you became a Christian, a human being in the Christian sense of the word'. Anatoly Nauman, another in that circle, remembered that after meeting her he was 'stunned by the fact that I had been in the presence of someone with whom no one on earth had anything in common'. Isaiah Berlin, throwing himself on his hotel bed after spending a day and a night talking to her in Leningrad, exclaimed: 'I am in love, I am in love!' Elaine Feinstein, author of this biography, calls her 'one of the greatest poets of Russian literature ... she became the voice of a whole people's suffering under Stalin ... an iconic figure for all those whom the Soviet regime repressed ...' This status was confirmed for ever when Andrey Zhdanov, Stalin's cultural rottweiler, excommunicated her in 1946 as 'half nun, half whore, or rather both nun and whore with her petty, narrow private life, her trivial experiences ...'

But icons are difficult to write about critically. How good a poet was she really? To me as a non-Russian, her contemporary Marina Tsvetaeva seems as a writer to be richer and more astonishing. I know Russians who now dismiss Akhamatova as 'a minor poet'. But how do you separate the passionate response to her verse, a response which has itself become part of Russian history, from the quality of that poetry?

Anna Akhmatova was born in Odessa in 1889 (her father was called Gorenko, but she took the more glamorous name of a Tatar ancestor). Brought up in and near St Petersburg, she became one of the young writers and performers who met in the 'Stray Dog' cellar in the years before the First World War. Mayakovsky, Mandelstam and many other men and women who were to be her friends for life went there. Akhmatova - tall, black-haired, with huge grey eyes - read poems about painful love. Before she was 30, she was famous. The writer Kornei Chukovsky said her first book, Evening, 'accompanied the next two or three generations of Russians whenever they fell in love'. In 1910, she married the poet and explorer Nikolai Gumilev. By the time of the revolution, seven years later, the marriage had come apart, but Gumilev's arrest and execution in 1920 on fictional charges of anti-Bolshevik conspiracy devastated Akhmatova. By now, she had begun the nomadic, chaotic existence which lasted most of her life. It brought her shabby rooms in old palaces, torn silk dressing gowns, a procession of momentary or semi-permanent lovers, semi-starvation ('a horrible skeleton dressed in rags', as one visitor saw her in 1919), tuberculosis and guilt. 'I brought destruction to those I loved.' There were several times when both her current lover and her son, Lev Gumilev, were in the Gulag (the son survived; the lover, Nikolay Punin, died in the camps) But Akhmatova never left Russia, or thought of doing so. And, with only a few interruptions, the poetry kept coming.

Caught in the siege of Leningrad in 1941, she was one of the few writers chosen to be flown out. In spite of her political views, Stalin recognised that she was worth saving. But in 1946 Akhmatova was denounced ('harlot and nun') by Zhdanov. She became an 'unperson', dangerous to everyone she met. Lev Gumilev was rearrested and released only in 1956, three years after Stalin's death. Only in 1957 was Akhmatova rehabilitated. But nobody had forgotten the poet who had given them courage in awful times, and the last 10 years of her life were spent in glory, if not exactly in comfort, in a dacha of her own near Leningrad surrounded by friends.

A great deal of Feinstein's biography is taken up with careful attempts to decipher Akhmatova's 'relationships'. These were multiple and often simultaneous. Nobody's love life looks simple under bright light, but the emotional life of Russian intellectuals - then, as now - was as disorderly as a London teenager's floor. Wisely, Feinstein also disentangles Akhmatova's friendships, the human bond which many Russians consider more important and lasting than sexual love. Most of her male intimates let her down, but her women friends stood by her. What society today can produce friends as wonderful as Lydia Chukovskaya? It was Chukovskaya who stood with her all those days and nights of frost, queuing outside prisons to hand in parcels. Akhmatova had food and clothes for Lev, bound for somewhere beyond the Arctic Circle. Chukovskaya took packages for her husband, not knowing that he had long ago been shot. In one of those terrible queues, a girl recognised Akhmatova and whispered: 'Can you describe this?' Akhmatova replied: 'I can.' Out of that grew, gradually, her tremendous poem cycle, Requiem. Once, when young, she had written the lines which lovers quoted to one another. Now she provided words which thousands of men and women repeated under their breath, as they suffered, feared and waited.

As Feinstein writes, Akhmatova always considered that she had been 'appointed by God to sing of this suffering'. Even after her brilliant looks had faded, she was vain and - for someone with such good friends - strikingly indifferent to anyone else's problems. As a conventional wife or mother, she was terrible. Her son, in the labour camps, deluded himself that she did not care how long he stayed there and that she was exploiting his fate to make her own poetry. (The embittered Lev Gumilev grew up to be the ultra-nationalist historian who reintroduced mystic racialism into post-Soviet education.) As a poet, her unambiguous language, like Pushkin's but almost always narration in the first person, does not translate easily into English, and can occasionally seem trite. But we know that for millions across the generations those words in Russian rang true.

Elaine Feinstein's achievement is to show us the life of an extraordinary woman in gleaming fragments, and to demonstrate, through so many witnesses, how she was worshipped....

#shouldread
#books

Reuters: CVS, Aetna Win U.S. Approval for $69 Billion Mer...

Reuters: CVS, Aetna Win U.S. Approval for $69 Billion Merger: "Pharmacy chain CVS Health Corp (CVS.N) won U.S. antitrust approval for its $69 billion acquisition of health insurer Aetna Inc (AET.N), the Justice Department said on Wednesday...

... paving the way for a combination the companies say can help cut soaring U.S. healthcare costs. It is the second large recent healthcare deal to win a thumbs up from the U.S. Justice Department. The agency gave the green light to health insurer Cigna Corp���s (CI.N) $52 billion acquisition of the nation���s largest pharmacy benefit manager (PBM), Express Scripts Holding Co (ESRX.O), on Sept. 17. Shares of CVS and Aetna each rose about 1 percent on Wednesday, a day when the broader market was sharply lower, with CVS trading at $80.25 and Aetna at $206.00...

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