J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 290

Dan Drezner: Assessing Nikki Haley: "Haley... had two tra...

Dan Drezner: Assessing Nikki Haley: "Haley... had two traits that made her unusual within the Trump foreign policy team. The first is that she was a professional politician... able to send messages to key constituencies, pleasing the Trump White House at times and other groups at other junctures...

...At the White House on Tuesday she claimed ���Now the United States is respected. Countries might not like what we do, but they respect what we do.��� That is flatly wrong, but Haley���s ability to say things like this with a straight face endeared her to this White House. This did not go unnoticed by others. One former senior administration official told Vanity Fair���s Abigail Tracy, ���I think her time at the U.N. has demonstrated very clearly that she will do whatever is politically expedient..." It worked: she polls pretty well,....

Haley���s true gift, however, was to pick the right fight at the right time within this administration. When Larry Kudlow claimed that Haley must have been momentarily confused after an announcement on Russia sanctions had not come to pass, Haley responded with ���With all due respect, I don���t get confused.��� That statement produced something extraordinary: an apology from a Trump White House official. In the end, that is the primary takeaway from Haley���s departure. She was adequate at the United Nations post at a time when so few Trump national security officials demonstrated adequacy. Furthermore, her departure, in contrast to Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, and H.R. McMaster, was on her terms.

Nikki Haley served in the Trump administration and departed with most of her dignity intact. That, in and of itself, is what makes her extraordinary...

#shouldread
#security
#orangehairedbaboons
#politics

Cedar Brook Notes: As C.S. Lewis said: ���I pray, my Lo...

Cedar Brook Notes: As C.S. Lewis said: ���I pray, my Lord, that I never believe I see my own face on the one seated on the judgment throne���. American religion, at least white Protestant and Catholic religion, is overwhelmingly a self-righteousness multiplier���not an independent influence. You could perhaps make an exception for Jewish and African-American religion, with their focus on _ avadim hayinu l���pharo b���mitzrayim_ and thus our need to succor the orphan and the stranger and be the hands of The One Who Is in the liberation of others. But those are minor currents in what is called ���American religion���.

#notetoself
#weblogs
#civilreligion
#cedarbrooknotes

Praise for Heather Boushey's 2016 book Finding Time from ...

Praise for Heather Boushey's 2016 book Finding Time from New School's Teresa Ghilarducci: Americans Should Have More Time Off: "Economist Heather Boushey��argues that solving work-family conflicts would help drive more sustainable economic growth. And Americans agree...

...85% support paid sick leave for themselves, 82% favor paid maternity leave, while 69% support paid leave for new fathers and 67%for paid sick leave to take care of family members. But all that is legally required at the federal level is twelve weeks of unpaid leave, and we exempt small businesses (those with fifty or fewer employees) from even that minimal standard.�� Some states are acting on their own���six (plus the District of Columbia) require some paid family and medical leave.�� But we won���t close the gap with our economic competitors without national legislation.�� Look for this issue to be fought over in upcoming elections, and maybe some day you���ll get more paid time off from work.�� Hey, all of us working people deserve it...

#shouldread

REMIND YOURSELF: Representation

Keep this near the top of working memory...

180.8 million people are represented by the 49 senators who caucus with the Democrats.
141.7 million people are represented by the 52 51 senators who caucus with the Republicans.
65.9 million people voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton and Tim Kaine to be their president and vice president
63.0 million people voted for Donald Trump and Mike Pence to be their president and vice president.



#workingmemory
#socialjustice
#politics
#weblogging

For the Weekend: Tom Petty: Learning to Fly

Learning To Fly:

#fortheweekend
#music

Ashlie Jensen (2013): Mendoza is Dismissed from Court: "I...

Ashlie Jensen (2013): Mendoza is Dismissed from Court: "In 1583 Queen Elizabeth I hosted her last Spanish Ambassador.... It became known to Elizabeth's intelligence network that Bernardino de Mendoza was conspiring.... He was ordered to leave England... [because] his involvement in the Throckmorton Plot [had] 'disturbed the realm of England'. Directly before his departure, Mendoza ordered the English officials seeing him off to go and, 'tell your mistress that Bernardino de Mendoza was born not to disturb kingdoms, but to conquer them'...

#shouldread
#history
#culturewars

A Baker's Dozen of Fairly-Recent Links

Michael Br��ning: Germany���s Socialism of Fools : "By adopting a program based on "identity and solidarity," Germany's far-right AfD is harking back to classic National Socialism. It is likely to be a winning formula in this month's state elections in Bavaria and Hesse...
Anjana Ahuja: Climate catastrophe warnings were greeted with global silence : "hortsighted folly of ignoring the IPCC will lead to drastic future policies...
Brad W. Setser: Russia, China, and (the Absence of) Global Funding of the U.S. Fiscal Deficit���
Robert Wilde: The Chevauch��e: Organised Medieval Murder
5, N.S. Gill: Rome 1st Century B.C. Chronology
Wikipedia: Legio X Equestris
Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer: A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility
Timur Kuran and��Dani Rodrik: The Economic Costs of Erdo��an : "For more than a decade, financial markets gave Recep Tayyip Erdo��an the benefit of the doubt and supplied the Turkish economy with easy credit. Such debt-fueled growth almost always ends badly, and now it has...
Wikipedia: Peace of Westphalia
William Shakespeare: The Second part of King Henry the Fourth
Daniel W. Drezner (20070: The New New World Order
(2004): Eric Alterman Told Us So
Matthew Buckley: @physicsmatt : "Are we going to do anything about our allies murding a journalist? No, because a) Prince Jared still needs a loan, and b) murdering journalists is a GOP party plank now. All the US will do is ask the Saudis for how-to tips...

"You don���t get to claim that you���re not attacking the...

"You don���t get to claim that you���re not attacking the university when your first few sentences read like that. It suggests a lack of clarity in the argument���a sentence I would have written if I had been asked to peer-review this essay". Dan Drezner mocks the anti-humanities industry, and, boy, is it mockable: Daniel Drezner: A Paper That Would Never Have Gotten Past Peer Review Criticizes the Academy. Film at 11: "Last year scholars James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian proudly declared that they had hoodwinked a peer-reviewed journal into publishing nonsense.... That... was riddled with problems, not the least of which was that the journal they had hacked was a pay-for-play scam...

...A year later, however, the two are back with another co-author, Helen Pluckrose.... The authors attempted to discredit a range of humanities journals by submitting more than 20 papers cloaked in the jargon of their subfields. They were pretty successful in their later efforts despite zero initial training in the cognate fields.... This shouldn���t be exaggerated... only two of the seven... ���could be considered mainstream���.... This paper reminded me of a... stor ... high-schoolers who thought they could program a computer to do a lot of their homework.... The principal didn���t punish them, because... to pull this... off, the students had to master the subject well enough to program the computer.... When the authors of this paper acknowledged that it took them several months of failure to learn how to craft a paper that would merit being sent out for peer review, I wondered if they had read that story and recognized the plot....

This paper would have never passed... peer review....

Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian contend that the fault lies with, ���at least fifteen subdomains of thought in grievance studies".... The authors contradict themselves on several fronts. In their conclusion, they warn that in response to their findings, ���[The] wrong answers are to attack the peer-review system or academia overall."... That���s great, but here is how Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian start their paper:

Something has gone wrong in the university���especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous.

You don���t get to claim that you���re not attacking the university when your first few sentences read like that. It suggests a lack of clarity in the argument���a sentence I would have written if I had been asked to peer-review this essay....

#shouldread

Development and Security

Not what I said at the Blum Center Development Lunch today: more what I wish I had said���albeit it is still incoherent and disorganized:

Let me begin with three direct responses to points Michael Nacht made. Let me then try to���briefly���propose a framework, perhaps a framework for analysis, perhaps merely a framework for convincing people in the national security community that they should take issues of economic development seriously, and so give large grants so that the Berkeley development community can do more things���things closely related to what we would be doing anyway.

The three direct responses:

There have been various attempts for at least two decades to gin up a ���New Cold War��� with China. According to Colin Powell���s shop, Richard Cheney wanted to gin up a ���New Cold War��� with China in 2001. I think saying that Walmart was an agent of influence for the sinister Chinese communists. But they got diverted by 9-11. Now it is coming back���some of the same people and some of a later generation thinking that national unity requires a foreign enemy, that the government needs to ���busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels���, as Henry IV Lancaster advised his son Prince Hal in Shakespeare���s Henry IV Part 2 to ���waste the memory of former days��� so that English public opinion would be diverted from thinking about the illegitimacy of the Lancaster dynasty. It is, however, three decades too late in my opinion. The US and Chinese economies have been so totally and completely intertwined by globalization that any attempts to create serious, significant international tensions that affect trade, freeze assets, and so one will likely be as disasters for both parties. The U.S. and China are now in the position that Jean Monnet and company hoped the European Economic Community would put France and Germany: make it economically unthinkable that they should even try to go to war with each other.

With respect to the ability of countries to move upward in terms of economic development. Michael Nacht referenced the standard road to development that was started in Providence RI and Waltham MA in the 1810s, when American entrepreneurs stole the plans for textile factories. Other countries have used this road since: use your low wages to gain an advantage in exporting simple manufactures, primarily textiles, and so build a community of engineering practice that can then be leveraged to bring in other more advanced technologies from the industrial core. That strategy was predicated on the fact that animal- or steam-powered machinery required microprocessors to control it, and the only available microprocessors were human brains���supercomputers that fit in breadboxes, drew 50 watts of power, and could be easily kept on task, even incredibly boring tasks. That was the major road to successful development. That road is now closing fast. You can no longer rely on low wage labor and a large global appetite for simple manufactures from the rich part of the world to drive your development. What���s the alternative? Is there an alternative? This is, as Michael said, a big problem.

Ever since the Treaty of M��nster and the Treaty of Osnabr��ck were signed in [Westphalia][] in 1648, there has been a strong belief in the imminent demise of the Westphalian system. The Peace of Westphalia made it settled European international law that the Roman Empire was dead���that there was no longer any supra-national authority, whether emperor or pope, who would exercise any kind of power or influence of even moral suasion over the local governments of kingdoms, principalities, republics, or whatevers. Individual states were ���sovereign��� and would run their internal affairs. Someday this Westphalian system will breakdown: someday it will stop being the case that, as far as international issues are concerned, kingdoms and principalities and republics and whatever are best treated as single autonomous unitary national actors pursuing rational or irrational purposes running their own affairs with their militaries, their diplomatic corps, and their economic regulatory agencies. Eventually civil society in one form or another will have its revenge. And we will analyze a more complicated world in which individual governments are sitting on top of a boiling sea of other transnational forces, putting themselves at the head of the parade and pretending to lead it. Soo far the Westphalian system has held up pretty well for 370 years. But it may finally be breaking. I was struck by hearing former general and Brookings president John Allen draw a very sharp distinction between U.S. government policy and U.S. civil society influence as two very different things, especially with respect to development issues.

That concludes my three direct reactions to what Michael Nacht said.

Now let me move on to some more elliptical comments on the complicated mix of issues that Michael has laid out, with my underlying motivation being to think how people like us should argue to security-minded people that they should worry about���and fund us to think about���issues of development. Here I do not think I have coherent things to say. Here I do not think that I have bottom lines. Here I have, rather some worries and some points:

I will begin by pulling one of my standard dodges: I will go back in time 6000 years to the early days of agriculture and the state and the beginning of war���war as something more than friction between two human bands or within one human band of 100 or so breaking out into deadly violence���as a social practice. I go back 6000 years so that I can at least start by talking about something that I know as much���or rather as little���as others around the table, rather than talking about something where others around the table know more.

Starting a bit more than 6000 years ago we have farmers: people who cannot run away from trouble into the forest because they have to stay to manage their fields and their crops. So 6000 years ago there is a new addition to the set of human occupations: the occupation of being a thug with a spear. ���Give me one-third of your crop���, you say to the farmers, ���or I will stab you with this spear���. Once you have this grift up and running, it perpetuates itself. Since you don���t have to really work for a living, you have lots of time to train with your spear and become truly expert at stabbing people with it. Because you and your children are well-nourished, they are four inches taller and 20 pounds heavier than the farmers. The fly in the ointment is that there are other thugs with spears nearby who want your farmers to pay taxes to them. And so we get the choice of Akhilleus: a glorious life, but quite possibly a short one. You get war as a social practice.

Historically, war as a social practice takes four forms:

Resisting attempts by the peasants when they decide they would rather not give the thugs with spears a third of the crop���internal security.
Banditry/repelling banditry���the Vikings, say, show up, and if you are armed to the teeth they will trade with you, if you are not they will sack your towns, steal or eat your livestock, take your stuff, kill some of you, and take your young men and young women away as slaves.
War for provinces���to acquire estates so your nobles can get promotions and so ���tax��� more peasants and your leaders can get duchies, counties, and baronies; and also to gain political advantage: over a decade C. Julius Caesar with his Legio X Equestris and other legions conquer Gaul, kill a million Gauls, enslave and sell another million Gauls, and so builds up the power base that enables him to win the eighth Roman Civil War of the 1st Century BC. This war can be profitable, if waged well and in the right place. ���I do not understand���, wrote M. Tullius Cicero to his best friend T. Pomponius Atticus, ���why Caesar is invading Britain. It is guarded by massive cliffs. There is not a single ounce of silver to steal on the entire island. And as for slaves���very low quality, not a single one skilled in literature or music!���
War as a way of enforcing imperial control over resources���make others trade with you on your terms.

Those four types of war could be profitable, or at least they get the young men out of town and unable to cause trouble for a while. But with the coming of Alfred Nobel���s explosives and of modern bureaucracy and the mass conscription and mobilization it makes possible, all four of these kinds of war, at least as kinds of offensive war, lose their rationales. As Norman Angell wrote in one of the most brilliant and most wrong books in the entire security studies field ever, it is much less costly in the lives of your young men and of your treasure to trade with others for whatever resources you want than to try to conquer them and extract those resources. That was the right part of his [The Great Illusion][]. The wrong part of The Great Illusion was that statesmen were relatively rational: that they would recognize this, and that aggressive war was a thing of the past. Of course, within a decade of The Great Illusion Europe began its downward spiral into an abattoir, an orgy of violent death and destruction of a magnitude that had never before been seen in human history.

Now, of course, the era of 20th century war���imperial war, national liberation war, total war���is over. War as a social practice has not regained any of the (1) through (4) rationales that made it profitable or at least worth undertaking from the deciders��� points of view before the 20th century. Yet it would be a rash human indeed who declared that war as a social practice will be unimportant in the 21st century. And we have little idea of what shape war as a social practide3 in the 21st century might take.

Our task here is complicated by the fact that the U.S. national security community comes at this Gordian Knot of issues from out of some left field. If we start in 1870, we see the U.S. national security apparatus going through nine stages in overlapping eras:

1870-1900: Indian removal���stealing the Black Hills and other pieces of land.

1900-1920: Wading into the Great Power waters���conquering the Philippines, Theodore Roosevelt���s white fleet (very visible, hence not viable in any North Atlantic or North Pacific contest with forces painted battleship grey like those of Britain, France, Germany, or even Japan), Woodrow Wilson���s sending John J. Pershing into Mexico to ���teach the Mexicans to elect good men���, Pershing���s army in France of World War I.

1920-1935: Latin American interventions���of little use or purpose, save possibly for those of the United Fruit company.

1935-1945: Preparing for and fighting World War II���the Arsenal of Democracy.

1945-1990: The Cold War���containment and deterrence until the drawbacks of the Soviet model become obvious to all.

1990-1995: Fettered hegemon���the U.S. military does the will of the U.N. Security Council.

1990-2016: Guilt for Yalta���the belief that the countries of the Soviet Empire had paid an awful price for our policy of containment; that even though containment was the right policy, we owe those countries and peoples; and that the right policy is to shrink the influence of Russia down until it is the Muscovy of Ivan the Dread or Peter the Great.

2001-????: The War on Terror (and, from 2001-2008 on Iraq, and on Iran, and on the Clinton legacy).

2017-????: ????

These last four are worth a little more expansion:

First, the George H.W. Bush policy of hegemony and nonproliferation. The United States military will do the will of the Security Council. If you cannot get a veto power on the Security Council to back you, you probably should be gone from the world as a r��gime. If you can get veto power backing, the U.S. military will leave it alone. These shackles meant���or, rather, if the policy had been continued would have meant���that no other power needed to spend a fortune building a military that could cause the U.S. military significant pain. Governments could safely devote their resources to other things more beneficial for their countries. That especially applied to nuclear weapons. Without a strong need to deter an aggressive and adventurous U.S. military, a country���s nuclear weapons were an existential threat to itself: the big danger was that one of your own God-maddened colonels would get the launch codes, and think that the Strong Right Hand of the Almighty would protect the country from retaliation. Better not to have weapons with launch codes. This George H.W. Bush policy was, I think, a very wise power: it greatly amplified our long-run power by giving away a bunch of our short-run power.

But that ship has sailed, and is out of sight beyond the horizon.

This policy does not last. It starts to crater under Clinton, who decides that Russia���s wishes about the Balkans are not to be fully expected. It craters completely in the Cheney administration. We and the world are worse off for it. We are now in a world in which China thinks it needs to have a serious military, and in which Russia thinks that it needs to cause us ���problems��� whenever and wherever it can just to limit our power. We are now in a world in which every power that fears it might someday arouse the ire of a Cheney���or a Trump���is thinking hard about how to acquire nuclear weapons. I guarantee right now Venezuela wishes it had some.

As for ���Guilt for Yalta������the outcome of the Yalta Conference and the way the Cold War went down produced a lot of guilt within the national security community, more guilt than I at least imagined existed back in 1990. George F. Kennan's policy of not aggressive rollback but rather defensive containment until the Soviet Union exposed itself as a catastrophic failure long run failure was probably the right policy, but it was extremely costly for other people. Since 1990 there has been a powerful current within the American national security community to curb Russian power and influence as much as possible, rather than to allow Russia to be the great power that practically all in Moscow���whether pro- or anti-Putin���believe it should be. And as a result virtually all in Moscow concerned with security are angry, and angry enough to cause us headaches whenever they believe they can.

The War on Terror has been expensive and, largely, counterproductive���we have made more enemies through it than we have removed. I have no idea what the Trump administration thinks the foreign policy of America is. I do not believe the Trump administration is usefully modeled as ���thinking���. The influence of America on the world right now is, I believe, best described as a combination of the soft-power influences exercised by American civil society, plus an active chaos monkey. The U.S. military is trying to grapple with how to deal with these two ���policies���, but it is trying.

Now we find ourselves in a world with many security threats to us and to others, with a military that does not have a history to prepare it to deal with the threats we face and the missions it is going to be asked to undertake. To amplify our problems, we have little idea about the form that the social practice of war will take in the 21st century. We do not expect to see the industrial total wars, the national liberation wars, the imperial little wars that we saw in the 20th century. But what will we see? What kind of U.S. military would best deal with what we are likely to see? And how can the U.S. government���s power���military, diplomatic, development���be deployed to eliminate as many 21st century war threats as possible?

And that leaves us with our current dilemmas. War in the 21st century will surely not look like World War, and not look like province-stealing by the kings of the Enlightenment Era. As we think about it, we should probably start with von Clausewitz���s: ���war is the continuation of politics by other means���. The politics that may turn into war involve various forms of banditry; they involve people who are resorting to violence to either create or reproduce or unwind hierarchy; they involve people for whom ethno-nationalism or religion are one hell of a drug and feel a remarkable need to fight over identity. Right now we face a Weimar Russia���an ex-great power that thinks that has been abused by the victors in a previous struggle, and wants revenge because they are angry. We have a national Hinduist India in which the currently-ruling coalition has cast the Muslims of India in the role traditionally reserved for the Jews in Europe. You have a Wilhelmine China: a rising industrial superpower with a ruling caste that no longer has a social role with a leadership hopes to distract attention from internal inequities by, in the words that Shakespeare put in the mouth of King Henry IV Lancaster ���busy[ing] giddy minds with foreign quarrels���.

And we have other threats. What happens when a large typhoon plausibly increased, in strength by global warming comes roaring up a Bay of Bengal plausibly higher because of global warming-induced sea-level hits the Ganges Delta, and five million citizens of Bangladesh die? Hurricane Michael has gained amazing force over the past two days simply because the Gulf of Mexico is these days the warmest it has been in quite a while. It is now slamming into Florida. When the great Bay of Bengal typhoon slams into Bangladesh and the government of Bangladesh then petitions the U.S. Security Council to allow it destroy U.S. coal-fired power plants with drones as a political response, how should we respond?. If individual Bengalis with dead relatives decide their dead relatives and they themselves need American escorts into Val-Hall and take action, how should we respond?

A great deal of the potential causes of 21st century war as a social practice, whatever form it turns out to take, are rooted or are aggravated by problems of development. And the U.S. military���with its tradition from the Black Hills-stealing army of the post-Civil War on up to the fast-moving powerful force of Desert Storm that we then tasked with being military police in a place where they did not speak the language is not well-equipped to think about the force structure and the doctrine needed for the 21st century. This is particularly the case because bureaucratic imperatives require that from the Pentagon���s point of view a mission be found for every piece of the current force structure, and that no task contemplated can be outside the competence of every piece of the current force structure.

Here I think we can really, genuinely, help.

And I have talked for more than long enough.

3232 words
#security
#economicdevelopment
#economicgrowth
#politicaleconomy
#moralphilosophy
#globalwarming
#highighted
#economics
#equitablegrowth

This File: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/10/development-and-security.html

Edit This File: http://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00e551f08003883400e551f080068834/post/6a00e551f080038834022ad398100a200d/edit?saved=e

Note to Self: Books for Econ 210a: Introduction to Econom...

Note to Self: Books for Econ 210a: Introduction to Economic History (Spring 2019)

Moses Finley (1973): The Ancient Economy https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0520025644
Partha Dasgupta (2007): Economics: A Very Short Introduction https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0191578282
Robert Allen (2011): Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0199596654
John Maynard Keynes (1931): Essays in Persuasion https://books.google.com/books?isbn=134959072X
Richard Baldwin (2016): The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0674972686



#berkeley
#economichistory
#books