J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 305
September 12, 2018
A very good point here: there is good reason not to take ...
A very good point here: there is good reason not to take a markup-free model as our benchmark from which we begin our analysis of Trump: Ben Golub: Krugman Thinks Efficiency Loss of a Trade War Is Small: "Krugman thinks efficiency loss of a trade war is small (Harberger triangle size) even though trade is now in intermediates along supply chains...
...This view is, I think, wrong because it ignores the most important thing about supply chains: complexity. In reality, unlike the toy model he sketches, MANY distinct intermediates go into a typical good. And this happens at many steps along a supply chain. Borders are crossed many times! When that happens, tariff-induced distortions get scaled up a LOT. Really a lot: in a beautiful recent working paper, Baqaee and Farhi show that when markups and complex production are combined, real efficiency losses from markups (which tariffs also are) are TWO ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE LARGER than previously thought. The combination of (i) distortions and (ii) complex production invalidates simple intuitions such as those behind @paulkrugman's toy model and makes for a potentially a huge multiplier on distortions.
Baqaee and Farhi's paper is here: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/farhi/files/micro_distortions_draft_new.pdf P.S. Their analysis is for markups in domestic production, but the intuitions apply directly to tariffs, and they're working on a version that "officially" covers an open economy. For nerd interest, the key thing going on is that with distortions (wedges) there's no macro envelope theorem, which is the key thing behind Krugman's Harberger triangles intuition....
#shouldread
No surprise: throwing people off Medicaid has substantial...
No surprise: throwing people off Medicaid has substantial costs and no benefits at all: Thomas DeLeire: The Effect of Disenrollment from Medicaid on Employment, Insurance Coverage, Health and Health Care Utilization: "From July through September 2005, TennCare, the Tennessee Medicaid program, disenrolled approximately 170,000 adults following a change in eligibility rules...
...Following this eligibility change, the fraction of adults in Tennessee covered by Medicaid fell by over 5 percentage points while uninsured rates increased by almost 5 percentage points relative to adults in other Southern states. There is no evidence of an increase in employment rates in Tennessee following the disenrollment. Self-reported health and access to medical care worsened as hospitalization rates, doctor visits, and dentist visits all declined while the use of free or public clinics increased. The Tennessee experience suggests that undoing the expansion of Medicaid eligibility to adults that occurred under the Affordable Care Act likely would reduce health insurance coverage, reduce health care access, and worsen health but would not lead to increases in employment...
#shouldread
#healthcare
September 11, 2018
Hoisted: The Attraction of Communism in the 1930s
George Orwell: The Attraction of Communism in the 1930s: "Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal...
...Here am I, sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire.... It is only very rarely... that I connect his coal with that far-off labour in the mines.... Yet their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower.... [I]t is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the Nancy Poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants���all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel...
Victor Gollancz: "The most frequent argument which socialists have to face is precisely this: ���I agree with you that Socialism would be wholly admirable if it would work-but it wouldn���t���...
...[This] objection was more frequently heard in 1919 than in 1927, in 1927 than at the end of the first Five Year Plan, and at the end of the first Five Year Plan than to-day-the reason being precisely that... the achievements of the Soviet Union are there to see...
George Orwell again: "In outward appearance [Barcelona] was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist...
...Everyone wore rough working class clothes.... All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.... There was no unemployment...you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars.... Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machines. In the barbers��� shops were anarchist notices...solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves...
#shouldread
Florence, Isaac, and Helene:
Florence, Isaac, and Helene:
Note to Self: I want a prize for this! What kind of prize...
Note to Self: I want a prize for this! What kind of prize can I get for this? To whom should I apply for my prize?
Willmoore Kendall, Harry Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided, and the Party of Abraham Lincoln: Hoisted from the Archives
More about the... rather strange... musings of: Geoffrey Kabaservice: Liberals Don't Know Much About Conservative History: "Buckley���s endorsement of Southern segregation was a moral blot on the conservative movement, and he later acknowledged it as his gravest error. But it���s anti-historical to assume that Buckley was little more than a Klansman with a large vocabulary...
...It���s true that the era when historians ignored conservatism or dismissed it as a curio is over; many universities now offer entire courses on its history. But a closer look at their syllabi typically reveals a paucity of writings by actual conservatives and a glut of hostile interpretations.... The serious work of intellectual conservatism... [in the 1980s] came from thinkers who had little to do with the emerging political-media entertainment complex.... Of course, not all the works of that period���s conservative tribunes have aged well. Culture wars tend to produce more heat than light. Bloom���s musings on rock and roll seem as ridiculous now as they did then... few... still defend Charles Murray���s 1994 The Bell Curve... and it���s hard to read the neoconservatives of the 1990s now without thinking of the Iraq War disaster looming on the horizon. But the conservatives listed above were for the most part intellectually honest, dedicated to the effort of persuading the unconvinced, and capable of changing their minds in the face of conflicting evidence...
Jeet Heer: @heerjeet: "Buckley being Buckley...
...Joshua_A_Tait: "On April 4, 1965, William Buckley addressed a prayer breakfast for Catholic police officers. The press reported that 'more than 5,600 New York policemen clapped and cheered' as Buckley praised the '"restraint" of the police in Selma...'"
A question for Kabaservice: If Buckley was not much more than a "Klansman with a large vocabulary", what would he have said instead? What would a "Klansman with a large vocabulary" have said then?
Coquetting with the idea that Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant and a communist fellow traveler was... rather common in Buckley's National Review. For example: Willmoore Kendall:
Hoisted from the Archives: Harry Jaffa, Willmoore Kendall, the Crisis of the House Divided, and the Party of Abraham Lincoln: Andrew Ferguson...
...Most conservative books are pseudo-books: ghostwritten pastiches whose primary purpose seems to be the photo of the "author" on the cover. What a tumble! From 'The Conservative Mind' to 'Savage Nation'; from Clifton White to Dick Morris; from Willmoore Kendall and Harry Jaffa to Sean Hannity and Mark Fuhrman-all in little more than a generation's time. Whatever this is, it isn't progress... -Andy Ferguson, Weekly Standard.
Let me enthusiastically agree with Andy Ferguson's high praise of the very interesting Harry Jaffa. But Willmoore Kendall? Those with access to National Review's electronic archives can read Willmoore Kendall's review of Harry Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0226391132/braddelong00, with Kendall's attack on Jaffa's argument that the Declaration and the Constitution are together living documents dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. As Kendall (unfairly) summarizes Jaffa's argument:
As for the "all men are created equal" clause, Jaffa's Lincoln... sees it as the indispensable presupposition of the entire American political experience.... Jaffa's Lincoln sees the great task of the nineteenth century as that of affirming the cherished accomplishment of the Fathers by transcending it. Concretely, this means to construe the equality clause as having an allegedly unavoidable meaning with which it was always pregnant, but which the Fathers apprehended only dimly.... The Civil War... had to be fought in the interest of freedom for all mankind... once the South had gone beyond slaveholding... to assert the "positive goodness" of slavery, and so to deny the... equality-clause standard as the basic axiom of our political system.... [Jaffa] insists that [the Civil War] had to be fought lest the possibility of self-government perish from the earth...
And what does Kendall think of Jaffa's argument? Let me quote the ultimate paragraph:
The idea of natural right is not so easily reducible to the equality clause, and there are better ways of demonstrating the possibility of self-government than imposing one's views concerning natural right upon others. In this light it would seem that it was the Southerners who were the anti-Caesars of pre-Civil War days, and that Lincoln was the Caesar Lincoln claimed to be trying to prevent; and that the Caesarism we all need to fear is the contemporary Liberal movement, dedicated like Lincoln to egalitarian reforms sanctioned by mandates emanating from national majorities, a [Civil Rights] movement which is Lincoln's legitimate offspring. In a word, it would seem that we had best learn to live up to the Framers before we seek to transcend them...
Kendall writes in code. Where Kendall writes "Caesar" read "illegitimate tyrant." Where he writes "egalitarian reforms" think "letting African-Americans vote." Where he writes "a movement which is Lincoln's legitimate offspring" read "post-WWII civil rights movement." Where he writes "live up to the Framers" read "abandon any attempt by federal courts or the national legislature to interfere with the peculiar institutions of the American South as they stood in 1950."
Abraham Lincoln���and Harry Jaffa���would agree that there are better ways of demonstrating the possibility of self-government than imposing one's views concerning natural right upon others. That's why they objected to Southerners' holding African-Americans as slaves: what could possibly be a greater "imposition"? For a Union army under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant to say to rich white Southerners that they cannot hold African-Americans as slaves would seem to everyone a lesser imposition than for the Mississippi militia under the command of Jefferson Davis to say to poor African-Americans that they are slaves. Well, it seems like a lesser imposition to almost everyone. It seems a greater imposition to Willmoore Kendall.
Oh. And the "transcending" that Kendall italicizes in the first of my quotations from him above? That's also code. That's code for "under Jaffa's interpretation, Abraham Lincoln is, at best, a fellow traveler of the communists."
Is this really any better than Sean Hannity? More sophisticated and more polite in form, yes. But better?...
#shouldread
#hoistedfromthearchives
September 10, 2018
Paul Campos: Trump: Symptom or Cause? (Or, tomorrow's his...
Paul Campos: Trump: Symptom or Cause? (Or, tomorrow's historical revisionism today): "The functionalist position will emphasize... continuity between Trump... [and] Goldwater... a triumph of mass movement politics over elite control....
...Trump���s rapid co-optation of the entire leadership of the Republican party once he was elected merely proved that the elites who at first resisted or at least hesitated to embrace him were deluded about the nature of movement conservatism, which in retrospect was always first and foremost a form of white ethno-nationalist reaction. From this perspective, Trump���s campaign and presidency simply tore the mask off.... The intentionalist view will emphasize that Trump was... the leader of an authoritarian cult of personality, who insisted, like his many South and Central American predecessors, on his populist bona fides, his supposed hostility to existing elites, etc. On this view, the Trump phenomenon, despite obvious points of continuity with post-Goldwater movement conservatism, represented a radical break in American political life...
#shouldread
Thinking About This Again: Extremely wise and interesting...
Thinking About This Again: Extremely wise and interesting on how the more empirical reality tells the Trumpists to mark their beliefs to market, the more desperate they are to avoid doing so: John Holbo: Epistemic Sunk Costs and the Extraordinary, Populist Delusions of Crowds?: "Here���s a thought.... The first rule of persuasion is: make your audience want to believe...
...Trump has a talent for that. But I think it���s fair to say that he has often lived his business life by a different maxim: if you owe the bank $100 it���s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million it���s the bank���s problem. There is a sense in which that works at the persuasion level, as epistemology.... There are two options as to things you might believe: (1) Justin Trudeau is a weak, nefarious dairy extortionist. (2) 1 is just f------ ridiculous. If 2 is true, Trump voters ought to be ashamed of themselves. Anyone can make mistakes. But the President of the United States should not be ridiculous. If you have to choose between being being ashamed of yourself or thinking Justin Trudeau is going to hell for dairy-related reasons, the latter option is far superior on grounds of psychic comfort. (Exception: you yourself are Justin Trudeau.)
But it adds up. I don���t just mean: you get wronger and wronger. It gets harder and harder to doubt the next ridiculous thing���since admitting Trump said or did one thing that was not just wrong but ridiculous would make it highly credible that he has done or said other ridiculous things. But that would raise the likelihood that you, a Trump supporter, have already believed or praised not just mistaken but flat-out ridiculous things, which would be an annoying thing to have to admit. So the comfortable option is to buy it all���the more so, the more ridiculous it threatens to be.
There is nothing uniquely Trumpian about epistemic over-investment. But Trump does seem to have a Too Big To Fail talent for locking folks in, by deliberately getting them deeper and deeper in epistemic hock.
Do you think it���s deliberate?
#shouldread
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