J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 312

Note to Self: "The Song of Everlasting Sorrow" and Historical Patriarchy...

Note to Self: The Song of Everlasting Sorrow and Historical Patriarchy: I was reading, as one does���I do not remember why I was reading this, however���an English translation_ of poet, landlord, scholar, bureaucrat, drunkard Bai Juyi's Song of Everlasting Sorrow. And I was struck by four short lines:

The overturning of the natural order as a consequence of the love of Emperor Xuanzong for Lady Yang Guifei was so great that all cross the empire parents wished for girl- rather than boy-children...

This struck me as having obvious bearing on my ["Historical Patriarchy"][] lecture...

For reading about Lady Yang Guifei, Emperor Xuanzong, An Lushan, and Yang Guozhong, the best thing I have ever read is, not surprisingly: Guy Gavriel Kay (2010): Under Heaven https://books.google.com/books?isbn=110118700X

TO lern more, start with your friend and mine Wikipedia:

Tang dynasty
Emperor Xuanzong of Tang
Yang Guifei
An Lushan
An Lushan Rebellion
Bai Juyi
Chang Hen Ge : ���������: The Song of Everlasting Sorrow...
Yang Guozhong

Bai Juyi: Song Of Unending Sorrow: For the Weekend

Bai Juyi: Song Of Unending Sorrow: "China's Emperor, craving beauty that might shake an empire,...

...Was on the throne for many years, searching, never finding,

Till a little child of the Yang clan, hardly even grown,

Bred in an inner chamber, with no one knowing her,

But with graces granted by heaven and not to be concealed,

At last one day was chosen for the imperial household.

If she but turned her head and smiled, there were cast a hundred spells,

And the powder and paint of the Six Palaces faded into nothing.

It was early spring. They bathed her in the FlowerPure Pool,

Which warmed and smoothed the creamy-tinted crystal of her skin,

And, because of her languor, a maid was lifting her

When first the Emperor noticed her and chose her for his bride.

The cloud of her hair, petal of her cheek, gold ripples of her crown when she moved,

Were sheltered on spring evenings by warm hibiscus curtains;

But nights of spring were short and the sun arose too soon.

The Emperor, from that time forth, forsook his early hearings

And lavished all his time on her with feasts and revelry,

His mistress of the spring, his despot of the night.

There were other ladies in his court, three thousand of rare beauty,

But his favours to three thousand were concentered in one body.

By the time she was dressed in her Golden Chamber, it would be almost evening;

And when tables were cleared in the Tower of Jade, she would loiter, slow with wine.

Her sisters and her brothers all were given titles;

And, because she so illumined and glorified her clan,

She brought to every father, every mother through the empire,

Happiness when a girl was born rather than a boy.

High rose Li Palace, entering blue clouds,

And far and wide the breezes carried magical notes

Of soft song and slow dance, of string and bamboo music.

The Emperor's eyes could never gaze on her enough-

Till war-drums, booming from Yuyang, shocked the whole earth

And broke the tunes of The Rainbow Skirt and the Feathered Coat.

The Forbidden City, the nine-tiered palace, loomed in the dust

From thousands of horses and chariots headed southwest.

The imperial flag opened the way, now moving and now pausing-

But thirty miles from the capital, beyond the western gate,

The men of the army stopped, not one of them would stir

Till under their horses' hoofs they might trample those moth-eyebrows.

Flowery hairpins fell to the ground, no one picked them up,

And a green and white jade hair-tassel and a yellow-gold hair-bird.

The Emperor could not save her, he could only cover his face.

And later when he turned to look, the place of blood and tears

Was hidden in a yellow dust blown by a cold wind.

At the cleft of the Dagger-Tower Trail

They crisscrossed through a cloud-line

Under Omei Mountain. The last few came.

Flags and banners lost their colour in the fading sunlight...

But as waters of Shu are always green and its mountains always blue,

So changeless was His Majesty's love and deeper than the days.

He stared at the desolate moon from his temporary palace.

He heard bell-notes in the evening rain, cutting at his breast.

And when heaven and earth resumed their round and the dragon car faced home,

The Emperor clung to the spot and would not turn away

From the soil along the Mawei slope, under which was buried

That memory, that anguish. Where was her jade-white face?

Ruler and lords, when eyes would meet, wept upon their coats

As they rode, with loose rein, slowly eastward, back to the capital.

The pools, the gardens, the palace, all were just as before,

The Lake Taiye hibiscus, the Weiyang Palace willows;

But a petal was like her face and a willow-leaf her eyebrow���

And what could he do but cry whenever he looked at them?

Peach-trees and plum-trees blossomed, in the winds of spring;

Lakka-foliage fell to the ground, after autumn rains;

The Western and Southern Palaces were littered with late grasses,

And the steps were mounded with red leaves that no one swept away.

Her Pear-Garden Players became white-haired

And the eunuchs thin-eyebrowed in her Court of PepperTrees;

Over the throne flew fire-flies, while he brooded in the twilight.

He would lengthen the lamp-wick to its end and still could never sleep.

Bell and drum would slowly toll the dragging night hours

And the River of Stars grow sharp in the sky, just before dawn,

And the porcelain mandarin-ducks on the roof grow thick with morning frost

And his covers of kingfisher-blue feel lonelier and colder

With the distance between life and death year after year;

And yet no beloved spirit ever visited his dreams.

At Lingqiong lived a Taoist priest who was a guest of heaven,

Able to summon spirits by his concentrated mind.

And people were so moved by the Emperor's constant brooding

That they besought the Taoist priest to see if he could find her.

He opened his way in space and clove the ether like lightning,

Up to heaven, under the earth, looking everywhere.

Above, he searched the Green Void, below, the Yellow Spring;

But he failed, in either place, to find the one he looked for.

And then he heard accounts of an enchanted isle at sea,

A part of the intangible and incorporeal world,

With pavilions and fine towers in the five-coloured air,

And of exquisite immortals moving to and fro,

And of one among them-whom they called The Ever True-

With a face of snow and flowers resembling hers he sought.

So he went to the West Hall's gate of gold and knocked at the jasper door

And asked a girl, called Morsel-of-Jade, to tell The Doubly-Perfect.

And the lady, at news of an envoy from the Emperor of China,

Was startled out of dreams in her nine-flowered, canopy.

She pushed aside her pillow, dressed, shook away sleep,

And opened the pearly shade and then the silver screen.

Her cloudy hair-dress hung on one side because of her great haste,

And her flower-cap was loose when she came along the terrace,

While a light wind filled her cloak and fluttered with her motion

As though she danced The Rainbow Skirt and the Feathered Coat.

And the tear-drops drifting down her sad white face

Were like a rain in spring on the blossom of the pear.

But love glowed deep within her eyes when she bade him thank her liege,

Whose form and voice had been strange to her ever since their parting���

Since happiness had ended at the Court of the Bright Sun,

And moons and dawns had become long in Fairy-Mountain Palace.

But when she turned her face and looked down toward the earth

And tried to see the capital, there were only fog and dust.

So she took out, with emotion, the pledges he had given

And, through his envoy, sent him back a shell box and gold hairpin,

But kept one branch of the hairpin and one side of the box,

Breaking the gold of the hairpin, breaking the shell of the box.

"Our souls belong together," she said, "like this gold and this shell���

Somewhere, sometime, on earth or in heaven, we shall surely

And she sent him, by his messenger, a sentence reminding him

Of vows which had been known only to their two hearts:

"On the seventh day of the Seventh-month, in the Palace of Long Life,

We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight world

That we wished to fly in heaven, two birds with the wings of one,

And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree."

Earth endures, heaven endures; some time both shall end,

While this unending sorrow goes on and on for ever.

Bai Juyi

#shouldread
#tangdynasty
#china

Adolf Hitler Interviewed by George Sylvester Viereck in 1923: Weekend Reading

George Sylvester Viereck: Great interviews of the 20th century: Adolf Hitler: "'When I take charge of Germany, I shall end tribute abroad and Bolshevism at home.' Adolf Hitler drained his cup as if it contained not tea, but the lifeblood of Bolshevism....

...G"Bolshevism," the chief of the Brown Shirts, the Fascists of Germany, continued, gazing at me balefully, "is our greatest menace. Kill Bolshevism in Germany and you restore 70 million people to power. France owes her strength not to her armies but to the forces of Bolshevism and dissension in our midst. "The Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of St Germain are kept alive by Bolshevism in Germany. The Peace Treaty and Bolshevism are two heads of one monster. We must decapitate both."...

I met Hitler not in his headquarters, the Brown House in Munich, but in a private home-the dwelling of a former admiral of the German Navy. We discussed the fate of Germany over the teacups. "Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?"

"Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists. Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic. We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one."...

"What," I continued my cross-examination, "are the fundamental planks of your platform?"

"We believe in a healthy mind in a healthy body. The body politic must be sound if the soul is to be healthy. Moral and physical health are synonymous."

"Mussolini," I interjected, "said the same to me." Hitler beamed.

"The slums," he added, "are responsible for nine-tenths, alcohol for one-tenth, of all human depravity. No healthy man is a Marxian. Healthy men recognise the value of personality. We contend against the forces of disaster and degeneration. Bavaria is comparatively healthy because it is not completely industrialised. However, all Germany, including Bavaria, is condemned to intensive industrialism by the smallness of our territory. If we wish to save Germany we must see to it that our farmers remain faithful to the land. To do so, they must have room to breathe and room to work."

"Where will you find the room to work?"

"We must retain our colonies and we must expand eastward. There was a time when we could have shared world dominion with England. Now we can stretch our cramped limbs only toward the east. The Baltic is necessarily a German lake."

"Is it not," I asked, "possible for Germany to reconquer the world economically without extending her territory?"

Hitler shook his head earnestly. "Economic imperialism, like military imperialism, depends upon power. There can be no world trade on a large scale without world power. Our people have not learned to think in terms of world power and world trade. However, Germany cannot extend commercially or territorially until she regains what she has lost and until she finds herself. We are in the position of a man whose house has been burned down. He must have a roof over his head before he can indulge in more ambitious plans. We had succeeded in creating an emergency shelter that keeps out the rain. We were not prepared for hailstones. However, misfortunes hailed down upon us. Germany has been living in a veritable blizzard of national, moral, and economic catastrophes. Our demoralised party system is a symptom of our disaster. Parliamentary majorities fluctuate with the mood of the moment. Parliamentary government unbars the gate to Bolshevism."

"Unlike some German militarists, you do not favour an alliance with Soviet Russia?"

Hitler evaded a direct reply to this question....

"The political combinations upon which a united front depend," Hitler remarked to me, "are too unstable. They render almost impossible a clearly defined policy. I see everywhere the zigzag course of compromise and concession. Our constructive forces are checked by the tyranny of numbers. We make the mistake of applying arithmetic and the mechanics of the economic world to the living state. We are threatened by ever increasing numbers and ever diminishing ideals. Mere numbers are unimportant."

"But suppose France retaliates against you by once more invading your soil? She invaded the Ruhr once before. She may invade it again."

"It does not matter," Hitler, thoroughly aroused, retorted, "how many square miles the enemy may occupy if the national spirit is aroused. Ten million free Germans, ready to perish so that their country may live, are more potent than 50 million whose will power is paralysed and whose race consciousness is infected by aliens. We want a greater Germany uniting all German tribes. But our salvation can start in the smallest corner. Even if we had only 10 acres of land and were determined to defend them with our lives, the 10 acres would become the focus of regeneration. Our workers have two souls: one is German, the other is Marxian. We must arouse the German soul. We must uproot the canker of Marxism. Marxism and Germanism are antitheses. In my scheme of the German state, there will be no room for the alien, no use for the wastrel, for the usurer or speculator, or anyone incapable of productive work."

The cords on Hitler's forehead stood out threateningly. His voice filled the room. There was a noise at the door. His followers, who always remain within call, like a bodyguard, reminded the leader of his duty to address a meeting.

Hitler gulped down his tea and rose.

#shouldread

The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler attacks Beto O'Rourke...

The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler attacks Beto O'Rourke. There is something deeply mentally, morally, and psychologically wrong here���with Glenn Kessler, with his bosses, and with his colleagues. In a Washington Post with good journalists, there would be a substantial number of resignations today.

Kessler's major point appear to be that Black teenage boys aren't children, and that you are armed and dangerous if you have a toy gun: Glenn Kessler: Beto O���Rourke���s claims on African Americans and police shootings: "If you drill down and look at the data for unarmed black children killed by police, there is virtually no support for the idea that this happens at a frightening level...

...The Washington Post fatal-shootings database for 2015, 2016, 2017 and through Aug. 20 of this year shows no black children were fatally shot by police in that period. (A well-known case in 2014, involving 12-year-old Tamir Rice, would not qualify as ���unarmed��� under Washington Post criteria because Tamir had a toy gun.) Even unarmed black teenagers (18 and under) who were fatally shot represent a small set. The Post database lists only three killings of unarmed black teens.... There���s little question the black community faces extraordinary levels of violence. But whether O���Rouke���s statement qualifies as Pinocchio or Geppetto-worthy depends on how you hear it. There have been virtually no shootings of unarmed children by police in the past five years...

Black teenage boys are probably not angels either...

#shouldread
#orangehairedbaboons

Humans as an Anthology Intelligence

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0mXqcK7TUGGJGZdud0ODZJjSg

This is the most hopeful take on American productivity gr...

This is the most hopeful take on American productivity growth relative stagnation I have seen. I thought it was coherent and might well be right 20 years ago. I think it is coherent and might possibly be right today. But is that just a vain hope?: Michael van Biema and Bruce Greenwald (1997): Managing Our Way to Higher Service-Sector Productivity: "What electricity, railroads, and gasoline power did for the U.S. economy between roughly 1850 and 1970, computer power is widely expected to do for today���s information-based service economy...

...But there is increasing concern because improvements in productivity growth are continuing at low levels despite the expenditure of trillions of dollars on information technology. Whereas productivity grew at an annual rate of 3% in the two decades following World War II, it has grown at an annual rate of only about 1% since the beginning of the 1970s. Had the earlier level of productivity growth been sustained, the gross domestic product would now be approximately $11 trillion instead of about $6.5 trillion. That extra $4.5 trillion per year in economic output���which amounts to roughly an additional $18,000 for every man, woman, and child���would be having a profound impact on a wide range of social and economic problems.

What is preventing a productivity revival in the U.S. economy? Clearly, the manufacturing sector cannot be blamed.... Goods-producing activities (such as manufacturing and construction) employed only 19.1% of the labor force in 1992���down from 26.1% in 1979.... Service-producing activities, on the other hand, employed 70% of all U.S. workers in 1992���up from 62.2% in 1979. By 1994, 71.5% of U.S. workers performed service jobs���whether in manufacturing or service organizations���as managers and professionals, salespeople, or technical support staff. Although the service sector���s size has grown in the past 20 years, its productivity growth has declined....

Why hasn���t productivity grown as fast in the service sector as in the manufacturing sector? Several incomplete explanations have been offered and have resulted, in our view... blame in two places: the ineffectiveness of many U.S. business managers at improving productivity and the inherent complexity of the service sector itself. A management-based approach to improving the service sector���s productivity offers hope for a rapid and significant turnaround of the sector���s productivity growth rate.... The problem is not a lack of resources; rather, it is that service sector companies operate below their potential and increasingly fail to take advantage of the widely available skills, machines, and technologies. The main reason the service sector has not reached its total potential output is management. If managers were focused energetically and intelligently on putting the existing technologies, labor force, and capital stock to work, rapid productivity growth would follow. To be sure, the management challenges are more severe in the service sector than in the manufacturing sector. However, the high productivity levels attained by leading-edge service companies indicate that attention from management can result in vastly improved performance throughout the service economy...

#shouldread

Dick Schmalensee: Handicapping the Highstakes Race to Net...

Dick Schmalensee: Handicapping the Highstakes Race to Net-Zero: "Economists argue that a broadly applicable incentive-based system... could reduce emissions at a much lower total cost than any alternative regime. Incentives to reduce emissions could be produced directly by a tax on emissions or through... cap-and-trade system. But the argument for relying primarily on financial incentives has historically not been very persuasive.... Even in California and the European Union, where cap-and-trade systems for CO��� have been established, so-called ���ancillary��� or ���belt-and-suspenders��� policies that target particular sectors or sources have also been deployed...

...Both jurisdictions subsidize renewables: the EU subsidizes energy efficiency, while California has a low-carbon fuel standard. To the extent that such policies affect behavior, they distort the patterns of investment and emissions abatement and so raise the total cost of abatement. Moreover, they reduce the carbon price implicit in the cap and trade systems, and thereby discourage productive investment and innovation in abatement technologies. If it persists, this neither-fish-nor-fowl policy architecture will make the path to net-zero both longer and more expensive. A clear focus on incentives will not be easy to obtain as a political matter, but if the heavy lifting is left to the future, it will only become more difficult to achieve.

It���s no accident that significant direct emission regulation has been adopted even in jurisdictions that have embraced the use of cap-and-trade systems. A high carbon price is a visible irritant to the body politic, so keeping the price low and using carrots rather than sticks to reduce emissions is the path of least resistance. Nonetheless, moving away from direct regulation and toward greater reliance on carbon pricing is essential to reduce the cost of getting to net-zero...

#shouldread

Comment of the Day: Graydon: Jacob Levy: I don���t think ...

Comment of the Day: Graydon: Jacob Levy: I don���t think there���s anything���anything���on which I���ve gotten so much disbelief-that-becomes-near-anger as when I contradict the post-2014 Fox narrative about campus life...: "I think the shorter version is 'participants in authoritarian systems seek to destroy any alternative source of authority'...

...I generally agree with what you write about process, but the real problem is that the academy is an alternative source of authority because it gets to designate facts. Authoritarians want you to do what you're told, and rely on belief; the entire concept of facts is antithetical to an authoritarian. So thereby the academy is antithetical to an authoritarian....

#shouldread

Charlie Stross: Dread of Heinleinism: "over on his other ...

Charlie Stross: Dread of Heinleinism: "over on his other blog, noted SF critic James Nicoll asked, 'I wonder if there's an essay on why discovering a writer of a certain age is setting out to write a Heinlein-style book fills me with dread'. What follows is my attempt at answering his question...

...Heinlein, when he wasn't cranking out 50K word short tie-in novels for the Boy Scouts of America, was actually trying to write about topics for which he (as a straight white male Californian who grew up from 1907-1930) had no developed vocabulary because such things simply weren't talked about in Polite Society. Unlike most of his peers, he at least tried to look outside the box he grew up in. (A naturist and member of the Free Love movement in the 1920s, he hung out with Thelemites back when they were beyond the pale, and was considered too politically subversive to be called up for active duty in the US Navy during WW2.) But when he tried to look too far outside his zone of enculturation, Heinlein often got things horribly wrong... Podkayne of Mars... Farnham's Freehold. But at least he was trying to engage, unlike many of his contemporaries.... And sometimes he nailed his targets: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as an attack on colonialism, for example (alas, it has mostly been claimed by the libertarian right), Starship Troopers with its slyly embedded messages that racial integration is the future and women are allowed to be starship captains (think how subversive this was in the mid-to-late 1950s when he was writing it).... Heinlein's boomer fans rarely seemed to notice that Heinlein was all about the inadmissible thought experiment, so their homages frequently came out as flat whitebread 1950s adventure yarns with blunt edges and not even the remotest whiff of edgy introspection, of consideration of the possibility that in the future things might be different (even if Heinlein's version of diversity ultimately faltered and fell short)...

#shouldread
#sciencefiction

Berkeley Economics Departmental Seminar: Sociological dis...

Berkeley Economics Departmental Seminar: Sociological distance, present and the legacy of past discrimination, and preventive treatment in Oakland, CA: perhaps 20% of the black-white cardiovascular health gap due to the fact that Black patients are seen by sociologically-distant white doctors: Marcy Alsan et al.: Does Diversity Matter for Health? Experimental Evidence from Oakland: "We study the effect of diversity in the physician workforce on the demand for preventive care among African-American men...

...Black men have the lowest life expectancy of any major demographic group in the U.S., and much of the disadvantage is due to chronic diseases which are amenable to primary and secondary prevention. In a field experiment in Oakland, California, we randomize black men to black or non-black male medical doctors and to incentives for one of the five offered preventives���the flu vaccine. We use a two-stage design, measuring decisions about cardiovascular screening and the flu vaccine before (ex ante) and after (ex post) meeting their assigned doctor. Black men select a similar number of preventives in the ex-ante stage, but are much more likely to select every preventive service, particularly invasive services, once meeting with a doctor who is the same race.

The effects are most pronounced for men who mistrust the medical system and for those who experienced greater hassle costs associated with their visit. Subjects are more likely to talk with a black doctor about their health problems and black doctors are more likely to write additional notes about the subjects. The results are most consistent with better patient-doctor communication during the encounter rather than differential quality of doctors or discrimination. Our findings suggest black doctors could help reduce cardiovascular mortality by 16 deaths per 100,000 per year���leading to a 19% reduction in the black-white male gap in cardiovascular mortality....

#shouldread