J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 320

Caroline Roullier, Laure Benoit, Doyle B. McKey, and Vinc...

Caroline Roullier, Laure Benoit, Doyle B. McKey, and Vincent Lebot: Historical collections reveal patterns of diffusion of sweet potato in Oceania obscured by modern plant movements and recombination: "The history of sweet potato in the Pacific has long been an enigma...

...Archaeological, linguistic, and ethnobotanical data suggest that prehistoric human-mediated dispersal events contributed to the distribution in Oceania of this American domesticate. According to the ���tripartite hypothesis,��� sweet potato was introduced into Oceania from South America in pre-Columbian times and was then later newly introduced, and diffused widely across the Pacific, by Europeans via two historically documented routes from Mexico and the Caribbean. Although sweet potato is the most convincing example of putative pre-Columbian connections between human occupants of Polynesia and South America, the search for genetic evidence of pre-Columbian dispersal of sweet potato into Oceania has been inconclusive. Our study attempts to fill this gap. Using complementary sets of markers (chloroplast and nuclear microsatellites) and both modern and herbarium samples, we test the tripartite hypothesis. Our results provide strong support for prehistoric transfer(s) of sweet potato from South America (Peru-Ecuador region) into Polynesia. Our results also document a temporal shift in the pattern of distribution of genetic variation in sweet potato in Oceania. Later reintroductions, accompanied by recombination between distinct sweet potato gene pools, have reshuffled the crop���s initial genetic base, obscuring primary patterns of diffusion and, at the same time, giving rise to an impressive number of local variants. Moreover, our study shows that phenotypes, names, and neutral genes do not necessarily share completely parallel evolutionary histories. Multidisciplinary approaches, thus, appear necessary for accurate reconstruction of the intertwined histories of plants and humans...

#shouldread
#economichistory
#globalization

Question for the Universe: I dimly remember some time ago...

Question for the Universe: I dimly remember some time ago thinking that Peter F. Drucker sought the reconciliation between the advantages of capitalism���bold entrepreneurship and growth���and socialism���redistribution, common concern, and all pulling in the same direction���in the figure of the manager, whose social role was precisely to arrange things so that society could be an "association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all". But now I cannot find it. Did I just dream that I had written this down someplace?

A paper I badly need to read, and to read today: Talia Ba...

A paper I badly need to read, and to read today: Talia Bar and Asaf Zussman: Partisan Grading: "We study grading outcomes associated with professors in an elite university in the United States who were identified...

...using voter registration records from the county where the university is located���as either Republicans or Democrats. The evidence suggests that student grades are linked to the political orientation of professors. Relative to their Democratic colleagues, Republican professors are associated with a less egalitarian distribution of grades and with lower grades awarded to black students relative to whites...

#shouldread

How, again, is Donald Trump supposed to win a breath-hold...

How, again, is Donald Trump supposed to win a breath-holding contest with an authoritarian r��gime that both controls its media and sees little downside in redirecting resources to cushion the impact on potentially noisy losers?: Paul Krugman: How to Lose a Trade War: "Trump���s declaration that 'trade wars are good, and easy to win' is an instant classic, right up there with Herbert Hoover���s 'prosperity is just around the corner'...

...Trump obviously believes that trade is a game in which he who runs the biggest surplus wins, and that America, which imports more than it exports, therefore has the upper hand in any conflict. That���s also why Peter Navarro predicted that nobody would retaliate against Trump���s tariffs. Since that���s actually not how trade works, we���re already facing plenty of retaliation and the strong prospect of escalation.

But here���s the thing: Trump���s tariffs are badly designed even from the point of view of someone who shares his crude mercantilist view of trade. In fact, the structure of his tariffs so far is designed to inflict maximum damage on the U.S. economy, for minimal gain. Foreign retaliation, by contrast, is far more sophisticated: unlike Trump, the Chinese and other targets of his trade wrath seem to have a clear idea of what they���re trying to accomplish.... The Navarro/Trump view, aside from its fixation on trade balances, also seems to imagine that the world still looks the way it did in the 1960s, when trade was overwhelmingly in final goods like wheat and cars. In that world, putting a tariff on imported cars would cause consumers to switch to domestic cars, adding auto industry jobs, end of story (except for the foreign retaliation.)

In the modern world economy, however, a large part of trade is in intermediate goods.... Put a tariff on car parts, and even the first-round effect on jobs is uncertain: maybe domestic parts producers will add workers, but you���ve raised costs and reduced competitiveness for downstream producers, who will shrink their operations. So in today���s world, smart trade warriors���if such people exist���would focus their tariffs on final goods, so as to avoid raising costs for downstream producers of domestic goods. True, this would amount to a more or less direct tax on consumers; but if you���re afraid to impose any burden on consumers, you really shouldn���t be getting into a trade war in the first place. But almost none of the Trump tariffs are on consumer goods....

Trump and company don���t actually have a plan to win this trade war. They may, however, have stumbled onto a strategy that will lose it even more decisively than one might have expected.

#shouldread

Seattle is pursuing (a version of) social democracy in on...

Seattle is pursuing (a version of) social democracy in one metropolitan area. In the 2010s we learned from some of our laboratories of democracy (cough, Kansas, Wisconsin) what really not to do. Will Seattle provide a model for what we should do?: Hilary Wething: Seattle: Paid Sick Leave And Workers��� Earnings Dynamics: "Utilize administrative data from Washington state to study the impact of Seattle���s paid sick time ordinance on...

...How has the ordinance impacted earnings, hours, employment levels, and earnings
volatility of workers covered by the new paid sick time law?... What share of
worker volatility is due to within-job volatility... versus between-job volatility... as a result of the paid sick time ordinance?... do the above effects vary?...

Add[ing] to what we know about... mandated employer-provided paid sick leave, including... whether employer-mandated paid sick leave has employment effects and on whom.... the mechanism... impacting employment outcomes... how this might impact worker well-being and firm productivity...

#shouldread

In retrospect, this from the usually-reliable Karl Smith ...

In retrospect, this from the usually-reliable Karl Smith and Brandon Arnold looks really, really, really awful, no?

But they really should have known better: Anyone who goes the extra mile to give the version of Kevin Hassett on display these days the benefit of the doubt is likely to wind up naked on the Moon. That, I think, is the real lesson here���shading your thoughts to think more highly of Kevin these days either out of comity or because you think he is broadly on your policy side will put you in the same position as those who surrender their dignity to Donald Trump: Karl Smith and Brandon Arnold: Kevin Hassett���s Defense of Tax Reform is Right on Point: "The Tax Policy Center... had recently issued a report suggesting that the ���Big Six��� tax-reform proposal would add nearly $2.4 trillion to the budget deficit over the next ten years, raise taxes on many upper-middle class households, and slash taxes for the top 1 percent. Mr. Hassett was invited to respond to the report. His remarks were, unsurprisingly, unsparing. After all, the government���s top economist shouldn���t sit quietly while premature invectives are launched at the administration���s signature fiscal proposal...

...He accused the Tax Policy Center of rushing to judgment and issuing a report before key details were available. The Big Six had released only a framework designed to guide negotiations, not a reform plan. In lieu of those details, the Tax Policy Center made a host of assumptions, nearly all disfavorable to the plan and some in direct contrast to the guidance laid out in the framework.... The framework explicitly leaves open the possibility for a fifth tax bracket for high-income earners, calls for expanding the child tax credit without giving a specific number, and states that the new system should be at least as progressive as the current one. But in assessing the proposal���s progressivity, the Tax Policy Center assumed there would be no fifth bracket and only a modest boost to the child tax credit. More crucially, the Tax Policy Center made sweeping assumptions about the impact of corporate tax cuts without making those assumptions transparent. Recent research has suggested that workers bear an increasing share of the burden from the corporate tax....

Mr. Hassett���s criticism of the Tax Policy Center report was well justified. By ignoring the framework���s progressivity goals and making no mention of the changing dynamics of corporate taxation, it introduced partisanship into what has been the most bipartisan proposal to come out of the Trump administration so far.... Nonetheless, in the days that followed, it was Mr. Hassett who faced the harshest critique, and not the Tax Policy Center���s report. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wrote in the Washington Post that Mr. Hassett and his colleagues were ���some combination of ignorant, disingenuous and dishonest.��� New York Times columnist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman accused Hassett of ���shlock��� reminiscent of the dangerous predictions during the Great Recession that low interest rates would be deflationary or that the economy would collapse if the debt-to-GDP ratio rose above 90 percent. These critiques are unfortunate and do not serve the larger debate....

Research on the corporate tax championed by Mr. Hassett is an effort to grapple with the effects of those new realities. The plan deserves a fair hearing. Despite criticism from a number of individuals and organizations, we cannot afford to sit idly while our economy languishes.

#shouldread

A spectacular catch by the highly-learned Adam Tooze, fro...

A spectacular catch by the highly-learned Adam Tooze, from his War in Germany, 1618-2018: Lecture 9: 1848 and the Impasse of Conservative Militarism in Prussia. The question here is: is Friedrich Engels threatening that the Angel of History will bring about the cultural elimination of the Slavic peoples of Greater Austria and Greater Hungary, or the physical elimination of the Slavic peoples of Greater Austria and Greater Hungary���"demographic replacement", either via exile or genocide?:

Adam Tooze: In February 1849 Frederick Engels wrote the following truly menacing lines for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Engels championed the [Magyar] revolution in Hungary against both the Czechs and the Russians...

...The Magyars are not yet defeated. But if they fall, they will fall gloriously, as the last heroes of the 1848 revolution, and only for a short time. Then for a time, the Slav counter-revolution will sweep down on the Austrian monarchy with all its barbarity, and the camarilla will see what sort of allies it has. But at the first victorious uprising of the French proletariat��� the Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians.

The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward...

A few weeks later he drove the point home:

People have learned by bitter experience that the "European fraternal union of peoples" cannot be achieved by mere phrases and pious wishes, but only by profound revolutions and bloody struggles; they have learned that the question is not that of a fraternal union of all European peoples under a single republican flag, but of an alliance of the revolutionary peoples against the counter-revolutionary peoples, an alliance which comes into being not on paper, but only on the battlefield...

#shouldread
#nationalism

The Battle of Diu: Hoisted from the Archives

Hoisted from the Archives: The Battle of Diu (1509): One of the great might-have-beens in world history concerns the 1509 Battle of Diu. What if it had gone the other way? Or what if Sultans Beyezid II, Selim the Grim, Suleiman the Lawgiver, and Selim the Sot, and Murad III had shifted a small additional part of the military effort they were making in the Balkans and the Mediterranean into the Indian Ocean?...

The European Seaborne Empires II: Malacca and Tenochtitlan
The European Seaborne Empires I: "To Serve God, to Win Glory for the King, and to Become Rich"
Yet More Sunny-Afternoon-Lying-in-Bed-with-Bronchitis-Trade-and-Power Blogging : "YET MORE SUNNY-AFTERNOON-LYING-IN-BED-WITH-BRONCHITIS-TRADE-AND-POWER BLOGGING

Finally digging deep into Ron Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium:..."

#shouldread

Should Kansas's (and Missouri's) Future Be "a Lot More Like Texas"?: Hoisted from the Archives

Hoisted from them Archives: Should Kansas's (and Missouri's) Future Be "a Lot More Like Texas"?: That is one of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback's constant applause lines���that he wants Kansas to be a lot less like California and a lot more like Texas.And so I was reading Bryan Burrough on Erica Grieder: ���Big, Hot, Cheap and Right���: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas.... Burrough applaud's Erica Grieder's "counter[ing] much of this silliness" that "Texas is corrupt, callous, racist, theocratic, stupid, belligerent, and most of all, dangerous.��� The problem is that three paragraphs later Burrough is writing of how:

Texas���s laissez-faire mix of weak government, low taxes and scant regulations is deeply rooted in its 1876 Constitution, which was an attempt to vehemently dismantle an oppressive post-Civil War government of Radical Reconstructionists���

What was most "oppressive" about the Radical Reconstructionists? It was, of course, that they thought African-Americans should vote, and enabled them to do so.

And so by paragraph 5 of Burrough's review... [he] managed to negate whatever countering Grieder had managed to do. To talk in the twenty-first century of oppressive Radical Reconstructionists who thought the 14th Amendment ought to mean something is to play not just the race card but the entire race deck.

And I thought that Grieder had set herself a Sisyphean task: Where else would a governor both think to say and believe it was a vote-winner to threaten to throw a necktie-wearing party for the Federal Reserve Chair should he set foot inside the state? Texas seemed to me to need different advocates���and a very different governor.

But let's put the callousness and the racism and the theocracy and the belligerency���where else has a state governor threatened to lynch the Federal Reserve Chair of his own party is he comes into the state?���and stick to the economics. Would it be good, economically, for states to become more like Texas? Is it good for Texas to be as much like Texas as it is?

In some ways, yes.... But, of course, when people talk about emulating the "Texas Miracle", they don't mean moving your state so that it is next to the Rio Grande and has a culture welcoming to Hispanics, has mild winters, and has plenty of oil and natural gas. They mean: low taxes, little regulation of business, weak unions, low minimum wages, a bare-bones Medicaid program, record percentages of people without health insurance, and so forth. Do those work? Would the rest of America be well-advised to emulate Texas along those dimensions? Paul Krugman says: "No"...

#shouldread
#mondaysmackdown
#hoistedfromthearchives
#journamalism
#publicsphere
#orangehairedbaboons

Am I the only one who remembers journamalist Erica Griede...

Am I the only one who remembers journamalist Erica Grieder's carrying water for Texas Governor Greg Abbott's tinfoil hat fear of Operation Jade Helm?: "Greg Abbott���s announcement... that he would direct the Texas State Guard to monitor Operation Jade Helm... has been widely derided as political pandering, stoking paranoia, wasting state resources, and making Texas look silly. Way harsh, guys..." Bending over backward to claim tinfoil hat behavior is not tinfoil hat behavior is never "balance", guys: Cassandra Pollock and Alex Samuels: Hysteria Over Jade Helm Exercise in Texas Was Fueled by Russians, Former CIA Director Says: "Gov. Greg Abbott's decision in 2015 to ask the Texas State Guard to monitor a federal military exercise.... A former CIA director said Wednesday that the move emboldened Russians to next target elections...

...Hysteria in Texas over��a 2015 U.S. military training exercise called Jade Helm��was fueled by Russians wanting to dominate ���the information space,�����and that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's decision to send the Texas State Guard to monitor the operation gave them proof of the power of such misinformation campaigns.��Michael Hayden, speaking on��MSNBC���s Morning Joe podcast, chalked up peoples��� fear over Jade Helm 15 to ���Russian bots and the American alt-right media [that] convinced many Texans [Jade Helm] was an Obama plan to round up political dissidents.��� Abbott ordered the State Guard to monitor the federal exercise soon after news broke of the operation. Hayden said that move gave Russians the go-ahead to continue���and possibly expand���their efforts to spread fear:

At that point, I���m figuring the Russians are saying, ���We can go big time���. At that point, I think they made the decision, ���We���re going to play in the electoral process���...

#shouldread
#journamalism
#moralresponsibility
#publicsphere