J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 33

Edmund S. Morgan: Slavery & Freedom���For the Weekend

Edmund S. Morgan: Slavery & Freedom https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/selections-morgan-slavery.pdf: 'It may be coincidence that so many Virginians who grew up after the advent of slavery turned out to be ardent republicans. And it may be coincidence that among their predecessors who lived before slavery became prevalent, so many were unrepublican, unattractive, and unscrupulous, not to say depraved...

...On the other hand, there may have been more than coincidence involved.

Although it seems unlikely that slavery had any tendency to improve the character of masters, it may have had affinities with republicanism that escaped Jefferson���s analysis. The presence of men and women who were, in law at least, almost totally subject to the will of other men gave to those in control of them an immediate experience of what it could mean to be at the mercy of a tyrant. Virginians may have had a special appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day what life without it could be like....

Aristocrats could more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one. Slaves did not become leveling mobs, because their owners would see to it that they had no chance to. The apostrophes to equality were not addressed to them. And because Virginia���s labor force was composed mainly of slaves, who had been isolated by race and removed from the political equation, the remaining free laborers and tenant farmers were too few in number to constitute a serious threat to the superiority of the men who assured them of their equality....

The small planter���s small stake in human property placed him on the same side of the fence as the large man, whom he regularly elected to protect his interests. Virginia���s small farmers could perceive a common identity with the large.... Neither was a slave. And both were equal in not being slaves. This is not to say that a belief in republican equality had to rest on slavery, but only that in Virginia (and probably in other southern colonies) it did. The most ardent American republicans were Virginians, and their ardor was not unrelated to their power over the men and women they held in bondage....

Virginia���s republicans had the decency to be disturbed by the apparent inconsistency of what they were doing. But they were far more disturbed by the prospect of turning 200,000 slaves loose.... The only serious plan for... emancipation, proposed by St. George Tucker in 1796... seemed too dangerous to receive serious consideration.

Virginia���s slaves had [not] belonged to the same race as their masters. The fact that they did not made it easier for Virginians to use slavery as a flying buttress to freedom. The English had come to view their poor almost as an alien race... [with] continual denunciations from a battery of philosophers and reformers; it even required special badges to proclaim the differentness of the poor.... In Virginia neither badges nor philosophers were needed.... Anyone could tell black from white, even if black was
actually brown or red. And as the number of poor white Virginians
diminished, the vicious traits of character attributed by Englishmen to their poor could in Virginia increasingly appear to be the exclusive heritage of blacks... ungrateful, irresponsible, lazy, and dishonest.... Racism thus absorbed in Virginia the fear and contempt that men in England, whether Whig or Tory, monarchist or republican, felt for the inarticulate lower classes....

By lumping Indians, mulattoes, and Negroes in a single pariah class, Virginians had paved the way for a similar lumping of small and large planters in a single master class.... The forces which dictated that Virginians see Negroes, mulattoes, and Indians as one also dictated that they see large and small planters as one. Racism became an essential, if unacknowledged, ingredient of the republican ideology that enabled Virginians to lead the nation

How Virginian, then, was America? How heavily did American economic opportunity and political freedom rest on Virginia���s slaves?... [In] Philadelphia and New York and Boston... the poor were... growing in numbers.... Would Northerners have embraced republican ideas of equality so readily if they had been [more] surrounded by men in ���a certain degree of misery���? And could the new United States have made a go of it in the world of nations without Virginia and without the products of slave labor?

Northern republicans apparently thought not.... They allowed Virginians to compose the documents that founded their republic, and they chose Virginians to chart its course for a generation.... Was the vision of a nation of equals flawed at the source by contempt for both the poor and the black? Is America still colonial Virginia writ large? More than a century after Appomattox the questions linger...

 

.#books #fortheweekend #liberty #racism #reading #2020-07-13

Morgan: American Slavery, American Freedom���Noted

Edmund S. Morgan: American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-morgan-slavery.pdf: 'Slaves could not be made to work for fear of losing liberty, so they had to be made to fear for their lives. Not that any master wanted to lose his slave by killing him, but in order to get an equal or greater amount of work, it was necessary to beat slaves harder than servants, so hard, in fact, that there was a much larger chance of killing them than had been the case with servants. Unless a master could correct his slaves in this way without running afoul of the law if he misjudged the weight of his blows, slaveowning would be legally hazardous. So in 1669 the assembly faced the facts and passed an act that dealt with them forthrightly: 'An act about the casuall killing of slaves: Whereas the only law in force for the punishment of refractory servants resisting their master, mistris or overseer cannot be inflicted upon negroes [because the punishment was extension of time], nor the obstinacy of many of them by other than violent meanes supprest, Be it enacted and declared by this grand assembly, if any slave resist his master (or other by his masters order correcting him) and by the extremity of the correction should chance to die, that his death shall not be accompted Felony, but the master (or that other person appointed by the master to punish him) be acquit from molestation, since it cannot be presumed that prepensed malice (which alone makes murther Felony) should induce any man to destroy his own estate..." With this act already on the books in 1669, Virginia was prepared to make the most of slavery when slaves began to arrive in quantity... #noted #2020-07-13

The Obelisk of Wokeness & the Dome of Cancellation

We have a Washington Monument in large part because there was a guy who forced his army to obey the law and the civil authorities, and not to grab what it had the power to take through force or the threat of force: "Let me conjure you, in the name of our common Country���as you value your own sacred honor���as you respect the rights of humanity, & as you regard the Military & national character of America... [do not] under any specious pretences overturn the liberties of our Country... open the flood Gates of Civil discord, and deluge our rising Empire in Blood..."

We have a Jefferson Memorial in large part because there was a guy who cancelled not an individual but a king, an empire, and an entire system of government: "To secure these rights, Governments are instituted... deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.... Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive... it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government... in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness..."

That we need these monuments to Wokeness and Cancellation, and that it is fitting and proper that they be associated with the names of Washington and Jefferson���oligarchs and slaveholders, but revolutionaries���is a hill I will die on.

We do not need to memorialize our slaveholders and our oligarchs. We do need to memorialize our revolutions. And it is fitting and proper that we memorialize our revolutionaries.

Come and get me Erik Loomis https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/07/what-to-do-about-jefferson

.#highlighted #justice #memory #pubicsphere #racism #slavery #2020-07-13

Lopez: Enlightenment Coffee Shop���Noted

Andrew Lopez: 'Just left an Enlightenment coffee shop https://twitter.com/Andrulus/status/1282445264960315393. Packed with Lockean and Humean liberals too afraid to even whisper about reason, federalism, IQ, and the superiority of the White race���Things are DIRE!:

Steven Pinker: 'Not just professors https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1282334711663165440. This AM, from a worker: "I feel uncomfortable expressing my thoughts, moderate as they are, to coworkers for fear of being labeled a bigot. I'm a moderate centrist and lib. in the tradition of Locke and Hume. Why can���t they accept me for revealing liberal enlightenment feelings?":

John McWhorter: 'Bravo to this honesty. Since May I have gotten almost an email a day from a professor who fears speaking out against the modern distortion of progressivism would get them fired. https://quillette.com/2020/07/08/a-declaration-of-independence-by-a-princeton-professor

.#noted #2020-07-13

Delbanco: Offerring More than ���Zoom from Your Room'���Noted

Andrew Delbanco: Universities Must Offer More than ���Zoom from Your room��� https://www.ft.com/content/27e3fc2a-1542-4a3c-964b-506dbe9c8ee2: ���The most candid thing to say to prospective students would be: ���Come to college and Zoom from your room!���... Richard Arum, dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine, has suggested that elite institutions, forced to resort to online technologies, should now help develop ���online learning options complementary in practice and commensurate in quality to face-to-face instruction���. This would benefit their own students and those whose ���life circumstances make them unable to leave their family homes and forgo paid work to attend college��� on a residential campus. What exactly this will mean no one can say.... Every college is now scrambling to make students��� online experience as personal as possible.... We need better online learning for everyone. The involuntary experiment at elite schools could help to achieve that. Harvard expects its innovations to have ���cascading effects on higher education���. If so, the disruption will have yielded some lasting benefit. Otherwise, the pandemic will have been an inconvenience for the privileged and a disaster for everyone else��� .#noted #2020-07-12

Werning, Rodrik, Dube, DeLong: Market & Government Failure���Dawn Procrastination Department

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1282300712718725121 Ivan Werning**: 'Many economists repeat (without thinking?) that the burden of the proof is on showing a market failure. Perhaps makes sense in some politico-economy perspective, to avoid lobbies. But scientifically, I cannot make sense of it from a Bayesian perspective.'

Dani Rodrik: 'It doesn't make sense even from a political-economy perspective (typically there are "barbarians" on the laissez-faire side of an issue as well). Here's something I wrote on this a while back, distinguishing first-best and second-best economists: Why do economists disagree? Non-economists are often baffled by the disagreements among professional economists on the issues of the day--from international trade to the minimum wage, from economic development to health policy... https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/weblog-rodrik-2007-disagree.pdf'

Arindrajit Dube: 'Exactly. I think since the 1970s, there has been a remarkably cavalier assumption that intellectual deviations from competitive, efficient, neoclassicism are somehow more amenable to capture by interest groups than fairy tales about how markets work.'

Brad DeLong: Say, perhaps, that we have very good theories of individual narow market failures, but no institutional ability to include them in our background model of how the economy outside of our narrow era of focus is working. Keynes's General Theory:

If effective demand is deficient, not only is the public scandal of wasted resources intolerable, but the individual enterpriser who seeks to bring these resources into action is operating with the odds loaded against him. The game of hazard which he plays is furnished with many zeros, so that the players as a whole will lose if they have the energy and hope to deal all the cards...

being only one of a very few attempts to even think about the implications for market Y of market failure in market Z.

And say that, while we have good models of market failure, we do not have good models of government failure. As Larry the S said a decade ago, on the one hand we have naive social democratic pollyannaish overconfidence about regulation, and on the other hand "the public choice school... driven... relentlessly towards nihilism in a way that isn���t actually helpful for those charged with designing regulatory institutions... https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/conversation-summers-wolf-bretton-woods.pdf

Cf.: Bill C. https://twentycentparadigms.blogspot.com/2007/08/two-kinds-of-economists.html

.#economicsgoneright #economicsgonewrong #twitter #2020-07-12

Holbo: 'This Maxim Is Patently, Grossly Inadequate for Governing a Blog Comment Box... Let Alone... Public Reason & a Public Sphere'���Noted

There is good-faith speech that is heated and provocative "discussion of the issues" that advances public reason and the public sphere. There is bad-faith speech that aims to undermine and destroy public reason and the public sphere���trolling, sealioning, discursive monkeywrenching, or simple grifting.

There is consensus that such a line exists. There is consensus that the public sphere and public reason require that that line be enforced���that those who violate it be "cancelled", that there be consequences. And in this real world there will be consequences, if only because people whose public face is that of a troll���or a sealion, a monkeywrencher, or a grifter���is unlikely to add to the quality of an employment or a social circle.

There is a problem that good-faith speakers will and do have good-faith disagreements as to where the line is between heated and provocative but productive contributions on the one hand and trolling, sealioning, monkey wrenching, and simple grifting on the other. There is also a problem that bad-faith speakers always and everywhere will and do attempt to fly under false flags to claim that some speech that advances public reason is in fact beyond the line. There is a tendency to wish the problem away by pretending not to see it

Thus the claim that it is always and everywhere the case that "the way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other" is itself bad speech: destructive of and aiming to undermine public reason and the public sphere. And so I reach the Harpers' letter (no, I am not going to give it a link).

But John Holbo gets there fastest with the mostest (yes, I do know who coined the phrase; I am confiscating it):

John Holbo: 'This Maxim Is Patently, Grossly Inadequate for Governing a Blog Comment Box... Let Alone... Public Reason & a Public Sphere' https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/holbo-this-maxim-is-patently-grossly-inadequate-for-governing-a-blog-comment-box-let-alone-public-reason-a-public.html: '[The Harpers letter says:] "The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other" https://twitter.com/jholbo1/status/12.... Some thoughts on 2nd-best solutions: This maxim is patently, grossly inadequate for governing a blog comment box... let alone a social media platform, let alone Public Reason and a Public Sphere���

[Second Best]: Ideally, the world contains no trolls, bots, bad faith actors���or few enough they can be dealt with retail not wholesale in the Marketplace of Ideas. In a world in which everyone were exchanging more or less in open-faced good faith, this rule would be good. In our actual world, however, it is not good. No, not really, sadly. Hence a dilemma.... There isn't really an obvious, simple 2nd best rule for our 2nd best world....

Partisanship is... a thing that should be damped in debate. The whole point of arguing is to consider changing your mind, via trying to change others' minds. So... partisans should���not disarm, that isn't it���but observe exacting dueling protocols when entering the debate arena. But this is hard to articulate and enforce....

[Vaccination Against Nazis]: Nazis are bad. In a politically liberal world in which there are only a few Nazis, you can argue with them. It's like a vaccine. You are inoculating the discourse by injecting it with small amounts of moribund evil, to build antibodies. Unfortunately, it is a fallacy that, if vaccines are good, virulent diseases must be good, too.

Republicans whine that they get called 'evil', but they support a President who tweets out 'White Power' and they are, no kidding, working to dismantle or hobble democracy.... Unless and until conservatism crawls out of its deplorable basket there isn't much realistic prospect of normalizing its tenets as non-deplorable, in discourse terms. It is not reasonable to ask the left to pretend things stand otherwise than they do....

[Downstream Worries]: A lot of bad faith sewage seep[s] in... all... [of] the same form... 'downstream worries'.... If 'trans rights are human rights', we have pronoun trouble, or need new norms for bathrooms or women's sports or in womens' shelters. Or philosophical ideas about the metaphysics of gender will be problematized. All this is true and some of it may get bumpy. But there's really no point arguing about it without a high baseline of initial acceptance.... But the bad faith arguers are not willing to debate the antecedent honestly. They have a sense they'll lose, and they are right.... So they fuss about bathrooms to pollute discourse with issues that can only be reasonably discussed after we accept something they don't, but aren't willing to argue about honestly. There is no reason to put up with the debate being rendered nonsensical.

[Cancel Culture]: It's fine to 'cancel' those who monkey wrench liberal discourse, rather than engage in honest debate. Unfortunately, that means those who are adjacent to bad faith actors, but in good faith, get cancelled-by-association. That's unfortunate but hard to rule out, with a rule...

.#noted #publicsphere #2020-07-11

Frieden: Weekly Roundup�����Noted

Tom Frieden: Weekly Roundup https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1281762304158240770.html: ���US lagging in control, surging in cases. Only the Northeast is at all reassuring, and those gains are at risk. Reopening schools is getting much harder. Drawing from @CDCgov Covid-View and Tracking Our��COVID-19 Response���covidexitstrategy.org. Test positivity reported up: 9.2%; South-Central at 17%! Look carefully at trends from commercial labs. The first decrease in positivity among young adults in 2 months... and now increasing in older adults. What started in young adults, didn���t stay in young adults.... Tests that take more than 48 hours to come back are of little [epidemic-assessing] value. We should see by state and race/ethnicity, the rates of tests that return results within 48 hours. Influenza-like and covid-like illness visits to emergency departments are rising in 7 of 10 US regions. Native Americans, African Americans, Latinx and others continue to be disproportionately affected: more exposed, more underlying, undertreated illness, and less access to care. Community engagement, empowerment, and leadership are crucial for progress. Deaths are below the epidemic threshold, but how long will that last?... Deaths are beginning to rise in the South/Southwest/West now offsetting the decline in New England, Mid-Atlantic midwest. And this is before young adults spread to lots of older and vulnerable people. Next 1-2 months will be worse. 8/10 States with the highest burden are least able to test and trace right now.... Covid19 will get worse before it gets better. Where Covid is spreading, close restaurants & bars, stop gatherings of more than a few people, follow the #3Ws: wear a mask correctly, wash your hands, watch your distance. And box the virus in: test, isolate, trace, quarantine... Unless this happens, there���s little hope of safely opening schools and keeping them open, no matter what anyone says��� .#noted #2020-07-11

Comment of the Day: Koop: [Watson] 'I Was Canceled & Deplatformed... by Richard Dawkins & His Fans Instead of, Like, Trans People...

Phil Koop: This Maxim Is Patently, Grossly Inadequate for Governing a Blog Comment Box... Let Alone... Public Reason & a Public Sphere https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/holbo-this-maxim-is-patently-grossly-inadequate-for-governing-a-blog-comment-box-let-alone-public-reason-a-public.html: 'Also, [Rebecca Watson:] "Sometimes I feel sympathy for the people who worry about ���cancel culture��� and then I remember that I was canceled and deplatformed but they don���t think it counts because I was targeted by Richard Dawkins and his fans instead of, like, trans people or antifa or whoever [woman shrugging]" https://twitter.com/rebeccawatson/status/1280901089831739392?s=20��� .#commentoftheday #2020-07-11

Greene: The Torturable Class���Noted

Graham Greene: Our Man in Havana https://lailalalami.com/2009/quotable-graham-greene/?doing_wp_cron=1594474604.1830689907073974609375: '"Did you torture him?" Captain Segura laughed. "No. He doesn"t belong to the torturable class." "I didn"t know there were class-distinctions in torture." "Dear Mr Wormold, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement." "There"s torture and torture. When they broke up Dr Hasselbacher"s laboratory they were torturing���?" "One can never tell what amateurs may do. The police had no concern in that. Dr Hasselbacher does not belong to the torturable class." "Who does?" "The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with ��migr��s from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides��� .#noted #2020-07-11