J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 338

How much of the forthcoming announcement of an upward bum...

How much of the forthcoming announcement of an upward bump in GDP growth in the second quarter is due to people battening down the hatches for Trump's trade war, and will be reversed over the course of the next year? That is what we are all trying to estimate right now: Paul Krugman: Trump, Tariffs, Tofu and Tax Cuts: "More than half of America���s soybean exports typically go to China, but Chinese tariffs will shift much of that demand to Brazil, and countries that normally get their soybeans from Brazil have raced to replace them with U.S. beans. The perverse result is that the prospect of tariffs has temporarily led to a remarkably large surge in U.S. exports...

...which independent estimates suggest will add around 0.6 percentage points to the U.S. economy���s growth rate in the second quarter. Unfortunately, we���ll give all that growth back and more in the months ahead. Thanks to the looming trade war, U.S. soybean prices have plummeted, and the farmers of Iowa are facing a rude awakening. Why am I telling you this story? Partly as a reminder of the unintended consequences of Donald Trump���s trade war, which is going to hurt a lot of people, like Iowa farmers, who supported him in 2016. In fact, it looks as if the trade war is in general going to hurt Trump���s supporters more than his opponents. Meanwhile, Trump���s trade war will benefit some unexpected parties. Was making Brazil great again part of his agenda?

>But mainly I offer the parable of the soybeans as a warning against what���s going to happen later this month, when the advance estimate of second-quarter G.D.P. comes in. The headline number is probably going to look good.... You need to know is that (a) quarterly fluctuations in growth are mainly noise, telling you very little about long-term economic prospects, and (b) more fundamental indicators show that Trump���s main policy achievement to date, last year���s tax cut, is basically delivering none of what its backers promised.... Pay little or no attention to short-term growth wobbles, which can be driven by transitory stuff like the reshuffling of world soybean trade...

#shouldread

Monday Smackdown: Epistemic Intellectual Bankruptcy Edition: Paul Krugman/Matt O'Brien/Niall Ferguson

I think Paul Krugman puts his finger on the decline of Niall Ferguson here: Paul Krugman: _"What we have here is an example of a phenomenon I've seen a number of times: the doom loop of hackery...

...It starts when a guy who actually does have something to offer, like an academic reputation based on real work, decides to expand his horizons by being cleverly contrarian:

Matt O'Brien: This is possibly the dumbest thing Niall Ferguson has ever written: he thinks Donald Trump might be the new Caesar Augustus, and that blowing up the liberal international order is worth it to keep China���s economy from growing so much...

Niall Ferguson: Yes, there is much to be said in principle for an international order based on explicit rules; and yes, those rules should favor free trade over protectionism. But if in practice your liberal international order has the consequence that China overtakes you, first economically and then strategically, there is probably something wrong with it.... The Trump presidency is that it holds out probably the last opportunity the United States has to stop or at least slow China���s ascendancy.... Trump���s approach to the problem, which is to assert American power in unpredictable and disruptive ways, may in fact be the only viable option left...

Paul Krugman: This contrarianism always involves shocking liberal pieties, never conservatives. Funny how that works.

Anyway, pretty soon it turns out that the contrarianism wasn't clever���it was simply ignorant; the liberal pieties were there because they were, well, true. You could do what some of us do when we get it wrong: admit the mistake, and try to learn from it. But our emerging hack won't do that, perhaps because his ego is too fragile. Instead, he doubles down, trying to regain his footing by becoming even more dumbly contrarian

And the further out he goes, the more he reveals that he has no idea what he's talking about. Misunderstandings of macro become claims that inflation is really 10%, then that Keynes didn't care about the future because he was gay, and so on. And in current circumstances, this ends up with once-respectable thinkers becoming Trump cultists. Because of course it does...

#shouldread

Hoisted/Smackdown: Yes, Noam Chomsky Is a Liar. Why Do You Ask?

Hoisted/Smackdown: On the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia...: May 31, 2006: Having made the mistake of having joked about Noam Chomsky and so provoked a Chomskyite troll eruption that was painful to clean out, I believe that I have to make my position clear:

Noam Chomsky is a liar.

For example, Noam Chomsky says:

On the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia, Noam Chomsky interviewed by Danilo Mandic: Director of Communications [for Clinton Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott], John Norris.... [T]ake a look on John Norris's book and what he says is that the real purpose of the war had nothing to do with concern for Kosovar Albanians. It was because Serbia was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms, meaning it was the last corner of Europe which had not subordinated itself to the US-run neoliberal programs, so therefore it had to be eliminated. That's from the highest level...

John Norris simply does not say what Chomsky says Norris says. "Reform[ing] their economies, mitigat[ing] ethnic tensions, and broaden[ing] civil society" is simply not the same thing as "subordinat[ing] itself to the US-run neoliberal programs". NATO moved against Milosevic because he had proceeded "from mass murder to mass murder", not because Serbia was evidence that economic prosperity was attainable by doing the opposite of what the U.S. recommended

Here's the passage from John Norris (2005), Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo (New York: Praeger), that Chomsky is misciting, p. xxii ff.:

For Western powers, the Kosovo crisis was fueled by frustration with Milsoevic and the legitimate fear that instability and conflict might spread further in the region, The evolving political aims of the Alliance and the changing nature of the transatlantic community also played a role. In that vein, it is useful to more broadly consider how NATO and Yugoslavia came to be locked in conflict....

NATO's large membership and consensus style may cause endless headaches for military planners, but it is also why joining NATO is appealing to nations across central and eastern Europe. Nations from Albania to Ukraine want in the western club. The gravitational pull of the community of western democracies highlights why Milosevic's Yugoslavia had become such an anachronism. As nations throughout the region sought to reform their economies, mitigate ethnic tensions, and broaden civil society, Belgrade seemed to delight in continually moving in the opposite direction. It is small wonder NATO and Yugoslavia ended up on a collision course. It was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform���not the plight of the Kosovar Albanians���that best explains NATO's war. Milosevic had been a burr in the side of the transatlantic community for so long that the United States felt that he would only respond to military pressure Slobodan Milosevice's repeated transgressions ran directly counter to the vision of a Europe 'whole and free', and challenged the very value of NATO's continued existence.

Many outsiders accuse western countries of selective intervention in Kosovo���fighting on a hair-trigger in the Balkans while avoiding the Sudans and Rwandas of the world. This was hardly the case. Only a decade of death, destruction, and Milosevic brinkmanship pushed NATO to act when the Rambouillet talks collapsed. Most of the leaders of NATO's major powers were proponents of 'third way' politics and headed socially progressive, economically centrist governments. None of these men were particularly hawkish, and Milosevic did not allow them the political breathing room to look past his abuses.

Through predatory opportunism, Milosevic had repeatedly exploited the weakest instincts of European and North American powers alike. Time and again, he had preserved his political power because nations mightier than his own lacked the political resolve to bring him to heel. His record was ultimately one of ruin, particularly for the Serbs, as Yugoslavia dwindled into a smaller and smaller state verging on collapse. It was precisely because Milosevic had become so adroit at outmaneuvering the west that NATO came to view the ever-escalating use of force as its only option. Nobody should be surprised that Milosevic eventually goaded the sleeping giant out of repose.

NATO went to war in Kosovo because its political and diplomatic leaders had enough of Milosevic and saw his actions disrupting plans to bring a wider stable of nations into the transatlantic community. Kosovo would only offer western leaders more humiliation and frustration if they did not forcefully respond U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's view of Milosevic was probably best revealed when she said that, at a certain stage at Rambouillet, it was evident that Milosevic was 'jerking us around'. In early June of 1999, German Minister Joschka Fischer rather angrily responded to those who questioned NATO's motives. Fischer observed that he had originally resisted military action, but that his views had changed, 'step by step, from mass murder to mass murder'...

Blaming the Pollyannaish fecklessness of the Bank of Engl...

Blaming the Pollyannaish fecklessness of the Bank of England on the feckless indolence of Britain's reporters: Simon Wren-Lewis: How UK deficit hysteria began: "Monetary policy ran out of reliable levers to manage the economy. However, journalists wouldn���t know that from the Bank of England, who tended to talk as if Quantitative Easing was a close substitute to interest rates as a monetary policy instrument...

...They would know it from academic macroeconomists, but journalists were generally too busy to make the effort to talk to them. For whatever reason, they did not fully appreciate how much the world had changed as a result of the GFC. So when in the budget of April 2009 the Treasury showed the full extent of the deficits that the recession (and to a smaller extent the government���s stimulus measures) had created, journalists behaved exactly as they would have done before the GFC.... So the coverage was all about higher taxes and lower spending, and whether they would be enough to close the record deficit. At no point in the subsequent discussion does anyone ask whether the current deficits are large enough to create a strong recovery...

#shouldread

1870 as the Inflection Point: An In-Take from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century

3.0: 1870 as the Inflection Point https://www.icloud.com/pages/0qen52fK3MKE3TlUkF4ViGtFQ: As of 1870 the smart money was still placed on the bet that the British Industrial Revolution would not mark a permanent divergence of human destiny from its agricultural-age pattern. All agreed that the Industrial Revolution had produced marvels of science and technology. All agreed that it allowed the world to support a much greater population than had previously been deemed possible. All agreed that it gave the world���s rich capabilities that, along many dimensions, fell little short of those previously attributed to gods. All agreed that it had greatly multiplied the numbers of the comfortable���that there were now many more people who did not feel the immediate bite of insufficient food, insufficient clothing, and insufficient shelter.

But had the Industrial Revolution lightened the toil of the overwhelming majority of humanity���even in Britain, the country at the leading edge? No. Had it materially raised the living standards of the overwhelming majority--even in Britain? Doubtful. Would it do either of these in the future? You had to be somewhat utopian to be confident that it would be so.

But that changed. Each year after 1870 John Stuart Mill���s belief that the progress of science and technology, of industry and enterprise had not lightened the day���s toil of any human being or effected great changes in human destiny became less and less credible and less and less true, and by the time World War I began in 1914 had become more-or-less completely false.

For, in comparative perspective with respect to all previous ages, 1870-1914 was indeed, as John Maynard Keynes wrote looking back at it from his World War I-era viewpoint: ���economic Eldorado��� economic Utopia��� the earlier economist would have deemed it��� an unprecedented situation��� an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of [hu]man[ity]���. Human numbers increased, and increased more rapidly than ever before, from about 1.3 billion in 1870 to 1.75 billion in 1914, and yet food became cheaper and easier and not harder and more expensive to secure. In terms of the ���bare-bones subsistence basket���, real wages of unskilled workers by the eve of World War I look like they stood more than 50% above their levels of 1870 or so���a world-wide reduction in potential Malthusian pressures never before seen.

How did the world accomplish its further threefold leap, relative to what had taken place in the British Industrial Revolution era of 1800-1870, in the underlying fundamentals of economic growth? And how did what was originally a geographically-concentrated surge become global, albeit unevenly global? Why, instead of the British Industrial Revolution growth surge petering out and being followed by a return to the Commercial Revolution era���itself a positive historical anomaly���did the rate of human progress leap ahead at a tenfold pace? Why does one year since 1870 see the relative technological and organizational progress of three years over 1800-1870, of ten years over 1500-1800, and of a hundred years over 1-1500? Just what happened around 1870 to make this shift? And what has happened between then and today to sustain it?

1870, you see, marked an inflection point in four important aspects of material life: transportation (with implications not just for goods traffic but for human migration as well; communication (with implications for finance and organization); openness (of societies and polities to financial, trade, and migration flows); and invention (with its implications for innovation and productivity growth):

Globalization in goods transport, in the form of the iron-hulled screw-propellered ocean-going steamship linked to the railroad network, and subsequent developments.
Globalization in communication, in the form of the global submarine telegraph network linked to landlines, and subsequent developments.
The openness of the world���most important, perhaps, the open borders in migration, as one in fourteen humans changed their continent between 1870-1914. But also and closely linked to the other forms of openness that allowed transport and communications to produce globalization; that allowed research and development to diffuse throughout the world, albeit slowly; and that made the Long 20th Century the American Century.
The development of the industrial research laboratory of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, and its subsequent bureaucratization and generalization

These all four together were, I think, more likely than not enough to be a tipping point. I wish that I could do more in this book to explain why they together were a tipping point, but I do not know enough to do so. I can, however, trace their consequences.

The first two created the possibility of making the world economy, for the first time, a single system: the earnings of a rubber tapper in Brazil would be powerfully influenced by things happening continents away���by the economic growth and demand for rubber in North America and in western Europe and by the success of the British imperial project in Malaya and the Belgian in the Congo, to name four. The third realized the possibility of an integrated world economic system. Moreover, it transformed the U.S. from likely fifth fiddle to lead violin among the Long 20th Century���s global powers. This chapter will focus on this ���globalization���.

The fourth greatly increased the pace of technological growth as inventors and innovators were no longer forced to be both lone wolves and to also be promoters, projectors, financiers, and managers. We postpone Thomas and Nikola, their industrial research labs, and their consequences to the next chapter.

What drove the world-wide surge in real wages over 1870-1914? That the surge was world-wide rather than confined to where industrial civilization had already taken root was due to the globalization of the economy of the railroad, the wharf and crane, the iron-hulled screw-propellered, ocean-going steamship, and openness to trade, finance, and migration���save that the pampas and the prairies and the other temperate climates were largely reserved for those of recent European descent.

The bringing new products���oil palms and nuts to west Africa, rubber to Malaysia, coffee to Brazil and central America, wheat and sheep to Australia, and many many more���and extracting resources from all around the globe was fueled by 100 million people leaving their continent of origin to live and work elsewhere: 50 million from China and India to places from South Asia and Africa to the Caribbean and the highlands of Peru; 50 million from Europe mainly to the Americas and Australasia but also to South Africa, the highland of Kenya, the black-earth western regions of the Pontic-Caspain steppe, and elsewhere.

These migrants and their descendants made a lot of our history:

One of these migrants���one whose move proceeded the great 1870-1914 wave as migration became really cheap���was Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), immigrated to America from Scotland in 1848. He was perhaps the champion of upward mobility: his father was a subsistence-level handloom weaver, and he become the world���s premier steelmaster and perhaps the second richest person in the world. We will see a lot of Andrew Carnegie later on in this book.

Another migrant was Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), who migrated from India to Britain to study at the Inner Temple from 1888-1891 and then to South Africa in 1893, where he stayed for 21 years. Only then did he return to lead the movement to win independence from the British Empire for India. The claim is that he sailed to South Africa thinking of himself as a British Empire citizen first and an Indian second, and returned convinced that the British Empire must end and willing to do something about it. We will see a lot of Mohandas Gandhi later on in this book.

A third was David Leontyevich Bronstein (1847���1922), who with his wife Anna Lvovna Zhivotovskaya (1850-1910) crossed the the greatest river he had ever seen and moved 200 miles out of the forest and into the grasslands���which had been horse-nomad lands within historical memory���to pioneer one of the richest agriculture soils in the world: it was fifteen miles from his farm in Yanovka to the nearest post office. We will see a lot of David and Anna���s fifth child, Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879-1940), later on in this book.

A fourth was Jennie Jerome (1854-1921), who made a reverse migration: from Brooklyn, New York, United States to Westminster, England to marry Lord Randolph Spencer Churchill, becoming engaged in 1873 three days after their first meeting at a sailing regatta on the Isle of Wight. Their marriage was then delayed for seven months while her father Leonard the financier and speculator and his father John Winston the seventh Duke of Marlborough argued over how much money she would bring to the marriage, and how it would be safeguarded. We will see a lot of her son, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1965), born eight months after their marriage later on in this book.

A fifth was Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), who left Croatia and his wished-for parental destiny as a Serbian Orthodox priest to Graz, Austria, Budapest, Paris, and then New York to become the most brilliant electrical engineer ever. We will see a lot of him later on in this book.

And a sixth was Herbert Hoover (1874-1967). Born in 1874 in Iowa, orphaned at 10, in 1885 he started moving west���first to Oregon to live with an uncle; second to California as the first student to attend Stanford University where he became a mining engineer, graduating in 1895 in the distressed aftermath of the Panic of 1893; and then in 1897 he crossed the Pacific to first Australia and then China to make his fortune. From 1901 to 1917 his base was London, as he worked in and managed investments in Australia, China, Russia, Burma, Italy, and Central America in addition to the United States. In 1917 he moved back to America. We will see a lot of him later on in this book.

The industrialization of western Europe and of the east and midwest of North America provided enough workmen to make the industrial products to satisfy global demands, and also to build the railways, ships, ports, cranes, telegraph lines, and other pieces of transport and communications infrastructure to make the first global economy a reality. The 1870-1914 world economy was a high���in historical comparative perspective���investment economy. Today there are 1 million miles of railroad in the world. There were 20 thousand miles of railways in the world when the U.S. Civil War ended in 1865. There were 300 thousand miles in 1914. (There are a million miles today.) In 1850 about 4% of all goods and services produced and marketed crossed national borders; in 1880 it was 11%; and by 1913 17%. (Today it is 30%.)

The upshot was indeed that for the world���s middle and upper classes, by 1914 it as indeed the case that ���life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages������ And for the working classes of the globe, an increasing margin between living standards and bare subsistence emerged. All around the world over 1870-1914 there were five people where there had been four a generation before���half a century thus saw more population growth than had 400 years of the Han and Roman empires of earlier millennia. Underpinning this growth in human numbers were women who were better nourished and so could reliably ovulate, children who were better nourished so that their immune systems were less compromised, and the beginnings of effective public health.

John Maynard Keynes (1926): Trotsky on England: Weekend Reading

John Maynard Keynes (1926): Trotsky On England: "A CONTEMPORARY reviewing this book says: 'He stammers out platitudes in the voice of a phonograph with a scratched record'...

...I should guess that Trotsky dictated it. In its English dress it emerges in a turbid stream with a hectoring gurgle which is characteristic of modern revolutionary literature translated from the Russian. Its dogmatic tone about our affairs, where even the author���s flashes of insight are clouded by his inevitable ignorance of what he is talking about, cannot commend it to an English reader. Yet there is a certain style about Trotsky. A personality is visible through the distorting medium. And it is not all platitudes.

The book is, first of all, an attack on the official leaders of the British Labour Party because of their ���religiosity���, and because they believe that it is useful to prepare for Socialism without preparing for Revolution at the same time. Trotsky sees, what is probably true, that our Labour Party is the direct offspring of the Radical Non-conformists and the philanthropic bourgeois, without a tinge atheism, blood, and revolution. Emotionally and intellectually, therefore, he finds them intensely unsympathetic. A short anthology will exhibit his state of mind:

The doctrine of the leaders of the Labour Party is a kind of amalgam of Conservatism and Liberalism partially adapted to the needs of trade unions ... The Liberal and semi-liberal leaders of the Labour Party still think that the social revolution is the mournful privilege of the European Continent.

���In the realm of feeling and conscience,��� MacDonald begins, ���in the realm of spirit, Socialism forms the religion of service to the people.��� In those words is immediately betrayed the benevolent bourgeois, the left Liberal, who ���serves��� the people, coming to them from one side, or more truly from above. Such an approach has its roots entirely in the dim past, when the radical intelligentsia went to live in the working-class districts of London in order to carry on cultural and educational work.

Together with theological literature, Fabianism is perhaps the most useless, and in any case the most boring form of verbal creation.... The cheaply optimistic Victorian epoch, when it seemed that to-morrow would be a little better than to-day, and the day after to-morrow still better than to-morrow, found its most finished expression in the Webbs, Snowden, MacDonald and other Fabians....

These bombastic authorities, pedants, arrogant and ranting poltroons, systematically poison the Labour Movement, befog the consciousness of the proletariat, and paralyse its will....

The Fabians, the I.L.P.ers, the Conservative bureaucrats of the trade unions represent at the moment the most counter-revolutionary force in Great Britain, and perhaps of all the world���s development....

Fabianism, MacDonaldism, Pacifism, is the chief rallying-point of British imperialism and of the European, if not the world, bourgeoisie. At any cost, these self-satisfied pedants, these gabbling eclectics, these sentimental careerists, these upstart liveried lackeys of the bourgeoisie, must be shown in their natural form to the workers. To reveal them as they are will mean their hopeless discrediting...

Well, that is how the gentlemen who so much alarm Mr. Winston Churchill strike the real article. And we must hope that the real article, having got it off his chest, feels better. How few words need changing, let the reader note, to permit the attribution of my anthology to the philo-fisticuffs of the Right. And the reason for this similarity is evident. Trotsky is concerned in these passages with an attitude towards public affairs, not with ultimate aims. He is just exhibiting the temper of the band of brigand-statesmen to whom Action means War, and who are irritated to fury by the atmosphere of sweet reasonableness, of charity, tolerance, and mercy in which, though the wind whistles in the East or in the South, Mr. Baldwin and Lord Oxford and Mr. MacDonald smoke the pipe of peace.

���They smoke Peace where there should be no Peace,��� Fascists and Bolshevists cry in a chorus, ���canting, imbecile emblems of decay, senility, and death, the antithesis of Life and the Life-Force which exist only in the spirit of merciless struggle.��� If only it was so easy! If only one could accomplish by roaring, whether roaring like a lion or like any sucking dove!

The roaring occupies the first half of Trotsky���s book. The second half, which affords a summary exposition of his political philosophy, deserves a closer attention.

First proposition. The historical process necessitates the change-over to Socialism if civilisation is to be preserved. ���Without a transfer to Socialism all our culture is threatened with decay and decomposition.���

Second proposition. It is unthinkable that this change-over can come about by peaceful argument and voluntary surrender. Except in response to force, the possessing classes will surrender nothing. The strike is already a resort to force. ���The class struggle is a continual sequence of open or masked forces, which are regulated in more or less degree by the State, which in turn represents the organised apparatus of force of the stronger of the antagonists, in other words, the ruling class.��� The hypothesis that the Labour Party will come into power by constitutional methods and will then ���proceed to the business so cautiously, so tactfully, so intelligently, that the bourgeoisie will not feel any need for active opposition,��� is ���facetious������though this ���is indeed the very rock-bottom hope of MacDonald and company.���

Third proposition. Even if, sooner or later, the Labour Party achieve power by constitutional methods, the reactionary parties will at once Proceed to force. The possessing classes will do lip-service to parliamentary methods so long as they are in control of the parliamentary machine, but if they are dislodged, then, Trotsky maintains, it is absurd to suppose that they will prove squeamish about a resort to force on their side. Suppose, he says, that a Labour majority in Parliament were to decide in the most legal fashion to confiscate the land without compensation, to put a heavy tax on capital, and to abolish the Crown and the House of Lords, ���there cannot be the least doubt that the possessing classes will not submit without a struggle, the more so as all the police, judiciary, and military apparatus is entirely in their hands.��� Moreover, they control the banks and the whole system of social credit and the machinery of transport and trade, so that the daily food of London, including that of the Labour Government itself, depends on the great capitalist combines. It is obvious, Trotsky argues, that these terrific means of pressure ���will be brought into action with frantic violence in order to dam the activity of the Labour Government, to paralyse its exertions, to frighten it, to effect cleavages in its parliamentary majority, and, finally, to cause a financial panic; provision difficulties, and lock-outs.��� To suppose, indeed, that the destiny of Society is going to be determined by whether Labour achieves a parliamentary majority and not by the actual balance of material forces at the moment is an ���enslavement to the fetishism of parliamentary arithmetic.���

Fourth proposition. In view of all this, whilst it may be good strategy to aim also at constitutional power, it is silly not to organise on the basis that material force will be the determining factor in the end.

In the revolutionary struggle only the greatest determination is of avail to strike the arms out of the hands of reaction to limit the period of civil war, and to lessen the number of its victims. If this course be not taken it is better not to take to arms at all. If arms are not resorted to, it is impossible to organise a general strike; if the general strike is renounced, there can be no thought of any serious struggle.

Granted his assumptions, much of Trotsky���s argument is, I think, unanswerable. Nothing can be sillier than to play at revolution���if that is what he means. But what are his assumptions? He assumes that the moral and intellectual problems of the transformation of Society have been already solved���that a plan exists, and that nothing remains except to put it into operation. He assumes further that Society is divided into two parts���the proletariat who are converted to the plan, and the rest who for purely selfish reasons oppose it. He does not understand that no plan could win until it had first convinced many people, and that, if there really were a plan, it would draw support from many different quarters. He is so much occupied with means that he forgets to tell us what it is all for.

If we pressed him, I suppose he would mention Marx. And there we will leave him with an echo of his own words������together with theological literature, perhaps the most useless, and in any case the most boring form of verbal creation.���

Trotsky���s book must confirm us in our conviction of the uselessness, the empty-headedness of Force at the present stage of human affairs. Force would settle nothing no more in the Class War than in the Wars of Nations or in the Wars of Religion. An understanding of the historical process, to which Trotsky is so fond of appealing, declares not for, but against, Force at this juncture of things.

We lack more than usual a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal. All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas���and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists. It is not necessary to debate the subtleties of what justifies a man in promoting his gospel by force; for no one has a gospel. The next move is with the head, and fists must wait.

#shouldread
#weekendreading

Joseph Goebbels (1932): Those Damned Nazis!: Weekend Reading

Joseph Goebbels (1932): Those Damned Nazis!: "Why Are We Nationalists? We are nationalists because we see the nation as the only way to bring all the forces of the nation together to preserve and improve our existence and the conditions under which we live...

...The nation is the organic union of a people to protect its life. To be national is to affirm this union in word and deed. To be national has nothing to do with a form of government or a symbol. It is an affirmation of things, not forms. Forms can change, their content remains. If form and content agree, then the nationalist affirms both. If they conflict, the nationalist fights for the content and against the form. One may not put the symbol above the content. If that happens, the battle is on the wrong field and one���s strength is lost in formalism. The real aim of nationalism, the nation, is lost.

That is how things are today in Germany. Nationalism has turned into bourgeois patriotism and its defenders are battling windmills. One says Germany and means the monarchy. Another proclaims freedom and means the Black-White-Red flag. Would our situation today be any different if we replaced the republic with a monarchy and flew the black-white-red flag? The colony would have different wallpaper, but its nature, its content, would stay the same. Indeed, things would be even worse, for a facade that conceals the facts dissipates the forces today fighting against slavery.

Bourgeois patriotism is the privilege of a class. It is the real reason for its decline. When 30 million are for something and 30 million are against it, things balance out and nothing happens. That is how things are with us. We are the world���s Pariah not because we do not have the courage to resist, but rather because out entire national energy is wasted in eternal and unproductive squabbling between the right and the left. Our way only goes downward, and today one can already predict when we will fall into the abyss.

Nationalism is more wide-reaching than internationalism. It sees things as they are. Only he who respects himself can respect others. If as a German nationalist I affirm Germany, how can I hold it against a French nationalist who affirms France? Only when these affirmations conflict in vital ways will there be a power-political struggle. Internationalism cannot undo this reality. Its attempts at proof fail completely. And even when the facts seem to have some validity, nature, blood, the will to life, and the struggle for existence on this hard earth prove the falsity of fine theories.

The sin of bourgeois patriotism was to confound a certain economic form with the national. It connected two things that are entirely different. Forms of the economy, however firm they may seem, are changeable. The national is eternal. If I mix the eternal and the temporal, the eternal will necessarily collapse when the temporal collapses. This was the real cause for the collapse of liberal society. It was rooted not in the eternal, but in the temporal, and when the temporal declined it took the eternal down with it. Today it is only an excuse for a system that brings growing economic misery. That is the only reason why international Jewry organizes the battle of the proletarian forces against both powers, the economy and the nation, and defeat them.

From this understanding, the young nationalism draws its absolute demand. The faith in the nation is a matter for everyone, never a group, a class or an economic clique. The eternal must be distinguished from the temporal. Maintaining a rotten economic system has nothing to do with nationalism, which is an affirmation of the Fatherland. I can love Germany and hate capitalism. Not only can��I, I must. Only the annihilation of a system of exploitation carries with it the core of the rebirth of our people.

We are nationalists because as Germans, we love Germany. Because we love Germany, we want to preserve it and fight against those who would destroy it. If a Communist shouts ���Down with nationalism!���, he means the hypocritical bourgeois patriotism that sees the economy only as a system of slavery. If we make clear to the man of the left that nationalism and capitalism, that is the affirmation of the Fatherland and the misuse of its resources, have nothing to do with each other, indeed that they go together like fire and water, then even as a socialist he will come to affirm the nation, which he will want to conquer.

That is our real task as National Socialists. We were the first to recognize the connections, and the first to begin the struggle. Because we are socialists we have felt the deepest blessings of the nation, and because we are nationalists we want to promote socialist justice in a new Germany.

A young fatherland will rise when the socialist front is firm.

Socialism will become reality when the Fatherland is free.

 

Why Are We Socialists? We are socialists because we see in socialism, that is the union of all citizens, the only chance to maintain our racial inheritance and to regain our political freedom and renew our German state.

Socialism is the doctrine of liberation for the working class. It promotes the rise of the fourth class and its incorporation in the political organism of our Fatherland, and is inextricably bound to breaking the present slavery and regaining German freedom. Socialism, therefore, is not merely a matter of the oppressed class, but a matter for everyone, for freeing the German people from slavery is the goal of contemporary policy. Socialism gains its true form only through a total fighting brotherhood with the forward-striving energies of a newly awakened nationalism. Without nationalism it is nothing, a phantom, a mere theory, a castle in the sky, a book. With it it is everything, the future, freedom, the fatherland!

The sin of liberal thinking was to overlook socialism���s nation-building strengths, thereby allowing its energies to go in anti-national directions. The sin of Marxism was to degrade socialism into a question of wages and the stomach, putting it in conflict with the state and its national existence. An understanding of both these facts leads us to a new sense of socialism, which sees its nature as nationalistic, state-building, liberating and constructive.

The bourgeois is about to leave the historical stage. In its place will come the class of productive workers, the working class, that has been up until today oppressed. It is beginning to fulfill its political mission. It is involved in a hard and bitter struggle for political power as it seeks to become part of the national organism. The battle began in the economic realm; it will finish in the political. It is not merely a matter of wages, not only a matter of the number of hours worked in a day���though we may never forget that these are an essential, perhaps even the most significant part of the socialist platform���but it is much more a matter of incorporating a powerful and responsible class in the state, perhaps even to make it the dominant force in the future politics of the fatherland.

The bourgeoisie does not want to recognize the strength of the working class. Marxism has forced it into a straitjacket that will ruin it. While the working class gradually disintegrates in the Marxist front, bleeding itself dry, the bourgeoisie and Marxism have agreed on the general lines of capitalism, and see their task now to protect and defend it in various ways, often concealed.

We are socialists because we see the social question as a matter of necessity and justice for the very existence of a state for our people, not a question of cheap pity or insulting sentimentality. The worker has a claim to a living standard that corresponds to what he produces. We have no intention of begging for that right. Incorporating him in the state organism is not only a critical matter for him, but for the whole nation. The question is larger than the eight-hour day. It is a matter of forming a new state consciousness that includes every productive citizen.

Since the political powers of the day are neither willing nor able to create such a situation, socialism must be fought for. It is a fighting slogan both inwardly and outwardly. It is aimed domestically at the bourgeois parties and Marxism at the same time, because both are sworn enemies of the coming workers��� state. It is directed abroad at all powers that threaten our national existence and thereby the possibility of the coming socialist national state.

Socialism is possible only in a state that is united domestically and free internationally. The bourgeoisie and Marxism are responsible for failing to reach both goals, domestic unity and international freedom. No matter how national and social these two forces present themselves, they are the sworn enemies of a socialist national state.

We must therefore break both groups politically. The lines of German socialism are sharp, and our path is clear.

We are against the political bourgeoisie, and for genuine nationalism!

We are against Marxism, but for true socialism!

We are for the first German national state of a socialist nature!

We are for the National Socialist German Workers��� Party!

 

Why a Workers��� Party? Work is not mankind���s curse, but his blessing. A man becomes a man through labor. It elevates him, makes him great and aware, raises him above all other creatures. It is in the deepest sense creative, productive, and culture-producing. Without labor, no food. Without food, no life.

The idea that the dirtier one���s hands get, the more degrading the work, is a Jewish, not a German, idea. As in every other area, the German first asks how, then what. It is less a question of the position I fill, and more a question of how well I do the duty that God has given me.

We call ourselves a workers��� party because we want to rescue the word work from its current definition and give it back its original meaning. Anyone who creates value is a creator, that is, a worker. We refuse to distinguish kinds of work. Our only standard is whether the work serves the whole, or at least does not harm it, or if it is harmful. Work is service. If it works against the general welfare, then it is treason against the fatherland.

Marxist nonsense claimed to free labor, yet it degraded the work of its members and saw it as a curse and disgrace. It can hardly be our goal to abolish labor, but rather to give new meaning and content. The worker in a capitalist state���and that is his deepest misfortune���is no longer a living human being, a creator, a maker.

He has become a machine. A number, a cog in the machine without sense or understanding. He is alienated from what he produces. Labor is for him only a way to survive, not a path to higher blessings, not a joy, not something in which to take pride, or satisfaction, or encouragement, or a way to build character.

We are a workers��� party because we see in the coming battle between finance and labor the beginning and the end of the structure of the twentieth century. We are on the side of labor and against finance. Money is the measuring rod of liberalism, work and accomplishment that of the socialist state. The liberal asks: What are you? The socialist asks: Who are you? Worlds lie between.

We do not want to make everyone the same. Nor do we want levels in the population, high and low, above and below. The aristocracy of the coming state will be determined not by possessions or money, but only on the quality of one���s accomplishments. One earns merit through service. Men are distinguished by the results of their labor. That is the sure sign of the character and value of a person.

The value of labor under socialism will be determined by its value to the state, to the whole community. Labor means creating value, not haggling over things. The soldier is a worker when he bears the sword to protect the national economy. The statesman also is a worker when he gives the nation a form and a will that help it to produce what it needs for life and freedom.

A furrowed brow is as much a sign of labor as a powerful fist. A white collar worker should not be ashamed to claim with pride that of which the manual laborer boasts: labor. The relations between these two groups determine their mutual fate. Neither can survive without the other, for both are members of an organism that they must together maintain if they are to defend and expand their right to exist.

We call ourselves a workers��� party because we want to free labor from the chains of capitalism and Marxism. In battling for Germany���s future, we freely admit to it, and accept the odium from the liberal bourgeoisie that results. We know that we will succeed in bringing new blessings out of their curses.

God gave the nations territory to grow grain. The seed becomes grain and the grain becomes bread. The middleman of it all is labor.

He who despises labor but accepts its benefits is a hypocrite.

That is the deepest meaning of our movement: it gives things back their original significance, unconcerned that today they may be in danger of sinking into the swamp of a collapsing worldview.

He who creates value works, and is a worker. A movement that wants to free labor is a workers��� party.

Therefore we National Socialists call ourselves a worker���s party.

When our victorious flags fly before us, we sing:

���We are the army of the swastika,

Raise high the red flags!

We want to clear the way to freedom

For German Labor!���

 

Why Do We Oppose the Jews? We oppose the Jews because we are defending the freedom of the German people. The Jew is the cause and beneficiary of our slavery He has misused the social misery of the broad masses to deepen the dreadful split between the right and left of our people, to divide Germany into two halves thereby concealing the true reason for the loss of the Great War and falsifying the nature of the revolution.

The Jew has no interest in solving the German question. He cannot have such an interest. He depends on it remaining unsolved. If the German people formed a united community and won back its freedom, there would be no place any longer for the Jew. His hand is strongest when a people lives in domestic and international slavery, not when it is free, industrious, self-aware and determined. The Jew caused our problems, and lives from them.

That is why we oppose the Jew as nationalists and as socialists.��He has ruined our race, corrupted our morals, hollowed out our customs and broken our strength. We owe it to him that we today are the Pariah of the world. He was the leper among as long as we were German. When we forgot our German nature, he triumphed over us and our future.

The Jew is the plastic demon of decomposition. Where he finds filth and decay, he surfaces and begins his butcher���s work among the nations. He hides behind a mask and presents himself as a friend to his victims, and before they know it he has broken their neck.

The Jew is uncreative. He produces nothing, he only haggles with products. With rags, clothing, pictures, jewels, grain, stocks, cures, peoples and states. He has somehow stolen everything he deals in. When he attacks a state he is a revolutionary. As soon as he holds power, he preaches peace and order so that he can devour his conquests in comfort.

What does anti-Semitism have to do with socialism? I would put the question this way: What does the Jew have to do with socialism? Socialism has to do with labor. When did one ever see him working instead of plundering, stealing and living from the sweat of others? As socialists we are opponents of the Jews because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation���s goods.

What does anti-Semitism have to do with nationalism? I would put the question this way: What does the Jew have to do with nationalism? Nationalism has to do with blood and race. The Jew is the enemy and destroyer of the purity of blood, the conscious destroyer of our race. As nationalists we oppose the Jews because we see the Hebrews as the eternal enemy of our national honor and of our national freedom.

But the Jew, after all, is also a human being. Certainly, none of us doubts that. We only doubt that he is a decent human being. He does not get along with us. He lives by other laws than we do. The fact that he is a human being is not sufficient reason for us to allow him to subject us in inhumane ways. He may be a human being���but what kind of a human being is he! If someone slaps your mother in the face, do you say: ���Thank you! He is after all a human being!��� That is not a human being, it is a monster. Yet how much worse has the Jew done to our mother Germany, and is still doing today!

There are also white Jews. True, there are scoundrels among us, even though they are Germans, who act in immoral ways against their own racial and blood comrades. But why do we call them white Jews? You use the term to describe something inferior and contemptible. Just as we do. Why do you ask us why we oppose the Jews when you without knowing it are one too?

Anti-Semitism is not Christian. That means that it is Christian to allow the Jews to go on as they are, stripping the skin from our bodies and mocking us. To be a Christian means to love one���s neighbor as oneself! My neighbor is my racial and blood brother. If I love him, I have to hate his enemies. He who thinks German must despise the Jews. The one requires the other.

Christ himself saw that love did not always work. When he found the moneychangers in the temple, he did not say: ���Children, love one another!��� He took up a whip and drove them out.

We oppose the Jews because we affirm the German people. The Jew is our greatest misfortune.

It is not true that we eat Jews for breakfast.

It is true that slowly but surely, he is stealing all that we have.

Things would be different if we behaved as Germans.

 

Revolutionary Demands: We do not enter parliament to use parliamentary methods. We know that the fate of peoples is determined by personalities, never by parliamentary majorities. The essence of parliamentary democracy is the majority, which destroys personal responsibility and glorifies the masses.��A few dozen rogues and crooks run things behind the scenes. Aristocracy depends on accomplishment, the rule of the most able, and the subordination of the less capable to the will of the leadership. Any form of government ��� no matter how democratic or aristocratic it may outwardly appear ��� rests on compulsion. The difference is only whether the compulsion is a blessing or a curse for the community.

What we demand is new, decisive, and radical, revolutionary in the truest sense of the word. That has nothing to do with rioting and barricades. It may be that that happens here or there. But it is not an inherent part of the process. Revolutions are spiritual acts. They appear first in people, then in politics and the economy. New people form new structures. The transformation we want is first of all spiritual; that will necessarily change the way things are.

This revolutionary act is beginning to be visible in us. The result is a new type of person visible to the knowing eye: the National Socialist.��Consistent with his spiritual attitude, the National Socialist makes uncompromising demands in politics. There is no if and when for him, only an either���or.

He demands:

The return of German honor. Without honor, one has no right to life. A nation that has pawned its honor has pawned its bread. Honor is the foundation of any people���s community. Losing our honor is the true cause of the loss of our freedom.

In place of a slave colony, we want a restored German national state. The state is not an end in itself for us, but rather a means to an end. The true end is the race, the sum of all the living, creative forces of the people. The structure that today calls itself the German republic is not a way to maintain our racial inheritance. It has become an end in itself with no real connection to the people and their needs. We want to abolish the slave colony and replace it with a people���s state in freedom.

Want work and bread for every productive national and blood comrade. Pay should be according to accomplishment. That means more pay for German workers! That will stop the senseless fighting in which we engage today.

First provide housing and food for the people, then pay reparations! No democrat, no republican, has the right to complain about this demand, for it was first raised by a banner carrier of November Germany [the Weimar Republic, beginning in November 1918]. We only want to make the slogan a reality.

Provide essentials first! First we must meet the critical needs of the people, then we can produce luxury goods. Provide work for those willing to work! Give the farmers land! The German foreign policy that today sells what we have at below-market rates must be completely transformed and must focus radically on the German need for space, drawing the necessary power-political conclusions.

Peace among productive workers! Each should do his duty for the good of the whole community. The state then has the responsibility of protecting the individual, guaranteeing him the fruits of his labor. The people���s community must not be a mere phrase, but a revolutionary achievement following from the radical carrying out of the basic life needs of the working class.

A ruthless battle against corruption! A war against exploitation, freedom for the workers! The elimination of all economic-capitalist influences on national policy.

A solution to the Jewish question! We call for the systematic elimination of foreign racial elements from public life in every area. There must be a sanitary separation between Germans and non-Germans on racial grounds exclusively, not on nationality or even religious belief.

Down with democratic parliamentarianism! Establish a parliament based on occupations which determines production. Policies will be determined by a political body that earns is place by the laws of strength and selection.

The return of loyalty and faith in economic life. The complete reversal of the injustice that has robbed millions of Germans of their possessions.

The right of personality before that of the mob. Germans always will have preference before foreigners and Jews.

A battle against the destructive poison of international Jewish culture! A strengthening of German forces and German customs. The elimination of corrupt Semitic principles and racial decay.

The death penalty for crimes against the people! The gallows for profiteers and usurers!

An uncompromising program implemented by men who will implement it passionately. No slogans, only living energy.

That is what we demand!...

#weekendreading

Meredith Haggerty: Review: We Tried Casper���s ���The Dre...

Meredith Haggerty: Review: We Tried Casper���s ���The Dreamery��� Nap Pods: "Casper opened a pay-per-nap store in New York, where you can use nice skincare products and ponder capitalism until you fall asleep.... Casper���s announcement that the mattress brand had created a space where New York���s tired could take 45 minute naps for $25 was met with a range of reactions.... In my sleepiness I saw an opportunity: to zonk out during work hours and charge it to Vox Media. No one asked, but I volunteered to take an expensive, expensed nap..."

#shouldread

Judea Pearl on the Meaning of the Monty Hall problem: Jud...

Judea Pearl on the Meaning of the Monty Hall problem: Judea Pearl: (2018): The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (New York: Basic Books: 046509760X): "Even today, many people seeing the puzzle for the first time find the result hard to believe. Why? What intuitive nerve is jangled?...

...There are probably 10,000 different reasons, one for each reader, but I think the most compelling argument is this: vos Savant���s solution seems to force us to believe in mental telepathy. If I should switch no matter what door I originally chose, then it means that the producers somehow read my mind. How else could they position the car so that it is more likely to be behind the door I did not choose?...

When we condition on a collider, we create a spurious dependence between its parents. The dependence is borne out in the probabilities: if you chose Door 1, the car location is twice as likely to be behind Door 2 as Door 1; if you chose Door 2, the car location is twice as likely to be behind Door 1. It is a bizarre dependence for sure, one of a type that most of us are unaccustomed to. It is a dependence that has no cause. It does not involve physical communication between the producers and us. It does not involve mental telepathy. It is purely an artifact of Bayesian conditioning: a magical transfer of information without causality. Our minds rebel at this possibility because from earliest infancy, we have learned to associate correlation with causation. If a car behind us takes all the same turns that we do, we first think it is following us (causation!). We next think that we are going to the same place (i.e., there is a common cause behind each of our turns). But causeless correlation violates our common sense. Thus, the Monty Hall paradox is just like an optical illusion or a magic trick: it uses our own cognitive machinery to deceive us....

Notice that I have really given two explanations of the Monty Hall paradox. The first one uses causal reasoning to explain why we observe a spurious dependence between Your Door and Location of Car; the second uses Bayesian reasoning to explain why the probability of Door 2 goes up in Let���s Make a Deal. Both explanations are valuable. The Bayesian one accounts for the phenomenon but does not really explain why we perceive it as so paradoxical. In my opinion, a true resolution of a paradox should explain why we see it as a paradox in the first place. Why did the people who read her column believe so strongly that vos Savant was wrong? It wasn���t just the know-it-alls. Paul Erdos, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of modern times, likewise could not believe the solution until a computer simulation showed him that switching is advantageous. What deep flaw in our intuitive view of the world does this reveal?

���Our brains are just not wired to do probability problems very well, so I���m not surprised there were mistakes,��� said Persi Diaconis, a statistician at Stanford University, in a 1991 interview with the New York Times. True, but there���s more to it. Our brains are not wired to do probability problems, but they are wired to do causal problems. And this causal wiring produces systematic probabilistic mistakes, like optical illusions. Because there is no causal connection between My Door and Location of Car, either directly or through a common cause, we find it utterly incomprehensible that there is a probabilistic association. Our brains are not prepared to accept causeless correlations, and we need special training���through examples like the Monty Hall paradox or the ones discussed in Chapter 3���to identify situations where they can arise. Once we have ���rewired our brains��� to recognize colliders, the paradox ceases to be confusing...

#shouldread
#cognition

Judea Pearl provides the first good response I have ever ...

Judea Pearl provides the first good response I have ever heard to Cosma Shalizi's priceless anti-Bayesian rant: Cosma Shalizi (2016): On the Uncertainty of the Bayesian Estimator: "I hardly know where to begin. I will leave aside the color commentary. I will leave aside the internal issues with Dutch book arguments for conditionalization. I will not pursue the fascinating, even revealing idea that something which is supposedly a universal requirement of rationality needs such very historically-specific institutions and ideas as money and making book and betting odds for its expression..."

Judea Pearl: (2018): The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (New York: Basic Books: 046509760X): "Belated awakenings of this sort are not uncommon in science. For example, until about four hundred years ago, people were quite happy with their natural ability to manage the uncertainties in daily life...

...from crossing a street to risking a fistfight. Only after gamblers invented intricate games of chance, sometimes carefully designed to trick us into making bad choices, did mathematicians like Blaise Pascal (1654), Pierre de Fermat (1654), and Christiaan Huygens (1657) find it necessary to develop what we today call probability theory. Likewise, only when insurance organizations demanded accurate estimates of life annuity did mathematicians like Edmond Halley (1693) and Abraham de Moivre (1725) begin looking at mortality tables to calculate life expectancies. Similarly, astronomers��� demands for accurate predictions of celestial motion led Jacob Bernoulli, Pierre-Simon Laplace, and Carl Friedrich Gauss to develop a theory of errors to help us extract signals from noise. These methods were all predecessors of today���s statistics...

#shouldread
#probability
#cognition