J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 341

Feminism in the Long 20th Century: An In-Take from "Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the Long 20th Century"

With November 8, 2016, the Long 20th Century comes to an end. It began in 1870, when the combination of the development of the industrial research lab, the screw-propellered iron-hulled steamship, the submarine telegraph network, and America's openness to (European) immigration brought the world out of the age of gunpowder empires and set it on the escalator to prosperous modernity. It ended in 2016, when the U.S. abandoned its role as Kindlebergian hegemon and as the, at least in its own mind, City Upon a Hill.

So it is time to finish my twentieth century history book, which has been hanging fire for two decades now as the 20th Century seemed to refuse to stop���as things kept happening that seemed to be the continuation of 20th Century processes.

Right now I am working on Chapter 2: Themes. I am making a hash of it. This part of it does not say what I want it to say, and I am not sure that what I want to say is what I should say. Advice, anybody?

2.2: The Arrival of Feminism

In 1764 in Britain���s Massachusetts colony Abigail Smith was 20, and had had no formal education at all: girls weren���t worth it. In that year married a man she had known for five years: the up-and-coming 30-year-old lawyer John Adams. Their daughter Nabby was born the following year, in 1765. There followed John Quincy (1767), Suky (1768, who died at the age of 2), Charles (1770, who died at the age of 10), Thomas (1772), with high probability a couple of miscarriages, and then the stillborn Elizabeth (1777). She ran their Boston-Braintree household and property operations while he played his role on the large political-intellectual stage, becoming second president of the United States.

Death and disease were, as was the case in the Agrarian Age, omnipresent. One letter to her husband in 1776 contains: ���our Neighbour Trot whose affliction I most sensibly feel but cannot discribe, striped of two lovely children in one week������, ���Betsy Cranch has been very bad������, ���Becky Peck they do not expect will live out the day������, ���The Mumps��� Isaac is now confined with it������, and ���your Brothers youngest child lies bad with convulsion fitts������[5]

Her letters tell us that she badly wanted to know what was going on in the world outside her household and the Boston-Braintree circle: ���I wish you would ever write me a Letter half as long as I write you; and tell me if you may: Where your Fleet are gone? What sort of Defence Virginia can make against our common Enemy? Whether it is so situated as to make an able Defence? Are not the Gentery Lords and the common people vassals? Are they not like the uncivilized Natives Brittain represents us to be?������ and ���I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for Liberty cannot be Eaquelly Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs������

And Abigail Adams was not happy about the position of women in society:

By the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity? Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness���

Her husband thought this was a great joke:

As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented.

This is rather too coarse a compliment, but you are so saucy, I won't blot it out.

Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight���

Why male supremacy was so firmly established back in the Agrarian Age is something that is not obvious to me. Yes, it was very important that people who wished to survive should they reach old age���especially women who did not want to be burned as witches���to have surviving descendants. The pressure at all levels of society was immense: Queen Anne I Stuart (1665���1714), the last British monarch of the Stuart dynasty,[6] was pregnant eighteen times: eight miscarriages, five stillbirths, George (who lived only minutes), Mary (premature: lived only two hours), Anne Sophia (who lived only nine months), Mary (died of smallpox before she would have turned two), and William (died at 11 of strep throat).

Anne survived all eighteen pregnancies. Many of her fellow-queens were not so lucky. Of the 45 queens and female heirs-apparent of England from the Norman Conquest through Victoria, seven died in childbed: 15.5%, more than one in seven, among the most cosseted and best-nourished women in England. In the horrible run from Isabelle de Valois in 1409 through Anne Hyde in 1671, six of twenty died in childbed. The last to die in childbed was Crown Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales in 1817. Being an Agrarian-Age woman was not for sissies.

Yes, back in the Agrarian Age the biological requirements of obtaining a reasonable chance of having surviving descendants to take care of one in one���s old age meant that the typical woman spent 20 years eating for two: 20 years pregnant and breastfeeding. Yes, eating for two is an enormous energy drain, especially in populations near subsistence. Yes, Agrarian Age populations were near subsistence���my great-grandmother Eleanor Lawton Carter���s maxim was ���have a baby, lose a tooth��� as the child-to-be leached calcium out of the mother to build her or his own bones, and she was an upper class Bostonian born in the mid-1870s. Yes, breastfeeding kept women very close to their children, and impelled a concentration of female labor on activities that made that easy: gardening and other forms of within-and-near-the-dwelling labor, especially textiles.[7] Yes, there were benefits to men as a group from oppressing women���especially if women could be convinced that they deserved it: ���Unto the woman he said, ���I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband; and he shall rule over thee���������[8] But surely even in the Agrarian Age a shift to a society with less male supremacy would have been a positive-sum change: women who are not kept illiterate, barefoot, and pregnant as a matter of course can do more, and we���optimistic���economists have a strong bias toward believing that people in groups will find ways to become, collectively, more productive and then to distribute the fruits of higher productivity in a way that makes such a more productive social order sustainable.[9]

There were signs of erosion in the bio-demographic underpinnings of high male supremacy even before the Long 20th Century began. But it was over 1870-2016 that these underpinnings dissolved utterly. The number of years the typical woman spent eating for two fell from twenty���if she survived her childbed���down to four, as better sanitation, much better nutrition, and more knowledge about disease made many pregnancies less necessary for leaving surviving descendants and as birth control technology made it easier to plan families. The number of babies per potential mother dropped by about two-thirds.

Thus reductions in infant mortality, the advancing average age of marriage, and the increasing costs of child raising together drove a decrease in fertility. And, after exploding in the Industrial Age, rate of population growth in the industrial core slowed drastically. The population explosion turned out to be a relatively short run thing. And so human population growth went from an approximate doubling each generation to a rate approximately consistent with zero long-run population growth in the advanced industrial economies, with the rest of the world now following along behind. I world that had had perhaps 750 million people in 1800, 1.1 billion in 1870, and 7.4 billion in 2016 now appears headed for a stable population of about 9.5 billion come 2050.������The path of within-the-household technological advance worked to the benefit of the typical woman in the Long 205h Century: dishwashers, dryers, vacuum cleaners, improved chemical cleansing products, other electrical and natural gas appliances, and so on, especially clothes-washing machines���all these made the tasks of keeping the household clean, ordered, and functioning much easier. Maintaining a nineteenth century, high-fertility household was a much more than fulltime job. Maintaining a late twentieth century household could become more like a part-time job. And so much female female labor that had been tied to full-time work within the household because of the backward state of household technology became a reserve that could now be used for other purposes.

My great-great grandmother Florence Wyman Richardson was born in 1855 in St. Louis, MO, a privileged scion of what then qualified as St. Louis���s upper class.[10] Unlike Abigail Smith Adams, she received an education���but not a college degree. Unlike Abigail Smith Adams, she was not limited to writing private letters to her husband asking him to please ���Remember the Ladies���. 1882 finds her lobbying for raising the age of consent in Missouri, then 12. 1908 finds her on the executive board of the St. Louis Woman's Trade Union League. 1910 finds her, with her daughter and my great-grandmother Florence (���Fonnie���) Richardson Usher, organizing the St. Louis Women���s Suffrage League. And the system��� responded: the 19th Women���s Suffrage Amendment, which had first been introduced back in 1878, was ratified on August 20, 1920.[11]

In response to the declining time demands of within household work and the expanding set of outside opportunities, female participation in the paid labor force surged. In the United States female levels of formal education are now poised to soon surpass male levels.

The move of women from largely within-the-household, unpaid to largely outside-the-household, paid work catalyzed an increase in women���s material welfare and social status. As Betty Friedan wrote in the early 1960s, women could advance toward something like equal status only if they found ���identity���in work��� for which, usually, our society pays.��� As long as women were confined to separate, domestic, occupations which the market did not reward with cash, it was easy for men to denigrate and minimize their competence and accomplishments. As the labor requirements of running a household fell, the wide separation of men���s from women���s roles became harder to maintain���and with it the belief that biology imposed a different, lower status on the female half of the human race.

Institutions and practices derived under the assumption that the overwhelming bulk of the labor force is male, attached to employment full-time over the long term, and has minimal child care and household-maintenance responsibilities held back progress toward something like full economic equality between men and women. Nothing like full equality has yet been established. Male wages and earnings still appeared higher than female wages and earnings by more than could be easily accounted for by differences in education, training, and degree of labor force attachment. There is still substantial discrimination visible, especially in the form of a ���break in labor force participation��� penalty. Today in Denmark���one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, mothers have a 7%-point lower chance of being employed, work an average of 7% fewer hours conditional on being employed, and receive an average of 7% less in compensation conditional on being employed and on working their hours.

In my intellectual discipline, economics, and in my labor market status group, tenured professors, we are now grappling with one of these institutions and practices: that, in the word of my friend and teacher ex-Harvard President Larry Summers, people deciding whether you are going to receive tenure expect that candidate professors in their 20s and 30s have ���near total commitments to their work��� a large number of hours in the office��� a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency��� a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and��� the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job���.[12] But requiring such total commitment up through one���s 30s does not fit easily or well with female parenthood. The response of universities was to give mothers extra time���extra years to prepare their portfolios for the tenure review. And then gender equality seemed to demand that universities give fathers���especially those who would certify that they had been primary caregivers���extra years on their tenure clocks as well.[13]

The effect of this facially-neutral pro-parent policy? Men whose wives gave birth and so got extra time on their tenure clocks saw their chances of getting academic tenure increase by 20% . Women who gave birth and so got extra time on their tenure clocks saw their chances of getting academic tenure decrease by 20%. The men had spent the extra time writing more articles. The women had spent the extra time eating for two under the heavy biological load of mammalian motherhood.[14]

I see the centrality of the economic and the extraordinary upward leap in prosperity as the principal news that the future will remember from the history of the Long 20th Century. But I am male. If I were female, would I see the demographic transition���the shift of the typical woman���s experience from one of eating for two for twenty years (and of having one chance in seven of dying in childbed) to eating for two for four years���and the rise of feminism as the biggest news?

Quite possibly.

[5] Abigail Smith Adams (1776): Letter to John Adams 31 Mar-5 Apr 1776 https://tinyurl.com/dl20180226a

[6] In the Protestant line. The last Catholic Stuart dynasty claimant was Henry IX Stuart, died 1807.

[7] See Elizabeth Wayland Barber (1994): Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (New York: W.W. Norton: 0393313484) https://books.google.com/books/?isbn=0393313484

[8] Genesis 3:16 (King James Version) http://biblehub.com/kjv/genesis/3.htm

[9] Or do we economists? See Adam Smith (1776): An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell) https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book03/ch02.htm. Smith, at least, grappled hard with the question of why human elites resorted to what he saw as the extremely unproductive system of slavery. His answer was the ���domination��� was something humans enjoyed for its own sake: ���In ancient Italy, how much the cultivation of corn degenerated, how unprofitable it became to the master when it fell under the management of slaves, is remarked by both Pliny and Columella. In the time of Aristotle it had not been much better in ancient Greece. Speaking of the ideal republic described in the laws of Plato, to maintain five thousand idle men (the number of warriors supposed necessary for its defence) together with their women and servants, would require, he says, a territory of boundless extent and fertility, like the plains of Babylon. The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen. The planting of sugar and tobacco can afford the expense of slave-cultivation. The raising of corn, it seems, in the present times, cannot. In the English colonies, of which the principal produce is corn, the far greater part of the work is done by freemen. The late resolution of the Quakers in Pennsylvania to set at liberty all their negro slaves may satisfy us that their number cannot be very great. Had they made any considerable part of their property, such a resolution could never have been agreed to������

[10] Florence Wyman���s father, Edward Wyman, was a graduate of Amherst College and himself an educator. In 1848 he built Wyman���s Hall: a then ���impressive four-story building��� on Market Street opposite the courthouse, where now the Gateway Arch stands. The third and fourth stories of the building housed Wyman���s Classical High School. The first story was for retail. The second story held a concert hall, at which Jenny Lind ���the Swedish Nightingale���, then the most prominent vocalist in the world, performed when she came to St. Louis in 1851.

[11] After the passage of the 19th Women���s Suffrage Amendment, Fonnie turned her energy to Black civil rights as a prominent member of the St. Louis Urban League.

[12] Lawrence Summers (2005): Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce https://www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_2005/nber.php

[13] An example of how at times feminism came into conflict with social democracy: the desire to use women���s ���specialness��� to win regulatory benefits conflicted with the feminist principle that ���special��� was code for ���low status���.

[14] Heather Antecol, Kelly Bedard, and Jenna Stearns (2016): Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits from Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies? https://tinyurl.com/dl20180226b Using a unique data set on the universe of assistant professor hires at top-50 economics departments from 1985-2004, we show that the adoption of gender-neutral tenure clock stopping policies substantially reduced female tenure rates while substantially increasing male tenure rates���

#shouldread
#slouchingtowardsutopia
#TCEH

Live from Steampunkland: Chris Lough**: Nikola Tesla Was ...

Live from Steampunkland: Chris Lough**: Nikola Tesla Was a Great Scientist, But a Greater Nerd: "Today marks the birthday of Nikola Tesla...

...a man so bizarre and scientifically curious that it���s easy to imagine him figuring out a method to cheat death and live to see this year, if only Thomas Edison or his suspected OCD weren���t interfering���. Tesla brought true advancements to the fields of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and talking about death ray urban legends while tipsy at parties. And although his scientific achievements are vital to the way we live today, I don���t think it���s a stretch to say that what we as fans of science fiction truly laud him for is for being a wildly imaginative outsider. Tesla was that person imagining how to build a robot during a boring family dinner. Tesla was that person reading a book in a quiet room just off of the main party. Tesla was that person who then felt obligated to read all of that author���s books.... So here���s to Super Nerd Nikola Tesla. Happy birthday, sir. Mind the pigeons.

Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality: July 11, 2008

EVERY TIME I TRY TO CRAWL OUT, THEY PULL ME BACK IN!: In short, I trot over to the J-School TV studio as part of the sober, sensible, bipartisan consensus, intending to carry water for Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson. And what do I find also on BBC/Newsnight when I get there? I FIND THAT I AM ON WITH GROVER-FRACKING-NORQUIST!! I FIND THAT I AM ON WITH GROVER-FRACKING-NORQUIST!!! WHO HAS THREE POINTS HE WANTS TO MAKE: (1) Barack Obama wants to take your money by raising your taxes and pay it to the Communist Chinese. (2) Oil prices are high today and the economy is in a near recession because of Nancy Pelosi: before Nancy Pelosi became speaker economic growth was fine--and she is responsible for high oil prices too. (3) Economic growth is stalling because congress has not extended the Bush tax cuts. Congress needs to extend the Bush tax cuts, and if it does then that will fix the economy, and if it doesn't then the economy cannot recover. I am not paid enough to deal with this lying bullshit. I am not paid enough to deal with Grover Norquist and his willful stream of defecation into the global information pool...

EconomistMom asks "Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?": Fiscal honesty doesn���t seem to pay,��not with the press at least.�� We���ll have to see how it goes over with the voters. The reason for this, of course, is that neither Mike Allen nor Nedda Pickler believe that they have an obligation to inform their readers. And both Mike Allen and Nedda Pickler believe that their lives will be more unpleasant if they anger John McCain's political staff. Mike Allen's current and former boss John Harris described the process.... John Harris, May 6, 2001: "Bush Catches a Washington Break.... [Bush] has done things with relative impunity that would have been huge uproars if they had occurred under Clinton.... There is one big reason for Bush's easy ride: There is no well-coordinated corps of aggrieved and methodical people who start each day looking for ways to expose and undermine a new president. There was just such a gang ready for Clinton in 1993.... We give more coverage to stories when someone is shouting.... Democrats... simply aren't as well organized. And they are not shouting as loudly..."

Why We Are a "Nation of Whiners"...: "Republicans had ideological majorities in Congress from 1981 through 2006 (at least). Republicans held the presidency for all except the eight Clinton years. The policies proposed by the executive, enacted by the legislature, and implemented by the courts over the past generation are Republican policies. And, to Phil Gramm, these policies must have worked. Hence the cognitiv dissonance created by the fact that people appear to be dissatisfied--and the "nation of whiners" quote: it's an attempt to make sense of the fact that the policies must have worked and the fact that the policies do not seem to be popular.

The Freddie-Fannie Situation Is Moving Much Faster than I Had Thought It Would..._: "Fair-value matters for private companies because things can happen that might force them to sell their assets now for whatever price they can get. That is not the case for Freddie and Fannie--with their government guarantee. For them the appropriate test is a cash-flow test: are payments coming in in excess of debt amortization payments going out? The answer is yes--so far...

Real Fiscal Responsibility II: Heritage-Brookings presents itself as balanced, but it isn't. Brookings might be able to present itself as balanced, but it shouldn't present its partnerships with Heritage as balanced. Only EPI-Heritage or CBPP-Heritage should be allowed to present themselves as balanced. And this is, in fact, the reason that Henry Aaron, Bob Greenstein, and Bob Solow got worked up about TBOFF: it's that the structure guaranteed a somewhat counterproductive document. Yet somehow this getting-worked-up surprises EconomistMom...

#shouldread

Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality: July 10, 2008

Department of "Huh?" General Motors Bailout Edition: Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Why oh why do we watch the New York Times in a death spiral? Why does it publish Roger Lowenstein telling us that: "Extravagant Pensions Are Killing General Motors.... G.M. acknowledged in its most recent annual report that from 1993 to 2007 it... has been sending far more money to its retirees than to its owners..." When GM offered the UAW more lavish benefits, it did so in order to induce the UAW to accept less generous wages. The money that GM paid in the 1990s and 2000s to fund pension and retiree health benefits was offset by wages that GM did not have to pay in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Lowenstein appears to want to live in a world in which GM (a) gets a break on its wage costs in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; and can do so (b) without having to pay any money to fund pensions in the 1990s and 2000s. I don't want to live in Roger Lowenstein's world.

Washington Post Death Spiral Watch: Words fail me: "Gerson: The Immorality of Food Stamps". Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

The Transparent Society: Distributed global surveillance: "Spotted Brad DeLong wearing a "Jedi Masters for Barack Obama" t-shirt..."

IMHO, betting that "even the Tory Party can spot a wrong ...

IMHO, betting that "even the Tory Party can spot a wrong 'un" seems a lot like drawing to an inside straight: Dan Davies: "The hard brexit types have been bounced into deal which has taught them that they're not as clever as they thought they were. Now they'll react to that with a leadership challenge which will teach them that they're not as popular as they thought they were. It's like education in the Montessori system-each little independence of discovery builds on the next..."

@Atrios: "Is there any kind of 'hard brexit' manifesto or whatever that makes any sense? something which could actually be implemented aside from 'no deal'?"

@dsquareddigest: "Of course not. Any more than Civil War reenactment societies have procurement and logistics corps."

@daveespley: "Isn't there a danger, though, that all they need to do is get a Brexiteer (Gove?) into the final run off, and the blue-rinse/Col Blimps in the country will ensure they win? Surely there are enough hard Brexiteers amongst MPs to make that happen?"

@dsquareddigest: "I strongly suspect that even the Tory Party can spot a wrong 'un when they see one."

@daveespley: "Hope you're right, but not so sure. Nightmare scenario is PM Gove leading a "just walk away" Brexit...

#shouldread

Anne Applebaum: Brexit is reaching its grim moment of tru...

Anne Applebaum: Brexit is reaching its grim moment of truth���and the Brexiteers know it: "David Davis... and Boris Johnson.... At no point... have they or any of their Brexiteer colleagues offered what might be described as a viable alternative plan. That is because there isn���t one...

...They cannot come up with something that, on the one hand, avoids any jurisdiction of European courts of any kind; avoids any payments into a European budget; avoids all membership in a European customs union and allows Britain to do trade deals with other countries; while, at the same time, keeps supply chains running smoothly; keeps the Irish border open; preserves tariff-free trade with Europe; and imposes no costs on anybody���and all of this by next October in order to leave the following March. It just cannot be done. The only deal they can genuinely offer... is the no-deal deal.... Britain crashes out of all of its trading and customs arrangements with Europe and, without the bureaucracy to cope, has, for some period of time, a great deal of trouble importing and exporting anything to Europe at all. Because this would cause major economic disruption, none of the Brexiteers wants to put his or her name on it. And so they leak to the newspapers, complain about the prime minister���and, now, resign...

#shouldread

Marcy Wheeler: "For those many people asking me about Cha...

Marcy Wheeler: "For those many people asking me about Chait's piece, I still prefer my own series about what Mueller is looking at, which has the advantage of incorporating actually known facts..."

Marcy Wheeler: The Mueller Questions Map Out Cultivation, a Quid Pro Quo, and a Cover-Up: "I wasn���t going to do this originally, but upon learning that the Mueller questions, as NYT has presented them, don���t maintain the sixteen subjects or even the 49 questions that Jay Sekulow drew up from those 16 areas of interest, and especially after WaPo continues to claim that Mueller is only investigating 'whether Trump obstructed justice and sought to thwart a criminal probe into Russia���s interference in the 2016 presidential election', I am going to do my own version of the questions, as released by the NYT. I���m not pretending that this better represents what Mueller has communicated to Sekulow, nor am I suggesting NYT���s version isn���t valid. But the questions provide an opportunity to lay out a cultivation, quid pro quo, and cover-up structure I���ve been using to frame the investigation in my own mind..." https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/02/the-mueller-questions-map-out-cultivation-a-quid-pro-quo-and-a-cover-up-part-one-cultivation/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/02/the-quid-pro-quo-a-putin-meeting-and-election-assistance-in-exchange-for-sanctions-relief/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/03/the-quo-policy-and-real-estate-payoffs-part-three/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/04/the-quest-trump-learns-of-the-investigation-part-four/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/07/the-sekulow-questions-part-five-attempting-a-cover-up-by-firing-comey/

#shouldread

J. Bradford DeLong (2008): Trade and Distribution: A Multisector Stolper-Samuelson Finger Exercise

An argument that I think is true���and important���but that I have never been able to get anybody else to pay attention to. Maybe I have just made an algebra mistake, and people are silent because they would feel embarrassed if they pointed that out. But I do not think so:

J. Bradford DeLong (2008): Trade and Distribution: A Multisector Stolper-Samuelson Finger Exercise: One of the basic building blocks of the political economy of international trade is the Stolper-Samuelson result: the shift from no trade to free trade is good for the owners of the abundant factor of production, but bad for the owners of the scarce factor of production. This accounts for why support for free trade tends to be stronger in democratic than in authoritarian regimes. The scarce factor of production tends to be, well, scarce. Hence not many potential voters own a lot of it. Hence the political support for trade protection in any system of government that gives weight to broad, as opposed to strong, preferences will tend to produce trade liberalization.

In the United States, and to some degree in western Europe, things are widely thought to be different���or so the argument goes, The relatively abundant factors of production are things like capital, organization, and technology, which have concentrated ownership. The scarce factor of production is labor. Hence free trade tends to be politically unpopular because it is not in the interest of the majority of potential voters.

This argument of an inconsistency between free trade and the well-being of the majority of potential voters rests substantially on the two-factor example of the Stolper-Samuelson result. It does not fare too well when we generalize to a situation in which there are a number of different factors���even if the ownership of the abundant factors of production is very concentrated indeed....

For �� very close to one, the critical ��* is also close to one. Trade among countries with small differences in relative proportions of the trade-relevant factors of production is good only for households that hold a greater than proportionate share of the initially abundant factor... households for which �� > 1. But as �� moves away from 1 things change. Efficiency and productivity gains grow faster than do the income redistributions from changing factor prices. Even households where the share of ownership of the initially-abundant factor is significantly less than proportionate can benefit. In the limit as N becomes large, the condition on �� for free trade to benefit the household becomes: ��* > ln(��)/(�����1)... Read MOAR

#delongpapers
#politicaleconomy
#globalization
#free trade

Hoisted/Smackdown: FLASH: Clive Crook and Jack Shafer Upset Because People Informing People Are Claiming to Be Journalists

I was performing one of my standard rants last week at lunch: about how���with very honorable but notably rare exceptions���you should view everything you see on a video screen or read in any medium from somebody paid to be a "journalist" through a hermeneutics of grave suspicion: Assume, unless and until demonstrated otherwise, that they are working for, in this order: (1) their sources, (2) their editors, (3) their advertisers, and (4) for you not at all���they simply are not interested in being a trustworthy information intermediary informing you about the world.

I got some pushback. So it is time to hoist this again from 2005. In one short week, pieces crossed my desk from both Jack Shafer and Clive Crook. Both made it very clear that, in their minds, informing people about the world is positively unprofessional for a journalist (that is the point of Shafer's attack on Klein and Yglesias) or simply not a relevant consideration (that is the point of Crook's relative exaltation of Cramer and dissing of Stewart):

FLASH: Monday Smackdown Clive Crook and Jack Shafer Upset Because People Informing People Are Claiming to Be Journalists: Hoisted from 2015: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/02/flash-clive-crook-and-jack-shafer-upset-because-john-stewart-and-ezra-klein-pretty-sure-earth-is-not-flat.html "Two things that crossed my desk last week that offend the shape of reality itself, and really do deserve to be smacked down.

The first was from Jack Shafer:

Jack Shafer: All the President���s Explainers: "What bothers me... Klein and Yglesias... are less interested in interviewing Obama than they are in explaining his policies. Again and again, they serve him softball���no, make that Nerf ball���questions and then insert infographics and footnotes that help advance White House positions.... [It] end[s] up looking and sounding like extended commercials for the Obama-in-2016 campaign. I���ve seen subtler Scientology recruitment films....

If you���re going to be partisan about your journalism, if you���re going to give the president an easy ride, you���ve got to be clean about it! You can���t pretend... that all you���re doing is making the news ���vegetables��� more palatable by roasting them to ���perfection with a drizzle of olive oil and hint of sea salt.��� Klein and Yglesias are like two Roman curia cardinals who want us to believe their exclusive interview with the pope is on the level.... Are there no upsides to interviews with the president, even toadying or hagiographic ones? I suppose durable White House contacts can be made by landing one, but will these contacts be useful in chasing real news? Not likely...

What Shafer has to say is that:

All interviews of the president are bad.
Klein's and Yglesias's interview is worse than most.
It is worse because they actually explain what the president's policies are, what problems they are in response to, and why the president thinks they will work.
By claiming that the president's policies have some correspondence to reality���are along some dimensions real responses to real problems that have a real chance of making the world a better place���they become partisan advocates.
How dare people say that the president's policies make sense! How unethical! How much like "a Scientology recruitment video"!
Do you see what he did there? Do you see how Shafer thinks that actually trying to inform readers���in this case, about the logic behind policies���is a bad thing to do, and not covering "real news" that journalists ought to cover?

Everyone has a view of the world. If a journalist's view of the world is such that it thinks that one politician's policies are pretty good ones, then naturally explaining what that politician's policies are���conveying what the journalist believes to be information to the readers���will look to Jeff Shafer like "extended commercials"... and the more information is conveyed, the worse it will look to Shafer.

But, says Shafer, this is unethical. No, Shafer: it is only unethical if journalists tune their views of the world and what they report to please politicians, not if they tell what they think is the truth about where policies do and do not match up to reality. Shafer's opinions-of-shape-of-earth-differ view from nowhere is the most tuned-to-politicians world view possible, and thus the least ethical. There is a reason that the Slate he helped build has such a bad reputation.

Following this across my screen immediately was Clive Crook:

Clive Crook: Without 'The Daily Show,' I Have No Reason to Live: "It's good to mock politicians...

...But somewhere along the line 'The Daily Show' cast itself, or allowed itself to be recast... as a competing supplier. Stewart... became another anchorman, smarter and funnier than the rest.... The show began to take itself seriously.... Stewart... attacked Jim Cramer, the hysterical loud-mouth stock-tipper, saying he lacked journalistic integrity. Cramer turns the dull world of investing into entertainment; Stewart turns the dull world of politics into entertainment. You see the difference...

You see what he did there?

Jim Cramer turns the world of investment into entertainment���but if you listen to him, join the day-traders, and invest on what he tells you, you find that you lose all your money fairly quickly.

John Stewart turns the world of politics into entertainment���but if you listen you find that you learn true stuff about the world.

For Clive Crook, the fact that Stewart informs and Cramer misinforms is literally so far from his mind that it is not on his radar screen at all.

So why does Clive Crook literally not care about the fact that John Stewart tries hard to say things that are both funny and accurate, while Jim Cramer, as best as I can judge, takes no effort to mark his beliefs to market but rather aims at keeping his viewers engaged by saying whatever will scare the piss out of them?

No. I do not understand how this reflex "opinions of shape of earth differ" journamalism acquired such a hold on Clive Crook's and Jack Shafer's minds that it is not only all they can think of to do, but all that they think anyone should ever do.

Can anybody help me here?

Seth Godin: Marketing Sauerkraut: "The story goes that Ja...

Seth Godin: Marketing Sauerkraut: "The story goes that James Cook brought fermented german cabbage with him on a long voyage, an innovative way to combat scurvy...

...He knew that getting his sailors to eat this strange and stinky food was going to be difficult, particularly since scurvy is a long-term problem, not something you want to try to solve after you get it. His answer was based on recognizing the power of status roles and is widely applicable: For the first two weeks of the journey, only the captain and the officers were allowed to eat sauerkraut. Demand creation through status roles has a long history, apparently...

#shouldread