J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 346

Tim Duy: The Fed Has Enough Room to Combat the Next Crisi...

Tim Duy: The Fed Has Enough Room to Combat the Next Crisis: "The��Fed has more than enough room to replicate the responses to the 1987 stock market crash or the 1997 Asian financial crisis...

...They even met the challenge of the 2015 oil price crash simply by scaling back expected rate hikes in 2016. Given the expectation among market participants that the Fed will continue raising rates over the next year, just pausing on rate hikes would be a powerful stimulus. The likely willingness of central bankers to shift to a dovish stance may help account for the overall benign response on Wall Street so far to emerging threats from a more turbulent external environment. These include not only trade wars but also potential for financial crisis among emerging markets or the euro area. The risk these events pose for the overall economy would be bigger and more worrisome if the Fed felt its hands were tied such that they could not respond to a downturn. This is not the case. Market participants should know that the Fed is in a position to cushion the impact should these risks become a reality...

#shouldread

From Atrios: What A Strange Publication: "I really have a...

From Atrios: What A Strange Publication: "I really have a had time understanding the people who work at the NYT..."

He is noting what Vivian Wang and her editors say this morning:

We are not very good at our jobs.
"Millenials" and "females" are not proper audiences for a "national publication".

Vivian Wang: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: A 28-Year-Old Democratic Giant Slayer: "Before Tuesday���s victory catapulted her to the front of the political conversation, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez seemed to find readier audiences with outlets such as Elite Daily, Mic or Refinery29���websites most often associated with millennial and female audiences���than with national publications..."

#shouldread

Hoisted from teh Archives from Four Years Ago: Matthew Yglesias on Greg Mankiw on Thomas Piketty

Matthew Yglesias: On Greg Mankiw on Thomas Piketty: "Greg Mankiw... the latest entry in a genre of... rebuttals that appear to be written by people who aren't familiar with... Piketty...

...Nobody really worries too much about arbitrary inheritance of freckles because freckles aren't important. But wealth is great! That's why Piketty thinks it's sad that so much of the wealth is in the hands of so few people, and it's why he's frightened by the prospect of a world in which the best way to get wealth is to be lucky in your parentage. So what's the solution?... [Piketty:]

When I talk about the progressive wealth tax, I'm not thinking of increasing the total tax burden.... My point is not to increase taxation of wealth. It's actually to reduce taxation of wealth for most people, but to increase it for those who already have a lot of wealth....

The idea is that it would be a world in which possession of wealth is less skewed, and therefore the typical person is more likely to inherit some.... Piketty's right-wing critics should engage with the fact that imposing a progressive wealth tax and using the proceeds to finance a giant middle class tax cut is hardly a sweeping rejection of capitalism. The question he's putting on the table is whether it's really necessary for a small number of people to live so large for so long and leave so little for the rest of us...

Sports fans: I need help. What are the right-of-center critiques of Piketty besides the excellent one by the very sharp Matt Rognlie that are good enough to be worth recommending, or assigning, or citing?

#shouldread

Not since Henry VIII Tudor Have We Seen the Like!

Disappointment, surprise, bluster, promises he cannot keep, illogic, threats, a promise to destroy the company...

President Donald Trump writes:

(1) Surprised that Harley-Davidson, of all companies, would be the first to wave the White Flag. I fought hard for them and ultimately they will not pay tariffs selling into the E.U., which has hurt us badly on trade, down $151 Billion. Taxes just a Harley excuse-be patient! #MAGA

(2) Early this year Harley-Davidson said they would move much of their plant operations in Kansas City to Thailand. That was long before Tariffs were announced. Hence, they were just using Tariffs/Trade War as an excuse. Shows how unbalanced & unfair trade is, but we will fix it.

(3) When I had Harley-Davidson officials over to the White House, I chided them about tariffs in other countries, like India, being too high. Companies are now coming back to America. Harley must know that they won���t be able to sell back into U.S. without paying a big tax! We are getting other countries to reduce and eliminate tariffs and trade barriers that have been unfairly used for years against our farmers, workers and companies. We are opening up closed markets and expanding our footprint. They must play fair or they will pay tariffs!

(4) A Harley-Davidson should never be built in another country-never! Their employees and customers are already very angry at them. If they move, watch, it will be the beginning of the end-they surrendered, they quit! The Aura will be gone and they will be taxed like never before!

What a difference a year makes!

Catherine Rampell_:

A little more than a year ago, Trump invited executives and union representatives from Harley-Davidson to the White House. There he vowed that the motorcycle manufacturer would flourish under his economic stewardship. ���Thank you, Harley-Davidson, for building things in America,��� he said. ���And I think you���re going to even expand���I know your business is now doing very well and there���s a lot of spirit right now in the country that you weren���t having so much in the last number of months that you have right now...

This is not governance in any form recognizable since the days of Henry VIII Tudor, when a strange combination of technocrats, plutocrats, time-servers, flatterers, and careerists surrounding the mentally-unbalanced monarch with impulse control problems tried to advance their careers and keep things from going off the rails.

Daniel W. Drezner: "Outside of the renegotiated KORUS, which included a symbolic move on autos, no other country has lowered its tariffs or other trade barriers to the United States. They have lowered barriers with each other though (TPP, Canada-EU, Japan-EU)..."

Catherine Rampell: Factory workers aren���t getting what Trump promised: "Harley-Davidson, whose U.S. factories are in Wisconsin, Missouri and Pennsylvania, is hardly the only firm buckling under the weight of Trump���s brilliant trade dealmaking...

...Don���t take it from out-of-touch East Coast elites like me; check out all the coverage from local papers and other news organizations around the heartland, documenting the damage.

In Missouri, the nation���s last remaining major nail producer has lost half its business in the past two weeks, laid off dozens of workers and may be out of business around Labor Day. All thanks to Trump���s steel tariffs, which have sharply raised its input costs.

In Florida, orange growers fear a drop-off in demand due to retaliatory tariffs on OJ shipped to China and the European Union.

In Iowa, soybean, corn and pork producers fret about the hundreds of millions of dollars in sales they stand to lose from retaliatory duties on their exports to China, Mexico and the E.U.

Hoosiers worry about the fate of those same sectors, plus the chemical, transportation equipment and machinery industries that are being targeted for Chinese tariffs. And Indiana automotive-part and orthopedic-joint manufacturers will now face higher input costs thanks to Trump���s steel tariffs.

In Kentucky, bourbon distillers are losing business with distributors, who are frightened off by retaliatory tariffs across many of our trading partners.

Similar stories apply to Wisconsin cheesemakers and MRI manufacturers. And Ohio auto and auto-parts manufacturers, brewers and appliance makers.

It is no coincidence that so many Trump-voting areas will suffer. That���s because of two unfortunate developments. First is our businessman in chief���s baffling lack of sophistication about supply chains. He still does not seem to understand that placing tariffs on intermediate goods such as steel and aluminum will hurt the downstream manufacturers that purchase those materials and that employ an order of magnitude more Trump Country workers than the U.S. steel and aluminum industries do. Second is the much more strategic retaliation by our furious trading partners, which are deliberately targeting industries located in politically sensitive areas. Trump���s approval ratings among Republicans remain strong. But as these tariffs and countertariffs steamroll across Trump Country, supporters may eventually get tired of all this ���winning.���

The question is: When will Congress? It is Congress, after all, that the Constitution actually empowers to ���regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.��� Yet over the past eight decades, the legislative branch has delegated more and more of its trade-regulating authority to the executive branch. This turn of events, which began just a few years after Congress had sparked a worldwide trade war with its disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, at first seemed like a good idea. It looked like the best way to streamline and depoliticize trade negotiations in service of a more liberalized international market ��� which Congress knew benefitted the increasingly hegemonic United States. The problem, of course, is that periodically presidents have abused this power. And none have done so more than Trump, who ludicrously argues that tariffs on Canadian steel and German cars are necessary on national security grounds.

Congress certainly has the ability to claw back some of the trade powers it gave away to the White House. It has, in fact, on occasion. But with rare exceptions, Republican legislators are too fearful of an angry Trump tweet today to prevent the wholly foreseeable economic misfortunes that will befall their own constituents tomorrow.

Voices from the Past: Trump vs. America's Founders: No Longer Fresh at Project Syndicate

No Longer Fresh at Project Syndicate: At the start of the American experiment, Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton and James Madison pulled no punches: admitting that the historical record strongly suggested that a democracy, a republic���indeed, any form of government that gave substantial political voice to those outside an aristocracy of counsellors or advisors to a monarch���was a really bad idea: "It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the... state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.... The [unflattering] portraits... sketched of republican government were too just copies of the originals..."

But, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison went on: "The science of politics, however, like most other sciences, has received great improvement.... Distribution of power into distinct departments... legislative balances and checks... judges holding their offices during good behavior... representation... in the legislature... are means, and powerful means, by which the excellences of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided..." The peculiar thing about this list, however, is that all of these great improvements in the science of politics apply just as well to monarchies as to republics.

Indeed, these institutional innovations have historical roots as actions by, well, monarchs:

The Plantagenet kings of England professionalized the judiciary.
They set forth (not completely willingly) the principal that not the king alone but the king-in-parliament held the power to levy direct taxes.
The professionalization and bureaucratization involved in distributing power applied as much to the Council of the Indies or the Council of Castile of Spanish sixteenth century monarch Filipe II Habsburg as to any republic.

Thus the "great improvement" in the "science of politics, which Alexander Hamilton and James Madison relied on held the potential to make both monarchy or aristocracy and republican government better, not to change the balance between them���a balance that seemed, according to the history Madison knew���to weight heavily against forms that produced "perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy".

From what source, then, did Alexander Hamilton and James Madison derive their confidence that the republican constitution of America that they had put so much effort into creating would, in fact, be a good idea? The arguments they set forth in their contributions to The Federalist Papers revolve around two ideas: "representation" and "faction":

Alexander Hamilton and James Madison placed stress on representation: "Cure... [in] the delegation of the government... to a small number of citizens elected by the rest..." "The public voice", he wrote, when "pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves..." Representatives chosen by and responsible to the electorate will look outward to the people, assessing their interests and drawing on their knowledge and good ideas, but also looking inward to the government and, via deliberation, discussion, and compromise, refine and elevate policy. Thus a republican form of government could gain the advantages of professionalization and expertise, the advantage of working in the public interest, and the advantage in gathering ideas from all of society.

And Alexander Hamilton and James Madison placed stress on how a large republic could avoid faction, which they defined as "some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community". A monarchy or aristocracy, of course, is nothing but a faction: a faction in control, with little pressure on it to work for the public interest or, indeed, to be open to good ideas from outside its circles of concern. Madison saw a republic as starting with a great advantage here: A faction could only rule if it could command a majority. And in a large republic with "a greater variety of parties and interests... less probable that a majority... will have a common motive to invade the rights of other[s]... or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other..."

Of course, when a majority did have a common motive to invade the rights of others and did discover its own strength and was able to act in unison���then we have Jim Crow; then we have the herding of Japanese-Americans into concentration camps; then we have the dispossession of the Cherokee and the Trail of Tears. "John Marshall has made his decision", said President Andrew Jackson, speaking of a judge holding office during good behavior exercising a distinct department of power and serving as a check, "now let him enforce it". If bureaucracy, procedure, representation, and deliberation cannot elevate and transform the passions of a majority faction into policies in the public interest, there is then no "republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government".

A century and a quarter ago the constitutional and semi-constitutional monarchies of Europe faced their crisis of political order which was resolved by the move neither to centralized socialist dictatorship in the interest of a progressive class nor to strongman plebiscitary leadership focusing on the unity of an ethnos but, rather, by a reinvigoration of election, representation, and deliberation in the form of parliamentary democracy. We do not yet face a crisis of the same magnitude. At the moment, our problems seem overwhelmingly to be those Alexander Hamilton and James Madison foresaw when they warned that "enlightened statesmen... able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good... will not always be at the helm". But there is a definite sense in the air that the two processes James Madison saw as the particular advantages of democratic republics���representation with its triple advantages of gathering ideas, working for the public, and refinement through deliberation; and control of faction���have gone awry. They need to be rebuilt if the case for a democratic republic is to remain an overwhelming and obvious one.

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Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads...

Neither Adam Smith���s nor Henry Ford's picture of the economy is relevant for us today. What thumbnail picture is relevant? We do not know, but Bill Janeway thinks harder and more successfully about this question than anybody else I have seen... William H. Janeway: Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, 2nd Edition

Jonathan Gottschall (2012): The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 0547391404) https://play.google.com/?id=Bl43cU5rdVwC

Brian Fennessy: "Gavin Wright keeping the slave-capitalism debate lively: slavery was profitable to slaveholders but it kept the region underdeveloped and claims about its centrality to US Econ growth are exaggerated! #DukeMonumentsSymposium��� https://t.co/un2nRZZ6jv..."

2008-2012 was, apparently, not enough for the Great and Good of Germany to decide to repair the Eurozone and European Union's structural economic flaws: Wolfgang M��nchau: Eurozone downturn and lack of reform presage existential crisis: "A slowdown mixed with a monetary union unwilling to repair itself would be a risk to the global economy...

Paul Krugman attempts to summarize the state-of-play on the slack-and-wages puzzle: Paul Krugman: Opinion | Monopsony, Rigidity, and the Wage Puzzle: "The unemployment rate... suggest[s] an economy pretty much at full employment...

Wall of Shame:

Morgan Gstalter: McConnell: Midterms could be 'a Category 3, 4 or 5' storm for GOP: "'We know the wind is going to be in our face. We don���t know whether it���s going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5'...

Matthew Yglesias: "The highbrow intellectual leaders of the modern conservative movement explicitly conceptualized it as a white nationalist undertaking. Trump is true to this legacy and his intra-movement critics are the innovators...

Eight years of Governor Sam Brownback has seen Kansas lose 8% of its jobs relative to the national average. Now Kansas is Ground Zero for Trump's trade war. Joshua Green: Chinese Sorghum Tariffs Will Hit Hard in Trump-friendly Kansas: "Trump���s Trade War Hits Another Red State: What���s the matter with Kansas? It���ll be hardest hit by new Chinese tariffs...

Will Wilkinson: The DACA and immigration debates are about whether Latinos are ���real Americans���: "Challenging the idea that Latino Americans can be truly American undercuts the very idea of America...

Just when you think the mainstream media could not sink any lower into misogyny and stupidity, it's the Atlantic Monthly!: Scott Lemieux: Are you provoked yet?: "Both James Bennet and Fred Hiatt have been asked to hold David Bradley���s beer...

Ezra Klein: @ezraklein on Twitter: "I don���t know what the [New York] Times should���ve done with Thrush. But I watched the efforts to plant oppo and smear @lkmcgann in the aftermath of her reporting. Anyone who thinks coming forward with these experiences is easy, even now, is wrong. I am beyond proud to be her colleague..."

Yes, this is as bad a violation of academic standards as it looks: Henry Farrell: The public choice of public choice: "Now this... 'financial ties to the Charles Koch Foundation... [but] George Mason University has cited its academic independence.

The Brexiters never had a plan for what they would do if they won the referendum. And they still do not have a plan. I do not see a road other than "transitional" arrangements that keep things as they are without the UK having any voice in Brussels���"transitional" arrangements that will keep getting indefinitely extended: Robert Hutton: Stuck In the Middle: These Are Theresa May's Four Brexit Options: "Her inner Brexit Cabinet has rejected her proposed customs relationship with the European Union...

Gabrielle Coppola: Trump���s TPP Pullout May Have Cost Missouri Its Harley Factory: "Harley-Davidson Inc.���s chief executive officer said he may have kept a plant open in Missouri if the U.S. had stayed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement that President Donald Trump withdrew from last year...

WTF happened to Brendan Nyhan? The braineater has eaten his brain: Josh Marshall: "There are several problems with this logic.: The first is that you are applying jury trial standards to what are political questions. You are also applying statutory standards where they do not exist. As a factual matter the obstruction question is not in doubt...

Some Fairly-Recent Links:

John Fortescue: The Governance of England: "Here He Shewith the Perellis That Mey Come to the Kyng by Ouer Myghtye Subgettes..."

Hans Sluga: Blog

David Strohmaier: The Way of Inquiry

David From et al.: What���s Left of the Right? : Democracy Journal

Karl Marx (1863): ETheories of Surplus-Value: "Ricardo���s Theory of Accumulation and a Critique of it: The Very Nature of Capital Leads to Crises..."

BoingBoing: Scientists accidentally engineer enzyme to eat plastic waste: "Researchers 'accidentally' engineered a natural enzyme found in a Japanese waste recycling plant to eat plastic waste.... the enzyme, Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6, degrades polyethylene terephthalate (PET).... 'We hoped to determine (the enzyme's) structure to aid in protein engineering, but we ended up going a step further and accidentally engineered an enzyme with improved performance at breaking down these plastics...' [said] NREL's lead researcher Gregg Beckham..."

Valentina Pop: The Ultimate D��marche: France Wants to Oust English From the EU: "Prompted by Brexit, French President Emmanuel Macron wants to restore his language, the way it was before Britain joined..."

Cali Bamboo: Bamboo Flooring

Isaiah Berlin (1958): Two Concepts of Liberty

Day 14 Transcript: Holocaust Denial on Trial: Irving v. Penguin Books and Lipstadt

Francis Fukuyama (1989): The End of History?

Note to Self: Last night I dreamed that I had traveled ba...

Note to Self: Last night I dreamed that I had traveled back in time and was having coffee with the young Schumpeter at the Cafe Central in Vienna. I tried to convince him not to be a "Liquidationist"���that the work of structural adjustment is done in the boom as people are pulled into 1/"](https://twitter.com/de1ong/status/101... "Last night I dreamed that I had traveled back in time and was having coffee with the young Schumpeter at the Cafe Central in Vienna. I tried to convince him not to be a "Liquidationist"���that the work of structural adjustment is done in the boom as people are pulled into higher-value activities, not in the depression as people are pushed into zero-value activities. I failed...

#shouldread
#liquidationism
#schumpeter

Trump May Not Be the Least Balanced Person in the Trump Administration: Kevin Hassett Monday Smackdown

This, from CEA Chair Kevin Hassett in 2010 has always seemed to me at if not over the edge of mental illness.

There are many tells. The reliance on a "brilliant review" by a UND law professor and on an Oxford philosopher with no particle physicists even named is one. The raising of "military action" as a response is a second. The plea for following his preferred course of action even though he does not understand the issues because "how can we know that things we do not understand will not kill us?" is a third.

Grandiosity and unmooring from rational inquiry to an extent that, it seemed and seems to me, might well clear the clinical diagnosis bar...

In its entirety:

Kevin Hassett: Atom Smasher Exposes Hole in Earth's Defenses: "The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most ambitious physics experiment ever...

...Buried in deep underground tunnels and covering a loop of about 16.5 miles, it consumes about the same amount of energy as a large city. The LHC will explore the most important unresolved questions in physics. In particular, it could provide evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson, a hypothesized particle that has become known as the God particle. If it is found to exist, it could complete our understanding of the basic laws of the universe.

Accelerators such as the LHC work by bashing energetic beams of particles together, then studying the detritus. The high-energy LHC is like a telescope with an extra-powerful lens. It will allow scientists to see things they have never seen before, because its energy is about seven times greater than that of the most powerful accelerator to date.

That high energy has caused significant controversy. Some have warned that the collider���s energy could induce a catastrophic event. A brilliant review of the risks associated with the experiment by University of North Dakota law professor Eric Johnson has made me think twice about an experiment I have always favored.

There are many things that theoretically could go terribly wrong, some of them quite exotic. The chief threat is that the LHC���s high-energy collisions might create a microscopic black hole that would, perhaps over a few years, swallow the Earth.

Raised Before: As Johnson documents, the issue was raised in the late 1990s when some questioned whether a smaller experiment at the physics laboratory in Brookhaven, New York, might create a black hole���an area of space with such a strong pull of gravity that not even light can escape. That experiment was allowed to proceed because a safety study concluded that the energy levels of the experiment were far too small to cause a hazard.

Unfortunately, subsequent research by physicists at the University of California-Santa Barbara, Stanford University and Brown University showed that it was theoretically possible that much lower energy levels could create black holes. One paper even suggested that something with the energy level of the LHC might generate one black hole per second.

With its initial safety argument under assault, the physics community turned to an alternative. Even if a black hole were created, this new argument went, it would be tiny and would evaporate harmlessly. This was consistent with a theory of physicist Stephen Hawking. The evaporation argument was widely viewed as sound, and the LHC continued on track.

Assurance Evaporates: But later, some top scholars began to publish papers questioning the evaporation hypothesis. The issue is far from decided.

So the physics community retreated to what originally seemed like a terrific point: High-energy cosmic rays constantly bombard Earth and collide with particles in the atmosphere. If those collisions were going to create a black hole, then Earth would already be gone.

It turns out that this argument, too, is a loser.

When a cosmic ray rocketing toward Earth collides with a particle, the result of the collision would most likely be blasted into space. That means a black hole created by such a collision might be well beyond our galaxy before it is large enough to harm anything. In the LHC, by contrast, the result of collisions between two particle beams might stay put and cause significant trouble.

Thus, the safety arguments that have justified turning on the LHC are each a little less decisive than was originally believed. Oxford University���s Toby Ord, a philosopher by training, adds one last concern. It may be that the models that we use to make predictions about the possibility of catastrophe are themselves flawed.

One in 1,000: Adjusting for this possibility, Ord estimates that the odds of the LHC producing a disaster are between one in 1,000 and one in 1 million.

Whatever the likely benefits from this experiment, it is impossible that they would be significant enough to justify accepting a cost that includes a real risk of the Earth���s destruction. If Ord���s numbers are correct, and they may not be, then the LHC is the biggest policy error of all time.

As science progresses, the possibility climbs ever higher that the fondest dreams of scientists might entail risks of planetary destruction���whether it���s the next physics experiment at even-higher energy or a genetic experiment that might unleash the perfect disease. The best science explores things far from our understanding. How can we know that things we do not understand will not kill us?

Worldwide Void: Right now, the world���s governments have no mechanism to coordinate rational thinking about these risks. If the U.S. wanted to stop the LHC experiment, it would have no recourse short of military action.

Early in his term, President George W. Bush appointed a bioethics panel to consider the weighty questions that scientific advances presented. A successor panel named by President Barack Obama has a lamentably narrow focus. It is urgent that a panel be assembled to explore policy in the presence of catastrophic scientific risks.

The alternative is to continue to bet the future of our planet on a process that keeps producing safety assurances that are subsequently refuted...

He tiptoes up to calling for the USAF to bomb both France and Switzerland, hoping to get the scientists in their tunnels before they can destroy the earth:

Atom Smasher Exposes Hole in Earth���s Defenses: The Large Hadron Collider... consumes about the same amount of energy as a large city... could induce a catastrophic event. A brilliant review... by University of North Dakota law professor Eric Johnson.... The LHC���s high-energy collisions might create a microscopic black hole that would, perhaps over a few years, swallow the Earth.... One paper even suggested that something with the energy level of the LHC might generate one black hole per second....

The physics community turned to an alternative... a black hole... would evaporate harmlessly... consistent with a theory of physicist Stephen Hawking.... But later, some top scholars began to publish papers questioning the evaporation hypothesis. The issue is far from decided. So the physics community retreated.... High-energy cosmic rays.... If those collisions were going to create a black hole, then Earth would already be gone. It turns out that this argument, too, is a loser. When a cosmic ray rocketing toward Earth collides with a particle, the result of the collision would most likely be blasted into space. That means a black hole created by such a collision might be well beyond our galaxy before it is large enough to harm anything. In the LHC, by contrast, the result of collisions between two particle beams might stay put and cause significant trouble....

Oxford University���s Toby Ord... Ord estimates that the odds of the LHC producing a disaster are between one in 1,000 and one in 1 million.... The likely benefits from this experiment... [cannot]... justify accepting a cost that includes a real risk of the Earth���s destruction.... As science progresses, the possibility climbs ever higher that the fondest dreams of scientists might entail risks of planetary destruction.... The best science explores things far from our understanding. How can we know that things we do not understand will not kill us?

Right now... [if] the U.S. wanted to stop the LHC experiment, it would have no recourse short of military action...

Business Week should be deeply, deeply ashamed of itself.

I know that the American Enterprise Institute is not shamed by anything. But even an organization that is not shamed by anything should be ashamed of this...

I think Daniel Walden gets this right: the idea that ther...

I think Daniel Walden gets this right: the idea that there is some single "civilization" running Gilgamesh-Hammurabi-Moses-David-Athens-Sparta-Jesus-Rome-Charlemagne-Renaissance-Glorious Revolution-Representative Government-Industrial Revolution-Democracy is a rather peculiar fiction. Better to remember that M. Tullius Cicero thought Britain was not worth the bones of a single Tuscan centurion, for there was not an ounce of silver on the whole island and the Britons were too stupid and uneducated for it to be worthwhile selling them as slaves: Daniel Walden: Dismantling the ���West���: "What is this mysterious entity called ���the West��� anyway?...

...What do they think they mean by ���the West,��� what are they actually signaling by talking about ���the West,��� and why should anyone care about ���the West��� at all (since, spoiler alert, it���s largely a fabrication)?... I don���t pretend to have uncovered some great secret about the far right. Talking to these people mirrors the experience of talking to someone who���s just a bit too interested in German artillery from the First and Second World Wars, though the alt-right���s attempts at dog-whistle Nazi fandom are less like a soft whistle than a fifty-piece military band.�� The more mainstream right, however, despite its frequent disavowal of racism, upholds these very same visions of European superiority and colonial conquest, and, moreover, does so in terms that an attentive reader cannot help but gloss as racial...

#shouldread
#history
#romanhistory
#westerncivilization
#cicero

Brian Fennessy: "Gavin Wright keeping the slave-capitalis...

Brian Fennessy: "Gavin Wright keeping the slave-capitalism debate lively: slavery was profitable to slaveholders but it kept the region underdeveloped and claims about its centrality to US Econ growth are exaggerated! #DukeMonumentsSymposium��� https://t.co/un2nRZZ6jv..."

#shouldread