J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 349

(Early) Monday (Self?) Smackdown: Baiae and LA as Causes of Republican Downfall? Seriously?

The scary thing is that I do not know whether Tom Holland:

did not notice that Niall Ferguson was misinterpreting his work...
does not care that Niall Ferguson was misinterpreting his work on the grounds that "all publicity is good publicity", or whether...
I am misinterpreting Tom Holland's work, and Holland really does agree with Ferguson���that it was the orgies of Baiae rather than, in Lucan's phrase, because "Caesar could brook no superior and Pompey could brook no rival...", and, as Plutarch put it, the right-wing decision to break the norms by which political clashes "though neither trifling nor raised for trifling objects, were settled by mutual concessions, the nobles yielding from fear of the multitude, and the people out of respect for the senate..."

A Twitter thread:

@holland_tom: This is probably the article on #Trump I have most enjoyed reading. Firm views, robustly stated. Excellent stuff. https://twitter.com/holland_tom/status/919548240042905600

@delong: ???? Do you see the origins of Trump in the luxury of Los Angeles, or the fall of Rome in the orgies of Baiae? If so, why, and how? ????

@holland_tom: @delong I think that the Roman republic provides a mirror into which the American republic cannot help but look.

@delong: The fall of the Roman Republic a mirror, yes. And I would replace "cannot help but look" with "ought to look".

But:

The focus on the orgies of Baiae? And the analogy to LA parties today? That strikes me as telling us much more about Niall Ferguson than about either the rise of Augustus or the election of Trump.

When I look at the U.S. today in the Roman mirror, I think of the slow breakdown of institutional norms:

the repeated consulships of Gaius Marius under the military pressure of the Kimbri and Teutones,
the revocation of the command of Sulla,
Sulla's march on Rome & proscriptions,
Pompey's consulship at 35,
Cicero's execution of Roman citizens without trial under cover of the S.C.U.,
Bibulus's attempt to block Caesar by declaring that all days were dies nefasti,
Caesar's silencing him and legislating nonetheless.

That was the powder.

And then the match was lit by the fact that, in Lucan's phrase: "Caesar could brook no superior and Pompey could brook no rival..."

But the story of the repeated destruction of institutional norms that maintain the system for the sake of short-term partisan advantage is not the kind of thing Ferguson is interested in seeing in the mirror, is it?

And we see pure howlers���like the claim that nobody quite noticed that Augustus was turning himself into an emperor���that defy comprehension.

And the final opposition of togas to jackboots strikes me very oddly, for I still think the best single book on Augustus is still Ronald Syme's study of Augustus-as-Mussolini...

& apropos Polybius XXXI.25.: "Cato... said once in a public speech that 'it was the surest sign of deterioration in the republic when pretty boys fetch more than fields, and jars of caviar more than ploughmen'. "Caviar" cannot be right, can it? Is Paton translating "garum" as "caviar" here, or is it something else?

Okay, back from Twitter...

Maybe Holland does agree with Ferguson. There are those odd passages about Lucius Licinius Lucullus in Holland's Rubicon...

I have always seen Lucullus as one of those norm-breakers: as one of those who broke the pattern by which political clashes were "settled by mutual concessions, the nobles yielding from fear of the multitude, and the people out of respect for the senate..." Lucullus, after all, weaponized misogyny by divorcing his wife Claudia Luculli, accusing her of incest with her brother Clodius Pulcher in order to damage his standing���an accusation that Cicero then gleefully picked up and deployed against Claudia Luculli's older sister Clodia Metelli for the crime of being too uppity a woman.

And Lucullus was the only one of his subordinate officers to join Lucius Cornelius Sulla in what was the first military coup in the history of the Roman Republic.

Norm breaker...

But Holland seems to see Lucullus as a potential upholder of the moderate republic who then defaulted on his historical task:

Lucius Lucullus was the most able and impressive of all the great noblemen who had attached their stars to the dictator [Sulla] and his settlement.... Lucullus had inherited the blood feud, and first made a name for himself by taking to court the man who had convicted his father. Such implacability was to prove an enduring feature of his character. It could translate all too easily into stiffness, for Lucullus was not blessed with the common touch, and rather than attempt to buy popularity, he was grimly content to be regarded as aloof and stingy. But he was also a humane and highly cultivated man, a philosopher and historian steeped in Greek culture and possessing a genuine concern for the well-being of Rome���s subjects....

Lucullus had every reason to feel peeved. His enemies, not content with having had him dismissed from his command, continued to goad him on his return to Rome. Most vindictively of all, they blocked his triumph.... Catulus and his supporters, who had been relying on Lucullus to take his place as a leader of their cause, were to be disappointed. With humiliation following humiliation, something inside Lucullus appeared to have snapped.... He abandoned the political battlefield to others and surrendered himself instead, with all the ostentation he could muster, to pleasure....

In place of a triumph he instead flaunted his fabulous appetites. Sulla, to celebrate his victories, had feasted the whole of Rome, but Lucullus, with a greater expenditure of gold, positively reveled in private���even solitary���excess. Once, when he dined alone and his steward provided him with a simple meal, he cried out in indignation, ���But Lucullus is feasting Lucullus today!��� The phrase was widely repeated, amid much shaking of heads, for nothing was more scandalous to the Romans than a reputation for enjoying haute cuisine. Celebrity chefs had long been regarded as a particularly pernicious symptom of decadence....

The talents that had once been devoted to the service of the Republic could not have been more spectacularly, or provocatively, squandered. ���Piscinarii,��� Cicero called Lucullus and Hortensius������fish fanciers.��� It was a word coined half in contempt and half in despair. For Cicero... the mania for fishponds... spoke of a sickness in the Republic itself. Rome���s public life was founded on duty. Defeat was no excuse for retiring from the commitments that had made the Republic great. The cardinal virtue for a citizen was to hold one���s ground, even to the point of death, and in politics as in warfare one man���s flight threatened the entire line of battle.... It appalled him to see men he regarded as his natural allies sitting by their fishponds, feeding their bearded mullets by hand, leaving the Republic to twist in the wind...

But... but... but... Plutarch writes: "Gaius Memmius... turned his attack upon Lucullus.... [But] Lucullus strove mightily... and by much entreaty and exertion at last persuaded the people to allow him to celebrate a triumph.... He decorated the circus of Flaminius with the arms of the enemy, which were very numerous, and with the royal engines of war; and this was a great spectacle in itself, and far from contemptible. But in the procession, a few of the mail-clad horsemen and ten of the scythe-bearing chariots moved along, together with sixty of the king's friends and generals. A hundred and ten bronze-beaked ships of war were also carried along, a golden statue of Mithridates himself, six feet in height, a wonderful shield adorned with precious stones, twenty litters of silver vessels, and thirty-two litters of gold beakers, armour, and money. All this was carried by men. Then there were eight mules which bore golden couches, fifty-six bearing ingots of silver, and a hundred and seven more bearing something less than two million seven hundred thousand pieces of silver coin.g There were also tablets with records of the sums of money already paid by Lucius to Pompey for the war against the pirates, and to the keepers of the public treasury, as well as of the fact that each of his soldiers had received nine hundred and fifty drachmas...

And Plutarch writes: "Lucullus gave a magnificent feast to the city, and to the surrounding villages..."

So where is the eschewing of a triumph? Where is the contrast with Sulla?

And Sulla also really liked to party. Personal love of luxury and political ineffectiveness go together in the rhetoric of Cato the Elder, but not in general in reality. Sulla's love of partying does not seem to have made him less cruel or less effective.

From Steven Saylor Roman Blood: Sulla throws a party:

Tables piled high with delicacies���olives slitted and stuffed with fish eggs, bowls of semolina flecked with the first tender asparagus sprouts of the season, figs and pears suspended in a yellow syrup, the carcasses of tiny fowl. The mingled smells rose on the warm air. My stomach growled. Most of the guests were men; the few women among them stood out on account of their obvious voluptuousness���not wives or lovers, but courtesans. The younger men were uniformly slender and good-looking; the older men had that indolent, well-groomed look of the very rich at play....

I recognized at once the famous female impersonator Metrobius. I had seen him a few times before, never in public and never performing, only in glimpses on the street and once at the house of Hortensius when the great lawyer had deigned to let me past his door. Sulla had taken a fancy to Metrobius long ago in their youth, when Sulla was a poor nobody and Metrobius was (so they say) a beautiful and bewitching entertainer. Despite the ravages of time and all the vagaries of Fortune, Sulla had never abandoned him. Indeed, after five marriages, dozens of love affairs, and countless liaisons, it was Sulla���s relationship with Metrobius that had endured longer than any other. If Metrobius had once been slender and beautiful, I suppose at one time he must have been a fine singer, too. He was wise now to restrict his performances to private affairs among those who loved him, and to limit his repertoire to comic effects and parodies.... He pretended to take every word with utmost seriousness, which only enhanced the comic effect. He must have already begun changing the lyrics before we chanced on the scene, because the young poet and aspiring sycophant who had ostensibly authored the paean was suffering a visible agony of embarrassment:

Who recalls the days when Sulla was a lad,

Homeless and shoeless with not a coin to be had?

And how did he pull himself up from this hole?

How did he rise to his fate, to his role?

Through a hole! Through a hole!

Through the gaping cavern of well-worn size

That yawned between Nicopolis���s thighs!

The audience howled... Sulla shook his head disdainfully and pretended to glower.... The rewritten poet blanched fish-belly white.... With each succeeding verse the song grew increasingly ribald and the crowd laughed more and more freely....

Down in Chrysogonus���s banquet hall, surrounded by spoils of the Social War, the civil war, and the proscriptions, Metrobius stood with his head held high and his hands clasped, drawing a deep breath. His song was nearing its end, having reviewed in witheringly satirical detail the highlights of its subject���s career. Even the humiliated poet, having emptied his belly of whatever ailed him and slunk back to his couch, had finally joined in the raucous laughter. Tiro turned toward me, shaking his head. ���I don���t understand these people at all,��� he whispered. ���What sort of party is this?��� I had been wondering the same thing myself:

I think the rumors may be true. I think our esteemed Dictator and Savior of the Republic may be contemplating his imminent retirement. That will mean solemn occasions and ceremonies, hymns of praise, retrospective orations, the official publication of his Memoirs. All very stiff and formal, respectable, Roman. But here among his own, Sulla would rather drink and make a joke of it. What a strange man he is! But wait, the song isn���t over...

From _Rubicon?:

Lucius Lucullus was the most able and impressive of all the great noblemen who had attached their stars to the dictator [Sulla] and his settlement.... Lucullus had inherited the blood feud, and first made a name for himself by taking to court the man who had convicted his father. Such implacability was to prove an enduring feature of his character. It could translate all too easily into stiffness, for Lucullus was not blessed with the common touch, and rather than attempt to buy popularity, he was grimly content to be regarded as aloof and stingy. But he was also a humane and highly cultivated man, a philosopher and historian steeped in Greek culture and possessing a genuine concern for the well-being of Rome���s subjects. Inveterate in his hatreds, he was also passionate in his loyalties and beliefs. He was particularly devoted to Sulla and his memory. It was almost certainly Lucullus who had been the one officer prepared to accompany Sulla on his first march on Rome...

Lucullus still had to be confirmed in his command. Even with the backing of both Catulus and the Claudii, he found that a majority of senators remained against him. Desperate, he realized that there was no alternative but to put out the feelers to the Senate���s arch fixer, Publius Cethegus. Too proud to do so directly, Lucullus opted for the lesser evil of seducing Cethegus���s mistress and persuading her to bring her lover on board. The ploy worked: Cethegus began to spin and strong-arm in Lucullus���s favor. His bloc of tame senators was brought into play and the deadlock was broken. Lucullus was finally given his command...

While Pompey lorded it over the east the man he had replaced indulged himself with the most flamboyant sulk in history. Lucullus had every reason to feel peeved. His enemies, not content with having had him dismissed from his command, continued to goad him on his return to Rome. Most vindictively of all, they blocked his triumph....

Catulus and his supporters, who had been relying on Lucullus to take his place as a leader of their cause, were to be disappointed. With humiliation following humiliation, something inside Lucullus appeared to have snapped.... He abandoned the political battlefield to others and surrendered himself instead, with all the ostentation he could muster, to pleasure.... On a ridge beyond the city walls he built a park on a scale never before witnessed in Rome, a riot of follies, fountains, and exotic plants, many of them brought back from his sojourn in the East, including a souvenir from Pontus: the most enduring of all his legacies to his homeland, the cherry tree. At Tusculum his summer villa was extended until it spread for miles.

Most spectacular of all, along the Bay of Naples, where Lucullus had no fewer than three villas, he built gilded terraces on piers, fantastical palaces shimmering above the sea.... His extravagances were deliberately raised to be offensive to every ideal of the Republic. Once, he had lived by the virtues of his class. Now, retiring from public life, he trampled on them. It was as though, embittered by the loss of first power and then honor, Lucullus had turned his contempt upon the Republic itself.

In place of a triumph he instead flaunted his fabulous appetites. Sulla, to celebrate his victories, had feasted the whole of Rome, but Lucullus, with a greater expenditure of gold, positively reveled in private���and even solitary���excess. Once, when he dined alone and his steward provided him with a simple meal, he cried out in indignation, ���But Lucullus is feasting Lucullus today!��� The phrase was widely repeated, amid much shaking of heads, for nothing was more scandalous to the Romans than a reputation for enjoying haute cuisine. Celebrity chefs had long been regarded as a particularly pernicious symptom of decadence....

The talents that had once been devoted to the service of the Republic could not have been more spectacularly, or provocatively, squandered. ���Piscinarii,��� Cicero called Lucullus and Hortensius������fish fanciers.��� It was a word coined half in contempt and half in despair. For Cicero... the mania for fishponds.. spoke of a sickness in the Republic itself. Rome���s public life was founded on duty. Defeat was no excuse for retiring from the commitments that had made the Republic great. The cardinal virtue for a citizen was to hold one���s ground, even to the point of death, and in politics as in warfare one man���s flight threatened the entire line of battle.... It appalled him to see men he regarded as his natural allies sitting by their fishponds, feeding their bearded mullets by hand, leaving the Republic to twist in the wind.

But for Hortensius, as for Lucullus, the consciousness of having been bested, of holding only second place, was a burning agony.... The ancient Roman yearning for glory turned pathological. Lucullus, splitting mountains for the benefit of his fish, and Hortensius, serving peacocks for the first time at a banquet, were both still engaged in the old, familiar competition to be the best. But it was no longer the desire for honor that possessed them. Instead it was something very like self-disgust....

No wonder his contemporaries were appalled and perplexed. Not properly understanding his condition, they explained it as madness. Ennui was an affliction unknown to the Republic. Not so to later generations. Seneca, writing in the reign of Nero, at a time when the ideals of the Republic had long since atrophied, when to be the best was to risk immediate execution, when all that was left to the nobility was to keep their heads down and tend to their pleasures, could distinguish the symptoms very well. ���They began to seek dishes,��� he wrote of men such as Lucullus and Hortensius, ���not to remove but to stimulate the appetite.���7 The fish fanciers, sitting by their ponds and gazing into their depths, were tracing shadows darker than they understood...

It was Lucullus, embittered and determined on the ruin of his in-laws, who had first made the rumors of incest public. On his return from the east he had openly accused his wife of sleeping with her brother and divorced her. Clodius���s eldest and dearest sister, who had let him into her bed when he had been a small boy, nervous of nighttime fears, inevitably found her own name blackened by such a charge as well. In Rome censoriousness was the mirror image of a drooling appetite for lurid fantasy. Just as it endlessly thrilled Caesar���s contemporaries to think of him as the bed partner of the king of Bithynia, so the pleasure that Clodius���s enemies took in the accusations of incest against him never staled. No smoke without fire���and there must have been something unusual about Clodius���s relations with his three sisters to have set tongues wagging.

The charges of incest against Clodia... marked her out as a player in the political game. Misogyny alone, however, savage and unrelenting though it was, does not entirely explain the vehemence of the abuse that society hostesses such as Clodia provoked. Women had no choice but to exert their influence behind the scenes, by stealth, teasing, and seducing those they wished to influence, luring them into what moralists were quick to denounce as a feminine world of gossip and sensuality.

To the already ferociously nuanced world of male ambition, this added a perilous new complication. The qualities required to take advantage of it were precisely those that had always been most scorned in the Republic. Cicero, not one of life���s natural party animals, listed them in salacious detail: an aptitude for ���debauchery,��� ���love affairs,��� ���staying up all night to the din of loud music,��� ���sleeping around,��� and ���spending cash to the point of ruin.���11 The final, clinching disgrace, and the ultimate mark of a dangerous reprobate, was to be a good dancer...

Nick Bunker: "Some personal, #JOLTS related news: today w...

Nick Bunker: "Some personal, #JOLTS related news: today was my last day at @equitablegrowth: After a bit over five years, I'm moving on. Incredibly grateful for the opportunity @hboushey and others gave me. The institution will always have a special place in my heart..." https://twitter.com/CardiffGarcia/status/1007717335707381760

Cardiff Garcia:: "Congrats, but what kind of world do we live in where you're not blogging and analyzing research at EG? 'Kool-aid, no sugar. Peanut butter, no jelly. Equitable Growth, no Nick Bunker. Daaamn.' -- Chris Tucker

#shouldread

Duncan Weldon: "The one tweet version https://twitter.com...

Duncan Weldon: "The one tweet version https://twitter.com/DuncanWeldon/status/1007681332137418759: 'Britain had unusually high wages compared to much of Europe (a legacy of more colonial trade) and easy access to coal. High wages and cheap energy made the introduction of labour saving technology profitable in Britain when it wouldn���t have been elsewhere..." https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/media/2162/allen-industrev-global.pdf

#shouldread
#economichistory
#industrialrevolution
#boballen

John Schmitt: "A straightforward example of an employer (...

John Schmitt: "A straightforward example of an employer (@AmericanAir) making work worse. No robots, no AI, no gig involved. Just using employer power to reduce predictability of flight attendants' schedules..." https://t.co/j0qcKJUjMA https://twitter.com/jschmittwdc/status/1007576291166572544

#shouldread

Neoliberal: "'We have to build more housing. We have to b...

Neoliberal: "'We have to build more housing. We have to build more housing. We have to build more housing, and I will be relentless in my pursuit to get the job done.' ������������������������" https://twitter.com/ne0liberal/status/1007855832762109952 "London Breed just made history as San Francisco's mayor-elect..."

#shouldread

Yes: Last Fall the Unprofessional Republican Economists Were Lying About Corporate Taxes, Investment, and Growth. Why Do You Ask?

There were "economists" last fall telling us that the Trumpublican tax cut was going to raise real wages in America substantially and soon: Robert J. Barro, Michael J. Boskin, John Cogan, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Glenn Hubbard, Lawrence B. Lindsey, Harvey S. Rosen, George P. Shultz, John. B. Taylor; Larry Lindsey and Douglas Holtz-Eakin; James Miller, Charlie Calomiris, Jagdish Bhagwati; Kevin Hassett; Greg Mankiw; and the others. The people who last fall were telling us that the Trumpublican tax cut was going to raise wages by boosting growth by a number they decided was 0.4% per year���get us an extra 80 billion dollars of prosperity each year growing over time���all did so by pointing to the investment channel: (a) the tax cut would make investment more profitable, (b) we would then have about 800 billion a year of extra investment, (c) the added production made possible by that investment would be 80 billion a year, (d) and eventually wages would rise. (a) has happened. (b) was supposed to take effect quickly���this year. But (b) has broken down: business investment "should" be jumping from 13% to 17% of total production. It is not. So far it has jumped from 12.4% to 13.1%���one-sixth of the jump we were promised:

This comes as no surprise: Paul Krugman: Tax Cuts and Leprechauns: "The immediate effect of cutting the corporate tax rate... a big fall in taxes collected from corporations...

...Why give up this revenue? The story told by modern advocates of corporate tax cuts, like the Trump CEA and the Tax Foundation, hinges critically on... [how in] a global capital market... investment flows to whichever country offers the highest after-tax rates of return. So cutting the tax rate, according to this story, will bring in lots of capital from abroad. This will drive the rate of return down and wages up.... Is there good reason to believe that the tax cut will do what it promised even in the long run? Specifically, are international capital movements really all that sensitive to tax rates?... No, say [Ludvig Wier, Thomas T��rsl��v, and] Gabriel Zucman.... Corporations... make profits appear in low-tax countries; but there���s very little real production or employment behind those profits.... Tax-haven countries... show... ridiculously high levels of profits relative to wages... because the profits aren���t being earned where they���re being reported.... Ireland....

But if Ireland hasn���t actually been attracting all that much real foreign investment, how do we explain the ���Celtic tiger��� growth rates it had for a number of years? The answer is that a lot of the growth isn���t real: it���s leprechaun economics, in which tax avoidance strategies produce fictitious growth.... It���s much less of a miracle than it seems, with real wages doing fine but nowhere nearly as well as measured productivity.... The supposed rationale for big corporate tax cuts is based on a misinterpretation of the evidence. Multinational corporations move profits���as reported���around based on tax considerations; actual capital, and hence actual economic activity, not so much.

But why aren���t actual capital movements that sensitive to tax rates?... [A] little secret.... Interest rates don���t have much direct effect on business investment. In fact, in general it���s hard to find any effect at all. Monetary policy works through housing and, these days, the exchange rate; if it affects business spending, the effect is indirect, through changes in sales that were caused by housing and the exchange rate. You can see what I���m talking about by looking at investment during the great slump of 1979-82, which was more or less deliberately engineered by the Fed to squeeze inflation down (Figure 6). Interest rates shot up, residential investment plunged, but nonresidential investment more or less kept plugging along:

Why doesn���t business investment respond more to interest rates? Because many though not all business investments are relatively short-lived.... A business considering investing a dollar will compare the marginal product of that dollar���s worth of capital with a cost that includes both the cost of capital and the rate of depreciation.... Cutting the corporate tax rate reduces the effective cost of capital, which should encourage more investment. But given the relatively short lives of business investments, this effect should be fairly small. Tax cutting as a way to encourage investment is fairly ineffective for the same reasons that monetary policy has relatively little direct traction over business spending....

[Is] the case for cutting corporate tax rates is unadulterated nonsense? No, it���s adulterated nonsense. There���s some reason to believe that lower tax rates will, other things equal, have some positive effect on capital formation. But... there is no reason to believe that the kind of tax cut America just enacted will achieve much besides starving the government of revenue.

If any of have revisited this issue and admitted error or deception, I have not seen it

#shouldread

June 15, 2008: Ten Years Ago at Grasping Reality

Why do people do this? Why clickbait: Jack Balkin Is Wrong: Jack Balkin says that the Bush legal revolution has failed. He is wrong: it has just not yet succeeded. A McCain victory in November and another statist Supreme Court appointee, and that's it for the rights of any whom the president classifies as an outlaw. Balkin acknowledges this at the end. Better he had done so at the beginning...

Why do people do this?: Ummm... No!: "Barbara Ehrenreich's Fear of Falling, Blood Rites, and The Hearts of Men are among the finest works of sociology I have every read or ever expect to read. Which is why it is so very hard for me to read things like this���to which the only reaction is "that's simply not true!".... "This Land Is Their Land.... The general rule, which has been in effect since sometime in the 1990s: if a place is truly beautiful, you can't afford to be there..." And the essay has gone totally off the rails. The places she talks about: Sun Valley, Idaho; Drigg dollars for a season; The Hamptons; Cape Cod; Telluride. Yes, Sun Valley, Driggs, Jackson Hole, Key West, The Hamptons, Cape Cod, and Telluride are beautiful. Yes, they are expensive��� as are Vail, Aspen, Back Bay, the Upper East Side, Santa Monica, Pacific Heights, and La Jolla. But it is a truly impoverished person who thinks that those rich yuppie watering holes are the only truly beautiful places in North America. The place I really want to go back to right now is the spine of the Canadian Rockies from the corner of Moose and Squirrel Streets in Banff to Malign Lake outside of Jasper. But Yosemite is always tugging at my heart. What's your favorite truly beautiful place to go that's cheap? The essay continues. But what's the point?...

#hoisted
#tenyearsagoongraspingreality

For the Weekend: Dante Alighieri and Guido da Montefeltro

Dante Alighieri: Inferno 27:

"And now, I pray you, tell me who you are:

do not be harder than I���ve been with you,

that in the world your name may still endure.���

After the flame, in customary fashion,

had roared awhile, it moved its pointed tip

this side and that and then set free this breath....

"While I still had the form of bones and flesh

my mother gave to me, my deeds were not

those of the lion but those of the fox.

"The wiles and secret ways-I knew them all

and so employed their arts that my renown

had reached the very boundaries of earth.

"But when I saw myself come to that part

of life when it is fitting for all men

to lower sails and gather in their ropes,

"What once had been my joy was now dejection;

repenting and confessing, I became

a friar; and-poor me-it would have helped.

"The Prince of the new Pharisees, who then

was waging war so near the Lateran-

and not against the Jews or Saracens....

"To ease the fever of his arrogance.

He asked me to give counsel. I was silent-

his words had seemed to me delirious.

"And then he said: ���Your heart must not mistrust:

I now absolve you in advance-teach me

to batter Penestrino to the ground.

"'You surely know that I possess the power

to lock and unlock Heaven; for the keys

my predecessor did not prize are two.���

"Then his grave arguments compelled me so,

my silence seemed a worse offense than speech,

and I said: ���Since you cleanse me of the sin

"'That I must now fall into, Father, know:

long promises and very brief fulfillments

will bring a victory to your high throne.���

"Then Francis came, as soon as I was dead,

for me; but one of the black cherubim

told him: ���Don���t bear him off; do not cheat me.

"'He must come down among my menials;

the counsel that he gave was fraudulent;

since then, I���ve kept close track, to snatch his scalp;

"'One can���t absolve a man who���s not repented,

and no one can repent and will at once;

the law of contradiction won���t allow it.���

"O miserable me, for how I started

when he took hold of me and said: ���Perhaps

you did not think that I was a logician!���

"He carried me to Minos; and that monster

twisted his tail eight times around his hide

and then, when he had bit it in great anger,

"Announced: ���This one is for the thieving fire���;

for which-and where, you see-I now am lost,

and in this garb I move in bitterness.���

And when, with this, his words were at an end,

the flame departed, sorrowing and writhing

and tossing its sharp horn. We moved beyond...

"Though I have come perhaps a little late,

may it not trouble you to stop and speak

with me; see how I stay-and I am burning!

"If you have fallen into this blind world

but recently, out of the sweet Italian

country from which I carry all my guilt,

"Do tell me if the Romagnoles have peace

or war; I was from there-the hills between

Urbino and the ridge where Tiber springs.���

I still was bent, attentive, over him,

when my guide nudged me lightly at the side

and said: ���You speak; he is Italian.���

And I, who had my answer set already,

without delay began to speak to him:

���O soul that is concealed below in flame,

"Romagna is not now and never was

quite free of war inside its tyrants��� hearts;

but when I left her, none had broken out.

"Ravenna stands as it has stood for years ;

the eagle of Polenta shelters it

and also covers Cervia with his wings.

"The city that already stood long trial

and made a bloody heap out of the French,

now finds itself again beneath green paws.

"Both mastiffs of Verruchio, old and new,

who dealt so badly with Montagna, use

their teeth to bore where they have always gnawed.

"The cities on Lamone and Santerno

are led by the young lion of the white lair;

from summer unto winter, he shifts factions.

"That city with its side bathed by the Savio,

just as it lies between the plain and mountain,

lives somewhere between tyranny and freedom.

"And now, I pray you, tell me who you are:

do not be harder than I���ve been with you,

that in the world your name may still endure.���

After the flame, in customary fashion,

had roared awhile, it moved its pointed tip

this side and that and then set free this breath:

���If I thought my reply were meant for one

who ever could return into the world,

this flame would stir no more; and yet, since none-

"If what I hear is true-ever returned

alive from this abyss, then without fear

of facing infamy, I answer you.

"I was a man of arms, then wore the cord,

believing that, so girt, I made amends;

and surely what I thought would have been true

"Had not the Highest Priest-may he be damned!-

made me fall back into my former sins;

and how and why, I���d have you hear from me.

"While I still had the form of bones and flesh

my mother gave to me, my deeds were not

those of the lion but those of the fox.

"The wiles and secret ways-I knew them all

and so employed their arts that my renown

had reached the very boundaries of earth.

"But when I saw myself come to that part

of life when it is fitting for all men

to lower sails and gather in their ropes,

"What once had been my joy was now dejection;

repenting and confessing, I became

a friar; and-poor me-it would have helped.

"The Prince of the new Pharisees, who then

was waging war so near the Lateran-

and not against the Jews or Saracens,

"For every enemy of his was Christian,

and none of them had gone to conquer Acre

or been a trader in the Sultan���s lands-

"Took no care for the highest office or

the holy orders that were his, or for

my cord, which used to make its wearers leaner.

"But just as Constantine, on Mount Soracte,

to cure his leprosy, sought out Sylvester,

so this one sought me out as his instructor,

"To ease the fever of his arrogance.

He asked me to give counsel. I was silent-

his words had seemed to me delirious.

"And then he said: ���Your heart must not mistrust:

I now absolve you in advance-teach me

to batter Penestrino to the ground.

"'You surely know that I possess the power

to lock and unlock Heaven; for the keys

my predecessor did not prize are two.���

"Then his grave arguments compelled me so,

my silence seemed a worse offense than speech,

and I said: ���Since you cleanse me of the sin

"'That I must now fall into, Father, know:

long promises and very brief fulfillments

will bring a victory to your high throne.���

"Then Francis came, as soon as I was dead,

for me; but one of the black cherubim

told him: ���Don���t bear him off; do not cheat me.

"'He must come down among my menials;

the counsel that he gave was fraudulent;

since then, I���ve kept close track, to snatch his scalp;

"'One can���t absolve a man who���s not repented,

and no one can repent and will at once;

the law of contradiction won���t allow it.���

"O miserable me, for how I started

when he took hold of me and said: ���Perhaps

you did not think that I was a logician!���

"He carried me to Minos; and that monster

twisted his tail eight times around his hide

and then, when he had bit it in great anger,

"Announced: ���This one is for the thieving fire���;

for which-and where, you see-I now am lost,

and in this garb I move in bitterness.���

And when, with this, his words were at an end,

the flame departed, sorrowing and writhing

and tossing its sharp horn. We moved beyond...

#shouldread
#fortheweekend
#weekendreading
#moralresponsibility
#books

The Damnation of the Professional Republican Policy Intellectuals

I have long known that the thoughtful and pulls-no-punches Amitabh Chandra has no tolerance for fuzzy thinking from Do-Gooder Democrats. He is one of those who holds that not even a simulacrum of utopia is open to us here, as we muck about in the Sewer of Romulus here in this Fallen Sublunary Sphere. ���There are always trade-offs���, he says. ���Deal with it���, he says. But here he leans to the other side, and, well, snaps: Amitabh Chandra: "GOP thinktanks https://twitter.com/amitabhchandra2/status/1007261629547982849 are the biggest milksops. From healthcare policy to environmental policy, from national security policy to fiscal policy, they have tacitly endorsed a mountain of anti-market + anti-growth + anti-America policies so as not to not upset their political masters...

...There was a time when I could go to a GOP thinktank and debate Peter Bach or Henry Aaron or Mark Pauly. We agreed on lots of things, and disagreed on many others. Now, it's completely fine to just shout socialism and markets, disparage expertise, and everyone claps. I don't consider myself a Democrat, but the quality of the conversation at CAP or Brookings is orders of magnitude richer, and more sophisticated, than what is happening at GOP thinktanks. And I say this is someone who often disagrees with both of them. You still can debate Henry Aaron or Mark Pauly perfectly pleasantly and productively. (I don't know Peter Bach.) We need to focus on the many intellectually honest folks along the political spectrum and try to ignore the fools. Honestly, my academic discussions haven't changed...

You could never have a fruitful discussion with people from Heritage. They were focused on (1) political effectiveness for their high politicians and (2) pleasing their funders. Nothing else mattered. And so nothing they said could be taken at its face intellectual value. And no evidence you could bring forward would change their minds���or, rather, would change what they said and wrote. Maybe it did change their minds. But how the hell could anyone ever know, since their words were completely determined by triangulating between their political masters and their funders?

I think Cato, AEI, the American Action Forum, and others have now entered the Heritage zone. Yes, they are happy to have your endorsement to make whatever they say as they triangulate between their funders and their political masters. No, they do not want to listen to any evidence. No, they do not care about policy effectiveness���or if they do still at some level care about policy effectiveness, it is the effectiveness of the policies they will be able to work for two decades in the future after sucking up to funders and political masters has gained them enough credibility that somebody will actually listen to them on the substance. And, no, they are not interested in marking their beliefs to market���because knowing and reflecting on how false their promises were would make them sad without any ability to do anything, because for at least 20 more years they will have no room to do anything other than utter the words that best triangulate between the demands of their funders and their political masters.

Anyone at Cato, AEI, that AAF, or any of the others that this does not describe? Damn few.

Case in point: last winter's tax cut bill. Professional Republican economist after Republican economist was falling over himself to get a 0.4% boost to annual economic growth in 2018 and 2019 from higher investment triggered by the tax bill. Do the arithmetic and that means an extra 800 billion dollars a year of investment in America. Six months later are we getting that extra investment? No. Are any of the professional Republican economists worried about why we are not getting that extra investment? No. By how much will the fact that we did not get that extra investment they projected change what they write in the future? Zero.

#shouldread
#publicsphere
#moralreponsibility
#publicfinance
#fiscalpolicy

IIRC, the last Republican President and his administratio...

IIRC, the last Republican President and his administration were guilty of large-scale torture. From that perspective, mere criminal perjury is a relief. Of course, Trump and his administration are also undertaking policies that will soon if they do not now amount to large-scale torture as well: Orin Kerr: "The NY complaint also more or less accuses Trump of criminal perjury... https://twitter.com/OrinKerr/status/1007300059291979777

#noted
#shouldread
#acrossthewidemissouri