J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 350

Is it worse than back in the day when Eduardo Porter was ...

Is it worse than back in the day when Eduardo Porter was writing stories that counterposed you and Donald Luskin as equally authoritative figures equally likely to be right about the economy, or when Mickey Kaus had a career saying you were too shrill, and whether Bush was lying about his tax cuts was irrelevant to the debate in the public sphere? Paul Krugman: "I'm finding it really painful to read the IG report stuff. FBI malpractice, combined with major media malpractice, got us Trump. This was obvious in real time. And many media organizations are still doing it in their reporting today..." https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1007595490198937601

#shouldread
#noted
#acrossthewidemissouri

Dan Nexon wrongly still thinks the media's crafting its h...

Dan Nexon wrongly still thinks the media's crafting its headlines and first paragraphs so that they do not offend the Trumpists is a mistake on the part of the Washington Post, the New York Times, and so forth. It is not a mistake: it is a strategy: Dan Nexon: "The same media that carefully tracks Trump���s constant lying & gaslighting still crafts headlines that repeat his tweets and statements. Discussions of Trump all need to begin from���and be guided by���the proposition that everything he says is false until proven otherwise."

#shouldread
#noted
#acrossthewidemissouri

This would be really funny if it were not so sad: why hav...

This would be really funny if it were not so sad: why have we not had a twenty-fifth amendment remedy yet, again?: Jeet Heer: "I hate to say I told you so..." https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1007631660987437057

#shouldread
#acrossthewidemissouri

Endorse. Super-strongly endorse. This has it right: Eric ...

Endorse. Super-strongly endorse. This has it right: Eric Rauchway: "In 1940 Henry Stimson and Frank Knox joined the Roosevelt administration. Both were Republicans. Neither supported the New Deal; Knox ran for office against it. But both opposed Nazism. I wish #NeverTrumpers invoked them as models, rather than Reagan." https://twitter.com/rauchway/status/1007625991680856064

#shouldread

For the Weekend: Walter Jon Williams: Something About Cabell

Walter Jon Williams: Something About Cabell: "I have lately been revisiting the works of James Branch Cabell. (rhymes, by the way, with ���rabble���)...

...Insofar as Cabell is remembered these days, it���s as a writer of fantasy fiction. ��The best of his fantasies were reprinted in the Sixties as part of Ballantine���s Adult Fantasy Series, which is where I found him when I was a teenager. ��I haven���t reread him till now. He���s part of a different fantasy tradition from what we see today. ��In his heyday, the teens and twenties of the previous century, fantasy could be High Literature, and that���s where he and his ambitions placed himself. ��He���s in the same literary niche as Lord Dunsany, say, or Arthur Machen, or Oscar Wilde, but not in the pulp tradition of Robert E. Howard or Lovecraft���s circle. ��And he��was considered literature (when he wasn���t considered obscene), and was paterfamilias to a Southern literary scene that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.L. Mencken, Ellen Glasgow, Carl van Vechten, and Eleanor Wylie. ��His admirers include Mark Twain, arch-modernist Edmund Wilson, Michael Swanwick, and Neil Gaiman.

He was a Virginian, and presented himself in the tradition of Southern gentleman, and spent a lot of time working out his genealogy, apparently to improve his mother���s reputation within the small circles of the Southern gentry. ��His own reputation in those circles suffered from suspicion of ��homosexual orgies in college and of having bumped off his mother���s lover. ��Both false, apparently, but they gave him a sort of louche public character that he never overcame. Most of his fantasies are part of the 18-volume��Biography of Manuel, and take place in the fictional French province of Poictesme. ��They are droll and ironical, and have subtitles like ���A Comedy of Appearances��� or ���A Comedy of Justice.��� ��(Heinlein���s��Job: A Comedy of Justice takes its subject matter from Cabell, and features Cabell as a character, but I strive to avoid books from Heinlein���s Dreadful Period, and haven���t read it.)

Cabell���s books mock themselves as they go along, and mock the chivalric romance also. ��Cabell can���t quite refrain from making the same point over and over again, which is that humanity is moderately ridiculous, human endeavor is pointless, and that human ambition is delusional (but necessary). (Imagine a modern fantasy writer committed to this point of view���but of course you can���t. ��Perhaps you���d have to be born in something like the ruins of the Confederacy for that to make sense to you.)

On rereading Cabell I was reminded of my impressions when I was a teenager, which was that he loved repeating his thesis a little too much. ��A good reader would catch it the first time; every other reader would catch it on the second go-round; and after that it became just a little tedious. The reason it isn���t��fully tedious is Cabell���s prose style, which is simply wonderful, and which carries the reader right along, often through its sheer beauty. ��Some of his prose is in fact poetry��� he would write a poem (a pretty good one, too), and then take it out of stanzas and put it into paragraphs of prose, and you encounter these little gems and have no choice but to stop and admire them. ��Cabell���s prose was clearly an influence on Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, and Clark Ashton Smith. Ballantine may have done Cabell a disservice by reprinting��only the fantasy. ��Many of Cabell���s novels have contemporary or historical settings, though some were rewritten to fit somewhere in the��Biography of Manuel.

And sometimes they surprise you. ��I recently read for the first time The Rivet in Grandfather���s Neck: A Comedy of Limitations, which is set in 1890s Virginia, in Cabell���s fictional town of Lichfield. (Recall what a ���lich��� is, and you may discover Cabell���s view of the postbellum South.) TRiGN is a social comedy, involving the middle-aged, chivalric, but somewhat mediocre Colonel Musgrave, who marries a young Yankee belle half his age, the daughter of a millionaire who was born poor white trash in Lichfield, but who went to New York to make his fortune. ��The sort of complications ensue that might be anticipated when the subject is a May-October marriage, and the young wife has all the money, and the husband nothing but shabby gentility. ��The story would be tragic in the hands of a writer less committed to drollery, and I won���t give you spoilers. But anyway, young Patricia isn���t in Lichfield very long before she scopes out the situation, particularly that of the black housekeeper, significantly named Virginia, and she gently confronts her husband about the town���s principal secret. The actual scene is couched in elaborately genteel language, so I will deliver it mostly in paraphrase:

SHE: ���Agatha told me about Virginia, and how she was raped by your uncle, and gave birth to a boy who was lynched in Texas.���

HE: ���Surely there are other matters which may be more profitably discussed.���

SHE: ���That colored boy was your own first cousin, and he was killed for doing exactly what his father had done. ��Only they sent the father to the Senate and gave him columns of flubdub and laid him out in state when he died��� and they poured kerosene on the son and burned him alive. ��And I believe Virginia thinks that wasn���t fair.���

HE:???

SHE: ���I think Virginia hates the Musgraves. ��I think she poisoned your dissipated brother with opium and let your sister die when she was nursing her.���

HE: ���This is deplorable nonsense, Patricia. ��Nothing more strikingly attests the folly of freeing the Negro than the unwillingness of the better class of slaves to leave their former owners.���

SHE: !!!

HE: ���You who were reared in the North are strangely unwilling to concede that we of the South are best qualified to deal with the Negro Problem. ��We know the Negro as you cannot ever know him.���

SHE: ���There are no Negroes in Lichfield! ��There are only people of mixed race employed as servants by their cousins!���

HE: ���You really shouldn���t talk about these things. ��It might give people a false idea of you.���

And then, this conversation over, the social comedy goes on. ��But it shows that Cabell didn���t spend his whole life in the South without knowing what was what. ��And perhaps, after all, his neighbors were quite right in thinking he wasn���t entirely respectable...."

#weekendreading
#books
#shouldread

John Holbo (2008): Douthat on Conservatism: "This has to ...

John Holbo (2008): Douthat on Conservatism: "This has to be a complete failure.... Take out the parenthetical bit and you have something that is much closer to a definition of ���liberalism��� than ���conservatism���, at least in the American context...

...I���ll just quote Douthat himself, who obviously agrees with me about this:

his ���revolution or bust��� tendency has defined traditionalist conservatism for some time now, with an alienation from actual-existing American politics coexisting with sweeping visions for what American politicians ought to be doing with themselves instead.... You start by telling yourself that retrenchment ��� whether to the age of Gingrich or Reagan or Robert Taft���is the path to victory, and you end, when victory doesn���t materialize, by embracing defeat as a badge of honor, and pining for either the barricades or the monastery...

Liberals are more resistant to ���Revolution or Bust��� because they tend to be more attached to ���the particular habits, mores and institutions of the United States against those socioeconomic trends that threaten to undermine them.��� I don���t expect Douthat simply to agree to that. But the fact that there is considerable truth to it means that just saying the opposite will never do as a definition of ���conservatism���. Being as generous as I can be: Douthat���s definition, minus the parenthetical, is a statement of something liberals and conservatives have in common, rather than what separates them. What does Douthat���s parenthetical add?... [Either] the false claim that ideologically-driven desire for radical change is more a feature of the American left than the right... [or] that... ���conservative��� must mean 'right-winger with a bad conscience'. As a liberal, I���m half inclined to say my suspicions are confirmed...

#shouldread

The Last Financial Crisis of the Nineteenth Century: Hoisted from the Grasping Reality Archives from Ten Years Ago

The slides from my ���Macroeconomic Situation and Outlook��� talk as it stood ten years ago, in June 2008. The subtitle and the conceit of the talk was that what we were then going through was an eruption into the twenty-first century of the kind of financial crisis that was typical of the pre-Great Depression period.

What did I get right and what did I miss? The main thing I missed was that I misunderstood what Bernanke, Paulson, and Geithner were doing. I thought that they were following the now century and a half-old Bagehot rule from Lombard Street for how to handle a financial crisis:

Lend freely
On collateral that is good in normal tomes
At a penalty rate

Most of the talk is therefore devoted to explaining what the Bagehot Rule is, why it is a good thing, and how it is all likely to work out.

But when Lehman hit the wall in the fall they refused to follow (2) in evaluating its collateral, and so they did not do (1). And they never showed any interest in doing (3). And so here we are...

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0QioimVob1vnDm7_UGy4AjVxA

http://j-bradford-delong.net/2008_html/20080610_delong_situation.html

Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality: June 10-14, 2008

Neither Louis Uchitelle or Tom Hamburger would ever tell me whose bidding they were doing in writing hit pieces on Jason Furman, or why they thought this was the way they should be doing their jobs:

Louis Uchitelle on Jason Furman: The odd thing is that Jason Furman has a very strong and very wide reputation as an honest broker and as a consensus builder, which is exactly the kind of thing that you want in the job--as long as you think that truth is on your side, and thus that you are more likely than not to win honest, substantive, evidence-based debates. It's not right to say that Jason Furman was closely associated with Robert Rubin without also saying that he was closely associated with Joe Stiglitz...

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Tom Hamburger of the Los Angeles Times Edition): "On June 11, 2008, you wrote: "Obama's selection of Jason Furman as economic advisor is criticized: [Jason Furman] was also quoted in a transcript from a CNBC interview in 2006 as suggesting openness to changes in Social Security that might include private accounts and benefit cuts. The approach he described sounded similar in some ways to that proposed at the time by President Bush."... Jason Furman was not a friend, advocate, or supporter of President Bush's Social Security privatization plan back in 2005, but instead one of its most strident and effective opponents...

We Get an Email from Tom Hamburger...: Apropos of the astonishing and false claim in this morning's LA Times that Jason Furman is some sort of a crypto-Bushie with views on Social Security matters "similar" to those Bush proposed in 2005, I write to the reporter involved, Tom Hamburger... He writes back. Mr. Hamburger's bottom line appears to be that his leaving a lot of readers with a false view of Jason Furman's position on Social Security is OK because that was "not the point of this story..."

Greg Anrig on Tom Hamburger on Jason Furman: Apropos of LA Times reporter Tom Hamburger's gross mispresentation of Jason Furman, Greg Anrig comments: "It wasn't a matter of 'space'���Hamburger simply got the facts totally wrong. If he had left out his errors about Social Security, he would have had more space. Jason may have been the single most effective wonk in the victory against SS privatization..."

Other things:

McCain Debates McCain: "Would a John McCain presidency be a Bush third term? Senator McCain says yes, while Senator McCain says no..."

Three questions about life on the internet in 2008: Ask the Mineshaft

The Washington Post is no better than it was in 2008. But it is also no worse. A trained incapacity among its reporters���if they know something about the issue, they would not be able to be such complaisant channels for the sources they wish to please: Paul Krugman Ruins My Peaceful Saturday Afternoon: Regulation via tax expenditures and a bureaucracy to define and monitor them is regulation���a point that eludes Perry Bacon Jr.... Nor does Bacon appear to realize that a government that spends through tax expenditure creates as many potential distortions as a government that spends through, well, spending���that is why they are called "tax expenditures", after all. We find this so often: reporters who have made no effort to get up to speed on issues so that they can have a chance of covering them in a way that informs their audience.... Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Dean Baker has already done the heavy lifting on this...

The only "conservative" political "philosophy" that is ever defensible is: "whig measures and tory men": "Conservatism": John Holbo.... I think John is a little too easy on Ross Douthat, largely because I do not believe that conservatism is a political philosophy. Conservatism is the practical principle that the pieces of furniture you have that suit and are comfortable should not be thrown away. And conservatism is a rhetorical mode of justification--effective on those who respect authority. But it isn't a philosophy.... I have written about this before: Edmund Burke does not believe that Tradition is to be Respected. He believes that good traditions are to be respected. When Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France makes the argument that Britons should respect the organic political tradition of English liberty that has been inherited from the past, he whispers under his breath that the only reason we should respect the Wisdom of the Ancestors is that in this particular case Burke thinks that the Ancestors���not his personal ancestors, note���were wise. Whenever Burke thought that the inherited political traditions were not wise, the fact that they were the inherited Wisdom of the Ancestors cut no ice with him at all...

The last time the Washington Post's Robert Samuelson wrote something worthwhile was... when?... 1985?: Washington Post Death Spiral Watch: Robert Samuelson... knows that these are extremely weak examples of "blatant contradiction" and "high partisanship." But you try to delude your readers with the ammunition you have, not the ammunition you wish you had. Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?...

Is This a Compliment?: From HTML Mencken: "Sadly, No! �� Oh, Please: (Indeed, the first person I think of as a ���latte-sipping elitist��� is Brad DeLong���a WASP..."

In Which We Rue the Confirmation of Roberts and Alito...: Hilzoy: "If we accept the government's argument, we would concede that it can legally do what it has tried to do in fact: to create a legal black hole in which it can act outside the law and the Constitution.... This decision was 5-4, with Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito in dissent.... Publius' headline is accurate: 'with this decision, Court Reaffirms Existence Of Constitution'. But had one vote changed, they would have given the Executive the power to avoid it at will..."

Felix Salmon on Jeff Bercovici on Citizen Journalism: Felix Salmon: "I'm puzzled by my colleague Jeff Bercovici.... Today he clarifies his position: by 'credibility' he means 'access': 'Much as the site claims to disdain the access-based Beltway news paradigm, it does seek access, whether in the form of an exclusive statement from Barack Obama, an interview with Dan Rather or invitations to cover events.... As it increasingly adopts the trappings of a conventional news organization, then, Huffpo becomes subject to the same kind of reprisals as a conventional news organization...' This is nothing to do with ethics any more, it's simple expediency. If Huffpo wants its precious access, then it had better learn to play by the rules, or else face 'reprisals'..."

The point was that we were then experiencing something that seemed a strange intrusion into the 21st century from the pre-Great Depression era: [The Last Financial Crisis of the Nineteenth Century]http://j-bradford-delong.net/2008html/20080610_delong_situation.html)_

#hoistedfromthearchives
#tenyearsagoongraspingreality
#shouldread

Twitter Has Crap Aggregation Tools: June 13, 2018

Nick Bunker: "The debates... sparked by Piketty..."

Radly Balko: "He should probably not exalt those authoritarians...: "Today in Both Things Are True https://twitter.com/radleybalko/statu...

Dan Pfeiffer: "Bob Corker should call the chair...""

Nouriel Robini: "Tether... criminal patrons... manipulate Bitcoin..."

#shouldread

Ernie Tedeschi: "Jason... 3 points: The 1st is: if... pri...

Ernie Tedeschi: "Jason... 3 points: The 1st is: if... prime-age... EPOP... better... than the headline unemployment rate, then why haven't wages accelerated more, given those measures have improved faster than U3?...

...This framing... starts with a U3 wage Phillips Curve and then assumes that we can then linearly map that into, say, a prime-age EPOP wage Phillips Curve. But U3 hasn't been a decent predictor of wage growth in this cycle....

Jason's second point... is concern over positing a relationship between a stationary variable like wage growth and an apparently-nonstationary variable like prime-age EPOP.... This is an important concern because if prime-age EPOP were truly nonstationary in recent years, then the tight relationship between it and wage growth could be spurious and not hold in future years. One condition under which the level of prime-age EPOP would be stationary would be if its trend / potential level were generally flat. That doesn't strike me as a crazy assumption if we're talking about recent history, say after female LFPR had mostly peaked in the 1990s....

An additional point about this... also speaks to Jason's third concern, which is that a wage Phillips Curve relationship ought to speak to the multitude of labor market phenomena we've seen over the past 25 years... like incarceration, deunionization, part-time work, aging of the population, educational attainment, female LFPR, etc.... Relating prime-age EPOP to ECI post-mid-1990s addresses many of these broad issues. Female LFPR had largely peaked by then, and inflation expectations stabilized around 2-ish after dropping in the 80s. On the wage side, ECI controls for occupation, industry, unionization, and part-time status. It's not a perfect measure by far (for one, its sample size is small), but it addresses many of the big concerns. On the EPOP side, I would in principle prefer a measure that controlled for things like race, education, sex, age, and metro status. But... controlling for all of those factors yields a series that is basically just a static level shift from prime-age EPOP....

My suspicion here is that the "right" way to think about a wage Phillips Curve is by relating compositionally-adjusted wages to compositionallly-adjusted employment, but that compositional effects mostly just happen to wash out in prime-age EPOP.

Last thing I'll say is that I don't think this approach satisfactorially answers all questions. For example, you'd need a more sophisticated approach to go back before ~1990, when female LFPR was still rising. Also, the role, or lack thereof, of productivity needs more rigorous teasing out. Other issues like incarceration and nominal wage rigidities also remain. But in terms of recent wage growth dynamics, the empirics suggest that demographically-adjusted employment explains much more of the mystery than U3 or U6 can.... I don't think it should be surprising that U3 and U6 -- which are ratios against measures of the labor force���have lost explanatory wage power in a cycle notable for large nonparticipation margins of slack...

#shouldread