J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 351

Nick Bunker: "I was just reminded https://twitter.com/nic...

Nick Bunker: "I was just reminded https://twitter.com/nick_bunker/status/1006636653010661379 about the debates around marginal elasticity of substitution & returns on capital sparked by Piketty. Feels like a different lifetime, but only 4 year ago... a time when most of economics/economic policy conversation was about a big, interesting book. Slightly different debate these days..."

#shouldread

Radley Balko: "Today in Both Things Are True https://twit...

Radley Balko: "Today in Both Things Are True https://twitter.com/radleybalko/status/1006607433781972993: 1. Diplomacy is preferable to war. So an American president should negotiate with adversaries. Even brutal, oppressive authoritarians. 2. He should probably not exalt those authoritarians, or proclaim that they���re adored by their people..."

#shouldread

Dan Pfeiffer: "Bob Corker https://twitter.com/danpfeiffer...

Dan Pfeiffer: "Bob Corker https://twitter.com/danpfeiffer/status/1006945780475678720 should call the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and see they can do something about all of this..."

Kyle Griffin: "Bob Corker: 'We are in a strange place... it's almost, it's becoming a cultish thing, isn't it? And it's not a good place for any party to end up with a cult-like situation as it relates to a president that happens to be of���purportedly���of the same party...'"

#shouldread

Nouriel Roubini: "Tether is a fiat crypto currency https:...

Nouriel Roubini: "Tether is a fiat crypto currency https://twitter.com/Nouriel/status/1006979204888629248 printed at will by its criminal patrons to manipulate Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies. The increase in its fiat supply faster than any major fiat currency. A criminal scam that needs to be stopped now. Why is the CFTC still asleep?..."

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Michael Tomasky: We Are Truly Living Through the Amateur ...

Michael Tomasky: We Are Truly Living Through the Amateur Hour Presidency: "From the moment when Donald Trump surprised even his own staff by announcing a summit with North Korea, it was obvious, I mean achingly obvious, that the president had no idea what he was doing...

...Needless to say, nearly everything that had happened since March 8 has been, at best, a misfire and, at worst, a disaster. Not the release of those three Americans. That was unambiguously a good thing. But everything else. Kim was elevated in this process to being not merely the equal of the President of the United States but, in some ways, his superior, the one who set the terms by which this process advanced (and then ended). One day, complete denuclearization meant one thing; another day it meant another thing. One day the summit was the most important thing in the world. The next day it was well, who knows, if it happens, great, if it doesn���t, it doesn���t. Trump even went out of his way to call Kim a ���very honorable��� man.

Can you imagine���yes, we have to go here���if President Clinton and her administration had engaged in this farce for 10 weeks? If she had bolted out of the Oval Office to make an announcement like the one Trump made with no forethought, to get a bad email story out of the cable news wheel?... He can���t be Manchuria���s candidate because he���s already the Kremlin���s. Well, the Kremlin would want a president who weakened America, discredited it, made it a laughing stock. Mission Accomplished.

#shouldread

I think Michael Berube overstates his case���as his chara...

I think Michael Berube overstates his case���as his character "His" notes at the end: Slate and #Slatepitch are still a thing. But they are much less of a thing. And everyone who writes for Slate or who used to write for the "never predictably Reaganite" Even the Liberal New Republic bears the mark on their reputation: Michael Berube: R.I.P., Liberal Contrarianism: "Before #Slatepitch became a punchline, Slate (and others) really did thrive on a certain kind of anti-liberalism. It���s dead now���well, almost...

...ILLE: Here���s your reliable index: the death of the liberal contrarian.

HIC: Come again?...

ILLE: You know what I mean. Go back into the files of your youth. It���s 1990, 1991. Richard Bernstein of The New York Times is appalled by the campus craziness. It���s like a dictatorship of virtue! Paul Berman discerns the roots of PC: a toxic hybrid strain of post-structuralism and Stalinism! The New York Review of Books reviews Dinesh D���Souza���favorably. The Atlantic actually publishes him.

HIC: Hell, The American Scholar published him. It was like seeing David Duke elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

ILLE: Well, that decision cost Joseph Epstein his job editing that thing.

HIC: A few years too late, no?

ILLE: But still. You know where I���m going with this. As the age of the liberal contrarian reaches maturity in mid-decade, Andrew Sullivan is hawking The Bell Curve at The New Republic, by then known as ���even the liberal New Republic.��� A few years later, Michael Kelly, having spent his time at TNR fulminating against the liberal hegemony of Heather Has Two Mommies, takes over The Atlantic. Camille Paglia is ubiquitous. Slate emerges as the West Coast, online TNR, and within a few years, the #Slatepitch becomes shorthand for the liberal contrarian hot take. By 1997, it���s like, they may seem innocuous, but maybe Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman and Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy are the most corrupt public officials in the history of the republic! Democracy and public decency demand an investigation! That was an actual, real Slate essay by Jacob Weisberg about Herman in February 1997.

HIC: And then what? What changes?

ILLE: What changes, my boy? What changes? Why, everything! Look around you! Mickey Kaus was once the #Slatepitch master���you know, ���I���m a Democrat but I hate unions and minorities.��� Now he doesn���t even have a career. Paglia lies on the ash heap of history. The Atlantic that once published D���Souza and answered to Kelly is now known as the place where Ta-Nehisi Coates airs his searing critiques of white supremacy....

I have one last sally. Let���s say Kimberly Peirce, the director of the acclaimed 1999 film Boys Don���t Cry, comes to the People���s Republic of Reed College. And she is greeted by trans students who are outraged that the film cast Hilary Swank as the young transgender person Brandon Teena and even more outraged that Peirce herself is merely lesbian and ���gender fluid��� rather than properly trans. They scream ���bitch��� at her and put up posters saying ���F--- this cis white bitch.��� And let���s even say that this is not the most important or even the 38th most important thing to happen on an American campus in the past ten years. Even still. Surely this is not okay with you?

HIC: It is not. I would imagine, in fact, that even people dogmatically opposed to the idea of universal moral principles might entertain the thought that ���F--- this cis white bitch��� is never an acceptable response to anything, let alone a plausible speech act with which to address the director of a trans-friendly film many years ahead of its time.... I���m as appalled as you are that 19-year-olds don���t have any sense of historical context. But you know what? If I try to tell them how mistaken they are, or how straight-up misogynist it is to be saying ���F--- this cis white bitch,��� they���re going to write me off as a grumpy old white guy.... Whereas if... Jack Halberstam responds... the aggrieved students might more readily understand that they are dealing with someone who has walked the walk.... Now, of course you could say that if I���m outsourcing my critique of the Reed protest to Jack Halberstam, I���m giving in to the logic of identity politics. But... some people are going to have more credibility on some subjects than others, and sometimes their identities are going to be part of that credibility, because sometimes, perhaps often, those identities will entail distinct social and political experiences that you and I don���t have. Get used to it.

ILLE: Very well. What then shall we say of the once and future liberal contrarian?

HIC: Oh, there will be a ready market for liberal contrarianism for the rest of our natural lives, and perhaps even for our artificially extended lives when we are downloaded into the matrix of self-driving cars. Even as I type, I see two New York Times op-eds devoted to defending Christina Hoff Sommers from the campus hordes, one of them by young liberal-contrarian-in-training Bari Weiss. You remember that big 1995 Times Magazine spread on the new renegade conservative intellectuals, with Laura Ingraham in a leopard skirt? Someone ought to get Weiss to do a big Times Magazine spread on the new renegade conservative inellectuals. They could call it ���The Counter Counterculture of the Intellectual Umbrageous Web,��� or something like that. Seriously, I keep having to check the decade hand on my watch to be sure I haven���t been sucked into one of those nasty hot tub time machines. But hey, the dinosaurs hung around for almost 200 million years. Yet today, there is something of a global consensus that they were dinosaurs. That gives me hope...

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Benjy Sarlin: "I���m not sure it���s possible to capture ...

Benjy Sarlin: "I���m not sure it���s possible to capture an entire era in one image, but Dennis Rodman running a cryptocurrency grift on live TV from the North Korea summit while wearing a MAGA is a serious nominee..."

#shouldread

Matthew Yglesias: "No one could have predicted���:Ver...

Matthew Yglesias: "No one could have predicted���:

Verified account

Matthew Yglesias: "Alternate take: The combination of corrupt motives, inattention to detail, and ignorance of the relevant issues is unlikely to produce a positive outcome on any trajectory..."

Bruce Klingner: "This is very disappointing. Each of the four main points was in previous documents with NK, some in a stronger, more encompassing way. The denuke bullet is weaker than the Six Party Talks language. And no mention of CVID, verification, human rights..."

Julian Sanchez: "It���s amazing this huge diplomatic win would be questioned by far leftists like... checks notes>... the Heritage Foundation���s North Korea expert..."

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The Nevilles, the Percys, and the Murdochs...

Back in fifteenth century England the landholdings of nearly all nobles were parcelized���manors and such fairly widely scattered. That made it difficult for individual nobles to raise a large force from their affinity, or even to develop a strong affinity. There were, however two exceptions: the nobles watching the Welsh and watching the Scottish border had been allowed���encouraged���by the king to develop large contiguous landholdings. Hence the Percys: Earls of Northumberland. Hence the Beauchamp-Nevilles: Earls of Warwick. These "ouer myghtye subgettes", in the words of Lord Chief Justice John Fortescue's Laws and Governance of England, could and did raise affinities and could and did shake the realm. Richard Neville the 16th Earl of Warwick was, after all, called "Warwick the Kingmaker".

The extremely shrewd Charlie Stross wonders at the presslords of the right as our modern-day "overmighty subjects":

Charlie Stross: The Pivot: "Brexit requires no introduction.... Nor... the main UK media players... pro-Brexit to the extent of attacking national institutions seen as being soft on Brexit...

...Then, last week, something happened. Or several somethings. (From the outside it's hard to be sure.)... The retirement of Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre and his replacement by Mail on Sunday editor Georgie Greig, a pro-European journalist.... Next, the Murdoch press began an extraordinary about-face on Brexit.... The Times... "Brexit backer Arron Banks's golden Kremlin connection"... the Observer... Arron Banks... "towards the end of last year, Banks issued a statement saying his contacts with 'the Russians' consisted of 'one boozy lunch' at the Russian embassy. Documents seen by the Observer, suggest a different version of events..." (Note that Banks has a net worth in the ~��100M range: you don't print anything about him in an English newspaper without getting a legal opinion first.)...

Not all billionaires stand to profit from seeing the remains of British industry sink beneath the waves, and not all of them are in the pocket of the Kremlin's financial backers. There are a bunch of very rich, rather reclusive men (and a handful of women) who probably thought, "well, let's sit back and see where this thing leads, for now" about 18 months ago. And now they can see it leading right over a cliff, and they are unhappy, and they have made their displeasure known on the golf course and in the smoke-filled rooms, and the quiet whispering campaign has finally turned heads at the top of the media empires. If I'm right, then over the next four to eight weeks the wrath of the British press is going to fall on the heads of the Brexit lobby with a force and a fury we haven't seen in a generation.... And in the large, I think it's no coincidence at all that this broke out in the same week as Donald Trump's epic tantrum at the G7 summit.

MOAR Links for June 12, 2018

Petra Moser: Further extending long-lived US copyrights will do no good. : No benefits from extensions. And if extensions ever get applied to science, there'd be huge welfare loss, especially for people at less affluent institutions...

Paul Krugman: We've basically crossed the line into treason now -- and a whole party is acquiescing: Benjamin Wittes: "I have a whole lot to say about how the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the President of the United States teamed up to out an intelligence source who aided our country in a properly predicated counterintelligence investigation against a hostile foreign power..."

Jen Kirby: Laurel/Yanny: the science behind the audio trick, explained: "It comes down to how our brains pick up on, and interpret, different frequencies..."

Yes, there are first-class New York-style bagels in Greater San Francisco: Bagel Baron: "2701 Eighth St Berkeley, CA 94710..."

Lois McMaster Bujold: The Flowers of Vashnoi goes live

Sangria

Captain Mardens

British governance appears at least as bad today as American governance even though they are not helmed by an unstable and corrupt kleptocrat: Simon Wren-Lewis: Delusions of National Power: "Inevitable that the UK would stay in the Customs Union (CU) and the Single Market (SM)...

Claremont Canyon Conservancy: Map/Trails

Eduard Bernstein: (1895): Cromwell and Communism