J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 353
June 9, 2018
After the Next Nuclear Fire...: Hoisted from 2007
Hoisted from the Archives: Rather more urgent than I thought it would be 27 months ago: After the Next Nuclear Fire...: In the early 1980s the U.S. NSA���or perhaps it was the Defense Department���loved to play games with Russian air defense. They would send probe planes in from the Pacific to fly over Siberia. And they would watch and listen: Where were the gaps in Russian sensor coverage? How far could U.S. planes penetrate before being spotted? What were Russian command-and-control procedures to intercept intruders? And so on, and so forth.
Then, one night, September 1, 1983, the pilot of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 to Seoul mispunched his destination coordinates into his autopilot, and sent his plane west of its proper course, over Siberia, where Russian fighters���confident that they had finally caught one of the American spyplane intruders napping���blew it and its hundreds of civilian passengers out of the sky. With some glee the Reagan administration claimed that the Russians had deliberately shot down a civilian airliner because they were barbarians and terrorists and wanted the world to know that they were barbarians and terrorists by handing the Reagan administration a propaganda victory. The Russians counterclaimed that the CIA had deliberately misprogrammed the autopilot of KAL 007 and monkeyed with its transponder in order to trick the Russians into shooting down a civilian airliner. What had actually happened was a mistake: radar operators, majors, colonels, and generals seeing what they expected to see���a U.S. spyplane intruding into Russian air space and, for once, not being alert enough to scoot out to sea before the defending fighters arrived.
In the late 1980s, the U.S. sent its warships into the Persian Gulf to protect Saudi and Kuwaiti tankers against Iranian attack. Saudi and Kuwaiti oil earned dollars that paid for Saddam Hussein's Iraq to fight its bloody war against Khomeini's Iran in what the carter and Reagan administrations approved of and encouraged as appropriate payback for the outrage against international law and diplomatic practice committed by Khomeini and company's seizure of hostages from the diplomats at the American embassy in Tehran. This time it was the turn of the Americans���the sailors on the "robo-cruiser" Vincennes���to shoot down a fully-loaded civilian airliner, Iran Air Flight 655 on its regularly-scheduled run in its regularly-scheduled flight path at its regularly-scheduled time across the Persian Gulf from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. Once again what happened was a mistake: sailors seeing an airliner flying straight and level as a hostile bomber dropping in altitude and preparing to fire its missiles. The records of the Vincennes��� instruments show no signals that would suggest a bomber was detected, while they do record detecting a civilian IFF signal.
Boys who don't think too fast and aren't too smart at processing information playing with deadly toys. Testosterone-poisoned devil-apes using not rocks and fists to demonstrate some bizarre concept of reproductive fitness but using buttons and missiles instead. And, increasingly, testosterone-crazed devil apes playing with nuclear weapons.
We are highly likely to lose a city to nuclear fire over the next half-century. Some not-too-smart major will see what he expects to see, or some god-maddened colonel will think he has received a holy command, or some ignorant general will believe that the logic of deterrence is failing but that the situation can be rescued if he strikes first. Tehran or Delhi or Islamabad or Pyongyang or Tel Aviv or Paris or London or Moscow or Beijing or Washington or some other city will become a sea of radioactive glass. With luck we will only lose one city, because the people ruled by the guilty government and military will immediately rise up and tear their politicians, bureaucrats, and commanders limb-from-limb before sending all possible aid to the wounded and the dying. But don't count on it. We are likely to lose more than one city. As Bill Clinton is supposed to have said: if North Korea were to use a nuclear weapon against the United States, an hour later there won't be a North Korea.
Perhaps there won't be a use of nuclear weapons in the next half century.
Every human household has the potential to use deadly force against its immediate neighbors, yet very few disputes over dog waste or storm runoff escalate to murder. Can't countries, like people, all just get along (for the most part, that is)? There is a problem, however: leaders of countries are not average people: imagine a neighborhood of Ariel Sharons living next to the Saddam Husseins living next to the as-Sabah family living next to the Assad compound, with the Mubarrak and Hashemite families across the street wishing that they lived in a very different neighborhood.
Let's look on the bright side: the aftermath of the first post-Nagasaki use of nuclear weapons to kill humans will be a moment of maximum political plasticity: a moment when swift global action in the heat of the moment can create institutions to govern the world. What then should be done? If we argue and debate in the aftermath of nuclear fire, we will lose a unique opportunity to shape events so that there will be no second post-Nagasaki use of nuclear weapons. We should have our arguments and debates now, so that we will know what to do when the moment strikes.
I propose the following plan for the aftermath of the horror: That non-great powers be bribed to abandon their nuclear weapons���they are a source of danger rather than an aid to defense. That great powers put their nuclear weapons under the joint control of their own militaries and of the United Nations Strategic Forces���with each of the two having the technical means to disarm and prevent use. That the great powers return us to the system of international relations toward which George H. W. Bush was working in 1989-1993: that the command and blessing of the United Nations Security Council be the only justification for any form of cross-border military adventure, and that the Secretary General raise, maintain, and deploy sufficient deadly armed force to make that principle stick.
But, I believe, it is much less important that we adopt this plan than that we have a plan. What will humanity do in the aftermath of a human city's next meeting with the siblings of Fat Man and Little Boy? What should our plan be?
June 9, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality
Heathers: They're Gonna Get Mean, and They're Gonna Get Ugly Somehow, and There's Gonna Be a Million More of Them...: Paul Krugman and Clive Crook congratulate America for becoming its best self. I am not so sure. Here's one of the mean ones: Robin Givhan of (surprise!) the Washington Post: "Hillary Clinton celebrated her tenacity... dressed all in cobalt blue.... The only people who dress from head to toe in bright blue are more than likely telling you to put your seat tray in the upright and locked position. What would possess a woman seeking the highest office to dress in a manner that only Veruca Salt could love?..." And here's one of the ugly ones: Tom Sowell of the (surprise!) Hoover Institution in the Orville Faubus role: "You cannot lose a nuclear war for three years and then come back.... Our one window of opportunity to prevent this will occur within the term of whoever becomes President of the United States next January.... We do not have the luxury of waiting for our ideal candidate or of indulging our emotions by voting for some third party candidate to show our displeasure���at the cost of putting someone in the White House who is not up to the job. John McCain has been criticized in this column many times. But, when all is said and done, McCain has not spent decades aiding and abetting people who hate America..." To quote the immortal Guy Fleegman: "I don't like this. I don't like this at all.... [I]n a second they're gonna get mean, and they're gonna get ugly somehow, and there's gonna be a million more of them..."
Thoma vs. Mankiw on Opt-Out Financial Regulation: I score this one for Mark Thoma. Mark Thoma is... puzzled, I think is the word... by Greg Mankiw's claim that there is something intellectually wrong with Austan Goolsbee's endorsement of the idea that there should be "enhanced regulation of any financial institution that has access to the Fed's discount window.... Mr. Goolsbee said that an Obama presidency would ensure that investment banks are regulated as closely as commercial banks." Mankiw writes: "George Stigler rolls over in his grave: Remember when the University of Chicago used to be the intellectual center of the deregulation movement? No more.... This story seems to confirm the fears of Vince Reinhart [that the Fed's actions in Bear Stearns will be used to argue for more spending and more regulation...]" Mankiw is wrong here on a bunch of levels. irst, George Stigler is not rolling over in his grave. On matters of financial regulation, George Stigler showed great deference to Milton Friedman, and Milton was in favor of extremely tight regulation of any financial institution whose liabilities served as part of the economy's stock of liquid assets--as those of us who did the reading that Tom Sargent assigned and read Friedman's Program for Monetary Stability know...
Financial Regulation in the Twenty-First Century: Yesterday I felt obliged to strongly dissent from Greg Mankiw's claim that Austan Goolsbee, in endorsing his boss Barack Obama's position on the regulation of investment banks, had sold his share of the grand Chicago intellectual tradition for a mess of political pottage. Mankiw... seemed to me to be (i) simply wrong in its understanding of the Chicago tradition on financial regulation, as I argued yesterday, (ii) wrong in its analysis of why the Federal Reserve believes it needs authority to both lend to and regulate non-bank banks, as Mark Thoma argued yesterday, and (iii) wrong in its misidentification of the source of the push for enhanced regulatory authority���which comes not out of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party as a partisan issue but out of the Federal Reserve as a technocratic issue. This last is, I think, especially important: getting financial regulation right to deal with financial crises is not properly a partisan or ideological issue, and nobody should try to make it one. And lo and behold, in this morning's Financial Times we have New York Fed President Tim Geithner explaining what he believes needs to be done: enhanced regulation of any financial institution that has access to the Fed's discount window--with which institutions have access something determined by the regulators in the interest of system stability...
Twitter Is Crap at Aggregation Tools: June 9, 2018
Dan Davies: "The phrase 'virtue signalling', uttered with a sneer, is always both (a) the sound of a guilty conscience and (b) the leper's bell of the modern online asshole..."
Matthew Yglesias: "Democratic Party governance ended up underdelivering in part because of policies that failed in technical design terms. Gotta do better next time!: Something that frustrates me about the current moment is that Team Obama owned the ���bloodless technocrat��� brand so well that it���s obscured the existence of very real technical failures of 2009-2010 Democratic governance. That, in turn, tends to lead people on the left who are critical of Obama-era policymaking to be completely blind to the very real importance of making your policies technically sound. There were little technical failures like so many TIGER grants for useless streetcar projects and big significant failures like crafting a stimulus bill that didn���t consider the possibility that the recession was worse than early data indicated. A fair amount of the problems were more with congressional Democrats than with the administration, but either way Democratic Party governances ended up underdelivering in part because of policies that failed in technical design terms. Gotta do better next time!..." Joseph Britt: _"How well do you think the public understood what Obama's stimulus was intended to do? I think that was a pretty significant failure right there. For such noted communicator, Obama didn't communicate very well..."
Andrew Dolan: "Periodic reminder: that TPP and TTIP removed many of the non-tariff barriers Trump says he wants to eliminate..."
Counterchekist: "If you think the 'pee tape' is what the Kremlin really has on tRUmp, then I have some bad news for you... It's much, much worse than that... You can tell what it is just by watching what the QAnon/InfoWars loons have been pushing the last few days. With full IRA technical assistance... Prepping the battlespace..." Lisa Hubbert: "Please elaborate, I cannot countenance looking at InfoWars for the answer..." Eight: "Pizzagate reversal debunk plus paedocamp red herring, there seems to be a theme..."
Richard M. Nixon: "Krauthammer's letter was well-written. He should chiefly be remembered as one of the forces behind the second Iraq War..." Jim Silberman: "A churlish and typically cheap Nixonian swipe at a decent and honorable man, with only weeks to live..." Richard M. Nixon: "Regarding Krauthammer. I'm not sure what the problem is, considering Krauthammer has no regrets..." David L. Franze: "As with all conservative thought leaders, he helped to give America, Vice President Richard Cheney, Speaker Newt Gingrich and President (!) Donald Trump. The Fourth Horseman is Roger Ailes..." Priscilla Maloney: "Agreed-you'll have to forgive me also sir; I'm not feeling particularily charitable today. I have a loved one with many of the same struggles as Mr. Bourdain and he admired him greatly. Mr. Bourdain will be remembered very kindly by history..."
Henry Farrell: "When MacLean talks about 'individual liberty' she suggests that this is a term that had a 'coded meaning'..." Brad DeLong: Henry Farrell really should not criticize MacLean thus: "When she talks about 'individual liberty' she suggests that this is a term that had a 'coded meaning'" as if freedom to discriminate was not a big piece of Buchanan's individual liberty and of states' rights. That's just not reality based...
Atrios: "My favorite thing with conservatives is how it is mean to accurately quote them in full context presenting perfectly representative (not slips of the tongue) expressions of their beliefs..."
#shouldread
Note to Self: I wouldn't call Thrush-Watkins etc. a "mist...
Note to Self: I wouldn't call Thrush-Watkins etc. a "mistake" by the New York Times as much as a strategic decision. I always thought that Harris, VandeHei, Allen & co. worked for their sources first, their bosses second, and their readers not at all���and that's how thy shaped Politico. Hiring a politics team from Politico got them what they paid for. And that is what the New York Times wanted to do...
Heidi N Moore: "I think that���s right. They wanted scoops at any cost, and they got scoops at a very high cost.
Plus 125 "Jared and Ivanka are going to save us all!" stories...
Heidi N Moore: It all needs to start over as far as political coverage there. I cannot imagine how they can be so sanguine about a reporter dragging the paper���s integrity through the mud...
#shouldread
#newyorktimesdeathspiral
#journamalism
#politicodeathspiral
June 8, 2018
Teddy Roosevelt (2007): "We Have Traveled Far...": Weekend Reading
How to make proper use of the good parts of an at best ambiguous past: Teddy Roosevelt https://archive.org/stream/addressofpreside00roo/addressofpreside00roo_djvu.txt: "There is nothing easier than to belittle the great men of the past by dwelling only on the points where they come short of the universally recognized standards of the present...
...Men must be judged with reference to the age in which they dwell, and the work they have to do. The Puritan's task was to conquer a continent; not merely to overrun it, but to settle it, to till it, to build upon it a high industrial and social life; and, while engaged in the rough work of taming the shaggy wilderness, at that very time also to lay deep the immovable foundations of our whole American system of civil, political, and religious liberty achieved through the orderly process of law.
This was the work allotted him to do; this is the work he did; and only a master spirit among men could have done it.
We have traveled far since his day.
That liberty of conscience which he demanded for himself, we now realize must be as freely accorded to others as it is resolutely insisted upon for ourselves.
The splendid qualities which he left to his children, we other Americans who are not of Puritan blood also claim as our heritage. You, sons of the Puritans; and we, who are descended from
races whom the Puritans would have deemed alien���we are all Americans together. We all feel the same pride in the genesis, in the history, of our people; and therefore this shrine of Puritanism is one at which we all gather to pay homage, no matter from what country our ancestors sprang.
We have gained some things that the Puritan had not���we of this generation, we of the twentieth century, here in this great Republic; but we are also in danger of losing certain things which the Puritan had and which we can by no manner of means afford to lose.
We have gained a joy of living which he had not, and which it is a good thing for every people to have and to develop.
Let us see to it that we do not lose what is more important still; that we do not lose the Puritan's iron sense of duty, his unbending, unflinching will to do the right as it was given him to see the right...
#things
#weekendreading
Terry McGlynn: "If a professor is not qualified to mentor...
Terry McGlynn: "If a professor is not qualified to mentor women, he must be disqualified from the professoriate...
@JanetLorin: "Universities have come up with workarounds for tenured faculty accused of sexual harassment: Keep your office door open. Don���t mentor any women. No coffees or dinners with students https://www.wsj.com/articles/universities-devise-rules-for-professors-accused-of-sexual-harassment-1528277400
Terry McGlynn: "By the way, I keep my office door open when meeting with students regardless of gender. If a student wants a more private conversation, then I leave it open just a wee bit..."
#shouldread
Josh Barro: "Bourdain's most essential writing, IMO, is t...
Josh Barro: "Bourdain's most essential writing, IMO, is the 'How to cook like the pros' chapter in Kitchen Confidential. It explains why restaurant food tastes better than your food at home. The main answers are: shallots, lots of butter in everything, high-quality stock, and demi-glace..."
#shouldread
Rick Petree: "He was more cogent, more linear: I suspect ...
Rick Petree: "He was more cogent, more linear: I suspect this is, again, a sign of mental deterioration. There have been many instances of him not knowing the words to our most common songs. I recall a Pentagon ceremony where he gave up singing entirely & waved his hands in time with the music. It's not at all funny...
...You don't unlearn the words to the national anthem. If you knew them in high school (a military academy, in this case), you know them for the rest of your life, unless your brain starts to deteriorate.... I agree on his basic level of intelligence. Never stellar. However, having been around him a bit over the years in NYC, he's way off his own mark of 10-20 years ago. He was more cogent, more linear. He could follow a discussion, make multi-part points over a period of minutes. He had greater concentration and focus. His vocabulary was notably larger. IMO, he's no better than 50-60% of what he was 20 years ago..."
#shouldread
#acrossthewidemissouri
#orangehairedbaboons
June 8, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality
Making the Case for Globalization: I suspect that we are, right now, seeing the peak of anti-globalization economic agitation in the United States. The fall in the real value of the dollar against European currencies and its coming real value fall against Asian currencies mean that export and import-competing sectors are likely to be expanding their employment rapidly over the next several years. It would be a pity if a look back deranged our policy going forward, especially if it is because trade is perceived to be a problem by politicians even though it has ceased to be perceived as a problem by voters...
What Does John McCain Think?: Digby writes: "A reader sent me this link to the Cunningrealist from May 5 and I was surprised by what it contained. Were you aware that John McCain wrote the forward to an edition of The Best And the Brightest? And were you aware that it said this?: 'It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn���t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay. No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.' Will anyone ask him about this?..."
Shut Up and Calculate!: Eliezer Yudkowsky wonders aloud just what the Born probabilities in quantum mechanics are. It is, I think, an object lesson that nobody should try to understand quantum mechanics: it simply cannot be done...
Some MOAR Links: June 8, 2018
Scott Aaronson (2015): Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity
TABLEIZER
Mark Kleiman: A primer on fentanyl(s)
Diane B. Paul
Ixtapa Mexican Cusine
Osteria Vespa
30 Boltwood Restaurant
Francis Wilkinson and David Runciman: Democracy Will Die, Maybe in Its Sleep
Berkeley Data Science: Economics and Data Science-Teaching with Jupyter Notebooks
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