J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 354

Matthew Yglesias: "I would like to read an intellectual h...

Matthew Yglesias: "I would like to read an intellectual history of how exactly ���slavery was a boon to economic development��� became the leftist position, and ���actually, slavery is a retrograde anti-growth system as well as an immoral one��� (Marx���s view!) became the neoliberal sellout view:"

Matthew Yglesias: "Another good essay advancing the (now-contrarian??) argument that slavery was a bad system:"

Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode: Cotton, Slavery, and the New History of Capitalism: "The 'New History of Capitalism' grounds the rise of industrial capitalism on the production of raw cotton by American slaves. Recent works include Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton, Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams, and Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told. All three authors mishandle historical evidence and mis-characterize important events in ways that affect their major interpretations on the nature of slavery, the workings of plantations, the importance of cotton and slavery in the broader economy, and the sources of the Industrial Revolution and world development..."

Steven Klein: "Not sure invoking Marx here is going to help, as my impression (as an outsider) is that the debate re: slavery is also a debate about whether Marx's thought is too teleological, developmental, Eurocentric etc...."

Patrick Iber: "I think there's a lot of room for a kind of post-revisionist synthesis here..."

Steven Klein: "agreed. the historians of capitalism seem to me to make too strong claims about necessity that then leaves them open to obvious rebuttals. But then the economists tend to assume because something = inefficient in an ideal world, no politics is necessary to change it..."

Pseudoerasmus: "Can I remind you that economists Conrad and Meyer in 1958, and economists Fogel and Engerman in 1974, both argued that slave capitalism was thriving and would not have withered away and that the civil war was required to abolish it?

Steven Klein: "Welcome back :). as I said from the beginning, this was my outsider read on the debate. the critique of beckert seems to me to be that he exaggerates the productivity of slavery when compared to emerging free labor, no? maybe no political analysis follows from that, but the view that slavery dying on its own. i'll be the first to admit I don't know the historiography and am approaching this as an outsider..."

Pseudoerasmus: "I don't even know where to begin, there's so much wrongness..."

Steven Klein: "Well, I don't have a dog in this debate, but it was specifically about arguments re: whether US slavery was necessary for cotton production for IR. could be misremembering. I'm more interested in broader stakes of the debate, such as the question Yglesias raised. So if nobody is saying that global competition would have made slavery redundant, fine by me. again, more interested in broader stakes, which seems to break down to whether something like permanent 'primitive accumulation' is necessary for 'capitalism'."

Pseudoerasmus: "well in Brazil slavery more or less withered away, but then Brazilian slave agriculture was not as productive Southern slave agriculture. And that's the basis for economic historians saying American slavery would not have withered away."

Steven Klein: "look, i could be completing misremembering, but isn't a part of the debate re: Beckert about comparing US cotton production to Indian, and that he exaggerates cost of Indian production in relation to industrial revolution?"

Pseudoerasmus: "That's not 'part of the debate' but Olmstead has mentioned in passing that Indian wage labour was actually cheaper than the cost of maintaining a slave (or the rental cost of slaves). The difference is that slave owners drove the slave so hard, productivity/cost ratio was higher. I thought the Marx question that @mattyglesias pointed out had to do with how some HOC could not decide whether antebellum slavery was 'primitive accumulation' prior to capitalism, or was actually "agrarian capitalism" itself -- both of those are in Marx. Though 'agrarian capitalism' was more really elaborated by kautsky, lenin, dobb, brenner, etc. AFAIK no one has considered that the antebellum American South constituted 'uneven and combined development' �� la Trotsky-Hilferding-etc., which (as later elaborated by dependency & worlds systems theorists) would have made the South part of the agrarian periphery! That makes much more sense b/c the American South was subject to the same globalisation forces as the rest of the periphery/global south in the 19th century, and was deindustrialised or anti-industrialised. But that would ruin the developmental narrative that the HOC want to tell..."

Steven Klein: "That sounds interesting, but I think Yglesias is making the much less interesting argument that you want to avoid about slavery being inefficient in the long run."

Matthew Yglesias: "I wouldn���t say that, but an unfree labor system seems like it could discourage developing strong educational institutions, human capital accumulation, and other drivers of longer-term growth."

Pseudoerasmus: "I think Steve is using the terms 'efficient' and 'inefficient' very loosely. (1) Slave agriculture can be very productive, & more productive than free farming (for certain crops & under certain conditions); I don't think anyone doubts this. Likewise (2) I don't know know anyone who doubts that slavery reinforced plantation agriculture & the south was therefore getting short-term growth (which highly unequally distributed) at the expense of long term development. Gavin Wright argued that slavery lowered investment in infrastructure and schooling, because you didn't really need either. I mean, who would doubt that? Not economists, not Marxists, not Marx himself, etc."

Patrick Iber: Right, so this is my understanding of what the debate between economic historians and the NHC is about. Two positions within NHC: 1) one says no capitalism w/o slavery, 2) one says one says slavery was integral to the development of capitalism. Then there's a position 3), which is that slavery was not important to the development of capitalism. My read is that both EH and NHC can basically agree about #2 but there are people who want a foot in #1 or #3."

Pseudoerasmus: "That is making things too clear. HOC typically say slavery was 'crucial' or 'essential' to capitalism and few people define what that means. But when you say that to an economist, it reads 'the industrial revolution could not have happened without slavery'; hence the responses. I am not including within the set of HOC assertions Baptist's hyperbole that what his book describes was 'absolutely necessary increase if the Western world was to burst out of the 10,000 year Malthusian cycle of agriculture'. I do not think Baptist is typical of HOC."

Patrick Iber: "In Latin American history this thesis is associated with Sokoloff and Engerman, especially this paper (http://www.nber.org/papers/w9259 ), they find, e.g. that votings rights are slower to be extended in places with high inequality and a legacy of slavery -> bad to invest in gen welfare. There's been pushback by Jeffrey Williamson for example, (http://www.nber.org/papers/w20915), who finds similar levels of inequality in Europe. Both this and the above strike me as quite good papers, but what do I know?"

Pseudoerasmus: "Williamson's pushback is that the 'bad' institutions in Latin America were reinforced in the late 19th century globalisation so those do not have the deep determinants argued by S & E..."

#shouldread

Scott Dworkin: "Any Republican who doesn���t immediately ...

Scott Dworkin: "Any Republican who doesn���t immediately speak out against Trump���s advocacy for Russia, needs to resign immediately. They take an oath to protect this country. Being silent on Trump���s treason means they have forsaken that oath and this country. Speak up or you���re a traitor. Period..."

#shouldread

Daniel Drezner: "Wait, so you���re saying Eagles fans don...

Daniel Drezner: "Wait, so you���re saying Eagles fans don���t wear jackets & ties or floral print dresses?..."

Kyle Griffin: "The alleged Eagles fans who were attending Trump's 'Celebration of America' were apparently RNC staffers. An RNC intern tells @phillydotcom that she received a mass email from the White House earlier in the day, inviting her to attend the event..."

Talk: Four Books to Help You Understand President Donald Trump

#books
#talk
#berkeley
#orangehairedbaboons
#neofascism
#resistance

June 7, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality

Uh-Oh! Now It Does Look a Lot Like a Recession... : How deep a recession remains an open question... Jim Hamilton has some interesting thoughts on business-cycle asymmetry...

Talk: Thinking About President Donald Trump

#talk
#berkeley
#orangehairedbaboons
#neofascism
#resistance

June 6, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality

FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS VOTE REPUBLICAN : Outsourced to Matthew Yglesias and commenters: Matthew Yglesias: "'How Do We Beat The Bitch?': Mark Kleiman suggests that revisiting this appalling episode in McCainiac misogyny might be a useful party unity exercise...' John McCain���kind of an appalling guy..."

Twitter Is Crap on Aggregation Tools

Matthew Yglesias: "Congressional Republicans are happy to stand up to Trump, they just legitimately do not object to his racist and authoritarian tendencies the way they do to higher taxes on aluminum imports: "'I���m dumfounded... I can���t be silent and complicit in this.'���House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling just assailed Pres. Trump���s trade agenda in interview with @BloombergTV. Airs in the 2pmET hour."

Marcy Wheeler: e"Reupping this bc I'm flabbergasted reporters covering this story don't understand this. The question about the statement on June 9 meeting isn't whether Don Sr or Jr dictated it. It's whether Putin did https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/06/02/the-non-denial-denial-in-trumps-response-on-the-june-9-meeting-statement-did-putin-dictate-the-statement/. That's a question about 'collusion', not obstruction..."

Nils Gilman: "In general, the United States is the best country in the world to be rich in, but mediocre or worse if you���re not at least affluent..."

Nils Gilman: "#40YearsAgoToday: California voters approve Proposition 13, a key moment in the rise of #PlutocraticInsurgency, as it leads to the steady defunding of public goods in the state..."

Damn: This is good: Jeffrey A. Sachs: Laicite: "I spent s...

Damn: This is good: Jeffrey A. Sachs: Laicite: "I spent six years in Quebec, a province that has moved in fits and starts toward criminalizing public displays of religiosity...

...At present, public institutions will not serve women who wear niqabs or burqas, nor employ them https://twitter.com/benmanson0/status/1003777437069606917. Hasids face similar challenges. In neighborhoods of Montreal, local elections center on the question of whether eruv-thin wires suspended above the rooftops-are a threat to public order. The answer, of course, is laicite. But that doesn���t really tell us anything. Why laicite? What does laicite assume about the world and human nature?

So we work ourselves backward through time, paddle against the current, until we reach the Enlightenment, when someone suggested that maybe there is such a thing as a state of nature. A stable reference point prior to states, prior to culture, prior (maybe) to family itself. That���s when we were free. So we work forwards again: from Rousseau to the Tennis Court to Catholic counter-reaction to the Quiet Revolution to eruv. And now we have the beginnings of an answer: Quebec���s government is hostile toward public displays of religiosity because it believes that the public sphere is a sphere for freedom, and to be free means to be pre-cultural. Not a spouse or a Muslim or candlestick maker, but a citizen.

There it is. Enlightenment ideas structure our thinking so completely that we don���t even recognize them, or the justices/injustices they might facilitate. That���s why the heavy lifting of intellectual historians is so worthwhile. That���s what���s at stake.

#shouldread
#history
#moralphilosophy
#moralresponsibility

June 5, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality

Biomedical Literary Criticism Ask the Internet "Age of Innocence" Blogging: "Edith Wharton's 1920 The Age of Innocence: My brother wonders if perhaps Edith Wharton meant us to understand that Count Olenski had tertiary syphilis a la Friedrich Neitzsche and Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill���hat he was not just your standard garden-variety European aristocrat libertine unfaithful cold penniless mentally-unbalanced domineering husband who married you for your money alone and from whom you fled back to New York���and that for Madame Ellen Olenska to return to him in Europe is to consign herself to marital rape, likely infection, and ultimate deep insanity herself. Is this a reading that Edith Wharton intended? A part of the book that literary critics lost with the discovery of penicillin? Or is it a reading that I am tempted to impose on the book simply because I have lived in the age of AIDS? And, in either case, does this reading deepen or trivialize the book?...

Delong Smackdown Watch: Why Cap-and-Trade Beats a Carbon Tax: Felix Salmon: "Brad DeLong reckons that the relative merits of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade 'roughly offset'.... 'Cap-and-trade runs the risk that the cap will be set at the wrong place and so the price will go damagingly above its social optimum value. Carbon taxes run the risk that the tax will be set too low and so the quantity emitted will go damagingly above its social optimum value.' These two considerations do not offset each other. The second risk is high and real; the first risk is low and politically much more unrealistic..."

The Meaning of Box 722: Rick Perlstein is a national treasure. Buy his Nixonland. Buy it now...

Answers to Easy Questions (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps New York Times Pitiful Embarrassment Department): Marty Lederman asks:" Today's New York Times story about the arraignment of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed concludes with this sentence: 'C.I.A. officials have said that Mr. Mohammed was one of three detainees who were subjected to the simulated-drowning technique known as waterboarding during interrogation, which is described by some as torture.' If the Attorney General insisted that the sun rises in the west, would the New York Times treat it as a contested question?" Answer: Yes. The New York Times death spiral continue...