J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 359
May 29, 2018
The Roman Empire: October 49 BC-May 1453 AD: Branko Milan...
The Roman Empire: October 49 BC-May 1453 AD: Branko Milanovic: Economic Reflections on the Fall of Constantinople: "May 29 marks the anniversary of the Fall of Constantinople in 1453...
...Thinking of... what is called (somewhat inaccurately) the Eastern Roman Empire, led me to two, I hope interesting, observations.... The second observation has to do with trade and war... trading city-states like Venice and Genoa. If you believe that trade is all about peace there would be no reason why these city-states had to maintain large naval fleets, fight battles, conquer islands, negotiate, under military threat, special rights to tariff-free imports and exports. Trade, debt and the army always moved together. No tourist to any Greek island today will fail to observe large Venetian and Genoan fortresses that could not have been built without money and labor but also without a naval presence that allowed the control or conquest of the islands in the first place...
#shouldread
#history
Unfair to most conservative students. Most conservative s...
Unfair to most conservative students. Most conservative students at Berkeley do not attract the eye of California Hall. Most are just trying to figure stuff out���not hoping for a Fox cameo by trying to make A-As, Latinos, immigrants feel small. The highly estimable Nils Gilman is unfair to the typical conservative Berkeley student here: https://twitter.com/nils_gilman/status/1001480840776376321
With respect to the atypical conservative Berkeley student, however, he has their number...
#berkeley
#notetoself
#ontwitter
The Public Sphere and "Civility"
"Civility" looks very different depending on where you stand...
From here http://crookedtimber.org/2018/05/23/neo-marxism/ I have excerpted three short paragraphs very much worth reading and thinking about:
Andrew Sullivan: "This bloggy exchange Ta-Nehisi and I had in 2009, on the very subject of identity politics and its claims.... there was a civility about it, an actual generosity of spirit, that transcended the boundaries of race and background.... The Atlantic was crammed with ideological opposites then, jostling together in the same office, and our engagement with each other and our readerships was a crackling and productive one. There was much more of that back then, before Twitter swallowed blogging, before identity politics became completely nonnegotiable, before we degenerated into these tribal swarms of snark and loathing. I think of it now as a distant island, appearing now and then, as the waves go up and down. The riptide of tribalism can capture us all in the end, until we drown in it..."
Ta Nehisi Coates: "I got incredibly used to learning from people... quite good at their craft, who I felt, and pardon my language, were fucking racist. And that was just the way the world was. I didn���t really have the luxury of having teachers who I necessarily felt, you know, saw me completely as a human being.... You can go into The Atlantic archives right now, and you can see me arguing with Andrew Sullivan about whether black people are genetically disposed to be dumber than white people. I actually had to take this seriously, you understand? I couldn���t speak in a certain way to Andrew. I couldn���t speak to Andrew on the blog the way I would speak to my wife about what Andrew said on the blog in the morning when it was just us.... I learned how to blog from Andrew. That was who I actually learned from. That was who actually helped me craft my voice. Even recognizing who he was and what he was, you know, I learned from him..."
Henry Farrell: "In juxtaposition, Sullivan���s and Coates���s pieces provide a miniature history of how a certain variety of self-congratulatory openness to inquiry is in actual fact a barbed thicket of power relations. What Sullivan depicts as a 'different time' when 'neither of us denied each other���s good faith or human worth', is, in Coates��� understanding, a time where he was required to 'take seriously' the argument that 'black people are genetically disposed to be dumber than white people' as a price of entry into the rarified heights of conversation at the Atlantic. The 'civility' and 'generosity of spirit' that supported 'human to human' conversation is juxtaposed to Coates���s 'teachers' who didn���t see him 'completely as a human being'. What was open and free spirited debate in Sullivan���s depiction, was to Coates a loaded and poisonous dialogue where he could only participate if he shut up about what he actually believed. Juxtaposing these two gives us a very different understanding of Sullivan���s claim that 'identity politics [have become] completely nonnegotiable', and we are all being pulled down by the 'riptide of tribalism'..."
Finished? Good. Perhaps I should simply say that Henry Farrell has written everything that needs to be written here.
Or perhaps I should note that, back in The Day, it was not us, their adversaries on, say, the 2001 tax cut, who were denying George W. Bush's and Andrew Sullivan's good faith in the debate. It was Andrew Sullivan himself glorying that neither George W. Bush nor he was arguing in good faith:
The fact that Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smoke screen of 'compassionate conservatism' shows how uphill the struggle is.... A certain amount of B.S. is necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state.... I just hope the smoke doesn't clear before the spenders get their hands on our wallets again...
Sullivan felt himself under no obligation to be honest or civil back when he thought he was riding high. Rather the reverse. And it was not just Black people���although it was far stronger there. Those of us who thought that, like, arithmetic in the public sphere should be accurate were also not worth engaging in good faith.
Let me venture to generalize: Andrew Sullivan was always an interesting thinker, in that "civility" was something that others needed to extend to him but not that he was under any obligation to extend to anybody else. Most of all, we remember Andrew Sullivan after 911:
The middle part of the country���the great red zone that voted for Bush���is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead���and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column...
and:
We might as well be aware of the enemy within the West itself-a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column that will surely ramp up its hatred in the days and months ahead...
It was not just Ta-Nehisi Coates but everybody who had doubts about the rush to conquer Iraq who had good reason to think they were regarded by Sullivan as something less than partners in argument and discernment.
May 29, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality
Ezra Klein Is Shrill! (Scott McClellan Watch): Ezra: "'The White House would prefer that I not talk openly about my experiences... I have a higher loyalty than my loyalty necessary to my past work. That's a loyalty to the truth'���Scott McClellan. There are no revelations in Scott McClellan's new book.... Just the tinny bleatings of a man who abetted a lying, disastrous presidency because it seemed like a good gig, but doesn't want his name maligned by the historians..."
Trade and Distribution: A Multisector Stolper-Samuelson Finger Exercise: Support for free trade tends to be stronger in democratic than in authoritarian regimes. The scarce factor of production tends to be, well, scarce. Hence not many potential voters own a lot of it. Hence the political support for trade protection in any system of government that gives weight to broad as opposed to strong preferences will tend to produce trade liberalization...
Spencer Ackerman on Senator Jim Webb: Ackerman likes him.... I am not so sure. I remember Webb as a Reagan Administration Navy Secretary who was too effective at fighting for an increased share of the Pentagon budget for the navy during the Cold War. Ronnie didn't seem to understand that the Soviet Union was a land power, and Webb appears to have put his service first. Not a new thing in the Pentagon, but still...
New York Times Death Spiral Watch (Thomas Friedman Edition): Duncan Black has commanded us to spend tomorrow celebrating our great good fortune in having geniuses like Thomas Friedman shaping our foreign policy thinking, and wonderful newspapers like the New York Times to publish them. Here's Duncan: "Tomorrow is the 5th anniversary of Tom Friedman going on Charlie Rose and telling the world that the Iraq war was fought to tell Iraqis to 'Suck On This'... because we could!..."
Reason to Believe that This Is Not Yet the Bottom for the Housing Market
Nunc Dimittis II: A catch by Matt Stoller: "Bush Reelect eCampaign Director: McClellan savaged for saying what everyone knows to be true: 'Feeling for Scott McLellan. Nice getting savaged for saying what everyone knows to be true anyway.' That was Bush-Cheney eCampaign Director Mike Turk, 16 hours ago on his Twitter feed...
Scott McClellan Fills in a Piece of the Bush Puzzle: So George W. Bush did send a signal to the CIA: if we don't like what your relatives say, we will burn your covert agents. Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now...
May 28, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality
Digby Watches Rick Hertzberg Jump the Shark in an Impressive Way, for Its Kind: Basically, Hertzberg says that Chris Matthews is a great American because... because... because... it's not clear why, other than that Chris Matthews was good to Rick Hertzberg when Rick Hertzberg was young. Digby: "The Villagers Defend The Perimeter: There are times lately when I feel as if I'm back in 2003. I'm being told that up is down and black is white and that what i'm seeing just isn't real. It's actually much more disorienting than it was then because this time it's coming from the left side of the dial. For instance: 'I have more reasons than most to love Chris Matthews....
"'It���s my impression, subjective and biased by friendship though it may be, that, certainly in the past five years or so, Matthews has been considerably tougher on the right than on the left. He was fierce on the Swift Boat slanderers. And on the war he has been magnificent...' The fact that he voted for Bush notwithstanding, of course. And yes, on the war, he certainly has been magnificent... chief among the cheerleaders when Bush delivered a nationally televised speech from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, in which he declared that '[m]ajor combat operations in Iraq have ended', all the while standing under a banner reading: 'Mission Accomplished'.
"Despite lingering questions over the continued violence in Iraq, the failure to locate weapons of mass destruction, and the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein, Matthews fawned over Bush: 'He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. ... He looks for real. ... [H]e didn't fight in a war, but he looks like he does.... We're proud of our president.... Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president...'
"Hertzberg ends his column with this: 'Chris Matthews is a net plus for American politics and American society. If he decides to pack it in and run for office, I plan to max out.' You know, I hear a lot about the need for change in our politics... I hear a lot of it from allegedly liberal pundits like Hertzberg and Matthews who, without irony, tell tales of their earlier flights on Carter's Airforce One and recount their adventures in the Reagan years.... And it never occurs to anybody that it's the liberal punditocrisy that's stale and tired and most in need of changing. If we are now believing that Chris Matthews is a "net plus" for American politics, then the reality based community has followed the Bush administration straight down the rabbit hole.... Let's just say that I'd be a lot more impressed with Matthews' pitbull routine if he used it, just once, on somebody with some real clout instead of low level nobodies who don't appear on TV regularly. Bullying people without power just doesn't impress me much, especially when you have people on the show every day who actually have some and you kiss their asses with gusto. Sorry, not impressed...
Nunc Dimittis: ""Lord, now may thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen the salvation." Something that I thought I would never see has come to pass: Republican thug Karl Rove has denounced former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan as the equivalent of "a left-wing weblogger." Let me say that I have never been prouder to be a left-wing weblogger...
New York Times "Suck on This!" Day: Hoisted from the Archives
Suck on This! Day: Duncan Black has commanded us to spend tomorrow celebrating our great good fortune in having geniuses like Thomas Friedman shaping our foreign policy thinking, and wonderful newspapers like the New York Times to publish them. Here's Duncan:
The... anniversary of Tom Friedman going on Charlie Rose and telling the world that the Iraq war was fought to tell Iraqis to "Suck On This"... because we could! I hope some of you will find your own creative ways to celebrate this most special of days.
Friedman: I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.... We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that [terrorism] bubble, and there was only one way to do it.... What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?" You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This. Okay. That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could...
#shouldread
#hoistedfromthearchives
Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads...
Doug J. Balloon: "'The coarsening of discourse' is a standard conservative pundit lament, but nothing illustrates the unfortunate reality better than the writings of conservative pundits themselves. Read a typical George Will column. It's probably wrong but the most aesthetically disturbing thing you're likely to encounter is a Mark Twain quote taken badly out of context. Read a typical Bobo, Bret, or Douthat column and you'll find discussions of how many sex partners a teen should have, defenses of pedophilia, and sex robots..."
I can't help it. Every time I see a 60 plus male from the South or the Midwest, I cannot help but think: "There goes an easily grifted moron!" The strong that has to be rolled uphill to keep Trumpland from falling further behind the rest of the country is very large and heavy: Paul Krugman: What���s the Matter With Trumpland?: "Regional convergence in per-capita incomes has stopped dead. And the relative economic decline of lagging regions has been accompanied by growing social problems...
David Glasner: Neo- and Other Liberalisms: "The point of neoliberalism 1.0��was to moderate classical laissez-faire liberal orthodoxy...
The usual dodge here is to make "the money" a trader deploys proportional to the gap between the current price and their estimate, and so dodge this question completely: Dan Davies: "The 'Manski Bounds'.... How surprisingly little information you can extract from prices.... All the price tells you is that half the money thinks the true value is more than that and half thinks it's less. It doesn't tell you how much more or how much less. I think this matters a lot when you're trying to analyse fast moving markets like TRY or BTPs. Most of the people selling are selling because their guess about true value has moved a long way, not because the price has moved and they switched from the bid to the offer..."
Not quite true. It is what the Left New Dealers' consensus was. They had lost power in the U.S. But enough of them made it across the Atlantic to do a lot of good: Daniel Davies: "If you like the German social, political and economic model, it's worth remembering that what it really represents is the consensus of American opinion on how to build a stable non-Communist polity if you were starting from scratch, circa 1945..."
Wall of Shame:
Morgan Gstalter: McConnell: Midterms could be 'a Category 3, 4 or 5' storm for GOP: "'We know the wind is going to be in our face. We don���t know whether it���s going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5'...
Matthew Yglesias: "The highbrow intellectual leaders of the modern conservative movement explicitly conceptualized it as a white nationalist undertaking. Trump is true to this legacy and his intra-movement critics are the innovators...
Eight years of Governor Sam Brownback has seen Kansas lose 8% of its jobs relative to the national average. Now Kansas is Ground Zero for Trump's trade war. Joshua Green: Chinese Sorghum Tariffs Will Hit Hard in Trump-friendly Kansas: "Trump���s Trade War Hits Another Red State: What���s the matter with Kansas? It���ll be hardest hit by new Chinese tariffs...
Will Wilkinson: The DACA and immigration debates are about whether Latinos are ���real Americans���: "Challenging the idea that Latino Americans can be truly American undercuts the very idea of America...
Just when you think the mainstream media could not sink any lower into misogyny and stupidity, it's the Atlantic Monthly!: Scott Lemieux: Are you provoked yet?: "Both James Bennet and Fred Hiatt have been asked to hold David Bradley���s beer...
Ezra Klein: @ezraklein on Twitter: "I don���t know what the [New York] Times should���ve done with Thrush. But I watched the efforts to plant oppo and smear @lkmcgann in the aftermath of her reporting. Anyone who thinks coming forward with these experiences is easy, even now, is wrong. I am beyond proud to be her colleague..."
Yes, this is as bad a violation of academic standards as it looks: Henry Farrell: The public choice of public choice: "Now this... 'financial ties to the Charles Koch Foundation... [but] George Mason University has cited its academic independence.
The Brexiters never had a plan for what they would do if they won the referendum. And they still do not have a plan. I do not see a road other than "transitional" arrangements that keep things as they are without the UK having any voice in Brussels���"transitional" arrangements that will keep getting indefinitely extended: Robert Hutton: Stuck In the Middle: These Are Theresa May's Four Brexit Options: "Her inner Brexit Cabinet has rejected her proposed customs relationship with the European Union...
Gabrielle Coppola: Trump���s TPP Pullout May Have Cost Missouri Its Harley Factory: "Harley-Davidson Inc.���s chief executive officer said he may have kept a plant open in Missouri if the U.S. had stayed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement that President Donald Trump withdrew from last year...
WTF happened to Brendan Nyhan? The braineater has eaten his brain: Josh Marshall: "There are several problems with this logic.: The first is that you are applying jury trial standards to what are political questions. You are also applying statutory standards where they do not exist. As a factual matter the obstruction question is not in doubt...
Some Fairly-Recent Links:
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
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
May 28, 2018
Note to Self: My cousin Phil Lord and his partner Chris M...
Note to Self: My cousin Phil Lord and his partner Chris Miller are geniuses for casting Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story. And we will never see what they wanted to do with the script. But looking at the financials I do not see how this thing is supposed to make any money...
Doug J. Balloon: "'The coarsening of discourse' is a stan...
Doug J. Balloon: "'The coarsening of discourse' is a standard conservative pundit lament, but nothing illustrates the unfortunate reality better than the writings of conservative pundits themselves. Read a typical George Will column. It's probably wrong but the most aesthetically disturbing thing you're likely to encounter is a Mark Twain quote taken badly out of context. Read a typical Bobo, Bret, or Douthat column and you'll find discussions of how many sex partners a teen should have, defenses of pedophilia, and sex robots..."
#shoulread
Will Someone Please Tell Me Why William Saletan Gets Paid to Not Do His Homework?: Monday Smackdown
Ah. Someone who wishes me ill informs me that William Saletan has surfaced, but cannot tell his own story straight: William Saletan (2018): Stop talking about race and IQ. Take it from someone who did: "A person with a taste for puncturing taboos learns about racial gaps in IQ scores and the idea that they might be genetic...
...He writes or speaks about it, credulously or unreflectively. Every part of his argument is attacked: the validity of IQ, the claim that it���s substantially heritable, and the idea that races can be biologically distinguished. The offender is denounced as racist when he thinks he���s just defending science against political correctness. I know what it���s like to be this person because, 11 years ago, I was that person.... Here���s my advice: You can talk about the genetics of race. You can talk about the genetics of intelligence. But stop implying they���re the same thing. Connecting intelligence to race adds nothing useful. It overextends the science you���re defending, and it engulfs the whole debate in moral flames...
What William Saletan does not say is: "Not only did I write credulously and unreflectively about claimed genetic racial gaps in IQ scores, but I did an incompetent and zero-assed job of doing my research. Why? Because I have insufficient work ethic, I am not very good at my job, I wanted to believe, I wanted to 'puncture taboos', and I thought trying to make African-Americans feel smaller was kinda fun."
Am I wrong? Anybody want to push back on whether Saletan does his homework? Anybody have anything from William Saletan worth reading to bring forward?
Let's turn the mike over to the not unintelligent Cosma Shalizi:
Cosma Shalizi (2007): Last Words on Saletan: "Saletan has written an epilogue, titled 'Regrets', to his series, which is a very curious piece of work indeed. Here's the end of it in its entirety (except for the links)...
...In researching this subject, I focused on published data and relied on peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue. As a result, I missed something I could have picked up from a simple glance at Wikipedia:
For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to "the scientific study of heredity and human differences." During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime ("Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous") and heresy ("Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people"). New Century publishes a magazine called American Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences. I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I'm sorry. I owe you better than that.
In my first post about this, I said that there were two possible interpretations of Saletan's actions: that he didn't know that the ideas he was spreading were crap, or that he did, but spread them anyway to advance an agenda.
Saying that the second interpretation was more charitable wasn't just a joke.
Sadly, this partial mea culpa supports the first interpretation, that of incompetence. To put it in "shorter William Saletan" form, what he is saying is: I am shocked���shocked!���to discover that the people who devote their careers to providing supposedly-scientific backing for racist ideas are, in fact, flaming racists. And he does seem to be shocked, though it is hard (as Yglesias says) to see why, logically, he should strain out those gnats he displays for our horrified inspection while swallowing the camel of group inferiority (and telling his readers that camel is really great and the coming thing). This indicates a level of incompetence as a reporter and researcher that is really quite stunning���as Brad DeLong says, this seems like a trained incapacity.
But let me back up a minute to the bit about relying on "peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue". There are two problems here. One has to do with the fact that, as I said, it is really very easy to find the rebuttals showing that Rushton's papers, in particular, are a tragic waste of precious trees and disk-space. For example, in the very same issue of the very same journal as the paper by Rushton and Jensen which was one of Saletan's main sources, Richard Nisbett, one of the more important psychologists of our time, takes his turn banging his head against this particular wall. Or, again, if Saletan had been at all curious about the issue of head sizes, which seems to have impressed him so much, it would have taken about five minutes with Google Scholar to find a demonstration that this is crap.
So I really have no idea what Saletan means when he claimed he relied on published rebuttals���did he think they would just crawl into his lap and sit there, meowing to be read? If I had to guess, I'd say that the most likely explanation of Saletan's writings is that he spent a few minutes with a search engine looking for hits on racial differences in intelligence, took the first few blogs and papers he found that way as The Emerging Scientific Consensus, and then stopped. But detailed inquiry into just how he managed to screw up so badly seems unprofitable.
The other problem with his supposed reliance on peer review is that he seems confused about how that institution works.... A journal's peer review is only as good as the peers it uses as reviewers. If everyone, or almost everyone, who referees for some journal is in the grip of the same mistake, then they will not catch it in papers they review, and the journal will propagate it.... Any group of quack scholars with a shared delusion can put together a journal, dub each other peer reviewers, and go on their cheerful way by endorsing each others' work for their journal. (One of the ways you can tell that intelligent design creationism is a propaganda front and not a real, if stupid, scholarly movement is that their effort to put together just such a journal was never more than half-assed, and it's moribund for some time now.) This isn't even always a bad thing, since sometimes people who seem like quacks are in fact right, and doing things like starting their own journals gives them a chance to get their act together and assemble a convincing case. But all of this does mean that the peer-review filter is a very weak and accepting one, especially on controversial topics. It does not seem unreasonable of me to ask that those who set themselves up as science reporters grasp this...
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