J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 363
May 20, 2018
1870: The Real Industrial Revolution?: Hoisted from the Archives from Ten Years Ago
1870: The Real Industrial Revolution?:: The most important fact to grasp about the world economy of 1870 is that the economy then belonged much more to its past of the Middle Ages than to its future of���well, of us, and what our successors eventually decide they want to use as an overarching term with which to label our age of fuel, machine, and digit.
If, back in the 1870s, you had bought the latest edition of the world���s most eminent economics textbook you would have read:
Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being...
The book���s author, John Stuart Mill, went on to explain himself. All the mechanical inventions of his and previous ages, he said:
have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot...
John Stuart Mill���Britain���s and the world���s leading economist, feminist, public intellectual, moral philosopher, and colonial bureaucrat���had originally written those words in 1847 for the first, 1848 edition of his Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy.
As time marched on from the first edition of 1848 to the seventh edition of 1871 he revised many pieces of the book: changing his views or at least his expression of his views on Ireland, socialism, the application of machinery to agriculture, immigration, the nature of interest on capital, and on whether it is useful to model the average level of wages as the result of dividing a fixed circulating wages-fund by the number of workers (in the last edition he concludes that it is not). But Mill did not change his ���Hitherto��� sentence, and did not change his judgment that all the mechanical inventions in the world had not yet even begun to yield their ���great changes in human destiny.���
John Stuart Mill���s claim���that even as late as 1871 the Industrial Revolution had not yet really begun to matter very much���may well strike you as surprising, even bizarre:
Was not the steam engine invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712?
Was not the spinning jenny invented by Thomas Hargreaves in 1764?
Was not the first cotton mill built in 1771?
Was not the thirty-five mile Liverpool and Manchester Railroad opened in Britain on September 15, 1830?
And was not that the day on which William Huskisson M.P. (1770-1830), former President of the Board of Trade (the equivalent in England of the Secretary of Commerce) became the first human to be killed in a railway accident?
Were there not 20,000 miles of railroads worldwide by 1850?
Were there not 25,000 miles of telegraph wires in the United States alone by 1850?
Didn���t all this matter?
John Stuart Mill may or may not have been completely right insofar as England itself and alone was concerned���that depends on where you place the emphasis���but he was undoubtedly and completely right if we take a step back and look at the globe as a whole. According to the estimates of Robert Allen et al., in Amsterdam in Holland, in Milan in Italy, and in Beijing in China it looks as though working-class real wages were substantially lower in 1870 than they had been a century and a half before. Real wages in London in England had shared the decline of Amsterdam until early in the nineteenth century���but had then diverged and had advanced to perhaps slightly more than their 1730 level by 1870. Only Leipzig in Germany of the sample of cities studied by Allen et al. shows any substantial edge in prosperity in 1870 compared to 1730 (and the marked difference in stability in the Leipzig real wage series between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century casts some doubt on whether the same thing is being measured in both centuries).
Perhaps John Stuart Mill was wrong about Leipzig in Germany: perhaps by 1870 the coming of the Industrial Revolution had substantially lightened the toil and raised the material well-being of those living in the valley of the Elbe River. Certainly the Industrial Revolution was putting its thumb on the scales of material well-being for the inhabitants of London in England. The nineteenth-century divergence between the courses of real wages in London and those of Amsterdam just across the narrow part of the North Sea surely shows the differential imprint of the machine- and commerce-driven industrial prosperity of England. But this appears to have been able to do no more than to hold working-class material standards of living in London steady, at least compared to 1730.
An alternative, more optimistic picture of England in the nineteenth century is painted by the estimates of Gregory Clark. He holds that in England the real wages of workers had by the 1860s probably attained a level half again as high as that earned by their predecessors of the previous century���and perhaps twice as high as those seen on average during the Middle Ages. Thus England by 1870 was supporting five times as many people on a better diet than had typically been the case half a millennium earlier.
But even if real wages in England in 1870 were substantially higher than past averages from the Middle Ages, real wages in China and India remained low by any standard. Travelers from western Europe to Asia in the 1600s and before had been impressed not just by the scale of the empires and the luxurious wealth of their rulers but by the scale of operations and prosperity of the merchant classes and by the good order and absence of extraordinary poverty among the masses of the relatively poor. By the 1800s this was no longer true: travelers��� reports then focused as much on mass poverty and near-starvation as on high-craft and high- culture luxury, and the wealth of the court took on a sinister ���orientalist��� cast against the background of the poverty of the masses that it had not possessed to nearly as great a degree a few centuries earlier.
Steam power and iron-making and spinning jennies and power looms and telegraph wires had made fortunes for a relatively few by 1870, but had not yet changed, in John Stuart Mill���s phrase, ���human destiny.��� Part of this failure was a matter of space and time. The world of 1870 was still much larger in terms of communication and transportation than our world is. It takes more time to cover space when your speed is low, and the century and a half from Newcomen and the century from Arkwright to 1870 was not enough for steam and iron and mechanical spinning to spread across the globe���but the world of 1870 was shrinking rapidly.. The iron-hulled steamship, the submarine telegraph cable, and the gunboat were rapidly creating a much smaller world which transport, communication, and imperial rule could cover quickly indeed.
Rather more of this failure was due to the fact that individual inventions had been invented, but that invention as a process had not yet been invented���or perhaps it is better to say that it had not yet been routinized, bureaucratized, and systematized. You had the Newcomens in steam and the Arkwrights in textiles and the Wedgwoods in pottery and the Stephensons in railroads and the Isambard Kingdom Brunels in ironwrought infrastructure who were inventor-entrepreneurs in one narrow line of business and technology. You did not yet have the Thomas Alva Edisons and their industrial research labs to create the business of invention and innovation as businesses in their own right.
Thus it may be best to take the historical axis on which the wheel of economic modernity, modern economic growth, the modern economy���whatever you choose to call it���turns to be 1870 rather than 1720: not the first atmospheric steam engine to pump water out of coal mines built to supply London with fuel to keep warm for the winter, but instead the triple of the submarine telegraph, the iron-hulled ocean-going steamship, and the industrial research laboratory. They were what made the truest Industrial Revolution���the one that was overwhelming in importance, global in scope, and unstoppable.
Comparative Deaths in Murder and Childbed: Dark Thoughts for a Royal Wedding Day: Note to Self
8 of 35 Monarchs of England from 1066 to 1850 dead in war or murder: 23%...
7 of 44 Queens of England from 1066 to 1850 dead and childbirth: 16%...
I am somewhat surprised: I had thought childbed would be a higher risk than war/murder. (But then there are Queens Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard who get murdered... Are there any more?)
May 19, 2018
Listening to Morris Dees: Notes to Self on "Forgiveness" and Social Action...
Listening at the Amherst College graduation to: Morris Dees: One Nation with Liberty and Justice for All. It struck me that Morris Dees of the SPLC speaks not as a lawyer but as a prophet. But when he spoke of "forgiveness" and of Martin Luther King, Jr., I found myself thinking that he wasn't expressing what he wanted to say very well���certainly not nearly as well as Martin Luther King, Jr., had...
Forgiveness, you see, is not supposed to be something that you get for free. It is not something you get by claiming to accept some messiah or other as your personal savior. It's not something that you demand from those you have harmed. For them, their forgiveness not a forgetting. Their forgiveness is, rather, a process one of the purposes of which is to engage you in the community. And, so engaged, you then owe the community something very valuable as reciprocity: the free gift of forgiveness leaves you with obligations, that you can choose to meet or not to meet.
What do you then owe the community as reciprocity for being forgiven by those of its members you have injured for your own past misdeeds? What you owe the community is true repentance. What is true repentance? "True repentance" is changing your life.
And here we get to the first of 95 of Martin Luther (1517): Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences: "Dominus et magister noster Iesus Christus dicendo `Penitentiam agite &c.��� omnem vitam fidelium penitentiam esse voluit..." "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, 'Repent', he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.... You don't say: I'm sorry; forgive me. Instead, you do. It is not really a saying thing at all.
Thus when Jesus says forgive your enemies "tibi usque septies: sed usque septuagies septies..." not seven times, but seventy time seven times..., that means that one is also making a pest of oneself seventy times seven times: asking that the one being forgiven truly repent���change their life���seventy times seven times.
This Martin Luther King, Jr., understood very well. He never tired of forgiving those who thought they were his enemies. But that was part of the process of never tiring of demanding that those who thought they were his enemies change their lives. And so we arrive at:
Martin Luther King, Jr.: My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence: "An Encounter With Reinhold Niebuhr: The prophetic and realistic elements in Niebuhr���s passionate style and profound thought were appealing to me, and I became so enamored of his social ethics that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything he wrote...
...I read Niebuhr���s critique of the pacifist position. Niebuhr had himself once been a member of the pacifist ranks.... His break with pacifism came in the early thirties, and the first full statement of his criticism of pacifism was in Moral Man and Immoral Society. Here he argued that there was no intrinsic moral difference between violent and nonviolent resistance. The social consequences of the two methods were different, he contended, but the differences were in degree rather than kind.
Later Niebuhr began emphasizing the irresponsibility of relying on nonviolent resistance when there was no ground for believing that it would be successful in preventing the spread of totalitarian tyranny. It could only be successful, he argued, if the groups against whom the resistance was taking place had some degree of moral conscience, as was the case in Gandhi���s struggle against the British.
Niebuhr���s ultimate rejection of pacifism was based primarily on the doctrine of man. He argued that pacifism failed to do justice to the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith, substituting for it a sectarian perfectionism which believes ���that divine grace actually lifts man out of the sinful contradictions of history and establishes him above the sins of the world.���...
As I continued to read, however, I came to see more and more the shortcomings of his position.... He interpreted pacifism as a sort of passive nonresistance to evil expressing naive trust in the power of love. But this was a serious distortion.... True pacifism is not nonresistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil.... Gandhi resisted evil with as much vigor and power as the violent resister, but he resisted with love instead of hate. True pacifism is not unrealistic submission to evil power... [but] rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart....
Niebuhr���s great contribution to contemporary theology is that he has refuted the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism.... Moreover, Niebuhr has�� extraordinary insight into human nature, especially the behavior of nations and social groups. He is keenly aware of the complexity of human motives and of the relation between morality and power. His theology is a persistent reminder of the reality of sin on every level of man���s existence. These elements in Niebuhr���s thinking helped me to recognize the illusions of a superficial optimism concerning human nature and the dangers of a false idealism. While I still believed in man���s potential for good, Niebuhr made me realize his potential for evil as well. Moreover, Niebuhr helped me to recognize the complexity of man���s social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil.
Many pacifists, I felt, failed to see this. All too many had an unwarranted optimism concerning man and leaned unconsciously toward self-righteousness.
It was my revolt against these attitudes under the influence of Niebuhr that accounts for the fact that in spite of my strong leaning toward pacifism, I never joined a pacifist organization. After reading Niebuhr, I tried to arrive at a realistic pacifism. In other words, I came to see the pacifist position not as sinless but as the lesser evil in the circumstances.
I felt then, and I feel now, that the pacifist would have a greater appeal if he did not claim to be free from the moral dilemmas that the Christian nonpacifist confronts...
A Honking List of 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
Thomas Philippon: Finance vs. Wal-Mart: Why are Financial Services so Expensive?
Sean Illing: Did Trump���s lawyer obstruct justice by floating pardons? 11 experts weigh in. - Vox: "Trump���s lawyer secretly floated pardons for Manafort and Flynn. He might have crossed a line..."
Gerard Roland: THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF YINGYI QIAN AND CHENGGANG XU TO ECONOMIC SCIENCE
Yingyi Qian
Ariel Kalil: Child development and parental engagement in rich and poor households
Paul Krugman: Putting the Ex-Con in Conservatism: "Massey Energy... Don Blankenship... sent to prison for conspiring to violate mine safety standards... appears to have a real chance at becoming the Republican candidate for senator from West Virginia.... G.O.P. politicians tend disproportionately to be con men (and in some cases, con women).... And the party���s base consists disproportionately of the easily conned..."
Anki
Ben A. Barres: Does gender matter?: "The suggestion that women are not advancing in science because of innate inability is being taken seriously by some high-profile academics. Ben A. Barres explains what is wrong with the hypothesis..."
Information Is Beautiful: Rhetological Fallacies���A list of Logical Fallacies & Rhetorical Devices with examples
Val Dusek: SOCIOBIOLOGY SANITIZED: THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND GENIC SELECTIONISM DEBATES: "Hereditarians suffered the embarrassment of the exposure of the later twin studies of Sir Cyril Burt as likely frauds.... Thomas Bouchard and colleagues... accounts of his research in all major news magazines and papers in the US... introduced a segment on telepathy among twins for the TV show Unsolved Mysteries.... Evolutionary psychologists such as Pinker (who contrast themselves with humanists by touting their own devotion to lawful
Wikipedia: Zhao Ziyang
Library Guides at UC Berkeley:
Jim Church: Introduction - GPP 115: Global Poverty: "Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium: Introduction..."
Jim Church: Philanthrocapitalism - GPP 115: Global Poverty - Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium - Library Guides at UC Berkeley: "Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium: Philanthrocapitalism..."
Wall Street Journal Editorial Board: Punishing America First: "Trump to Iowa: You���ll have to suffer while I force Xi Jinping to give in: Donald Trump and his advisers spent much of Friday telling everyone that the U.S. is not in a trade war with China, but investors weren���t buying it..."
Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: Interest Rate Rule Utility
Wikipedia: Taylor rule
Jared Bernstein (2016): Important new findings on inflation and unemployment from the new ERP
John Williams: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco | Three Questions on R-star: "Low r-star is a global phenomenon, is likely to be very persistent, and is not confined only to safe assets..."
Ken White: The Search of Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen's Office: What We Can Infer Immediately
Becoming Human: Artificial Intelligence Magazine
Rowan Langford: Stats Models vs SKLearn for Linear Regression
Statsmodels Examples
Allen Downey: Probably Overthinking It
Think Stats
Think Bayes
Think Python
Think Complexity
Manton Reece: Micro.blog
Gravatar: Globally Recognized Avatars
Jo Marie Scaglia: Caffetteria
raindrop drop top
Martha Stewart: Peel-and-Eat Shrimp
Augie's Montreal Deli: "Served on Metropolis Bakery Deli Rye Bread, with Uncle���s Famous Pickles, and choice of yellow or spicy brown mustard..."
Katie McDonough: Jezebel Regrets Its Decision to Hire Cannibal Witch as Writer-at-Large: "..."
Steve M.: THERE'S NO REASON TO LISTEN TO CONSERVATIVE THINKERS, BUT EDITORS WANT THEM MORE THAN EVER: "The mainstream media has spent so many years insisting that... the extremism of talk radio and Fox, Gingrichian bomb-throwing, the Bush push for the Iraq War, torture, disastrously hands-off financial regulation, and disenfranchisement of non-whites, and then Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and the norm-shattering GOP Congress of the Obama years... was fine. Surely it'll be fine again..."
TidBITS: Everything You Need to Know about the TidBITS 2018 Infrastructure
Marion Laboure et al.: The Rise of Silicon China: "Key features of Chinese history and culture have put it in a position to become the global leader in artificial-intelligence technologies, surpassing even the tech giants of Silicon Valley..."
Sara Benincasa: Better Headlines For A WaPo WASP
A Waspy Chick: How Come Jewish Men Keep Breaking Up With Me?
Emma Adler: The Man Without a Brain
Michael Wolff: : "Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion..."
Ian Millhiser: The Supreme Court was itching to strike down a partisan gerrymander today, but has no idea how: "There are almost certainly five votes to strike down Maryland's gerrymander, but there's no clarity about how the Court will do it..."
Orsetta Causa and Mikkel Hermansen: Income redistribution through taxes and transfers: "Taxes and transfers are less effective at reducing inequality today than they were in the mid-1990s. This drop in effectiveness has largely been driven by declining cash transfers, with a smaller, more heterogeneous role for personal income taxes..."
Joseph MacKay and Christopher David LaRoche: Why Is There No Reactionary International Theory?: "A field that ignores reaction as such may be blind to reactionary political practice. This blindness in turn weakens the responses scholars can offer..."
Sushi Japanese Restaurant Kui Shin Bo
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt: Okonomiyaki (Japanese Cabbage Pancake) Recipe: "The shredded or chopped cabbage in the base is a given, but beyond that, you can add whatever you'd like to the batter. Once you've got a few Japanese staples in your pantry (all of which have a shelf life of forever), making it at home is cheap, quick, easy, and filling..."
Gideon Rachman: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and the Lure of the Strongman
Robert Shiller (2017): Narrative Economics: "The human brain has always been highly tuned towards narratives, whether factual or not, to justify ongoing actions...
Martin Feldstein (1979): Introduction to The American Economy in Transition: Weekend Reading
Martin Feldstein (1979): Introduction to The American Economy in Transition: "The post-[World] War [II] period began in an atmosphere of doubt and fear...
Many economists believed that the nation would slip back into the deep recession from which it had escaped only as the war began. In the decade between 1929 and 1939, real gross national product (GNP) had not grown at all, and the official unemployment rate had reached one-fourth of the labor force. During the war, the economy had returned to full or overfull use of its capacity: real GNP rose 75 percent between 1939 and 1944, while the unemployment rate fell to less than 2 percent. Even many optimists worried that demobilization and the transition to a civilian economy would lead to a new period of long-term stagnation caused by inadequate demand.
Real output did decline as the war ended, and the unemployment rate did begin to rise. Real GNP fell by nearly 20 percent between 1944 and 1947. As ten million men and women left the armed forces, total employment (civilian and armed forces combined) declined by nearly 10 percent and the unemployment rate rose to nearly 4 percent. But the fears and doubts of the "secular stagnationists" were unwarranted. After 1947 the economy began a period of remarkable growth and stability. In the next decade, real GNP rose 45 percent, and in the decade that followed another 48 percent. In only one of those twenty years did real GNP fall by as much as 1 percent, and that was in 1954, when military spending had been sharply reduced. This sustained and rapid expansion had occurred with a relatively stable price level; the annual rise in the consumer price index averaged only 2 percent. The first two decades of the postwar period were a time of unsurpassed economic prosperity, stability, and optimism.
The contrast between the strength and achievement of the economy during those years and its poor record since then signals a major change in the performance of the economy over the postwar period. At the aggregate level, real GNP growth slowed from an annual rate of 3.9 percent between 1947 and 1967 to only 2.9 percent between 1967 and 1979. The growth of productivity per man-hour in the private business sector dropped from an annual rate of 3.2 percent during 1947-67 to less than 1.5 percent since 1967 and less than 1 percent since 1973. The average unemployment rate rose from 4.7 percent of the labor force to 5.8 percent. The average rate of consumer price index (CPI) inflation jumped from 2 percent to 6.7 percent (since 1967) with an acceleration to an average of nearly 9 percent since 1973 and over 13 percent in 1979. The Standard and Poor's index of common stock prices, an indicator of both after-tax profitability and investors' expectations about the future of the economy, rose sixfold between 1949 and 1969. Even after adjusting for the rise in the general consumer price level3 this index of share prices increased by more than 300 percent. In the decade since 1969, however, the index rose only 10 percent and in constant dollars fell nearly 50 percent. The poor performance of the economy in recent years can also be seen at a less aggregate level: a falling share of national income devoted to net investment and to research and development; increasing pressures and risks in the financial sector; low profitability and an aging stock of plant and equipment in many specific industries; and a deteriorating performance of United States exports.
There is a strong temptation to regard the poor performance of the past decade as the beginning of a new long-term adverse trend for the American economy. It is, however, too early to know whether such an extrapolation is really warranted. Some of the poor record of the 1970s has undoubtedly been due to inappropriate macroeconomic policies adopted during the Vietnam War, to the change in the production policy of the OPEC cartel, and to other disturbances whose impacts will eventually fade away. But the deteriorating performance of the economy may also have more fundamental causes that will not automatically recede. Indeed, some of the sources of our performance may now be so deeply rooted in our social and political system that they cannot be eliminated even when the causes of the problem become better understood. It is clear that there is little hope of reversing the poor performance that has lasted for more than a decade unless the underlying causes are identified and changed.
Many of the papers and comments in this volume point to the expanded role of government as a major reason, perhaps the major reason, for the deterioration of our economic performance. The government's mismanagement of monetary and fiscal policy has contributed to the instability of aggregate output and to the rapid rise in inflation. Government regulations are a principal cause of lower productivity growth and of the decline in research and development. The growth of government income-transfer programs has exacerbated the instability of family life and perhaps the decline in the birthrate. The low rate of saving and the slow growth of the capital stock reflect tax rules, macroeconomic policies, and the growth of social insurance programs.
The expanded role of government has undoubtedly been the most important change in the structure of the American economy in the post-war period. The extent to which this major change in structure has been the cause of the major decline in performance cannot be easily assessed. This introductory essay is certainly not the place to evaluate just how much of our recent problem derives from specific government policies or to assess the positive contributions that government policies have made during the postwar period. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that government policies do deserve substantial blame for the adverse experience of the past decade. I would like, therefore, to devote these few pages to examining the general character of government policies and of government decision-making that causes it to create problems of the type we have experienced.
Economists generally regard all economic choices as the result of explicit comparisons of costs and benefits. When an individual buys an apple rather than a pear, we assume that he has considered the prices of each and the pleasures that he would expect from the apple and the pear. Even for more complex choices with uncertain future benefits, such as an individual's choice among careers or a firm's choice among investment options, the economist automatically assumes that the decision-maker has considered the possible costs and benefits of the option he selects. Individuals and firms may occasionally be surprised by adverse consequences they had not anticipated, but on average the outcomes should correspond to expectations. Applying such a "rational choice" view to government policies would imply that successive governments made deliberate decisions to accept certain adverse consequences in order to achieve other goals: for example, that the current high inflation was accepted in order to avoid more unemployment; that the low rates of saving and investment were accepted in order to have tax policies and transfer programs that could more equally distribute disposable income; or that the low rate of R&D spending and the fall in productivity were accepted as a consequence of imposing regulations that could protect the environment and the safety of workers.
I find this picture of economically rational choice implausible. I find it much more believable that the adverse consequences of government policies have been largely the unintended and unexpected by-products of well-meaning policies that were adopted without looking beyond their immediate purpose or understanding the magnitudes of their adverse long-run consequences. Expansionary monetary and fiscal policies were adopted throughout the past fifteen years in the hope of lowering the unemployment rate but without anticipating the higher inflation rate that would eventually follow. High tax rates on investment income were enacted and the social security retirement benefits were increased with- out considering the subsequent impact on investment and saving. Regu- lations were imposed to protect health and safety without evaluating the reduction in productivity that would result or the effect of an uncertain regulatory future on long-term R&D activities.
Similarly, I believe the government never considered that raising the amount and duration of unemployment benefits to the current high levels to avoid hardship among the unemployed would encourage layoffs and discourage reemployment; that Medicare and Medicaid, introduced to help the elderly and the poor, might lead to an explosion in health care costs; that welfare programs, introduced and expanded to help poor families, might weaken family structures; or that federal aid through the tax laws and through special credit programs to encourage homeownership would have such adverse effects on the cities, precipitating the relocation of business and consequent poverty and other problems for those who remained behind. The list of well-meaning policies with unintended adverse consequences could be extended almost without limit.
Moreover, in many cases the adverse consequences have resulted not from the introduction of fundamentally new programs and policies, but from the fact that old programs are retained and expanded in a changed economic environment. Social security and unemployment compensation were introduced in the 1930s; the differences between the economy then and now would imply corresponding differences in the likely impact of these programs. The high rate of unemployment, the lack of investment demand, and the low rate of personal income tax constituted an environment in the 1930s in which the side effects of social security and unemployment compensation would be relatively innocuous. Today's tight labor market, capital scarcity, and high personal tax rates imply that these programs now impede employment and capital formation. Similarly, our personal and business tax laws were designed for an economy with little or no inflation. The interaction of this tax structure with the current high inflation rates causes extremely high effective tax rates on capital income, a discouragement to saving, and a distortion of investment away from plant and equipment toward housing and consumer durables.
Unfortunately, even when the inappropriateness of old policies is recognized, change is difficult to achieve. Existing programs are main- tained even though the same programs would not be adopted today. These programs survive and grow with the help of sympathetic bureaucrats and well-organized beneficiary groups. Loyalties develop to the form of public programs rather than to their basic purpose.
There is a fundamental reason why well-intentioned government policies often have adverse consequences. The government in its decision-making is inherently myopic, more myopic than either households or firms. Political accountability means that a policy will be judged on its apparent effects within as little as two years. A congressman or senator may understand the long-run implications of a policy, but the relevance to him of those long-run effects is very limited if voters look only at the short-run impact. The political process lacks the equivalent of capital assets through which private decision-makers are rewarded or penalized for the long-term consequences of previous decisions. And because the political process does not reward or punish elected officials for the long-term consequences of their actions, there is little or no incentive for these officials to learn about such long-term effects. Political myopia reflects the public's general inability to anticipate the long-run consequences of political decisions and even to associate those consequences when they occur with the policies that caused them. It is not surprising therefore that well-meaning policies frequently have unexpected adverse consequences and that policies with short-run costs and long-run benefits are not adopted.
The nature of the political decision-making process is perhaps most apparent in the development of macroeconomic policy. In the early 1960s, expansionary monetary and fiscal policies were pursued in what might be described as a rational choice based on the Phillips curve analysis that was then widely accepted by the economics profession. But later in the decade President Lyndon Johnson rejected the warnings of his economic advisors that taxes had to be raised in order to avoid an accelerating rate of inflation. Johnson chose to accept an increased long-run inflation rate in order to avoid the short-run political cost of a tax increase. His choice, while perhaps politically rational, was economically myopic. During the 1970s, the government and the monetary authorities focused on the short-run goal of reducing unemployment through expansionary policies that served only to exacerbate the inflationary situation. If escaping from the current high rate of inflation requires a sustained period of increased unemployment and economic slack, the shortsighted- ness of the political process may make this very difficult to achieve.
The myopia of the political process is also reflected in policies that discriminate against saving and investment. It is significant that pro-investment legislation has always been justified as a way of stimulating short-run demand and thereby reducing current unemployment. There has been little effective support for policies to increase saving and investment in order to expand the capital stock and raise future income. In contrast, tax and transfer policies that favor current public and private consumption have been favored. The long-run benefits of increasing the capital stock apparently lie beyond the political horizon.
If the electoral process makes political decisions inherently myopic, we should recognize this as an intrinsic feature of our democracy. It is important, moreover, to consider this bias in political decision-making in determining the extent of the role that government should play in our economic life.
Of course, politicians do not have a monopoly on myopia. But although some of the political shortsightedness is undoubtedly a response to constituent pressures, the myopia of the political process actually encourages voters to be impatient. Voters demand faster results from the political process than they demand from private activities because they recognize that elected officials are accountable only in the short run. Politicians' promises of "quick-fix" solutions to major social and economic problems also induce voters to expect such solutions and to judge incumbents and candidates by a short-run standard.
The policies that are adopted also bias individuals to be more short- sighted and impatient in their private decisions. Tax policies, credit market rules, and social insurance programs encourage current consump- tion and a decrease in private provisions for the future. In more subtle ways, government programs that substitute the state for the family cause behavior that weakens the development of the future population: fewer births, more unmarried individuals, more childless couples, and more divorced parents. Of course, to some extent, these government policies may only reflect a growing impatience in the public that stems from other sources. It is impossible to identify the relative importance of different factors, but the government clearly bears substantial responsibility for encouraging and stimulating shortsighted behavior.
To the extent that the poor economic performance of the past decade can be traced to the growing role of government and the inherent myopia of the political process, improvement of our performance will be difficult to achieve. Difficult but not impossible. The public's support for environ- mental protection and for expenditure on research and development shows that programs with long-run benefits can be politically viable. There are at present some signs of growing public and governmental interest in increasing the rate of capital formation. The Keynesian fear of saving that has dominated thinking on this subject for more than thirty years is finally giving way to a concern about the low rates of productivity increase and of investment. The public has also recognized that the key problem for macroeconomic policy is now inflation, not unemployment. If the public begins to see more clearly the links between current policies and future consequences, there will be less reason to fear the unexpected consequences of myopic decisions.
The 1970s have been a decade of frustrated expectations. The size and influence of the government have grown rapidly, but the public's distrust of government has grown even more rapidly. The economics profession has discovered a new humility as the economy's performance has worsened. As the 1980s begin, there is widespread anxiety about the future. Will this decade be a period of severe economic problems with a major recession, accelerating inflation, or both? Or can the poor economic performance of the 1970s be reversed? The current data on the developing state of the economy are not clear. And, while some events may be outside our control, the success of the economy in the current decade and in the remainder of this century will depend also on whether we choose wisely as we reevaluate and restructure our major economic policies.
#weekendreading
May 18, 2018
Watching the Orange-Haired Baboons: Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads
Watching the Orange-Haired Baboons: Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads:
The states have been serving as laboratories of democracy over the past decade, with Wisconsin and Kansas seeing the greatest policy swerves and serving as the most striking ominous warnings: David Cooper: As Wisconsin���s and Minnesota���s lawmakers took divergent paths, so did their economies: Since 2010, Minnesota���s economy has performed far better for working families than Wisconsin���s: "Seven years removed from when each governor took office, there is ample data to assess which state���s economy���and by extension, which set of policies���delivered more for the welfare of its residents. The results could not be more clear: by virtually every available measure, Minnesota���s recovery has outperformed Wisconsin���s..."
The awesomely smart and industrious Chye-Ching Huang of the CBPP praises Greg Leiserson's must-read guide to understanding last December's tax bill. There was space for a growth-promoting corporate tax cut that did not widen income inequality that much. That space was occupied, instead, by something that manages to increase inequality sharply while reducing projected national income���three steps backward for equitable growth.
The Sisyphean work of getting to people to recognize that the Reagan "morning in America" boom was a standard Keynesian reaction to a larger federal deficit in a time of high unemployment���it continues: Menzie Chinn: The Reagan Tax Cuts and Defense Buildup: Supply-Side Miracle or Keynesian Stimulus?: "This set of outcomes does not deny the existence of some supply side effect���the dots in Figure 2 don���t line up exactly on a straight line���but the overall pattern seems to be more consistent with an AD shift from the tax cuts and spending increases (combined with monetary policy relaxation) as opposed to a supply-side scenario as laid out by Wanniski and Laffer.... Bruce Bartlett, who was there at the inception, reminds me of Barry Ritholtz���s review of Reaganomics. See also Bartlett���s piece on the subject..."
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)...
The New York Times tried to suck up to the eminent and intelligent Alice Dreger the wrong way. Boy! Is she pissed! And she only gets pissed when getting pissed helps fix a significant problem: that the New York Times today is a central part of a "postapocalyptic, postmodern media landscape where thoughtfulness and nonpartisan inquiry go to die": Alice Dreger: Why I Escaped the ���Intellectual Dark Web���: "I asked what this group supposedly had in common...
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...
Time to go read The Federalist Papers, written when it was not a slam-dunk belief anywhere that a republic could be sustained, again: Barry Eichengreen: China and the Future of Democracy: "Growing geostrategic influence, rising soft power, and, above all, continued economic success suggest that other countries will see China as a model to emulate...
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...
Kevin Drum: What Made Marxism So Deadly?: "[Noah] Smith has the causation backward here...
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...
If the U.S. wants to avoid a very damaging outcome to all this, the less immoderate Republicans and the Democrats need to be thinking hard about how to take power away from Donald Trump on trade matters���and national security matters���come January 5, 2019: Martin Wolf: Donald Trump declares trade war on China: "The Trump administration has presented China with an ultimatum on trade...
National Taxpayers Union: More Than 1,100 Economists Join NTU to Voice Opposition to Tariffs, Protectionism: "The lowering of trade barriers between nations has been one of the great achievements of the global economic system in the postwar era...
The White House press corps: working for their sources first, their bosses second, and themselves third. Do they view themselves as working for their readers at all?: Katha Pollitt: A Press Corps Full of Aunt Lydias: "The real reason... would call into question the underlying presumption of the dinner, which is that there is no price for 'access'...
Ashley Feinberg: Leak: The Atlantic Had A Meeting About Kevin Williamson. It Was A Liberal Self-Reckoning: "In a staff meeting, Jeffrey Goldberg and Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed the hiring and firing of a conservative writer. But it wound up being about a lot more than that...
The extremely sharp Joe Romm: Trump voters hurt most by Trump policies, new study finds: "Failure to stop business-as-usual global warming will deliver a severe economic blow to Southern states, a recent paper by the��Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds..." and he sends us to: Riccardo Colacito, Bridget Hoffman and Toan Phan: Temperature and Growth: A Panel Analysis of the United States: "Seasonal temperatures have significant and systematic effects on the U.S. economy...
Republicans purge every thinker who was correct. Republican economists who were right about 2007-2012 are now, as best as I can see, all ex-Republican economists. And the same dynamic has long been working in the national security space: Gene Healy (2015): Think Tanks and the Iraq War: "It would be even better if the GOP���s 2016 contenders weren���t still, 12 years later, so eager to seek foreign policy advice from people who got the Iraq War Question spectacularly wrong...
This phenomenon is truly deplorable, on many levels: Gillian Tett: True believers: why US evangelicals support Trump: "80 per cent of white evangelicals voted for him in the 2016 election...
I do think that this is the best thing on Paul Ryan's retirement: Alexandra Petri: Paul Ryan can���t possibly have made a deal with the Devil: "His piano-playing has not improved. He has not become any wiser. He has not been able to travel widely and see the great sights of the present and past...
Should not the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School bigtime rethink the support services it provides to potential donor admittees, and do so pronto? He does have what Wharton calls an economics degree: Justin Wolfers: "If OPEC were boosting oil prices,
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...
Credulous business-friendly reporters willing to publish cries of "labor shortage" without evidence are annoying: Neel Kashkari: "The extreme emotions around the labor market 'historic, severe worker shortages'. Sounds like a real crisis. Is it?...
Alessandro Nicita, Marcelo Olarreaga, and Peri da Silva: [A trade war will increase average tariffs by 32 percentage points(https://voxeu.org/article/trade-war-w... "A trade war will increase average tariffs by 32 percentage points...
"If getting China to pay what it owes for technology were the goal, you���d expect the U.S.... to make specific demands... and... build a coalition", a Tran-Pacific Partnership, so to speak: Paul Krugman: The Art of the Flail: "Whenever investors suspect that Donald Trump will really go through with his threats of big tariff increases... stocks plunge...
The idea that the collapse of the aristocratic Roman Free State into the Roman Empire was due to wild dissipative partying���luxus, a vice caught from the Greeks and "Asiatics", giving rise to avaritia, which then leads to ambitio and cupido imperii���was originally a meme put forward by those I regard as the true villains���plutocrats and political norm breakers���to avoid responsibility: A.W. Lintott (1972): Imperial Expansion and Moral Decline in the Roman Republic: "Imperial expansion in general did of course have divisive economic and political effects...
Imposing tariffs on intermediate inputs is especially bad, especially destructive: Chad Brown: The Element of Surprise Is a Bad Strategy for a Trade War: "Trump���s decision to impose restrictions on intermediate inputs and capital equipment is a step backward...
@#$#@!*&%%!! Ana Swanson: Trump Proposes Rejoining Trans-Pacific Partnership to Shield Farmers From Trade War: "President Trump... [said] he was directing his advisers to look into rejoining the multicountry trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership...
Justin Fox: Paul Ryan's Roadmap Was an Epic Fiscal Failure: "Paul Ryan did not cause the financial crisis.��He has nonetheless failed pretty spectacularly...��his actions have made the situation much worse than it had to be...
Jonathan Chait: Trump Attacks Comey for Handing Him the Presidency: "Comey all but confirms the Democrats��� complaints.... He considered Clinton a lead-pipe cinch to win...
Robert Skidelsky: The Advanced Economies��� Lost Decade: "Policy interventions immediately following the 2008 crash did make a difference.... The 2008 collapse was as steep as that of 1929, but it lasted for a much shorter time...
Lisa Mascaro and Bill Barrow: Ryan Retirement Fuels House GOP Desperation To Maintain Control: ���'It���s like Eisenhower resigning right before D-Day', said Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia...
Matthew Yglesias: House Speaker Paul Ryan���s retirement: good riddance: "The many lives of Paul Ryan: Ryan joined Congress in 1998 but first really made his mark during the Social Security privatization wars of 2004-���05...
Ezra Klein (2012): A not-very-truthful speech in a not-very-truthful campaign: "Honestly? I didn't want us to write this piece...
Steve M.: NEEDY, RAGE-FILLED TRUMP IS THE PERFECT CANDIDATE FOR CONSERVATIVES NOW: "Past presidents, most of whom were emotional adults, knew they'd be attacked and tried to appear above the fray...
Paul Krugman: Unicorns of the Intellectual Right: "Economics... a field with a relatively strong conservative presence.... [But] trying to find influential conservative economic intellectuals is basically a hopeless task...
Heidi Moore: "What is going on at the Atlantic?](https://twitter.com/moorehn/status/98... 'Too far'?" It���s the genteel form of white ethnicism...
Mark Mazower: Opinion | Anti-Semitism and Britain���s Hall of Mirrors: "I am not sure that my grandfather would have seen much change in the Labour Party...
Justin Fox: Beware Economists Who Warn of an Entitlement Explosion: "A��quintet of��notable Republican economists... Michael J. Boskin, John H. Cochrane, John F. Cogan, George P. Shultz and John B. Taylor...
Henry Farrell: Who has any use for conservative intellectuals?: "The firing of Kevin Williamson has led, predictably, to outrage from other conservatives, and in particular from anti-Trumpers like Bill Kristol and Erick Erickson...
Noah Smith: "Yep. Restrictionists lie when they say that our current system is 'open borders'. Restrictionists lie when they say Democrats want open borders. Restrictionists lie, all the time, about everything.
Larry Summers: No, ���Obamasclerosis��� wasnt a real problem: "The Wall Street Journal���s Greg Ip... finds credible... claims that President Barack Obama���s policies... materially slowed economic growth...
Mark Antonio Wright: Oklahoma���s Teachers & Education Funding Issues: "No reasonable examination of the facts can avoid laying blame at the feet of Republican governor Mary Fallin...
Joe Pompeo: ���Journalism Is Not About Creating Safe Spaces���: Inside the Woke Civil War at The New York Times: "For someone like Dean Baquet, the Times���s then 60-year-old executive editor, the dominant emotion was exhilaration about this new national epic...
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'...
Paul Krugman: Trade Wars, Stranded Assets, and the Stock Market: "Even a trade war that drastically rolled back globalization wouldn���t impose costs on the economy comparable to the kinds of movement we���ve seen in stock prices...
Charles F. Manski (2011): Genes, Eyeglasses, and Social Policy: "Suppose that nearsightedness derives entirely from the presence of a particular allele of a specific gene...
Martin Wolf: How China can avoid a trade war with the US: "The objectives of these US actions are unclear... to halt alleged misbehaviour... or, as the labelling of China as a ���strategic competitor��� suggests, is it to halt China���s technological progress altogether���an aim that is unachievable and certainly non-negotiable...
Max Boot: Why I changed my mind about John Bolton: "To accommodate... Trump, the Republican Party has betrayed its principles on issues including Russia, immigration, free trade and fiscal austerity...
Ezra Klein: Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science : "This is not 'forbidden knowledge'. It is America���s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality...
Thomas Piketty: Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017): "Using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US...
Kevin Drum: National Review Still Has a Race Problem: "The Atlantic recently hired... Kevin Williamson... [who] believes abortion is murder and... any woman who gets an abortion should be executed...
Paul Krugman: Globalization: What Did We Miss?: "Anyone who worked on the political economy of trade policy knew that fights over tariffs look very much as if they come out of a specific-factors world...
Quinn Slobodian: The World Economy and the Color Line: Wilhelm R��pke, Apartheid, and the White Atlantic: "The article takes 'white Atlantic' as a useful term to describe the worldview that R��pke and his collaborators cultivated in this period...
A Treasury Secretary None Worse than Whom Can Be Conceived: I give up. Steve Mnuchin is the worst Treasury Secretary that can be conceived���an ontological singularity of sorts a la Saint Anselm of Canterbury. Phenomenally underbriefed and uncurious: Manu Raju: "Told line-item veto was ruled unconstitutional, Mnuchin says: 'Congress can pass a rule that allows them to do it'...
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...
Shawn Donnan: Trump is about to launch a trade war with no way out: "Business chiefs have pleaded for the Trump administration not to impose tariffs on electronics, shoes and other imports from China that go far beyond the steel and aluminium he has already targeted...
Ed Luce: Anti-Semitism in the age of Donald Trump: "Whether you are a Muslim, Hispanic, African-American or a globalist, America���s president has made it safe to disparage you...
David Zilbermann: What economics and cars can tell us about guns: "Willie Brown states it as a matter of fact that the NRA is ���the political arm of a gun manufacturing industry intent on increasing sales..."
Simon Wren-Lewis: Beliefs about Brexit: "I want to... ask why public opinion seems oblivious to the failures of all those claims before the negotiations that ���we hold all the cards��� compared to the reality that the UK has largely agreed to the terms set out by the EU...
Live from the Baboon Cage: Marcy Wheeler: "'What did the president do, and what the fuck was he thinking when he did it?' are questions not about the cover-up, but about the substantive crime. And that's the question Mueller's Watergate prosecutor has now posed to the president's lawyers..."
David Brady: We... would be delighted by... lift[ing] all single mothers out of poverty.... Making a substantial fraction of people not poor would reduce poverty. Duh: "In @washingtonpost, Robert Samuelson has written a 'critique' of our NY Times piece...f
Live from the Baboon Cage: Steve M.: TRUMP���NOT COMPLETELY OFF THE CHAIN?: '@Tara_Mckelvey: "Whisked" is right ��� members of the pool were told to rush - (i.e. run) - to the vans in the motorcade at the White House. We're here at the golf club now, waiting for developments...'
Paul Krugman: Trump and Trade and Zombies: "Until now, the most visible neo-goldbug in the administration has been David Malpass... the former chief economist of Bear Stearns...
Those beats won't sweeten themselves!: Zack Kanter: "Absolutely bizarre, fawning NYT piece [by Zach MacFarquhar]. I���m not sure I���ve read anything quite like it in recent memory..."
Martin Feldstein: The Real Reason for Trump���s Steel and Aluminum Tariffs: "The US tariffs will... increase the likelihood that China will accelerate the reduction in subsidized excess capacity...
Dan Shaviro: Another new publication!: "'Evaluating the New U.S. Pass-Through Rules'...
Brad DeLong (2012): Ahem! Niall Ferguson Fire-His-Ass-from-NewsBeast-Now Department: Niall Ferguson writes
FT: Thoughts for the weekend: "'To wit, Phil Gramm was right: We are in a mental recession, not an actual recession.' - 2008 comments from President Trump's new economic advisor [Larry Kudlow]..."
Paul Bedard: Larry Kudlow predicts 4%-5% growth, 'investment boom': "Larry Kudlow, picked to be President Trump���s new economic adviser...
Jonathan Chait: New Trump Economist Kudlow Has Been Wrong About Everything: "The Republican Party... supply-side economics... not merely a generalized preference for small government with low taxes...
Ed Kilgore: What the Christian Right Sowed, Trump Reaped: "Gerson is especially insightful [in saying]: Conservative Evangelicals didn���t back Trump despite his unsavory personality...
Dean Baker: Doesn't Anyone Care If the Trump Tax Cuts Are Working?: "Capital goods orders for January...
Josh Barro and Isaac Chotiner: Policy without politics, immigration, and Trump���s self-awareness: Isaac Chotiner: "Are you enjoying this moment? By 'this moment', I mean the last 14 to 15 months of being a political commentator?...
Dani Rodrik: Trump���s Trade Gimmickry: "The imbalances and inequities generated by the global economy cannot be tackled by protecting a few politically well-connected industries, using manifestly ridiculous national security considerations as an excuse...
Bill McBride: Larry Kudlow is usually wrong... "...and frequently absurd, as an example, in June 2005 Kudlow wrote...
Comment of the Day: Graydon: Mobilization for Total War a...
Comment of the Day: Graydon: Mobilization for Total War and Democratic Order: "Great War mobilization levels are fundamentally voluntary...
...(Note that the US did not meaningfully participate in the Great War and if want a reason the US is different about almost everything compared to the rest of the North Atlantic, there you go.) You can't possibly impose them, there aren't enough people to do the imposing. Hitler's War more complicated but not politically different.
If you look at personnel counts you're going to get the wrong answers; look at percentage of the population. Look at whether or not there was (an intent for) a decisive result. (Colonial wars are not (directly) about how industrial states relate to their own populace and political legitimacy.)
Yes, revolutionary France invented mass armies; they were not decisive. (Scaring your neighbours is not decisive.) Yes, there are existential wars all through history. The difference is that you get a situation where you expect that your survival requires mass armies and will involve an existential conflict. (In part because it's possible due to logistical improvements that go along with the industry that can make drawn brass cartridges.)
The change with metal cartridges is threefold: you need to go to dispersed infantry tactics, which plays hob with your previous mechanisms of articulation and control so you have to invent a new army; your effectiveness is the number of accurately-shot rifles you can get into the conflicted volume; there is no counter (pre-1915!) to rifle regiments except more rifle regiments. Suddenly the feedback mechanism is open-ended; you have the industry to feed and supply all the troops you can raise. Great War mobilization rates hit 15% of the total population in industrialized primary participants. (The French hit 21%.)
You absolutely must have the voluntary participation of your population to do that; you can look at the Great War and note that only the British Empire survived of the participating empires because trying to keep that participation rate shredded the pre-war social order. (the British one, too, but not quite to the point of changing the formal basis for the legitimacy of government.)
#commentoftheday
I Hope Very Much the Republican Party Is Destroying Itself. If It Isn't, We Are in Big Trouble...
No longer fresh at Project Syndicate: The Destruction of the Republican Party: There can no longer be any doubt that America has an unhinged, unqualified kleptocrat presiding in the White House. Nor can there be any question that the Republicans who put him there may be sealing their party's fate as the manifestation of Trumpism, rather than traditional conservatism.
It has been one and a half years since Donald Trump was elected to the US presidency, so now is as good a time as any for Americans to take a deep breath and contemplate their broken political system.
To be sure, the United States has not experienced any major catastrophes, even though massive policy mistakes always seem to be looming on the horizon. But the country has been suffering a death by a thousand cuts, leaving it weaker and poorer the longer Trump is in office.
Much of the blame for this belongs to the Republicans, who have fallen into line behind Trump for reasons that are still difficult to understand. Trump was elected with over 60 million votes���some three million fewer than his opponent, Hillary Clinton. But he gained public backing from a wide array of Republican mandarins, policy advisers, and activists, all of whom knew that a President Clinton would pose less of a risk to the country.
Why did they do it? The most persuasive hypothesis is that���like former FBI Director James Comey and Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times���they ignored polling that did not underestimate the risk of a Trump victory. Mainstream Republicans assumed that they had little to lose, and perhaps something to gain, by opposing Clinton, because that is the lesson they took from the experiences of both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
It is worth remembering that in 1964, Nixon backed the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, while other Republicans, such as then-Governor of Michigan George Romney, did not. Nixon then went on to become the party���s presidential nominee in 1968, winning out over Republicans who had alienated the party���s activist base by opposing Goldwater.
Likewise, Ronald Reagan backed Nixon until the very end, even as Nixon���s impeachment was imminent, while Republicans such as Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee concluded that Nixon would have to go. Reagan went on to become the party���s presidential nominee in 1980, winning out over Republicans who had stepped out of line with the party���s activist base.
In 2016, the Republicans who backed Trump most likely saw it as a cheap way to advance their future in the party. What they did not count on was that he would actually become president, and that they would still have to look at themselves in the mirror every morning. Now that Republican rank-and-file voters have come to regard themselves more as Trump supporters than as Republicans, the party���s leading lights must decide what to do next.
Some have already made their choice. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is retiring at the end of this term. Barring the unlikely possibility that he will mount a presidential run sometime in the future, he is effectively abdicating one of the most powerful positions in the US government, and abandoning his country to the leadership of an unhinged and unqualified kleptocrat. And Ryan is hardly alone: at last count, 43 Republican House members have decided not to seek reelection in November.
Whatever becomes of the Republican Party, it is within the American people���s power to mitigate some of the damage from Trump���s domestic policies at the local level. That is precisely what California and other Democratic (���blue���) states have been doing���and with a great deal of success so far.
But in Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Nebraska, and other red states, the Republican voter base continues to be easily grifted. Farmers in Iowa and other heartland states turned out heavily for Trump in 2016, only to find that he regards them as acceptable casualties in the trade war he wants to launch against China, and perhaps Mexico, too. One should feel sorry for these voters, but not for the Republican politicians who have continued to swindle them by supporting Trump.
What can be done? For starters, we have to educate voters, and keep the spotlight on policies that are against their interests. Normalization is not an option. Pointing out the stupidity and destructiveness of Trump���s policies, and making the case for their immediate reversal, should be an everyday occurrence.1
Beyond that, Americans should try to persuade Vice President Mike Pence that it���s time to invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, which provides for the removal of a president who has been deemed unfit to serve by a majority of his or her cabinet.
Public pressure should also be brought to bear on Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the co-chairmen of 21st Century Fox, which owns Fox News. Many of Trump���s policy decisions and tweets track whatever his favorite Fox News commentators say on any given day. In the long run, though, kleptocrats tend to make prey of plutocrats. If the Murdochs care about their long-term fortunes, their best move may be to have their network tell the president: ���You gave it a good try, but you���re tired and clearly unhappy in the job, so why not just quit and go play golf, for the sake of your health?���
Finally, Republicans should be made to understand that this is their party���s ���Pete Wilson��� moment. Pete Wilson is a former Republican governor of California who in the 1990s consigned his party to permanent minority status in the state by smearing Latinos as a menace. Today, California���s large Latino population���which includes many dedicated, socially conservative churchgoers���have no truck with the Republicans. (Nor do many elderly white men in California, because even they are capable of embarrassment.)
Trump could do to the Republican Party nationally what Wilson did to it in California. Party leaders���already facing the likely loss of the House, and possibly the Senate, in November���need to act before it���s too late.
Ten Years Ago Today: May 18, 2008
Little Brothers: Panel on David Brin's "The Transparent Society": Thursday May 22 Omni New Haven 3-5 PM George A&B: I am on a panel to talk about David Brin's decade-old book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? at the 2008 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference: David Brin, Alan Davidson, J. Bradford DeLong, A. Michael Froomkin, Stephanie Perrin, Zephyr Teachout...
Ezra Klein Calls for the Total and Immediate Removal of America's Mainstream Political News Media: Makes sense to me: Ezra Klein: "A campaign without the 'gotchas': Gore was seen, in 2000, as a condescending, exaggeration-prone prig. But in the ensuing years, he stepped out of campaign journalism. He began sending his speeches out directly... made a movie that asked people to sit down and listen to him for the better part of two hours, and did his rounds on interview shows on which he could have fairly lengthy conversations.... The result? A massive rehabilitation of his reputation, including in the eyes of the very political pundits who once spurned him.... Ask those pundits about the new Gore, of course, and they will sigh and search the heavens and moan that, oh, if he had only been this way when he was in politics, how different it all could have been. But he was.... His pipeline to the public was a gaffe-hungry media looking for ways to humiliate him".... The problems for the media are structural.... [T]he shows are really run as a type of soap opera.... Clips that can be easily and endlessly replayed to remind viewers of what they're watching and what happened in past episodes... the media hunger for out-of-character gaffes and missteps���those moments are crucial to the business model..." Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
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