J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 38

Was the Great Recession More Damaging Than the Great Depression?

Brad DeLong: Was the Great Recession More Damaging Than the Great Depression?: Your parents������more likely your grandparents������Great Depression opened with the then-biggest-ever stock market crash, continued with the largest-ever sustained decline in GDP, and ended with a near-decade of subnormal production and employment. Yet 11 years after the 1929 crash, national income per worker was 10 percent above its 1929 level. The next year, 12 years after, it was 28 percent above its 1929 level. The economy had fully recovered. And then came the boom of World War II, followed by the ���thirty glorious years��� of post-World War II prosperity. The Great Depression was a nightmare. But the economy then woke up���and it was not haunted thereafter. Our ���Great Recession��� opened in 2007 with what appeared to be a containable financial crisis. The economy subsequently danced on a knife-edge of instability for a year. Then came the crash ��� in stock market values, employment and GDP. The experience of the Great Depression, however, gave policymakers the knowledge and running room to keep our depression-in-the-making an order of magnitude less severe than the Great Depression. That���s all true. But it���s not the whole story. The Great Recession has cast a very large shadow on America���s future prosperity. We are still haunted by it... Read MOAR at Project Syndicate

#shouldread #greatrecession #greatdepression #macroeconomics #economichistory

78 Years Ago Today: The Nazi "Operation Blue" Commences...

Remind Me Again: Friedrich Paulus https://www.bradford-delong.com/2012/07/remind-me-again-friedrich-paulus.html#comments: The Nazis planned to push four armies forward and only four armies forward in the summer and fall of 1942���Sixth, Seventeenth, First Panzer, and Fourth Panzer. One can understand why an army personnel office would choose Hermann Hoth as commander of Fourth Panzer Army and von Kleist as commander of First Panzer Army. But Richard Ruoff as commander of the Seventeenth Army? And Friedrich Paulus as commander of the Sixth Army? What was there in their previous careers to mark them as the right people for army command in Southern Russia in the summer and fall of 1942?

Peter T: 'Paulus was recommended by the head of the army, Halder and by Army Group South commander Reichenau. He had served both in senior staff positions, including during the French campaign. In fact, Paulus did not make too many mistakes���he simply lost to a strong, determined and increasingly capable enemy...

Troy: 'In mid-1942, Hitler wanted Paulus to be his new OKH Chief of Staff, replacing Zeitzler after Stalingrad was taken. Paulus was a Panzer General���he had served alongside Guderian in the mid-1930s in the nascent panzer arm, when there were only enough panzers to form the first corps, and after France had been conquered Paulus was made deputy to Halder in 1940 in preparation for the attack on Russia���no small job! As Chief of Staff to Reichenau 1939-1940, Paulus had overseen the 10th/6th Army's marches towards Warsaw in 1939 and Paris in 1940. Reichenau had recommended Paulus to succeed him in command of the 6th (after Reichenau took over for the retired Rundstedt). Starting out, the 1942 campaign for the 6th looked to be a walk in the park, IMO. The 2nd Army and the 4th Pz Army provided initial flank security for it, its major job was just to march the 400 miles from Kharkov to Stalingrad. The big bag earlier in the year on the Donets had apparently cleared the table for the 6th (let us remember that more Russians were bagged in May 1942 than Germans six months later!). The battle for Stalingrad itself was expected to be a formality, taking a day or two like Kharkov, Kursk, Voronezh, and Rostov. Little did they suspect that the Stavka would be able to pour a million men into that meatgrinder. The key difference for Stalingrad was the German operational inability to cut behind it and isolate the defenders, the typical way the German way of war did this sort of thing. Paulus' job in 1942 was to take Stalingrad, his flank security was the Army Group's responsibility, not his. And once the 6th had been encircled, it's tough to say what the best course of action should have been. An Army that has lost its entire logistics tail is a pretty fragile animal that probably isn't going anywhere. And an Army without weapons can't fight its way out of anything, either, so to attempt to fight back to the Don and beyond would have been suicidal, and disobeying OKH orders to boot, since the 6th by late November had lost the mobility and combat power to do much of anything against the million new Russian troops so brilliantly inserted between it and freedom. The stand & wait for rescue approach had worked at the division (at Kholm) and corps (at Demyansk) level in 1942 already, but trying to sustain and rescue an entire Army was a bridge too far, so to speak. Hindsight strongly colors what we know about the events of 1942...

Rune: 'Didn't Paulus do very well as Guderian's chief of staff? And he did lead an armoured corps in France, didn't he? He must have done something right, surely. I also seem to recall that he had been heavily involved in the planning of the invasion of the Soviet Union, so perhaps he looked good on paper...

rea: 'There simply aren't that many people capable of commanding armies. In 1942, the German order of battle contained 20 armies. Once you screen potential army commanders for ideological soundness and willingness to comply with the high command's plans, it's amazing that they came up with someone as sound as Paulus. See also, for example, Ambrose Burnside and John Bell Hood...

Mike Kimel: 'I haven't spent all that much time checking this, but off the top of my head, von Paulus' experience prior to the invasion of the USSR was more significant and less of a stretch than, say, Ike's experience prior to heading allied forces in the European theater. Both were involved in planning the Big Campaign and both obtained an unexpected promotion. Here's Ike, cut and paste, from Wikipedia: "After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Eisenhower was assigned to the General Staff in Washington, where he served until June 1942 with responsibility for creating the major war plans to defeat Japan and Germany. He was appointed Deputy Chief in charge of Pacific Defenses under the Chief of War Plans Division (WPD), General Leonard T. Gerow, and then succeeded Gerow as Chief of the War Plans Division. Then he was appointed Assistant Chief of Staff in charge of the new Operations Division (which replaced WPD) under Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, who spotted talent and promoted accordingly. At the end of May 1942, Eisenhower accompanied Lt. Gen. Henry H. Arnold, commanding general of the Army Air Forces, to London to assess the effectiveness of the theater commander in England, Maj. Gen. James E. Chaney. He returned to Washington on June 3 with a pessimistic assessment, stating he had an "uneasy feeling" about Chaney and his staff. On June 23, 1942, he returned to London as Commanding General, European Theater of Operations (ETOUSA), based in London, and replaced Chaney." Here's von Paulus: "In February 1938 Paulus was appointed Chef des Generalstabes to Guderian's new XVI Armeekorps (Motorisiert), which replaced Lutz's command. Guderian described him as ���brilliantly clever, conscientious, hard working, original and talented��� but already had doubts about his decisiveness, toughness and lack of command experience. He remained in that post until May 1939, when he was promoted to Major General and became Chief of Staff for the German Tenth Army, with which he saw service in Poland, the Netherlands and Belgium (by the latter two campaigns, the army had been renumbered as the Sixth Army). Paulus was promoted to Lieutenant General in August 1940 and the following month he was named deputy chief of the German General Staff. In that role he helped draft the plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union"...

Gene O'Grady: 'And Nimitz, whose performance was perhaps even more impressive than Eisenhower's, came from a position as head of Navy personnel. I remember when I was a corporate flunky noting the importance attached to succession planning. And then when the company my wife worked for fell down on that job and had their CEO die unexpectedly I understood just why it was such a big deal. Henry Halleck usually has pretty much a bad name, but apparently as Chief of Staff in Washington during the latter part of the Civil War he excelled at putting the right commanders in place.

Ralph H.: 'Mike, Rune, & Troy are correct. Paulus was an experienced General Staff officer who was due for a major command, which might in other circumstances have been a Corps but with the Wehrmacht having greatly expanded and a number of senior generals resigning or fired after Barbarossa stalled, the 6th Army assignment was not unexpected. By contrast, Eisenhower was jumped up with almost indecent speed and much less command and staff experience, and furthermore got the job after the death (in an aircraft accident) of Marshall's first choice, Lt. Gen. Frank Andrews. Re. Nimitz, as a junior Rear Admiral he was (I believe) offered CINCPAC in late 1940 (ahead of the unfortunate Admiral Kimmel) but declined and went to the Bureau of Navigation, the Navy's confusingly-named personnel bureau. Even more interesting is the case of Admiral Louis Denfeld, who succeeded Nimitz as Chief of Naval Operations in 1947. Denfeld spent almost the entire war in the Bureau of Navigation, eventually becoming its Chief, until the summer of 1945 when he was given a command at sea, a battleship division that participated in bombardment of the Japanese home islands in the last days of the war. With an abundance of distinguished admirals with solid wartime records from which to choose as Nimitz's successor in 1947, why did Denfeld get the nod? Clearly both he and Nimitz had, earlier in their careers, attracted notice as flag officers of great potential. A similar case with Eisenhower and von Paulus���

.#history #notetoself #2020-06-28

John Bell Hood Blames Everybody Else for His Failure to Win the Battle of Spring Hill���Weekend Reading

The anti-Patton. Maybe he was a good regimental or brigade commander. Maybe. But no appreciation for the frictions of war in attempting complicated simultaneous actions, and no appreciation for the power of the defense and the rifle: John Bell Hood: Advance & Retreat: Personal Experiences in the United States and Confederate States Armies https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-hood-advances-%26-retreat.pdf: 'I dispatched a messenger to General Cheatham to lose no time in gaining possession of the pike at Spring Hill. It was reported back that he was about to do so.... I became somewhat uneasy, and again ordered an officer to go to General Cheatham.... I entrusted another officer with the same message... finally requested the Governor of Tennessee, Isham G. Harris, to hasten forward and impress upon Cheatham the importance of action without delay...

...I thought it probable that Cheatham had taken possession of Spring Hill without encountering material opposition, or had formed line across the pike, north of the town, and entrenched without coming in serious contact with the enemy.... When General Cheatham rode up... I exclaimed with deep emotion, as I felt the golden opportunity fast slipping from me, " General, why in the name of God have you not attacked the enemy, and taken possession of that pike?" He replied that the line looked a little too long for him, and that Stewart should first form on his right. I could hardly believe it possible that this brave old soldier, who had given proof of such courage and ability upon so many hard-fought fields, would even make such a report....

It was reported to me after this hour that the enemy was marching along the road, almost under the sight of the camp-fires of the main body of the Army. I sent anew to General Cheatham to know if at least a line of skirmishers could not be advanced, in order to throw the Federals in confusion, to delay their march, and allow us a chance to attack in the morning. Nothing was done....

I could not succeed in arousing the troops to action, when one good division would have sufficed to do the work. One good division, I re-assert, could have routed that portion of the enemy which was at Spring Hill; have taken possession of and formed line across the road; and thus have made it an easy matter to Stewart's Corps, Johnston's Division, and Lee's two Divisions from Columbia, to have enveloped, routed, and captured Schofield's Army that afternoon and the ensuing day....

Had I dreamed one moment that Cheatham would have failed to give battle, or at least to take position across the pike and force the enemy to assault him, I would have ridden, myself, to the front, and led the troops into action. Although it is right and proper that a Commander-in-Chief, in the event of disaster to a portion of his line during an engagement, should endeavor in person to rally the troops, it is not expected nor considered expedient that he should inaugurate a battle by leading a division or brigade. Had I done so, my opponents would have just cause for the charge of recklessness. I would, nevertheless, have risked my life in this instance, had I conceived the possibility of the disregard of my orders, on the part of this officer.

General Lee was in a measure thwarted by the same want of prompt action, at Gettysburg. Whilst I failed utterly to bring on battle at Spring Hill, he was unable to get the corps of his Army to attack and co-operate, as desired. He was thus checkmated for two days, and finally lost the battle. Had our immortal Chieftain foreseen the result of this inactivity, he would, doubtless, have ordered and acted differently...

Notwithstanding my endeavors to explain satisfactorily to myself my inability to procure co-operative action upon the 20th, and 22d, I remained somewhat perplexed upon the subject���especially in regard to the failure, on the 20th, of the best troops of the Army, Hardee'sCorps. Shortly after the beginning of the siege. Major General Cleburne, commanding a division in that corps, called at my headquarters. The occurrences of the hour were discussed, and, finally, the two late battles in which he had been a participant...

...Much was said pro and con, relative to the condition of the Army and the causes of failure in the above referred to engagements. I then unfolded to him the plans of action, together with the peremptory orders to halt at nothing on our side of Peach Tree creek. Cleburne seemed surprised, and thereupon informed me that as his Division was about to move forward to the attack, on the 20th, General Hardee rode along the line, and, in the presence of those around him, cautioned him to be on the lookout for breastworks.

I can recall no reply on my part at the time, save, perhaps, some expression of astonishment. I could say nothing, even to so worthy a subordinate. He left me to infer, however, from subsequent remarks, that his Division would have taken quite a different action on the 20th, had it not been for the forewarning of his corps commander.

I give the above narrative of facts with a full knowledge of my accountableness to the same Ruler before whom those two gallant soldiers have been summoned; and, as I avowed at the beginning of my task, would not have undertaken to write of these unpleasant subjects, were it not for the seeming perpetuation of injustice and misrepresentation in the guise of truth and history.

It is but reasonable to deduce from this unfortunate observation to Cleburne that General Hardee gave a similar warning to other officers. At all events, those who are able to realize the baneful effect of such a remark from the commander of a corps d'armee, upon the eve of conflict, know that his words were almost equivalent to an order to take no active part in the battle.

From the hour one of the main sources of our trouble was thus accidentally made known to me, I recognized that my power, upon any occasion, to deal quick and heavy blows to the enemy, would be greatly hampered, unless I could procure the relief of this officer and the appointment of one better qualified for the actual emergencies. Whilst General Hardee had, perhaps, no superior as a corps commander during retreat in presence of an enemy, or in defensive operations, he was wanting in that boldness requisite for offensive warfare. This his defect, which may be found in officers of undoubted courage and of every rank, was aggravated by the protracted "timid defensive " policy under my predecessor, and to this misfortune I attributed his non-observance of orders.

Long and gallant service had, however, endeared him to his troops, and, because of further demoralization which I feared might ensue in the event of his removal, I decided to retain him in command. Moreover, President Davis held in high appreciation his ability as a corps commander. Lee, Stewart, and G.W. Smith were very open in the expression of their opinion, in regard to his conduct which they imported to a less charitable notice than I was willing to concede. Their opinion of the consequences of his non-fulfilment of orders is recorded in the following extract from the official report of Major General G. W. Smith:

If they (the corps commanders) are not unanimous, there is but one, if any, who dissents from the opinion expressed above, viz : Sherman would have been beaten had your orders been obeyed on the 2oth of July, 22d of July, and 31st of August...

'[General Frank Blair:] "We congratulated ourselves on being able to hold our position, and we felt satisfied that Hood's Army could not stand much longer the terrible losses it was suffering from these brilliant but disastrous movements. The opinion in our Army was that the result would have been the same if Joe Johnston had continued in command, but that the denouement was hastened and expedited by the change of tactics adopted by General Hood. This I think, and indeed am sure, was General Sherman's opinion.... Sherman... wrote me back that [Hood's appointment to command]... was very good news, but to look out for an attack; that Hood would make it very lively for us, and that it was necessary to be exceedingly cautious...." General Blair was mistaken in pronouncing the attack disastrous, since, as I have stated, it greatly improved the morale of the Army, and arrested desertion. In connection with the battle of the 20th, it also enabled us to hold possession of Atlanta a prolonged period. He erred likewise in attributing the lack of spirit in Hardee's troops to fatigue from the march of the night previous. Decatur is but six miles from Atlanta, and the detour required to be made was but slight. Beside, those troops had been allowed almost absolute rest the entire day of the 21st...

...Stonewall Jackson made a hard march, in order to turn Pope at Second Manassas, and again to come up in time at Antietam, or Sharpsburg; as also at Chancellorsville, in order to fall upon Hooker's flank and rear. Longstreet likewise made hard marches, prior to the battles of Second Manassas and Gettysburg. The men were often required, under Lee, to perform this kind of service an entire day and night, with only a halt of two hours for sleep, in addition to the ordinary rests allowed on a march; and were then expected to fight two or three consecutive days.

Indeed, in movements of this char-
acter, it is rare that a decided advantage is gained over an enemy, without the endurance of great fatigue and privation on the part of the troops. Neither Johnston's nor Sherman's Armies ever experienced the weariness and hardship to which Lee and Jackson frequently subjected their troops���the fruits of which, brought to perfection by their transcendent genius, won for them a fulness of

I am as thoroughly convinced at present as at the hour these events transpired, that had these same forces, at my disposal in these battles, been previously handled according to the Lee and Jackson school, they would have routed the Federal Army, and, in all probability have so profited by Sherman's blunders as to have altered signally the issue of these operations...

.#moralresponsibility #orangehairedbaboons #weekendreading #2020-06-28

Siegele: Can Technology Plan Economies & Destroy Democracy���Noted

There was much talk two decades ago about how the high-tech information age economy would be an attention economy, in which convincing people to focus their attention on commodities and activities would be truly though. What people did not talk about but should have was that the information age was bringing an information overload attention polity as well: there in order to rift the public and the political system, you needed not cogent arguments and policies but rather to flood zone and distract with irrelevancies. The others ��� the Chinese communist party, for one ��� look at the north Atlantic���s public sphere and conclude John Milton and Jon Stewart Mill's praise of free speech was definitely miss guided. Those of us who do still believe in free speech need to figure out answers:

Ludwig Siegele: Can Technology Plan Economies & Destroy Democracy? https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2019/12/18/can-technology-plan-economies-and-destroy-democracy: ���Democracy, [Farrell & Shalizi] argued, has a ���capacity unmatched���in solving complex problems���. To understand why this may be, consider the informational challenges faced by centralised or authoritarian regimes. They lack what Mr Shalizi calls a ���feedback channel���. Just as markets generate information about what people want, so does open discussion. In autocracies, citizens have no interest in openly discussing problems or experimenting with solutions, lest they end up in jail or worse. As a result, an unelected government has a limited capacity to understand what is going on in its polity���and thus tends to make bad decisions. Dictators maintain extensive security apparatuses not just to repress the people but to understand them; they serve as the feedback channel through which dictators get the information which they need to govern. Such measures are not just an affront to human rights. They are politically destabilising. The head of an effective security service can easily become either a rival for the top spot or a self-censoring information block, neither of which bodes well for the boss.... Despite its advantages, both in terms of economic growth and problem solving, 21st-century free-market liberal democracy has not enjoyed quite the apotheosis that some expected at the beginning of the 1990s. The setbacks to democratic norms at the level of the state have been well documented. The persistence of planning goes unnoticed because it is so familiar: it is the way that companies are run.... ���Internally, firms are planned economies no different to the Soviet Union: hierarchical, undemocratic planned economies,��� write Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, two leftist activists, in ���The People���s Republic of Walmart��� (2019), a highly readable romp through the history and possible futures of planning.... The Chinese Communist Party shows every sign of wanting... not the democratisation of planning, but the sort of planning that permits democracy to be minimised.... When it comes to eroding an existing democracy, rather than shoring up a dictatorship, there are somewhat similar technologies on offer. Some are destructive. Social media, driven as its commercial interests are by the desire to ���go viral���, offers ways to inject the equivalent of computer viruses into the public���s political information processing, degrading and distorting its output through misinformation, emotional incontinence and cognitive sabotage...

.#noteed #2020-06-28

Mathai & DeLong: Artists Paint Hundreds of Social Justice Murals Across the Bay Area���Noted

Raj Mathai & Jonathan DeLong: Artists Paint Hundreds of Social Justice Murals Across the Bay Area https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/artists-paint-hundreds-of-social-justice-murals-across-the-bay-area/2308811/: ���We���re now seeing hundreds of murals across the Bay Area. Color, creativity and social justice. But who���s organizing all of this? spoke to one of them���Jonathan DeLong from Oakland.���

.#noted #2020-06-28

Goolsbee: Cases Back on the Rise Ominous���Noted

Somewhat paradoxically, the coronavirus plague turns out not to be a huge supply shock to the American economy. Yes, a great many activities become essentially impossible as too costly���but for the overwhelming majority, they have close substitutes that use essentially the same factors of production in the same proportions: take-out and grocery stores rather than sit-down restaurants; shopping online and delivery by truck rather than shopping in person. And those that do not have close substitutes in terms of contemporaneous substitution have close substitutes in terms of intertemporal substitution.

Thus lockdowns had little effect on the overall level of economic activity���it was the rise in savings, and the failure of the government to take steps to ensure that rise in planned savings was absorbed by greater planned private investment and government investment and consumption. And this strongly suggests that anything that boosts caseloads will, be further raising planned savings, further depress the economy. It makes this week one hell of a moment to have a large, loud indoor gathering in of all places Arizona, I tell you:

Austan Goolsbee: 'The results from March-May https://twitter.com/Austan_Goolsbee/status/1275575900499775488 suggest that the fact that cases are back on the rise is very ominous not just for public health but for the economy. If people get scared again, a lot of activity may start to tank.... Short version: they don't do much. Of the 60% drop in consumer activity, only 7 came from shutdown orders. Fear of the virus is the main thing. The collapse of economic activity in 2020 from COVID-19 has been immense.... We have consumer visits to 2.3m businesses in 110 industries through the crisis. We tracked down the county level shutdown orders and can compare across borders in the same metro area where the policy differs.... Evidence of fear as the driver: 1) more covid deaths in your county drive down economic activity signif[icantly] even including metro-week dummies, 2) people heavily shift visits away from larger/busier stores to smaller/less busy ones in the same industry (and especially if lots of local deaths). We have data up to late May and include some states ending their shutdown orders. The increase in economic activity is just as modest coming out as it was going in. Policy itself isn't the driver. But there is one way policy matters: diversion from one kind of business to another. We have essential/non-essential definition in each place. Non-essential business collapses. Essential business soars. Restaurant/bar orders cause massive hit there but an equally big increase to grocery and food stores.... If people get scared again, a lot of activity may start to tank... #coronavirus #depression #macro #noted #publichealth #2020-06-27

Stokes: Unpacking the Logic Behind ���Slow Testing"���Noted

Jon Stokes: Unpacking the Logic Behind ���Slow the Testing Down, Please��� https://theprepared.com/blog/logic-behind-slow-the-testing-down/: ���A lot has been made of the President���s claim that we should ���slow the testing down,��� a claim that he doubled down on in subsequent remarks to reporters. Most commentators state that he���s under the mistaken impression that if we just don���t look at the problem, it���ll go away. But I follow a bunch of virus skeptics.... I think I understand the reasoning behind the president���s remark.... There is an actual school of thought behind this.... I want to unpack all this... because it���s important... to understand... [the] virus skeptics... [and the] story they���re telling themselves and anyone who���ll listen, and that this story is driving the US response to the virus at the highest levels.... The story the virus skeptics are currently telling goes something like this: "The outbreak actually peaked in March, and at far higher numbers than we know about. The cases were probably in the millions, and were undercounted... because the virus is very mild... unless you���re very old or otherwise compromised.... The number of uncounted cases has been dropping dramatically as the outbreak fizzles, and you can see this in the ongoing drop in deaths.... Therefore, the rise in detected cases is simply because we���re doing a bunch of track-and-trace and testing, which is leading us to uncover all these previously undetected cases that were out there. So the bottom line... is that if we weren���t sending ���hotspot hunters��� (a real term I���ve come across) to do contact tracing and find all the remaining pockets of infections, we wouldn���t be seeing these alarming rises in case counts. By this logic, this ���phantom��� rise in apparent cases (remember, really we���re just finding more old cases that are mild) is giving rise to media hysteria and economic devastation.... At this point, goes the reasoning, the economic damage from the ���fake��� rise in cases is far worse than any damage from the very mild virus, so we need to just quit testing.... To be clear, the above is still head-in-the-sand-ism, but it reflects a sophisticated head-in-the-sand-ism that���s being earnestly promoted by a crowd that includes some prominent medical professionals in the US and abroad. The government of Sweden, for instance.... What's happened in Sweden is crystal clear, as it has happened out in the open: the Swedes thought & said the virus was very weak & already quite widespread, and that assumption was the basis of their strategy & projections. It turns out they were wrong https://t.co/lecQxpqVS5... .#coronavirus #noted #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-06-26

Capos���Remember When Bret Stephens Said COVID Was Just a NYC Problem?���Noted

Paul Campos: Remember when Bret Stephens Told Us That Covid Was Just a NYC Problem? https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/06/remember-when-bret-stephens-told-us-that-covid-was-just-a-nyc-problem: ���[Bret Stephens (2020-04-24):] "Much of America has dwindling sympathy with the idea of prolonging lockdown conditions.... The curves are flattening; hospital systems haven���t come close to being overwhelmed; Americans have adapted to new etiquettes of social distancing. Many of the worst Covid outbreaks outside New York... have specific causes that can be addressed without population-wide lockdowns. Yet Americans are being told they must still��play��by New York rules���with all the hardships they entail���despite having neither New York���s living conditions nor New York���s health outcomes. This is bad medicine, misguided public policy, and horrible politics." Remember when firing James Bennet was the worst persecution of free speech since that thing that happened at a college somewhere? The claim was that the New York Times wasn���t willing to publish conservative voices on its op-ed page, and that just proved that Political Correctness Has Gone Too Far. James Bennet hired this guy, and he���s still there��� .#noted #moralresponsibility #orangehairedbaboons #2020-06-26

Respect Mah Authoritah���Noted

Edge of the American West: Respect Mah Authoritah https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/respect-mah-authoritah/: ���Serious question: are there good reasons why an individual���s background or cultural positioning should provide that person more authority in a political argument? I ask, because as I read the incredibly predictable debates about the nightmare unfolding in Gaza, I keep seeing people say things like, ���Well, I���m a Jew, and I think what Israel is doing is wrong/immoral.��� The implicit points apparently are: 1) ���My Jewishness should insulate me from charges of anti-Semitism. So don���t go there.��� And 2) ���My Jewishness provides me with a window, through which the goyim can���t possibly see, into this intractable problem.��� I���m slightly sympathetic to the former point. Maybe.... The latter argument, though, leaves me shaking my head. I���m not entirely sure it���s wrong. But I don���t like its implications at all. And if it���s valid, I���d like someone to explain why.... I don���t feel like linking to Marty Peretz, professional asshat, or the incensed commenters weighing in on the Gaza incursion in various corners of the blogosphere. Sorry. I���m both a bit flummoxed by the whole thing and also, as this post notes, more focused here on the broader question of argumentation...

Ahistoricality: There���s a huge gray area between a kind of essentialist exclusion ��� which I don���t buy as valid ��� and the sense of understanding that comes with experience. Experience can be wrong (misleading, etc.), but it���s still real, and people generally weigh direct knowledge over general knowledge, long engagement over recent interest. I think for good reason, too, but that doesn���t automatically make it an epistemological trump card.

kid bitzer: there���s just going to be no illuminating general thing to say about this question. certainly experience counts in arguments. it���s good to know stuff, and some stuff you can only know in some ways, sometimes by being some place or living through something. at the same time, the appeal to privileged knowledge is often abused. it���s just all going to get down to cases: what���s the question, what���s the knowledge, what���s the experience, etc. that���s not a helpful answer. but there is not going to be a helpful answer.

ekogan: "are there good reasons why an individual���s background or cultural positioning should provide that person more authority in a political argument?" Yes. There is a difference between ���more authority��� and ���absolute authority���. If someone is better informed about a subject, their statements about the subject are more likely to be correct, but not with 100% probability. If you heard the statement ���I���m from Israel, and the traffic in Tel Aviv is terrible���, you, who probably have no prior opinion on the subject, would assign a high certainty to ���Traffic in Tel Aviv is terrible���, and a higher certainty than if you heard ���I���m from Cleveland, and the traffic in Tel Aviv is terrible���. When you hear the statement ���I���m from Israel, and the attacks on Gaza were necessary���, since you already have a strong opinion on the subject, this doesn���t change your opinion that much, but still more than if you���ve heard ���I���m from Cleveland and the attacks on Gaza were necessary���. Bayesian reasoning applies

JPool: There was a version of this with fairly wide currency in the late 1980s/early 1990s, exemplified in bell hooks���s application of Engels���s parable of the slave knowing more about the master than the master does about the slave. The bowdlerized version of this took a key insight about generalized power and knowledge and turned it into a universalized epistemological principle, in which oppression became a special truth revealing machine (rather than something with varied epistemological costs and benefits). I find this manuever much less common these days. The problem I saw them was not just the rhetorical cudgel that this could be turned into, but the way it let both sides of whatever identity divide off the hook from the hard work of critical self-awareness.

Marc Bloch: ��� methodical study of testimony reveals an extremely serious consequence, one that has been little remarked ��� it delivers a cruel blow to picturesque history. Guillaume de Saiunt-Thierry, in his Life of Saint Bernard, reports that when Bernard was a monk of C��teaux he did not know for a long time how the chapel was lit; he was surprised one day to learn that three windows shed light on his altar, and not only one, as he had hitherto believed. On this point and others like it, the hagiographer expresses surprise and admiration: what a holy man to have such indifference to the vanities of this earth! But we know today that to be mistaken concerning things that should ��� it seems ��� be familiar, one does not need to be a Doctor of the Church and a prince of mysticism. The students of professor Clapar��de proved, during famous experiments, that they knew as little about the architecture of the hall of their University as Bernard the vault or the refectory of his convent. In a normal statement ��� i.e., mixed truth and falsehood ��� nothing is more inaccurate than all the small material details; everything happens as if most men walked around with eyes half-closed in a world they scorn to look at. How can we now take seriously the descriptive pieces of history ��� the colored costumes, the gestures, the ceremonies, the incidents of war, all these odds and ends the romantics love so much ��� when all around us not a single witness is able to retain correctly the scenes we devour so greedily when we find them in the medieval chronicles?��� M. Graux gathered the reports of the various newspapers on the answers M. Malvy gave to the final question of the president of the High Court on the death of Bolo-Pasha, the last hearing of the Toqu�� lawsuit; the contradictions are striking and amusing; we shall probably never know if Bolo���s hat were maroon or black, of round or soft shape, if M. Malvy pronounced his testimony in a sharp or weak voice; le Matin and la Petite R��publique give widely differing texts.

Bitchphd: Sure. The validity of such claims depends on the ideas that identty is an important part of experience in the real world and that experience is an important part of understanding. Both of such are, I think, true. That said, such claims aren���t automatic trump cards and when they���re played that way they suggest that identity is ALL the player has���even without experience. And in order for an argment to be taken seriously, it has to be actually presented. ���I���m a woman, and I think that���s sexist��� isn���t an argument without any attempt to explain why.

Carl: Just wanted to second the referral to Joan Scott���s ���The Evidence of Experience,��� (1991, i.e. at the height of the debate recalled by JPool, on which she went all meta) in which she concludes (in pertinent part, as the lawyers say): ���Experience is not a word we can do without, although, given its usage to essentialize identity and reify the subject, it is tempting to abandon it altogether. But experience is so much a part of everyday language, so imbricated in our narratives that it seems futile to argue for its expulsion. It serves as a way of talking about what happened, of establishing difference and similarity, of claiming knowledge that is ���unassailable.��� Given the ubiquity of the term, it seems to me more useful to work with it, to analyze its operations and to redefine its meaning. This entails focusing on processes of identity production, insisting on the discursive nature of ���experience��� and on the politics of its construction. Experience is at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted. What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, and always therefore political. The study of experience, therefore, must call into question its originary status in historical explanation. This will happen when historians take as their project not the reproduction and transmission of knowledge said to be arrived at through experience, but the analysis of the production of that knowledge itself. Such an analysis would constitute a genuinely nonfoundational history, one which retains its explanatory power and its interest in change but does not stand on or reproduce naturalized categories. It also cannot guarantee the historian���s neutrality, for deciding which categories to historicize is inevitably political, necessarily tied to the historian���s recognition of his or her stake in the production of knowledge. Experience is, in this approach, not the origin of our explanation, but that which we want to explain.��� Scott here shifts the politics from knowledge to knowledge formation, citing Foucault among others. Laura Stoker as also cited above does the same thing, recalling Bourdieu���s hermeneutic suspicion of the sneaky power play contained in scholarly ���interest in disinterest.��� How���s that for some hasty name droppin���. Anyway, I���m teaching sophomore historiography right now and one of the things newbies gotta get clear on right away is that when we study, say, 18th century Italy, personal experience is not available as an immediate foundation of knowledge. So if that���s the only way we can know stuff with any authoritah, then, y���know, so much for our whole profession. Even in the present, however, there���s a self-defeat in the claim that only experience produces adequate knowledge. I sometimes hear, for example, that as an X it is impossible for me to understand what it���s like to be a Y. To which my reply is, ok, if that���s true, shut up about it. You���re wasting your breath. Strict identity epistemology is a conversation killer.

Charlieford: I had a great encounter with experiential authority a few years back. I was talking about slave religion, and describing the limitations slave preachers might have worked under: no Bibles, no commentaries, no encyclopedias, charts, histories, maps���indeed, often illiterate. Most of the things any of us couldn���t do without if we wanted to give a talk on something���texts���they didn���t have. So I went on, you can imagine they might have been a bit confused about what Biblical personages did what, about chronology, or about who a certain Abraham might be. I was going to go one and talk about the other side���orality, memory, etc. But I didn���t get there. An older���quite older���balck woman was taking the class, and her hand shot up. ���Well, professor, you may have all your degrees and books, but my grandparents were born into slavery down in Mississippi, and you don���t know nuthin��� about those sermons!��� She had misinterpreted what I was trying to get across, and I���m not sure if I was doing all that good a job anyway, but I was happy to have her exert her authority. The class, all of the rest of whom were of typical college age, were just stunned at this unexpected intrusion of the real past into their supposedly safe class-room.

andrew: Someone who spent an entire battle face down in their fox hole is likely to have less of an understanding than someone who watched from a distance. Another Bloch quote: 'Let us suppose that a military commander has just won a victory. That, immediately, he sets to work writing an account with his own hand. That it was he who conceived the plan of the battle, and that it was he who directed it. And finally that, thanks to the moderate size of the field (for in order to sharpen the argument, we are imagining a battle of former times, drawn up in a confined space), he has been able to see almost the entire conflict develop before his eyes. Nevertheless, we cannot doubt that, in more than one essential episode, he will be forced to refer to the reports of his lieutenants. In acting thus as narrator, he would only be behaving as he had a few hours before in the action. Then as commander, regulating the movements of his troops to the swaying tide of battle, what sort of information shall we think to have served him best? Was it the rather confused scenes viewed through his binoculars, or the reports brought in hot haste by the couriers and aides-de-camp? Seldom can a leader of troops be his own observer. Meanwhile, even in so favorable a hypothesis as this, what has become of that marvel of ���direct��� observation which is claimed as the prerogative of the studies of the present?'

grackle: Those who are telling you that their view is privileged by the circumstance of their experience, such that you ���can���t understand,��� or that, by virtue of their gender, ethnicity, skin color, etc. they have a perspective that trumps yours, are merely telling you in no uncertain terms that discussion with them is futile (see KB , above, his first comment.) This seems to me, to be a kind of short-hand advising me that I shouldn���t waste my energy with any attempts at engagement. A graceful response is, ���You are probably right,��� and I am freed from yet another doomed enterprise. I am better off without any policy arguments with them.

.#cognition #noted #publicsphere #2020-06-26

Hernandez & al.: Catching Covid-19���Noted

Daniela Hernandez & c.: How Exactly Do You Catch Covid-19? There Is a Growing Consensus https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-exactly-do-you-catch-covid-19-there-is-a-growing-consensus-11592317650: ���It���s not common to contract Covid-19 from a contaminated surface.... Fleeting encounters with people outdoors are unlikely to spread the coronavirus.... The major culprit is close-up, person-to-person interactions for extended periods. Crowded events, poorly ventilated areas and places where people are talking loudly���or singing, in one famous case���maximize the risk.... Reopening... to protect public health... includes tactics like installing plexiglass barriers, requiring people to wear masks in stores and other venues, using good ventilation systems and keeping windows open when possible.... Better protections for nursing-home residents and multigenerational families living in crowded conditions, they said.... Stressing physical distancing and masks, and reducing the number of gatherings in enclosed spaces. ���We should not be thinking of a lockdown, but of ways to increase physical distance,��� said Tom Frieden, chief executive of Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit public-health initiative.... The group���s reopening recommendations include widespread testing, contact tracing and isolation of people who are infected or exposed.���

.#coronavirus #noted #publichealth #2020-06-26