J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 57

Comment of the Day: Ronald Brakels: On First Things and R...

Comment of the Day: Ronald Brakels: On First Things and R.E. Reno's Mammon-Coronavirus Death Cult Author https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/from-_first-things_-rr-reno-tells-us-that-a-culture-of-life-is-all-very-fine-when-it-comes-to-bullying-women-but-not-wh.html#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a519c2e9200b: 'Not cancelling a small dinner party is exactly the same as refusing to cower under the Nazi heel and allowing the death camps to operate for a generation. Therefore, by imagining having a small dinner party, I personally am as great as Churchill or possibly Jesus of Nazareth. I haven't decided yet. If only they'd had a love child, Jeston of Nazhill...

#commentoftheday #2020-03-23

Comment of the Day: JEC: On First Things and Its Mammon-C...

Comment of the Day: JEC: On First Things and Its Mammon-Coronavirus Death Cult https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/from-_first-things_-rr-reno-tells-us-that-a-culture-of-life-is-all-very-fine-when-it-comes-to-bullying-women-but-not-wh.html?cid=6a00e551f0800388340240a4f519bf200d#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a4f519bf200d: 'I see a number of lessons to be learned here. Lesson 1: Don't read Twitter. It never ends well. Lesson 2: If your desire to be "interesting" leads you to celebrate an apocalyptic death cult, reconsider your life choices. Lesson 3: If someone invites you to a literal Masque of the Red Death, chain them to an alcove in your basement and wall them up. This is an important public health measure....

#commentoftheday #2020-03-23

From First Things. R.R. Reno tells us that a "Culture of ...

From First Things. R.R. Reno tells us that a "Culture of Life" is all very fine when it comes to bullying women, but not when it begins to interfere in even a minor way with the worship of the true God: Mammon, in the form of a higher value of he DJIA. And I must say, Matthew 25 does not command people to hold dinner parties during a plague so that their guests can infect one another: First Things: "There is a demonic side to the sentimentalism of saving lives at any cost. https://twitter.com/firstthingsmag/status/1242174110035214338: 'R.R. Reno: "Satan rules a kingdom in which the ultimate power of death is announced morning, noon, and night.... This is what is happening in New York as I write. The media maintain a drumbeat of warnings. And the message is not just that you or I might end up in an overloaded emergency room gasping for air. We are more often reminded that we can communicate the virus to others and cause their deaths.... The mass shutdown of society to fight the spread of COVID-19 creates a perverse, even demonic atmosphere.... We... are collectively required to cower in fear���fear that we���ll die redoubled by the fear that we���ll cause others to die. We are stripped of whatever courage we might be capable of. Were I to host a small dinner party tonight, wanting to resist the paranoia and hysteria, I would be denounced.... Alexander Solzhenitsyn resolutely rejected the materialist principle of ���survival at any price.��� It strips us of our humanity. This holds true for a judgment about the fate of others as much as it does for ourselves. We must reject the specious moralism that places fear of death at the center of life. Fear of death and causing death is pervasive���stoked by a materialistic view of survival at any price and unchecked by Christian leaders who in all likelihood secretly accept the materialist assumptions of our age. As long as we allow fear to reign, it will cause nearly all believers to fail to do as Christ commands in Matthew 25. It already is..."

#noted #2020-03-23

*Note to Self: Reported Coronavirus Cases per Million (20...

*Note to Self: Reported Coronavirus Cases per Million (2020-03-22 12:00:00 PDT):

Top 20 States;

NY: 1200

WA: 236

NJ: 215

LA: 182

DC: 145

MI: 89

CO: 82

MA: 77

RI: 75

MS: 69

ME: 68

CT: 62

NV: 61

IL: 59

TN: 55

WI: 55

GA: 48

UT: 43

FL: 40

CA: 40

#coronavirus #notetoself #publichealth #2020-03-22

Comment of the Day: The Trump Administration Has Made Ame...

Comment of the Day: The Trump Administration Has Made America #1: Worst in the World at Coronavirus Response: Ronald Brakels https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/the-trump-administration-has-made-america-1-worst-in-the-world-at-coronavirus-response.html#comment-6a00e551f080038834025d9b3f29b6200c: 'Australia's Coronavirus fiscal stimulus is 9.7% of GDP. I think this is the largest peacetime fiscal stimulus by a developed nation. Hopefully, now they are taking the economic effects seriously, the Australian Federal Government will start taking the disease seriously. At least Western Australia and South Australia have islanded themselves, while Tasmania actually is an island. The other three states though... Well, you can walk between them being eaten by a shark, a dingo, or desolation...

#commentoftheday #2020-03-22

Economic Growth in Historical Comparative Perspective: Assignment 8: Economic Growth in Historical Perspective

Econ 135: Assignment 8: Character of Modern Economic Growth Paper https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/economic-growth-in-historical-comparative-perspective-assignment-8-economic-growth-in-historical-perspective.html: Explain, in about 500 words, how the character of modern economic growth as it has been seen in the world since 1870 differs from economic growth���or not-growth���in previous eras since the invention of agriculture. Upload your short essay to this webpage. Submitting: a text entry box. Due Apr 8 at 11:59pm...

#berkeley #economicgrowth #economichistory #teaching #2020-03-22

The Trump Administration Has Made America #1: Worst in the World at Coronavirus Response

The trajectory of cases since the 100th reported case is now "ahead" of all other counries. The Trump administration truly has made America #1!

Donald Trump: Coronavirus Statements https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/12/trump-coronavirus-timeline/:

Jan. 22: ���We have it totally under control.���

Jan. 24: ���It will all work out well.���

Jan. 29: ���We have the best experts anywhere in the world, and they are on top of it 24/7!���

Jan. 30: ���We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment���five. And those people are all recuperating successfully."

Feb. 2: ���Well, we pretty much shut it down coming in from China."

Feb. 10: ���I think the virus is going to be���it���s going to be fine.���

Feb. 14: ���We have a very small number of people in the country, right now, with it. It���s like around 12. Many of them are getting better. Some are fully recovered already. So we���re in very good shape.���

Feb. 19: ���I think it���s going to work out fine. I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus. So let���s see what happens, but I think it���s going to work out fine.���

Feb. 24: ���The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.��� Stock Market starting to look very good to me!���

Feb. 25: ���You may ask about the coronavirus, which is very well under control in our country. We have very few people with it, and the people that have it are... We���re doing a great job.���

Feb. 26: ���Because of all we���ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low.��� When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero. That���s a pretty good job we���ve done."

Feb. 26: "We���re ready for it. It is what it is. We���re ready for it. We���re really prepared."

Feb. 27: ���Only a very small number in U.S., and China numbers look to be going down. All countries working well together!���

Feb. 28: ���I think it���s really going well. We did something very fortunate: we closed up to certain areas of the world very, very early���far earlier than we were supposed to. I took a lot of heat for doing it. It turned out to be the right move, and we only have 15 people and they are getting better, and hopefully they���re all better. There���s one who is quite sick, but maybe he���s gonna be fine."

Feb. 28: ���It���s going to disappear. One day, it���s like a miracle, it will disappear.���

Feb. 29: ���We���re the number-one travel destination anywhere in the world, yet we have far fewer cases of the disease than even countries with much less travel or a much smaller population.���

March 4: ���Some people will have this at a very light level and won���t even go to a doctor or hospital, and they���ll get better. There are many people like that.���

March 5: ���With approximately 100,000 CoronaVirus cases worldwide, and 3,280 deaths, the United States, because of quick action on closing our borders, has, as of now, only 129 cases (40 Americans brought in) and 11 deaths.���

March 6: ���Calm. You have to be calm. It���ll go away.���

March 7: ���It came out of China, and we heard about it. And made a good move: We closed it down; we stopped it. Otherwise���the head of CDC said last night that you would have thousands of more problems if we didn���t shut it down very early. That was a very early shutdown, which is something we got right."

March 9: ���The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant."

March 9: ���So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!���

March 10: ���As you know, it���s about 600 cases, it���s about 26 deaths, within our country. And had we not acted quickly, that number would have been substantially more.���

March 10: ���We���re prepared, and we���re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.���

March 11: ���I think we���re going to get through it very well.���

March 12: ���The United States, because of what I did and what the administration did with China, we have 32 deaths at this point��� when you look at the kind of numbers that you���re seeing coming out of other countries, it���s pretty amazing when you think of it.���

March 13: ���[FDA] will bring, additionally, 1.4 million tests on board next week and 5 million within a month. I doubt we���ll need anywhere near that.���

March 14: ���We���re using the full power of the federal government to defeat the virus, and that���s what we���ve been doing.���

March 15: ���This is a very contagious virus. It���s incredible. But it���s something that we have tremendous control over���...

#coronavirus #orngehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-03-21

Catherine Rampell has good ideas for how the press could ...

Catherine Rampell has good ideas for how the press could do its proper job. Her ideas meet enthusiastic approval: Mistermix: This, This, This https://www.balloon-juice.com/2020/01/02/this-this-this/: 'Catherine Rampell has a few resolutions for the media. This one really hit home: "Don���t spend more time analyzing an idea that the president proposes than he spent coming up with it. This one is hard, I know. Sometimes Trump says things that are just so wrong, in so many ways, that it���s difficult to resist the urge to enumerate all the details of their wrongness. But a 4 a.m. cyberbullying toilet tweet about Kim Jong Un doesn���t necessarily mean there���s an actual, deliberate shift in diplomatic strategy. A blurted parenthetical about how he���d love to pass a middle-class tax cut, the biggest tax cut ever, doesn���t mean he seriously plans to propose such a thing. Let���s not pretend a secret plan actually exists and then conjure up tea leaves for experts to read. Don���t impute more seriousness or thoughtfulness than ad-libbed drivel deserves." Trump���s Twitter feed is like a chicken shit cannon from which the media is constantly trying to make chicken salad. It���s a goddam waste of time and the sooner they find a way to ignore most of it, the better for all of us...

#noted #2020-03-21

Jennifer Ouellette: _It���s the Network, Stupid: _ https:...

Jennifer Ouellette: _It���s the Network, Stupid: _ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/its-the-network-stupid-study-offers-fresh-insight-into-why-were-so-divided/: 'Study offers fresh insight into why we���re so divided: social perception bias might simply be an emergent property of our social networks. Eun Lee [and] Fariba Karimi... decided to collaborate on a study of the effect of "homophily"���people's tendency to hang out with those who are similar to them (think "birds of a feather flock together")���on people's perceptions using network models. They came up with a generic binary model dividing individual nodes into two groups: Democrat or Republican, smoking or non-smoking, male or female, immigrants or nonimmigrants, for example. The model treated people as individual nodes in a network, with no consideration of human cognitive processes. The emergence of perception biases depended solely on the relative sizes of the majority and minority groups, and the extent to which like nodes connected to other like nodes...

...To test the predictions of their model, they collaborated with co-author Mirta Galesic, who leads the research group on human social dynamics at SFI. The team conducted a survey of 300 participants based in Germany, the US, and South Korea, asking about perceptions of specific minority-associated attributes.

The team was surprised to find that the survey results closely matched the model's predictions. Specifically, "People who were surrounded by people similar to them think that their group is larger than it really is, and people who have more diverse social circles think their group is smaller than it really is," Galesic told Ars. "These biases are exaggerated with the relative size of the majority and minority groups."

Thus, social perception bias appears to be a basic property of social networks (and large-scale networks in general), similar to the famous "six degrees of separation" phenomenon, or small world network structure, whereby everyone is separated by six or less social connections...

#noted #2020-03-21

Very interesting: whenever "one side of a social divide r...

Very interesting: whenever "one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate," then lies become the truth. Those who feel like disrespected outsiders can regard a lying demagogue or their authentic champion. Their authentic appeal is precisely that they delegitimize what their supporters regard as an illegitimate system. Thus Trump's core supporters know full well that he constantly lies, and love it. young is not a bug but a feature: Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim, Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan: The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy8 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0003122417749632: 'We develop and test a theory to address a puzzling pattern that has been discussed widely since the 2016 U.S. presidential election and reproduced here in a post-election survey: how can a constituency of voters find a candidate ���authentically appealing��� (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a ���lying demagogue��� (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)? Key to the theory are two points: (1) ���common-knowledge��� lies may be understood as flagrant violations of the norm of truth-telling; and (2) when a political system is suffering from a ���crisis of legitimacy��� (Lipset 1959) with respect to at least one political constituency, members of that constituency will be motivated to see a flagrant violator of established norms as an authentic champion of its interests. Two online vignette experiments on a simulated college election support our theory. These results demonstrate that mere partisanship is insufficient to explain sharp differences in how lying demagoguery is perceived, and that several oft-discussed factors���information access, culture, language, and gender���are not necessary for explaining such differences. Rather, for the lying demagogue to have authentic appeal, it is sufficient that one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate...

#noted #2020-03-20