J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 59

Betty Cracker: Red State, Blue State https://www.balloon-...

Betty Cracker: Red State, Blue State https://www.balloon-juice.com/2020/03/19/red-state-blue-state/: 'I asked in the earlier thread if y���all thought Trump would ever be held accountable for his epic bungling. I hold out no hope that he���ll get what he deserves... but will it ever be widely acknowledged that he hideously bungled the coronavirus response, similarly to how W is commonly acknowledged to have fucked up by starting the Iraq War?I don���t know, but it���s vitally important that Trump, his elected and appointed enablers and the media sycophants who propped him up and misled people with disastrous results are held to account. It���s not just a question of having nice things. It���s life or death, as new reporting by The Times underscores...

#noted #2020-03-19

I disagree profoundly with the "you are [a team player], ...

I disagree profoundly with the "you are [a team player], and don���t let your university exploit that". I am not separate from and being exploited by the university. I am the university. It has no hands and voices in this world without me, and people like me. It's certainly the case that other tasks can and do have higher priorities right now than being the university's hands and voice. But when those tasks are done���or, rather, when those tasks are not doable in the current moment���then working hard under unexpected conditions to fulfill as much as possible of the university's contract with its students is what I signed up to do. Otherwise, the advice is very good: Rebecca Barrett-Fox: Please Do a Bad Job of Putting Your Courses Online https://anygoodthing.com/2020/03/12/please-do-a-bad-job-of-putting-your-courses-online/: 'I���m absolutely serious.... You are NOT building an online class. You are NOT teaching students who can be expected to be ready to learn online. And, most importantly, your class is NOT the highest priority of their OR your life right now.... If you are getting sucked into the pedagogy of online learning or just now discovering that there are some pretty awesome tools out there to support students online, stop. Stop now. Ask yourself: Do I really care about this? (Probably not, or else you would have explored it earlier.) Or am I trying to prove that I���m a team player? (You are, and don���t let your university exploit that.)...

...Remember the following as you move online: Your students know less about technology than you think.... They will be accessing the internet on their phones. They have limited data. They need to reserve it for things more important than online lectures.... Some of your students will get sick. Others will be caring for people who are ill. Many will be parenting. Social isolation contributes to mental health problems. Social isolation contributes to domestic violence. Students will be losing their jobs, especially those in tourism and hospitality. All of these factors mean that your students are facing more important battles today than your class���if they are even able to access it....

Do not require synchronous work. Students should not need to show up at a specific time for anything. REFUSE to do any synchronous work.... Do not record lectures unless you need to.... They take up a lot of resources on your end and on theirs.... Do record lectures if you need to.... Rremember that your students will be frequently interrupted in their listening, so a good rule is 1 concept per lecture.... Make all work due on the same day and time for the rest of the semester. I recommend Sunday night at 11:59 pm.... Do NOT require students to use online proctoring or force them to have themselves recorded during exams or quizzes. This is a fundamental violation of their privacy, and they did NOT sign up for that when they enrolled in your course.... Make everything self-grading if you can (yes, multiple choice and T/F on quizzes and tests) or low-stakes (completed/not completed).... Listen for them asking for help.... This advice is very different from that which I would share if you were designing an online course. I hope it���s helpful, and for those of you moving your courses online, I hope it helps you understand the labor that is required in building an online course a bit better...

#noted #2020-03-19

Nicole Cliffe: I Tried Joe Manganiello's Diet and Workout...

Nicole Cliffe: I Tried Joe Manganiello's Diet and Workout Regimen https://www.elle.com/beauty/health-fitness/a38304/joe-mangianello-diet-workout-regimen/: 'Should you do this workout plan? I don't know, I'm not your mom.... Joe Manganiello.... You may know Joe as Big Dick Ritchie, or as Sofia Vergara's husband who HASN'T tried stealing her embryos, or as Alcide Herveaux, the sexiest werewolf in Shreveport. But the Joe who matters to us today is this one: Evolution: The Cutting-Edge Guide to Breaking Down Mental Walls and Building the Body You've Always Wanted has been an obsession of mine for a few years now. This is because I really like Joe Manganiello's face and body, and there are many pictures of said face and body contained within.... However, it is also very very funny. Joe Manganiello is one of the most earnest humans who has ever lived. He believes in himself and he believes in you. He probably believes in you more than you believe in yourself.... Okay, now me. I am a 33-year-old mother of two. I have brown and gray hair. One of my eyes is 30 percent smaller than the other. I work out a lot, and have for the last few years.... What Joe outlines in Evolution is, like it says on the tin, a six-week workout and diet routine. It purports to be the exact plan he followed to get in shape for "True Blood". When it occurred to me that it might be fun to do a stunt journalism piece where I followed his plan to the letter for six weeks and wrote about the results, I was in the process of shutting down my website, The Toast, which I had started and run with my friend Mallory Ortberg for the last three years. As you can imagine, I had a lot of feelings about this, and sometimes the best thing to do with too many feelings is to embark on an extremely grueling six-day-a-week workout regimen and refuse to eat any carbs that aren't sweet potatoes, a starch I personally loathe in all its forms...

#noted #2020-03-16

1919: Inevitability and Chance: A Teaser for "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century"

From 1870-1914 we can see global economic history as by-and-large following a logic that was if not inevitable at least probable, or explicable after the fact. Luck and probability gave humanity an opening around 1870 in the form of a quintuple breakthrough: the ideology and policy of an open world, the transportation breakthrough, the communications breakthrough, and���most important the coming of the research laboratory plus the large corporation to to more than double the pace of invention and greatly speed the deployment of new technologies. Thereafter to 1914 the economic logic rolled forward: the idea of invention, the specialization of inventors, the deployment of technology in corporations trade, the international division of labor, and global growth (but also the creation of a low-wage periphery, and the concentration of industrialization of wealth in what is still the global north); the beginnings of the demographic transition that curbed the tendency for technological progress to be nearly entirely eaten up by greater numbers; the shift of work from farm to factory; and the coming of sufficient (if ill-distributed) prosperity. These all raised the possibility that someday, not that far away, humanity, in the rich economies of the global north at least, might attain something that previous eras would have judged to be a genuine utopia.

From 1870-1914 we can see global political-economic history as by-and-large following a possible if not an overwhelmingly likely or near-necessary path. We see the threading of the needle in the creation and maintenance of an increasingly liberal order within the economies and polities of the global north: expanding suffrage, growing rights, increasing prosperity, increasing inequality accompanied by political movements in or near power that sought to curb such inequalities, and an absence of large-scale revolution. We see the conquest of the rest of the world into formal and informal empires as the power gradient between the North Atlantic and the rest became overwhelmingly huge. Both of these could have been otherwise. But it is not that surprising that they were what they were.

But in the politics of World War I���s outbreak and war���s progression we enter pure chance and contingency. World War I did not have to happen���the 1914 Bosnian crisis might have been finessed, or the war might have ended with a quick decisive victory for one side or the other, or governments and elites might have come to their senses. Whether some such catastrophe like World War I was probable or whether humanity was unlucky is harder to judge. However, the fact that we had two world wars in the long 1870-2016 twentieth century gives us good reason to fear that there was a deep flaw at the heart of the ���western��� civilization that had dominated the world from 1870-1914.

To much of the industrial world���especially to those engaged in commerce, trade, and enterprise���World War I had seemed impossible to imagine beforehand. While it was going on it felt like a nightmare. And afterwards seemed like a new, very different, and very bitter life.

The British economist John Maynard Keynes saw the war as a previously-unimaginable horror. He saw his own participation in its planning as he worked at the British Treasury as contemptible: He wrote to his friend David Garnett that he ���agreed that there was a great deal of truth��� in Garnett���s denunciation of Keynes���s role as an analytical:

genie taken��� out... by savages to serve them faithfully for their savage ends, and then���back you go into the bottle.... Oh... our savages are better than other savages.... But don���t believe in the profane abomination...

After the war, Keynes scorned the naivete of the upper-middle class pre-World War I inhabitant of London ���for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages��� who had seen:

this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable...

He was, of course, speaking of himself. He and his had seen:

the projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent��� as ���little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper��� [with] almost no influence��� on��� economic and social life...

And they had been wrong, with awful consequences for the world.

World War I did not have to end as it did���with Germany defeated but not conquered, and with Germany���s right wing ready to propagandize that it had not been beaten in a fair fight but rather stabbed in the back by the diplomats, socialists, liberals, and Jews who made up the ���November criminals���; with the United States withdrawing into isolation; with Russia in revolution; and with Britain unwilling and France too shell-shocked by the horrendous casualty roll to take on the task of hegemon stabilizing Europe.

Thus after World War I humanity faced a huge problem: Could it pick up the pieces and try again? Could it do something like restore the pre-World War I order, fix the flaws that had generated the catastrophe of World War I, and resume its tasks���the economic task of advancing and deploying technology and organization for a rich and truly human world and the political-economic task of managing to keep domestic and international peace by satisfying people���s desires to have and exercise the rights they thought they had that were more than just property rights? Or would human progress in the direction of something that some might judge as a utopia greatly slow, or even come to a screeching halt?

We know that it did: confidence in the future of civilization was, worldwide, much lower in 1946 than it had been in 1919. The question is why?

#economichistory #highlighted #politicaleconomy #slouchingtowardsutopia #2020-03-14


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#noted #2020-03-12

#noted #2020-03-12

A Grave Setback for Left-Neoliberalism

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1238263706837975043: The electorate of all those who care enough to be motivated to vote for Chief Neoliberal Shill has spoken: I am defeated. Congratulations to @scottlincicome on a well-fought campaign. I wish him luck. He will need it.

This marks the end of an era. Since its inception, the office of Chief Neoliberal Shill has been occupied by someone from the left wing of the neo \liberal movement. The wearers of the Iron Crown have put forward a claim to a kinder, gentler neoliberalism; one that is really nothing but a more effective form of social democracy; a neoliberalism with a human face. The argument has been that the resort to market mechanisms maximizes human freedom and choice and also maximizes the collective entrepreneurial energy of the human race by using Pigou-compatible incentives to crowd source the solutions to all human problems. Thinkers on the left have long called for "think globally, act locally": the Pigou-compatible market powerfully incentivizes that and accomplishes it in a way that no other societal system can. And as for the fact that markets not only allocate scarce resources among alternative uses but also create rich and poor���and make the societal voices of the rich much, much, much louder than those of the poor? Neoliberalism with a human face has called for large scale redistribution and pre-distribution to prevent inequalities of income from becoming poisonous. That has been our Polarstar ever since the days when John Maynard Keynes called for the "euthanasia of the rentier" as a side effect of pursuing a monetary policy consistent with constant full employment.

Suffice to say that large scale pre-distribution and redistribution and the euthanasia of the rentier has never been in the Cato Institute's wheelhouse.

Rather, the vibe I have always gotten from it is that of Andrew Carnegie back when he was a robber baron: "When visiting the Sioux, I was led to the wigwam of the chief. It was just like the others in external appearance, and even within the difference was trifling between it and those of the poorest of his braves. The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us to-day measures the change which has come with civilization.

This change, however, is not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly beneficial. It is well, nay, essential for the progress of the race, that the houses of some should be homes for all that is highest and best in literature and the arts, and for all the refinements of civilization, rather than that none should be so. Much better this great irregularity than universal squalor.
"Without wealth there can be no M��cenas. The 'good old times' were not good old times. Neither master nor servant was as well situated then as to-day. A relapse to old conditions would be disastrous to both���not the least so to him who serves--and would Sweep away civilization with it. But whether the change be for good or ill, it is upon us, beyond our power to alter, and therefore to be accepted and made the best of. It is a waste of time to criticise the inevitable....

To-day the world obtains commodities of excellent quality at prices which even the generation preceding this would have deemed incredible. In the commercial world similar causes have produced similar results, and the race is benefited thereby. The poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford. What were the luxuries have become the necessaries of life. The laborer has now more comforts than the landlord had a few generations ago. The farmer has more luxuries than the landlord had, and is more richly clad and better housed. The landlord has books and pictures rarer, and appointments more artistic, than the King could then obtain.

The price we pay for this salutary change is, no doubt, great. We assemble thousands of operatives in the factory, in the mine, and in the counting-house, of whom the employer can know little or nothing, and to whom the employer is little better than a myth. All intercourse between them is at an end. Rigid Castes are formed, and, as usual, mutual ignorance breeds mutual distrust. Each Caste is without sympathy for the other, and ready to credit anything disparaging in regard to it. Under the law of competition, the employer of thousands is forced into the strictest economies, among which the rates paid to labor figure prominently, and often there is friction between the employer and the employed, between capital and labor, between rich and poor. Human society loses homogeneity.

The price which society pays for the law of competition, like the price it pays for cheap comforts and luxuries, is also great; but the advantage of this law are also greater still, for it is to this law that we owe our wonderful material development, which brings improved conditions in its train. But, whether the law be benign or not, we must say of it, as we say of the change in the conditions of men to which we have referred: It is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.

We accept and welcome therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race. Having accepted these, it follows that there must be great scope for the exercise of special ability in the merchant and in the manufacturer who has to conduct affairs upon a great scale. That this talent for organization and management is rare among men is proved by the fact that it invariably secures for its possessor enormous rewards, no matter where or under what laws or conditions..."

GLORY TO THE RACE! (BUT BY NO MEANS SERVICE TO THE STATE)

#highlighted #neoliberalism #politicaleconomy #2020-03-12

Coronavirus...

https://delong.typepad.com/files/coronavirus.pdf

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#coronavius #highlighted #publichealth #2020-03-12

Tomas Pueyo: Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now https://me...

Tomas Pueyo: Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca: 'For the Bay Area, they were testing everybody who had traveled or was in contact with a traveler.... I looked at that ratio for South Korea... 86%.... With that number, you can calculate the number of true cases. If the Bay Area has 86 cases today, it is likely that the true number is ~600.... France claims 1,400 cases today and 30 deaths. Using the two methods above, you can have a range of cases: between 24,000 and 140,000.... Spain has very similar numbers as France.... So the coronavirus is already here. It���s hidden, and it���s growing exponentially.... The World Health Organization (WHO) quotes 3.4% as the fatality rate.... This number is out of context.... It really depends on the country and the moment: between 0.6% in South Korea and 4.4% in Iran. So what is it? We can use a trick to figure it out.... Deaths/Total Cases and Death/Closed Cases. The first one is likely to be an underestimate.... The second is an overestimate, because it���s likely that deaths are closed quicker than recoveries.... Hubei���s fatality rate will probably converge towards 4.8%. Meanwhile, for the rest of China, it will likely converge to ~0.9%.... Iran���s and Italy���s Deaths / Total Cases are both converging towards the 3%-4% range. My guess is their numbers will end up around that figure too.... The last relevant example is the Diamond Princess cruise: with 706 cases, 6 deaths and 100 recoveries, the fatality rate will be between 1% and 6.5%. Note that the age distribution in each country will also have an impact: Since mortality is much higher for older people, countries with an aging population like Japan will be harder hit...

...Countries that are overwhelmed will have a fatality rate between ~3%-5%. Put in another way: Countries that act fast can reduce the number of deaths by ten.... Around 20% of cases require hospitalization, 5% of cases require the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), and around 2.5% require very intensive help, with items such as ventilators or ECMO (extra-corporeal oxygenation).... A few years ago, the US had a total of 250 ECMO machines.... That is without taking into account issues such as masks. A country like the US has only 1% of the masks it needs.... Countries like Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong or Singapore, as well as Chinese regions outside of Hubei, have been prepared and given the care that patients need. But the rest of Western countries are rather going in the direction of Hubei and Italy....

What Should You Do? Flatten the Curve.... The more we postpone cases, the better the healthcare system can function, the lower the mortality rate.... Social Distancing: There is one very simple thing that we can do and that works: social distancing. If you go back to the Wuhan graph, you will remember that as soon as there was a lockdown, cases went down. That���s because people didn���t interact with each other, and the virus didn���t spread. The current scientific consensus is that this virus can be spread within 2 meters (6 feet) if somebody coughs.... The worst infection then becomes through surfaces: The virus survives for up to 9 days on different surfaces such as metal, ceramics and plastics. That means things like doorknobs, tables, or elevator buttons can be terrible infection vectors.... Learning from the 1918 Flu Pandemic: You can see how Philadelphia didn���t act quickly, and had a massive peak in death rates. Compare that with St Louis, which did. Then look at Denver, which enacted measures and then loosened them. They had a double peak, with the 2nd one higher than the first....

On average, taking measures 20 days earlier halved the death rate. Italy has finally figured this out.... Hopefully, we will see results in the coming days. However, it will take one to two weeks to see. Remember the Wuhan graph: there was a delay of 12 days between the moment when the lockdown was announced and the moment when official cases (orange) started going down.... Containment is making sure all the cases are identified, controlled, and isolated. It���s what Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan or Taiwan are doing so well.... China.... The lengths at which it went to contain the virus are mind-boggling. For example, they had up to 1,800 teams of 5 people each tracking every infected person, everybody they got interacted with, then everybody those people interacted with, and isolating the bunch. That���s how they were able to contain the virus across a billion-people country.

This is not what Western countries have done. And now it���s too late. The recent US announcement that most travel from Europe was banned is a containment measure for a country that has, as of today, 3 times the cases that Hubei had when it shut down, growing exponentially. How can we know if it���s enough? It turns out, we can know by looking at the Wuhan travel ban.... The Wuhan travel ban only delayed the spread in China by 3���5 days.... The US administration���s ban on European travel is good: It has probably bought us a few hours, maybe a day or two. But not more. It is not enough. It���s containment when what���s needed is mitigation....

Mitigation requires heavy social distancing. People need to stop hanging out to drop the transmission rate (R), from the R=~2���3 that the virus follows without measures, to below 1, so that it eventually dies out... cclosing companies, shops, mass transit, schools, enforcing lockdowns��� The worse your situation, the worse the social distancing. The earlier you impose heavy measures, the less time you need to keep them, the easier it is to identify brewing cases, and the fewer people get infected.... This is what countries like Iran, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland or the US need to do. But they���re not doing it.... One approach is to gradually increase measures. Unfortunately, that gives precious time for the virus to spread. If you want to be safe, do it Wuhan style. People might complain now, but they���ll thank you later.... This is an exponential threat. Every day counts. When you���re delaying by a single day a decision, you���re not contributing to a few cases maybe. There are probably hundreds or thousands of cases in your community already. Every day that there isn���t social distancing, these cases grow exponentially...

#noted #2020-03-12

Duncan Black: Well, Then... https://www.eschatonblog.com/...

Duncan Black: Well, Then... https://www.eschatonblog.com/: '���The lack of testing in the United States is a debacle,��� said Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at Harvard���s Chan School and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. ���We���re supposed to be the best biomedical powerhouse in the world and we���ve been unable to do something that every other country has been able to do.���...

#noted #2020-03-12

Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie: Coronavirus Disease (COVID-...

Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie: Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#what-do-we-know-about-the-mortality-risk-of-covid-19: "What we want to know is the total number of COVID-19 cases.... What we do know: the doubling time of known cases. The WHO is publishing daily Situation Reports (here) which list the number of confirmed cases.... Doubling time for the global number of cases (excluding China): 4 days...

#coronavirus #noted #2020-03-09