J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 62

One view is that in the world of abundance we would all a...

One view is that in the world of abundance we would all act as the British upper class acted, as portrayed in the books off Jane Austen. But even there the fear of descending in the class hierarchy���of failing to marry well, or marrying a husband whose gambling and debauchery debts force one out of the leisured-aristocratic lifestyle���or that one's children might descend in the class hierarchy is a major motivating factor keeping people acting as though they are still in the kingdom of necessity. Perhaps the lesson is that we will always imagine ourselves in the kingdom of necessity. Perhaps there are no good models for what worthwhile human life would become in an age of true abundance: Robert Skidelsky: Economic Possibilities for Ourselves https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/economic-possibilities-for-ourselves-by-robert-skidelsky-2019-12?barrier=accesspaylog: 'The most depressing feature of the current explosion in robot-apocalypse literature is that it rarely transcends the world of work. Almost every day, news articles appear detailing some new round of layoffs. In the broader debate, there are apparently only two camps: those who believe that automation will usher in a world of enriched jobs for all, and those who fear it will make most of the workforce redundant. This bifurcation reflects the fact that ���working for a living��� has been the main occupation of humankind throughout history. The thought of a cessation of work fills people with dread, for which the only antidote seems to be the promise of better work. Few have been willing to take the cheerful view of Bertrand Russell���s provocative 1932 essay In Praise of Idleness. Why is it so difficult for people to accept that the end of necessary labor could mean barely imaginable opportunities to live, in John Maynard Keynes���s words, ���wisely, agreeably, and well���? The fear of labor-saving technology dates back to the start of the Industrial Revolution, but two factors in our own time have heightened it. The first is that the new generation of machines seems poised to replace not only human muscles but also human brains. Owing to advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, we are said to be entering an era of thinking robots; and those robots will soon be able to think even better than we do. The worry is that teaching machines to perform most of the tasks previously carried out by humans will make most human labor redundant. In that scenario, what will humans do?...

#noted #2020-03-05

Were material incentives always a weak and blunt tool in ...

Were material incentives always a weak and blunt tool in the face of a society in which people's lives were deeply interwoven in social networks? Or is America today different from at least what America was in the past, in which moving to opportunity was a real thing? The brilliant Duflo and Banerjee have thoughts: Esther Duflo & Abhijit Banerjee: Economic Incentives Don���t Always Do What We Want Them To https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/26/opinion/sunday/duflo-banerjee-economic-incentives.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage: 'Tax incentives do very little. For example, in famously ���money-minded��� Switzerland, when people got a two-year tax holiday because the tax code changed, there was absolutely no change in the labor supply. In the United States, economists have studied many temporary changes in the tax rate or in retirement incentives, and for the most part the impact of labor hours was minimal. Nor do people slack off if they are guaranteed an income: The Alaska Permanent Fund, which, since 1982, has handed out a yearly dividend of about $5,000 per household, has had no adverse impact on employment.... Evidence suggests that it has not decreased participation in the labor market. Employment has tracked that of similar states since the dividend began.... On the flip side, when jobs vanish and the local economy collapses, we cannot count on people���s desire to seek out a better life to smooth things out. The United States population is surprisingly immobile now. Seven percent of the population used to move to another county every year in the 1950s. Fewer than 4 percent did so in 2018.... The [manufacturing] decline started in 1990 and accelerated in the mid-2000s, precisely at the time when the industries in some regions were hit by competition from Chinese imports. When jobs disappeared in the counties that were producing toys, clothing or furniture, few people looked for jobs elsewhere. Nor did they demand help to move or to retrain ��� they stayed put and hoped things would improve. As a result, one million jobs were lost and wages and purchasing power fell in those communities, setting off a downward spiral of blight and hopelessness. Marriage rates and fertility fell, and more children were born into poverty. Despite this, the faith in incentives is widely shared. We encountered this mismatch firsthand, when, in the fall of 2018, we (along with the economist Stefanie Stantcheva) conducted a survey of 10,000 Americans. We asked half of them what they thought someone should do if he or she were unemployed and a job was available 200 miles away. Sixty-two percent said the person should move. Fifty percent also said that they expected at least some people to stop working if taxes went up, and 60 percent thought that Medicaid beneficiaries are discouraged from working by the lack of a work requirement. Forty-nine percent answered yes when asked whether ���many people��� would stop working if there were a universal basic income of $13,000 a year with no strings attached....

#noted #2020-03-05

A very nice piece from my colleague Pranab Bardhan: Prana...

A very nice piece from my colleague Pranab Bardhan: Pranab Bardhan: The Achilles Heel of Liberal Democracy https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2020/02/the-achilles-heel-of-liberal-democracy.html: 'If the constitution in some democratic countries incorporates liberal inclusive values and is reasonably difficult to change, it can provide the basis of some form of civic nationalism (or what Habermas called ���constitutional patriotism���) that may resist the marauding forces of majoritarianism or exclusivist ethnic nationalism. But the ethnic nationalist leaders are so adept at whipping up our primordial or visceral evolutionary defensive-aggressive urge to fight against so-called ���enemy��� groups, that such resistance is currently crumbling in many countries���for example, conspicuously in India under the onslaught of Hindu nationalism, even after several decades of reasonably successful civic nationalism based on values of pluralism enshrined in the constitution and undergirded by centuries of folk-syncretic tradition of tolerance and pluralism of faith among the common people.... The fundamental problem [is] in something lacking in the origin of the democratic political settlement.... It is the diversity of interest groups, regions and identities and their collective action ability that may be the main source of lingering hope in extremely diverse countries like India. The Hindu nationalists currently enjoy a great deal of advantages in their onward march: a massive cadre-based disciplined, though thoroughly bigoted, organization (RSS) attempting to forge cultural homogenization among the Hindus, a charismatic political leader not averse to spreading misleading half-truths, lies and disinformation, access to a disproportionately large amount of corporate donations for election funds, and an infernal ability to use the arms of a pre-existing over-extended state to harass and persecute dissidents and intimidate the rest (through ample use of investigative and tax-raiding agencies, and misuse of colonial-era sedition laws against critics of the government, threats of withdrawal of public advertisements from critical media outlets, allowing impunity for the partisan lynch-mobs or police against minorities, and so on). The atmosphere of fear and intimidation has immobilized many civil society groups. Labor unions as a possible center of organized opposition have been in a kind of structural decline. Sadly, even the judiciary seems to have been compromised, and often timid or erratic. Nevertheless in the long run the odds are against such drastic homogenization and cramming of the manifold diversities of Hindu society into the Procrustean bed of an invented, artificial, poisonous, religious nationalism���against which Gandhi, the father of the nation, fought all his life.... This is an uphill battle for protecting the essence of liberal democracy that liberals all over the world should keep a vigilant eye on. It is vitally important particularly at a time when the Achilles Heel of liberal democracy everywhere looks grievously exposed...

#noted #2020-03-05

A sophisticated look at some of the issues around the "we...

A sophisticated look at some of the issues around the "wealth tax" that we do not (yet) have a good handle on: Josh Gans: Does Being Rich Make You Better at Allocating Capital? https://digitopoly.org/2019/10/27/does-being-rich-make-you-better-at-allocating-capital/: 'While we can all agree that the wealth tax likely deters risk-free saving, where the money actually goes otherwise is quite open. It could go to consumption which will cause actual resource use in ways that are certainly not in the direction people concerned with redistribution would like although just how much of that there can be given that the wealthy haven���t managed to do that spending previously is arguable. It could go to philanthropy which is a form of consumption (at least from the point of view of the donator) and is something that could be beneficial (but we have to consider whether the wealthy are the most productive to make those decisions���more on that another time). Or it could go to political influence which is a mixture of consumption (the naked expression of power) or investment to help them get wealthier (the well-dressed expression of power) but in actuality depends on how much other rich people are spending on these activities in terms of the potential return (a complicated game). Finally, where the money could go is to riskier investment because at the margin this is now more attractive than risk-free investment. This is not a given as the wealth tax could deter or spur this type of investment based on other margins (something Summers notes) but given the presumption above, if it does cause the wealthy to get out and find places for their money with a higher potential return, it is causing the wealthy to live their intended social purpose. So we are left with two empirically resolvable statements: Will the wealth tax increase or decrease riskier investment by the wealthy? Are the wealthy the most productive people to be making investment decisions?... We are left with either the early exit entrepreneurs (like Khosla) or the retired entrepreneurs (like Gates). But what skills did they have that they earned as a result of building a successful business that makes them likely to be presumptively socially optimal allocators of capital? I think there are things that likely do transfer so if I had to allocate capital between someone with their experience and someone with no experience, then the presumption makes sense. But note that, in terms of the impact of a wealth tax, wouldn���t it be presumptively sensible to suggest that the wealthy who have the skills are precisely those who are likely to end up investing more in riskier options than less when the risk-free capital is taxed so effectively?...

#noted #2020-03-05

Livetweeting the conversation about Paul Krugman's new bo...

Livetweeting the conversation about Paul Krugman's new book Arguing with Zombies: Claudia Sahm: 'Here we go!!!... https://twitter.com/Claudia_Sahm/status/1224848106333917187 Heather Boushey sets up conversation about Adam Smith���s invisible hand... Paul Krugman less of a believer in it now than earlier in his career... She shared image of Hamburger Helper, not so gentle or invisible... is that what he thinks of it when he points to market power? Paul Krugman said that that hand reminded him of very early career when he was a research assistant living on his own and eating a lot of hamburger helper :-)... More seriously, he sees power as a blind spot to economists today and throughout his career...

#noted #2020-03-05

You should read this book: Zephyr Teachout: Review of Ste...

You should read this book: Zephyr Teachout: Review of Steven Greenhouse: The Upheaval in the American Workplaces https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/books/review/beaten-down-worked-up-steven-greenhouse.html: 'There���s an enormous upheaval in the American workplace right now.... ���Beaten Down, Worked Up��� [is] the engrossing, character-driven, panoramic new book on the past and present of worker organizing by the former New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse. At the beginning of this decade, less than 7 percent of private-sector workers belonged to a union, and support for organized labor unions was at an all-time low. Corporations were using illegal tactics to stop unionization, tactics unheard-of in other countries, and new hires at the biggest companies were often required to watch anti-labor propaganda depicting unions as greedy and self-interested...

...The ���Fight for $15��� was born, leading to huge rallies and predawn fast-food walkouts across the country. The workers lacked union protection, and big corporations shelled out cash telling lawmakers that raising the wage would cause small businesses to collapse and result in economic disaster. Nonetheless, the workers won. A wave of minimum wage raises passed. In New York, the rate hit the magic number of $15 an hour. Those 2012 meetings and the Fight for $15 almost didn���t happen; this was not the kind of organizing work that labor unions like S.E.I.U. had been doing for decades. This required unions to spend money on organizing people who would most likely never pay dues. You���ll have to read Greenhouse���s book to learn why the union did it, and how a $50 million failure by one of the country���s biggest unions led to one of its greatest recent successes.... With the breaking of the air traffic controllers��� strike in 1981, the Reagan years are generally understood as the tipping point in labor history. It would be tempting to write about that strike through the lens of Reagan���s ideology alone or, alternatively, to blame the strikers for their defeat. But Greenhouse gives the events leading up to the strike the respect and context they deserve, making it possible even for a reader who knows exactly how it turns out to hope that things might go differently, because the world from inside the minds of the strikers seems so coherent.... Greenhouse may be a great advocate for unions, but he has no patience for union insiders who have grown used to internal power and external weakness, who ask for too little and focus too much attention on strategies designed to minimize damage. George Meany, the longtime head of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., comes in for special scorn.... But Greenhouse���s greatest anger is for the large companies���and their Wall Street owners���that have no human connection to the workplace and that are pushing the limits with new tactics to demoralize workers and strip them of their power and dignity.... Labor laws won���t change without breaking the grip of big money on politics, and if we ignore campaign finance law, we do so at workers��� peril. It will also require union leaders to embrace and invest in the hard work of organizing, and to organize workers who will never pay dues. And it will require putting the stories of work���and of working men and women ��� at the center of our news...

#noted #2020-03-05

Worthy Reads from February 27, 2019

Worthy Reads at Equitable Growth:

Great conversation between Heather Boushey and Emmanuel Saez. My favorite highlight: Heather Boushey: In Conversation with Emmanuel Saez: "Kansas... illustrates beautifully from a research perspective even though it���s a disaster in terms of public policy... tax avoidance... pass-through businesses... huge incentives for high-income earners to reclassify... a big erosion of the wage income tax base in the state... a much bigger negative impact on tax revenue than would have been predicted mechanically.... When governments have actually to balance their budgets, they realize that taxes are useful, and that brings the two pieces of the debate together.... Certainly Kansas didn���t experience an economic boom...

Damon Jones came to Equitable Growth and gave a paper about Alaska's Oil Dividend Fund that made me significantly more optimistic about Universal Basic Income: Damon Jones: Labor Market Impacts of Universal and Permanent Cash Transfers: "UBI-like cash transfer in Alaska: unconditional, universal, long-run, captures macro effects. The macro effects of Alaska PDF on labor supply less negative than the macro effects of an unconditional cash transfer... a very small *(0.001) and insignificant effect on employment to population...

Excellent from the very sharp Elena Prager and Matt Schmitt down at UCLA and out by Lake Michigan. Hospital mergers appear to be as much about gaining market power with respect to health-care workers as about gaining market power with respect to patients and their insurers.There continues to be very little evidence that they are about efficiencies of any kind: Elena Prager and Matt Schmitt: Employer Consolidation and Wages: Evidence from Hospitals: "We find evidence of reduced wage growth in cases where both (i) the increase in concentration induced by the merger is large and (ii) workers��� skills are at least somewhat industry-specific. Following such mergers, annual wage growth is 1.1pp slower for skilled non-health professionals and 1.7pp slower for nursing and pharmacy workers than in markets without mergers.... Observed patterns are unlikely to be explained by merger-related changes aside from labor market power. Wage growth slowdowns appear to be attenuated in markets with strong labor unions, and we do not observe reduced wage growth after out-of-market mergers that leave employer concentration unchanged...

I did not go to last month's Niskansen Center Conference on "Beyond Left and Right": Reviving Moderation in an Era of Crisis and Extremism. But I did watch it. And watching it did provoke a tweetstorm about what I think it needs to do that some have found interesting: Brad DeLong: I think it is fair to say that the already-broken American political public sphere has become significantly more broken since November 8, 2018...

The WCEG has money to spend to support research. It is very easy and straightforward to apply: Equitable Growth: Request for Proposals: "Equitable Growth supports inquiry utilizing many different kinds of evidence, relying on a variety of methodological approaches and cutting across academic disciplines. We are especially interested in projects using data linking individuals, households, and/or firms, and those that utilize geocoded data or rigorous comparative case studies���including across places in the United States, as well as comparing the experience of different countries���that allow for insight into the role of place in shaping economic opportunities and outcomes...

 

Worthy Reads Elsewhere:

Now compiling and sending out fewer links than in the past, but still by far the best sorter and selector of what is interesting in economics: Mark Thoma: Economist's View: Links (2/19/19)

I am still recovering from my joint appearance at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club with Steve Moore, and my having to listen to an extraordinary number of things from his mouth that simply were not true. It is draining to find oneself thinking over and over again: "But this is different than you said last year" and "but that prediction will be so obviously wrong in six months". Menzie China has a similar reaction: Menzie Chinn: Why Isn���t Stephen Moore Still Bragging about Coal As #1?: "Recall from July 2017, when Stephen Moore wrote an article entitled 'When It Comes To Electric Power, Coal Is No. 1'? No more. Now, lying has never been an impediment to Mr. Moore claiming something that was untrue (see [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] )���but in this case perhaps it���s just so clearly untrue, he was chastened. So much for 'winning' (coal edition). Not that I���m complaining: http://econbrowser.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/powergenshares-1.png

Jacob Levy: Democracy for Republicans: "American conservatism and market liberalism... overlook the deep relationship between democratic government and modern commercial capitalism.... The kind of positive-sum market economy that has transformed the world since 1800 through compounding productivity increases and economic growth is very different from the ancient Rome riven by class conflicts over zero-sum land distribution, but the Founders understood the Roman precedents better than they understood the world that was about to emerge. And that economic world emerged with, not against, the development of a kind of democratic government they also did not foresee, government by contending, permanent political parties alternating in power by competing for votes in a mass-suffrage society...

Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, newly-installed over at EPI, is doing a bang-up job: Pedro Nicolaci da Costa: These 5 Charts Show Inequality Is Bad for Your Health���Even If You Are Rich: "Pickett and Wilkinson kept coming back to a single uniting factor���inequality: 'What the research shows���not just ours but that of hundreds of researchers around the world���is that inequality brings out features of our evolved psychology, to do with dominance and subordination, superiority and inferiority, and that affects how we treat one another and ourselves, it increases status competition and anxiety, anxieties about our self worth, worries about how we are seen and judged'.... Here are five charts from their presentation...

Wise from Simon: a "Green New Deal" needs to be not just technocratically efficient but politically popular: Simon Wren-Lewis: How to Pay for the Green New Deal: "Tackling climate change is resisted by powerful political forces that have in the past prevented the appropriate taxes, subsidies and regulations being applied. Which is a major reason why the world has failed to do enough to mitigate climate change.... Just as proponents of a Green New Deal are savvy about the need to overcome the resistance of, for example, the oil and gas industry, they also realise that the Green New Deal needs to be politically popular. So the New Deal package has to include current benefits for the many, perhaps at the expense of the few.... If you cannot make the polluter pay, it is still better to take action to stop climate change even if future generations have to pay the cost of that action...

Excellent insight into police-community relations in America from a very observant and thoughtful peace officer: Patrick Skinner: "One of the questions I ask every class: When was the last time you had a positive encounter with a cop who didn���t know you were a cop in which she wasn���t telling you to do something (Traffic) or you weren���t asking something. The answer 100% has been ���never���. That���s an issue.... I���m speaking to literally the most cop supportive group-other cops-and they can���t think of a positive voluntary encounter with a cop. The problem isn���t our neighbors. It���s us the cops. It doesn���t have to be this way. So, that���s my whole 1 day course kinda.... We need to train cops entirely as if they didn���t have a badge and a gun. And only at the end say ���by the way, you have this authority, use it as a parachute.��� The badge gets you in the door. The rest is anti-drama. Act accordingly...

What does the left���the Democratic���wing of the Democratic Party find itself reading this winter? Well, it looks like it is reading, in part, me and my coauthor Steve Cohen. Admittedly, "tells much of the same story... in language even more accessible and unobjectionable to mainstream and centrist audiences" is not the most enthusiastic endorsement I have ever had. But I will take what I can get: Demond Drummer: New Consensus Reading List: "A new consensus in economic thought is emerging.... This reading list is designed with the goals of winning over people who���whether they���re progressives or centrists���are still entrenched in the old consensus of neoliberalism, and also providing converts with a deeper understanding of various aspects of the new consensus.... ��Bad Samaritans [by]... Ha-Joon Chang.... Concrete Economics [by Steve Cohen and Bard DeLong].... Made in the USA ... [by] Vaclav Smil.... Mariana Mazzucato _The Entrepreneurial State.... Kate Raworth['s] Doughnut Economics.... Rana Foroohar... _Makers and Takers.... [Invisible Hands by Kim Phillips-Fein.... Mariana Mazzucato and Michael Jacobs [Rethinking Capitalism].... Ha-Joon Chang [Economics].... Justin Yifu Lin [Against the Consensus].... The Public Banking Solution [by] Ellen Brown.... Ann Pettifor [The Production of Money].... The End of Alchemy by [Mervyn King].... Martin Wolf [The Shifts and the Shocks].... Mohamed El-Erian [The Only Game in Town].... +Freedom���s Forge [by Arthur Herman].... Mark Wilson���s Destructive Creation.... [When Small States Make Big Leaps) by Darius Ornston].... The Park Chung Hee Era [by Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra Vogel].... MITI and teh Japanese Miracle [by Chalmers Johnson].... Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not [by Prassanan Parthasarathi]...

Dani Rodrik has, I think, a better way to frame the problems that he and Richard Baldwin are both thinking about this winter: Dani Rodrik: The Good Jobs Challenge: "[For] developing countries... existing technologies allow insufficient room for factor substitution: using less-skilled labor instead of skilled professionals or physical capital. The demanding quality standards needed to supply global value chains cannot be easily met by replacing machines with manual labor. This is why globally integrated production in even the most labor-abundant countries, such as India or Ethiopia, relies on relatively capital-intensive methods.... The standard remedy of improving educational institutions does not yield near-term benefits, while the economy���s most advanced sectors are unable to absorb the excess supply of low-skilled workers. Solving this problem may require... boosting an intermediate range of labor-intensive, low-skilled economic activities. Tourism and non-traditional agriculture... public employment ... non-tradable services carried out by small and medium-size enterprises, will not be among the most productive, which is why they are rarely the focus of industrial or innovation policies. But they may still provide significantly better jobs than the alternatives in the informal sector...

Richard Baldwin has a new book and has coined the ugliest word I have ever seen to promote it. It is very interesting, and I think it is largely right. But I think it does have a big problem with the word "globotics": "globalization" and "robots", even robot-enabled globalization and globalization-enabled robots, are two very different processes with very different implications. Squashing them into one makes his argument less coherent than it might have been: Richard Baldwin: The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work: "A new form of globalization will combine with software robots to disrupt service-sector and professional jobs in the same way automation and trade disrupted manufacturing jobs.... Software robots... pervasive translation that open[s] new opportunities for outsourcing to tele-migrants.... Future jobs will be more human and involve more face-to-face contact since software robots and tele-migrants will do everything else...

Some of us may be intellectually quicker than others. Some of us may have a greater breadth or depth of real or virtual experience than others. But intellectual quickness, depth or breadth of experience, and depth or breadth of virtual experience���none of those make us smart, or wise. Being stupid is a choice. We can all train ourselves not to make that choice: Morgan Housel: Different Kinds of Stupid: "Smart is the ability to solve hard problems, which can be done many ways. Stupid is a tendency to not comprehend easy problems. It���s also is a diversified trait. A few kinds of stupid.... 1. Intelligence creep: Not knowing the boundaries of what you���re good at.... 2. Underestimating the complexity of how past successes were gained in a way that makes you overestimate their repeatability.... 3. Discounting the views of people who aren���t as credentialed as you are.... 4. Not understanding that in the... real world it���s you vs. coworkers, employees, customers, regulators, etc., all of whom need to be persuaded by more than having the right answer.... 5. Closed-system thinking: Underestimating the external consequences of your decisions in a hyperconnected world, or dismissing how quickly those consequences can backfire on you...

#noted #weblogs #2019-02-27

In my email stream this morning. With Trump and the Trump...

In my email stream this morning. With Trump and the Trumpists, "the cruelty is the point" is almost always the first thing you should reach for to understand their actions: [Redacted]: This story about Iranians turned back at airports https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxwGCtPhzCKpxRhgXMhNMQbHVNvh: 'Just astonishing. Even if you don't feel for these young people���and how could you not?���it just makes zero sense to have a system in which one set of government workers engage in the expensive task of vetting these students, and then some random CBP schmuck can override their decision, in the moment, on the basis of noting. I understand that "the cruelty is the point" is part of the explanation here, but we do��have a preexisting government apparatus which exists for the worthy goal of making sure these talented students can come study here. There's just some real schizophrenia in the government...

#noted #2020-03-05

At a very basic level, there is something very wrong with...

At a very basic level, there is something very wrong with the New York Times. Bloomberg the most viable challenger to Sanders when his attachment to the Democratic Party is even less than Sanders's, he has few grassroots supporters, and he does not thrive when challenged verbally? Move Warren out of the Senate, where she is very effective, and into HHS? Bernie Sanders as Treasury Secretary? This is not even phoning it in. In a way, it is the Fox News journalism strategy but for a different demographic: let's tell our audience not what they need to learn but what we think they want to hear. It is, I think, as poisoned: Scott Lemieux: Who Moved Tom Friedman's Cheese? http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/02/who-moved-tom-friedmans-cheese: 'I regret to inform you that Tom Friedman has written about electoral politics again.... "Something extraordinary... a national unity ticket.... What would this super ticket look like? Well, I suggest Sanders���and Michael Bloomberg, who seems to be his most viable long-term challenger..." It���s hard to see how a longtime Republican who is third in the national polling averages, leading in the polls in zero states despite a massive ad blitz, and coming off one of the most humiliatingly bad debate performances in the history of the contemporary primary system is Bernie���s ���most viable long-term challenger,��� but moving right along.... "these will be my cabinet choices���my team of rivals.... I want Mike Bloomberg (or Bernie Sanders) as my secretary of the Treasury. Our plans for addressing income inequality are actually not that far apart.... I will ask Elizabeth Warren to serve as health and human services secretary..." ���Bloomberg or Bernie for Secretary of the Treasury���doesn���t matter, they���re basically the same. Oh, and let���s give Republicans an extra Senate seat for a crucial few months so that Elizabeth Warren can have a second-tier cabinet position in an area... not her main area of interest but probably torpedoed her campaign. And let���s get someone who has been very successful winning elections in a purple state out of the Senate too. Does control of that institution really matter anyway?��� Hard to see any flaws in this logic!...

#noted #2020-03-03

Let's Get Even More Depressed About Castro's Cuba: Hoisted from the Archives

Hoisted from the Archives from 2003: _Let's Get Even More Depressed About Castro's Cuba: _ https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/02/lets-get-even-m.html: Just because people begin their papers with quotes from Ludwig von Mises does not automatically mean that they are wrong:

The hideously depressing thing is that Cuba under Battista���Cuba in 1957���was a developed country. Cuba in 1957 had lower infant mortality than France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had doctors and nurses: as many doctors and nurses per capita as the Netherlands, and more than Britain or Finland. Cuba in 1957 had as many vehicles per capita as Uruguay, Italy, or Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had 45 TVs per 1000 people���fifth highest in the world. Cuba today has fewer telephones per capita than it had TVs in 1957.

You take a look at the standard Human Development Indicator variables���GDP per capita, infant mortality, education���and you try to throw together an HDI for Cuba in the late 1950s, and you come out in the range of Japan, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Israel. Today? Today the UN puts Cuba's HDI in the range of Lithuania, Trinidad, and Mexico. (And Carmelo Mesa-Lago thinks the UN's calculations are seriously flawed: that Cuba's right HDI peers today are places like China, Tunisia, Iran, and South Africa.)

Thus I don't understand lefties who talk about the achievements of the Cuban Revolution: "...to have better health care, housing, education, and general social relations than virtually all other comparably developed countries." Yes, Cuba today has a GDP per capita level roughly that of���is "comparably developed"���Bolivia or Honduras or Zimbabwe, but given where Cuba was in 1957 we ought to be talking about how it is as developed as Italy or Spain....

#hoistedfromthearchives #2020-03-03