J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 65

An interesting week in the stock market. No, I don't know...

An interesting week in the stock market. No, I don't know what has changed since a week ago: MarketWatch: SPX https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/spx

#noted #2020-02-28

Still not playing my position. But things like this are v...

Still not playing my position. But things like this are very important: Dan Nexon: How Many Hidden Thresholds of Soft Authoritarianism have we Already Crossed? http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/02/how-many-hidden-thresholds-of-soft-authoritarianism-have-we-already-crossed: 'For example, aspects of liberal international ordering have already substantially unravelled���but it seems like many international-affairs experts either don���t realize it or, at the other extreme, think that ongoing mutations in international order presage some kind of collapse into multipolar chaos.... Our tendency to think in ���all or nothing��� terms... obscures a great deal of alteration in political orders. Even the kinds of events���such as impeachment���that I once thought would change this dynamic seem to be resolving into collective anticlimax. Meanwhile, Trump has transformed, in a way unlike any other modern president, the Republican party into his own personal patrimony. And the self-abasement of Senators before the Mad Emperor now just seems like par for the course.... But it���s worth noting that many of the most vulnerable people already live in an illiberal state, and Trump���s policies have overall broadened and deepened the extent of American pocket authoritarianism. To wit: 'The strangers trying to arrest his mom���s boyfriend weren���t wearing uniforms or badges, and they didn���t have a warrant. So 26-year-old Eric Diaz did the only thing he could think of: Outside his front door, on the otherwise quiet Brooklyn street, he confronted the plainclothes officers. Then, one of them shot him in the face���just below his right eye...

...���He literally points the gun at my brother and didn���t even hesitate,��� Kevin Ya��ez Cruz, who witnessed the scene on Thursday morning, told WABC. ���Just pulled the trigger.��� Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed that agents discharged ���at least one firearm��� in the altercation, which landed two officers and two others in the hospital, agency officials said in statements to local news outlets. Diaz and the man they were targeting are now in their custody in the hospital, activists say.

Not surprisingly, the situation is intertwined with New York���s refusal to cooperate with Trump���s ethnic cleansing. This leads to policies that put due process considerations first, as they should be. But, of course, ICE blames respect for basic civil liberties for what happened in this case:

Gaspar Avendano-Hernandez, the longtime boyfriend of Diaz���s mother, had been deported back to Mexico twice, ICE officials said.... Immigration officials issued a detainer request.... New York, like other ���sanctuary cities,��� does not comply with these orders, which many courts have said violate due process. ���This forced ICE officers to locate him on the streets of New York rather than in the safe confines of a jail,��� ICE spokeswoman Rachael Yong Yow said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal. A team of officers tracked him down to a residential street in Gravesend, an ethnically diverse neighborhood in south Brooklyn, arriving around 8 a.m. Thursday to try to arrest him. He would not budge. ���He resisted because they didn���t show him no papers, like, ���Oh, I���m the police,��� no badge, no nothing, no warrant, no nothing,��� Ya��ez Cruz told WABC. They Tasered him. At that point, two sons of his live-in girlfriend, including Diaz, stepped outside, unarmed, to check on what was happening. The officers didn���t say anything at all, Ya��ez Cruz told the station. According to ICE, that���s when the two agents were ���physically attacked.��� The ICE spokeswoman did not identify Diaz or say whether he was among the attackers...

#noted #2020-02-22

Perhaps it is the growing recognition that while Tesla ha...

Perhaps it is the growing recognition that while Tesla has its problems its competitors are all trapped in Clayton Christensen's innovator's dilemma to a previously unforeseen degree? Yes, shorts are always vulnerable to a squeeze���almost by definition, they cannot stay solvent long enough to outlast any serious outburst of market irrationality. But I must confess I agree with Josh Brown here: the bloodbath of the Tesla bears is definitely one for the ages: Joshua M Brown: Greatest Short Squeeze of All Time? https://thereformedbroker.com/2020/02/04/greatest-short-squeeze-of-all-time/: 'Now this is just breathtaking���I have no skin in the game on this one but cannot stop watching it. I think what���s happened with Tesla recently represents the greatest short squeeze of all time. A rally since around October when they surprised to the upside in an earnings report has just culminated in an explosive 100% year-to-date gain at this morning���s open...

#noted #2020-02-22

Note to Self: MOAR political economy readings, 1920-1950 ...

Note to Self: MOAR political economy readings, 1920-1950

John Maynard Keynes (1925): "Review of Edgar L. Smith: Common Stocks as Long-Term Investments", Nation & Athen��um https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/keynes-smith-review.pdf
John Maynard Keynes (1926): The End of Laissez-Faire https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/keynes-end-of-lf.pdf
John Maynard Keynes (1936): Concluding Notes on the Social Philosophy Towards Which the General Theory Might Lead https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/keynes-social-philosophy.pdf
Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation, selections https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/polanyi-great-transformation-selections.pdf
Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation, ch. 6 https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/polanyi-selections-6.pdf




#history #notetoself #politicaleconomy #2020-02-22

From last March, but very much worth reading: Elisabeth J...

From last March, but very much worth reading: Elisabeth Jacobs and Kate Bahn: U.S. Women���s Labor Force Participation https://equitablegrowth.org/womens-history-month-u-s-womens-labor-force-participation/: 'For women in the United States, labor force participation rates have not followed a straight path. It has been a complicated narrative, deeply affected by women���s family roles, by discrimination, by the changing economy, by technological change, and by their own choices. And it is a continuing story, with surprising twists that economists continue to explore. In a sense, this story begins with its first twist, in the 18th and 19th centuries. To be clear, this is a twist for us today, not for those who experienced it. From our modern perspective, we might assume that significant participation by women in the workforce was practically nonexistent until it began rising gradually in the 20th century. We would be wrong. A number of economists, and especially Claudia Goldin of Harvard University, have shown that women in the 18th and 19th centuries played a considerably more important role in the economy than we might have thought. They were critical to their families��� economic well-being and their local economies, not in their rearing of children or taking care of household responsibilities but by their active participation in growing and making the products that families bartered or sold for a living...

#noted #2020-02-21

From the New School. I thought this went extremely well f...

From the New School. I thought this went extremely well for Heather Boushey: Heather Boushey: Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy https://livestream.com/thenewschool/Unbound...

#noted #2020-02-21

An excellent catch from Claudia Sahm: Claudia Sahm: When ...

An excellent catch from Claudia Sahm: Claudia Sahm: When will everyone who wants to work have a job in the United States? https://equitablegrowth.org/when-will-everyone-who-wants-to-work-have-a-job-in-the-united-states/: 'Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) prefaced her questions directed to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell at last week���s semiannual Humphrey-Hawkins congressional hearings with a history of the full employment mandate.... President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for a Second Bill of Rights, including a right to a ���useful and financially rewarding job.��� Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued that the ���right to a job��� was secured by the 14th Amendment. Martin Luther King Jr. called for a job to all ���who want to work and are able to work.��� She underscored that the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a march for ���economic justice.��� After Dr. King���s assassination, Coretta Scott King carried on fight for the full employment mandate. She attended the signing of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act in 1978, and the reason why Powell was there to testify. Rep. Pressley then asked Powell, ���Yes or no, given persistent concerns about inflation, do you believe the Federal Reserve can achieve full employment?��� Powell began by thanking her for the history, which he said he ���did not know���...

#noted #2020-02-21

Edward Gibbon: History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire: Weekend Reading

Edward Gibbon: History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25717/25717-h/25717-h.htm#Alink2HCH0001: 'If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect. The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws. Such princes deserved the honor of restoring the republic, had the Romans of their days been capable of enjoying a rational freedom. The labors of these monarchs were overpaid by the immense reward that inseparably waited on their success; by the honest pride of virtue, and by the exquisite delight of beholding the general happiness of which they were the authors. A just but melancholy reflection imbittered, however, the noblest of human enjoyments. They must often have recollected the instability of a happiness which depended on the character of single man. The fatal moment was perhaps approaching, when some licentious youth, or some jealous tyrant, would abuse, to the destruction, that absolute power, which they had exerted for the benefit of their people. The ideal restraints of the senate and the laws might serve to display the virtues, but could never correct the vices, of the emperor. The military force was a blind and irresistible instrument of oppression; and the corruption of Roman manners would always supply flatterers eager to applaud, and ministers prepared to serve, the fear or the avarice, the lust or the cruelty, of their master. These gloomy apprehensions had been already justified by the experience of the Romans. The annals of the emperors exhibit a strong and various picture of human nature, which we should vainly seek among the mixed and doubtful characters of modern history. In the conduct of those monarchs we may trace the utmost lines of vice and virtue; the most exalted perfection, and the meanest degeneracy of our own species. The golden age of Trajan and the Antonines had been preceded by an age of iron...

...It is almost superfluous to enumerate the unworthy successors of Augustus. Their unparalleled vices, and the splendid theatre on which they were acted, have saved them from oblivion. The dark, unrelenting Tiberius, the furious Caligula, the feeble Claudius, the profligate and cruel Nero, the beastly Vitellius, 50 and the timid, inhuman Domitian, are condemned to everlasting infamy. During fourscore years (excepting only the short and doubtful respite of Vespasian's reign) 51 Rome groaned beneath an unremitting tyranny, which exterminated the ancient families of the republic, and was fatal to almost every virtue and every talent that arose in that unhappy period. Vitellius consumed in mere eating at least six millions of our money in about seven months. It is not easy to express his vices with dignity, or even decency. Tacitus fairly calls him a hog, but it is by substituting for a coarse word a very fine image:

At Vitellius, umbraculis hortorum abditus, ut ignava animalia, quibus si cibum suggeras, jacent torpentque, praeterita, instantia, futura, pari oblivione dimiserat. Atque illum nemore Aricino desidem et marcentum," &c. Tacit. Hist. iii. 36, ii. 95. Sueton. in Vitell. c. 13. Dion. Cassius, l xv. p. 1062.

Under the reign of these monsters, the slavery of the Romans was accompanied with two peculiar circumstances, the one occasioned by their former liberty, the other by their extensive conquests, which rendered their condition more completely wretched than that of the victims of tyranny in any other age or country. From these causes were derived, 1. The exquisite sensibility of the sufferers; and, 2. The impossibility of escaping from the hand of the oppressor.

I. When Persia was governed by the descendants of Sefi, a race of princes whose wanton cruelty often stained their divan, their table, and their bed, with the blood of their favorites, there is a saying recorded of a young nobleman, that he never departed from the sultan's presence, without satisfying himself whether his head was still on his shoulders. The experience of every day might almost justify the scepticism of Rustan. Yet the fatal sword, suspended above him by a single thread, seems not to have disturbed the slumbers, or interrupted the tranquillity, of the Persian. The monarch's frown, he well knew, could level him with the dust; but the stroke of lightning or apoplexy might be equally fatal; and it was the part of a wise man to forget the inevitable calamities of human life in the enjoyment of the fleeting hour. He was dignified with the appellation of the king's slave; had, perhaps, been purchased from obscure parents, in a country which he had never known; and was trained up from his infancy in the severe discipline of the seraglio. His name, his wealth, his honors, were the gift of a master, who might, without injustice, resume what he had bestowed. Rustan's knowledge, if he possessed any, could only serve to confirm his habits by prejudices. His language afforded not words for any form of government, except absolute monarchy. The history of the East informed him, that such had ever been the condition of mankind. 54 The Koran, and the interpreters of that divine book, inculcated to him, that the sultan was the descendant of the prophet, and the vicegerent of heaven; that patience was the first virtue of a Mussulman, and unlimited obedience the great duty of a subject.

The minds of the Romans were very differently prepared for slavery. Oppressed beneath the weight of their own corruption and of military violence, they for a long while preserved the sentiments, or at least the ideas, of their free-born ancestors. The education of Helvidius and Thrasea, of Tacitus and Pliny, was the same as that of Cato and Cicero. From Grecian philosophy, they had imbibed the justest and most liberal notions of the dignity of human nature, and the origin of civil society. The history of their own country had taught them to revere a free, a virtuous, and a victorious commonwealth; to abhor the successful crimes of Caesar and Augustus; and inwardly to despise those tyrants whom they adored with the most abject flattery. As magistrates and senators they were admitted into the great council, which had once dictated laws to the earth, whose authority was so often prostituted to the vilest purposes of tyranny. Tiberius, and those emperors who adopted his maxims, attempted to disguise their murders by the formalities of justice, and perhaps enjoyed a secret pleasure in rendering the senate their accomplice as well as their victim. By this assembly, the last of the Romans were condemned for imaginary crimes and real virtues. Their infamous accusers assumed the language of independent patriots, who arraigned a dangerous citizen before the tribunal of his country; and the public service was rewarded by riches and honors. The servile judges professed to assert the majesty of the commonwealth, violated in the person of its first magistrate, whose clemency they most applauded when they trembled the most at his inexorable and impending cruelty. The tyrant beheld their baseness with just contempt, and encountered their secret sentiments of detestation with sincere and avowed hatred for the whole body of the senate.

II. The division of Europe into a number of independent states, connected, however, with each other by the general resemblance of religion, language, and manners, is productive of the most beneficial consequences to the liberty of mankind. A modern tyrant, who should find no resistance either in his own breast, or in his people, would soon experience a gentle restraint from the example of his equals, the dread of present censure, the advice of his allies, and the apprehension of his enemies. The object of his displeasure, escaping from the narrow limits of his dominions, would easily obtain, in a happier climate, a secure refuge, a new fortune adequate to his merit, the freedom of complaint, and perhaps the means of revenge. But the empire of the Romans filled the world, and when the empire fell into the hands of a single person, the world became a safe and dreary prison for his enemies. The slave of Imperial despotism, whether he was condemned to drag his gilded chain in Rome and the senate, or to were out a life of exile on the barren rock of Seriphus, or the frozen bank of the Danube, expected his fate in silent despair. To resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly. On every side he was encompassed with a vast extent of sea and land, which he could never hope to traverse without being discovered, seized, and restored to his irritated master. Beyond the frontiers, his anxious view could discover nothing, except the ocean, inhospitable deserts, hostile tribes of barbarians, of fierce manners and unknown language, or dependent kings, who would gladly purchase the emperor's protection by the sacrifice of an obnoxious fugitive. "Wherever you are," said Cicero to the exiled Marcellus, "remember that you are equally within the power of the conqueror"...

#history #weekendreading #2020-02-21

xkcd: Git https://xkcd.com/1597/:#noted #2020-02-21

xkcd: Git https://xkcd.com/1597/:

#noted #2020-02-21

Some of my thoughts, now two decades old, on Piketty and ...

Some of my thoughts, now two decades old, on Piketty and other issues. Surprisingly, I still think much the same as I did then: Brad DeLong: Bequests: An Historical Perspective https://www.bradford-delong.com/2014/04/bequests-an-historical-perspective-hoisted-from-the-archives-for-april-2-2014.html: 'Practically every major aspect of our system of inheritance today is less than two hundred and fifty years old. Two hundred and fifty years ago, inheritance proceeded through primogeniture--as if those leaving bequests cared not for the well-being of their descendants but only for the wealth and power of the lineage head. Before the industrial revolution, inheritance played an overwhelming and crucial role in wealth accumulation and wealth distribution that it does not play today. Migration to the New World was accompanied by a rapid shift in the perception of the purpose of inheritance as the old patterns failed to flourish in a land-rich, rapidly-growing frontier-settler economy. By the start of the twentieth century inherited wealth was regarded with suspicion in America, with even some of the richest calling for estate taxes to keep the rich from diverting the public trust of their fortunes into the pockets of their descendants. Thus the coming of social democracy to America brought with it high statutory rates of tax on large estates, which nevertheless did not raise a great deal of revenue...

#noted #2020-02-18