J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 78

Feminism: I Need to Include Something Like This in My Twentieth Century History Book. But I Would Like Something from 1870-1950���Not Something from 1776 and 1700 and Before...

Plus I am worried that I am, somewhere in here, striking the wrong tone. Yes, many people will find what is below annoying. But will the people annoyed be the people I want this to annoy, or will they be people whom I desperately do not want to read my work and then be annoyed?

2.5: The Arrival of Feminism: In 1764 in Britain���s Massachusetts colony Abigail Smith was 20, and had had no formal education at all: girls weren���t worth it. In that year married a man she had known for five years: the up-and-coming 30-year-old lawyer John Adams. Their daughter Nabby was born the following year, in 1765. There followed John Quincy (1767), Suky (1768, who died at the age of 2), Charles (1770, who died at the age of 10), Thomas (1772), with high probability a couple of (very early) miscarriages from 1774-6, then the stillborn Elizabeth (1777), and (perhaps) another miscarriage afterwards���but I suspect not. She ran their Boston-Braintree household and property operations while he played his role on the large political-intellectual stage, becoming second president of the United States.

Death and disease were, as was the case in the Agrarian Age, omnipresent. Her most letter to her husband was written in 1776. A part of it that is rarely���I would say never���excerpted contains these: ���our Neighbour Trot whose affliction I most sensibly feel but cannot discribe, striped of two lovely children in one week������, ���Betsy Cranch has been very bad������, ���Becky Peck they do not expect will live out the day������, ���The Mumps��� Isaac is now confined with it������, and ���your Brothers youngest child lies bad with convulsion fitts������

Her letters tell us that she badly wanted to know what was going on in the world outside her household and the Boston-Braintree circle:

I wish you would ever write me a Letter half as long as I write you; and tell me if you may: Where your Fleet are gone? What sort of Defence Virginia can make against our common Enemy? Whether it is so situated as to make an able Defence? Are not the Gentery Lords and the common people vassals? Are they not like the uncivilized Natives Brittain represents us to be?������ and ���I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for Liberty cannot be Eaquelly Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs������

And note how she cannot say "I think...", even to her ten-years-older husband: she has to say "I have sometimes been ready to think..."

Abigail Smith Adams was not happy about the position of women in society:

By the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity? Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness���

Her husband thought this was a great joke:

As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented.

This is rather too coarse a compliment, but you are so saucy, I won't blot it out.

Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight���

In some ways Abigail Smith Adams was not typical: literate, smart as a whip, upwardly mobile, upper-class, married to a husband she could talk to.

In other ways she was very typical: subordinated to her husband (and to other male relatives), many of her concerns given little weight, embedded in a social network in which aiding other mothers as they watched and desperately tried to stop their children get sick and die, pregnant (5 years; I don���t know whether she nursed or not, but somebody or somebodies nursed her children for perhaps fourteen years), and, of course, desperate concern for ���our own little flock��� My Heart trembles with anxiety for them������

Being female in the Agrarian Age, back before the Long 20th Century, was not for sissies.

Why male supremacy was so firmly established back in the Agrarian Age is something that is not obvious to me. Yes, it was very important that people who wished to survive should they reach old age���especially women who did not want to be burned as witches���to have surviving descendants. The pressure at all levels of society was immense: Queen Anne I Stuart (1665���1714), the last British monarch of the Stuart dynasty, was pregnant eighteen times: eight miscarriages, five stillbirths, George (who lived only minutes), Mary (premature: lived only two hours), Anne Sophia (who lived only nine months), Mary (died of smallpox before she would have turned two), and William (died at 11 of strep throat).

Anne survived all eighteen pregnancies. Many of her fellow-queens were not so lucky. Of the 45 queens and female heirs-apparent of England from the Norman Conquest through Victoria, seven died in childbed: 15.5%, more than one in seven, among the most cosseted and best-nourished women in England. In the horrible run from Isabelle de Valois in 1409 through Anne Hyde in 1671, six of twenty died in childbed. The last to die in childbed was Crown Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales in 1817.

Yes, back in the Agrarian Age the biological requirements of obtaining a reasonable chance of having surviving descendants to take care of one in one���s old age meant that the typical woman spent 20 years eating for two: 20 years pregnant and breastfeeding. Yes, eating for two is an enormous energy drain, especially in populations near subsistence. Yes, Agrarian Age populations were near subsistence���my great-grandmother Eleanor Lawton Carter���s maxim was ���have a baby, lose a tooth��� as the child-to-be leached calcium out of the mother to build her or his own bones, and she was an upper class Bostonian born in the mid-1870s.

Yes, breastfeeding kept women very close to their children, and impelled a concentration of female labor on activities that made that easy: gardening and other forms of within-and-near-the-dwelling labor, especially textiles.

Yes, there were benefits to men as a group from oppressing women���especially if women could be convinced that they deserved it: ���Unto the woman he said, ���I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband; and he shall rule over thee���������

But surely even in the Agrarian Age a shift to a society with less male supremacy would have been a positive-sum change? Women who are not kept unlettered, barefoot, and pregnant as a matter of course can do more, and we���optimistic���economists have a strong bias toward believing that people in groups will find ways to become, collectively, more productive and then to distribute the fruits of higher productivity in a way that makes such a more productive social order sustainable.

But not.

There were signs of erosion in the bio-demographic underpinnings of high male supremacy even before the Long 20th Century began. But it was over 1870-2016 that these underpinnings dissolved. The number of years the typical woman spent eating for two fell from twenty���if she survived her childbed���down to four, as better sanitation, much better nutrition, and more knowledge about disease made many pregnancies less necessary for leaving surviving descendants and as birth control technology made it easier to plan families. The number of babies per potential mother dropped by about two-thirds.

Thus reductions in infant mortality, the advancing average age of marriage, and the increasing costs of child raising together drove a decrease in fertility. And, after exploding in the Industrial Age, rate of population growth in the industrial core slowed drastically. The population explosion turned out to be a relatively short run thing. And so human population growth went from an approximate doubling each generation to a rate approximately consistent with zero long-run population growth in the advanced industrial economies, with the rest of the world now following along behind. I world that had had perhaps 750 million people in 1800, 1.1 billion in 1870, and 7.4 billion in 2016 now appears headed for a stable population of about 9.5 billion come 2050.������The path of within-the-household technological advance worked to the benefit of the typical woman in the Long 205h Century: dishwashers, dryers, vacuum cleaners, improved chemical cleansing products, other electrical and natural gas appliances, and so on, especially clothes-washing machines���all these made the tasks of keeping the household clean, ordered, and functioning much easier. Maintaining a nineteenth century, high-fertility household was a much more than fulltime job. Maintaining a late twentieth century household could become more like a part-time job. And so much female female labor that had been tied to full-time work within the household because of the backward state of household technology became a reserve that could now be used for other purposes.

My great-great grandmother Florence Wyman Richardson was born in 1855 in St. Louis, MO, a privileged scion of what then qualified as St. Louis���s upper class. Unlike Abigail Smith Adams, she received an education���but not a college degree. Unlike Abigail Smith Adams, she was not limited to writing private letters to her husband asking him to please ���Remember the Ladies���. 1882 finds her lobbying for raising the age of consent in Missouri, then 12. 1908 finds her on the executive board of the St. Louis Woman's Trade Union League. 1910 finds her, with her daughter and my great-grandmother Florence (���Fonnie���) Richardson Usher, organizing the St. Louis Women���s Suffrage League. And the system��� responded: the 19th Women���s Suffrage Amendment, which had first been introduced back in 1878, was ratified on August 20, 1920.

In response to the declining time demands of within household work and the expanding set of outside opportunities, female participation in the paid labor force surged. In the United States female levels of formal education are now poised to soon surpass male levels.

The move of women from largely within-the-household, unpaid to largely outside-the-household, paid work catalyzed an increase in women���s material welfare and social status. As Betty Friedan wrote in the early 1960s, women could advance toward something like equal status only if they found ���identity���in work��� for which, usually, our society pays.��� As long as women were confined to separate, domestic, occupations which the market did not reward with cash, it was easy for men to denigrate and minimize their competence and accomplishments. As the labor requirements of running a household fell, the wide separation of men���s from women���s roles became harder to maintain���and with it the belief that biology imposed a different, lower status on the female half of the human race.

Institutions and practices derived under the assumption that the overwhelming bulk of the labor force is male, attached to employment full-time over the long term, and has minimal child care and household-maintenance responsibilities held back progress toward something like full economic equality between men and women. Nothing like full equality has yet been established. Male wages and earnings still appeared higher than female wages and earnings by more than could be easily accounted for by differences in education, training, and degree of labor force attachment. There is still substantial discrimination visible, especially in the form of a ���break in labor force participation��� penalty. Today in Denmark���one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, mothers have a 7%-point lower chance of being employed, work an average of 7% fewer hours conditional on being employed, and receive an average of 7% less in compensation conditional on being employed and on working their hours.

In my intellectual discipline, economics, and in my labor market status group, tenured professors, we are now grappling with one of these institutions and practices: that, in the word of my friend and teacher ex-Harvard President Larry Summers, people deciding whether you are going to receive tenure expect that candidate professors in their 20s and 30s have ���near total commitments to their work��� a large number of hours in the office��� a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency��� a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and��� the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job���. This is, Larry said, not a problem that can be solved by talking about how we are all people of goodwill here, singing "Kumbayah", and offering free childcare. Requiring such a near-total commitment work spurt up through one���s 30s does not fit easily or well with female parenthood. The response of universities was to give mothers extra time���extra years to prepare their portfolios for the tenure review. And then gender equality seemed to demand that universities give fathers���especially those who would certify that they had been primary caregivers���extra years on their tenure clocks as well. First-world problem, I know. But a powerful indicator that gender inequality shadows the life of every single woman and girl on this planet.

The effect of this facially-neutral pro-parent policy? It appears to have been that men whose wives gave birth and so got extra time on their tenure clocks saw their chances of getting academic tenure increase by 20% . Women who gave birth and so got extra time on their tenure clocks saw their chances of getting academic tenure decrease by 20%. The men had spent the extra time writing more articles. The women had spent the extra time eating for two under the heavy biological load of mammalian motherhood.

I see the centrality of the economic and the extraordinary upward leap in prosperity as the principal news that the future will remember from the history of the Long 20th Century. But I am male. If I were female, would I see the demographic transition���the shift of the typical woman���s experience from one of eating for two for twenty years (and of having one chance in seven of dying in childbed) to eating for two for four years���and the rise of feminism as the biggest news?

Quite possibly.

Perhaps we move from ���possibly��� to ���probably��� when we reflect on the connections between the rise of feminism and the demographic transition. As the world became richer���and as knowledge about how to manage public health was slowly and painfully developed���the world saw first a population explosion: The world had grown from 170 million in the year 1 to 425 million in 1500���growth at the very slow walking pace of 0.06% per year that corresponded to the very slow pace of pre-Commercial Revolution technological development. The Commercial Revolution era of 1500-1800 saw population more than double and grow to 900 million. The British Industrial Revolution era of 1800-1870 saw population increase half again to 1.3 billion. And the Long 20th Century saw human population nearly sextuple to 7.5 billion. By and large, even as mortality fell men still wanted many, many children. Women, first, did not have the knowledge that changing public health meant that many pregnancies were no longer necessary to give at least some confidence of great-grandchildren. And women, second, did not have the social power to set their fertility at levels that seemed good to them. Feminism gave them both the knowledge and the social power.

Thus we now appear to be on track to a world with its population peaking at between 9.5 and 10 billion around 2050.

That feminism came late to the initially-poorer regions of the world has been a major cause of the Long 20th Century���s global divergence in living standards and productivity levels. It was not the most important cause: the most important cause was communist central planning���Vladimir Lenin���s belief that one should run an entire economy by generalizing what he saw and guessed about German mobilization for World War I was not the brightest light on the tree of humanity���s good ideas. It was not the second most important cause: that was the slowness with which modern industrial technologies were diffused around the world. But that feminism came late, and so the demographic transition came late, to the poorer regions of the world was the third most important cause: the demographic burdens placed on poor countries by the continued population explosion were heavy���but they are now ebbing, as we now see the demographic transition to not just extended lifespan but to low fertility finish its spread around the globe...

#economichistory #equitablegrowth #feminism #highlighted #slouchingtowardsutopia #2019-12-30

Yes, austerity still rules in Europe. Which makes it very...

Yes, austerity still rules in Europe. Which makes it very likely that the next recession will be a deep one, and that the current expansion will remain an anemic one. Why do you ask?: Barry Eichengreen: The Policy Debate Europe Needs https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/eurozone-stimulus-ramp-up-european-investment-bank-by-barry-eichengreen-2019-12: 'National policymakers in a number of eurozone countries, starting with Germany, are dead set against fiscal expansion. Believing that they are being asked to encumber their children with debt in order to provide the stimulus that countries like Italy are unable to deliver, they happily invoke the EU���s fiscal rules to justify not running budget deficits. This impasse has prompted suggestions that the ECB should pursue fiscal policy by stealth.... The legitimacy of the ECB depends on more than legal formalities. Fundamentally, it derives from public support. And public opinion toward quasi-fiscal measures by the ECB would be strongly negative in countries like Germany.... Rather than attempting to circumvent the intent of the ECB���s statute, the resources of the European Investment Bank should be enlisted. The EIB has ���70 billion of paid-in capital and reserves and ���222 billion of callable capital. It has a board of directors from all 28 EU member states, limiting the danger of capture. Its charge is to fund sustainable investment projects, and it is empowered to borrow for that purpose. Because it is required to place its bonds with private investors, it is subject to market discipline, and it earns positive returns on its investments. Ramping up its borrowing and spending would be entirely consistent with its mandate.... Proposals for doing so will meet with political resistance from those who fear that a larger EIB would be a loss-making EIB. But significant losses are unlikely in an environment where borrowing costs are only a fraction of the return on equity investment. This, in any case, is the debate Europe should be having. Tackling the stimulus issue head-on is more likely to succeed than proceeding by subterfuge...

#noted #2019-12-30

Mark Koyama: The End of the Past https://www.bradford-del...

Mark Koyama: The End of the Past https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/11/should-read-mark-koyama-the-end-of-the-pasthttpsmediumcommarkkoyamathe-end-of-the-past-2f028cb970ed-temin.html: 'Temin���s GDP estimates suggest that Roman Italy had comparable per capita income to the Dutch Republic in 1600..... Aelius Aristides celebrating the wealth of the Roman empire in the mid-2nd century AD... a panegyric addressed to flatter the emperor but its emphasis on long-distance trade, commerce, manufacturing is highly suggestive. Such a speech is all but impossible to imagine in an predominantly rural and autarkic society. Aristides is painting a picture of a highly developed commercialized economy that linked together the entire Mediterranean and beyond. Even if he is grossly exaggerates, the imagine he depicts must have been plausible to his audience. In evaluating the Roman economy in the age of Aristides, Schaivone notes that: "Until at least mid-seventeenth century Amsterdam, so expertly described by Simon Schama���the city of Rembrandt, Spinoza, and the great sea-trade companies, the product of the Dutch miracle and the first real globalization of the economy���or at least, until the Spanish empire of Philip II, the total wealth accumulated and produced in the various regions of Europe reached levels that were not too far from those of the ancient world..." This is the point Temin makes. Whether measured in terms of the size of its largest cities���Rome in 100 AD was larger than any European city in 1700���or in the volume of grain, wine, and olive oil imported into Italy, the scale of the Roman economy was vast by any premodern standard. Quantitively, then, the Roman economy looks as large and prosperous as that the early modern European economy. Qualitatively, however, there are important differences...

...Roman history leaves no traces of great mercantile companies like the Bardi, the Peruzzi or the Medici. There are no records of commercial manuals of the sort that are abundant from Renaissance Italy... no political economy or ���economics���.... The most obvious institutional difference between the ancient world and the modern was slavery. Recently historians have tried to elevate slavery and labor coercion as crucial causal mechanism in explaining the industrial revolution. These attempts are unconvincing (see this post) but slavery certainly did dominate the ancient economy...

#noted #2019-12-30

Mark Koyama: The End of the Past https://medium.com/@Mark...

Mark Koyama: The End of the Past https://medium.com/@MarkKoyama/the-end-of-the-past-2f028cb970ed: '[Aldo] Schiavone suggests that ultimately the economic stagnation of the ancient world was due to a peculiar equilibrium that centered around slavery.... The apparent modernity of the ancient economy... rested largely on slave labor. The expansion of trade and commerce in the Mediterranean after 200 BC both rested on, and drove, the expansion of slavery. Here Schiavone note that the ancient reliance on slaves as human automatons... removed or at least weakened, the incentive to develop machines for productive purposes.... There was also a specific cultural attitude that formed the second leg of the equilibrium: ���None of the great engineers and architects, none of the incomparable builders of bridges, roads, and aqueducts, none of the experts in the employment of the apparatus of war, and none of their customers, either in the public administration or in the large landowning families, understood that the most advantageous arena for the use and improvement of machines���devices that were either already in use or easily created by association, or that could be designed to meet existing needs���would have been farms and workshops.��� The relevance of slavery colored ancient attitudes towards almost all forms of manual work or craftsmanship. The dominant cultural meme was as follows: since such work was usually done by the unfree, it must be lowly, dirty and demeaning.... The phenomenon coined by Fernand Braudel, the ���Betrayal of the Bourgeois,��� was particularly powerful in ancient Rome. Great merchants flourished, but ���in order to be truly valued, they eventually had to become rentiers, as Cicero affirmed without hesitation: ���Nay, it even seems to deserve the highest respect, if those who are engaged in it [trade], satiated, or rather , I should say, satisfied with the fortunes they have made, make their way from port to a country estate, as they have often made it from the sea into port. But of all the occupations by which gain is secured, none is better than agriculture, none more delightful, none more becoming to a freeman������.... Having taken note of the existence of such a powerful equilibrium... resting on both material and cultural foundations, we can now return to Schiavone���s argument for why a modern capitalist economy did not develop in antiquity.... Economic expansion and growth... between c. 200 BCE to 150 CE... generated a growth efflorescence... but it ultimately undermined itself because it was based on an intensification of the slave economy that, in turn, reinforced the cultural supremacy of the landowning aristocracy and this cultural supremacy in turn eroded the incentives responsible for driving growth.... The most advanced economies of early modern Europe, say England in 1700, were on the surface not too dissimilar to that of ancient Rome. But beneath the surface they contained the ���coiled spring���, or at least the possibility, of sustained economic growth... a culture of improvement... a commercial or even capitalist culture. According to Schiavone���s assessment, the Roman economy at least by 100 CE contained no such coiled spring...

#noted #2019-12-30

Richard Jensen: Unix at 50: How the OS that Powered Smart...

Richard Jensen: Unix at 50: How the OS that Powered Smartphones Started from Failure https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/08/unix-at-50-it-starts-with-a-mainframe-a-gator-and-three-dedicated-researchers/: 'Today, Unix powers iOS and Android���its legend begins with a gator and a trio of researchers.... In 1965, the GE 645 that Bell Labs used to develop Multics cost almost as much as a Boeing 737. Thus, there was widespread interest in time sharing.... Multics was conceived with that goal in mind. It kicked off in 1964 and had an initial delivery deadline of 1967. MIT, where a primitive time-sharing system called CTSS had already been developed and was in use, would provide the specs, GE would provide the hardware, and GE and Bell Labs would split the programming tasks.... Thompson bundled up the various pieces of the PDP-7���a machine about the size of a refrigerator, not counting the terminal���moved it into a closet assigned to the acoustics department, and got it up and running. One way or another, they convinced acoustics to provide space for the computer and also to pay for the not infrequent repairs to it.... By September, the computer science department at Bell Labs had an operating system running on a PDP-7���and it wasn���t Multics...

#noted #2019-12-30

Duncan Black: Eschaton: Clearly, The Problem Is Our Reade...

Duncan Black: Eschaton: Clearly, The Problem Is Our Readers https://www.eschatonblog.com/2019/12/clearly-problem-is-our-readers.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/bRuz+(Eschaton): 'One reason I hate the NYT is the absolute contempt it has for the truth and for its readers: Julia Carrie Wong: "Do they actually just think we���re stupid?:

New York Times Editors: Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors' views...

Bret Stephens: Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it���s true. ���Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,��� noted one 2005 paper. ���During the 20th century, they made up about 3 percent of the U.S. population but won 27 percent of the U.S. Nobel science prizes and 25 percent of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions���...

So the correction makes it ... worse ?? somehow?

Seems like bad qualities in a newspaper!!! "Sorry I wrote that. It wasn't what I meant to say but that happens sometimes." Would be lie but not a "fuck you, readers" lie...

For some reason, the New York Times is unwilling to say either (1) "yes, Henry Harpending is one of Bret Stephens's go-to authorities, but we have told him not to do it again..." or (2) "Bret Stephens often pretends he has read papers that he has not. He just googles, cherry-picks a couple of reported numbers, and then presents them as if he had actually done some research and gained some knowledge. This time this method of working went wrong. But by and large we are happy with him..."

#noted #2019-12-30

John Scalzi: 2019, Professionally Speaking https://whatev...

John Scalzi: 2019, Professionally Speaking https://whatever.scalzi.com/: 'For 2020, my life project is going to have to be working on that focus, so that my professional time is more productively organized and spent. This is something I���ve talked about a lot previously and have already instituted some steps toward (software to block social media while I���m supposed to be working being the best example of this), but there���s more to be done here, and I���ll be doing it...

#noted #2019-12-30

Neoliberalism: Are We Sure That's the Right Word?: Talking to Noah Smith

Noah Smith and Bradford DeLong: Neoliberalism: Are We Sure That's the Right Word? http://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/6420f501123b4520892978e93565cff9/1: Noah Smith: 'So we're supposed to be discussing neoliberalism, are we? Well, I was elected "Chief Neoliberal Shill of 2018" in a rigged joke online poll, so I spent a year looking around for reasons to think that "neoliberalism" might describe a good and useful policy outlook instead of Reagan/Thatcher/Milton Friedman libertarian dogma. I remembered that you had penned a defense of something called "neoliberalism" a while back: You framed "neoliberalism" as basically a program that protected markets as the basic engine of production and then tried to add a welfare state on top of those markets. And you depicted the main benefits of this system as being poor-country growth and global convergence. That strikes me as a useful definition and a solid assessment of its benefits...

#highlighted #politicaleconomy #publicsphere #2019-12-30

A Note on Reading Big, Difficult Books...

Knowledge system and cognitive science guru Andy Matuschak writes a rant called Why Books Don���t Work https://andymatuschak.org/books/, about big, difficult books that take him six to nine hours each to read:

Have you ever had a book��� come up��� [and] discover[ed] that you���d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences?��� It happens to me regularly���. Someone asks a basic probing question��� [and] I simply can���t recall the relevant details��� [or] I���ll realize I had never really understood the idea��� though I���d certainly thought I understood���. I���ll realize that I had barely noticed how little I���d absorbed until that very moment���

However, he goes on to say:

Some people do absorb knowledge from books��� the people who really do think about what they���re reading.��� These readers��� inner monologues have sounds like: ���This idea reminds me of���,��� ���This point conflicts with���,��� ���I don���t really understand how���,��� etc. If they take some notes, they���re not simply transcribing the author���s words: they���re summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing���

But:

Unfortunately, these tactics don���t come easily. Readers must learn specific reflective strategies��� run their own feedback loops��� understand their own cognition��� [what] learning science calls ���metacognition������. It���s challenging to learn these types of skills, and that many adults lack them���

These points had strong relevance for students in U.C. Berkeley���s Econ 105: History of Economic Thought: Do we live in a Smithian, Marxian or Keynesian World?

The core of the course is an assisted reading of three big books that are d���-ably difficult: Adam Smith���s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx���s Capital, and John Maynard Keynes���s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

These are all big, difficult, flawed, incredibly insightful, genius books. And it is a principal task of a successful modern university to teach people how to read such things. Indeed, it might be said that one of the few key competencies we here at the university have to teach���our counterpart or the medieval triad of rhetoric, logic, grammar and then quadriad of arithmetic, geometry, music and astrology���is how to read and absorb a theoretical argument made by a hard, worthwhile, flawed book. People need to understand what an argument is, and the only way to do that is actually go through an argument���to read the argument and try to make sense of it. People need to be able to tell the difference between an argument and an assertion. People need to be able to do more than just say whether they liked the conclusion or not: they need to be able to specify whether the argument hangs together given the premises, and where it is the premises, and where it is the premises themselves that need to be challenged. People need to learn that while you can disagree, you need to be able to specify why and how you disagree.

The first order task is to teach people how to read difficult books. Teaching people five facts about some thinker's theoretical perspective is subordinate: those five facts will not stick with them over the years. Teaching them how to read difficult books will stick with them over the years. Knowing what to do with a book that makes an important, an interesting, but also a flawed argument���that is a key skill.

Therefore, at the start, people need to read the Wealth of Nations. They need to read Books III, IV, and V, to see how Smith uses and qualifies the theoretical system he has built. But most of all people need to read Books I and II, both as an example of a powerful analytical argument, and because unless you understand Books I and ii you do not understand the most powerful ideology in the world today���the argument, it's dazzling. With Adam Smith, you can see how he starts from some premises and then builds it up to his conclusions. Starting with his premises about human nature, he derives his theory of the market as a system that has its own logic: it makes people do things they would not otherwise do, and so makes them act, collectively, to achieve outcomes that nobody intended. Since 1800 almost all other major positions in social theory have either drawn us or been trying to undermine Smith.

And then, after Smith, we go on to Marx, and Keynes. And we urge you to focus on the "meta" to the extent that you can: it is not so much the ability to answer the question "what does Marx think about X?" that we want you to grasp, but rather "how do I figure out what Marx thinks about X?" that is the big goal here.

We have our recommended ten-stage process for reading such big books:

Figure out beforehand what the author is trying to accomplish in the book.
Orient yourself by becoming the kind of reader the book is directed at���the kind of person with whom the arguments would resonate.
Read through the book actively, taking notes.
���Steelman��� the argument, reworking it so that you find it as convincing and clear as you can possibly make it.
Find someone else���usually a roommate���and bore them to death by making them listen to you set out your ���steelmanned��� version of the argument.
Go back over the book again, giving it a sympathetic but not credulous reading
Then you will be in a good position to figure out what the weak points of this strongest-possible argument version might be.
Test the major assertions and interpretations against reality: do they actually make sense of and in the context of the world as it truly is?
Decide what you think of the whole.
Then comes the task of cementing your interpretation, your reading, into your mind so that it becomes part of your intellectual panoply for the future.

Follow this process, and your reading becomes active. Then you have the greatest possible chance of learning the books���of thereafter being able to summon up sub-Turing instantiations of the thinkers Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes and then running them on your wetware. If you can do that, you can be closer to being as smart as they were. And at the same time you will be aware enough of their weak points and blindnesses that you can be wiser than they were.

To assist you in this process, we compiled 150 questions-and-answers���50 about Smith, 50 about Marx, and 50 about Keynes���that we think you should review and learn as part of your active-learning incorporation of the thought of these three authors into your own minds.

���But���, you may well say, ���simply learning these questions-and-answers merely gets me the ability to parrot verbal formulas. We want more: we want a least knowledge of facts, terms, and concepts; and we ideally want deep understanding���.

It is certainly true that there are many who can parrot verbal formulas yet lack knowledge of facts, terms, and concepts. It is certainly true that there are many who have knowledge of facts, terms, and concepts and yet lack deep understanding. But I am not aware of anyone who has deep understanding of a discipline and yet lacks knowledge of facts, terms, and concepts. And those who know the facts, terms, and concepts cold are the absolute best at parroting verbal formulas.

As our Economics Department Vice Chair Jon Steinnson says: ���You sit there listening and it makes no sense������you are at best parroting verbal formulas������until one day you find that it does���: that the network of interlocking verbal formulas has become at least the beginning of knowledge, and hopefully some day deep understanding. These questions-and-answers are a way of getting you to ask your own questions of the text, and to hear it answer���to do your own active reading. If you do it well, than big, difficult books will come to be to you what they came to be to Renaissance diplomat and political scientist Machiavelli, who wrote http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Politics/Vettori.html that his books were:

ancient men��� [who] receive��� [me] with affection���. I��� speak with them and��� ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death���

And so before he began reading them in the evening, he dressed up: ���[took] off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly������ (The ���not frightened by death��� part? When Machiavelli wrote this letter the Republic of Florence he had been worked for had been overthrown by the Medici dynasty, and he was righty fearful that they might decide to arrest, torture, and execute him.)

From Smith, Marx, Keynes: Cement Your Knowledge: https://www.icloud.com/pages/0yyHboa030OEohMkflwYE1u5w

#berkeley #books #cognition #highlighted #2019-12-28

Not a surprise: Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce: Disentang...

Not a surprise: Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce: Disentangling the Effects of the 2018-2019 Tariffs on a Globally Connected U.S. Manufacturing Sector https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2019086pap.pdf: 'Since the beginning of 2018, the United States has undertaken unprecedented tariff increases, with one goal of these actions being to boost the manufacturing sector. In this paper, we estimate the effect of the tariffs���including retaliatory tariffs by U.S. trading partners���on manufacturing employment, output, and producer prices. A key feature of our analysis is accounting for the multiple ways that tariffs might affect the manufacturing sector, including providing protection for domestic industries, raising costs for imported inputs, and harming competitiveness in overseas markets due to retaliatory tariffs. We find that U.S. manufacturing industries more exposed to tariff increases experience relative reductions in employment as a positive effect from import protection is offset by larger negative effects from rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs. Higher tariffs are also associated with relative increases in producer prices via rising input costs...

#noted #2019-12-28