J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 80

Note to Self: Best books about pre-industrial human socie...

Note to Self: Best books about pre-industrial human society:

Patricia Crone (1989): Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World https://delong.typepad.com/files/crone-pre.pdf...

Ernest Gellner (1989): Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History https://delong.typepad.com/files/gellner-plough.pdf...

Jared Diamond (1997): Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies https://delong.typepad.com/files/diamond-selections.pdf...

#books #notetoself #2019-12-26

Martin Wolf: How to Reform Today���s Rigged Capitalism ht...

Martin Wolf: How to Reform Today���s Rigged Capitalism https://www.ft.com/content/4cf2d6ee-14f5-11ea-8d73-6303645ac406: 'We must address weakened competition, feeble productivity growth, high inequality and degraded democracy: ���It is clear then that���.���.���.���those states in which the middle element is large, and stronger if possible than the other two [wealthy and poor] together, or at any rate stronger than either of them alone, have every chance of having a well-run constitution.��� Thus did Aristotle summarise his analysis of the Greek city states. The stability of what we would now call ���constitutional democracy��� depended on the size of its middle class. It is no accident that the US and UK, long-stable democracies today succumbing to demagogy, are the most unequal of the western high-income countries. Aristotle, we are learning, was right. My September analysis of ���rigged capitalism��� concluded that ���we need a dynamic capitalist economy that gives everybody a justified belief that they can share in the benefits. What we increasingly seem to have instead is an unstable rentier capitalism, weakened competition, feeble productivity growth, high inequality and, not coincidentally, an increasingly degraded democracy.��� So what is to be done? The answer is not to overthrow the market economy, undo globalisation or halt technological change. It is to do what has been done many times in the past: reform capitalism. That is the argument I made in a recent debate with former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis on whether liberal capitalism should be saved. I argued, in effect, that ���if we want everything to stay the same, everything must change���, as the Italian author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote. If we want to preserve our freedom and democracy we need to embrace change. Here are five policy areas that need to be addressed. First, competition.... Second, finance.... Third, the corporation. The limited liability joint stock corporation was a great invention, but it is also a highly privileged entity. The narrow focus on maximising shareholder value has exacerbated the bad side-effects.... Fourth, inequality. As Aristotle warned, beyond a certain point, inequality is corrosive.... Finally, our democracies need refurbishing. Probably, the most important concerns are over the role of money in politics and the way the media works. Money buys politicians. This is plutocracy, not democracy. The malign impact of fake news (which is the opposite of what the US president means by the term) is also clear. We need public funding of parties, complete transparency of private funding and also far greater use of consultative forums...

#noted #2019-12-26

Very Briefly Noted 2019-12-26:The Edge of Democracy ht...

Very Briefly Noted 2019-12-26:

The Edge of Democracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLe24M_PB5E: 'A cautionary tale for these times of democracy in crisis-the personal and political fuse to explore one of the most dramatic periods in Brazilian history. Combining unprecedented access to leaders past and present, including Presidents Dilma Rousseff and Lula da Silva, with accounts of her own family's complex past, filmmaker Petra Costa (ELENA) witnesses their rise and fall and the tragically polarized nation that remains...

Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren (1972): How to Read a Book https://delong.typepad.com/files/adler-read.pdf...

I.A. Richards (1942): How to Read a Page: A Course in Efficient Reading with an Introduction to a Hundred Great Words https://delong.typepad.com/files/richards-page.pdf...

Edward Bellamy (1887): Looking Backward 2000-1887 https://delong.typepad.com/files/bellamy-backward.pdf...

Karl Polanyi (1944): The Great Transformation https://delong.typepad.com/files/polanyi-transformation.pdf...

Roam Research https://roamresearch.com/: 'A note taking tool for networked thought...

Julia Buckley: Roman Shipwreck in the Eastern Mediterranean Is 'Biggest Ever' http://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/roman-shipwreck-kefalonia-fiskardo/index.html: 'Dated to between 100 BCE and 100 CE... the largest classical shipwreck found in the eastern Mediterranean. The wreck of the 110-foot (35-meter) ship, along with its cargo of 6,000 amphorae, was discovered at a depth of around 60m (197 feet) during a sonar-equipped survey of the seabed off the coast of Kefalonia...

eBook to PDF https://ebook2pdf.com/...

Aldo Schiavone: The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_End_of_the_Past/YcWVMCqaRwcC...

Weekend Reading: Ernest Gellner (1990): : From The Civil and the Sacred https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/02/weekend-reading-from-ernest-gellner-1990-the-civil-and-the-sacred.html...

Reading: Hoyt Bleakley and Jeffrey Lin (2012): Portage and Path Dependence https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/02/reading-hoyt-bleakley-and-jeffrey-lin-2012-portage-and-path-dependence.html...

Wikipedia: Battle of Killiecrankie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Killiecrankie...

John Scalzi: Thoughts on a Year of Exercise https://whatever.scalzi.com/2019/12/26/thoughts-on-a-year-of-exercise/...

Laura Hercher: The List Returns: My Top 10 Stories in Genetics in 2019 https://thednaexchange.com/2019/12/26/the-list-returns-my-top-10-stories-in-genetics-in-2019/...

#noted #verybrieflynoted #2019-12-26

It is well known that systems in which there is too much ...

It is well known that systems in which there is too much feedback and too little reliance on fundamentals become unstable: I believe that this is how nicotine and caffeine and chocolate work in their evolved function as nerve poisons for bugs: excite the neurons to fire more often, and rational coordination breaks down, and the bugs that ate the tobacco leaves die. Here we are the bugs, and social media is our tobacco leaf: Charles Stross: Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace? http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artificial-intelligence-threat.html: 'Today's internet ads are qualitatively different from the direct mail campaigns of yore. In the age of paper, direct mail came with a steep price of entry, which effectively limited it in scope���also, the print distribution chain was it relatively easy to police. The efflorescence of spam from 1992 onwards should have warned us that junk information drives out good, but the spam kings of the 1990s were just the harbinger of today's information apocalypse. The cost of pumping out misinformation is frighteningly close to zero, and bad information drives out good: if the propaganda is outrageous and exciting it goes viral and spreads itself for free. The recommendation algorithms used by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter exploit this effect to maximize audience participation in pursuit of maximize advertising click-throughs. They promote popular related content, thereby prioritizing controversial and superficially plausible narratives. Viewer engagement is used to iteratively fine-tune the selection of content so that it is more appealing, but it tends to trap us in filter bubbles of material that reinforces our own existing beliefs. And bad actors have learned to game these systems to promote dubious content. It's not just Cambridge Analytica I'm talking about here, or allegations of Russian state meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. Consider the spread of anti-vaccination talking points and wild conspiracy theories, which are no longer fringe phenomena but mass movements with enough media traction to generate public health emergencies in Samoa and drive-by shootings in Washington DC. Or the spread of algorithmically generated knock-offs of children's TV shows proliferating on YouTube that caught the public eye last year...

#noted #2019-12-26

On the one hand, this type of paper feels to me like engi...

On the one hand, this type of paper feels to me like engineered wheel-reinvention. It is microfoundations tuned to give a desired macroeconomic result, but its microfoundations are not real: we have no statistical mechanics in economics to get us from the real microfoundations to emergent macro properties like pressure and temperature. All we have are just-so stories: "if these were the microfoundations, then..." Nevertheless, this is a very, very nice example of the genre. And lots of people find this kind of thing very useful, or at least comforting. So I am probably wrong in my lack of enthusiasm here: Daniel Murphy: Excess Capacity in a Fixed Cost Economy https://economics.virginia.edu/sites/economics.virginia.edu/files/macro/murphy.pdf: '[When] firms... face only fixed costs over a range of output... equilibrium output and income depend on consumer demand rather than available supply, even when prices are flexible and there are no other frictions. The theory matches the procyclicality of capacity utilization, firm entry, and markups. A heterogeneous household version of the model demonstrates how an economy can enter a capacity trap in response to a temporary negative demand shock: When demand by some consumers falls temporarily, other consumers��� permanent income (and hence their desired consumption) falls. Since output is demand-determined, the permanent fall in desired consumption causes a permanent state of excess capacity...

#noted #2019-12-26

I was convinced by Burfisher &al. back in 2001 http://www...

I was convinced by Burfisher &al. back in 2001 http://www2.hawaii.edu/~noy/362texts/NAFTA-US.pdf that old NAFTA had been a net plus for United States autoworkers���and a huge plus for North American autoworkers. The downside industries seemed to be furniture, timber, and possibly apparel. But I do agree with Sandy and Harley that worker-rights violations ought to be as subject to trade sanctions as other violations of the rules of the international trading game. Sherrod Brown and company did not get that from Trump's underbriefed negotiators, but they did get a lot: Sander M. Levin and Harley Shaiken: _How Can Americans Compete With Mexicans Making a Tenth of What They Do? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/opinion/UAW-GM-Mexico-Nafta.html: 'Despite financial gains won recently by the United Auto Workers in a new contract that ended a nearly six-week-long strike against General Motors, the longest in a half-century, the deal will not rectify the major problem that has hurt American autoworkers and will continue to do so. The problem has been the longstanding lack of workers��� rights in Mexico. Wages there are roughly one-tenth of what American workers earn and the unions are often tools of the employer. This has warped the playing field and resulted in the transfer of American manufacturing jobs to south of the border. American autoworkers have been hit particularly hard. This situation can be blamed in part on a flawed 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement and addendum that, though it included provisions to protect workers, failed to ensure adequate monitoring and enforcement. Transgressions of workers��� rights were not subject to trade sanctions.... Congress must insist that Mexico first demonstrate that workers there can form independent unions and bargain collectively before agreeing to any new trade deal.... Mexico should focus on worker rights in the auto industry, which accounts for 37 percent of the country���s exports to the United States...

#noted #2019-12-26

Alice Dreger: Napoleon Chagnon Is Dead https://www.chroni...

Alice Dreger: Napoleon Chagnon Is Dead https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191023-dreger-chagnon?key=mi0Bff1vaLHL09_no2Emg5PWXO__JoamjKQr2Gq1TY9HA2L6VXvdoh4Rvoh8qT3jdHhUVUhoODlYamhvVlh6UU9CV3lfUzl2cjZPaV81b3ZjSzhuRmttZlBrYw: "Consider the recent blog post published by science journalist John Horgan at Scientific American���s website, in which, in light of Nap���s death, he revisits his review of Darkness in El Dorado for the New York Times Book Review.��Horgan now confesses that, warned by Chagnon���s most prominent allies not to support Tierney���s falsehoods, he doubled down in his influential review: 'I ended up making my review of Darkness more positive. I wanted Darkness to get a hearing'. He apologizes now not for amplifying a work full of lies, but only for understating the subtleties in Chagnon���s work. In his 2000 review of Darkness for the Washington Post, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins also endorsed Tierney���s bullshit. In that review, speaking of things he knew nothing about, Sahlins seconded Tierney���s sharp criticism of Chagnon for pressing the Yanomam�� for information about their dead: 'As for the dead', Sahlins wrote, 'they are completely excluded from Yanomami society, ritually as well as verbally, as a necessary condition of the continued existence of the living'. 'It���s a goddamned lie', Hames told me when we talked soon after Nap died. 'You walk into any Yanomam�� village on any evening, and you will hear people mourning their beloved deceased family members. You will hear the sobbing. They never forget.' The Yanomam�� dead, Ray told me, 'are not forgotten and obliterated from memory. They���re kept alive by the people who love them'. After we hung up, I thought about why Ray was harping on this particular factual error. Then it came to me. The people who became like kin to Chagnon never expected the people who considered themselves journalists and scholars to love Nap. They did, however, expect that journalists and scholars would feel as Nap did���that we ought to always be aiming for the earthly truth. Because that is how we can begin to take care of each other...

#noted #2019-12-26

Josiah Ober: Agamemnon's Cluelessness https://delong.type...

Josiah Ober: Agamemnon's Cluelessness https://delong.typepad.com/files/ober-agamemnon-selections.pdf: 'For Aristotle, ethics and politics must take into account ���merely living��� (ze��n) as the foundation for the end of living well (eu ze��n)... in a way... cognizant of the kinds of expertise necessary for living, without losing sight of the ultimate goal of living well. The domain of expertise... concerned with natural material conditions and forms of authority (especially master-slave) required by the end of self-sufficiency is designated oikonomia. But the definition of oikonomia and especially its relationship to money-making (chre��matistike��) is, Aristotle says, contested.... Among the many goals of Politics book 1 is to put chre��matistike�����as expert knowledge of a particular relationship among production (poie��sis), exchange (allange��/metable��tike��), and consumption/possession (kte��sis), all characteristically involving coined money���into the normatively correct place in his naturalized hierarchy of value. The critical conclusion is that chre��matistike�� (or one specific type of chre��matistike��) is a subordinate part of oikonomia. It is not ���according to nature��� (kata phusin) but rather a techne�� arising from practical experience (empeiria). It aims the possession and increase of wealth, at accumulation of money, as an end. That accumulation is by its internal logic unbounded and unconstrained, insofar as wealth denominated in monetary terms has no natural limit. Chre��matistike�� thus is a matter of maximizing a single resource (one thought to give access to all other resources), rather than optimizing or satisficing in respect to other values. It is at once contrary to the true end of human existence, a prevalent approach to the management of material goods, and (at least potentially) an essential instrument for both the oikonomos and the politikos. Among the delicate tasks of book 1 of the Politics is, then, to demonstrate that Aristotle knows enough about this dangerous and vulgar (phortikon) instrument to specify its proper uses, while avoiding appearing to honor it as a science worthy of a detailed treatment. Much of Politics book 1.8-11 is devoted to sorting out the contested relationship between chre��matistike�� and oikonomia...

#noted #2019-12-24

Katherine Policelli and Alix Gould-Werth: California Paid...

Katherine Policelli and Alix Gould-Werth: California Paid Family Leave Reduces Poverty: "Between 2004 and 2013, the California paid leave program increased household income levels and lowered poverty rates for mothers of 1-year-olds... an average 3,407 increase in income.... Also... good news specific to the bottom end of the income distribution: The introduction of paid leave in California is tied to a 10.2 percent decrease in risk of new mothers dropping below the poverty threshold and disproportionately helps women with lower levels of education and who are unmarried: Alexandra Boyle Stanczyk: Does Paid Family Leave Improve Household Economic Security Following a Birth? Evidence from California...

#noted #2019-12-20

I have not yet seen a good estimate of the impact of Trum...

I have not yet seen a good estimate of the impact of Trump's trade war on supply-side growth. Half a percentage point per year is what my own back-of-the-envelope guesses are suggesting to me now, but I have no confidence in them. I would really love to see a comprehensive assessment that I could trust: Jayant Menon: The Knock-On Consequences Of The Us-China Trade Tariffs on Global Value Chains https://voxeu.org/article/knock-consequences-us-china-trade-tariffs-global-value-chains: "The impact of a simple 25% trade tariff can go far beyond the costs of directly impacted goods. This column shows that seemingly small tariffs can substantially disrupt global value chains, both through the difference between nominal and effective tariff rates and the relative costs of relocation and transhipment, and also because of how the trade dispute is being perceived. If it is seen as a symptom of an enduring geopolitical struggle for global economic dominance, then it could recur.... Effective rather than the nominal tariff rate, and the perception that the dispute will not end with the trade war... explain how a relatively small tariff has permanently fractured GVCs. The recent escalation in the trade war, both in terms of increases in tariffs and its greater coverage of products, suggests that the disruption will be even higher.... A similar dispute took place just over 30 years ago, also triggered by a large bilateral trade imbalance, but between the US and Japan.... Japan responded by moving labour-intensive segments of manufacturing production to lower wage destinations in Southeast Asia, giving birth to ���Factory Asia��� (Baldwin 2006). In the process, Japan was able to retain its export competitiveness... shift a part of its export surplus to the balance of payments accounts of the countries it had invested in, thereby appearing to shrink its bilateral surplus.... The creation of Factory Asia benefitted consumers around the world and raised world incomes. This trade war is having the opposite effect. And the fallout could continue for a long time yet...

#noted #2019-12-20