J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 9

DeLongTODAY: Nudging Ourselves Toward Full Employment...

The rough transcript & slides for my latest DeLongTODAY briefing


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I am Brad DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a sometime Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. This is the weekly DeLongToday briefing. Here I hold forth here on the Leigh Bureau���s vimeo platform on my guesses as to what I think you most need to know about what our economy is doing to us right now.

I promised Wes Neff when he agreed to provide the infrastructure for this that I and my briefings would be: lively, interesting, curious, thoughtful, and relatively brief. 

Relatively.

I promised I would provide briefings on a mix of: forecasting, politics, macroeconomic analysis, history, and political economy.

Today is an economic analysis & policy briefing: is Biden doing the right thing? 

But first���

Wednesday the Republican House of Representatives caucus voted 145-61 to endorse Liz Cheney as one of their leaders, and thus to approve of her for her conscience vote to impeach Donald Trump. On Wednesday half the Republican caucus also gave bigoted conspiracy theorist, Marjorie Taylor Greene���she who has called for the assassination of Democratic House leaders, denied that mass school shootings really happened, and blames Jewish Space lasers for forest fires���a standing ovation. The difference? The Cheney vote was a secret ballot. The Greene applause was public.

I harken back to 1993 and then-Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen from Texas describing to some of his senior staff���and to us junior spear-carriers standing in the back of the room against the wall���what his long-time friend Bob Dole, the Republican senate minority leader, from Kansas had said to him. Dole had said that the Republican senate caucus was going to go all-in against Clinton���s deficit-reducing reconciliation bill. It needed to be done for the country���s sake, Dole said, but we Democrats would do it. And he needed to position the Republicans to pick up seats, and the best way to do that was for none of the Republicans to be onboard voting for any of Clinton���s initiatives so that Democrats could be blamed for whatever went wrong, with no water-muddying possible.

It���s been this way for thirty years. And I am tired of it. I would call the Republicans cowardly quislings, except that a not-inconsiderable portion of them appear to be true fascists rather than just going along with the Trump- and Fox-addled base, and World War II-era Vidkun Quisling stood up and was counted when he decided that enthusiastically backing Hitler was best for his career and the only political strategy that promised some hope for Norway.

So whatever is to be done needs to be done by the 50 Democratic senators and Kamala Harris, by Pelosi���s narrow House majority, and by President Biden.

So what needs to be done to bring about full economic recovery?

First, scotch the virus.

The new-case counts are, as always, hopelessly flawed. We guess that Australia detects pretty much every coronavirus case, that Canada and Germany detect 3/4, that the United States detects about half of cases now and a much smaller fraction last spring and summer and even into the fall, that that the United Kingdom���well, a case count per 100,000 roughly equal to the United States since mid-December, but 50% more deaths suggests that Boris Johnson���s MBGA government is only detecting a third. An Australian result was not out of reach for the United States, except for Trump. A German or Canadian response and result was definitely something we should have been able to achieve. We didn���t. 1 in every 100,000 Americans is now dying of COVID-19 every day. That means that roughly 1 in every 500 Americans is catching COVID every day���that is 700,000 per day, and we are only vaccinating 1,000,000. So far we have vaccinated 10% of the population with at least one dose. American Samoa has vaccinated 20%. Israel has vaccinated 60%.

Until the virus is scotched, opening up the country to restore full employment is a fool���s errand: the government needs to be focused on relief���getting families the incomes they need to live, and avoiding permanent shutdowns of businesses that we will want to have when summer comes around and the virus is scotched. But after relief, when the virus is scotched, it will then be time for recovery.

Recovery is going to start from a bad place: 143 million people at work when we want to have 155 million. This 12 million job gap cannot be filled right now: it consists overwhelmingly of workers who do not want to be at work during the plague either for personal-safety or for caring-for-family reasons plus absent customers who do not want to buy during the plague for personal- and family-safety reasons. But it is not worthwhile trying to rejigger the economy to find those 12 million people other jobs in other sectors, because we are highly likely to want them back in their old sectors by late summer at the latest. So right now we stand pat. And as we approach herd immunity we reopen. At the moment we are at, perhaps, 85 million with at least temporary immunity from past infection, 35 million with at least temporary immunity from one-dose vaccination, with that today total of 120 million growing at 2 million per day. That would mean May 1 for being close enough to herd immunity.

Will the economy then pick up its mat and walk? Will people then return to the businesses that they worked for in February 2020, and will those businesses reopen? The experience of 2008 to 2010 strongly suggests that they will not. Back then there was not a biological plague, but there was a psychological and financial plague: a collapse of finance and credit that caused the absence of financing for business and of customers for products that produced an employment gap of about our current magnitude. This financial and credit plague however, was over by the start of 2010. Interest rate risk premium had normalized. And financial institutions were recapitalized.

There was by 2010 no reason why the businesses that were in operation in December 2007 and profitable could not have resumed operation. You may object: but we needed to move workers out of construction, for, as Chicago economist now hiding out at the Hoover institution John Cochrane claimed in late 2008, "workers pounding nails in Nevada need to find something else to do���. But Cochrane and company never did their arithmetic. Employment in construction was back below its long run average share of the economy by December 2007. The fundamental sectoral labor adjustment in response to the collapse of the housing boom had already been accomplished, and had been accomplished without mass unemployment.

And yet there was no rapid recovery. There were no green shoots. There was no "recovery summer". People did not return to the jobs in the businesses, or to the types of jobs and businesses, that they had been working in December 2007 overnight, or even in years. People needed to be pulled back into the labor market by stronger aggregate demand. And a Federal Reserve desperate to normalize interest rates and its asset portfolio and fearful of letting inflation even kiss 2% per year, let alone climb above it even for a short period of time did not help. And a Republican Party eager to hamstring Barack Obama by demanding massive deficit reduction immediately without tax increases did not help. And an Obama administration conflicted and divided between those who saw the situation clearly, those who really believed that deficit reduction was Job One, and those who thought they were being clever by pretending to prioritize deficit reduction���they really did not help the situation either.

But might things be different this time? They might. And there is one important way in which the situation is different which might matter.

The way in which things are different is that there are now $3 trillion of extra savings on household balance sheets. There was no analog to this back in 2010. Then the shortfall in spending was tied to a shortfall in income with no massive household asset accumulations. There were no extra piles of savings that raised people���s wealth to income ratios substantially above their previous targets. Now there are. Is this extra $3 trillion burning a hole in people���s pockets right now? If people spend 5% of it in the year after they feel safe from the plague,If people spend 5% of it in the year after they feel safe from the plague, that would boost economic growth over the year from mid-2021 to mid-2022 by 3/4%-point relative to mid-2020 to mid-2021. if they spend 10%, the boost would be 1.5%-points. If they spend 20%, the boost would be 3%-points. "We will", as my colleague Andres Rodriguez-Clare said earlier this week, ���learn a lot about savings behavior in the American economy over the next year". I think that we are as likely to see 20% as 5% because I have been persuaded by Chris Carroll's theory that Americans savers are prudent but impatient: those with money are anxious to spend as long as they can convince themselves that they are unlikely to run out and find themselves even temporarily squeezed.

This time may well be different. I would not be surprised to find this time���because of the great savings accumulation, itself for the result of the wise relief and income support policies of 2020���we do get the semi-spontaneous market led recovery without extraordinary government support and action going forward that we did not get after 2010.

So does that mean that we should not enact extraordinary fiscal support for the economy right now? Does that mean that the Biden administration is barking up the wrong tree, as are Pelosi and Schumer, in moving their $1.9 trillion reconciliation relief, support, and stimulus bill right now?

No it does not. I might be very wrong about what the central tendency likely going forward is. And even if I am right, the balance of risks is extraordinarily asymmetric, and that calls for Biden $1.9 trillion reconciliation relief, support, and stimulus bill as insurance against a repeat of the anemic post-2010 recovery.

Louise Sheiner of Hutchins and Wendy Edelberg of Hamilton have just carried out a nice exercise. Let me enlarge it so that you have a chance of seeing it���I have clearly failed at the task of slide construction here. There.

Sheiner and Edelberg���s standard Keynesian counterfactual forecasting exercise is truly useful. It shows us that the Biden $1.9 trillion reconciliation bill is not well targeted as a fiscal stimulus. Indeed, it is not: it is aimed at relief and support, as well as stimulus. Doing it through reconciliation, and doing it in such a way as to hold all 50 Democratic senators in support���those impose considerable constraints on the form that it can take. As optimal policy, it fails. As politics as the art of the possible, it succeeds. And as boosting an economy that may well need boosting, it seems effective. By contrast, the Republican bill is��� too small unless you accept CBO���s depressed view of what potential output is, and unless you in addition hold on to the belief that there should be no recoupment of output gaps: that potential output is a ceiling rather than an average that you should aim to fluctuate around.

But it is a mistake to conceptualize the problem of policy design here as one of producing a policy that is forecast, in the central case, either to get back to potential quickly or to overshoot potential and then return in such a way as to balance out the demand-side component of the coronavirus plague���s depression of economic activity below potential.

Instead, optimal policy design at this point in time needs to deal with uncertainties, asymmetry, and option value. It all discussion needs to start from the premise that this is quite likely going to be the only bite at the apple. It might be possible to provide a further substantial fiscal boost to the economy at sometime in the future if it is needed. But it might well not be politically possible. And it would be massively imprudent to plan on and expect that it will be politically possible to do so. 

What that means is that we need to make the chance that we will wish in the future that we had done more today very low.

How about the chance that we will wish in the future that we had done less today? Do not we need to worry about that? We do need to worry about that to the extent that we do not trust the Federal Reserve to take appropriate steps to control inflation should such steps become necessary. Let me postpone the question of whether we trust the Federal Reserve to the next slide.

In order to calculate what we should do in order to have a low probability of wishing in the future that we had done more, we need to push our judgments to the edge of significant probability in three respects:

We need to act as though we are highly optimistic as to the pace of potential output growth: we do not want, after the fact, to look back and say: ���gee, we really underestimated potential output growth���. 

We need not to be optimistic about the multiplier in this case. We need to suppose that that portion of the reconciliation bill money that is going to those who normally have a low marginal propensity to consume will not materially boost the pile of savings that are burning a hole through their pockets and that they will spend quickly. It is thus prudent to suppose that only those income boosts that hit the truly liquidity constraint will be spent. And that is significantly less than half of the total spending bill.

Shouldn't we then take steps to craft the bill more carefully? If we are giving money away to people who are not liquidity constraint for no good macroeconomic purpose, shouldn't be halt those expenditures and so avoid such a great increase in the national debt? If interest rates were positive, the answer to that question would be yes. But since interest rates are not positive and since we want to have this bill having its impact on the economy over the summer, it seems best to postpone issues of debt management and income distribution and so forth into the future, and right now focus on relief, support, and stimulus.

We need to presume that Americans understand that the world is now a riskier place then we thought it was a year and a half ago. Thus we need to presume that increases in wealth to income ratios even among rich households reflect the changing definition of prudence rather than sums that are going to be rapidly spent-down as a result of impatience.

All of these, I think militate strongly in support of the Biden package���as long as we can trust the Federal Reserve to handle problems that emerge if the policy does what it is supposed to do, that is, boosts production and employment up above potential output and beyond full employment in the absence of monetary policy offset.

So can we trust the Federal Reserve? One thing seems certain about Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell: he will not make his "temper tantrum" mistake again. He and his open-market committee will not prematurely withdraw monetary stimulus before he sees the whites of rising inflation's eyes.

Does that mean that he will hesitate to withdraw monetary stimulus and impose monetary austerity if we do reach a situation in which inflation control is rightly the highest priority of the Federal Reserve? Will Jay Powell, if faced with a return of the 1970s, turn into the equivalent of an Arthur Burns or a G. William Miller and, either out of a sense of loyalty to his political patrons, or out of fear of losing the Federal Reserve���s independence through policies Congress judges as excessively austere, or by misjudging the situation?

Never say ���never���. 

But the odds of that seem to be extremely low. First, the more we look at how industrial economies behave, the more it looks as though the inertial inflation of the 1970s was a one off produced by a unique confluence of a central bank that did not take its price-stability mission seriously and an economic structure in which major moves in the price of a single crucial commodity���oil���both of very powerful fundamental importance and served as a signal on which market participants could condition their own inflation expectations. No key fundamental role of oil, no conditioning of market expectations of inflation on the oil price, no absence of trust in central banks, then no inflation of the 1970s.

I am highly confident that Jerome Powell will neither make the Greenspan mistake of viewing unregulated bubble finance with benign neglect, the Bernanke mistake of premature normalization come hell or high water, nor the Burns-Miller mistakes. He will make his own mistakes. But we do not know what those will be. And we should not fear him making Burns-Miller mistakes in the future and have that fear lead us into avoiding appropriate fiscal stimulus out of fear of what is in the shadows.

So, yes, I do think that the Biden reconciliation bill for relief, support, stimulus is highly appropriate at this moment and deserves to pass. And I think it will do a lot of good in easing America's recovery. At this point it is traditional to say something about sausage and legislation. But I do not think we really need to say that: this looks to me like as much of a technocratic triumph as one can have in this fallen sublunary sphere, in this sewer of Romulus in which we live and work. 

I am impressed with the policy design and with the marshaling of the political coalition.

That is, I am impressed with the policy design and the marshaling of the political coalition among the Democrats.

I am not so impressed with the Republicans. These do not seem to me to be partisan issues here. I could understand if the right wing of the Republican Party, with its ideological blinders and its deficiencies and its inability to avoid thinking of an optimal policy is very different when a Democrat than when a Republican is president were to show up with a $600 billion proposal. I am rather embarrassed for the moderate, non-fantasy-based wing of the Republican Party when that is what it brings to the pot-luck

I���m Brad DeLong. This is the DeLongTODAY Briefing.

Briefly Noted: 2021-02-05

First, read & think about:

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Schuman may well be right. But he also may well be wrong here:

Michael Schuman: The Undoing of China���s Economic Miracle: ���Regulators squelched��� [Jack] Ma���s fintech giant, Ant Group, a mere two days before its November debut on the Shanghai and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges��� widespread concern that Chinese authorities were punishing Ma for criticizing their oversight of the finance industry���.  Jerome Cohen��� ���a new central campaign to curb the political and economic power of major private entrepreneurs who refuse to follow the central Party line in every respect.������ Though Xi has occasionally implemented market reforms��� [but] overall��� has shown a preference for the very visible hand of the state��� financial aid to a wide range of high-tech industries, including microchips and electric cars���.���dual circulation������ self-sufficiency���especially [in] microchips and other critical technologies���. Xi is preparing for protracted conflict between the world���s two largest economies by attempting to fireproof China from measures President-elect Joe Biden might use against him��� LINK: <https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/01/xi-jinping-china-economy-jack-ma/617552/?=>

I see Xi as seeking to protect himself and his r��gime against three threats:

Pressure applied from ���the west��� via weaponized interdependence.

Billionaires who become independent political actors as a bourgeoisie.

The complete corruption of the party that would turn it into a parasitic class without a credible societal role���and, eventually, perhaps trigger a revolution.

Remember that Xi, at some level, believes Marxism. He does not believe in rule by the bourgeoisie. He does not believe in rule by���as so often has been the case in China���s history���a parasitic bureaucratic aristocracy. He wants to see China ruled by a Communist Party that carries the banner of utopia, whatever that turns out to be, into the future.

And he wants to be the boss. And once he is the boss, it is very hard to step down: emperors tend to turn into emperors for life, and���this will be China���s problem of Xi succeeds in his entrenchment���humans have little experience with the problems of imperials succession in an age of modern medicine extending life expectancy well past the age major cognitive decline begins.

And now:

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Very Briefly Noted:

Ancient Coins Forum: Buying Power of Ancient Coins  <https://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/worth.html>

John Maynard Keynes (1942): How Much Does Finance Matter <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-keynes-finance-matter.pdf>

David Kessler & Peter Temin: Money & Prices in the Early Roman Empire<https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/63816/moneypricesinear00kess.pdf>

Scott Lemieux: Seditionist Commits Kinsleyan Gaffe: ���Even a bullshit artisan as well-practiced as Virginia via Missouri ���populist��� Stanford Yale Hawley Esq. can only keep up the facade for so long:

Ryan Grim @ryangrim: Hawley in this interviews slips at one moment and says of his claims of a fraudulent election, ���I didn���t mislead anybody, I was very careful...��� Catches himself and says he was ���very explicit.��� At about 3:40: https://t.co/0AQzlIajOo Hear the sad interview for yourself: <https://t.co/oAF9aVVRmv>
 

<https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/01/seditionist-commits-kinsleyan-gaffe>

Scott Alexander: Book Review: ���Julian Jaynes���The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it���s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact��� LINK: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/

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Seven Paragraphs:

Dan Froomkin: What the next generation of editors need to tell their political reporters: ���I���ve written a speech for the next boss to give to their political staffs. It goes like this���. Hi! It���s so nice to be here���. It���s impossible to look out on the current state of political discourse in this country and think that we are succeeding in our core mission of creating an informed electorate. It���s impossible to look out at the looming and in some cases existential challenges��� and think that it���s OK for us to just keep doing what we���ve been doing. So let me tell you a bit about what we need to do differently��� LINK: https://presswatchers.org/2021/01/what-the-next-generation-of-editors-need-to-tell-their-political-reporters/

Kiona Smith: This Is How Hominins Adapted to a Changing World 2 Million Years Agohttps://arstechnica.com/science/2021/01/this-is-how-hominins-adapted-to-a-changing-world-2-million-years-ago/: ���Jacks of all trades: And even if the earliest hunters and gatherers at Ewass Oldupa would have found later versions of the place totally alien, they would still have recognized the tools people used to survive it. For roughly 200,000 years, hominins relied on the same basic tools to tackle the bracken meadows beside the river, the patchwork of woods and grassland, the lush lakeshore, and the dry steppe. The chopping, scraping, and pounding tools of the Olduwan were relatively simple, but they were also incredibly versatile. According to Petraglia and his colleagues, Olduwan technology offered a basic, general toolkit that worked as well in a lakeside palm grove as it did on a dry steppe. Humans took over the world because we���re generalists, and generalists can adapt to nearly anything. Our early relatives clearly had the same advantage���

Jamie Powell: The EV Bubble Spreadsheet: Update Dos: ���Just gawp at the aggregate figures in FT Alphaville���s proprietary EV bubble Google Sheet, which we launched a fortnight or so ago. Our favourite ridiculous metric at the moment? BMW���s research and development spend in 2019 is almost double what every electric vehicle stock is expected to spend in 2020. Which somewhat dampens the idea that this particular market bubble will have positive spillover effects in the real economy. So what���s new in the sheet this week? Well, in terms of stocks, we���ve added much hyped electric vehicle maker Faraday Future��� LINK: https://www.ft.com/content/9d877b55-a0f9-47b9-bc8a-7d7bd36a03f8

Steve M.: How Republicans Think & How Democrats Think: ���Democrats have learned��� that it���s dangerous to let a crazy, angry extremist become the face of the GOP because there���s no reason to believe that the Republican electorate��� will reject crazy, angry extremism. It���s just the opposite, in fact���Republicans love Trump and Greene, and while Trump-like figures might never win majority support nationwide, Republicans don���t need majorities to seize control. During the Obama years, Republicans accused the president and members of his administration (Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice) of malfeasance, but they never seriously tried to punish them. Democrats, by contrast, have (futilely) impeached Donald Trump twice. Democrats aren���t faking outrage, the way Republicans have against Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Democrats genuinely believe that people like Trump and Greene are dangerous. Given the choice of making them examples or ridding the country of the threat they pose, Democrats will choose the latter��� LINK: https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2021/02/how-republicans-think-and-how-democrats.html

Sam Arbesman: Reinventing Book Publishing in the Tech Worldhttps://arbesman.substack.com/p/-reinventing-publishing-in-the-tech: ���attempts to constantly reexamine and reinvent the democratization, distribution, and furthering of knowledge should be watched closely (and please let me know of other examples you are aware of!). For ultimately, publishers are catalysts of world-changing ideas���

Gerard Baker (2020���11���16): Four Seasons Total Landscaping Isn���t Exactly the Reichstag https://www.wsj.com/articles/four-seasons-total-landscaping-isnt-exactly-the-reichstag-11605545752: ���Trump���s shambolic vote challenges provoke cries of ���coup��� and the usual comparisons to Hitler���

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Plus:
The Context of John Stuart Mill���s: ���Hitherto It Is Questionable If All the Mechanical Inventions Yet Made Have Lightened the Day���s Toil of Any Human Being���

In the Ashley edition that has been standard since��� 1909, I believe, the end of Book IV, Chapter 6, ���Of the Stationary State��� of John Stuart Mill���s Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy reads:

Of the Stationary State: Hitherto [1848] it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day���s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot.

The ���[1848]��� in square brackets was added by W.J. Ashley in 1909 to indicate that that that first sentence, with its ���Hitherto,��� had been in the book since its first 1848 edition. Mill���s time references, Ashley explained, were:

occasionally a little bewildering: a ���now��� in his text may mean any time between 1848 and 1871. In every case where it seemed necessary to ascertain and to remind the reader of the time when a particular sentence was written, I have inserted the date in the text in square brackets���

Political Economy came out in seven editions: 1848, 1849, 1852, 1857, 1862, 1865, and 1871. In none of them did Mill himself think that it was worth changing ���hitherto��� to ���formerly.���

LINK: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2008/05/hitherto-it-is.html

Briefly Noted: 2021-02-01 Mo

<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-2021-02-01-mo>
What I have been reading that has arrested me, and made me think. This may be one use I make of my substack as I try to figure out what this platform is useful for. Let me start with things thatwhizzed by, and follow with some long-paragraph chunks that I think are very worth reading,

 
But first:

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And:
One Video That Is Very Much Worth Watching:

40 minutes: JaydenX: Shooting and Storming Of The US Capitol In Washington DC

Very Briefly Noted:

Wikipedia: Fascinus <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascinus>

Sarah Levin-Richardson: The Brothel of Pompeii <https://books.google.com/books?id=ZoOWDwAAQBAJ>

Economic History Society: The Long Run <https://ehsthelongrun.net/>

Nico Voigtl��nder <https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty_pages/nico.v/>

Giuseppe di Lampedusa: The Leopard: ���Tancredi: If everything is going to stay the same, everything must change������ <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/book-lampedusa-leopard.pdf> | Wikipedia: Il Gattopardo <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leopard>

Seven Paragraphs-Plus for Dinnertime:

Matt Yglesias: Vaccines Are Better than You Think: ���None of the people in the Pfizer/Moderna treatment groups died or even fell seriously ill and had to be hospitalized���. These days they vaccinate kids against chickenpox, so kids mostly don���t get chicken pox. But even more remarkable, when they do get chickenpox these days it���s a ���sick for a few days��� kind of thing not ���miss weeks of school while suffering in agony.��� This is a really big deal with regard to the lower efficacy we are expecting from the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. A vaccine that���s only 70 percent effective at blocking infection would be expected to generate a larger than that reduction in hospitalizations and an even larger reduction in deaths��� LINK: <https://www.slowboring.com/p/good-vaccines>

Kyle Orland: Robinhood���s plan to ���democratize finance��� hit a GameStop-shaped speed bump [Updated] | Ars Technica: ���Tenev said point blank that ���there was no liquidity problem��� and that Robinhood���s move was made ���pre-emptively and proactively��� to ���protect the firm and protect customers.��� But in the same interview, he said he ���know[s] how Clorox and Lysol felt in the pandemic when they were running out of hand sanitizer and supplies,��� which suggests that the company didn���t have enough of something (e.g. money) on hand to handle the SEC requirements for the trading influx��� LINK: <https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/01/robinhoods-plan-to-democratize-finance-hit-a-gamestop-shaped-speed-bump/>

James H. Williams & al.: Carbon���Neutral Pathways for the United States: ���Modeling the entire U.S. energy and industrial system��� we created multiple pathways to net zero and net negative CO2 emissions by 2050. They met all forecast U.S. energy needs at a net cost of 0.2���1.2% of GDP in 2050, using only commercial or near���commercial technologies, and requiring no early retirement of existing infrastructure. Pathways with constraints on consumer behavior, land use, biomass use, and technology choices (e.g., no nuclear) met the target but at higher cost. All pathways employed four basic strategies: energy efficiency, decarbonized electricity, electrification, and carbon capture. Least���cost pathways were based on >80% wind and solar electricity plus thermal generation for reliability���.

In the next decade, the actions required in all pathways were similar: expand renewable capacity 3.5 fold, retire coal, maintain existing gas generating capacity, and increase electric vehicle and heat pump sales to >50% of market share. This study provides a playbook for carbon neutrality policy with concrete near���term priorities��� LINK: <https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020AV000284>

Timothy B. Lee: No, WallStreetBets isn���t robbing Wall Street to help the little guy | Ars Technica: ���The effort has been so effective in part because its architects have convinced people that it���s not just a pump and dump scheme��� a seductive story in which retail investors found a loophole that allows them to make money at the expense of hedge funds���. In reality, most of the gains captured by early GameStop investors will come at the expense of later investors who will be left holding the bag when the stock falls��� LINK: <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/the-gamestop-bubble-is-going-to-hurt-a-lot-of-ordinary-investors/>

Noah Smith: About that TFP stagnation���: ���Wow! If you look only at the durables sector, there was no Great Stagnation at all���. Durables TFP has been growing more strongly post���1993 than it ever did in the post-WW2 boom! Consider this: In the 26 years from ���47 to ���73, durables TFP nearly doubled, but in the 15 years from ���94-���09, durables TFP more than doubled���. Something big did happen to technological progress��� not in 1973��� but a decade earlier. In the 15 years to 1963, the two sectors progressed pretty much in tandem. But sometime in the early- to mid���60s, they diverged wildly, with nondurables [and services] TFP rising anemically through the late 70s and then basically flatlining until now���.

I think we should look at the ���Great Stagnation��� as a more subtle phenomenon than simply the exhaustion of the ���low-hanging fruit��� of nature. Our technologies for producing durable goods are improving faster than ever��� LINK: <https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/tfp-and-great-stagnation.html>

Matt Clancy: Maybe There is No Technological Slowdown: ���Vollrath���s preferred decomposition of the causes of the 1.25% annual slowdown in real GDP per capita growth is: 0.80pp - Declining growth in human capital; 0.20pp - The shift of spending from goods to services; 0.15pp - Declining reallocation of workers and firms; 0.10pp - Declining geographic mobility���. Human capital alone accounts for two-thirds of the slowdown���.

This leaves about 0.45pp left over for explanations related to the capital stock and TFP. Indeed, you can see in the graph above that GDP per capita growth drops noticeably in 2007, but TFP growth only drops a bit. Thus, right off the bat, Vollrath argues a slowdown in technological progress explains at most part of one-third of the growth slowdown���.

Services involve the purchase of attention from someone: childcare workers, doctors, restaurant servers, and so on. To the extent you are paying for attention from someone, it���s very hard to improve TFP. For these kind of services, TFP growth would entail finding a way to get more minutes of attention out of the same number of workers���. It���s not clear where the extra attention can come from��� LINK: <https://mattsclancy.substack.com/p/maybe-there-is-no-technological-slowdown>

Nino Scalia says: The poor should die in the street: Supreme Court (2012���03���27): The Health Care Law & The Individual Mandate: ���In the health care market, you���re going into the market without the ability to pay for what you get, getting the health care service anyway as a result of the social norms that allow���that���to which we���ve obligated ourselves so that people get health care.��� JUSTICE SCALIA: ���Well, don���t obligate yourself to that. Why���you know?��� LINK: https://www.npr.org/2012/03/27/149465820/transcript-supreme-court-the-health-care-law-and-the-individual-mandate

Briefly Noted: 2021-01-31 Su

It is curious that���so far at least���this from the extremely sharp McKay Coppins has turned out to be wrong: McKay Coppins: ���People who spent years coddling the president will recast themselves as voices of conscience, or whitewash their relationship with Trump��� LINK: <https://uphill.thedispatch.com/p/biden-cabinet-inauguration-gop-future>

The Republicans are all doubling down on Trump, even though he is now out of office, and off of Twitter. He has all but disappeared from the general public sphere. Is he still ruling the fever swamps? And do the Republicans not recognize that there is anything else?

Plus Two Videos Well Worth Watching:

Roosevelt & Churchill: Christmas, 1941


Arnold Schwarzenegger: Governor Schwarzenegger���s Message Following This Week���s Attack on the Capitol

Very Briefly Noted:

Joshua Gans: B.1.1.7: ���B.1.1.7 has an advantage��� when the mitigation strategies are in place��� [in] getting around them.... The fight against B.1.1.7 requires the places that have been the most vigilant need more action. It is hard to know what that is��� LINK: <https://joshuagans.substack.com/p/b117>

Nora Caplan-Bricker: An Overlooked Novel from 1935 by the Godmother of Feminist Detective Fiction: ���A new group biography establishes Dorothy L. Sayers���s ���Gaudy Night��� as a forerunner of works by Gillian Flynn and Tana French��� LINK: <https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/an-overlooked-novel-from-1935-by-the-godmother-of-feminist-detective-fiction>

Annalee Newitz: What Ancient Roman Hospitality Workers Can Teach Us About This Moment in History <https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/what-ancient-roman-hospitality-workers���

Ben Sasse: ���Many party leaders and consultants thought they could preach the Constitution while winking at QAnon. They can���t. The GOP must reject conspiracy theories or be consumed by them. Now is the time to decide what this party is about��� LINK: <https://uphill.thedispatch.com/p/biden-cabinet-inauguration-gop-future>

Acropolis Museum: Digital Museum: ���The Acropolis Museum enters dynamically into the world of digital technology and opens new channels of communication with the public��� LINK: <https://www.theacropolismuseum.gr/en/digital-museum>

Seven Paragraphs-Plus for Dinnertime:

Anna Akhmatova: From ���Requiem��� : ���During the years of the Yezhovschina, I spent seventeen months standing outside the prison in Leningrad, waiting for news. One day someone recognized me. Then a woman with lips blue from the cold, who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all. She whispered in my ear (for we all spoke in whispers there): ���Can you describe this?��� I said, ���I can.��� Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face��� LINK

Ken Untener: Prophets of a Future Not Our Own : ���It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God���s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us. No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the Church���s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything. This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities. We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord���s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own. LINK

Rosa Luxemburg: The Russian Revolution: ���The socialist system of society should only be, and can only be, an historical product, born out of the school of its own experiences, born in the course of its realization, as a result of the developments of living history���. Socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed or introduced by ukase���. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot. New Territory. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways. Only unobstructed, effervescing life falls into a thousand new forms and improvisations, brings to light creative new force, itself corrects all mistaken attempts.

The public life of countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress���. Otherwise, socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals���. Life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously���at bottom, then, a clique affair���a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins (the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month periods!)

Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc��� LINK: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch06.htm>

Noah Smith: Short Thoughts on the Insurrection: ���I think Republicans who still support the insurrectionists���or who are still on the fence���are motivated not by hate but by fear. To understand the mind of American conservatives, you have to understand the constant diet of fear that they consume every day. For decades, right-wing talk shows and Fox News have understood that they could get conservatives to tune in by constantly pumping up the fear���fear of a War on Christmas, fear of gay culture, fear of terrorism, fear of Black crime, fear fear fear. During the Trump Era, the chief bugaboos have been A) wokeness, B) immigration, and C) antifa. To be a conservative in America is to exist in a constant state of having people trying to scare you.

Now, in the era of Trumpist insurrection, the chief threat that the fearmongers are hawking is that Republicans and conservatives will become a persecuted class in America���.. Some Republicans will see this threatening warning and think ���Ehh, that���s hysteria; let���s focus on the real threat of insurrection and then things will be back to normal.��� But some will think ���OMG it���s true���. I���m going to be hunted and persecuted in my own country just because I���m a conservative���. Who can protect me from this terror?��� And for many, the only possible answer to the question of ���Who can protect me from this terror?��� will be ���Trump, and the people who stormed the Capitol���. Having been told that the institutions of America are an existential threat to them, they will cling to the only force they feel might be capable of protecting them���.

All the insurrectionists have to do to retain Republican support is to keep pumping up the threat, and keep presenting themselves as the only port in the storm. And some Republicans, tragically, will cling ever tighter to the very monster that is at their throats��� LINK >

Tom Snyder: The American Abyss: ���When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around.... Social media... supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true��� LINK: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html>

Haley Bird Wilt: The Consequences of Lying to People: ���Republican lawmakers misled millions of people into believing the results of a legitimate election could be overturned. Many of them viewed contesting the outcome as a relatively easy way to gain political currency among Trump supporters, knowing all the while that their efforts would have no real impact on who will be sworn into office in two weeks. The deception���primarily led by Trump, yet enabled by members of Congress���set the stage for the violence that unfolded at the Capitol Wednesday. Four people died....

The normally dry procedural affair of counting of the Electoral College votes was viewed by everyday Republicans and zealots alike as the place to make a final stand to overturn the election���even though elected Republicans knew the outcome would ultimately remain unchanged. As my colleague Jonah writes this morning, ���Convincing people they need to prevent a coup when no such coup exists is a recipe for violence.��� This was the energy that fueled the horde on Wednesday��� LINK: <https://uphill.thedispatch.com/p/the-consequences-of-lying-to-people>

Scott Alexander: Still Alive: ���513,000 people read my blog post complaining about the New York Times��� attempt to dox me (for comparison���. So many people cancelled their subscription that the Times��� exasperated customer service agents started pre-empting callers with ���Is this about that blog thing?������ I got emails from no fewer than four New York Times journalists expressing sympathy and offering to explain their paper���s standards in case that helped my cause. All four of them gave totally different explanations, disagreeing about whether the reporter I dealt with was just following the rules, was flagrantly violating the rules, was unaffected by any rules, or what. Seems like a fun place to work. I was nevertheless humbled by their support���.

Someone who knows New York Times reporters says the guy on my case was their non-hit-piece guy; they have a different reporter for hatchet jobs. After I torched the blog in protest, they seem to have briefly flirted with turning it into a hit piece, and the following week they switched to interviewing everyone who hated me and asking a lot of leading questions about potentially bad things I did���.

I think the New York Times wanted to write a fairly boring article about me, but some guideline said they had to reveal subjects��� real identities, if they knew them, unless the subject was in one of a few predefined sympathetic categories (eg sex workers). I did get to talk to a few sympathetic people from the Times, who were pretty confused about whether such a guideline existed, and certainly it���s honored more in the breach than in the observance (eg Virgil Texas)���.

I had a phobia of being doxxed. But psychotherapy classes also teach you to not to let past traumas control your life even after they���ve stopped being relevant. Was I getting too worked up over an issue that no longer mattered? The New York Times thought so. Some people kept me abreast of their private discussions (in Soviet America, newspaper���s discussions get leaked to you!) and their reporters had spirited internal debates about whether I really needed anonymity. Sure, I���d gotten some death threats, but everyone gets death threats���. Sure, I might get SWATted, but realistically that���s a really scary fifteen seconds before the cops apologize and go away. Sure, my job was at risk, but I was a well-off person and could probably get another���.

In the New York Times��� worldview, they start with the right to dox me, and I had to earn the right to remain anonymous by proving I���m the perfect sympathetic victim who satisfies all their criteria of victimhood���. I don���t think anyone at the Times bore me ill will, at least not originally. But somehow that just made it even more infuriating���

From Yesterday: DeLongTODAY: GameStonk

From 2021-01-29 Fr

From <http://.delongtoday.com>

On Tuesday, January 26, 2021, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted out one word���GameStonk!!���with two exclamation points, and with a link to a board on the internet discussion site Reddit, a board that describes itself as: ���WallStreetBets: Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal���. The word ���GameStonk��� is a mashup of ���stonk���, a misspelling of ���stock���, and ���GameStop������the Dallas-headquartered U.S. bricks-and-mortar videogame retailer with 5000 stores, $1 million of annual revenue per store, and currently $200 million a year of losses. The misspelling of ���stock��� means that Musk wants his readers to know that he is adopting a pose of enthusiasm and excitement: the pose is that he must communicate, and cannot be bothered to spellcheck anything before he sends his words out to the internet. ���GameStonk!!��� could therefore be translated thus: ���excitement, enthusiasm, and approval for (or perhaps for what is currently going on with) the stock of the company GameStop.��� 

The price of  GameStop (ticker $GME) immediately rose 60%.

The stock had doubled earlier in the day. The supposed trigger was early Facebook executive and current venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya���s tweeting that he had bought call options on GameStop, betting the stock would go still higher than it had before. The total equity value of GameStop was $5.5 billion Tuesday morning, $11 billion Tuesday afternoon, $17 billion Tuesday evening, a peak (so far) of $26 billion Wednesday, and $18 billion Thursday as I am taping this.

OK. So what is going on? And what does this mean?

Wikipedia tells us that GameStop is headquartered in suburban Dallas, TX, near to a LEGOLAND:

GameStop is an American video game, consumer electronics, and gaming merchandise retailer. The company is headquartered in Grapevine, Texas, United States, a suburb of Dallas, and operates 5,509 retail stores throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe as of February 1, 2020. The company's retail stores primarily operate under the GameStop, EB Games, ThinkGeek, and Micromania-Zing brands. In addition to retail stores, GameStop also owns Game Informer, a video game magazine.

GameStop last made a profit in calendar 2017: $35 million. It lost $673 million in 2018, lost 20% of its revenue in 2019 down to $6.46 billion for a loss of $471 million, looks to realize $5.26 billion in revenue and lose $200 million, and is forecast���but tracking analysts forecasts are usually optimistic���at revenues of $5.84 billion and break-even in 2022. Up until September, it was worth some $5 per share, $350 million for the 70 million shares outstanding.

The stock jumped in September and October���roughly tripled, boosting the company���s equity valuation from about $350 million to about $1 billion. Why? Because of Ryan Cohen. Ryan Cohen had founded online pet retailer MrChewy in 2011 at the age of 25. He had made a success of it, selling it to PetSmart for $3.35 billion and stepping down from the CEO position in 2019. He had bought 10% of GameStop. He hoped to turn it around: ���GameStop needs to evolve into a technology company that delights gamers and delivers exceptional digital experiences���not remain a video game retailer that overprioritizes its brick-and-mortar footprint and stumbles around the online ecosystem������ he wrote. 

Before Ryan Cohen���s appearance, the consensus was that GameStop would be closed in a decade. The market���s valuation was that of the $50 billion in revenue the firm might collect before it closed, it would be generous to think that 1% of that might be ultimately paid out to shareholders. Afterwards, the market was more optimistic: maybe with Ryan Cohen involved, there was a 20% chance GameStop could, instead, become an internet property as valuable as MrChewy was when Cohen sold it to PetSmart. Maybe Ms. Market was right here; maybe Ms. Market was wrong. I tend to think that Ms. Market was being too enthusiastic about the ability of one charismatic 35er with successful experience in an adjacent market segment to make a big difference. But I would not say that I was at all sure that Ms. Market was wrong.

One other thing happened in September-October: an extra 35 million shares or so were shorted. As of August, there were 100 million shares in long positions���people who stood to gain if GameStop went up or paid dividends���and 30 million shares in short positions���people who stood to gain if GameStop went down. By the end of October there were 135 million shares in long positions in 65 million shares in short positions. And then nothing happens until January 12, 2021.

So what happens in the two weeks between the end of January 12 and dawn on January 26? The stock-market valuation of the company then went from $1 to $5.5 billion. Why and how? 

One part of it is a ���technical��� story. The technical story has two parts. The first part is the ���short squeeze��� part. Suppose that you are a short seller. And suppose that the price of a stock you have shorted goes up���goes way up. What do you do? On the one hand, the profits from your short, if it comes in, are now much bigger, so you hold on to and may well increase your short position. 

On the other hand you are now poorer���perhaps a lot poorer���and your tolerance for risk goes down. Moreover, you are in this as a business: you cannot get yourself into a situation where one bet going wrong will destroy your ability to make other bets in the future, no matter how big a winner this one bet looks. And, in addition, the fact that the stock has moved against you is evidence that your initial analysis of the situation was, to some degree at least, not accurate. Those will tend to make you shrink your position.

The net effect of these factors is that, for short sellers, their demand curve may well slope the wrong way. Markets are stable because when price goes up demand tends to go down. But if short-sellers decide to cover rather than increase their positions when the price rises, their component of the demand curve does not slope down but slopes up���unless and until much bigger short sellers with much deeper pockets and much greater risk tolerances are attracted into the market.

The second part of the technical story is the call option part. Suppose you want to bet on Ryan Cohen���s success���or bet that it might look like he might possibly be a success. You could buy the stock. Or you could amplify your potential winnings by buying a way-out-of-the-money call option on the stock. That way you can make a bet that might come in really big, and make it cheaply. If you think you have more knowledge than capital, and yet you want to limit your downside exposure by not borrowing to buy stock and hence being on the hook if the stock goes bankrupt, a call option can look attractive.

The question is: who do you buy the call option from? If you can find somebody who wants to make the opposite bet���to bet that Ryan Cohen will not succeed���well and good. But odds are you will buy the call option from somebody who does not have strong views about Ryan Cohen and GameStop. They simply want to collect some money for making a market up front, and then be out of the game. They do not want to gamble. They want to hedge their position.

How do they hedge their position? Well, they sell you a call option and then they buy a little bit of the stock at the market price. If the call option price goes up, it must be because the stock price has gone up. When the call option is way out-of-the-money, a $1 increase in the stock price produces only a very small increase in the value of the option, so you do not need to buy much stock. But as the stock price approaches the option strike price���the price at which you get to buy the stock if you ���call��� your option���the proper delta hedge requires more and more of the stock. And at the limit, as the option comes into the money, the delta hedge amount becomes one.

Thus as the stock price goes up, your counterparty who has sold you the option must increase his or her long position in the stock in order to stay hedged. From your perspective, you are not doing anything as the stock price rises. You have an option. You are just letting it ride as the stock bounces around. But the combination of you-and-your-counterparty-who-has-hedged-their-position as a unit is another positive-feedback trader: somebody else whose demand curve slopes the wrong way, with your collective demand for the stock not falling but rising as the stock price rises.

And, of course, as the stock price rises, it gains more mindshare. And some of those whom news about the stock touches will decide to buy.

So far we have three factors: short-sellers who can be squeezed, and thus turned into positive-feedback traders; counterparties of call option purchasers, who are positive-feedback traders as well; and the fact that news and buzz is a source of stock demand. There are also three more factors: call them YOLO (as Matt Levine does), rage-against-the-(financial)-machine (as John Authers does), and pump-and-dump.

Let me quote from Matt Levine on YOLO:

The people on the WallStreetBets subreddit sometimes all get into a stock at once. This is fun, a nice social outing in an age of social distancing, a risky but potentially lucrative collective entertainment. Recently they decided to do GameStop. Because, I don���t know, they���re gamers��� it���s a little comical to pump the stock of��� mall video-game stores during a pandemic, or because��� professional investors are short GameStop and they thought it���d be funny to mess with them. Or, especially, because their friends on Reddit were buying���. Take one person who���s long for fundamental reasons, add 100 people who are long for personal-amusement reasons like ���lol gaming��� or ���let���s mess with the shorts,��� and then add thousands more who are long because they see everyone else long, and the stock moves: ������It was a meme stock that really blew up���, said WallStreetBets moderator Bawse1���. GameStop seemed so utterly doomed that the current situation was actually sort of funny to the subreddit���s denizens. Banded together, WallStreetBets members bought in big enough to move the stock���. Here is a seven-hour YouTube video from Friday in which a guy called ���Roaring Kitty��� dips a chicken tender in champagne to celebrate his GameStop wins. ���This is the thing, overbought can stay overbought, remain overbought, even get more overbought,��� he says, which is as good a summary of the situation as anything else���

And let me quote from John Authers on rage-against-the-(financial)-machine:

I argued that it was misplaced to take pleasure at the pain for the short-sellers who had attacked GameStop stock, and then been subjected to a ���short squeeze��� for the ages by traders coordinating on Reddit. I received a bumper crop of feedback��� leaving out many with unprintable expletives): ���How much did [GameStop short-position hedge fund] Melvin pay you to write this garbage? shill. Literally trying to protect an industry trying to fleece jobs from low income workers. Sleep well chump������ ���Watching entitled institutional shorts whine��� that millennials equipped with margin accounts & zero fees are collaborating on Reddit to target them is my new favorite sport. Looks perfectly healthy��� plus 1 for the little guys.��� ���Normal isn't putting the retail trader down for being independent while organized hedge funds force you to take their way or suffer in fear. Normal is the American dream and being able to make your own way. This isn't a casino. This is a riot������

We coordinated our purchases on Reddit, and we got rich, and in the process we made a bunch of overrich institutional Wall Street plutocrats sad and poorer. What is not to like?���that seems to be their view.

Well, what is not to like is that ultimately all the money there is is the dividends that will be paid by GameStop and the price that will be paid by its acquirer whenever the GameStop corporate shell is dissolved and its assets are repositioned. At the moment those who have sold GameStop on its ride up have collected perhaps $14 billion���$7 billion from the shorts and $7 billion from current GameStop holders who were late into their long positions. The short-sellers have lost $7 billion. Current stockholders of GameStop have an asset 

worth $14 billion that they paid $7 billion for���and so a paper profit of $7 billion right now. But the only value to back GameStop is the money that will be flowing out of the firm as distributed profits���and that is likely to be $400 million only, or maybe $700 million, or maybe $1 billion at best.

Current GameStop shareholders are thus looking to lose at least $6 billion of the $7 billion they have paid for the stock���unless they find greater fools willing to take their shares off their hands at something like its current $14 billion paper-profit valuation.

And here we get to the pump-and-dump question: How much do those who have already received $14 billion in profits from GameStonk so far overlap with those who currently hold a $14 billion paper position in GameStonk���a position that was $28 billion at one moment Thursday afternoon? And how much have those who have profited already dumped their positions? And what role did those who have profited play in pumping up the stock in the first place?

Combine pump-and-dump, rage-against-the-(financial)-machine, YOLO, hedged call options as strong sources of positive-feedback trading, and the short squeeze with the excitement provoked by the hope that Ryan Cohen could repeat his success with MrChewy, and you have the stage set for Elon Musk and Chamath Palihapitiya to trigger the quintupling of Tuesday and Wednesday. It is hard to know why they did what they did. It seems likely to be YOLO���for if they had positions, they are likely to spend the rest of their lives enmeshed in nets of lawsuits.

The story is really reminiscent of the bad old days of Gilded Age Wall Street���the Harlem corner, the stats bearcat corner, the Northern Securities panic. (The family story is that one of my great-great grandfathers killed himself with his revolver because he could not face telling his family the scale of his losses in Northern Securities).

There is, however one big difference. In previous search episodes of short squeezes, corners, and massive immediate fast-moving bubble divergences of market prices from fundamentals, there was considerable uncertainty about what those fundamentals really were. Was the stock being pumped above its value by cynics who wanted to dump it later? Or were people who had learned that there was about to be great news about the business trying to quietly buy it up in advance? And were the rumors that there was a pump-and-dump going on false-flag diversions to keep the general public from getting in on a good thing?

Before there was always a universe to be understood and mastered, or Masters of the Universe who you could profit be emulating. Knowledge either about what fundamental values really were or about the plans of insiders. But this time there is no knowledge, there is no pattern.

Just as Donald Trump was a reality-TV simulacrum of a president, so this feels like a reality-TV version of financial Robber Barons. A going-through-the-motions for the camera, but, somehow, not the real thing. Then there was a reason to think things might work out as planned.

Now there is only: GameStonk!!  

Hayek & Einstein...

<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hayek-and-einstein>

Chasing down an intellectual rabbit hole at Wednesday lunchtime...

 

I was browsing through Friedrich von Hayek's The Fatal Conceit���although it is not clear to me how much of this very late (1988) Hayek is Hayek, and how much is ���editor��� William Warren Bartley. Why? Because Hayek is playing a larger part in my history of the Long 20th Century, Slouching Towards Utopia?, as it moves toward finality, and I am concerned that I be fair to him. And I ran across his claim that the ���socialists��� felt:

an urgent need to construct a new, rationally revised and justified morality which��� will not be a crippling burden, be alienating, oppressive, or`unjust', or be associated with trade. Moreover, this is only part of the great task that these new lawgivers���socialists such as Einstein, Monod and Russell, and self-proclaimed 'immoralists' such as Keynes���set for themselves. A new rational language and law must be constructed too, for existing language and law also fail to meet these requirements���. This awesome task may seem the more urgent to them in that they themselves no longer believe in any supernatural sanction for morality (let alone for language, law, and science) and yet remain convinced that some justification is necessary���.

The aim of socialism is no less than to effect a complete redesigning of our traditional morals, law, and language, and on this basis to stamp out the old order and the supposedly inexorable, unjustifiable conditions that prevent the institution of reason, fulfilment, true freedom, and justice. The rationalist standards on which this whole argument, indeed this whole programme, rest, are however at best counsels of perfection and at worst the discredited rules of an ancient methodology which may have been incorporated into some of what is thought of as science, but which has nothing to do with real investigation���

Who are these Mephistophelean demons seeking to destroy human morality? Keynes, Russell, Monod, and��� Einstein?

Let���s leave John Maynard Keynes to one side���even though the paragraph in his essay My Early Beliefs where Keynes calls himself an ���immoralist��� is, in context, a declaration that when he was young he was foolish, that he is not yet fully wise, and that as a result people regard him with justified suspicion as someone who is ���not aware that civilization was a precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rule and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved������ Anybody who makes this and claims that Keynes boasted that he was���and saw himself as���an ���immoralist��� a la Andr�� Gide is not in the business of informing but of misleading you.

Let���s leave Bertrand Russell to one side (even though there was nobody more skeptical of idealist thinkers suffering from ���the fatal conceit���, and nobody more willing to seek truth from facts.)

But let���s focus for a moment on Jacques Monod. What seems to have incited Hayek���s (or Bartley���s) ire? It is Monod���s short book Chance and Necessity. For Monod, we���indeed, all life���are completely and purely the result of chance and necessity working together, through the process of variation and evolution by natural selection. And what is a choice or a chance decision at one level���the cell can choose to admit or not admit a virus, the antibody can choose to grab onto and tag the virus or let the virus pass by���is at a lower level the result of necessity as the molecules do or do not fit together so that the key can turn the lock or not.

Science, Monod says, has taught us this, and in so teaching has ���outrage[d] values��� subvert[ed] every one of the mythical or philosophical ontogenies upon which the animist tradition, from the Australian aborigines to the dialectical materialists, has made all ethics rest: values, duties, rights, prohibitions������ Monod���s belief is that as the scientific pursuit of knowledge has brought us to this wisdom, we should response by wisely taking the further advance of scientific knowledge as our ethical touchstone, and accept that our purpose is���we are made���to be Francis Bacon���s Salomon���s House, for which ���the end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible������

Now I would have thought that Monod���s ideas would have been attractive to the Hayek who sees the people���s god as ���just a personification of that tradition of morals or values that keeps their community alive���.

So I cannot but believe that Hayek���s (or Bartley���s) real beef with Monod is that he says what are supposed to be the quiet parts too loudly���that it is good for other people to believe that their god is more than just a personification of their moral tradition.

And then we come to��� Einstein.

Einstein?

Einstein���s Theory of Relativity is not opinion or doctrine, but fact: When you measure the clocks and yardsticks of others who are moving rapidly relative to yourself, you do measure that their clocks tick more slowly than yours and their yardsticks are contracted in the direction of motion and so measure smaller distances than yours. That is simply a fact. GPS satellites are so programmed that if that were not a fact, they would not work.

Why this animus against Einstein? It is true that he did say that socialism was a necessity, and did say something like: ���I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.��� But how does that translate into Einstein being a crusader ���to effect a complete redesigning of our traditional morals, law, and language���?

Am I wrong in misreading this as, at base, simply Hayek viewing a prominent Jew (pretty much any prominent Jew) as an Enemy of the People (George Soros today, anyone?)?

In the same era as The Fatal Conceit was published, you could read the right-wing American Spectator stating as fact that Einstein���s Theory of Relativity was simply an enormous conspiratorial con game played against the righteous and the conservative, and that ���the constancy of the speed of light, irrespective of the observer's movement, has not been demonstrated experimentally���. Never mind that that constancy was what had been tested and demonstrated in the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment that the American Spectator had just referred to on the previous page.

And you could read stated as fact that even though all professional physicists know that Relativity Theory is false, for the most part they ���shrug and accept relativity theory���theirs is not to quarrel with the sainted genius of the twentieth century���, while:

among intellectuals in general, the theory has been much admired: so abstruse, so deliciously disrespectful of the eternal verities, so marvelously baffling to the bourgeoisie. It doesn't interfere with the daily routine, makes no practical difference to the Newtonian world. But it does upset its theoretical underpinnings. Wonderful!���

<https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/bethel-einstein-i.pdf>

W.H. Auden: Spain

<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/wh-auden-spain>
Written just before WWII, during the Spanish Civil War...

 

Yesterday all the past. The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.

Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
the fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
the chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;

The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. but to-day the struggle.

As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,
Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
On the crag by the leaning tower:
���O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor.���

And the investigator peers through his instruments
At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
���But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire.���

And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: ���Our day is our loss. O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser. Time the refreshing river.���

And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,

���Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin���s plucky canton?
Intervene. O descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend.���

And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city
"O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I���m the

"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.

���What���s your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.���

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen���s islands
Or the corrupt heart of the city.
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people���s army.

To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue
And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the Octaves of radiation;
To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
the photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty���s masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,

The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The consious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

LINK: https://sites.google.com/a/upr.edu/modernpoetry/Student-Blogs/ivan-andres-rodriguez/spainbywhauden

I Am Wondering If I Want to Move This Party Over to SubStack for Real...

There seems to be no fundamental reason to do so. But it does seem that there may be community-discovery and network reasons to do so. So yesterday I threw a bunch of things up at SubStack: http://braddelong.substack.com:

Taking ��e Temperature of Twitter: 2021-01-27 We: Twitter has always been absolute s--- at aggregation tools. & that is one of the things that makes it so effective at keeping people inside its walled garden. Aggregation tools allow you to step back, evaluate, and assess. So I am going to see if I can use SubStack to try to do that. I always see myself on Twitter as a pig digging for truffles. Here���s what I have found��� LINK: https://braddelong.substack.com/p/taking-e-temperature-of-twitter-2021-ae4

Briefly Noted: 2021-01-27 We: What I have been reading this morning that has arrested me, and made me think. This may be one use I make of my substack as I try to figure out what this platform is useful for. Let me start with things that whizzed by, and follow with some long-paragraph chunks that I think are very worth reading, and that I noted this morning.... Very Briefly Noted: Jen Sorensen:��For January 26, 2021: GoComics: Freedom��LINK. William H. Shrank, Nancy-Ann DeParle, Scott Gottlieb, Sachin H. Jain, Peter Orszag, Brian W. Powers, and Gail R. Wilensky:��Health Costs & Financing: Challenges & Strategies For A New Administration | Health Affairs: ���The HHS secretary should��� work��� with Congress to decrease the age of Medicare eligibility to fifty-five��� LINK���

Hayek & Einstein...: Chasing down an intellectual rabbit hole at Wednesday lunchtime... I was browsing through Friedrich von Hayek.... Why? Because Hayek is playing a larger part in my history of the Long 20th Century, Slouching Towards Utopia, as it moves toward finality, and I am concerned that I be fair to him. And I ran across his claim that the ���socialists��� felt: "an urgent need to construct a new, rationally revised and justified morality which��� will not be a crippling burden, be alienating, oppressive, or 'unjust', or be associated with trade. Moreover, this is only part of the great task that these new lawgivers���socialists such as Einstein��� LINK

Written just before WWII, during the Spanish Civil War...: W.H. Auden (1937): Spain: 'The stars are dead. The animals will not look./We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and/History to the defeated/May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon... LINK

Plus:

Fascism: This is the current draft of chapter 11 of my Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long 20th Century 1870-2016. This is the chapter of the book that I am currently having the most trouble with. So advice & comments are very seriously genuinely welcomed, & badly needed��� LINK: https://braddelong.substack.com/p/fascism

This Really Is Fine!

Relatively, that is. Compared to the raging dumpster fire before:

====

��

Take a Look at:

Three short thinking pieces on what Biden is doing/should do:

��

Eric Levitz:��Biden���s Inaugural Address: ���Biden���s speech was riddled with contradictions. He called for unity (against everything the GOP stands for), and decried extremism (while demanding ���bold��� action on climate and racial justice). How he resolves these tensions will define his presidency <LINK>

��

Ezra Klein:��Joe Biden & Democrats Must Help People Fast: ���Among the many tributaries flowing into Trumpism, one in particular has gone dangerously overlooked. In their book ���Presidents, Populism and the Crisis of Democracy,��� the political scientists William Howell and Terry Moe write that ���populists don���t just feed on socioeconomic discontent. They feed on ineffective government���and their great appeal is that they claim to replace it with a government that is effective through their own autocratic power��������<LINK>

��

Ed Luce:��Joe Biden Embraces His Inner Radical to Confront Winter Of Peril: ���America���s��� most consequential presidents���George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and FDR���were all leaders of moderate temperament. Their skill was to bring others along���. Biden��� spelt out the way��� to advance his agenda���. Civility. At another time, such boilerplate language might prompt narcolepsy���. But��� Biden���s hand of friendship is also a weapon���. No significant Republican[s]��� wav[ing] Mr Trump off from the White House or Andrews Air Force Base speaks volumes���. Biden sketched out the ���winter of peril and significant possibility��� that is facing America. In practice, Mr Biden���s first 100 days could prove to be very interesting indeed�����<LINK>

��

��

====

One thing you should think about studying this spring. Why? Because the subfield of economic development has gotten unbalanced, so that these days it tells us a lot about micro-behavioral parameters and relatively little about, well, economic development. STEG is trying to offer people tools to think about this:

STEG:��Key Concepts in Macro Development: ���Why?��Macro development is a small field. Textbooks are unavailable, and while many graduate programs teach some of these concepts in their courses, very few have a specific course organised around and dedicated to macro development. This virtual course will fill the gap for Ph.D. students or even junior faculty throughout the profession who are interested in these topics but do not have access otherwise. The virtual classes will be interactive, just as virtual graduate lectures in most departments are now�����<LINK>

Plus:

We have no idea whether the person writing this was serious. We have little idea how many people believe that it is, or might be, true:

��

��

��
��
1����

Briefly Noted for 2021-01-21(a)

Tom Snyder: The American Abyss https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html: ���When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around.... Social media... supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true���

Haley Bird Wilt: The Consequences of Lying to People https://uphill.thedispatch.com/p/the-consequences-of-lying-to-people: ���Republican lawmakers misled millions of people into believing the results of a legitimate election could be overturned. Many of them viewed contesting the outcome as a relatively easy way to gain political currency among Trump supporters, knowing all the while that their efforts would have no real impact on who will be sworn into office in two weeks. The deception���primarily led by Trump, yet enabled by members of Congress���set the stage for the violence that unfolded at the Capitol Wednesday. Four people died.... The normally dry procedural affair of counting of the Electoral College votes was viewed by everyday Republicans and zealots alike as the place to make a final stand to overturn the election���even though elected Republicans knew the outcome would ultimately remain unchanged.��As my colleague Jonah writes this morning, ���Convincing people they need to prevent a coup when no such coup exists is a recipe for violence.��� This was the energy that fueled the horde on Wednesday���

====

BRIEFLY NOTED:

Joshua Gans: B.1.1.7 https://joshuagans.substack.com/p/b117: ���B.1.1.7 has an advantage over older variants in infecting people when the mitigation strategies are in place. In other words, it is getting around them.... My guess is that the new variant can obtain more cases in certain settings���like workplaces that previously were able to keep transmission low���and then people carry the new variant home where fewer mitigations are in place and transmission occurs more easily there.... That means that the fight against B.1.1.7 requires the places that have been the most vigilant need more action. It is hard to know what that is.... The other option���and I will continue to beat this still live horse here���is ramping up testing���

Nora Caplan-Bricker: An Overlooked Novel from 1935 by the Godmother of Feminist Detective Fiction https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/an-overlooked-novel-from-1935-by-the-godmother-of-feminist-detective-fiction: ���A new group biography establishes Dorothy L. Sayers���s ���Gaudy Night��� as a forerunner of works by Gillian Flynn and Tana French���

Annalee Newitz: What Ancient Roman Hospitality Workers Can Teach Us About This Moment in History https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/what-ancient-roman-hospitality-workers���

Ben Sasse https://uphill.thedispatch.com/p/biden-cabinet-inauguration-gop-future: ���Many party leaders and consultants thought they could preach the Constitution while winking at QAnon. They can���t. The GOP must reject conspiracy theories or be consumed by them. Now is the time to decide what this party is about���

McKay Coppins https://uphill.thedispatch.com/p/biden-cabinet-inauguration-gop-future: ���People who spent years coddling the president will recast themselves as voices of conscience, or whitewash their relationship with Trump altogether. Policy makers who abandoned their dedication to ���fiscal responsibility��� and ���limited government��� will rediscover a passion for these timeless conservative principles. Some may dress up their revisionism in the rhetoric of ���healing��� and ���moving forward,��� but the strategy will be clear���to escape accountability by taking advantage of America���s notoriously short political memory...

Acropolis Museum: Digital Museum https://www.theacropolismuseum.gr/en/digital-museum: ���The Acropolis Museum enters dynamically into the world of digital technology and opens new channels of communication with the public. The large number of applications that were developed under the programme ���Creation of the Digital Acropolis Museum��� showcases the multiple aspects of its exhibits, offers unique experiences in its galleries and creates a new, exciting world for kids and grownups alike. At the same time its new website captures in a contemporary way the Museum���s function and activities, provides multidimensional orientation and entertainment, renders all its collections open and accessible to the international community and forms an attractive environment, designed specifically for children���

Kiona Smith: This Is How Hominins Adapted to a Changing World 2 Million Years Ago https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/01/this-is-how-hominins-adapted-to-a-changing-world-2-million-years-ago/: ���Jacks of all trades: And even if the earliest hunters and gatherers at Ewass Oldupa would have found later versions of the place totally alien, they would still have recognized the tools people used to survive it. For roughly 200,000 years, hominins relied on the same basic tools to tackle the bracken meadows beside the river, the patchwork of woods and grassland, the lush lakeshore, and the dry steppe. The chopping, scraping, and pounding tools of the Olduwan were relatively simple, but they were also incredibly versatile. According to Petraglia and his colleagues, Olduwan technology offered a basic, general toolkit that worked as well in a lakeside palm grove as it did on a dry steppe. Humans took over the world because we���re generalists, and generalists can adapt to nearly anything. Our early relatives clearly had the same advantage���

Sam Arbesman: Reinventing Book Publishing in the Tech World https://arbesman.substack.com/p/-reinventing-publishing-in-the-tech: ���attempts to constantly reexamine and reinvent the democratization, distribution, and furthering of knowledge should be watched closely (and please let me know of other examples you are aware of!). For ultimately, publishers are catalysts of world-changing ideas���

John Maynard Keynes (1942): How Much Does Finance Matter https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-keynes-finance-matter.pdf...

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Governor Schwarzenegger's Message Following This Week's Attack on the Capitol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_P-0I6sAck&feature=youtu.be...

40 minutes: JaydenX: Shooting and Storming Of The US Capitol In Washington DC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfiS8MsfSF4&bpctr=1610381708���

Gerard Baker (2020-11-16): Four Seasons Total Landscaping Isn���t Exactly the Reichstag https://www.wsj.com/articles/four-seasons-total-landscaping-isnt-exactly-the-reichstag-11605545752: ���Trump���s shambolic vote challenges provoke cries of ���coup��� and the usual comparisons to Hitler���

Substack CEO Chris Best https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRJUNF5tHG4���

Model Economic History Papers https://delong.typepad.com/teaching_economics/model-economic-history-papers.html���

Congressional Record 2021-01-06 https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/congressional-record-2021-01-06.pdf...

K. N. Chaudhuri (1968): International Economy in the Nineteenth Century: An Historical Survey https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-chaudhuri-india-1800s.pdf...

Economic History Society: The Long Run https://ehsthelongrun.net/���

John Maynard Keynes (1924): A Tract on Monetary Reform https://delong.typepad.com/keynes-1923-a-tract-on-monetary-reform.pdf...

Colonial Williamsburg: Men���s Dress in the 1770s https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2875778182533255