J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 93

The book that is going to come out of Ober's 2019 Sather ...

The book that is going to come out of Ober's 2019 Sather lectures is going to be so great: Josiah Ober: Agamemnon���s Cluelessness: Economic Rationality and the Alternatives. https://tinyurl.com/dl20191121: 'Among the many goals of Politics book 1 is to put chr��matistik�����as expert knowledge of a particular relationship among production (poi��sis), exchange (allang��/metabl��tik��), and consumption/possession (kt��sis), all characteristically involving coined money���into the normatively correct place in his naturalized hierarchy of value. The critical conclusion is that chr��matistik�� (or one specific type of chr��matistik��) is a subordinate part of oikonomia. It is not ���according to nature��� (kata phusin) but rather a techn�� 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. Chr��matistik�� 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...

#noted #2019-11-21

Lecture Notes: Adam Smith

Adam Smith starts with the observation that humans are largely but not exclusively self-interested creatures: we are, largely but not exclusively greedy. Yet we have a complex and sophisticated societal division of labor. And that division of labor is essential to our prosperity. Indeed, it is essential to our survival: drop one or two of us into the Sierra Nevada, even in summer, and we will quite likely die. Drop 100 of us, and we will quite likely survive, and even flourish. How can animals that are by nature greedy nevertheless cooperate on a large scale? That is the deep moral-philosophical question that we can see in both of Smith���s big books...

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#berkeley #economics #highighted #historyofeconomicthought #lecturenotes #moralphilosophy #politicaleconomy #2019-11-21

Timothy B. Lee: No, Apple Isn���t Opening a New Manufactu...

Timothy B. Lee: No, Apple Isn���t Opening a New Manufacturing Plant in Texas https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/trump-brags-he-opened-apples-texas-mac-pro-plant-it-opened-in-2013/: '���I opened a major Apple manufacturing plant in Texas,��� Trump wrote Wednesday.... Trump echoed that theme in a tweet��after the tour. "Today I opened a major Apple manufacturing plant in Texas that will bring high paying jobs back to America," he wrote.... It's technically owned by Apple contractor Flex, not Apple.... More important, it's not new. Apple has been building the Mac Pro at the same location since 2013. Apple is opening a new facility in Austin���a 3 million-square-foot office complex where Apple says its employees will perform... "engineering, R&D, operations, finance, sales and customer support".... But that new facility isn't a manufacturing plant. It will create some high-paying jobs, but they'll mostly be white-collar jobs in areas like engineering, finance, and sales...

...Apple's decision to keep Mac Pro manufacturing in the United States follows contentious negotiations with the Trump administration. Back in June, a Wall Street Journal story suggested that Apple was preparing to move Mac Pro manufacturing to China. The��Journal story included remarks from an Apple spokesman that didn't dispute plans to move to China. Instead, the spokesman��emphasized that "final assembly is only one part of the manufacturing process." Behind the scenes, Apple was seeking tariff concessions that would make it more affordable to assemble the Mac Pro in the United States. Several key components of the Mac Pro were made in China, and Apple would incur tariffs if it shipped those parts to the US for assembly. Donald Trump took a hard line��on the issue in a July tweet.... But then in September, Apple announced that it would continue making the Mac Pro in Austin after all���and the company credited the Trump administration for the shift. "The US manufacturing of Mac Pro is made possible following a federal product exclusion Apple is receiving for certain necessary components," Apple wrote in its September announcement. Despite Trump's threats, his administration��granted 10 out of 15 Apple requests for relief from Trump's 25% tariff on Chinese imports...

#noted #2019-19-21

Comment of the Day: Ronald Brakels https://www.bradford-d...

Comment of the Day: Ronald Brakels https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/gdp-b-accounting-for-the-value-of-new-and-free-goods-in-the-digital-economy.html?cid=6a00e551f0800388340240a48e6cf3200c#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a48e6cf3200c re "GDP-B: Accounting for the Value of New and Free Goods in the Digital Economy": 'It's a very interesting question, but I will say any country that needs to rely on the unmeasured benefits of new technology to be able to say life has improved over the past generation or two for the lower income half of their population is doing something wrong...

#commentoftheday #2019-11-19

One very good thing coming out of the Silicon Valley cult...

One very good thing coming out of the Silicon Valley culture is that having done one's best and failed at something bold and important is no longer a black mark. But I do think that it has gone much too far. Real artists ship. Real entrepreneurs can distinguish a bold exploratory gamble from a con game. The Financial Times calls this kind of thing "The Whole Economy is Fyre Festival". That is a good rubric to hold in the front of one's mind to understand a bunch of things these days: Scott Lemieux: Today Amongst Our Overcompensated and Underachieving Elites: "John Carreyrou���s Bad Blood is essential reading.... Throughout the book America���s most decorated elites are revealed as bad actors or easy marks (or in the case of David Boies, both.) Another example is alleged Trump administration Adult In The Room (TM) James Mattis.... Mattis not only served on Theranos���s board during some of the years after he���d retired from military service, while it was perpetrating the scheme, but he earlier served as a key advocate of putting the company���s technology (technology that was, to be clear, fake) to use inside the military while he was still serving as a general. Holmes settled the SEC case, paying a 500,000 fee and accepting various other penalties, while Balwani is fighting it out in court. (Holmes and Balwani are both��battling criminal fraud charges.) Nobody on the board has been directly charged with anything. But accepting six-figure checks to serve as a frontman for a con operation is the kind of thing that would normally count as a liability in American politics.... Fundamentally,��Trump���s rise to power is part of a broader epidemic of elite impunity in the United States. And Mattis���s ability to dabble in questionable activity, cash a few checks, and then skate away with his reputation intact is very much part of the problem...

#noted #2019-11-19

Comment of the Day

Comment of the Day: Graydon: "'Truth' and 'facts' are different; "truth" is a statement about the inside of someone's head. (Generally one's own head.)

"facts" are that stuff independent of any particular person's imagination of the world. Facts are inherently collective.

If you've got enough money, you can blur this hopelessly because there's a bug in the wetware and anything that gets repeated enough becomes true. It helps a lot if the repeated thing is simple.

Keeping a political process facts-based is a hard problem, because you're effectively expecting people to prefer an effective process to getting what they want. That's challenging.

So there's a structural advantage on the "repeat lies" side. Any sensible framework of laws would take this into account...

#commentoftheday #2019-11-19

Yes, rural Kansas is now, in some ways, reminiscent of se...

Yes, rural Kansas is now, in some ways, reminiscent of seventeenth-century England. Why do you ask?: Cory Doctorow: In Kansas's Poor, Sick Places, Hospitals and Debt Collectors Send the Ailing to Debtor's Prison https://boingboing.net/2019/10/16/midwestern-dickens.html: "Kansas is a living laboratory for far-right experimentation with extreme economic cruelty: a state where Medicare expansions were thwarted, where xenophobia has penetrated the state bureaucracy, where a grifty, incompetent lawyer has apologized for slavery and driven women out of his own party, even as neighboring states thrive by tending to the needs of working people, rather than the super-rich. As Kansas sinks into poverty and ruin, its people are growing ever-sicker: poverty is strongly correlated with poor health outcomes, especially in America, where being poor means you can't afford preventative care, and even more especially in Kansas, where limits on Medicare expansion exclude even very poor people from access to subsidized care. Enter hospital debt collectors. Propublica's Lizzie Presser reports from Coffeyville, Kansas, home to Coffeyville Regional Medical Center, the only hospital for 40 miles, now that its rivals have all shut down. In Coffeyville, magistrate judges are appointed, and need no special training to hold the office. Judge David Casement���a cattle rancher who never studied law���presides over medical debt cases, which he hears quarterly at 'debtor's exam' days. At these proceedings, debt-collectors���who do have law degrees, and whom the judge relies heavily on for legal advice���are allowed to quiz sick people, or the parents or spouses of critically ill or dying people, about their assets and income and to ask the judge to order them to divert what little they have to Coffeyville Regional Medical Center, minus the debt-collector's healthy cut. But sick, poor people can't always afford to travel to the courthouse: sometimes, it's because they have to go see a specialist (or take their kid or spouse to see one); sometimes it's because they had to sell their car to make a previous debt payment. When this happens, debt collectors like Michael Hassenplug from Account Recovery Specialists Inc (ARSI) can ask the judge to issue a warrant for the debtor, who is taken to the local jail and hit with 500 in bail. Many can't pay it, and stay in jail (Hassenplug insists that they're not in jail for their debts, but rather for their failure to appear), while others who manage to borrow the 500 often find that it is then surrendered to the hospital and its arm-breakers. Meanwhile, the debts mount: in addition to punitive, usurious interest, the hospital and its debt-collectors reserve the right to lard on fees, fines and penalties...

#noted #2019-11-19

Unpredictable and chaotic work schedules are turning out ...

Unpredictable and chaotic work schedules are turning out to be an extra source of inequity that is, at least to me, surprisingly large. About the only half-silver lining is that Britain appears to be even worse: Cesar Perez and Alix Gould-Werth: How U.S. Workers��� Just-In-Time Schedules Perpetuate Racial and Ethnic Inequality https://equitablegrowth.org/how-u-s-workers-just-in-time-schedules-perpetuate-racial-and-ethnic-inequality/: "n an attempt to minimize labor costs, employers in today���s U.S. economy saddle workers with last-minute and low-quality schedules. These schedules, sometimes referred to as ���just-in-time schedules,��� are unpredictable, unstable, and often provide workers with an insufficient number of hours. Today, sociologists Kristen Harknett at the University of California, San Francisco and Daniel Schneider at the University of California, Berkeley released new analyses drawing from surveys with 30,000 retail and food workers at 120 of the largest retail and food service companies in the United States to show who suffers from these schedules, and how...

#noted #2019-11-19

Heather Boushey: On Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/polit...

Heather Boushey: On Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/df2ua6/im_heather_boushey_president_and_ceo_of_the/: "I���m Heather Boushey, president and CEO of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and author of the forthcoming book, Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It. AMA! : politics.... The latest economic research from across academic disciplines shows the many ways that high economic inequality���in incomes, wealth, and across firms���serves to obstruct, subvert, and distort the processes that lead to widespread improved economic well-being...

#noted #2019-11-19

Wikipedia: Tale of Ragnar's Sons https://en.wikipedia.org...

Wikipedia: Tale of Ragnar's Sons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_of_Ragnar%27s_Sons: "When Sigurd Hring dies, Ragnar Lodbrok succeeds him as the king of Sweden and Denmark. Many foreign kings come to take parts of his kingdom as they think Ragnar is too young to defend it. Herrau��r, the earl of G��taland and one of Ragnar's vassals had a daughter, ����ra Borgarhj��rtr, who was very beautiful. He gave her a lindworm, but after some time, it encircles her tower and threatens anyone who approaches it, except for her servants who fed it with an ox every day. At his symbel, Herrau��r promises his daughter to the man who kills the serpent. When Ragnar hears of this, he goes to V��sterg��tland and dresses himself in shaggy clothes that he had treated with tar and sand. He took a spear and approached the serpent which blew poison at him. Ragnar protected himself with his shield. He speared the serpent through its heart. He then cut off the serpent's head, and when the people found out what had happened, he married Thora. Then, he proceeded to liberate his kingdom.

M��rten Eskil Winge: Kraka (Aslaug): "Ragnar and Thora had two sons, Eir��kr and Agnar, and after a few years Thora dies of illness. He then married Aslaug, also known as Randalin, the daughter of Sigurd and Brynhildr. They had 4 sons, Ivar the Boneless, Bj��rn Ironside, Hvitserk, and Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye...

Wikipedia: Lindworm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindworm: "The Lindworm (cognate with Old Norse linnormr 'ensnaring snake', Norwegian linnorm 'dragon', Swedish lindorm, Danish lindorm 'serpent', German Lindwurm 'dragon') is either a legendary dragon-like creature or serpent monster. In British heraldry, lindworm is a technical term for a wingless serpentine monster with two clawed arms in the upper body. In Norwegian heraldry a lindorm is the same as the wyvern in British heraldry...

Wikipedia: Wyvern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyvern: "A wyvern... is a legendary bipedal dragon with a tail often ending in a diamond- or arrow-shaped tip. A sea-dwelling variant dubbed the sea-wyvern has a fishtail in place of a barbed dragon's tail. The wyvern in its various forms is important to heraldry, frequently appearing as a mascot of schools and athletic teams (chiefly in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada). It is a popular creature in European and British literature, video games, and modern fantasy. The wyvern in heraldry and folklore is rarely fire-breathing like the four-legged dragon...

#noted #2019-11-19