J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 99

Se��n Clarke and Cath Levett: Canada Election 2019 https:...

Se��n Clarke and Cath Levett: Canada Election 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/22/canada-election-2019-full-results: 'Justin Trudeau defied worst expectations to keep his job as prime minister. His Liberals are again the largest party, but have lost their majority. Find out where the parties are strongest and who were the winners and losers on the night:

#noted #2019-10-25

Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-25:Bret Devereaux https://a...

Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-25:

Bret Devereaux https://acoup.blog/author/aimedtact/

Wikipedia: Antonine Plague: Smallpox?...

Wikipedia: Plague of Cyprian: Ebola variant? Measles?...

Wikipedia: Valerian: 253-260...

Wikipedia: Gallienus: 253-268...

Wikipedia: Plague of Justinian: Bubonic Plague?...

Xenophon: Anabasis http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1170/1170-h/1170-h.htm...

Pseudo-Aristotle: Oeconomica https://ia600201.us.archive.org/9/items/oeconomica01arisuoft/oeconomica01arisuoft.pdf...

Xenophon: The Economist http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1173/1173-h/1173-h.htm...

Wikipedia: Aleksandr Tsekalo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Tsekalo...

Mark Graham: The Wayback Machine���s Save Page Now is New and Improved https://blog.archive.org/2019/10/23/the-wayback-machines-save-page-now-is-new-and-improved/: 'Have you ever wanted to archive all the web pages linked from an email message?�� Well, you are in luck because now you can forward that email to ���savepagenow@archive.org��� and after a few minutes you will get an email back filled with Wayback Machine playback URLs...

#noted #verybrieflynoted #2019-10-25

Benjamin Wittes: The Collapse of the President���s Defense: Weekend Reading

Benjamin Wittes: The Collapse of the President���s Defense https://www.lawfareblog.com/collapse-presidents-defense: 'President Trump���s substantive defense against the ongoing impeachment inquiry has crumbled entirely���not just eroded or weakened, but been flattened like a sandcastle hit with a large wave. It was never a strong defense. After all, Trump himself released the smoking gun early in L���Affaire Ukrainienne when the White House published its memo of Trump���s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That document erased any question as to whether Trump had asked a foreign head of state to ���investigate������a euphemism for digging up dirt on���his political opponents. There was no longer any doubt that he had asked a foreign country to violate the civil liberties of American citizens by way of interfering in the coming presidential campaign. That much we have known for certain for weeks. The clarity of the evidence did not stop the president���s allies from trying to fashion some semblance of defense. But the past few days of damaging testimony have stripped away the remaining fig leaves. There was no quid pro quo, we were told���except that it���s now clear that there was one. If there was a quid pro quo, we were told, it was the good kind of quid pro quo that happens all the time in foreign relations���except that, we now learn, it wasn���t that kind at all but the very corrupt kind instead. The Ukrainians didn���t even know that the president was holding up their military aid, we were told���except that, it turns out, they did know. And, the president said, it was all about anti-corruption. This was the most Orwellian inversion; describing such a corrupt demand as a request for an investigation of corruption is a bit like describing a speakeasy as an alcoholism treatment facility. As this tawdy fact pattern has become increasingly exposed, the only defense that remains to the president is that it does not amount to an impeachment-worthy offense���an argument difficult to square with either the history of impeachment or its purpose in our constitutional system...

...Yet the president���s public support has not collapsed alongside the substance of his defense. The president���s approval rating, even as support for impeachment has ballooned, has moved only modestly. In the FiveThirtyEight average of presidential approval polls, Trump has dropped about two percentage points over the past month���which is not nothing, given the narrow range in which his approval numbers fluctuate. But it shows considerable resilience under the circumstances.

Most people know Federalist 65, if they know it all, for its famous characterization of the impeachable offense:

those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself...

But it is in the sentences that immediately follow these words that Alexander Hamilton peered through the ages and commented on the current Republican failure to abandon Donald Trump:

The prosecution of [impeachments], for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influences, and interests on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of the parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt...

Nailed it.

Yes, Trump���s approval numbers show there are cracks in the wall, as every pundit is busily pointing out. But the larger point, it seems to me, is that there is still a wall. And as Hamilton argued, it is the comparative strength of that wall, not any demonstration of Trump���s innocence or guilt, that will regulate the decision as to the president���s fate. The president���s defense, in other words, has been reduced to raw political power; it is not a genuine examination of facts but rather a numbers game to assemble enough elected officials alligned with the president���s faction to refuse to look reality in the eye and thus to assure Trump���s acquittal.

Of course, no senators or members of the House of Representatives can say this outright. Despite this era of shredded norms and broken taboos, it is still verboten to state what is so obviously true:

I refuse to support Trump���s impeachment because, however merited it may be, I am a Republican and he is a Republican and the advantage of my party would be ill-served by his removal���which might also threaten my own prospects of reelection, which depend on voters who like the president more than they like me...

Perhaps such a defense���so overtly unprincipled and open in embrace of Federalist 65���is impossible because Americans still have some shame about seeking power for its own sake. I���ll leave the reason for its impossibility to others. Suffice it for now to observe that it is impossible, which means that even those making obvious political calculations have to hide behind arguments, however implausible, that sound in some kind of principle or public good.

The problem is that it���s pretty hard to mask the reality of cold political calculus when the president���s defenses have collapsed as they have here. There are no plausibly exculpatory facts to hide behind. Each new witness makes matters worse for the president; even his own chief of staff can���t manage to talk about the matter without piling on more damning admissions. There just isn���t any good argument for Trump at this stage. So what is a poor Republican member of Congress or senator, animated by Federalist 65 but unable to admit it, to do?

Their answer is to make noise. Indeed, the more the president���s defense crumbles, the louder the noise gets: Republicans have gone after Peter Strzok. Trump has tweeted, once again, about ���insurance policies.��� He and his allies in Congress have complained about House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and about the supposed deficiencies in the ���process��� and the legitimacy of the House���s impeachment inquiry. They have yelled about outing the whistleblower and the procedural protections available to the president in a process he does not recognize.

But the problem with a strategy of making noise is that, if you do it long enough, the ear grows accustomed to a certain ambient level of it and the public collectively tunes it out. In order to sustain distracted attention, one has to constantly increase the volume and vary the sound. It���s not enough to quote the same text messages over and over again. Distraction has to be distracting, which means it has to be at least a little bit novel. And you always have to escalate.

And so the president and his allies have graduated from the propagation of conspiracy theories to ���Storming the SCIF,��� an effort by House Republicans to simply barge into the space in which the Intelligence Committee is conducting depositions and refuse to leave. The President brands career public servants and lawyers who have the temerity to represent their clients as ���human scum.��� They seek to censure Schiff. And, of course, they clamor for investigation of the investigators, as though if John Durham could only discredit John Brennan or Jim Comey or some career official no one has ever heard of, that would somehow discredit Bob Mueller, which would somehow mean that it was okay for the president to lean on Zelensky for political favors in a totally different election cycle.

It all could change, of course. Polls are unmovable until they move. Cracks in the wall are mere cracks until the wall comes down and we realize the bricks were actually just the spaces between the cracks. Senators are a fickle lot, and when the winds shift, they can shift suddenly.

Hamilton���s point was that guilt or innocence might be not be dispositive in impeachment trials. It was not that guilt or innocence doesn���t matter in the face of political power. There���s a temptation to conflate these two points. If the president���s defense has crumbled but that fact will not trigger his removal, does it even matter? In fact, the crumbling of the president���s defense matters a great deal���even if the wall ultimately holds, even if a large segment of the public refuses to engage that reality and even a large cadre of elected officials chooses to keep escalating the noise instead of either accepting Trump���s guilt or mounting a substantive defense of his actions.

The collapse matters���even if it does not prove dispositive politically���because persuasion matters and thus persuasiveness matters. The last line of defense against a lawless, oathless president is the electoral process, and clarifying Trump���s conduct before the electorate is thus crucial to voters��� ability to make informed decisions. The process of evaluation itself also plays an important role here. The definition in the minds of members of Congress of what is unacceptable helps to articulate and reinforce norms of behavior. In a period in which we are fighting to defend norms, that articulation and reinforcement is a critical exercise.

It���s a little harder to violate a particular norm of behavior once you have publicly voted to impeach someone for it���not impossible, to be sure, but harder. Conversely, argue that conduct is acceptable or tolerable in a president, and it becomes a little easier to do it yourself. It is a notable fact that Democrats have not, by and large, argued for Trump���s impeachment based on his conduct���very likely criminal���in the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal matters. Having argued during Bill Clinton���s tenure that crimes undertaken to cover up mere sexual misconduct are not impeachable, Democrats are staying away from that one.

We can hope that something of the opposite effect is happening here: If the only consequence of going through this process is to make it a little harder for some Democratic president in the future to emulate Trump���s ongoing abuses of foreign policy and law enforcement in the service of political ends���because essentially all Democrats will have labeled the conduct as impeachment-worthy���that alone will be worth the process the country is going through now.

Because the adjudication matters, the record Congress builds matters too. It is important to build it rigorously, to be able to defend it as amply justifying whatever action Congress takes. And it is also important, even while tuning out the noise and not jumping in response to every frivolous process grievance Republicans may raise, to run a process that a reasonable Republican would regard as fair. The goal has to be to create a record that would speak to marginal, open-minded Republican members���even if one worries that the species is close to extinct. Every Mitt Romney, every Justin Amash, every Adam Kinzinger is important. So being persuasive���even if there are very few people to persuade���is important too. I���m less concerned here with the process points that Republicans are raising, most of which are trivial, than I am with the creation of an evidentiary record that will stand up well in the Senate, through whatever trial happens, and in the press and over time.

Because while Hamilton was surely correct that impeachments will ���agitate the passions of the whole community, and . . . divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused,��� while he was surely correct as well that it ���will connect itself with the pre-existing factions and . . . enlist all their animosities, partialities, influences, and interests on one side or on the other,��� and while he was no doubt prescient in his warning that such concerns will overwhelm ���real demonstrations of innocence or guilt,��� democracy at the end of the day is government by persuasion.

We shouldn���t be quick to give up on persuading marginal legislators���much less marginal voters. Eventually, if only in historical retrospect, people do hear the signal through the noise.

#fascism #moralresponsibility #orangehairedbaboons #politics #weekendreading #2019-10-25

Note to Self: Industrial Policy in Korea: Readings:Alic...

Note to Self: Industrial Policy in Korea: Readings:

Alice Amsden (1989): Asia's Next Giant https://www.google.com/books/edition/Asia_s_Next_Giant/j0E9qKIqD-cC chs. 1-6...

Nathan Lane (2019): Manufacturing Revolutions: Industrial Policy and Networks in South Korea https://delong.typepad.com/lane-korea.pdf...

L.E. Westphal: (1990): Industrial Policy in an Export Propelled Economy: Lessons from South Korea���s Experience https://delong.typepad.com/files/westphal.pdf

Ha-Joon Chang (1993): The political economy of industrial policy in Korea." Cambridge Journal of Economics 17.2 (1993): 131-157 https://delong.typepad.com/files/chang.pdf

Rodrik, Dani. "Getting interventions right: how South Korea and Taiwan grew rich." Economic Policy 10.20 (1995): 53-107 https://delong.typepad.com/files/rodrik-korea-taiwan.pdf

#books #economicgrowth #equitablegrowth #notetoself #2019-10-24

Is this as insane as it looks? @thetomzone: "Sheryl Sandb...

Is this as insane as it looks? @thetomzone: "Sheryl Sandberg https://twitter.com/thetomzone/status/1186821100518432769: "We Let Politicians Lie in Facebook Ads for the "Discourse", Not the Money...

#noted #2019-10-24

Matthew Yglesias: Impeachment Protests and Mass Resistanc...

Matthew Yglesias: Impeachment Protests and Mass Resistance Are Needed to Beat Trump https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/18/20905686/resistance-protest-impeachment-rallies-trump: "Watergate is the ur-text for how Americans imagine the defeat of a sitting president, but it shouldn���t be how to think about the impeachment of Donald Trump.... A lawless government cannot be constrained by the institutions of the law alone. It is popular mass resistance that creates a crisis point and forces action. And if Democrats want to beat Trump���s stonewalling tactics in 2019, they should consider doing it again.... Defeating Nixon... meant winning a series of difficult elite insider games.... Building a consensus that compelled the president to resign was arduous, and the people who did it are rightly proud of their work. But none of this is relevant to contemporary politics, any more than the Senate���s unanimous passage of the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act has relevant lessons for contemporary climate politics. Today���s Congress is much more partisan and much more ideological, featuring many members who have no personal loyalty to Trump but who can nevertheless be expected to stand by him through thick and thin, thanks to broader partisan and policy objectives. In an extraordinary moment, you need to reach beyond ordinary politics.... The mechanisms through which protest works seem multifaceted, with some of the impact driven by direct personal participation, some driven by witnessing the protest themselves, and some driven by media coverage which serves to rebroadcast key elements of the protest message. The key to it all, however, is that bothering to show up to a march is a moderately costly investment of time and energy. When a bunch of people do that, it serves as a powerful signal to the rest of society that something extraordinary is happening.... The Constitution is in need of defending. And it would be extremely foolish to believe that Republican senators and Federalist Society judges are going to come riding out of the woods in order to do the job....

#noted #2019-10-24

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

Alice Dreger: Napoleon Chagnon Is Dead https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191023-dreger-chagnon: "The peer-reviewed article I ultimately published in Human Nature about the AAA task force is the angriest academic piece I have ever written.... Tierney had misrepresented so much. The chair of the AAA task force knew it too. That was Jane Hill, former president of the AAA. During my research, Sarah Hrdy shared with me a previously confidential message, dated April 15, 2002, in which Hill responded to Hrdy���s concerns about the task force���s work. 'Burn this message', Hill told Hrdy. 'The book [by Tierney] is just a piece of sleaze, that���s all there is to it (some cosmetic language will be used in the report, but we all agree on that). But I think the AAA had to do something because I really think that the future of work by anthropologists with indigenous peoples in Latin America���with a high potential to do good���was put seriously at risk by its accusations, and silence on the part of the AAA would have been interpreted as either assent or cowardice. Whether we���re doing the right thing will have to be judged by posterity.'... Of course, the failure of facts in the Darkness case extended beyond academe. If The New Yorker and W.W. Norton had done proper fact-checking, so much mischief would have been avoided.��Still, the AAA made it all much worse. The AAA could have done what the National Academy of Sciences, the American Society of Human Genetics, the International Genetic Epidemiology Society, and the Society for Visual Anthropology did: looked at the facts and condemned Tierney. Instead, the AAA thanked Tierney 'for his valuable service.' A kangaroo court. A show trial. That���s how many saw the AAA investigation. The AAA membership eventually voted to rescind acceptance of the report. 'It was really amateur hour' at the AAA, Hagen told me...

#noted #2019-10-23

The best thing I have yet seen on how industrial organiza...

The best thing I have yet seen on how industrial organization, concentration, and monopsony drive the conclusion that increases in the minimum wage do not reduce employment in the United States today���or, rather, for which groups of workers minimum wage increases lower and for which raise employment:

Jos�� Azar, Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, Ioana Marinescu, Bledi Taska, and Till von Wachter: Minimum Wage Employment Effects and Labor Market Concentration: "Why is the employment effect of the minimum wage frequently found to be close to zero? Theory tells us that when wages are below marginal productivity, as with monopsony, employers are able to increase wages without laying off workers, but systematic evidence directly supporting this explanation is lacking. In this paper, we provide empirical support for the monopsony explanation by studying a key low-wage retail sector and using data on labor market concentration that covers the entirety of the United States with fine spatial variation at the occupation-level. We find that more concentrated labor markets���where wages are more likely to be below marginal productivity���experience significantly more positive employment effects from the minimum wage. While increases in the minimum wage are found to significantly decrease employment of workers in low concentration markets, minimum wage-induced employment changes become less negative as labor concentration increases, and are even estimated to be positive in the most highly concentrated markets. Our findings provide direct empirical evidence supporting the monopsony model as an explanation for the near-zero minimum wage employment effect documented in prior work. They suggest the aggregate minimum wage employment effects estimated thus far in the literature may mask heterogeneity across different levels of labor market concentration...

#noted #2019-10-23

David Glasner: What���s Wrong with DSGE Models Is Not Rep...

David Glasner: What���s Wrong with DSGE Models Is Not Representative Agency https://uneasymoney.com/2019/09/16/whats-wrong-with-dsge-models-is-not-representative-agency/: "The completely ad hoc and artificial concept of a representative firm was not well-received by Marshall���s contemporaries.... The young Lionel Robbins... subjected the idea to withering criticism.... James Hartley wrote about the short and unhappy life of Marshall���s Representative Firm in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. One might have thought that the inauspicious career of Marshall���s Representative Firm would have discouraged modern macroeconomists from resurrecting the Representative Firm in the barely disguised form of a Representative Agent in their DSGE models, but the convenience and relative simplicity of solving a DSGE model for a single agent was too enticing to be resisted. Therein lies the difference between the theory of the firm and a macroeconomic theory. The gain in convenience from adopting the Representative Firm was radically reduced by Marshall���s Cambridge students and successors who, without the representative firm, provided a more rigorous, more satisfying and more flexible exposition of the industry supply curve and the corresponding partial-equilibrium analysis than Marshall had with it. Providing no advantages of realism, logical coherence, analytical versatility or heuristic intuition, the Representative Firm was unceremoniously expelled from the polite company of economists. However, as a heuristic device for portraying certain properties of an equilibrium state���whose existence is assumed not derived���even a single representative individual or agent proved to be a serviceable device with which to display the defining first-order conditions, the simultaneous equality of marginal rates of substitution in consumption and production with the marginal rate of substitution at market prices.... An excellent example of this heuristic was provided by Jack Hirshleifer in his 1970 textbook Investment, Interest, and Capital.... Here is how Hirshleifer explained what was going on:

Figure 4-6 illustrates a technique that will be used often from now on: the representative-individual device. If one makes the assumption that all individuals have identical tastes and are identically situated with respect to endowments and productive opportunities, it follows that the individual optimum must be a microcosm of the social equilibrium. In this model the productive and consumptive solutions coincide, as in the Robinson Crusoe case. Nevertheless, market opportunities exist, as indicated by the market line M���M��� through the tangency point P* = C*. But the price reflected in the slope of M���M��� is a sustaining price, such that each individual prefers to hold the combination attained by productive transformations rather than engage in market transactions. The representative-individual device is helpful in suggesting how the equilibrium will respond to changes in exogenous data���the proviso being that such changes do not modify the distribution of wealth among individuals....

Hirshleifer makes it clear that the representative-agent device is being used as an expository technique to describe, not as an analytical tool to determine, intertemporal equilibrium. The existence of intertemporal equilibrium does not depend on the assumptions necessary to allow a representative individual to serve as a stand-in for all other agents. The representative-individual is portrayed only to provide the student with a special case serving as a visual aid with which to gain an intuitive grasp of the necessary conditions characterizing an intertemporal equilibrium in production and consumption. But the role of the representative agent in the DSGE model is very different.... In contrast to Hirshleifer���s deployment of the representative-individual, representative-agent in the DSGE model is used as an assumption whereby an analytical solution to the DSGE model can be derived, allowing the modeler to generate quantitative results to be compared with existing time-series data, to generate forecasts of future economic conditions, and to evaluate the effects of alternative policy rules...

#noted #2019-10-23

Comment of the Day: Grizzled https://www.bradford-delong....

Comment of the Day: Grizzled https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/age-of-the-expert-as-policymaker-is-coming-to-an-end-financial-times.html?cid=6a00e551f0800388340240a4dd9749200b#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a4dd9749200b in Age of the Expert as Policymaker Is Coming To an End: "Alas, I don't think it's usually possible for non-experts to evaluate expert judgements. The Reinhard and Rogoff example is more the exception than the rule. Consider the case of global warming. Google 'Conversion of a Global Warming Skeptic'. This is a case where is took 18 months of work, which was funded so it could be not only full time but assisted, for a Phd in physics to accumulate enough background to become convinced that the climate scientists had been right all along. This is not a level of investment available in the ordinary run of things. The practical question is how to pick experts to trust. I don't have a quick answer to that, other than to reject anyone associated with Republicans...

#commentoftheday #2019-10-23