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"In the Provinces" writes:
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Economist Brad DeLong's Fair, Balanced, and Reality-Based Semi-Daily Journal: Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg was a much nicer man than Dick Cheney, and his conscience bothered him a lot more about starting a criminal war of aggression than Dick Cheney's has.
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"I now know it is a rising, not a setting, sun" --Benjamin Franklin, 1787
J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at U.C Berkeley, a Research Associate of the NBER, a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and Chair of Berkeley's Political Economy major.
Among his best works are: "Is Increased Price Flexibility Stabilizing?" "Productivity Growth, Convergence, and Welfare," "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets," "Equipment Investment and Economic Growth," "Princes and Merchants: European City Growth Before the Industrial Revolution," "Why Does the Stock Market Fluctuate?" "Keynesianism, Pennsylvania-Avenue Style," "America's Peacetime Inflation: The 1970s," "American Fiscal Policy in the Shadow of the Great Depression," "Review of Robert Skidelsky (2000), John Maynard Keynes, volume 3, Fighting for Britain," "Between Meltdown and Moral Hazard: Clinton Administration International Monetary and Financial Policy," "Productivity Growth in the 2000s," "Asset Returns and Economic Growth."
The Eighteen-Year-Old is going to college next year, which means that I need to think about making more money. (The idea that one might write checks to rather than receive checks from universities is now strange to me.) So I have signed up with the Leigh Speakers' Bureau which also handles, among many others: Chris Anderson; Suzanne Berger; Michael Boskin; Kenneth Courtis; Clive Crook; Bill Emmott; Robert H. Frank; William Goetzmann; Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin; Paul Krugman; Bill McKibben; Paul Romer; Jeffrey Sachs; Robert Shiller;James Surowiecki; Martin Wolf; Adrian Wooldridge.
This is one of the rare times in which I have to come to Brad's defense here. Dick Cheney may well have one eye on the center of his forehead, but he has not generated the human catastrophe on the scale that Kaiser Willy, Kaiser Franz Josef, Helmut von Moltke, and Bethmann-Hollweg did.
Cheney could fear no physical repercussions other than low-level terrorism against the US increasing and a mere few thousand American soldiers coming home in body bags. But the leaders of the Central Powers chose to invade their Iraq and Afghanistan knowing full well that an equally powerful enemy coalitio was willing to oppose them militarily. If the Austro-German invasion of Serbia and Belgium had generated no more repercussions than did the US invasion of Iraq, Bethmann-Hollweg would have had a much easier time living with his conscience.
Posted by: andres | January 08, 2008 at 04:26 PM
> Dick Cheney may well have one eye on the center of
> his forehead, but he has not generated the human
> catastrophe on the scale that Kaiser Willy, Kaiser
> Franz Josef, Helmut von Moltke, and Bethmann-Hollweg did.
Not that is so immediately apparent, no. But the results aren't in yet and won't be for 50, possibly 100 years. Terminating all progress on the energy and climate issues and roiling the Middle East into, well, an angry beehive (thanks PNAC) may have long-run consequences even worse than The Great War[1].
In any case Brad is to be thanked for these two threads. The effect of 1880-1910 Germany on US history (and the rest of the world too) is underappreciated in my opinion.
Cranky
[1] Now, if you think that there is a direct link between the trenches and training barracks of the war and the Spanish influenza epidemic, then that is another story.
Posted by: Cranky Observer | January 08, 2008 at 07:14 PM