bradford-delong.com: Grasping Reality with Both Hands

Schoolmen, and Others, as Public Intellectuals...

In retrospect, I like my "The Economist as...?: The Public Square and Economists" paper for the Notre Dame "public intellectualism" conference (and the newly-published conference volume) very much indeed.

It would be very nice if more people read it, and talked about it...

A discussion page...

Plus my note on an unfavorable review of the book in the Wall Street Journal, and some recent musings on failures of economists as public intellectuals.

Michael C. Desch, ed.: Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena: Professors or Pundits? (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press: 0268100241) http://amzn.to/2ifc7qn

Public Intellectualism: Wednesday Economic History

A correspondent tells me that the Wall Street Journal has reviewed the book from our Notre Dame public intellectuals conference of three years ago and that, while the book is trashed, my piece is called "entertaining and enlightening" by the reviewer Daniel Johnson. This greatly pleases me--enlightenment is all one can hope for, and if one is entertaining as well one may be read even by those who do not get paid to do so. That makes my--personal--day, and I gratefully thank him.

Unfortunately, he also writes:

Jeffrey Toobin on Robert Bork: Hoisted from the Internet from Four Years Ago

Hoisted from Others' Archives:

Jeffrey Toobin: Robert Bork, 1927-2012: "Robert Bork, who died Wednesday...

...was an unrepentant reactionary who was on the wrong side of every major legal controversy of the twentieth century. The fifty-eight senators who voted against Bork for confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1987 honored themselves, and the Constitution. In the subsequent quarter-century, Bork devoted himself to proving that his critics were right about him all along.

Should-Read: One loose end left in traditional histories of the Reagan administration is why Argentina moved in and occupied the Falkland Islands in 1982. Why didn't the fear a U.K. response supported by the U.S.'s logistical tail? Here David Drake provides an answer: the Argentine generals thought that they had been of so much assistance to the U.S. in its attacks on Nicaragua that the U.S. would stand aside--and it seems likely that policymakers like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Alexander Haig, William Casey and perhaps Zbigniew Brzezinski (if Drake has not written "1979" where he should have written "1981") had led them to believe that it would be so:

David Drake: What Distant Deeps: "Empires have generally used proxies to fight wars on their borders...

Weekend Reading: John Steinbeck: The 1930s: A Primer: "Everyone Was a Temporarily Embarrassed Capitalist"

Weekend Reading: John Steinbeck: The 1930s: A Primer: "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted...

Discussion Questions on Partha Dasgupta: Science and Technology as Institutions

Science and Technology as Institutions

• What does it mean for knowledge to be "non-rival"?
• Given that knowledge is "non-rival", what justification could there possibly be for charging people for access to knowledge and its uses?
• If people weren't allowed to charge others for access to knowledge and its uses, would there be any reason to think that society would be putting a properly-large share of our resources into creating and disseminating knowledge?
• Why can contests and the rule of priority be good ways to spur the creation and dissemination of knowledge?
• How well do contests and the rule of priority fit with a private-property market economy?

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Partha Dasgupta (2007): Economics: A Very Short Introduction

Discussion Questions on Partha Dasgupta: Sustainable Economic Development

Sustainable Development

• Why are we destroying our fisheries?
• Why are we rapidly using up our atmosphere's capacity to absorb carbon dioxide without substantial increases in temperature?
• Why is such a large chunk of our population potentially short of fresh water?
• Why have we been able to successfully capture and use 40% of the photosynthesis on earth without already severely disrupting our planet?
• How have we managed to become so much more numerous and rich since 1800 without rapidly-rising prices of pretty much all natural resources?

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Partha Dasgupta (2007): Economics: A Very Short Introduction http://amzn.to/2gR2jH3

Discussion Questions on Partha Dasgupta: Societal Well-Being and Democratic Government

Societal Well-Being and Democratic Government

• What are T.H. Marshall's "three revolutions"?
• Why is each of them important?
• How does a government based on T.H. Marshall's "three revolutions" tend to promote a prosperous market economy?
• Does a prosperous market economy tend to promote T.H. Marshall's "Three Revolutions"--and if it does, does it promote them all?

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Partha Dasgupta (2007): Economics: A Very Short Introduction http://amzn.to/2gR2jH3

Live from Trumpland: Look for a lot of this from the right over the next four years--people deliberately missing the point that Trump is not up to the job, and that his decision are at best random monkeyshines:

Scott Eric Kaufman: [Media Criticism: Tears Brent Bozell into Shreds and Gobbets, and then Eats the Gobbets...][]: "And the Award for Missing the Point goes to...

...Brent Bozell, of the ironically named “Media Research Center,” who refuted Oliver Stone’s comment that “Nixon always said Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch” by quoting a number of prominent figures in Reagan’s administration who thought Reagan was really smart.... Bozell to Stone:

Bob Allen and Friends: Before the Industrial Revolution

How much to make of the post-1400 pre-1650 divergence between London and Amsterdam on the one hand and Valencia and Florence on the other? We want to grab for the explanation that the Black Death (and associated fourteenth-century demographic disasters) was a huge deal--and then things returned to Malthusian normal in southern Europe. But not so in northern Europe. And Delhi laborers are hanging up there, as well-off as Londoners (as best as Bob Allen and company can tell) in 1625 and 1650...

Hoisted from the Archives: The Critique of the Golgotha Program

Hoisted from the Archives: Robert Waldmann Has an Interpretation of Karl Marx that Is New to Me...: I would not have thought it was possible.

Robert Waldmann has an interpretation of Karl Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Program" that I have never seen before.

Robert argues that the correct interpretation of Marx's phrase "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," in context, is this:

Shorter Critique of the Gotha Program: We socialists cannot now--and probably never will--be able to inscribe on our banners the wacka-wacka primitive Christian slogan "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." And the Lasalleans are really stupid for thinking that we can and should do it now...

Hoisted from the Archives: This Time It Is Not Different: Walter Bagehot and the Persistent Concerns of Financial Macroeconomics: Introduction

Hoisted from the Archives: This Time It Is Not Different: Walter Bagehot and the Persistent Concerns of Financial Macroeconomics

http://delong.typepad.com/20120411-russell-sage-delong-paper.pdf

http://www.russellsage.org/rethinking-finance

J. Bradford DeLong: U. C. Berkeley and NBER

April 2012: DRAFT 2.4: 11905 words

ABSTRACT: When the Financial Times's Martin Wolf asked former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers what in economics had proved useful in understanding the financial crisis and the recession, Summers answered: “There is a lot about the recent financial crisis in Bagehot...”. “Bagehot” here is Walter Bagehot’s 1873 book, Lombard Street.

How is it that a book written 150 years ago is still close to state-of-the-art in economists’ analysis of episodes like the one that we hope is just about to end? There are three reasons. The first is that modern academic economics has long possessed drives toward analyzing empirical issues that can be successfully treated statistically and theoretical issues that can be successfully modeled on the foundation of individual rationality. But those drives are disabilities in analyzing episodes like major financial crises that come too rarely for statistical tools to have much bite, and for which a major ex post question asked of wealth holders and their portfolios is: “just what were they thinking?”. The second is that even though the causes of financial collapses like the one we saw in 2007-9 are diverse, the transmission mechanism in the form of the flight to liquidity and/or safety in asset holdings and the consequences for the real economy in the freezing-up of the spending flow and its implications have always been very similar since at least the first proper industrial business cycle in 1825. Thus a nineteenth-century author like Walter Bagehot is in no wise at a disadvantage in analyzing the downward financial spiral. The third is that the proposed cures for current financial crises still bear a remarkable family resemblance to those proposed by Walter Bagehot. And so he is remarkably close to the best we can do, even today.

• Introduction
• Say's Law
• The British Downturn of 1825-6
• Market Failure
• "Inside Money" and "Outside Money"
• E.M. Forster's Great-Aunt Marianne
• Robert Peel and Moral Hazard
• Robert Peel's Successors and "Suspension Letters"
• Bagehot's Rules
• The Great Depression
• Conclusion: From 1873-2009

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Housekeeping

• Original File: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2012/04/this-time-it-is-not-different-walter-bagehot-and-the-persistent-concerns-of-financial-macroeconomics.html

For the Weekend...

Osip Mandelstam: The Wolf-Fanged Age:

On my shoulders pounces the wolf-fanged age,
But I am no wolf by my blood;
Thrust me, instead, like a hat up the sleeve
Of the Siberian steppe’s warm fur coat,

So I can’t see the coward or the soft bit of grime
Or the bloodied bones on the wheel;
So that all night the blue-fox furs might shine
For me in their primeval beauty...

Should-Read: Nathan Lane: Readings in the History of Asian State Capacity: "A reading list related to a long undertaking with... Melissa Dell (Harvard) and Pablo Querubin (NYU), where we explore the historic roots of economic divergence in Asia...

Adolf Hitler: Man of the Year, 1938: Hoisted from the Archives

Time (1939): Adolf Hitler: Man of the Year, 1938: "What Adolf Hitler & Co. did to Germany in less than six years was applauded wildly and ecstatically by most Germans...

Keynes on 1870-1914: Wednesday Economic History

John Maynard Keynes (1919): The Economic Consequences of the Peace: "After 1870 there was developed on a large scale an unprecedented situation, and the economic condition of Europe became during the next fifty years unstable and peculiar...

Popular Vote vs. Electoral College...

The Thursday night before the 2000 election I gave a talk at St. Mary's College, trying to present the Bush and Gore points of view as fairly as I could...

Live from Nineteenth-Century London: John Stuart Mill (1848, 1871): Principles of Political Economy: "Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being...

BREXIT, Trump, and Eurozone Breakup Odds

Q: Have BREXIT and Trump increased the probability of a breakup of the eurozone?

A: Yes.

That Britain voted for BREXIT, even under the false pretense of an extra 350 million pounds a week for the health service, is a strong indication that the tide of globalization and integration is not irresistible. That Americans... well, Americans did not vote for Trump--they voted for Clinton. That the quirks of the electoral college have made Trump president-elect is a strong indication that the tide of globalization and integration is not irresistible.

Live from Lancashire: Pseudoerasmus: Random Thoughts on Critiques of Allen’s Theory of the Industrial Revolution: "I love the work of Robert Allen...

Live from Constantinople: Gregory of Nyssa: On the Deity of the Son: "THE whole city is full of it, the squares, the marketplaces...

The One Best Way We Does the Tell of the History of the Twentieth Century...

I must take exception to something said earlier today by the very sharp Neville Morley:

Neville Morley: When It Changed: "Unless you do assume that one strand of historical development...

...changes in productivity, or technology, or ideology--is determinative of all the others, then there’s no particular reason to assume that everything will change according to the same chronological pattern...

I think he has gone wrong here. In the past--even in the first half of the nineteenth century--the assumption that there was one principal engine driving the belts and powering the orreries of history was just that: an assumption, and a simplifying and probably badly chosen assumption.

But for the past hundred and fifty years things have been different.

In the "long" twentieth century the pace of economic transformation has been so great as to force nearly every other aspect of history to respond according to the same chronological pattern.

Weekend Reading: Abraham Lincoln: State of the Union Address (December 3, 1861)

Abraham Lincoln: State of the Union Address: "Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives...

In the midst of unprecedented political troubles we have cause of great gratitude to God for unusual good health and most abundant harvests.

Russia...

There are three important points about the role of Russia in the international community.

In order of importance:

Parrots, Laissez Faire, Supply and Demand, and Political Economy

Thomas Allen Horne: Property Rights and Poverty: Political Argument in Britain, 1605-1834: "To appeal to laissez-faire on all occasions, [J.R. McCulloch wrote]...

savors more of the policy of a parrot than of a statesman or philosopher...

Quote Investigator: Teach a Parrot to Say ‘Supply and Demand’ and You Have an Economist: "Dear Quote Investigator: There is a humorous saying about parrots and economists that is often attributed to the philosopher and satirist Thomas Carlyle...

...Sometimes the joke is simply ascribed to Anonymous. Here are three versions:

Hoisted from the Archives from 2012: Eric Hobsbawm, RIP: Let me correct the late Tony Judt, who said: "If he had not been a lifelong Communist, [Eric Hobsbawm] would be remembered simply as one of the great historians of the 20th century."

It should read: "Even though he was a lifetime Communist, Eric Hobsbawm was one of the greatest historians of the 20th century."

A thousand years from now people are likely to still read The Age of Revolution and The Age of Capital. I have tried to write reviews of those two books, and so far I have failed--I have been unable to write anything that conveys just how good they are.

Kindred Winecoff also has some thoughts:

Hoisted from the Archives from 1984: Faith: Pascal's Wager, When the Odds Are a Thousand to One Against: Eric Hobsbawm says that he would have still been a communist in 1934 even if he had known about Stalin's slaughter and starvation in the Ukraine because Stalin might have been building a utopia.

May I guess that Eric Hobsbawm never read Rosa Luxemburg?

The "Short" vs. the "Long" Twentieth Century...

Ah. I see that you have found the first draft of my opening lecture for Econ 115 next semester... https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/804205835543019520 https://t.co/lK82RVQudb

I think whether it is more useful to do the tell of 20th century economic history as the "short" 1914-1989 (as Hobsbswm does) or the "long" 1870-2012 (as I want to) rests on two analytical judgments:

Live from Havana: Larry Summers: Castro Is Dead: "History will judge the US embargo policy a total failure...

When Is Responsible Democratic Governance Possible? The Classical View: Never

Democracy Must Be Irresponsible: So Responsible Governance Must Be Undemocratic

When is responsible democratic governance possible? Our classical predecessors would have given a simple answer: never.

Weekend Reading: Thoukydides: The Mytilenean Debate (427 B.C.)

Thoukydides: The Mytilene Debate (427 B.C.): "The Athenians... in the fury of the moment determined to put to death not only the [Mytilenean] prisoners at Athens, but the whole adult male population of Mitylene, and to make slaves of the women and children...

Good Riddance to Fidel Castro!: Hoisted from 2008

Good Riddance to Fidel Castro!: Fidel Castro has retired. Good riddance!!

That the Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin Authoritarian Project of which Fidel Castro was the next-to-last exemplar was not an advance toward but a retreat from a better world was obvious long, long ago. Quite early--Kronstadt?--it was clear to all save the dead-enders that the project was a mistake.

As Rosa Luxemburg wrote in "The Russian Revolution":

To All You Halfwits Hailing a Hitler, Stooges Searching for a Stalin, Morons Marching for a Mussolini, Clowns Craving a Castro...

Ana Navarro: @ananavarro: "Why Miami celebrating? Ppl like my friend, Claudia Puig. Her dad killed by a Castro firing squad. Her uncle was a political prisoner 25 yrs."

Sean Carroll: @seanmcarroll: “'Universal health care' and 'other countries were worse' don’t make Castro worth celebrating. Repressive dictatorships are bad."

manu saadia: @trekonomics: "Today's @lemondefr is on point:" https://t.co/eXkNcfTD75

Adrian Monck: @amonck: "Channelling Public Enemy on Elvis:"

Stefan Leifert: @StefanLeifert: "Jean-Claude Juncker: 'With the death of Fidel Castro, the world has lost a man who was a hero for many'."

Jaybird Has a Good Response to the Crazies Out This Morning: "Vladimir, Joseph, and Zedong"

For all of our stooges searching for a Stalin, half-wits hailing a Hitler, morons marching for a Mussolini, and clowns craving a Castro this morning:

Jaybird: Vladimir, Joseph, and Zedong:

Has anybody here seen my old friend Vladimir?
Can you tell me where he’s gone?
He freed a lot of people,
But it seems the good they die young.
You know, I just looked around and he’s gone.

Fidel Castro Dead at 90

AP: Fidel Castro Dead at 90: "HAVANA (AP) — Cuban President Raul Castro has announced the death of his brother Fidel Castro on Cuban state media. Fidel Castro was 90 years old..."

Some teabaggers like Augusto Pinochet. Some herbal teabagger liked Fidel Castro. Peas in a pod:

Weekend Reading: Hamilton: "The Science of Politics... Has Received Great Improvement..."

Alexander Hamilton: The Federalist Papers: No. 9: "To the People of the State of New York:

A FIRM Union will be of the utmost moment to the peace and liberty of the States, as a barrier against domestic faction and insurrection. It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.

Quo Usque Tandem Abutere, Trumpetina?

Note to Self: Was it Mary Beard who said that, much as she loved to read Tacitus and Suetonius, it was implausible that all the good emperors were those who died in their beds and were followed by their chosen successors no matter how many senators they had killed or poets they had exiled, while all the bad emperors were those who had been assassinated? Were no good emperors ever assassinated? Did no bad emperors ever die in their beds? Thus she tends toward structural rather than accident- or personality-based history...

Question: Is This a Recipe Principally Designed to Make Eating Up the Huge Pumpkin Harvest Possible and Palatable? Or Is This Something Else?

• Filling: 2 cups pumpkin, 1 cup sugar, 2 cups heavy cream, 4 large eggs (2 oz. each: 1 cup total), 2 teaspoons cinnamon, 1 teaspoon ginger, 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, 1 pinch clove...

• Crust: 1 3/4 cups flour, 5 oz. butter, 2 oz. shortening, 1 egg yolk, 3 tablespoons sugar, 2 teaspoons orange zest, 2 teaspoons lemon zest...

• Whipped Cream: to taste...

On a Thousand Year Timescale, the Human Race Really Is Just One Big Unhappy Family

Hoisted from the Archives: 470 years ago, in 1543, King Henry VIII Tudor of England married his sixth and last wife, Katherine Parr. He also:

• allied with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V Habsburg "of Ghent";
• declared war on France;
• imposed the English administrative grid of counties, shires, boroughs, and House of Commons representatives on Wales;
• made yet another short-lived treaty with Scotland;
• burned the three Protestant Windsor Martyrs; and
• named the composer Thomas Tallis a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal.

A busy king, for one so sick and mad.

American Patriotism: New England vs. Virginia vs. Ethno-Linguistic

There are, broadly speaking, three kinds of American patriotism. There is Kentucky, which is the standard ethno-linguistic nationalism of soil and blood (think: age of Andrew Jackson). There is Virginia, which is a peculiar form of libertarianism-of-adoption: "we" have come here so that nobody else can boss "us" or those we adopt to become "us" around (think: Thomas Jefferson). And there is New England, which is the utopian nationalism of election: those who elect to come here and help "us" to build utopia are "us", and are very welcome as long as they commit to building the City Upon a Hill.

To no one's surprise, I like the third kind. And here is its root, in John Winthrop's Arabella Sermon:

John Winthrop: From "A Model of Christian Charity": "We are entered into covenant with Him for this work...

Anybody Feel Like Making a Cleaned-Up Transcript of This: Historical Scholarship and the New Media?

I must say I would greatly appreciate one...

Tedra Osell, Scott Eric Kaufman, Brad DeLong, Ari Kelman, and Eric Rauchway: Historical Scholarship and the New Media: May 23, 2007 U.C. Davis History Department Lunch Colloquium: Courtesy of U.C. David Department of History http://history.ucdavis.edu/:

Weekend Reading: Luigi Zingales: The Right Way to Resist Trump

The best thing I have seen on the mess that America has now gotten itself into:

Luigi Zingales: The Right Way to Resist Trump: Five years ago, I warned about the risk of a Donald J. Trump presidency. Most people laughed...

They thought it inconceivable. I was not particularly prescient; I come from Italy, and I had already seen this movie, starring Silvio Berlusconi, who led the Italian government as prime minister for a total of nine years between 1994 and 2011. I knew how it could unfold.

A Short Vade Mecum for the Courtier-Technocrat in the Age of Trump

When I was working in the Treasury in 1993-5, I was struck by how much it was the case that President Bill Clinton was still the ex-Governor of Arkansas. Thus arguments that would have been powerful and important when directed at a Governor of Arkansas still resonated in his mind. Moreover, it seemed to me that they resonated much more strongly than they perhaps should have, given that he was now not Governor of Arkansas but President of the United States, if they were evaluated purely on technocratic grounds.

Weekend Reading: Diane Coyle: On Richard Baldwin's "The Great Convergence"

Diane Coyle: The Trade-Investment-Service-Intellectual Property Nexus: "I’ve managed to resist reviewing Richard Baldwin’s new book The Great Convergence: information technology, trade and the new globalization until now...

Weekend Reading: Alexander Hamilton: Protecting the Choice of President from Sinister Foreign Interference

Alexander Hamilton (1778): Federalist No 68: "Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption...

Weekend Reading: Neville Morley: Vicarious Virtue

Neville Morley: Vicarious Virtue: "The seminar text for my Roman History course over the last fortnight has been the opening of the third book of Varro’s Rerum Rusticarum...

A Question for Paul Krugman: Please, Sir, May I Still Fly My Neoliberal Freak Flag?

Let me distinguish between:

• Supervulgar Trumpism: Donald Trump will return manufacturing employment to 24% of the nonfarm labor force.

• Vulgar Trumpism: Donald Trump will renegotiate NAFTA and China's accession to the WTO. We will not get all or even most of the manufacturing jobs back, but the industries and the communities will be healthy.

• Semi-intelligent Trumpism: The U.S. ought to be a high savings capital and manufactures exporting country, like Germany and Japan. Bad macro and trade policies--the Reagan and Bush 43 deficits, keeping the strong dollar policy long past its sell-by date, prioritizing finance over manufacturing--accelerated the decline of manufacturing employment well beyond its proper technology driven pace and eroded our valuable communities of engineering practice.

Note to Self: Why Donald Trump's attempt to make trade policy his arena for rescuing America's white want-to-be-blue-collar workers will fail:

Pascal Lamy:

Brad DeLong started by alluding to Indian philosophy. I will start with Chinese: The philosopher says: 'When the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger'. Market capitalism is the moon. Globalization is the finger...

Whether you think the problem with market capitalism is income stagnation coupled with in adequate social insurance on the one hand, or a Polanyian disruption of expected life paths and chances on the other, Pascal Lamy is right in saying that it is a problem with market capitalism, not with trade and globalization.

Weekend Reading: Izabella Kaminska: Facebook and the Manufacture of Consent

Weekend Reading: The problem with this from the extremely smart and thoughtful Izabella Kaminska's argument here is that people pay for the New York Times--and they got Judy Miller, Whitewater!, and Emails!. People pay for the Washinton Post, and get Fred Hiatt--plus get told that Stanley Kaplan University is wonderful, and that Clarice Starling and Eliot Ness established the high reputation of the FBI. In pay-for journalism you may be the customer rather than the product, but that does not get you far enough:

Izabella Kaminska: Facebook and the manufacture of consent: "As to... what’s really wrong with the media, the simple adage that you get what you pay for and that if it’s free you are the product is... insightful...

...If you pay peanuts, you will get poorly balanced, poorly verified, poorly sourced and poorly scrutinised news. And if you condone the mass distribution of free news and normalise it by calling it a “business model” or an “eco-system” you will fan the propaganda war rather than abate it. Don’t make Facebook and Google filter fake news. If you value truly balanced and verified news; if you value comment which scrutinises vested interests, business models or government policy; or if you value being confronted by views which are different from your own but still well argued, pay for the news, don’t just get it from Facebook....

Note to Self: Imagined Communities vs. Nations and Nationalism

Benedict Anderson's (1983) Imagined Communities is a great book--but great at posing the problem of why political action and agency went to the ethno-linguistic nation and not to the class, not great at finding a solution to the problem...

**Ernest Gellner's also 1983 Nations and Nationalism is a much better place to start...

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• Benedict Anderson (1983): Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism http://amzn.to/2fYVq1e
• Ernest Gellner (1983): Nations and Nationalism http://amzn.to/2fYUg62