Brad DeLong

Mike the Mad Biologist: The Profoundly Serious David Brooks on Iraq: Tuesday Ten Years Ago on the Internet Weblogging

Mike the Mad Biologist:

Ten Years Ago, What One Very Serious Person Was Writing About Iraq: Here’s what David Brooks, now respectable rightwing (but not too rightwing! Must…reposition…in…political…landscape…) pundit for the New York Times wrote in his then-home The Weekly Standard ten years ago to the day:

J. Bradford Delong for Democracy Journal: Shrugging off Atlas

J. Bradford Delong for Democracy Journal: Shrugging off Atlas: Issue #28: Exactly how did once-respectable conservative economists get swept up in “moocher class” mania?

Review of Nicholas Eberstadt (2012), A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic (Templeton Press) http://www.amazon.com/Nation-Takers-Americas-Entitlement-Epidemic/dp/1599474352.

If there was a single moment when Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, it was in May when he stood in front of the $50,000-a-plate audience at Sun Capital honcho Marc Leder’s home in Boca Raton and spoke his soon-to-be-infamous words:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the President no matter what…. There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government…who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they’re entitled to health care, to food, to housing, you name it…. These are people who pay no income tax…. My job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives…

This is what Mark Schmitt of the Roosevelt Institute calls “the theory of the moocher class.” And Romney is all in with it. In July, after a poorly received speech at the NAACP convention, he boasted:

When I mentioned I am going to get rid of Obamacare, they weren’t happy…. But I hope people understand this… if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy—more free stuff.

Those of us who know the numbers, or who simply live in America and look around, know that the 47 percent who aren’t paying federal income taxes this year are by and large not “moochers.” About a fifth are elderly retired. About two-thirds are in households with incomes of less than $20,000 a year—definitely not living high. And nearly one-third owe no income taxes because of the earned-income and child tax credits, which both became law with bipartisan support.

As a group, the 47 percent who pay no income taxes do not lack work ethic. They do take personal responsibility for their lives. They may not pay federal income taxes this year, but they pay plenty of sales, property, and payroll taxes. For the most part, they do not constitute the Democratic base. More than half of the 47 percent are the elderly white and Southern white voters who voted for Romney by substantial margins.

So how does someone like Romney, along with his peers and all their staffs and everyone else in that Boca Raton room, become convinced that 47 percent of Americans are the moochers, the takers, dependent on “free gifts” from the government, lacking work ethic, lacking personal responsibility?

Enter Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), with his contribution to the think tank’s “New Threats to Freedom” series. We need venture no further into A Nation of Takers than the bottom of the second page…

Why Should We Care?: Saturday Twentieth Century Economic History Weblogging

Why should you care about how our history and the history of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents--the history of the long twentieth century, 1870-2010--will appear to people five and more centuries into the future?

First of all, it makes a very good story. And it makes an even better story because the story is real. We are gossiping animals—we have evolved to like to tell and hear stories about what is happening and has happened to our friends and not-friends. We like this so much. We like this so much that out of our time that is not spent hewing wood and drawing water we spend a very large chunk gossiping and listening to gossip about not our real friends and not-friends but about imaginary friends: there is no such person as Harry Potter, and so there is no strong reason to care about what happens to him or to Severus Snape, but we do.

And the best stories to tell and listen to are the real stories, about real people: they have a depth and an import that fiction cannot reach.

Did Stan Lebergott Implicitly Compare U.S. WPA Workers with Nazi German Labor Camp Inmates?

Sure looks like it…

Wow!

Eric Rauchway:

Louis Menand and New Deal Denialism in The New Yorker — Crooked Timber: Tyler, if you’d follow the link, you’d see, or possibly remember, that it’s Darby with whom I agree. It’s Lebergott to whose usage I object. I’ll quote him again here:

These estimates for the years prior to 1940 are intended to measure the number of persons who are totally unemployed, having no work at all. For the 1930′s this concept, however, does include one large group of persons who had both work and income from work—those on emergency work. In the United States we are concerned with measuring lack of regular work and do not minimize the total by excluding persons with made work or emergency jobs. This contrasts sharply, for example, with the German practice during the 1930′s when persons in the labor-force camps were classed as employed, and Soviet practice which includes employment in labor camps, if it includes it at all, as employment.

Pope Francis and the Sins of the Argentine Church

The sins of the Argentine church | Hugh O'Shaughnessy | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk:

The Catholic Church was complicit in dreadful crimes in Argentina. Now it has a chance to repent.

---

Uki Goni and Jonathan Watts: Pope Francis: questions remain over his role during Argentina's dictatorship:

The Catholic church and Pope Francis have been accused of a complicit silence and worse during the "dirty war" of murders and abductions carried out by the junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.

The evidence is sketchy and contested. Documents have been destroyed and many of those who were victims or perpetrators have died in the years that followed. The moral argument is clear, but the reality of life at that time put many people in a grey position. It was dangerous at that time to speak out and risk being labelled a subversive. But many, including priests and bishops, did so and subsequently disappeared. Those who stayed silent have subsequently had to live with their consciences — and sometimes the risk of a trial.

Its behaviour during that dark period in Argentine history was so unsaintly that in 2000 the Argentine Catholic church itself made a public apology for its failure to take a stand against the generals. "We want to confess before God everything we have done badly," Argentina's Episcopal Conference said at that time.

In February, a court noted during the sentencing of three former military men to life imprisonment for the killings of two priests that the church hierarchy had "closed its eyes" to the killing of progressive priests.

As head of the Jesuit order from 1973 to 1979, Jorge Bergoglio – as the new pope was known until yesterday – was a member of the hierarachy during the period when the wider Catholic church backed the military government and called for their followers to be patriotic. Bergoglio twice refused to testify in court about his role as head of the Jesuit order. When he eventually appeared in front of a judge in 2010, he was accused by lawyers of being evasive.

The main charge against Bergoglio involves the kidnapping of two Jesuit priests, Orland Yorio and Francisco Jalics, who were taken by Navy officers in May 1976 and held under inhumane conditions for the missionary work they conducted in the country's slums, a politically risky activity at the time.

His chief accuser is journalist Horacio Verbitsky, the author of a book on the church called "El Silencio" ("The Silence"), which claims that Bergoglio withdrew his order's protection from the two priests, effectively giving the military a green light for their abduction.

The claims are based on conversations with Jalics, who was released after his ordeal and later moved to a German monastery.

Bergoglio has called the allegations "slander" and holds that, on the contrary, he moved behind the scenes to save the lives of the two priests and others that he secretly hid from the death squads. In one case, he claims he even gave his identity papers to one dissident who looked like him so that he could flee the country.

For some, that makes him a hero. Other are sceptical. Eduardo de la Serna, co-ordinator of a left-wing group of priests who focus on the plight of the poor, told Radio del Plate that: "Bergoglio is a man of power and he knows how position himself among powerful people. I still have many doubts about his role regarding the Jesuits who went missing under the dictatorship."…

A Little Early for Liveblogging World War II: July 20, 1944

BBC: Hitler assassination plotter von Kleist dies:

A former German army lieutenant who took part in a plot to assassinate German leader Adolf Hitler in 1944 has died. Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist died aged 90 at his home in Munich last Friday, his wife Gundula told the Associated Press.

Mr von Kleist was just 22 when he volunteered to wear a suicide vest at a meeting with Hitler. The meeting did not come off, but months later he played a key role in what became known as the 20 July plot. He was supposed to carry a briefcase packed with explosives to a meeting with the Nazi leader, but in a change of plan the bomb was planted by plot mastermind Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg…. Col Von Stauffenberg, along with von Kleist's father - a known opponent of Hitler - and others involved in the plot were arrested and later executed. Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, but was later allowed to return to combat duty.

Born in 1922 in an area of north-eastern Germany that is now part of Poland, Mr von Kleist came from a long line of Prussian landowners. While an infantry officer, he was approached by Col von Stauffenberg - who suggested he wear a suicide vest under a new uniform he was due to be modelling for Hitler. Mr von Kleist later recalled how his father gave his blessing to the suicide mission.

Fathers love their sons and mine certainly did, and I had been quite sure he would say no. But as always, I had underestimated him…

The meeting with Hitler never happened.

In later life, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist founded the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy.

As Cosma Shalizi Says, "The Singularity Is in Our Past": Saturday Twentieth Century Economic History Weblogging

Look at the bleeding edge of urban North Atlantic or East Asian civilization, and you see a world fundamentally unlike any human past. Hunting, gathering, farming, herding, spinning and weaving, cleaning, digging, smelting metal and shaping wood, assembling structures--all of the “in the sweate of thy face shalt thou eate bread” things that typical humans have typically done since we became jumped-up monkeys on the East African veldt--are now the occupations of a small and dwindling proportion of humans. And where we do have farmers, herdsmen, manufacturing workers, construction workers, and miners, they are overwhelmingly controllers of machines and increasingly programmers of robots. They are no longer people who make or shape things--facture--with their hands--manu.

At the bleeding edge of the urban North Atlantic and East Asia today, few focus on making more of necessities. There are enough calories that it is not necessary that anybody need be hungry. There is nough shelter that it is not necessary that anybody need be wet. There is enough clothing that it is not necessary that anybody need be cold. And enough stuff to aid daily life that nobody need feel under the pressure of lack of something necessary. We are not in the realm of necessity.

What do modern people do? Increasingly, they push forward the corpus of technological and scientific knowledge. They educate each other. They doctor each other. They nurse each other. They care for the young and the old. They entertain each other. They provide other services for each other to take advantage of the benefits of specialization. And they engage in complicated symbolic interactions that have the emergent effect of distributing status and power and coordinating the seven-billion person division of labor of today’s economy. We have crossed a great divide between what we used to do in all previous human history and what we do now. Since we are not in the realm of necessity, we ought to be in the realm of freedom.

Friday Music: Condemned as Degenerate by *Both* Theodore Adorno and Adolf Hitler!

You know who else besides Theodore Adorno thought that German jazz was a degenerate art form?

Eric Rauchway: Louis Menand and New Deal Denialism in The New Yorker

Eric:

Louis Menand and New Deal Denialism in The New Yorker: In the current New Yorker, Louis Menand says there is a puzzle about how Franklin Roosevelt got reëlected:

When Roosevelt ran for reëlection in 1936, the unemployment rate was 16.9 per cent, almost twice what it had been in 1930. Yet he won five hundred and twenty-three electoral votes, and his opponent Alf Landon, eight. When Roosevelt ran for the unprecedented third term, unemployment was 14.6 per cent. He carried thirty-eight states; Wendell Willkie carried ten.

When Menand says unemployment was 16.9 and 14.6 percent when FDR ran for reëlection, he is counting federal relief workers as unemployed. According to the economist who constructed the series Menand is using, people working for the WPA were morally the same as concentration camp workers in Germany in the 1930s. If Menand realized that, the puzzle would go away: FDR and his New Deal were popular because they gave people jobs and sparked a rapid recovery.

Ludwig von Mises Thought That Detective Stories Were Communist by Nature?!

Twitter / emmetmatheson:

@HeerJeet Ludwig von Mises called detective fiction part of "the artistic superstructure of the epoch of labor unionism and socialization"

Ben Bernanke (1999): "Rooseveltian Resolve"

Ben Bernanke on Japan in 1999:

It is true that current monetary conditions in Japan limit the effectiveness of standard open-market operations. However… liquidity trap or no, monetary policy retains considerable power…. Money, unlike other forms of government debt, pays zero interest and has infinite maturity. The monetary authorities can issue as much money as they like. Hence, if the price level were truly independent of money issuance, then the monetary authorities could use the money they create to acquire indefinite quantities of goods and assets. This is manifestly impossible in equilibrium. Therefore money issuance must ultimately raise the price level, even if nominal interest rates are bounded at zero. This is an elementary argument… quite corrosive of claims of monetary impotence….

[A] policy of aggressive depreciation of the yen would by itself probably suffice to get the Japanese economy moving again….

American Conservatism’s Crisis of Ideas: Project Syndicate Monarchy, Patriarchy, Orthodoxy Weblogging

Let me note three things:

1. Most of what I have to say is highly, highly derivative from Mike Konczal and Mark Schmitt (and others);
2. The problem is not just that today's crop of AEI-conservative ideas is not politically sustainable, but that it is simply wrong--Cahn and Carbone's Red Families, Blue Families has convinced me that contra Murray America's (Blue) families are actually in pretty good shape (Red families that try to keep their daughters ignorant about family planning not so much), my take on Eberstadt is coming out in Democracy Journal later this month; and
3. Arthur Brooks seems to me at bottom simply lamenting that Democratic policies work and make people's lives better--that Republicans are losing their campaign to try to make America a worse-off place does not strike me as a minus.

And we are live at Project Syndicate:

American Conservatism’s Crisis of Ideas: BERKELEY – On the back left corner of my desk right now are three recent books: Arthur Brooks’ The Battle, Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, and Nicholas Eberstadt’s A Nation of Takers. Together, they constitute an important intellectual movement, which also happens to be a large part of the reason that American conservatism today has little that is constructive to say about managing the economy – and little purchase on the center of the American electorate.

But let’s back up historically, to the founding of what we might call modern conservatism in early nineteenth-century Britain and France. There were some – Frédéric Bastiat and Jean-Baptiste Say come to mind – who believed that government should put the unemployed to work building infrastructure when markets or production were temporarily disrupted. But they were balanced by those like Nassau Senior, who spoke out against even famine relief: Although a million people would die in the Irish Potato Famine, “that would scarcely be enough.”

The main thrust of early conservatism was root-and-branch opposition to every form of social insurance: make the poor richer, and they would become more fertile. As a result, farm sizes would drop (as land was divided among ever more children), labor productivity would fall, and the poor would become even poorer. Social insurance was not just pointless; it was counterproductive.

The proper policy was to teach people to venerate the royal throne (so that they would respect property), the paternal hearth (so that they would not marry imprudently young), and the religious altar (so that they would fear pre-marital sex). Then, perhaps, with women chaste for half or more of their childbearing years, the surplus population would diminish and conditions for the poor would be as good as they could be.

Henry A. Wallace (1952) on the Ruthless Nature and Utter Evil of Soviet Communism: Cold-War Era God-That-Failed Weblogging

Henry A. Wallace (1952), "Where I Was Wrong", The Week Magazine (September 7):

Here are startling admissions from a former vice-president of the United States. For years a Russian apologist, he now tells "Where I Was Wrong", by Henry A. Wallace.

Wallace says his big mistake was not denouncing Red coup in Czechoslovakia.

Henry A. Wallace:

Many people have asked me how I reconcile my stand before Korea with my uncompromising anti-Communist attitude of the past two years The answer is simple.

Before 1949 I thought Russia really wanted and needed peace. After 1949 I became more and more disgusted with the Soviet methods and finally became convinced that the Politburo wanted the Cold War continued indefinitely, even at the peril of accidentally provoking a hot war.

In this article eI shall speak frankly of some of the circumstances which have caused me to revise my attitude.

Over on Twitter Jeet Heer Demands Some Calvin Coolidge Blogging...

Appropriately for Silent Cal, there ain't all that much to say. Coolidge did little, and what he did was largely harmful to America. Remember that for Calvin Coolidge America's biggest problem was that it had too many Jews, too many Italians, too many Slavs. Of all the disasters inflicted by American governmental policies on human welfare in the twentieth century, Calvin Coolidge's immigration policy seems to me to win the prize:

IMMIGRATION…. New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship. America must be kept American. For this i purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration…. I am convinced that our present economic and social conditions warrant a limitation of those to be admitted…. Those who do not want to be partakers of the American spirit ought not to settle in America

It is closely followed, perhaps, by his financial regulatory policy:

Frederick Lewis Allen: Only Yesterday: The bull party in Wall Street had been still further encouraged by the remarkable solicitude of President Coolidge and Secretary Mellon, who whenever confidence showed signs of waning came out with opportunely reassuring statements which at once sent prices upward again. In January 1928, the President had actually taken the altogether unprecedented step of publicly stating that he did not consider brokers' loans too high, thus apparently giving White House sponsorship to the very inflation which was worrying the sober minds of the financial community.

He was, at least, strongly in favor of the International Criminal Court.

A Somewhat Strange Piece from Nick Eberstadt: Motes and Beams! Weblogging

The usually-intelligent Nicholas Eberstadt writes:

What is the future of conservatism?: The “clear and present danger” for the United States today is domestic… subverting… the American way of life…. [T]he collapse of the nation’s family structure…. By 2010, a child was more likely to grow up in a broken home in America than in practically any other Western society, including the Scandinavian ones…. America’s… retirement from religion…. [O]ur citizenry’s steady slide into financial dependence on the government… healthy, able-bodied, and relatively well-to-do Americans plead[ing] “poverty” for the purpose of handouts from Uncle Sam. These powerful, deeply entwined trends are progressively degrading both our people and our polity… an ignominious end to American exceptionalism….

Hoisted from the Archives from Four Years Ago: Tracing Wingnuttery Abuout John Maynard Keynes Back to Henry Hazlitt Weblogging

Brad DeLong : The Agenda with Steve Paikin: Rethinking Keynes: I am looking for is a good survey of where the wingnut idea that John Maynard Keynes did not care about the long run came from.

It is not true. Even the General Theory Keynes thought of as a book that was at least as concerned with the long run than the short run--the idea that the Keynesian model is about the short run and the classical model about the long run is a post-1947 creation of the MIT- and Yale-based neoclassical synthesis. Keynes throughout his writings worries about Malthusian forces, about the economic possibilities for our grandchildren, about secular stagnation, and about a host of other long-run issues.

Are You, Theologically, Supposed to Consecrate a Bishop During Lent?

The Opening of "The History of the Peloponnesian War" by Thoukydides the Athenian

Worth noting for two reasons:

First, Thoukydides takes it for granted that the coming of "civilization"--large-scale social organization in the form of states, etc.--produces a general pacification that allows for a large degree of mutual social disarmament: one has to worry less about pirates, brigands, and the possibility that the stranger one meets on the road will rob or kill you.

Second, of course, Thoukydides is writing about another thing produced by the coming of "civilization": the greatest war he and his kin have ever seen, stretching across 800 miles and over 30 years.

Deadly violence by humans against humans becomes much less an endemic fact of everyday life and much more something concentrated: committed by skilled professionals in concentrated bursts. Are your chances of being a killer less? Certainly. Are your chances of dying violently less? Probably…

The Jared Diamond Wars Are on Again!

I see that the Savage Minders are back. Alex Golub:

How can we explain human variation? | Savage Minds: I’ve been struggling to find a way to blog regularly about Jared Diamond’s new book, The World Until Yesterday…. It begins with a set piece... the airport in Port Moresby.... He contrasts traditional societies with modern ones…. [T]here is no way that [Diamond's] concept of ‘traditional society’ makes any sense…. I honestly cannot tell what Diamond has in mind here…. [W]hat we see… is a profound lack of thought…. [W]hat we have is someone with a very basic, text-book answer about what constitutes an acceptable study…. Diamond seems unable to comprehend…. Diamond’s premisses affect his interpretation in problematic ways… anthropology — real, actual anthropology — has come up with a better way of doing things.

Last time it was pretty clear that at least some of the Savage Minders' "better way of doing things" included not understanding Jared Diamond's "Prologue":

Die by the Technicality, LIve by the Technicality: DeLong Lawyering, 1855 Edition

Collection: African American Newspapers
Publication: THE NATIONAL ERA
Date: February 1, 1855
Title: SLAVE CASE.

CAMBRIDGE, O., Jan. 12, 1855.

To the Editor of The National Era: Enclosed I send you an account of a recent “Slave Case,” which occurred at this place. Having seen no notice of it in your paper, I clipped the enclosed account from the Guernsey Jeffersonian, thinking that you had not, perhaps, heard of it.

Yours truly, E. SMITH.

---

DECISION OF JUDGE DELONG. The State of Ohio, on Relation of P.B. Sarchett, against A.W. Graham.

*Habeas Corpus - before James Delong, Probate Judge of Guernsey County, Ohio.

This writ was issued for the purpose of taking from the custody of A.W. Graham two negro boys, and bringing them before said Judge, to try the right of said Graham to said custody.

The principal facts, as they appear upon the papers filed in the case, are these:

• One of the boys, whose name is Enoch, and age ten years, is the slave of N.M. Lee, of Richmond, Virginia; and the other, whose name is Lewis, and age nine years, is the slave of T. Newdigate, of Kentucky.
• That about the 5th day of December, 1854, the owners of said boys put them in charge of said A.W. Graham, at Richmond, Virginia, for the purpose of having them taken to Kentucky, at the same time instructing said Graham to proceed by the way of the Ohio river.
• That said boys were not being taken to Kentucky for the purpose of sale.
• That A.W. Graham, having said boys in his charge, on his way from Richmond, Va., to Kentucky, came to the Ohio river, but finding it not then navigable, without the express consent or knowledge of said owners, proceeded through the State of Ohio, upon the Central Ohio railroad, and that by reason of an accident to the train of cars in which said Graham with said boys were travelling, he was detained at Cambridge, during which detention this writ issued, and said boys were taken, from his said custody.

Hoisted from Comments: What Was the Purpose of the Quadrivium, Anyway?: Medieval Curriculum Weblogging

DCA writes:

The Trivium (which did not include history, something regarded as inferior by (eg) Aristotle), was designed to produce advocates in the law courts of Rome. The Quadrivium I'm less sure about: it may have been added as a step on the way to real learning, namely the degree in theology. None of this had anything to do with "landed scions" for whom the relevant training was in jousting, dancing, hawking, hunting, heraldry, and other courtly activities. The claim that the landed aristocracy needed university learning was put forward in the Renaissance by self-interested humanists (see J. H. Hexter's article "The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance". Remember that scholars were not usually gentlemen!

Grand Mal Economic Seizures

Project Syndicate: Across the North Atlantic region, central bankers and governments seem, for the most part, helpless in restoring full employment to their economies. Europe has slipped back into recession without ever really recovering from the financial/sovereign-debt crisis that began in 2008. The United States’ economy is currently growing at 1.5% per year (about a full percentage point less than potential), and growth may slow, owing to fiscal contraction this year.

Industrial market economies have been suffering from periodic financial crises, followed by high unemployment, at least since the Panic of 1825 nearly caused the Bank of England to collapse. Such episodes are bad for everybody – workers who lose their jobs, entrepreneurs and equity holders who lose their profits, governments that lose their tax revenue, and bondholders who suffer the consequences of bankruptcy – and we have had nearly two centuries to figure out how to deal with them. So why have governments and central banks failed?

And Ci Devant Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens, Grasping at Straws

Alexander Stephens, 1910:

What I Really Said in the Cornerstone Speech: The relation of the black to the white race, or the proper status of the coloured population amongst us, was a question now of vastly more importance than when the old Constitution was formed. The order of subordination was nature's great law; philosophy taught that order as the normal condition of the African amongst European races. Upon this recognized principle of a proper subordination, let it be called slavery or what not, our State institutions were formed and rested. The new Confederation was entered into with this distinct understanding.

This principle of the subordination of the inferior to the superior was the "corner-stone" on which it was formed.

I used this metaphor merely to illustrate the firm convictions of the framers of the new Constitution that this relation of the black to the white race, which existed in 1787, was not wrong in itself, either morally or politically; that it was in conformity to nature and best for both races. I alluded not to the principles of the new Government on this subject, but to public sentiment in regard to these principles. The status of the African race in the new Constitution was left just where it was in the old; I affirmed and meant to affirm nothing else in this Savannah speech.

My own opinion of slavery, as often expressed, was that if the institution was not the best, or could not be made the best, for both races, looking to the advancement and progress of both, physically and morally, it ought to be abolished. It was far from being what it might and ought to have been. Education was denied. This was wrong. I ever condemned the wrong. Marriage was not recognized. This was a wrong that I condemned. Many things connected with it did not meet my approval but excited my disgust, abhorrence, and detestation. The same I may say of things connected with the best institutions in the best communities in which my lot has been cast.

Great improvements were, however, going on in the condition of blacks in the South. Their general physical condition not only as to necessaries but as to comforts was better in my own neighbourhood in 1860, than was that of the whites when I can first recollect, say 1820. Much greater would have been made, I verily believe, but for outside agitation. I have but small doubt that education would have been allowed long ago in Georgia, except for outside pressure which stopped internal reform.

Damn those outside agitators who forced the slaveholders of Georgia to be such bad masters!!

Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

Fellow-Countrymen:

AT this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented.

DEXIT: Jefferson Davis Leaves the Senate

DEXIT:

January 21, 1861: I rise, Mr. President, for the purpose of announcing to the Senate that I have satisfactory evidence that the State of Mississippi, by a solemn ordinance of her people, in convention assembled, has declared her separation from the United States. Under these circumstances, of course, my functions are terminated here. It has seemed to me proper, however, that I should appear in the Senate to announce that fact to my associates, and I will say but very little more. The occasion does not invite me to go into argument; and my physical condition would not permit me to do so, if it were otherwise; and yet it seems to become me to say something on the part of the State I here represent on an occasion as solemn as this.

Not Being Asleep at the Switch: DeLong Self-Smackdown Watch

Paul Krugman:

What Did I Know, And When Did I Know It?: People have been poring over the just-released 2007 Fed transcripts, and the main surprise seems to be how complacent the institution was. Some members of the open market committee, including Janet Yellen and, let’s give credit where due, Tim Geithner, seem to have had a sense of dread; but the overall consensus was that nothing really bad would happen….

It seems to me that the really big determinant of whether you were intellectually ready for this crisis was how much attention you paid to events in the late 1990s — the crisis in emerging Asia, LTCM here, and the Japanese liquidity trap. I paid a lot of attention back then (as did Nouriel Roubini)…. And the result is that I’ve had a pretty good stretch; the only big thing I got wrong, I think, was in underestimating the stickiness of wages, and hence inflation, and therefore overestimating the risks of actual deflation…

I, by contrast, got it more-or-less completely wrong in that I drew the wrong lessons from the 1990s and before:

Northwest Ordinance: July 13, 1787

Northwest Ordinance; July 13, 1787:

An Ordinance for the government of the Territory of the United States northwest of the River Ohio.

§1: Be it ordained by the United States in Congress assembled, That the said territory, for the purposes of temporary government, be one district, subject, however, to be divided into two districts, as future circumstances may, in the opinion of Congress, make it expedient.

In 1787, when the Congress of the United States Under the Articles of Confederation Passed the Northwest Ordinance Forbidding Slavery Between the Ohio and Mississippi...

…only Massachusetts and Vermont were free states, and only Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had enacted laws that would someday lead to their becoming free states.

What went on in 1787 to make this happen?

Quote of the Day: January 12, 2013

"[Althusser] seems to know nothing of recent history (among his howlers is an indictment of the “Polish fascist” Pilsudski for starting World War II). He appears only late in life to have discovered Machiavelli and other classics of Western philosophy, and he even admits to a skimpy and partialacquaintance with Marx’s texts (something one might have inferred from his published work). He is also unsophisticated to the point of crudity in his political analysis. He seems to have learned nothing and to have forgotten nothing in the last twenty years of his life. Thus there is much talk of “the hegemony of bourgeois, imperialist capitalism”; and he is dismissive of the dissidents of the Soviet bloc (“cut off from their own people”) and contemptuous of writers like André Glucksmann for “putting around unbelievable horror stories of the Gulag.” Those words were written in 1985!"

--Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

Tom Slee: Intellectual Property and Capital-Biased Technological Change

tomslee

I love the singularity video at #22 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/05/welcome-to-life-the-singularity-ruined-by-lawyers/, and it highlights one of the major differences between the next round of technologies and previous ones, which is that the new ones will be pervasively governed by license agreements. The ways in which they benefit and harm us will depend more on the terms of those agreements than on the engineering aspects of the technology.

A Question for Harold Hongju Koh on Changes Over the Last Nine Centuries in the Law of Outlawry...

Come January 6 I will be not in New Orleans but in San Diego, and hence not at the AALS Luncheon with the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State, Harold Hongju Koh.

So I will not get to ask Dean Koh the following question:

Dean Koh,

According to John Reeves, author of the History of English Law from the Time of the Romans to the End of the Reign of Elizabeth, a declaration of outlawry—that such-and-such a man could and should be shot or knifed on sight—proceeded according to a legal process in front of judges at least since the reign of Henry III Plantagenet. To quote:

[T]hose of inferior age, as they were not sub lege, could not properly be ever said to be outlawed, or put out of the law: the same of a woman, who, as she also was never in laughe—that is, in frank pledge, or in a decenna, could not be outlawed; but if she fled upon commission of any felony she might be wayviata, as they called it…. esteemed as one deserted and forlorn….

The time necessary to complete the outlawry was this: the offender was to be demanded at four counties, from county to county, till he was outlawed; but at the first county there was only to be what they termed simplex vocatio; and that was not computed towards the time of one of the four counties; so that in truth five were to pass before the outlawry was had; the outlawry therefore was to be at the fourth of those after the simplex vocatio. At the fifth or, as they called it, the fourth county, no essoin or excuse could be received, nor was it sufficient that any one would engage to produce him at the next county…. [T]he fugitive had till the fifth county to render himself to prison or defend himself and purge his innocence, but after that time the outlawry stood in the way, and he could not return till that was removed by the mercy of the king….

In… instances where the king would have pardoned a conviction of the fact [of the underlying crime], he would readily pardon the outlawry, as in case of homicide per infortunium, or se defendendo; and in general where there was really no offence committed. Process of outlawry would not lie against a clerk…

Today, by contrast, in order to be outlawed—and thus in order to have your death commanded not just by blade or bow or gun but by teleoperated robot drone—there needs to be no public process by which you are commanded and offered the opportunity under the king’s peace to surrender and publicly defend yourself at five different successive county sessions. Instead, all that has to happen is that the high functionaries of the President, men and women not bound to others by feudal ties of mutual obligation or republican ties of election and representation but simply chosen at the President’s pleasure to sit on the National Security Council, in secret proceeding without judicial or other scrutiny, put your name on a list. And if you are a minor? Then a high functionary of the President will say, with a straight face, that you “should have chosen a better father” than one who was himself outlawed.

This is not a good trend in the rule of law as applied to outlawry that we have seen since the thirteenth century, is it?

What steps have you taken while in government to reverse this trend, and return the law of outlawry to something that would not have caused the justiciars of Henry III to raise their eyebrows and suggest that we remember what the common law is?

I cannot ask this question. I would dearly love to hear Harold Hongju Koh answer it.

David Drake Writes Understated Horror

David Drake:

Five Firebases: I was very pleased when I got the materials for the "Hammer’s Slammers" role-playing game…. I like the art as well, but that leads to a different question: does it look the way I meant it to? The truth is that I write from the mental pictures I formed in the field in 1970 with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, and I wasn’t thinking much about US equipment then.  An M48 tank (for example) was something I rode on, having generally mounted by climbing the bow slope. I spent much more time looking from tanks than at them. Therefore I write from the viewpoint of people who don’t think much about the appearance of their own vehicles or fellow crewmen, and whose view of the surrounding landscape is primarily concerned with potential ambush sites and whether the fellow with the hoe in the rice paddy has a Kalashnikov hidden nearby….

David Frum: Americans for Insurrection

David Frum: Americans for Insurrection:

In National Review Online before New Year's, Kevin Williamson explained that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of individual Americans to launch an insurrection against governments they believe tyrannical.

There is no legitimate exception to the Second Amendment for military-style weapons, because military-style weapons are precisely what the Second Amendment guarantees our right to keep and bear. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to secure our ability to oppose enemies foreign and domestic, a guarantee against disorder and tyranny.

To deliver the rebuttal, we welcome guest blogger Abraham Lincoln. In his first message to Congress, July 4, 1861, the sixteenth president explained:

Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it, our people have already settled,--the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains,--its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal, except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace; teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take it by a war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.

Tedra Osell: The Ghost Writer: English Essay Periodicals and the Materialization of the Public in the Eighteenth Century

Tedra Osell.pdf

Brad DeLong: Why Next to No Political Reaction to the Second Gilded Age?

CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY: INEQUALITY: DIALOGUES FOR THE AMERICAS, FALL 2012: OCTOBER 15, 2012 http://www.clas.berkeley.edu/Events/series/inequalityfall2012/index.html

• Full cleaned-up transcript
• Video

---

Oh dear, that's really tough.

I want to sharpen that question and give it historical context.

During the Gilded Age of the 1890s and 1900s you had strong political movements saying "something is going remarkably wrong with this, this isn’t the country we thought we were going to live in". The way that the historian--I'm blanking--Ray Ginger?

Harley Shaiken: Yes, Ray Ginger.

Brad DeLong: Ray Ginger put it in two absolutely brilliant books--Altgeld’s America and The Age of Excess--even the Republicans thought that they wanted to live in Abe Lincoln’s America, where when you are young you split wood into fence rails and go to law school at night and when you are middle-aged you become a lawyer and get rich and when you are old you enter politics and save the union and free the slaves. They wanted to live in that kind of world, of upward mobility, in which opportunity is wide open even to the son of a penniless and not very successful rural farmer.

By 1890 they discovered that they weren’t living in Abe Lincoln's America at all.

Hoisted from Comments: Thoughts on Lincoln

Brad DeLong: Kate Masur Works Remarkably Hard to See a Different "Lincoln" Than I Saw--and, I Would Argue, a Different "Lincoln" than Spielberg and Company Made:

Harold said...

Masur and Robin also saw Mrs. Keckly gazing up adoringly and gratefully at the Lincolns whereas the film saw her glaring angrily at the Lincolns and other white people and pointing out that she gave up her son as the Lincolns are frantically trying to prevent their own son from sacrificing himself.

J. Bradford DeLong said in reply to Harold...

Touché... Once again, the sense that they are trying much too hard to see a different movie than the one in front of their noses...

Ed B. said...

The structural problem here is the inability of history as a profession over the last thirty years to figure out how to deal with political activity, including political leadership. The mandate for rendering visible the effects of history made from below has been transformed into an incapacity to admit that political decisions made from "above" can 1) have positive effects 2) be made in any degree out of independent agency. The #1 flashpoint of these contradictions in the study of US history is surely the figure of Abraham Lincoln. Many historians so routinely seek ways to undermine the myth of Lincoln as Great Emancipator that they erase distinctions between him and the fifteen who proceeded him in the Presidency. Yet only Lincoln used the power of the federal government to promote emancipation, even before 1862. Any President could have sought emancipation in the District of Columbia. Only Lincoln did this. And that was only the beginning.

Bloix said in reply to Ed B....

This comment captures my reaction to the Robin post much better than I was able to say it, even to myself.

J. Bradford DeLong said in reply to Ed B....

Nicely put...

You could have two different narrative lines running--the high-politics one, and the lived-experience one of how high politics shapes life on the ground and how what is happening on the ground shapes high politics. And Spielberg and company do do a little bit of that. Were I King of the World, I would have made them do considerably more...

Historic, Touristic, Lawrence Kansas

The "What Would John Brown Do?" t-shirts are awesome!:

Disappointed that the Free State Hotel--built in 1855, sacked and destroyed by U.S. Senator (D-MO) Davey Atchison and his border ruffians in 1856, rebuilt by Colonel Shalor Eldridge and Company in 1857, sacked and destroyed by Copperhead William Quantrill and his terrorist guerrillas in 1863, rebuilt in 1865, rebuilt again in 1926, and then thoroughly renovated in 1985--is now called the Eldridge Hotel rather than the Free State Hotel.

I mean, Shalor Eldridge was a good man, a hero, well worth remembering--but I want to stay at the Free State Hotel, particularly in Room 506 with its portal to the Spirit World…

Herbert Hoover: "The White Race Cannot Survive without Dairy Products!"

The White Race Cannot Survive Without Dairy Products

Which Technological Advances Are Bad?: Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram Comes Out Against Literacy **UPDATE** and Musical Instruments too!

No. I'm not going to give him a link. UPDATE: Chris Bertram asks for a link http://crookedtimber.org/2012/12/27/noah-smith-had-me-going-for-a-minute-there/ and promises "this post was a dig at generalized uncritical tech-enthusiasm, a more nuanced post is in preparation." /UPDATE

Chris Bertram: Noah Smith had me going for a minute there:

I just love econobloggers, with their capacity for Swiftian satire. Dry as dust, yet clearly having a laugh, they aim to reel in the poor saps who are take them seriously, but they are big enough to continue to play along, making as if they really mean it. Until now, I’d thought of Tyler Cowen, Bryan Caplan and, perhaps, even Arnold Kling as being the true masters of the genre. But I’m pretty sure that Noah Smith surpasses them all with a new blog on eyeglasses and literacy.

Yes, Ramesh Ponnuru, You Are Mistaken

Ramesh Ponnuru:

Re: The Serfdom Scare: It has been a long time since I read The Road to Serfdom, John, but I remember it to have argued that central planning was incompatible with a free society, not that “regulatory intervention” per se was. (I may well be mistaken.) In any case, Tyler Cowen goes after that same review with unaccustomed irritation.

And--surprise!--Ramesh Ponnuru is wrong. Hayek thought his thesis was that regulatory intervention was in the long run incompatible with a free society.

Friedrich Hayek, 1956 Preface to The Road to Serfdom, on the effects of the 1945-1951 Clement Attlee government on the United Kingdom:

Jeff Toobin on Robert Bork, 1927-2012

Postscript: Robert Bork, 1927-2012 : The New Yorker:

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.

Bork was born in 1927 and came of age during the civil-rights movement, which he opposed. He was, in the nineteen-sixties, a libertarian of sorts; this worldview led him to conclude that poll taxes were constitutional and the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was not. (Specifically, he said that law was based on a “principle of unsurpassed ugliness.”) As a professor at Yale Law School, his specialty was antitrust law, which he also (by and large) opposed.

Robert Bork Has Died: R.I.P.

"It was a very small [poll] tax, it was not discriminatory, and I doubt that it had much impact on the welfare of the nation one way or the other…"

KENNEDY: Let me go to the issue of poll taxes. The right to vote is the cornerstone of a free society. For decades poll taxes were used to keep poor Americans, often of racial minorities, from exercising the franchise. In Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, which was decided in 1966, the Supreme Court struck down the poll tax because it deprived poor Americans of equal protection of the laws by barring them from exercising their fundamental right to vote. In its majority opinion the court stated: "Wealth or fee paying has, in our view, no relation to voting qualifications. The right to vote is too precious, too fundamental to be so burdened or conditioned." Judge Bork, is it not true that in your confirmation hearings to be Solicitor General in 1973 you testified that you thought that Harper, and I quote, "as an equal protection case seemed to be wrongly decided"?

You were asked whether as far as the welfare of the nation was concerned the Harper case was correctly decided. Am I correct that you answered, "I do not really know about that. As I recall it was a very small poll tax. It was not discriminatory and I doubt it had much impact on the welfare of the nation one way or the other." And then you were asked about the constitutional issue, and you responded, "I think that is a question of degree. It depends on the size of the poll tax."

Do you remember? Is that accurate?

BORK: AS I recall it, Senator, yes.

KENNEDY: NOW, am I correct that in 1985, in your forward to The Constitution and Contemporary Theory, you again suggested the Supreme Court had been wrong to strike down the poll tax in the Harper case?

BORK: Sir, I am willing to discuss that case, fully, Senator.

KENNEDY: I am just wondering if you have changed your view that the Supreme Court was wrong in the Harper case to hold that poll taxes are unconstitutional?

BORK: I think it was, and I will tell you why, and I have no desire to bring poll taxes back into existence. I do not like them myself. But if that had been a poll tax applied in a discriminatory fashion, it would have clearly been unconstitutional. It was not. I mean, there was no showing in the case. It was just a $1.50 poll tax.

Bloomberg: Best Books of 2012

Brad DeLong:

The best thing I have read this year is “The Age of Capital: 1848-1875” by Eric Hobsbawm. There is no better book for understanding both the sheer power of modern economic growth to transform lives and societies and the opportunities and problems that such growth and transformation create for those who are lucky/unlucky enough to get caught in the process.

Kate Masur Works Remarkably Hard to See a Different "Lincoln" Than I Saw--and, I Would Argue, a Different "Lincoln" than Spielberg and Company Made

Kate Masur, edited:

[T]he film gives us powerful scenes of black men as soldiers… [to] demonstrate that African-Americans participated in the struggle for abolition…. [A]n early scene shows two black soldiers talking with Lincoln and then, with two white soldiers, reciting the Gettysburg Address…. [T]his scene lays out some of the stakes and possibilities of that historical moment…. Another scene in which stoic black soldiers on horseback stare down the Confederate commissioners…. [T]he scene references the dramatic changes in Southern life that the Civil War would bring….

[T]he scenes that feature soldiers… the first one showing intense hand-to-hand combat and the later one in which the audience views, with Lincoln, scores of soldiers lying dead where they fell… frame the film’s central concern: political deliberations in Washington. Violence, suffering, and death on the battlefield remind us of the stakes of Lincoln’s decisions…

Kate Masur, unedited:

Some critics argue that the film gives us powerful scenes of black men as soldiers and that these sufficiently demonstrate that African-Americans participated in the struggle for abolition. It’s worth acknowledging that there are black Union soldiers in Lincoln, though frankly, it would have been egregious if Spielberg’s vision of the military conflict in the winter of 1865 had not included them. In an appealing example of artistic license, an early scene shows two black soldiers talking with Lincoln and then, with two white soldiers, reciting the Gettysburg Address. I like how this scene lays out some of the stakes and possibilities of that historical moment. And the black soldiers’ speaking parts are probably longer and certainly more interesting than any other lines delivered by black characters in the film.

Another scene in which stoic black soldiers on horseback stare down the Confederate commissioners suggests more, I think, about the commissioners’ horror at black enlistment in the Union army than it does about the soldiers’ own agency. But I appreciate how the scene references the dramatic changes in Southern life that the Civil War would bring.

Even so, the scenes that feature soldiers—including the first one showing intense hand-to-hand combat and the later one in which the audience views, with Lincoln, scores of soldiers lying dead where they fell—mainly function to frame the film’s central concern: political deliberations in Washington. Violence, suffering, and death on the battlefield remind us of the stakes of Lincoln’s decisions and help us understand why he was (according to the film) tempted by the possibility of forging peace without emancipation.

As the political scientist Corey Robin wrote, this film de-centers Lincoln, giving us a cacophony of voices on the subject of abolition, but almost every one of those voices belongs to a white person. It is because the movie’s dramatic tension focuses on civilian life in general and on politics in particular that its creators’ failure to imagine the activities of black civilians is so disappointing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Volokh Conspiracy Commits "One of the Most Immoral Paragraphs [He Has] Read in a Long Long TIme"

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Post reminds me of Aunt Sally and Huck Finn in Mark Twain's novel (yes, Samuel Longhorne Clemens knew what he was making his characters say):

HUCK FINN: "It warn't the grounding -- that didn't keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head."

AUNT SALLY: "Good gracious! anybody hurt?"

HUCK FINN: "No'm. Killed a nigger."

AUNT SALLY: "Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.

Ta-Nehisi Coates::

Slavery Is A Love Song: A commenter sent me this piece [by David Post] from The Volokh Conspiracy…. I made the mistake of reading it and thus stumbling on one of the most immoral paragraphs I've read in a long long time:

Jefferson, Finkelman tells us, was not a "particularly kind" slave-master; he sometimes "punished slaves by selling them away from their families…" believed that "blacks' ability to reason was 'much inferior' to whites'…. So what? Really - so what? If you want to think that he was a bad guy -- or even a really bad guy, with truly grievous personal faults -- you're free to do so. But to claim that that has something to do with Jefferson's historical legacy is truly preposterous.

That's pretty deep. 

One way to approach this is with "facts" and "arguments." I think the sort of callousness that allows you to look upon the visage of human trafficking and say "So what?" probably inures you against such tactics.  I, myself, always like to remember that I'm writing actual people, who were more than happy to give us some sense of precisely how it feels to be among the So Whats of America. This is a letter… written to Laura Spicer by her husband, who was sold away, much as Jefferson sold people away….

I would much rather you would get married to some good man, for every time I gits a letter from you it tears me all to pieces. The reason why I have not written you before, in a long time, is because your letters disturbed me so very much. 

You know I love my children. I treats them good as a Father can treat his children; and I do a good deal of it for you. I am sorry to hear that Lewellyn, my poor little son, have had such bad health. I would come and see you but I know you could not bear it. I want to see and I don't want to see you. I love you just as well as I did the last day I saw you, and it will not do for you and I to meet. 

I am married, and my wife have two children, and if you and I meets it would make a very dissatisfied family. Send me some of the children's hair in a separate paper with their names on the paper. Will you please git married, as long as I am married. My dear, you know the Lord knows both of our hearts. You know it never was our wishes to be separated from each other, and it never was our fault. 

Oh, I can see you so plain, at any-time, I had rather anything to had happened to me most than ever to have been parted from you and the children. As I am, I do not know which I love best, you or Anna. If I was to die, today or tomorrow, I do not think I would die satisfied till you tell me you will try and marry some good, smart man that will take care of you and the children; and do it because you love me; and not because I think more of the wife I have got then I do of you. The woman is not born that feels as near to me as you do. 

You feel this day like myself. Tell them they must remember they have a good father and one that cares for them and one that thinks about them every day-My very heart did ache when reading your very kind and interesting letter. 

Laura I do not think I have change any at all since I saw you last.-I think of you and my children every day of my life. Laura I do love you the same. My love to you never have failed. Laura, truly, I have got another wife, and I am very sorry, that I am. You feels and seems to me as much like my dear loving wife, as you ever did Laura. You know my treatment to a wife and you know how I am about my children. You know I am one man that do love my children…

Northern Civil War Widows vs. the Marriage Mart: Lunch with Laura Salisbury of BU

Laura Salisbury of BU has a fact: It look as though northern Civil War widows with pensions (as opposed to northern Civil War widows without pensions) delay remarriage for three years. This surprises me: I had thought it likely that women with pensions would be attractive on the marriage mart--yes, they lose their pension when they remarry, but the lost pension goes to their kids, and money is fungible. But apparently not: female agency--the desire to stay independent rather than marry that drunkard--trumps the male eye for placing a widow with assets earlier in the wooing queue.

Clearly my knee-jerk reactions underrate female agency...

 

Erik Loomis Muses on Southern Whites as an Ethnos

Erik Loomis:

Southern Demographics: Growing Latino and black populations in Virginia and North Carolina have turned those states into Florida, meaning Republicans have to fight…. What blew me away though was…:

[A]long the Mississippi River — where Bill Clinton polled most strongly — the GOP remains largely unchallenged and the voting divide between blacks and whites is deepening. Nearly nine of 10 of white voters in Mississippi, for instance, went for Republican nominee Mitt Romney this year, according to exit polls. About 96 percent of black voters in the state supported Obama.

90% for Romney among Mississippi whites? That’s amazing and disturbing.

I understand why 96% of blacks would vote for the Democrats--the Republicans are a party of institutionalized racism.

But that 90% of Mississippi whites would essentially accept that racism and identify with the white man’s party… it wasn’t just a few white yahoos rioting at the University of Mississippi on election night…

Hard to Believe that There Are Still Economists Who I Thought of Note Five Years Ago Who Still Claim That Fiscal Expansion in a Depressed Economy in a Liquidity Trap Will Not Boost Production

John Maynard Keynes, May 23, 1939:

It is not an exaggeration to say that the end of abnormal unemployment is in sight. And it isn't only the unemployed who will feel the difference. A great number besides will be taking home better money each week.

The Grand Experiment has begun. If it works--if expenditure on armament really does cure unemployment--I predict we shall never go back all the way to the old state of affairs. Good may come out of evil. We may learn a trick or two which shall be useful when the day of peace comes.

If we can cure unemployment for the wasted purpose of armaments, we can cure it for the productive purposes of peace.

But, alas, it is true.

Brink Lindsey Shoots! He Scores!--Unfortunately for Him, It Is in What He Regards as His Own Goal

Brink Lindsey tries to criticize Paul Krugman. Lindsey says the aggressive expansion of government spending on infrastructure and the incentives to push forward technology and organization under the forced-blast of the government's redirection of spending during World War II set the stage for very rapid post-WWII Growth:

Nostalgianomics: Economic performance is a function of both economic policies and the underlying conditions for growth. When conditions are highly favorable (as, in China’s case, when relative backwardness creates the possibility for rapid catch-up growth), even fairly bad policies (like China’s) can produce good results. And it turns out that the conditions in the United States during the early post-WWII decades were highly favorable indeed…. [S]everal factors were especially conducive to strong performance at that time. There was a pent-up demand for goods and services after the privations of the Great Depression and the mobilization of World War II. There was also a pent-up supply of new products that couldn’t be brought to market during the depression and war years. That pent-up supply was augmented by technological and organizational breakthroughs accelerated by the imperatives of total war.

Sounds to me like Lindsey is saying that the policies of the New Deal and of Franklin Roosevelt's war were a solid home run, and did much more good for America's economic growth than any drag from post-World War II social democracy did harm.

I think Paul Krugman could live with that...

Yes. Obama's Economic Policies Have Been the Best in the North Atlantic World--and Would Have Been Better Still Were It Not for Republican Obstruction. Why Do You Ask?

And Paul Krugman comments:

The Halt and the Lame: Ryan Avent reminds us just how poor economic performance has been since the crisis…. As John Quiggin has been emphasizing, this across-the-board poor performance puts the lie to claims that it’s all because of that scary Obama person; in fact, the US has done better than the rest, although still quite badly — this is indeed a race between the halt and the lame…. What accounts for the differences? The most obvious culprit is austerity…. Europe and the UK have fully reversed any stimulus introduced during the crisis…. You can always try to argue that this has nothing to do with the results we see. But since textbook macroeconomics says that contractionary fiscal policy is contractionary; since those of us who went with the theory rather than the confidence fairy said it would be contractionary; and sure enough, the areas pursuing austerity have done badly; the case for a connection is pretty strong.

And this means that much of the advanced world blithely repeated the mistakes of the 1930s.

Remind me, again, why Ed DeMarco still heads FHFA?