Brad DeLong

Paul Krugman (2012): Economics in the Crisis

Paul Krugman (2012): Economics in the Crisis:

To say the obvious: we’re now in the fourth year of a truly nightmarish economic crisis. I like to think that I was more prepared than most for the possibility that such a thing might happen; developments in Asia in the late 1990s badly shook my faith in the widely accepted proposition that events like those of the 1930s could never happen again. But even pessimists like me, even those who realized that the age of bank runs and liquidity traps was not yet over, failed to realize how bad a crisis was waiting to happen – and how grossly inadequate the policy response would be when it did happen.

And the inadequacy of policy is something that should bother economists greatly – indeed, it should make them ashamed of their profession, which is certainly how I feel. For times of crisis are when economists are most needed. If they cannot get their advice accepted in the clinch – or, worse yet, if they have no useful advice to offer – the whole enterprise of economic scholarship has failed in its most essential duty.

Matthew Yglesias Watches Keith Hennessy Give a Non-Denial Denial of George W. Bush's Non-Involvement in 2008

Matthew Yglesias:

Keith Hennessy on Bush and the financial crisis: How Involved Was George W. Bush in the Fall of 2008?: As most of us recall, George W. Bush was president of the United States during the crucial year of 2008 when the economy slid into recession and a series of panics and runs gripped the shadow banking system. As we also recall, Bush did not play a significant public-facing role in the response. Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain said a lot, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was visible, America got to know the previously obscure figure of New York Fed President Timothy Geithner, and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was frequently on television. But Bush was president, and one assumes he was doing something. But what, exactly?

Mike Konczal: Reinhart-Rogoff a Week Later: Why Does This Matter?

Mike Konczal:

Reinhart-Rogoff a Week Later: Why Does This Matter?: Well this is progress. We are seeing distancing by conservative writers on the Reinhart/Rogoff thesis. In Feburary, Douglas Holtz-Eakin wrote:

The debt hurts the economy already. The canonical work of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff and its successors carry a clear message: countries that have gross government debt in excess of 90% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are in the debt danger zone. Entering the zone means slower economic growth. Granted, the research is not yet robust enough to say exactly when and how a crisis will engulf the US, but there is no reason to believe that America is somehow immune. (h/t QZ.)

Andrew Bacevich on Dwight MacDonald, Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Henry Wallace

Andrew Bacevich trashing Dwight MacDonald, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. for their attacks on Henry Wallace…

Henry Wallace on Henry Wallace

I had always thought that Henry Wallace's major sin was trying to elect Thomas Dewey in 1948.

Review of Robert Skidelsky (2000), "John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain": Hoisted from the Archives from Twelve Years Ago

Review of Robert Skidelsky (2000), "John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain" (London: Macmillan: 0333604563), pp. xxiii, 580.

J. Bradford DeLong

July 2001

Each of the first two volumes of Robert Skidelsky's biography of John Maynard Keynes--Hopes Betrayed, and The Economist as Saviour--was an astonishing intellectual achievement. Now that it is complete, it is clear that as a whole the three-volume biography is the finest biography of an economist that I have ever read, or that I ever expect to read. However, this third volume--Fighting for Britain--does not quite measure up to its predecessors. Nevertheless, it is still a superb book. It falls short only because its predecessors have raised the bar so very high indeed.

Is There Really No Kindle Version of Either Alasdair Macintyre's "After Virtue" or His "A Short History of Ethics"?

Paul Krugman Makes (Justified) Fun of Allan Meltzer, Who Does Not Know His Basic Price Theory...

It really does seem as if Allan Meltzer does not understand the basic economics of money demand--does not understand that the short-term safe nominal interest rate is the opportunity cost of holding cash balances. And not understanding that makes it impossible to think coherently about nearly any issues in monetary economics…

Paul Krugman:

Trap Denial: OK, probably going on too much about this, but I want to return briefly to the issue of puzzled economists, specifically Allan Meltzer.

Four years ago Meltzer and I effectively had a debate about the effects of the rapidly expanding Fed balance sheet. He (and others) warned of inflation ahead; I (and others) said that we were in a liquidity trap, so that the Fed’s bond purchases would basically just sit there. So here we are four years later, the huge expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet has not, in fact, led to inflation. And Meltzer is puzzled by the fact that all those bond purchases just sat there:

Since late 2007, the Fed has pumped more than $2 trillion into the U.S. economy by buying bonds. Economist Allan Meltzer asked: “Why is there such a weak response to such an enormous amount of stimulus, especially monetary stimulus?” The answer, he said, is that the obstacles to faster economic growth are not mainly monetary. Instead, they lie mostly with business decisions to invest and hire; these, he argued, are discouraged by the Obama administration’s policies to raise taxes or, through Obamacare’s mandate to buy health insurance for workers, to increase the cost of hiring.

He made a monetary prediction; I made a monetary prediction; his prediction was wrong. Therefore, it must be because of Obamacare!

And, of course, if ObamaCare was causing structural problems and reducing aggregate supply, that would make inflation not undershoot but overshoot Meltzer's forecast. What we have here on Meltzer's part is simply badly-prepared word salad.

The Economist as...?: DRAFT Talk: Notre Dame Public Intellectualism Conference

Draft 0.7 :: PRELIMINARY AND INCOMPLETE

Whenever I begin thinking about the economist as public intellectual, five questions come to the fore:

1. Why should anybody care what we economists say?
2. What do we economists have to say?
3. Do we say it well?
4. Is there any way to change things so that we say it better?
5. Given what we economists have to say and how we say it, should the rest of you listen?

Why should anybody care what we economists say?

The Economist as…?: Slides for Notre Dame Public Intellectualism Conference

20130423 DeLong "The Economist as a…?" Notre Dame Slides.ppt

20130423 DeLong "The Economist as a…?" Notre Dame Slides.pdf

Yes, the Entire Washington Post Ediitorial Board and Its Columnist Robert Samuelson Are Clown Shows. Why Do You Ask?

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Outsourced to Jared Bernstein:

The Papers: Weirdness at the WaPo: First, on the oped page, a confusing, ahistorical editorial riffing off of the Rogoff-Reinhart (R&R) debacle. The piece starts… [saying that] absent [the RR] paper, the austerions would find other misguided sources…. The fact that one of those sources would indeed be the editorial page of the WaPo is where the editorial gets weird.  All the sudden, the ed board is all “austerity?…us?…really?…why, we’ve been veritable Keynesians over here, praising the stimulus and simply calling for long-term balance.” [I’m paraphrasing.] In fact, they’ve constantly criticized policy makers for not cutting deep enough and fast enough, and have consistently failed to blow the whistle on cuts that have us stuck in our current slog and Europe back in recession. It’s interesting to see reactions like this to R&R’s mistakes.  An optimist might think that some of those who’ve been relentlessly confident in their bad, contractionary advice might start thinking twice.  I am not such an optimist.

Next, just across the broadsheet, we come across an even weirder commentary by Robert Samuelson, on how economics has just become really confusing, and no one knows what to do because nothing seems to work. Huh? This is like someone who’s supposed to be getting in shape for a race saying “I’ve tried eating extra snack foods, sitting around watching TV, and napping…but nothing seems to be improving my speed.  It’s a mystery!”

Interestingly, on a different oped page today, Krugman writes:

The main reason our economic recovery has been so weak is that, spooked by fear-mongering over debt, we’ve been doing exactly what basic macroeconomics says you shouldn’t do — cutting government spending in the face of a depressed economy….

[T]he evidence, both from our own Recovery Act, and from research on the European situation (see box 1.1 here), is very strong, showing multipliers from Keynesian measures that are well above 1 right now. To say “we just don’t get it” is to stubbornly and willfully ignore that evidence.

Notre Dame Public Intellectualism Conference: Ezekiel's Call: Comment on Joan Chittister on Public Intellectuals

Ezekiel's Call:

And he said unto me: "Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee." And the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me, and set me upon my feet, that I heard him that spake unto me.

And he said unto me: "Son of man, I send thee to the children of Israel, to a rebellious nation that hath rebelled against me: they and their fathers have transgressed against me, even unto this very day. For they are impudent children and stiffhearted.

"I do send thee unto them; and thou shalt say unto them: 'Thus saith the Lord GOD.' And they, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear, (for they are a rebellious house,) yet shall know that there hath been a prophet among them."

Public Intellectualism in Comparative Context: Different Countries, Different Disciplines

Public Intellectualism in Comparative Context: Different Countries, Different Disciplines

Schedule

Participate in "Public Intellectualism" Conference Sessions Remotely // News // Advanced Study // University of Notre Dame:

If you are unable to attend the "Public Intellectualism" conference this Monday through Wednesday, April 22-24, you can still take part in the conference sessions and engage the discussants over the web. To participate remotely, for FREE, check out our conference blog at http://blogs.nd.edu/ndias/ -- on the blog's Event pages you can watch the conference sessions LIVE via Web Simulcast and ask questions to the conference presenters and commentators in the Comment field at the bottom of the pages. We encourage all of our virtual participants to ask questions early and often.

Streaming live video by Ustream

This international conference, taking place April 22-24, 2013 in McKenna Hall's Notre Dame Conference Center at the University of Notre Dame, will focus on the roles played by public intellectuals—persons who exert a large influence in the contemporary society of their countries by virtue of their thought, writing, or speaking—in various countries around the world and in their different professional roles. Leading experts from multiple disciplines will come together to approach this elusive topic of public intellectualism from different perspectives.

No, I Don't See Why the Washington Post **New York Times** Employs Peter Baker. Why Do You Ask?

Margaret Sullivan:

Submitting a Correction to The New York Times - NYTimes.com: Requests for corrections should be submitted to The Times at nytnews@nytimes.com. This office works outside the newsroom and has no say in whether a correction is offered, but please contact us if you are dissatisfied with the response you receive from The Times. Please include the following in your e-mail to The Times:

A request for a correction in The New York Times:

Article Headline:
Date Published:
Web or Print:
Phrase in Question:
Your Concern (please limit to 300 words):

Your Name:
Your E-mail:
Your Location:

Michael Froomkin:

A request for a correction in The New York Times:

Article Headline: Rewinding History, Bush Museum Lets You Decide

Date Published: 4/21/13, Print (National Edition, p. A1)

Phrase in Question: “As president, he rarely had a chance to rest….”

Your Concern (please limit to 300 words): In the page A10 continuation of the front-page article in today’s paper by Peter Baker, “Rewinding History, Bush Museum Lets You Decide”, Mr. Baker writes, “As president, he [Bush] rarely had a chance to rest….”

In fact, George W. Bush spent 32 months at his ranch (490 days) or Camp David (487 days) — an average of four months away every year, according the the Washington Post’s POTUS tracker (as cited at http://theweek.com/bullpen/column/235844/deconstructing-the-5-most-ridiculous-myths-about-barack-obama).

I understand Presidents sometimes take their work with them when they travel, but I submit that there were plenty of chances to rest in those 977 days.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Conference: Notre Dame: Public Intellectualism in Comparative Context

Sunday, April 21: Welcome Dinner

Monday, April 22: ​8:00 a.m.​Continental Breakfast

• 8:30 a.m. Welcome, Robert Bernhard, Vice President for Research, University of Notre Dame
• 8:45 a.m. ​“Caveat Lector: Intellectuals and the Public” Mark Lilla, Commentary: Michael Zuckert
• 10:45 a.m. “The Public Intellectual in China” Willy Lam, Commentary: Lionel Jensen ​​* 2:00 p.m. “The Public Intellectual in Latin America” Enrique Krauze, Commentary: Paolo Carozza ​​* 4:00 p.m. “The Artist as Public Intellectual” Maxim Kantor, Commentary: Peter Holland
• 5:45 p.m. Dinner
• 7:15 p.m.: Evening Presentation "The Religious Leader as Public Intellectual” Sr. Joan Chittister, Commentary: Ann Astell

"Austerity" in the Context of the Global Economic Downturn: Wednesday Hoisted from Archives from Two Years Ago Weblogging

Brad DeLong: Friday February 18, 2011: Let me speak as a card-carrying neoliberal, as a bipartisan technocrat, as a mainstream neoclassical macroeconomist--a student of Larry Summers and Peter Temin and Charlie Kindleberger and Barry Eichengreen and Olivier Blanchard and many others.

We put to one side issues of long-run economic growth and of income and wealth distribution, and narrow our focus to the business cycle--to these grand mal seizures of high unemployment that industrial market economies have been suffering from since at least 1825. Such episodes are bad for everybody--bad for workers who lose their jobs, bad for entrepreneurs and equity holders who lose their profits, bad for governments that lose their tax revenue, and bad for bondholders who see debts owed them go unpaid as a result of bankruptcy. Such episodes are best avoided.

From my perspective, the technocratic economists by 1829 had figured out why these semi-periodic grand mal seizures happened. In 1829 Jean-Baptiste Say published his Cours Complet d'Economie Politique… in which he implicitly admitted that Thomas Robert Malthus had been at least partly right in his assertions that an economy could suffer from at least a temporary and disequliibrium "general glut" of commodities. In 1829 John Stuart Mill wrote that one of what was to appear as his Essays on Unsettled Questions in Political Economy in which he put his finger on the mechanism of depression.

Rand Paul Says: "I Am the Real Victim Here"

Elias Asquith:

Rand Paul, Victim — The League of Ordinary Gentlemen: As Ta-Nehisi Coates notes, this report should put to rest any questions of Rand Paul’s sincerity when it comes to minority outreach:

Paul acknowledged criticism for the speech he gave at Howard University Wednesday, saying, “I think some think a white person is not allowed to talk about black history … which I think is unfair.”

Here’s Coates’ response, which is far more civil than Paul deserves:

Rand Paul went to Howard University, lied, and then got his ass kicked… [and] having gotten his ass kicked, his answer is to not to reflect but to make an allegation of racial discrimination.

One of the things I try to do in my work is — in general — take people at their word. It’s very hard to communicate about anything without good faith. This, of course, assumes that communication is the goal. That was my assumption about Rand Paul. I was clearly wrong.

You know, I liked Rand Paul’s trollspeech a whole lot better when Mitt Romney gave it.

Keeping the President from Having Powers William the Bastard Never Claimed

William the Bastard never claimed to have the power to execute his vassals on his say-so and whim without providing an explanation. Pejman Yousefzadeh has a proposal to keep U.S. presidents from claiming that power without ceding jurisdiction to an Article III court:

Drones and the Law: Restoring Checks and Balances: The Department of Justice has recently released a white paper detailing what it believes to be the scope of the president’s authority to kill Americans suspected of being members of al Qaeda… states that the power to kill such suspects can take place “away from the zone of active hostilities.”… The white paper has prompted spirited reaction… who qualifies as “an informed high-level official”[?]… Jeffrey Rosen claims that the administration’s arguments do not pass constitutional muster…. Jack Goldsmith states that… the white paper “does reveal problems in the administration’s political and legal strategy for conducting drone strikes, especially against American citizens”… we need “a new framework statute”….

Some have argued that the best “form of review” of the president’s actions would be found in a FISA-like court charged with the responsibility to authorize lethal operations against Americans…. But as Robert Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas, Austin notes, “some judges want absolutely nothing to do with” the process of reviewing whether certain Americans ought to be marked for death, and even if they do, judicial oversight may be constitutionally and procedurally problematic. So perhaps a different “form of review” is required. One such alternative mechanism might be to empower the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board to serve as a check against any overreach of presidential power in targeting American suspects for killing… to truly establish the entity’s independence from the office of the presidency, Congress should pass and the president should sign legislation reconstituting the PIAB as a Federal Intelligence Commission, and making it an independent regulatory agency… members of the new FIC must be nominated by the president and must undergo Senate confirmation…. Empowering an independent agency to act as a check against presidential power and allowing for greater congressional oversight in the process is a good way to ensure the drone program is not being abused…

It's a smart idea--I'm still attracted to the idea of using the medieval law of outlawry, on the grounds that that worked reasonably well, and I do not see why courts do not see this as their business. But definitely worth thinking about...

?-Rated Economists Thursday Weblogging: Did James Buchanan Live in the Twentieth Century at All?

An economist deeply focused on public policy and politics. A Virginian living in the twentieth century. And yet as I scan through his collected works…

There are two references to "Lyndon Johnson"--one to his refusal to follow his economic advisors' advice to shrink aggregate demand in 1967-8, and a second to "the redistributionist zeal of Lyndon Johnson's 'Great Society'…"

There is one reference to "voting rights" advocating the removal of the franchise from public employees:

There are two references to "African", both of them citations to G.F. Thirby in the South African Journal of Economics:

And there are 29 references to "black"--28 of them references to Duncan Black, author of The Theory of Committees and Elections, and one a reference to black ink on white paper:

My mind is officially blown...

Wednesday Hoisted from (Other People's) Archives: Ethics of Macroeconomics Edition

Something to remember.

Paul Krugman:

A Brief Note on Macroeconomics and Ethics: I want to acknowledge Karl Smith’s very gracious and brave response to my piece on economics in the crisis. And I’d also like to add a small further thought….

[D]isagreement will happen. Economics is a hard subject, people will come to different provisional conclusions, and some of them will, in retrospect, turn out to have given very bad advice. That’s a shame but not a sin…. Ken Rogoff and I differ seriously on the relative risks of public debt and failure to spend on job creation. One of us is wrong, which means that the other is giving bad advice…. But this is an argument in good faith.

What bothers me, and should bother you, about much of this debate is that it pretty clearly is not in good faith. Too many economists and commentators on economics are clearly playing for a political team; too many others are clearly playing professional reputation games. Their off-the-cuff reactions to policy issues were wrong and foolish, and I think they know in their hearts that they messed up; but instead of trying to remedy the fault, they’re trying to defend the property values of their intellectual capital.

And that really is a sin…. This really matters to millions of people, and refusing to think clearly because you don’t want any negative thoughts about the papers you and your friends have been writing the past few decades is unforgivable.

Hey, Benn Steil, You Know Who Else Said the U.S. Was Tricked into World War II?

You would think that the past six years would have led Benn Steil to rethink his beliefs that (a) Jacques Rueff decisively refuted Keynesian economics in the 1940s by demonstrating the truth of Say's Law, and (b) that Bernanke's inflationist policies were going to lead in short order to a collapse of the dollar and an explosion of inflation. But no. He doesn't mark his beliefs to reality at all.

Now Eric Rauchway informs me that he has gone the full Pat Buchanan--he is arguing that the U.S. was tricked into World War II.

You know who else said the U.S. was tricked into entering World War II to benefit the Bolsheviks and the Jews?

Dennis Perrin on the Transformation of Christopher Hitchens: Tuesday Ten Years Ago on the Internet Weblogging

Dennis Perrin: A friend and protégé tries to make sense of what's happened to Christopher Hitchens:

Bright spring afternoon. Hitch and I spend it in his fave D.C. pub just down the street from his spacious apartment. At the long polished bar, he sips a martini, I swig Tanqueray on ice offset by pints of ale. The pub's TV is flashing golf highlights while the jukebox blasts classic rock. We're chatting about nothing in particular when the juke begins playing "Moonshadow" by Cat Stevens. Hitch stops talking. His face tightens. Eyes narrow. I know this look--I saw it on Crossfire when he nearly slugged a Muslim supporter of the Ayatollah's fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I saw it during a Gulf War panel discussion at Georgetown when he responded to some pro-war hack with a precision barrage of invective, followed by the slamming down of the mike, causing a brief reverb in the speakers.

And here it was again.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Michael Kelly: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

TNC:

Some Thoughts on Michael Kelly - Ta-Nehisi Coates: I didn't really know Michael Kelly…. He does not come off as the sort of guy to opine on TV comforted by the safety of reports from Brookings…. Over at Gawker, Tom Scocca published a very hard--and very fair--assessment of Kelly's role in the Iraq War. I hadn't read much of the work Scocca referenced, so I did myself a favor and looked up some of Kelly's columns in the days leading up to Iraq…. Kelly's columns are not pro-war, they are ferociously pro-Bush, and gleefully contemptuous of liberals who thought otherwise. 

It's the glee that burns. There's a kind of writer who gets his kicks writing bad reviews of music and books. You see that same spirit in Kelly's mocking of Paul Krugman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Janeane Garofalo, or in his attacks on the French by evoking the ghost of Pétain. That glee turned Kelly  into a thin writer who spurned nuance in favor of hyperbole….

Yes, George Orwell Is a Good "Plutarch's Lives" Partner for Tony Judt...

…not least because Eric Blair's various authorial personas and Eric Blair himself was a much more devious operator than was Orwell's self-presentation and the presentation of him his fans today make. Totally successful. Astonishingly right. But not quite the bluff, honest English truth-teller…

Geoffrey Wheatcroft has a very nice piece:

Less than 100,000 Payroll Jobs, a 58.5% Employment-to-Adult-Population Ratio Exactly Where It Was a Year Ago, and Labor Force Participation Down by 0.5 Percentage Points in the Past Year

This is a bad employment report.

Twenty years from now, young whippersnapper economic historians will come to interview me.

They will ask: "Why don't you think Ben Bernanke was the worst Fed Chair since the Great Depression--worse even than the hapless G. William Miller--because of his failure to understand even one of (a) the implications of the pre-2008 growth of leverage, derivatives, and shadow banking; that his job in the summer and fall of 2008 was not to curb moral hazard but to prevent depression; (c) the goals of his dual mandate; the structure of the economy he was managing; and (e) how to mark his beliefs to market when the economy did not evolve as he had predicted?"

What answer am I going to be able to give?

What was Barack Obama thinking? What was Tim Geithner thinking? What was Ben Bernanke thinking?

What is Barack Obama thinking? What is Jack Lew thinking? What is Ben Bernanke thinking?

Jonathan Chait on the Sad Excuse for a Republican Policy Infrastructure

Jonathan Chait:

Pretend GOP Urged to Adopt Imaginary Health Plan: You, in the clown makeup -- you seem to have some innovative proposals for state level high risk insurance pools you want to propose. Yuval Levin… and Ramesh Ponnuru have a (paywalled) cover story in National Review urging Republicans to stand fast in their fanatical determination to repeal Obamacare. As a piece of policy analysis, it is not remotely persuasive. What is interesting… the delicate balance… authors… coax the partisan rage of the party faithful toward their desired policy ends… avoiding any engagement with the cruelty and indifference of the actual Republican agenda…. This passage jumps out as especially telling:

The law also vastly expands Medicaid, which is a crummy form of insurance: Researchers who compare the program’s beneficiaries with people who have no insurance at all often have a hard time finding much of a difference in health.

Donald Luskin Is No Longer the Stupidest Man Alive: Steven Landsburg Is--and the University of Rochester Has a Big Problem…

Yet another gift to our public sphere from Jacob Weisberg and Michael Kinsley…

Cord Jefferson has the report:

Steven Landsburg… economics professor at the University of Rochester. Formerly a Slate columnist…. March 20… "Censorship, Environmentalism and Steubenville," the post attempts to compare and contrast potential "psychic harms" associated with pornography, environmentalism, and being raped while you are passed out. If one of those things, prima facie, doesn't sound like the others to you, well, Landsburg would like to understand "what is the key difference among them?"…

After describing a scenario in which a character named "Farnsworth McCrankypants" is mentally traumatized by knowing other people watch porn ("Question 1"), and another in which "Granola McMustardseed" is distressed by the idea of wilderness desecration ("Question 2"), Landsburg poses "Question 3," which references the recently closed Steubenville rape case:

Let's suppose that you, or I, or someone we love, or someone we care about from afar, is raped while unconscious in a way that causes no direct physical harm—no injury, no pregnancy, no disease transmission. (Note: The Steubenville rape victim, according to all the accounts I've read, was not even aware that she'd been sexually assaulted until she learned about it from the Internet some days later.)… Ought the law discourage such acts of rape? Should they be illegal?… I'm having trouble articulating any good reason why Question 3 is substantially different from Questions 1 and 2. As long as I'm safely unconsious and therefore shielded from the costs of an assault, why shouldn't the rest of the world (or more specifically my attackers) be allowed to reap the benefits?…

Every time someone on my street turns on a porch light, trillions of photons penetrate my body… if those… caused me deep psychic distress, the law would continue to ignore them… bodily penetration does not seem to be in some sort of special protected category…

A request for comment to Landsburg has thus far gone unanswered.

David Graeber April Fools' Day Post: Cheaply Manufacturing Extended Trollage via Sub-Turing Evocations: Threat or Menace? Weblogging

David Graeber wrote, about his book Debt:

[S]cholars of Greece, Mesopotamia, and Islam, Medievalists, Africanists, historians of Buddhism, and a wide variety of economists... none have noticed any glaring errors... it’s remarkable that someone who is not an area specialist actually more or less gets it right (remember, these are scholars often loathe to admit even their own colleagues in the field get it more or less right.)... meticulously researched and has stood up to scholarly review...

I protested that David Graeber's chapter 12, at least, got quite a large number of things wrong.

For one thing, Graeber thinks that the participants in the meetings of the Federal Reserve's decision-making body--the Federal Open Market Committee--are eighteen private bankers and one person, the Chair, appointed by the President. In actual fact the participants in FOMC meetings consist of (a) the seven Governors of the Federal Reserve (of whom one is Chair) all of whom are appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, and (b) the twelve heads of the regional Federal Reserve Banks, all of whom must be approved by a majority vote of the Governors and who are not private bankers seeking profits but rather heads of government-sponsored enterprises that do not view maximizing their bottom lines as their goals. Rather than one out of nineteen, all nineteen FOMC participants are either chosen by the President (with the advice and consent of the Senate) or by the President's appointees. Graeber does not get it right. If you want to understand today's economy, it is important to know whether one of nineteen or all of its top decision makers serve because the President and his appointees want them to. It is important to know whether eighteen of them or zero of them are private bankers. It is important to know whether the Federal Reserve is very akin to the American Petroleum Institute or the Federal Trade Commission.

This is a big deal. This stuff matters. It is a glaring error, along the lines of claiming that adolescent females in Samoa speak to no males save their fathers, uncles, and brothers. It is a glaring error, along the lines of claiming that high-status adult males among the Yanomamo behave like the seventeenth-century Quaker followers of William Penn rather than like Akhilleus son of Peleus. (And, yes, I have a very large bone to pick with Napoleon Chagnon for translating the Yanomamo self-description as "fierce" rather than "noble" or "manly"--as in Sigifrith the Atheling, or Arjuna of the Arya, or Horatius Cocles virtus holding the bridge against Lars Porsenna. But that is for another time and place.)

My protest was received with hoots:

Philip Pilkington:

Seriously?... petty stuff…. We can all pick over tiny details in books and engage in hermeneutic readings…. It’s not hard.…. [W]hat’s going to be remembered, David’s book with its intellectually revolutionary message, one that has inspired so many young economists that I meet or DeLong’s pedantic complaints about ambiguous meanings and contentious issues.… Who wins in the contest for etiquette? I don’t know. But who wins the intellectual argument? Again, let history decide. But I’m thinking Graeber.

And David Graeber:

[F]or all [DeLong's] blustering about how my chapter 12 was full of factual errors, he had never managed to identify more than one--a minor point about the number of reserve board governors who are Presidential appointees (the main point, about the Fed not being part of the government and not operating under Presidential oversight DeLong does not contest)…

But it wasn't one error, David.

It seemed that I had a discourse-situation problem. (I) Graeber's default seemed to be to claim that his book Debt was error-free. (II) If challenged on any point, his mode of operation appeared to be to retreat--admit error--and then counterattack claiming that this error is minor--no matter how glaring it was--and that the fact that people are attacking that error shows how totally right the rest of the book was.

So how to stake out a marker that there are dozens of errors, without wasting a lot of time doing so?

And there are dozens of errors: the Federal Reserve is not a council of eighteen private bankers plus a presidential appointee as their chair; Korean-American shopkeepers do not long to treat everybody else in Brooklyn the way Saul and Samuel treated the people of Amalek; Apple Computer--this was a hilarious one--Apple was not founded by ex-IBM engineers who formed little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages--there were neither laptops nor garages big enough to hold 20 in Silicon Valley in 1978, nor was Apple either Democratic or made up of any ex-IBM employees--the fact that people are as happy to hold the debt of the Swiss government than the debt of the U.S. government shows that it is not fear of being bombed by the US Air Force that makes countries seek to buy U.S. Treasury bonds; the Federal Reserve is perfectly constitutional, as is the FDA, the FCC, the EPA, the FTC, etc.; Nixon did not close the gold window because of the mounting costs of the Vietnam War; there is nothing that makes Iraq more likely than any other corner of the world to be the source of the next forward leap in human society; the Federal Reserve does not lend private banks money at the prime rate--you really don't know whether to laugh or cry at passages like: "For those who don't know how the Fed works: technically, there are a series of stages. Generally the Treasury puts out bonds to the public, and the Fed buys them back. The Fed then loans the money thus created to other banks at a special low rate of interest ('the prime rate')". Et cetera.

It was a puzzle that I could not solve.

At the end January I noticed David Graeber was on Twitter tweeting things like:

David Graeber ‏@davidgraeber: considering the misery & devastation DeLong's NAFTA inflicted on Mexico, it's hardly surprising

David Graeber ‏@davidgraeber: @delong author of economic catastrophes arrogantly inflicted only on others (NAFTA), lashes out at such as tried to warn him at the time


David Graeber ‏@davidgraeber: they feel history passing them by. Even the IMF seems to take me more seriously than DeLong these days

And a light bulb went on in my head.

Ezra Klein: Is Texas Governor Rick Perry Going to Shoot Texas in the Head to Prove That ObamaCare Is a Failure?

Ezra Klein thinks he just might…

Will the GOP’s plan to fight Obamacare in the states backfire?: The question, though, is whether governors who purposefully do a very bad job implementing Obamacare will hurt the law, or just themselves and their states. Call it the California v. Texas question. In 2010, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California signed into law two bills to establish the online insurance marketplace — “exchanges” — that are at the center of President Obama’s health-care reform…. California promptly accepted the law’s Medicaid expansion. By this time next year… it’s possible that the portion of the state’s uninsured population will have declined from 20 percent to less than five percent.

In Texas… the Lone Star State isn’t lifting a finger to create an exchange, instead leaving the work to the federal government. Texas is refusing Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, too. “The idea that we would expand and put more money and more people into a broken system is not unlike putting another 1,000 people on the Titanic,” Republican Gov. Rick Perry told Forbes. “You know how this is going to turn out. And it’s going to be a disaster.” One might observe that the health-care system in Texas, which, has the nation’s highest rate of uninsured residents — 24 percent, or more than six million people — is already a disaster. But the recalcitrance of Perry and Republican state lawmakers has the potential to make it much worse.

The North Atlantic Macroeconomy: Let it Bleed?: We Are Live at Project Syndicate

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-depression-redux-by-j--bradford-delong

BERKELEY – In the 12 years of the Great Depression – between the stock-market crash of 1929 and America’s mobilization for World War II – production in the United States averaged roughly 15% below the pre-depression trend, implying a total output shortfall equal to 1.8 years of GDP. Today, even if US production returns to its stable-inflation output potential by 2017 – a huge “if” – the US will have incurred an output shortfall equivalent to 60% of a year’s GDP.

In fact, the losses from what I have been calling the “Lesser Depression” will almost certainly not be over in 2017. There is no moral equivalent of war on the horizon to pull the US into a mighty boom and erase the shadow cast by the downturn; and when I take present values and project the US economy’s lower-trend growth into the future, I cannot reckon the present value of the additional loss at less than a further 100% of a year’s output today – for a total cost of 1.6 years of GDP. The damage is thus almost equal to that of the Great Depression – and equally painful, even though America’s real GDP today is 12 times higher than it was in 1929.

The Live Arguments for Austerity Right Now: A Bestiary

Arguments that looser monetary policy right now would be too risky:

The Jeremy Stein argument: At very low interest rates, banks will gamble not quite for resurrection but for (apparent) profitability, because bank executives who report losses tend to lose their jobs. Thus it is very important that the central bank keep nominal interest rates on loans banks can safely make above 3%/year in order to prevent the impact of the lower bound on deposits from generating unwise reaching for yield, and consequent systemic vulnerability.

The Gavyn Davies argument: Central banks won't dare unwind because politicians won't like it when central banks report losses. Therefore central bankers dare not adopt policies that have a chance of incurring losses because they will not be able to execute such policies.

Arguments that looser fiscal policy right now would be contractionary:

Kick-Starting Employment: Wednesday Hoisted from the Archives from Four Years Ago

Brad DeLong (March 2009): Kick-Starting Employment: Unemployment is currently rising like a rocket, because businesses that normally would be expanding and hiring are not, and those businesses that would normally be contracting and shedding workers are doing so very rapidly. Businesses that ought to be expanding and hiring cannot, because the depressed general level of financial asset prices prevents them from borrowing money or selling bonds on profitable terms.

In response, central banks should purchase government bonds for cash in as large a quantity as needed to push their prices up as high as possible. Expensive government bonds will shift demand to mortgage or corporate bonds, pushing up their prices.

Even after central banks have pushed government bond prices as high as they can go, they should keep buying government bonds for cash, in the hope that people whose pockets are full of cash will spend more of it, and that this will directly pull people out of joblessness and into employment.

In addition, governments need to run extra-large deficits. Spending - whether by the United States government during World War II, following the Reagan tax cuts of 1981, by Silicon Valley during the late 1990's, or by home buyers in America's south and on its coasts in the 2000's - boosts employment and reduces unemployment. And government spending is as good as anybody else's.

Mark Thoma Laments the Gramscian Hegemony of the Overclass

Why Don’t Politicians Care about the Working Class?: If we want to ensure that our children and grandchildren have the brightest possible future, the national debt is not the most important problem to address. Reversing the polarization of the labor market… is much more important. But money driven politics and a political class that has all but forgotten about the working class… stand in the way of progress…. [A]round two-thirds of the jobs lost during the recession were in moderate-wage occupations… more than one-half of subsequent job gains have been in low-wage jobs….

To be successful, we must make jobs our top priority. Instead, our focus has been on the debt, but all of the hand wringing over the debt and the future of our children is a ruse by Republicans that diverts our attention from the plight of the working class. As I explained a few weeks ago, we can pay our bills. If we have problems, it will be because of the politics surrounding the debt, the political brinksmanship conservatives have used in pursuit of ideological gains, not the economics…. Republicans see the large debt, much of which was caused by the recession, as a golden opportunity to reduce the size of government…. I don’t blame Republicans for their efforts. I wish the working class was more important to Republicans, and I cannot understand the indifference to the struggles of so many people. But… [f]undamentally, it’s the party of the rich and this is a chance to lower government spending and reduce the pressure for tax increases on high-income households.

Psychological Roots of Political Austerity?

Paul Krugman: Psychological Roots of Austerity:

Simon Wren-Lewis has a thoughtful post on the reasons for austerity mania, in which he accepts the role of special interests but argues that there are also psychological roots. Specifically, he suggests that politicians know that they are often irresponsible, and:

when the market starts to punish fiscal profligacy, it is as if a parent has discovered the child’s guilty secret. (The market is seen by many as a mysterious deity.) The politician wants to repent (or at least be seen to repent), and atone for past sins. After eating too many pastries, we go on a crash diet. After deficit bias, we have austerity.

Doug J: Principled Burkean Arguments for the Iraq War

Doug J.:

It’s in the order of the hedgerows: Conor Friedersdorf has a good round-up of various principled Burkean arguments in favor of the Iraq war.

Andrew Sullivan:

FABULOUSLY ANTI-WAR: No, I don’t mean Madonna. I mean a group called Glamericans. These are drag queens, performance artists, and sundry others who form “a non-partisan group of funky Americans committed to non-violence and its promotion through glamorous, media-savvy, cultural events. We believe in America’s potential to be a peaceful and powerful force in the world. We believe that war is bad for our country, bad for our environment and bad for our travel plans.” Dammit. Let Saddam test nerve gas on political prisoners strapped down in hospital beds. Let him gas the Kurds. Let him protect terrorist groups.

Jonah Goldberg:

I want to rub it in the anti-war crowd’s face so badly. I want to hear the protesters explain why it’s a bad thing we released more than 100 children from an Iraqi gulag for underage political prisoners.

Some idiot named Brendan O’Neill who opposed the war but hated the protesters more than the war:

Most of the new antiwar groups express an entirely personal opposition to war, one based more on moral revulsion than effective political opposition. Protesters voice a personal distaste for violent conflict, rather than organizing a collective stand against it. And when opposing war is about making pompous moral statements about me, myself, and I, you can count me out.

He left out my favorite, from Megan McArdle:

I can’t be mad at these little dweebs. I’m too busy laughing. And I think some in New York are going to laugh even harder when they try to unleash some civil disobedience, Lenin style, and some New Yorker who understands the horrors of war all too well picks up a two-by-four and teaches them how very effective violence can be when it’s applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner.

Atrios puts it well:

I know all the ‘liberal hawks’ perceive themselves as having engaged in some sort of high minded intellectual exercise back in the day, but what they were really doing most of the time was punching hippies. The respectable position, then, was to support the war, never mind the details like how many soldiers to send in and how to deal with sectarian strife. Freedom isn’t free! Just as now the respectable position is austerity, never mind the real world effect it might have on the economy. End the debt!

I do wish that just once, someone who supported the war but who isn’t a total asshole would admit that they backed it because that’s just what serious people did at the time, that they had no idea, in practice, how the war might work out, that they’d never thought about it all.

Robert Dole Says: "Who Made That Mess in Washington?"

Those of us who tried to deal with Robert Dole's root-and-branch opposition in 1993-1995 to so many of what had been his own policies from 1981-1992 are sardonically amused at (a) his distress at the Washington that he did so much to help make, (b) his apparent lack of self-knowledge of what he did, and (c ) Michael Kranish's gullibility and willingness to butter Dole up.

It really isn't funny, though:

Michael Kranish:

The story of Washington gridlock seen through the eyes of Bob Dole: It had been 16 years since Bob Dole stepped down as Senate Republican leader, ending a legislative career in which he earned a reputation as a master of bipartisanship. Yet there he was at the end of 2012, trying to close a deal.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?: Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard Edition

Why do the Weekly Standard's writers work so hard to persuade me that they lack both intelligence and honor? I mean, they work really hard to do so--and they do so quite effectively.

Let's back up, and start with one of my favorite readings from Thomas Nagel (2012), Mind and Cosmos:

If I decide, when the sun rises on my right, that I must be driving north instead of south, it is because I recognize that my belief that I am driving south is inconsistent with that observation [that the sun is rising on my right], together with what I know about the direction of rotation of the earth. I abandon the belief because I recognize that it couldn’t be true…. If I oppose the abolition of the inheritance tax, it is because I recognize that the design of property rights should be sensitive not only to autonomy but also to fairness…. I operate in the space of reasons. The appearance of reason… seems… something radically emergent…. Like consciousness, reason is inseparable from the physical life of organisms that have it…. It was originally a biological evolutionary process…. This, then, is what a theory of everything has to explain… the emergence from a lifeless universe of reproducing organisms… greater and greater functional complexity… consciousness… [and] the development of consciousness into an instrument of transcendence that can grasp objective reality and objective value.

I claim that Thomas Nagel's mind is not an instrument of transcendence grasping objective reality and objective value. I claim that, as Thomas Nagel claims to transcendentally grasp objective value when he concludes that there should be an inheritance tax, he is wrong. I claim that, as Thomas Nagel claims to transcendentally grasp objective reality when he concludes that if he is facing south the rising sun must be on his left, he is wrong.

As evidence for his wrongness, I point out that I once was facing south and saw the sun rising in front of me: in the south. True story. During northern hemisphere winter, a plane flying over the pole from Europe to America can exit the earth's shadow at a point where the sun is due south, thus the sun can rise in the south, and it did.

Yes, Restricting Access to Contraception Is Immoral. Why Do You Ask?

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill on the Real Moocher Class

Winston Churchill:

Here let me remark that the best way to insure against unemployment is to have no unemployment.

There is another point: unemployables, rich or poor, will have to be toned up. We cannot afford to have idle people. Idlers at the top make idlers at the bottom. No one must stand aside in his working prime to pursue a life of selfish pleasure.

There are wasters in all classes. Happily they are only a small minority in every class, but anyhow we cannot have a band of drones in our midst, whether they come from the ancient aristocracy or the modern plutocracy, or the ordinary type of pub crawler.

These Are Not the Deficit or GDP Numbers That George Osborne Was Looking For...

Nick Clegg should end this farce, let the Wookie win, and allow a party with Balls take over the government. He has no future as a politician. Why doesn't he try being a patriot?

Ryan Avent:

Britain's budget: Not the result they'd hoped for: GEORGE OSBORNE, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, is out with the government's new budget. The Spectator, which live-blogged the proceedings, posted this interesting chart. Not exactly what the government had in mind when it rolled out its austerity plans, I'm sure. And the sort of thing that should make it difficult for the chancellor to continue arguing that it is confidence in the government's commitment to fiscal prudence that is responsible for Britain's low interest rates. Stephanie Flanders does the explaining:

Whitehall departments have stuck to the chancellor's budget plans since then. In fact, they have spent rather less than he first asked them to. That is why he has again felt able to take a few billion more pounds out of their budgets for the next two years, to increase infrastructure spending and perhaps deliver other minor goodies later today. No, it's not Whitehall, but the UK economy that's wildly departed from the chancellor's original script.Britain's national output has risen by just over 1% since the election, instead of the 7% George Osborne was hoping for in his first Budget.

Society Telling American Conservatives: You Must Act Stupid If You Want to Be One of Us!

Sarah Palin consumes 25% of her daily requirement of calories, and obtains no other nutrients at all…

Doug J.:

Career opportunities: There’s also this sort of thing:

What message did Sarah Palin send to her CPAC ’13 audience Saturday, and thence to the world, by sipping from a Big Gulp soda during her speech and, in conclusion, brandishing it as if it were a trophy? Oh, I know what message she intended to send: Don’t tell us real Americans how to live our lives. We’ll decide what’s best for ourselves and our children. Stop treading on our liberty. But… the message Sarah Palin sent was this: Republicans will start winning elections again by telling Americans they should be proud of acting stupid.

When I was in school, there was a lot of talk about population groups (classified by gender, ethnicity, class, income, etc.) not performing as well as they could academically because society — in some cases, other members of the population group — sent them the message that they must be stupid because they were poor or women or black. I think there’s something to that, people are affected a lot by what society tells them to think of themselves. And I think it probably is happening to conservatives today, to some extent.

Math is hard, let’s go drink big gulps.

Hey! Young conservative kids! If Sarah Palin jumped off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge too?

Moishe ben Amram and the "Nation of Takers": Wednesday Hoisted from the Archives from the Reign of Rameses II Weblogging

Another thought...

Focus on those entitlements--unlike Social Security or unemployment insurance--where you do get more the poorer you are. These are programs that you can think of as providing an incentive to slackerhood, of subsidizing moocherhood. Nicholas Eberstadt writes in his A Nation of Takers:

[p]overty- or income-related entitlements... increased over thirty-fold [since 1960]...

Yes, I know that these are aggregate--not per capita--nominal--not real--spending-growth numbers, and hence the wrong numbers to look at. But he does then take much of it back:

two-thirds of those... are... Medicaid... traditional safety-net programs now comprise only about a third of entitlements granted on income terms...

Had Eberstadt gone a step further, he would have computed that cyclically-adjusted spending on traditional safety-net programs have risen from 1.1% of GDP in 1960 to a cyclically-adjusted 1.5% of GDP today. That is an increase. Our safety-net programs really are somewhat more generous as a share of our national resources than they were in 1960. Should they be?

Eberstadt likes to talk about how Americans in the past were self-reliant Randite individuals, scornful of dependency and charity, different from the moochers of these degenerate days, and how we should return to our old time values. But before America's rich were Randites America's settlers were church-going Protestants. They saw themselves as building a City Upon a Hill, building the New Jerusalem, becoming the New Israel. I know: those who hit the beaches at Plymouth in 1620 and Boston in 1630 were pretty much all (some of) my ancestors.

My New England WASP Puritan ancestors read the Hebrew Bible very seriously indeed. And they hearkened unto Moishe ben Amram:

No, John Taylor's Piece Doesn't Say What Taylor Says It Says: Noah Smith to the Rescue! Weblogging

Noah Smith plays Three-Card Monte, and wins! Taylor has a model in which (a) interest rates can go negative, (b) the Federal Reserve is successfully stabilizing GDP, and (c) the damaging effects of taxation on work effort are so large that western Europe ought to be an impoverished hellhole.

Noahpinion: John Taylor's austerity model: [Y]our friendly neighborhood Noah is here to read and explain where Taylor is getting his arguments…. The "1970s" reference is pure conservative herp-derpery. People weren't trying to fight stagflation with fiscal policy in the 70s; deficits were quite low. "The 70s" is just a word that conservative writers throw into their pieces so that conservative old men who read the article will nod their snowy heads in sage agreement and mumble "Yes, the 70s. Carter. Stagflation. Mmm-hmm!"…

Why does Taylor think austerity will produce growth?… This is NOT the "Treasury View."… This is NOT the "Confidence Fairy."… Taylor's model has distortionary taxation in it, and the distortions are large…. [T]he GDP boost in Taylor's model doesn't come from reducing the deficit, it comes from cutting taxes…. Taylor assumes that the Fed… cancels out… positive demand shocks from stimulus. So it's hardly surprising that Taylor is not going to see government spending doing much good for the economy; he's assumed that 1) the Fed is… managing aggregate demand, and 2) the Fed will tighten to… counteract stimulus…. There is no Zero Lower Bound…. The "New Old Keynesians" such as Paul Krugman and Gauti Eggertsson, who advocate fiscal stimulus, explicitly make reference to the ZLB as the reason stimulus works. Taylor just ignores that idea…. In Taylor's model, if you cut government purchases, it throws the economy into a recession. Taylor's suggested austerity plan makes big spending cuts, but the cuts are almost entirely cuts in transfers…. Now as you should remember from Econ 102, government purchases make much more effective stimulus than transfers…. The reason he gets short-run benefits from spending cuts has everything to do with the fact that it's almost all transfers being cut….

Upshot: If you have no Zero Lower Bound, and if the Fed partially counteracts the demand-side effects of fiscal policy, and if people have forward-looking expectations, and if you don't cut government purchases much, and if taxes are very distortionary, then austerity works…. [T]he result… ignores the real Keynesian critique that… the Zero Lower Bound matters a lot… assumes… taxes are… more distortionary than they really are… overestimates the Republicans' real willingness to cut transfers… underestimates their willingness to cut government purchases… ignores distributional concerns, but that's pretty much par for the course…

No, You Should Not Take What John Cogan and John Taylor Write in the Wall Street Journal Seriously Until They Even Try to Explain What They Got Wrong in 2009. Why Do You Ask?

They are highly likely to be wrong for three reasons:

1. It is in the Wall Street Journal, hence presumptively wrong.
2. They were wrong in 2009, and hence likely to be wrong now.
3. They have made no effort to figure out why they were wrong in 2009, hence they are very likely to be making the same mistakes still.

Paul Krugman collects the intellectual trash:

Economics and Politics by Paul Krugman: Ugh. And I say that advisedly. John Cogan and John Taylor have a piece in the WSJ (where else) arguing that the latest Ryan budget would actually be expansionary, because confidence! It’s as if all the experience of recent years, in which the confidence fairy has yet to make an appearance, hasn’t happened….

Cogan and Taylor [also] make a basically dishonest claim about the state of research. Reading them, you’d think that anyone who believes that contractionary policy is contractionary is just a simpleton who doesn’t know about expectations:

Our assessment is based on a modern macroeconomic model (developed with Volker Wieland of the University of Frankfurt and Maik Wolters of the University of Kiel) whose features include a recognition that the resources to finance government expenditures aren’t free—they withdraw resources from the private economy….

[But i]n a depressed economy the resources to finance government expenditures are free, because they would otherwise be unemployed…. [T]he notion that Keynesians don’t believe that expectations of future conditions affect decisions today is … strange. Both old Keynesian and new Keynesian models — like Mike Woodford, whom they appear never to have read — are very much about expectations.

In fact, the only interesting question here is why their results are so different from Woodford’s. My guess is that they have slipped in some assumption that won’t stand scrutiny, like the notion that the Fed will raise rates even with the economy deeply below capacity. (They’ve done that before).

Anyway, sad stuff to see, and a disservice to readers.

Thoughts on Ludwig von Mises's Lectures to His "Inferiors"

Arianne Emory, Administrator of Reseune on Cyteen around Lalande 46650 in Union, speaks:

Absolutely essential... are adequately diverse [human] genepools. We do not create Thetas because we want cheap labor. We create Thetas because they are an essential and important part of human alternatives. The ThR-23 hand-eye coordination, for instance, is exceptional. Their psychset lets them operate very well in environments in which geniuses would assuredly fail. They are tough, ser, in ways I find thoroughly admirable, and I recommend you, if you ever find yourself in a difficult [wilderness] situation... hope your companion is a ThR... who will survive, ser, to perpetuate his type, even if you do not...

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:

The Real Underlying Source of Washington Gridlock: "The President Is a--CLANG!"

Greg Sargent:

Why We're at a Fiscal Impasse: 1. Obama can't sell entitlement cuts to his base, or indeed Democrats in general, without Republicans agreeing to new revenues, and has offered them a straightforward compromise -- one that would anger the base on both sides -- based on the premise that total victory for the GOP is not an acceptable or realistic outcome. 2. Republican leaders can't even begin to acknowledge that Obama has offered them a real compromise, because they can't sell their base on the idea that the President is being flexible, let alone get them to seriously entertain accepting any compromise with him, because the base sees total victory over Obama as the only acceptable outcome.

So why is it that the Republican base refuses to believe that Obama is not a Kenyan Muslim Socialist, and demands total victory over him?

Yes, CPAC Speakers Think the Big Problem with the Democrats Is That They Loathe Black People. Why Do You Ask?

Josh Marshall:

When The GOP Told Whitey I Aint Gonna Take It No More: Yesterday, a CPAC breakout session on reaching out to black voters broke down in shouting and acrimony as a handful of ‘disenfranchised whites’ attacked the premise of the session (along with black complaints about slaveholders), got into a verbal fight with a black female attendee and with all that managed to unite the crowd against the black woman as the one who somehow spoiled all the fun…. [T]he whole imbroglio ended with denunciations of the black woman who was the one person to go into freak out mode — pretty understandably — on hearing the merits of chattel slavery being argued in the 21st century at a panel on racial tolerance and outreach. (And I’m using ‘freak out mode’ here in the most positive sense.) And that, I think, goes to the heart of the enterprise, this panel, itself…. The panel (“Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?”) was run by an African-American man named K. Carl Smith (founder of something called “Frederick Douglass Republicans”) whose schtick is to rant against Democrats as the party of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan… preaching/ranting to a crowd of Republicans (an almost entirely lilly white party) against the racism, softness on paramilitary violence and Confederacy-love of the Democratic party (roughly half of which is made up of non-whites). There’s just too much denial, bad faith and comedy there under high pressure for the center to hold. And you can’t tempt the gods of farce on such an epic scale and not have a blow up.

The Arkansas Medicaid Budget-Buster

Austin Frakt:

So efficient you can’t afford not to buy it: Medicaid private option edition: David Ramsey of the Arkansas Times has done a ton of great reporting on the private option. His latest post begins:

The strangest part of the “private option” is that the plan grew out of pressure from local Republican lawmakers, the very same folks who had the loudest concerns about costs of the original Medicaid expansion. That’s strange because the new “private option” is going to cost more (not necessarily for the state — see here and here — but almost certainly for the feds)…. There are a number of reasons that offering coverage via private insurance is costlier than offering it via Medicaid but the main one ain’t rocket science: private insurers reimburse at higher rates. Even conservatives that like the “private option” better agree that it will cost more. Well here’s the thing. Despite a broad consensus about cost, Republicans at the forefront of advocating for a “private option” as a possible alternative to Medicaid expansion do not agree. They think that the “private option” might not be any more expensive for the feds, and could even cost less.

He gives those Republican views a generous airing in the rest of his piece. Go read it! I didn’t see anything in it that I didn’t touch on in my “prebuttal.” (I should be clear. I’m not against expanding the scope of exchanges. I just think it will cost more and we should not be deluding ourselves that it won’t.) It’s crucial to separate two propositions: (1) Competition can be efficiency increasing; (2) Competition on a state insurance exchange of the type permitted under the ACA can bring spending below that of Medicaid. The former can be true even if the latter isn’t. That’s a reasonable expectation if Arkansas or any other state goes forward with the private option, as we currently know it (which is not very well).

The Onion Is America's Finest News Source

GOP Senator Flips On Gay Marriage After Son Comes Out:

Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), a leading conservative who was on Mitt Romney’s shortlist for vice president, announced the reversal of his longstanding position against same-sex marriage, saying he had a change of heart after his son came out to him two years ago. What do you think?

“Let’s hope his kid has a tough time finding affordable health care.”

Lee Swart – Wharf Worker

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.