Brad DeLong

More Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren…

Ashok Rao:

The Future and its Critics: This post is dedicated to the brilliant John Stuart Mill…. Every now and then, it seems, the blogosphere plunges into deep introspection of all that we think to be holy: technology, growth, and even utopian prosperity. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has a piece about “Robot Overlords” and the more-optimistic Matt Yglesias can’t help but go long on beachfront property. A while back, I wrote about technology at the end of history, and I think I got one thing absolutely right:

Yet, when reading Fukuyama’s gripping essay years ago, I had one big qualification, a fleeting hope for the end of history. Ideological struggle is romantic for those of us who sit in comfort and liberty. For the scholars who write in the dimmed halls of Harvard. For the man of letters in Lamont Library; or better the Bodleian. For the precocious high schoolers who fawn on every dripping word from their history teacher. But for the many who are in the throes of historical struggle, there is nothing poetic. For the Russians who were slave to the Gulag, the romanticism of Wilson’s To the Finland Station, is but a Western concoction of reality, beautifully written for the scholar…. For the small actors in history, the girls murdered by Taliban and the dissidents silenced by Communists, the real victory would be a textbook of history blank after today….

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Dark Art of Racecraft

Andrew Sullivan says, apropos of Jason Richwine, the cross-burning Charles Murray, and company, that the racists are the real victims here…

Twenty-eight hours before Sullivan posts--thus showing that Ta-Nehisi Coates's worldline is capable of following closed timeline paths--Ta Nehisi Coates delivers the smackdown. And in the process he says what Sandy Jencks, George Borjas, and Dick Zeckhauser really should have said to Jason Richwine when he first proposed his dissertation topic, and he lays out arguments that Richwine really should have been forced to acknowledge and grapple with before they signed off on his dissertation:

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Dark Art of Racecraft:

Dave Weigel is one of my favorite reporters, but I think this piece on Jason Richwine, intelligence research, and "race" deserves a closer look:

Academics aren't so concerned with the politics. But they know all too well the risks that come with research connecting IQ and race. At the start of his dissertation, Richwine thanked his three advisers -- George Borjas, Christopher Jenks, and Richard Zeckhauser -- for being so helpful and so bold. Borjas "helped me navigate the minefield of early graduate school," he wrote. "Richard Zeckhauser, never someone to shy away from controversial ideas, immediately embraced my work…." Anyone who works in Washington and wants to explore the dark arts of race and IQ research is in the right place. The city's a bit like a college campus, where investigating "taboo" topics is rewarded, especially on the right. A liberal squeals "racism," and they hear the political-correctness cops (most often, the Southern Poverty Law Center) reporting a thought crime.

It is almost as though the "dark arts of race and IQ" were an untapped field of potential knowledge, not one of the most discredited fields of study in modern history. We should first be clear that there is nothing mysterious or forbidden about purporting to study race and intelligence. Indeed, despite an inability to define "race" or "intelligence," such studies are one of the dominant intellectual strains in Western history. We forget this because its convient to believe that history begins with the Watts riots. But it's important to remember the particular tradition that Charles Murray and Jason Richwine are working in. A brief reminder seems in order. 

Mary Carson and Jordan Rau: A Patient’s View on the Oregon Medicaid Experiment

A patient’s view on the Oregon Medicaid experiment:

Jordan Rau, KHN:

A study of Oregonians who won Medicaid benefits in a 2008 state lottery has sparked an intense debate about the value of expanding health care to the poor — and the value of health benefits in general. Mary Carson is, in a way, at the center of that debate. The 55-year-old Oregon woman was accepted into the Oregon Health Plan, the state Medicaid program, in 2011. She and her partner live with her three children. They earn about $1,000 a month by making and selling replicas of historic battle knives used in the Civil War and the two World Wars, doing odd jobs and providing respite care for people with cancer.

Niall Ferguson Is Wrong to Say That He Is Doubly Stupid: Why Did Keynes Write "In the Long Run We Are All Dead"? Weblogging

Niall Ferguson:

An Open Letter to the Harvard Community: Last week I said something stupid about John Maynard Keynes.  Asked to comment on Keynes’ famous observation “In the long run we are all dead,” I suggested that Keynes was perhaps indifferent to the long run because he had no children, and that he had no children because he was gay. This was doubly stupid. First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. Second, I had forgotten that Keynes’ wife Lydia miscarried.

Niall is wrong. His suggestion was not doubly stupid. There is more.

Niall speaks of Keynes's "In the long run we are all dead" as if it is a carpe diem argument--a "seize the day" argument, analogous to Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" or Herrick's "To the Virgins"--and Ferguson sees his task as that of explaining why Keynes adopted this be-a-grasshopper-not-an-ant "party like we're gonna die young!" form of economics, or perhaps form of morality.

But that is not it at all.

My John Maynard Keynes Lecture

Little more than quotes from Skidelsky's three-volume Keynes biography strung together, with a little commentary and occasional quibbling…

---

John Maynard Keynes

J. Bradford DeLong Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley

Econ 115 Lecture

September 29, 2009

http://delong.typepad.com/files/20090929-115-lecture-9.pdf

5,562 words: September 29, 2009

Who Are the Right-Wing Republicans Whom Clive Crook Thinks Are "Thoughtful [and] Public-Spirited… [with] Vews… Worthy of Respect"?: Tuesday Crickets Weblogging

Paul Krugman observes:

Not Everything Is Political: Clive Crook demands that I engage respectfully with reasonable people on the other side, but somehow fails to offer even one example of such a person. Not long ago Crook was offering Paul Ryan as an exemplar of serious, honest conservatism, while I was shrilly declaring Ryan a con man. But I suspect that even Crook now admits, at least to himself, that Ryan is indeed a con man…

Psychohistorical Origins of Niall Ferguson's Bizarre Remarks About John Maynard Keynes

Henry Blodget writes:

Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson Reportedly Just Blamed Keynes' Economic Philosophy On Him Being Homosexual And Childless:

The source appears to be a rather remarkable screed by Gertrude Himmelfarb in a rather McCarthyite vein, that manages to get a lot about Keynes's economics and his family life substantially wrong in a very short space, which in turn appears to be based on the views of Joseph Schumpeter:

Demography: Twentieth Century Economic History Weblogging

Tyrannies throughout the world—dictators, sane or insane—for whom prosperity was not a concern or was even seen as a threat, were the principal cause of rising relative inequality around the globe. But the second cause were the demographic burdens placed on poor countries by the population explosion. These burdens are now, fortunately, ebbing as the demographic transition to low fertility and extended lifespan finish their spread across the globe.

The Long-Run and Short-Run Budget Picture

Opening statement at K-State Debate with Alan Reynolds:

How big a government should we have?

Right now the U.S. has a relatively small government: in a normal year the U.S. government as a whole spends something like 32% of total production. The U.S. government spends about ten percentage points less of GDP than the average rich, industrialized country spends. The U.S. government spends about 15 percentage points less of GDP than a never-Communist country as rich as the U.S. is today would be expected to spend. We are thus, in comparative perspective, a small-government country.

Understanding Karl Marx: Hoisted from the Archives from Four Years Ago May Day Weblogging

In the beginning was Karl Marx, with his vision of how the Industrial Revolution would transform everything and be followed by a Great Communist Social Revolution—greater than the political French Revolution—that would wash us up on the shores of Utopia.

The mature Marx saw the economy as the key to history: every forecast and historical interpretation must be based on the economy's logic of development. This project as carried forward by others ran dry. Sometimes--as in, say, Eric Hobsbawm's books on the history of the nineteenth century--this works relatively well. But sometimes it led nowhere. The writing of western European history as the rise, fall, and succession of ancient, feudal, and bourgeois modes of production is a fascinating project. But the only person to try it seriously soon throws the Marxist apparatus over the side, where it splashes and sinks to the bottom of the sea. Perry Anderson's Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State are great and fascinating books, but they are not "Marxist". They are Weberian. The key processes in Anderson's books concern not “modes of production” but rather “modes of domination.”

Stanford Talk: Understanding Karl Marx.pdf

What Have We Learned About Fiscal Policy as Stabilization Policy since 2007?

Laura Tyson and I gave a presentation to the IMF Fiscal Forum on Wednesday the 17th. A draft of our paper. I talked about changing perceptions of fiscal policy. Laura talked about changing perceptions of multipliers.

Here is my part of our talk:

---

For the past five years, each year I have begun talks by saying that I thought in the previous year that the crisis was at its peak, and that each year I turned out to be wrong, as the crisis revealed itself as even deeper and more of a crisis than it had been the year before.

We are now six years in. The natural thing to do, therefore, is to compare 1929-1935 with 2007-2013. 1929-1933 saw much larger output declines and unemployment increases than 2007-2011--between two and three times as large. But by 1935 the tide had turned nearly everywhere except France, which was still on the gold standard (but about to elect a Popular Front government and drop its link). There had been substantial gap closing between 1931 or 1933 and 1935. The Great Depression was clearly not over by 1935, but the global economy was clearly on the mend.

By contrast, today we have had a slower decline. But we have seen no signs of anything we could call gap-closing, no sign of any returns back to what we used to think of as normal levels of activity. Here at the IMF we speak of a "three speed recovery". In the North Atlantic plus Japan, at least, the speeds are "reverse" in Europe--the proportion of the population at work is dropping--and "neutral" in America--the proportion of the population is stable. Thus it is no longer clear that, when this is over, people will look back and classify it as a smaller worldwide event than 1929-1939. Another five years of the last two years' trends, and it will be 2007- rather than 1929-1939 that will seize the name of "The Great Depression".

Global Inequality: Saturday Twentieth Century Economic History Weblogging

Those economies relatively rich at the start of the twentieth century have by and large seen their material wealth and prosperity explode. Those nations and economies that were relatively poor have grown richer, but for the most part slowly. The relative gulf between rich and poor economies has grown steadily over the past century. Today it is larger than at any time in humanity’s previous experience, or at least larger than at any time since only some tribes knew how to use fire. The gulf across which the world’s rich and poor regarded each other exists in every dimension: how much people consume, whether they can read, what tools they use, and how they make their living.

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.

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"?

Notre Dame Public Intellectualism Conference: Comment on Ahmad Moussalli: Islam and the Public Intellectual

Last year my former student Eric Chaney wrote a paper "Democratic Change in the Arab World: Past and Present". In it he saw a striking difference between not the Arab lands but rather the lands of the original first two centuries of Arab conquest on the one hand, and the lands of subsequent expansion on the other. In the 28 countries that are lands of the original Arab conquest, there is a substantial "democratic deficit". In the 15 countries that are lands of subsequent post-Ummayad expansion, democracy is doing about as well as one would expect.

From this pattern Chaney concludes that there is little special about Islam, little special about oil, little special about desert terrain, little special about Arab culture, but that there is something special about the long-run historical heritage--about the political modes of domination established after the Rashidun, under the Ummayad and especially the Abbasid ruling dynasties. They led to a millennium-long withdrawal of religious and other intermediary forms of social organization from the task of criticizing the doings of the state to following the doctrine that the state is to be supported.

Now I at least do not think that a theocracy controlled by those of the Party of Ali who claim to speak in the name of the Occulted One is a step forward. And similar currents of theocracy among those following Traditional Practices seem similarly unwise.

But is there a middle way, a creative tension, something like the medieval European intellectual contest between the Emperor's University of Naples and the Pope's University of Bologna both arguing for the rule of law and the curbing of arbitrary power, a way--without a theocratic turn--for the ulema to take on a more active and prophetic critical role vis-a-vis the governments? Not Jerusalem speaking to Athens, but Mecca speaking to Baghdad?

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

Notre Dame Public Intellectuals Conference: Comment on Enrique Krauze: Latin America: Intellectuals or Intelligentsia?

It seems to me that I have both more hopes and more fears for democracy and liberty and progress in Latin America.

The first is Brazil and Mexico. Should Brazil and Mexico become normal social-democratic growing-economies--and, the Mexican drug war aside, they have had now good 15 years--then they will be of sufficient weight to pull the rest of Latin America in their wake, and that would be a great accomplishment.

The fear is, largely, the consequences of the failure of the neoliberal promise. The hope was that by turning to market mechanisms to attain social democratic ends then, with skillful Keynesian or Friedmanite technocratic governance and with the assistance of publicly-provided pensions, education, infrastructure, etc., the world could rapidly become much more prosperous while becoming somewhat more equal.

The reality has been that the "much" in "much more prosperous" has fallen by the wayside, and in the past five years the "more" part has vanished as well. The reality is that if the world as a whole has become more equal over the past generation it is because the peasants of China and India are no longer so desperately poor. The rest see growing global wealth, and see that if they do not belong to the plutocracy at the top they are not getting a proper share of that growing global wealth.

And the people feel betrayed.

And the people are betrayed.

Copying the United States does not look attractive to anybody in Latin America, given our rapidly-growing inequality of wealth. Copying Russia never looked attractive. Copying Cuba does not look attractive. Copy Venezuela requires that you have a lot of oil per capita--much more oil than even Brazil and Mexico can muster.

We up here at least would like a Latin America taking a somewhat different road--if only because a diversified intellectual and institutional portfolio is a very important thing for the human race to have. But it is not clear to me what that road might be. And I was hoping that you would provide an answer...

Notre Dame Public Intellectualism Conference: Mark Lilla and My Instant Reaction

Mark Lilla: Caveat Lector:

I speak as a defender of liberal democracy. But I want to be a lucid one. I don't think it can be understood or defended without recognizing two things. First, that the finance-driven economy of today is no longer your mother's capitalism, and is threatening important democratic values around the world, including in the West, even the United States; and, second, that liberal democracy is not in the future in many countries of the world, and that to understand them we need to, well, understand them and not ourselves. During the Cold War I felt that the most important function the intellectual could serve was to expose and dismantle the radical ideologies of left and right that were spawned by the French Revolution, to hold other intellectuals responsible for the consequences of their ideas. That has been accomplished. The intellectual task before us today is different. It is to think the present, the way it actually is, and try to develop a coherent, historically grounded picture of it. As Alasdair Macintyre might have put it in an earlier stage of his career, "We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another--doubtless very different--Karl Marx.

My comment on his paper:

The puzzling thing from my perspective about Mark Lilla's talk was that he blames the current troubles in Europe on (a) a lack of coherent grand-narrative ideologies and (b) the power of international financial markets.

I would blame it on the weakness of international financial markets--the inability of banks and bankers to win the trust of people and so mobilize the risk-bearing capacity of the world to bear the risks of investing in a radically-uncertain future, and the unwillingness of governments to do what is necessary--either abandon the euro or move forward to the continent-wide banking regulatory union, fiscal transfer union, and political union necessary if the market is to be properly backstopped and regulated by the state. The problem is not that international financial markets are too strong. It is that they are too weak to bear the weight that the EU's institutions have placed on them.

And they are too weak precisely because of an ideology--the sound-finance ideology: gold and hard money are good, people should pay their debts, the bankers have sinned and because they sinned Greece and Spain must suffer.

So I would call for managerialism: for public intellectuals as people able to step back and bring what concerns ordinary people and should concern those who hold power and megaphones.

For this ideology that we have is, precisely, our great-grandmother's capitalism. It is the "austerity" of Baldwin and Churchill and Coolidge and Hayek and Hoover and Mellon and MacDonald and Norman. It came a-crash in 1929. Yet, somehow, it is back. And it is coming a-crash again. Then the cost was 1933, 1939, and 1945. Now--we hope--the cost will be less. But we must make it so.

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.

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

Economic Policy: Saturday Twentieth Century Economic History Weblogging

Note well: the economy will not manage itself, at least not in a good way.

As John Maynard Keynes shrilly stated back in 1926:

Let us clear… the ground…. It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive 'natural liberty' in their economic activities. There is no 'compact' conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened… individuals… promot[ing] their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. Experience does not show that… social unit[s] are always less clear-sighted than [individuals] act[ing] separately. We [must] therefore settle… on its merits… "determin[ing] what the State ought to take upon itself to direct by the public wisdom, and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual exertion".

The management of economies by governments in the twentieth century was at best inept. And, as we have seen since 2007, little if anything has been durably learned about how to regulate the un-self-regulating market in order to maintain prosperity, or ensure opportunity, or produce substantial equality.

Productivity: Saturday Twentieth Century Economic History Weblogging

The twentieth century saw the material wealth of humankind explode beyond all previous imagining: we—at least those of us who belong to the upper middle class and live in the industrial core of the world economy—are now far richer than the writers of previous centuries’ utopias could imagine. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw, for the first time, productive capability outran population growth and natural resource scarcity. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the average inhabitant of a leading economies—a Briton, a Belgian, a Dutchman, an American, a Canadian, or an Australian—had perhaps twice the material wealth and standard of living of the typical inhabitant of a pre-industrial economy. The standards of living of the bulk of the population underwent a substantial, sustained, and unreversed rise in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for perhaps the first time in a thousand, if not in seven thousand years.

Seven Themes: Saturday Twentieth Century Economic History Weblogging

Survey history courses in 2500—if they even have universities—will have at most one single week to spend on the twentieth century. In that one single week, teachers will focus on economic, and technological, and secondarily political and social history as they try to hastily and cursorily make seven points:

(1) Twentieth-centiury history was overwhelmingly economic history: the economy was the dominant arena of events and change, and economic changes were the driving force behind other changes in a way rarely—if ever—seen before.

Would Tom Slee Be a Good Counterbalance to *Free to Choose* When Next I Teach "Principles of Economics"?: Monday Question Weblogging

• Tom Slee: No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice

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:

Tyrannies: Saturday Twentieth Century Economic History Weblogging

The twentieth century’s tyrannies were more brutal and more barbaric than those of any previous age. And—astonishingly—they had their origins in economic discontents and economic ideologies. People killed each other in large numbers over questions of how the economy should be organized, which had not been a major source of massacre in previous centuries.

Twentieth-Century governments and their soldiers have killed perhaps forty million people in war: either soldiers (most of them unlucky enough to have been drafted into the mass armies of the twentieth century) or civilians killed in the course of what could be called military operations.

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.

The Grand Narrative: Saturday Twentieth Century Economic History Weblogging

Every history tells a story of what happened: one damned thing after another. But which story do you tell?

If you are telling a story of the history of five hundred years ago, you most-likely focus on Martin Luther and Jean Calvin’s Protestant Reformation, on the Spanish conquest of the Americas, on the rise of the Shāhān-e Gūrkānī—the Moghul Empire—in the Indian subcontinent, and maybe a couple more. Those are the axes of the history of the 1500s: religion, expansion, and conquest. If you are telling a story of a thousand years ago, you most-likely focus on the rise of the Song Dynasty in China, on the waning of the golden age that was Abbasid Baghdad-centered Islamic civilization, and on, perhaps, the establishment of feudal “civilization” in western Europe. Those are the axes of the history of the 1000s: politics and culture. Other stories of other centuries would most-likely focus on the Christianization of the Roman Empire, the shift of China’s population center of gravity to the rice-growing south and and so forth. The rise, diffusion, and fall of dynasties, empires, religions, and cultures are the axes of history, with perhaps some reference to what the cultures of material subsistence in the background were and how they slowly changed.

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

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:

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...

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.

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.

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.

The Smart and Witty Michelle Goldberg Says: Sheryl Sandberg’s "Lean In" Is Reasonable, Thoughtful, and Necessary

Michelle Golberg:

The Absurd Backlash Against Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’: Columnists are mercilessly attacking Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Lean In. Michelle Goldberg says they might be surprised to find that her ideas are reasonable, thoughtful—and necessary….

“My hope is that my message will be judged on its merits,” she writes. She may have been hoping for too much…. [A] strange, sour backlash has already begun, aimed… at who Sandberg is. Joanne Bamberger, who either didn’t read Lean In or didn’t comprehend it, lumps Sandberg in with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, accusing both of launching “the latest salvo in the war on moms.”… [S]upercilious Maureen Dowd evince[s] a sudden concern for feminist authenticity…. Melissa Gira Grant, writing in The Washington Post, carps that “this is simply the elite leading the slightly-less-elite, for the sake of Sandberg’s bottom line,” which makes sense if you believe that a woman worth hundreds of millions of dollars would go into feminist publishing for the money. (Skirting feminist self-parody, Grant proceeds to complain that Sandberg fails to grapple with the struggles of domestic workers, the unemployed, people whose caretaking duties extend beyond children to aging parents as well as “close friends and extended families,” women who can’t have children, and those who are lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.)… Deanna Zandt admits that she didn’t bother trying to get a review copy of Lean In, but nonetheless claims that Sandberg’s message is “buck up, little campers. It’s a tough world, and you’ve got to be tough.”… [Thus] there’s already a lot of public misunderstanding of her book’s message. One would think she was peddling a multilevel marketing scheme, not the most overtly feminist mainstream business book ever written….

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.

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….

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":

Tom Slee: No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart, Chapter 1

Tom Slee: No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice: Chapter 1 — A World Of Choice:

We live in a world of choice.

We make choices every day. We choose the clothes we wear, the way we travel, the movies we watch, and the places we shop. From time to time we make bigger choices as well: the neighbourhoods we live in, the jobs or universities or schools we go to, and even the cultures we identify with. These choices give us a measure of control over our lives, and it seems natural to believe that individual choice is, almost by definition, a good thing.

Members of the political right have long believed in its virtues, but now individual choice has also gained a much broader appeal. Individual choice is being promoted, to different degrees, across the political spectrum as a key ingredient in the recipe for economic prosperity and political freedom.

The recipe has an appealing common-sense simplicity. First, let the people choose. Second, let suppliers compete to give us what we want. Finally, let the invisible hand of the free market provide efficiency, innovation, responsiveness, and growth.

What's more, individual choice appears to be on the side of the powerless. No one, after all, makes you eat at McDonald's, drive Ford cars, wear Nike shoes, or shop at Wal-Mart. In our role as consumers, we can choose to walk away from the sales pitches of even the largest multinational corporations. Consumers are sovereign, and multinationals are their subjects.

Ann Marie Marciarille: Up In Smoke: ObamaCare's Tobacco Surcharge

Ann Marie Marciarille:

PrawfsBlawg: Up In Smoke: [T]he ACA's much vaunted promise to end both pre-existing condition exclusions and individual underwriting of insurance risk…. There are some exceptions… use of tobacco products…. The ACA permits premiums to vary based on tobacco use by a factor of 1.5.  And the premium supports available to low income individuals are not available for the tobacco use premium band bump. 

What does this really mean for older low income tobacco users?… [I]nsurers could apply a different -- and considerably lower -- surcharge for tobacco use on younger smokers than on older smokers… could knock a substantial number of older smokers into a very familiar kind of uninsurability known as unaffordability… an un-subsidized tobacco premium surcharge of perhaps $4,000 a year…. (Of course, were you an older low income citizen intent on evading the individual mandate you could take up smoking and game yourself into the exceeds 8% of houshold income exemption for the individual mandate.)

All of this makes some actuarial sense…. All of this may not make the most public health sense, however.  If higher unsubsidized premiums are designed to discourage tobacco use, there is little doubt that shorter term tobacco users have a higher success rate at quitting. Older smokers -- say a 57 year old male -- tend to be those with a pretty hard core addiction to nicotine, an addiction intensity not evenly distributed among the smoking population.

Mourning the Death of James Buchanan

James Buchanan Is Dead.

Daniel Kuehn gets it right, I think, on the significance of the career of the late Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan:

He got a lot right, with public choice and constitutional economics. He also got a lot quite wrong, particularly his take on the political economy of the Keynesian revolution. But he certainly was a talented and productive economist well deserving of his Nobel prize.

I would go somewhat further: he got a lot right that desperately needed to be gotten right and that nobody else would have gotten right in his absence. He made a difference in economics at more than the margin, which is something you can say of very few economists.

Scott McLemee on Eugene Genovese: Changing Your Mind and Still Being Wrong

Scott McLemee:

Essay on Death of Eugene Genovese: An ancient and corny joke of the American left tells of a comrade who was surprised to learn that the German radical theorist Kautsky’s first name was Karl and not, in fact, “Renegade.”… Eavesdropping on some young Marxist academics via Facebook in the week following the historian Eugene Genovese’s death on September 26, I’ve come to suspect that there is a pamphlet out there somewhere about the Renegade Genovese…. Genovese published landmark studies like Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) and – with the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, his wife -- Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism…. The author of the most influential body of Marxist historiography in the United States from the past half-century turned into one more curmudgeon denouncing “the race, class, gender swindle.” And at a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee, no less. The scholar who did path-breaking work on the political culture of the antebellum South -- developing a Gramscian analysis of how slaves and masters understood one another… ended up referring to the events of 1861-65 as “the War of Southern Independence.” Harsher words might apply, but “renegade” will do….

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.

David Brooks, Get a Clue: Relative to Today's Republicans, Democrats Are From a Morally Superior Civilization!

Snorted out loud. RT @politico: David Brooks: Obama governs 'like a visitor from a morally superior civilization' politi.co/12YamAZ

— Lisa McIntire (@LisaMcIntire) December 30, 2012

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: