February 28, 2003
Arman Alchian Plays the Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma
K. Harris asks for a link to an extended passage I posted from William Poundstone's (1992) marvelous book Prisoners Dilemma (New York: Doubleday: 038541580X).
Here it is:
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/economists/prisoners_dilemma.html.
Warning: Professional economists will find this hilarious and thought-provoking. Others... others will probably simply find it bizarre, insane, incomprehensible, and weird. It comes from pp. 106-118 of Poundstone's book.
O Brave New World!
I don't know about you, but in the future I'm only making contracts with people with elevated oxytocin levels... Virginia Postrel writes about those who are beginning to found the subdiscipline of Neuroeconomics: Looking Inside the Brains of the Stingy.
Brad DeLong points to an article by Virginia Postrel about the nascent science of neuroeconomics. There's a lot of experimental work showing that people typically trust each other much more than homo economicus would. In standard bargaining games, where it's rational to stiff the other guy but better (in terms of your prize money) if you both trust each other for a bit, people tend to trust each other. This holds even where experimenters create exchange conditions that positively encourage you to be an asshole -- by removing face-to-face interaction, ensuring anonymity, making the games one-shot deals, and so on.
The new studies look at what happens to the brain chemistry of people playing the game. They find that people who trust show higher levels of the hormone oxytocin. In a different set of studies, the article says researchers, 'receiving low-ball offers stimulates the part of the brain associated with disgust. "They can predict with good reliability, from looking at the brain, what a person will do," said Colin F. Camerer, an economist at the California Institute of Technology. "People whose brains are showing lots of disgust will reject offers."'
There?s an interesting question here about what, exactly, is being explained here. On the one hand, people are of course unaware of their current oxytocin levels and fMRI scan patterns, so it's interesting that we can do a blood test or a brain scan and predict their choice. On the other hand, they're well aware of when they're feeling trusting or disgusted. Those feelings have some biological substrate (it's all happening inside your brain, after all) but how much does it add to say "People whose brains are showing lots of disgust will reject offers"? They're showing lots of disgust because they're disgusted.
This is the sort of levels of explanation/ reductionism/ supervenience stuff that the philosophers are good at clearing up. There's never one around when you need one.
Which led Matthew Yglesias to chime in:
Too true. I was actually supposed to have a seminar session where we were going to discuss this topic (well, an analogous one related to electric fish) on Monday, but the professor never showed up (he was jetlagged). But yeah, I would say that this bit about the fMRI is a red herring. They already knew where disgust-brain-activity took place, they already knew that lowball offers disgust people, and they already knew that disgusted people reject offers. Rephrasing this in terms of brain patterns doesn't seem to add anything.
To which I reply:
Ha! Your these-are-simply-alternative-frames-of-description ploy is futile! Yes, this is what you say now. But what will you say But what will you say in the future, when the dean's special assistant says, "Time for your oxytocin shots Mr. Healy, Mr. Yglesias" just before you go in to hear her decision on your next year's salaries?
Why Nobody Should Listen to Martin Anderson
I read this morning that ABC News's "The Note" is giving Martin Anderson space to trash Greg Mankiw: "Martin Anderson... complain[s] of [Mankiw's Textbook], '"It's stupid; it's simply not what a good economist writes."'
About a decade ago I took a look at Martin Anderson's writings, and found them very, very unimpressive: in the bottom quintile of Republican hack-work, in fact. One of our big problems is that most economic journalists are very bad at figuring out when they are giving space to a charlatan or a crank: a friendly manner, a willingness to return calls, and a willingness to say exciting things get you quoted many, many more times than actually knowing what you are talking about. Greg Mankiw is a very, very good economist indeed. Martin Anderson is a Republican hack. For Anderson to say that Greg is not a good economist is the silliest thing I've read this week.
Here's a draft from the files giving reasons for my view of Anderson:
June 17, 1993
MEMORANDUM FOR ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY ALICIA MUNNELL
From: J. Bradford DeLong, Deputy Assistant Secretary
Subject: Origin of the Deficit: "Presidential" or "Congressional"?
SUMMARY: The overwhelming proportion of the deficits of the last decade [i.e., the 1980s] were already proposed in President Reagan's and President Bush's original budget submission. There was no explosion of federal spending over and above what the presidents had asked for. More than four-fifths of the 1980s deficits were "presidential." Less than one-fifth were "congressional."
DISCUSSION: For ten years the United States government has run annual budget deficits of more than two-hundred billion dollars a year. These deficits have placed a substantial burden on and slowed the growth of the American economy: had the budget been balanced over the past twelve years, and had the money that the government has borrowed to finance the deficit instead been invested in the United States, average American workers would have seen their incomes grow faster over the past decade, and their incomes would now be higher by an extra $3,000 or so.
If you listen to Republicans, you might think that the Republican administrations of the past twelve years have played little role in the deficit. They claim that high deficits exist because Congressional Democrats have spent the past decade funding new programs and busting agreed-upon spending limitations. A typical version of this claim comes from former Reagan staffer Martin Anderson, who writes:
[W]e don’t [have a balanced budget] because those with the real power to decide… have consciously and deliberately decided to unbalance the federal budget.…[T]he real culprit in federal spending is the Congress.…The president may propose the… budget…but it is the Congress that disposes.…Time and time again [the] president…sent budgets to the U.S. Congress to limit and control federal spending. Time and time again, the Congress has rebuffed those plans, and substituted levels of spending they, and they alone, considered appropriate...
In the world Anderson lives in, sober and realistic executive-branch Republicans who send realistic budgets to Capitol Hill are powerless in the face of a Congress that knows no restraint:
Under current arrangements, the president must submit his budget proposals to the Congress, which can then add or delete as it wishes. What it deletes cannot be put back by the president, but deletions are rare these days. The Congress is much better at adding…
Are Martin Anderson and company telling the truth? No.
To see that Anderson's claims are false, compare the cost of the spending plan first proposed by the president in his annual budget submission to the actual level of spending from the appropriations bills that Congress actually passes. Assign to congress this part of the deficit--this "congressional" deficit. The remainder--the difference between tax revenues and the spending level the president had proposed in his budget submission--is the "presidential" deficit. Figure 1 shows both the actual deficit and this "presidential" deficit. Both are scaled by the total size of the economy: they are measured as percentages of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)--the market value of all goods and services produced within America’s boundaries.
Figure 1: "Presidential" and Total Deficits as Shares of GDP 
In figure 1 the "presidential" and actual deficits are almost the same. Had the Congress been a rubber stamp and taken no action to change the president’s budget at all, the 1982–91 years would have seen total budget deficits more than ninety percent as large as actual deficits. Figure 1 shows us that the federal government has not run large budget deficits over the past decade because "Congress…rebuffed" presidential plans to control federal spending. Instead, the large deficits have been there from the beginning in presidential spending plans.
Figure 2: "Presidential," "Congressional," and "S&L" Deficits as Shares of GDP 
A different view of the same underlying numbers—a view that leads to the same conclusions—is to graph the "presidential" deficit not against the actual deficit but against the "congressional" and "S & L bailout" deficits. Define the "legislative" deficit to be the difference between the actual level of spending carried out and the level proposed by the president. And define the "S & L bailout" deficit to be the cost of S & L bailout activities. Figure 2 shows that the other two components of the deficit are small relative to the "presidential" component. The "presidential" component varies between two and a half and six percent of GDP. After 1981, the "congressional" deficit never reaches even one percent.
Either way, the conclusion is the same: the U.S. has had large budget deficits over the past decade not because Congress has rejected presidential spending restrictions, but because large budget deficits have been implicit in every single year’s presidential spending plan. Congress has largely played a passive role: delivering by and large the level of spending that the president proposed.
You can fault Congress in the 1980s for many things—for playing this passive role, and playing along with the executive branch. But you cannot fault Congress for creating the deficit: it has not added program after expensive program to fiscally-responsible executive branch proposals, but almost exclusively confined its activities to swapping spending from one category to another.
Originally posted as http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000432.html.
Would Ezra Pound Have Been a Better Poet If He Had Taken Ec 10 From Marty Feldstein?
Would Ezra Pound have been a better poet if he had taken Ec 10 from Marty Feldstein? Daniel Davies appears to answer this question with a "yes," as he turns his attention to critiquing Pound's Canto XLV for Pound's failure to include an appropriate general-equilibrium model in his stanzas.
D-squared Digest -- A fat young man without a good word for anyone: If you aren't able to charge rates of interest which compensate you for the risk you're taking, then as a lender, you're only going to do business with people familiar to you, which means that the typical working man is not going to find anyone who is prepared to lend to him. This means that the working class is denied one of the principle luxuries of the capitalist class; the ability to make decisions about the timing of purchases of goods independently of the fixed timing of the arrival of one's income. And it turns out that this is a very valuable advantage to enjoy. Usury has been very good in this regard. Pound is possibly in this passage and in the "bread made of good flour", thinking of the obvious association between predatory lending practices and poverty, but it seems to me that if he is, he has confused cause and effect here. Loan sharks seek out poor neighbourhoods; they don't create them, and the fact that extremely poor people are nevertheless prepared to pay extortionate prices for the ability to move consumption around in time just confirms what a great thing it is to have access to debt.
This is a topic I'll come back to lower down, and a genuine weakness of a lot of economic commentary, including Pound's; a fixation on "finance capital" without putting it in the context of a capitalist economy. If you believe that poor people are poor because the system exploits them, then you need to blame the system, not the particular exploiters. George Orwell saw a similar tendency in Dickens; the belief that the only thing wrong with Victorian capitalism was that some employers were cruel people, and if they only changed their hearts, happiness would be universal. Similarly, there is a tendency to believe that if you remove the loan-sharks from a slum, the slum-dwellers will be richer to the tune of their weekly interest bill, and this is poor general equilibrium analysis. If part of the cost of living in a slum is that you end up paying 10% of your wages to the money-lenders, then the wages of the slum-dwellers will reflect that; otherwise, the workers wouldn't be receiving a subsistence wage and there soon wouldn't be any workers. If you take away the loan sharks, then the most likely outcome is that the slum-dwellers get used to a life without credit, and over time, wages in the slum get bid down 10%. But as I say, this fixation on the "contra naturam" nature of money-lending as distinct from other forms of capitalist enterprise is part of a general deficiency in the economic school which Pound followed...
I agree. Perhaps the biggest true bill of indictment that can be laid at the feet of economists is that we have done such a bad job in getting our powerful vocabulary of concepts--opportunity cost, market equilibrium, general equilibrium--into the mainstream of literate discourse.
D^2 says a number of other interesting things, also worth reading, as well...
I was, however, disappointed in one thing. He seemed to be on the verge of covering the Philosophical Cage Match between Voltaire (one of those who thinks that market society make people friendlier and more sociable) and Pound (who thinks that market society makes people crabbed, passionless, and unfeeling). I'm on the side of Voltaire (most of the time). But just before the Match was about to begin D^2 appears to have tripped over the cord and cut the mike...
February 27, 2003
Excuse Me, What's Your Oxytocin Level Today?
I don't know about you, but in the future I'm only making contracts with people with elevated oxytocin levels...
Virginia Postrel writes about those who are beginning to found the subdiscipline of Neuroeconomics:
Looking Inside the Brains of the Stingy: ...Professor Zak and his colleagues study trust with a variation of the ultimatum game. Each player receives $10. Player 1 gets an additional $10. Players interact anonymously over computers. Player 1 can send any whole-dollar amount to Player 2. Whatever he sends is tripled, so a $5 gift turns into $15. Finally, Player 2 can return some of the money to Player 1.
If Player 1 expects Player 2 not to send any money in return, Player 1 will keep the initial stake. That's the game's standard equilibrium.
"In fact," Professor Zak said, "most people send about half of their stake to Player 2. They're signaling that they want to trust them." In response, about 75 percent of the Player 2's return some money, making both better off.
"Even though we can't see each other and we don't know each other, we understand the other person as a human being," Professor Zak said. Extrapolating from animal results, he hypothesized that the hormone oxytocin, which is associated with social bonding, might play a role.
"When you read the studies on lower mammals," he said, "everything suggests that this is a candidate to induce trustworthiness because it's something that you would not consciously be aware of and yet it would influence decision making."
Researchers tested each subject's blood for eight different hormones right after the person made the decision about whether to send money. For Player 1, no hormone appeared to make a difference. But the more money the Player 2's received, the higher their oxytocin, even after controlling for factors like age, sex and menstrual cycle timing. The higher the oxytocin, the more money each Player 2 returned.
That response didn't correlate with various personality measures. "It's not that these people who returned more money are just nicer," Professor Zak said.
February 27, 2003
Looking Inside the Brains of the Stingy
ERE's a game economists play: Player 1 has $10 and can give any dollar amount to Player 2. Player 2 can either accept or reject it. If Player 2 accepts, they both keep the money. If Player 2 rejects it, neither player gets anything.
What should the players do? Arguably, Player 2 should accept whatever is offered, since some money is better than none. Player 1 should thus offer as little as possible: $1. That strategy is the standard game-theory equilibrium.
But that's not necessarily what happens when real people play this "ultimatum game" in laboratory settings with real money on the line. Faced with low-ball offers, many Player 2's reject them. And many Player 1's make more generous offers, often nearly half the money.
"About half the subjects that we observed played according to the way the game theory said people should play, and about half didn't," said Kevin McCabe, an economist and director of the Behavioral and Neuroeconomics Laboratory at George Mason University.
The Player 1's who do not follow the presumably rational strategy often wind up better off. Even without communicating with fellow players, they are able to cooperate for mutual benefit.
Why do people react differently to the same situation? And why do so many people give up money to punish anonymous cheapskates?
Experimental economists have mapped out these anomalies and tested how much they affect economic interactions. Now a new field, called neuroeconomics, is using the tools of neuroscience to find the underlying biological mechanisms that lead people to act, or not act, according to economic theory.
In neuroeconomics, volunteers go through exercises developed by experimental economists studying trust or risk. Instead of simply observing subjects' behavior, however, researchers use imaging technologies, like M.R.I.'s, to see which brain areas are active during the experiment.
Researchers at Princeton, for instance, have found that receiving low-ball offers stimulates the part of the brain associated with disgust. "They can predict with good reliability, from looking at the brain, what a person will do," said Colin F. Camerer, an economist at the California Institute of Technology. "People whose brains are showing lots of disgust will reject offers."
Professor Camerer says looking inside the brain's "black box" is like looking inside a company. Traditionally, economists treated a company as a largely automatic "production function" that turns labor, capital and resources into output. Over the last several decades, however, many economists have turned their attention to understanding companies' internal workings. Most prominently, "agency theory" examines how companies can be governed to encourage employees (the "agents") to pursue the goals of the owners, rather than their personal agendas.
This research hasn't replaced the production-function approach, but it has enriched economists' understanding of company behavior. Neuroeconomists want to do something similar for how individuals make economic choices.
"Neuroeconomics could be to consumer theory what agency theory is to the production-function approach," Professor Camerer said.
While many economists remain skeptical, neuroscientists have welcomed the interest.
"Anyone working with the brain likes this approach because economists have these nicely defined behavioral models," said Paul Zak, an economist and director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University.
Neuroscientists do experiments like looking at which parts of the brain are active when someone looks at photographs and decides which faces are trustworthy. Neuroeconomists don't just ask people to use their imaginations, though ? they have subjects play laboratory games to find out what happens in real interactions.
Professor Zak and his colleagues study trust with a variation of the ultimatum game. Each player receives $10. Player 1 gets an additional $10. Players interact anonymously over computers. Player 1 can send any whole-dollar amount to Player 2. Whatever he sends is tripled, so a $5 gift turns into $15. Finally, Player 2 can return some of the money to Player 1.
If Player 1 expects Player 2 not to send any money in return, Player 1 will keep the initial stake. That's the game's standard equilibrium.
"In fact," Professor Zak said, "most people send about half of their stake to Player 2. They're signaling that they want to trust them." In response, about 75 percent of the Player 2's return some money, making both better off.
"Even though we can't see each other and we don't know each other, we understand the other person as a human being," Professor Zak said. Extrapolating from animal results, he hypothesized that the hormone oxytocin, which is associated with social bonding, might play a role.
"When you read the studies on lower mammals," he said, "everything suggests that this is a candidate to induce trustworthiness because it's something that you would not consciously be aware of and yet it would influence decision making."
Researchers tested each subject's blood for eight different hormones right after the person made the decision about whether to send money. For Player 1, no hormone appeared to make a difference. But the more money the Player 2's received, the higher their oxytocin, even after controlling for factors like age, sex and menstrual cycle timing. The higher the oxytocin, the more money each Player 2 returned.
That response didn't correlate with various personality measures. "It's not that these people who returned more money are just nicer," Professor Zak said.
Neuroeconomists caution that their research is just starting. But that does not reduce their enthusiasm.
"For me, it's just an extremely exciting area in terms of potential," Professor McCabe said. "There's always new findings every day."
February 26, 2003
The Decline in the Art of Political Invective
I'm reading Procopius's Secret History of Byzantium, and thinking how far the art of political invective has declined since the sixth century. Mind you, someone like Andrew Sullivan on Bill Clinton at least gets the ball in the ballpark, but there is nothing to match, say:
Well, then, this emperor was dissembling, two-faced; a clever fellow with a marvellous ability to conceal his real opinion, and able to shed tears, not from any joy or sorrow, but employing them artfully when required in accordance with the immediate need, lying all the time; not carelessly, however, but confirming his undertakings both with his signature and with the most fearsome oaths, even when dealing with his own subjects. But he promptly disregarded both agreements and solemn pledges, like the most contemptible slaves, who by fear of the tortures hanging over them are driven to confess misdeeds they have denied on oath. A treacherous friend and an inexorable enemy, he was passionately devoted to murder and plunder; quarrelsome and subversive in the extreme; easily led astray into evil ways but refusing every suggestion that he should follow the right path; quick to devise vile schemes and to carry them out; and with an instinctive aversion to the mere mention of anything good. How could anyone find words to describe Justinian's character? These vices and many yet greater he clearly possessed to an inhuman degree; it seemed as if nature had removed every tendency to evil from the rest of mankind and deposited it in the soul of this man...
Swords Don't Kill People! Novels Kill People! Department
Mark Kleiman, a professor supported in high style by the hard-working taxpayers of Orange County, has been reading the kind of violent-youth-subculture glorifying novel that right-thinking people like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney see as a large part of the permissive-decadent destructive culture imposed on us by a liberal elite that is responsible for so many of the ills of America today. Shame on him! Shame! Shame!
Mark A. R. Kleiman: Just finished reading (re-reading, actually) a book about a young man who starts out in life with almost no money, no job or job-relevant education, a deadly weapon, and a determination that anyone who fails to treat him with what he considers proper respect will pay for it in blood. Eager to achieve membership in one of the two gangs of armed thugs who between them terrorize the peaceful citizens of a great city, he challenges three of its respected members to fight to the death. When their affray is interrupted by members of the rival gang, he joins with the three he was about to fight, and together they kill one of their assailants and leave three others seriously wounded. That makes the four of them inseparable friends from then on.
The rest of the book is largely a description of their cheerful conversation and their murderous and erotic exploits. Eschewing any actual work as socially degrading, the protagonist and his three friends live mainly off the money they get from various lady-loves. The story ends with the ritualized killing of the former wife of one of the four (who, in the narrative past of the book, had already strangled her and left her for dead but apparently had failed to complete the job) in revenge for her having poisoned the young protagonistÂ?s favorite among his girlfriends (who is also the wife of his landlord).
As a measure of how far moral degradation can go, the author presents the four central characters as charming, brave, and admired, encouraging the reader to identify with them without at all concealing the reality of their mercenary promiscuity and their commitment to violence as a way of life. I expect William Bennett to have a word or two to say to the author, whose delicate ear for dialogue and superb narrative gifts cannot conceal the ethical rottenness that lies at the heart of The Three Musketeers. I suppose we should have expected nothing better from the ancestor of cheese-eating surrender monkeys, but M. Dumas should be ashamed of himself.
Yes, that was supposed to be a joke; I actually admire The Three Musketeers extravagantly as political fiction, and Dumas's trick of making the Cardinal the actual hero of the book (check out his last scene with D'Artagnan) while convincing juvenile readers of all ages that he's the bad guy is really pretty impressive. (Shakespeare does the opposite trick -- much better, of course -- in Henry V, but I always admire that particular form of irony when someone brings it off.) But it is astonishing to recall an age when it was rich -- or at least nobly-born -- adolescents and young adults who made a lifestyle out of killing one another over minor affronts. Any theory that derives violence directly from deprivation needs to take that phenomenon into account.
Notes: Weber (Steve, Not Max): The Success of Open Source
I've been reading Steven Weber's forthcoming Harvard University Press book, The Success of Open Source. He has a great deal of very interesting things to say, and I have not yet managed to wrap my mind around and synthesize all of them:
Steven Weber: The Success of Open Source: "People often see in the open source software movement the politics that they would lke to see -- a libertarian reverie, a perfect meritocracy, a utopian 'gift culture' that celebrates an economics of abundance instead of scarcity, a 'virtual' or electronic existence proof of communitarian ideals, a political movement aimed at replacing obsolete 19th century capitalist structures with new 'relations of production' more suited to the information age." "No one says that hierarchical coordination is efficient, only that it is less inefficient than alternatives."
The problems of:
- Motivation: Why do highly-talented programmers voluntary allocate some or a substantial portion of their time and mind-space to a joint project for which they will not be compensated?: "Humans often have a passionate relationship with their creations and their work, humans wish to share, humans find 'value' in rewards other than money. Each of these attitudes exists within open source, as each exists everywhere. The rapid introduction into human affairs of extensive telecom bandwidth does not change everything, but it does change some very important things about constraints and opportunities. It takes a huge amount of 'charisma' to support open-source-like endeavors without the bandwidth (indeed, young religions are perhaps the only durable example). It takes only a small amount of 'charisma' to support open source with high telecom bandwidth, where charismatic-follower motivations are blended with the joy of doing something useful, the status of contributing something valuable to a community, and the reputational benefits of being able to say 'I rewrote that'"
- Coordination: How and why do these individuals coordinate their contributions on a single 'focal point'? "Analyzing open source software through the lens of collective action begins to look subtly misleading. Linux now appears less like a complicated collective action problem, than a complicated coordination problem. Contributions to innovation are not problematic in this setting. The more important challenge is to coordinate those contributions on a focal point, so that what emerges is technically useful.... The open source community has developed a set of cultural norms that support this logic of incentives. A prevalent norm assigns decision-making authority within the community. The key element of this norm is that authority follows and derives from responsibility. The more an individual contributes to a project and takes responsibility for pieces of software, the more decision-making authority that individual is granted.... The Open Source Initiative codified this cultural frame by establishing a clear priority for pragmatic technical excellence.... A cultural frame based in engineering principles (not anti-commercial ideology) and focused on high reliability and high performance products gained much wider traction within the developer community. It also underscored the rationality of technical decisions driven at least in part by the need to sustain successful collaboration -- hence legitimating concerns about 'maintainability' of code, 'clean-ness' of interfaces, clear and distinct modularity. The clear mastery of technical rationality in this setting is made clear in the creed that developers say they rely on --- 'let the code decide'.... Torvalds does, in fact, have many characteristics of a charismatic leader in the Weberian sense. Importantly, he provides a convincing example of how to manage the potential for ego-driven conflicts among very smart developers.... Torvalds... continues to invest huge effort in maintaining his reputation as a fair, capable, and thoughtful manager. It is striking how much effort Torvalds puts into justifying to the community his decisions about Linux, and documenting the reasons for decisions -- in the language of technical rationality that is currency for this community.... There do exist sanctioning mechanisms to support the nexus of incentives, cultural norms, and leadership roles that maintain coordination.... Shunning is the more functionally important sanction. To shun someone -- refusing to cooperate with them after they have broken a norm -- cuts them off from the benefits that the community offers.... The threat is to be left on your own to solve problems, while the community can and does draw on its collective experience and knowledge to do the same. This is clearly a strong disincentive to strategic forking..."
- Complexity: Brooks's Law: in software program lines written scale linearly with the number of programmers, while complexity and vulnerability to mistakes scale geometrically. How does open source avoid falling into the trap of Brooks's Law, and the resulting dynamic toward more and more hierarchical forms of organization? "Linux has overwhelmed BSD Unix, absorbed its key ideas, and attracted much of the brain power that was going into it. Linux is taking away market share from commercial versions of Unix.... Standard arguments in organization theory predict that increasing complexity in a division of labor leads to formal organizational structures.... [But] formal organizational structures are radically undermined by technologies that reduce the costs of communication and transactions. Both of these arguments have a point.... Clearly, the Internet decreases or removes the costs of geographically widespread and time-dependent collaboration. But it does not remove other costs of collaboration -- decision making, human emotion and ego, etc. These need to be managed by other means.... Managing complexity... depends on characteristics of the software itself, and characteristics of the social/political structure that embeds it. The key to managing the level of complexity within the software itself, is modular design.... It is notable that one of the major improvements in Linux release 2.0 was moving from a monolithic kernel to one made up on independently loadable modules. The advantage, according to Torvalds, was that "programmers could work on different modules without risk of interference… managing people and managing code led to the same design decision. To keep the number of people working on Linux coordinated, we needed something like kernel modules." Torvalds' point is simple: these engineering principles are important because they reduce organizational demands on the social/political structure. In no case, however, are those demands reduced to zero. Libertarian and self-organization accounts of open source software are frankly naïve. The formal organization of authority is quite structured for larger open source projects. Torvalds, as I explained, sits atop a decision pyramid as a de facto benevolent dictator. Apache is governed by a committee..."
"If altruism were the primary driving force behind open source software, no one would care very much about who was credited for particular contributions or who was able to license what code under what conditions.... The macro-logic of open source does not reduce to an aggregation of the motivations of the individuals who participate.... This is not a self-organizing system.... Lerner and Tirole in "The Simple Economics of Open Source" make what is probably the most forceful microfoundational argument.... The immediate benefits are simply private benefits: creating a fix for the specific problem....
"Open source modifies the cost-benefit analysis in two ways. First, the 'alumni effect' tends to lower the cost for working on open source.... Second, there are 'delayed' benefits that together make up a strong 'signaling incentive'..... With open source, a software user can see not only how well a program performs. She can also look to see how clever and elegant is the underlying code -- a much more fine-grained measure of the quality of the programmer. And since no one is forcing anyone to work on any particular problem in open source, the performance can be assumed to represent a voluntary act on the part of the programmer, which makes it all that much more informative about that programmer.... Because online communities live in a situation of abundance not scarcity, they are apt to develop "gift cultures" where social status depends on what you give away, rather than what you control....
"What, exactly, is the nature of abundance in this setting?... The time and brainspace of smart, creative people are not abundant. They are scarce.... The question of who owns what in this setting is critical to determining the things that actually matter about ownership in the open source economy: who has the right to make decisions about which pieces of code are included in public distributions, who gets credited for what work, and who can make a legitimate choice, sanctioned by the community, to 'fork' the code and claim to be 'the' product....
"Lockean property theory says that there are three ways to acquire ownership of land. You can homestead on a piece of frontier territory that has never had an owner. Or you can receive title from a previous owner. Last, if title is lost or abandoned, you can claim it through adverse possession by moving onto the land and improving it. The resemblance is uncanny. And it may be that the descriptive economics behind it are quite simple: property customs like these can arise in settings where property is valuable, there is no authoritative allocation, and the expected returns from the resource exceed the expected cost of defending it..."
"Rishab Aiyer Ghosh takes an important step.... [H]e tells a story about collective action where one person puts in a chicken, someone else puts in carrots, another person puts in some onions…and everyone can take out delicious stew. Nonexcludability is an issue because if anyone can take bowls of stew out of the pot without necessarily putting anything in, there might be nothing left for those who did contribute and thus they are unlikely to put anything in in the first place. But what if the cooking pot was magically non-rival -- if production of stew simply surged to meet consumption without any additional expenditure of effort? Then everyone knows that there will always be stew in the pot and that even if people who don't put anything in take some out, there will still be plenty left for those who did contribute. In this setting an individual faces a different calculus: "you never lose from letting your product free in the cooking pot, as long as you are compensated for its creation." The Internet makes a digital product like software 'magically' non-rival. Because a digital product can be copied an infinite number of times at no cost, this is a cooking pot that creates as many bowls of stew as there is demand.
"Given that, how are you going to be compensated for creating your product? In the digital environment this too is nearly straightforward although slightly more subtle. When I put my product into the cooking pot, I am giving away in effect a thousand or a million or really an infinite number of copies of that product. However, in my private utility calculations, multiple copies of this single product are not very valuable -- in fact the marginal utility of an additional copy to me is de facto zero. But single copies of multiple products are, to me or any other single user, immensely valuable. In practice, then, I am giving away a million copies of something, for at least one copy of at least one other thing. That is a good trade and clearly a utility enhancing one for anyone who makes it. As Ghosh puts it, "if a sufficient number of people put in free goods, the cooking pot clones them for everyone, so that everyone gets far more value than was put in."
"The problem with Ghosh's argument is that it does not explain the 'trade'.... It is still a narrowly rational act for any single individual to take from the pot without contributing -- and free ride on the contributions of others.... I believe the solution to this puzzle lies in pushing the concept of non-rivalness one step further. Software in some circumstances is more than simply non-rival. Operating systems like Linux in particular, and most software in general, are actually subject to positive network externalities. Call it a network good, or an anti-rival good (an awkward but nicely descriptive term). What I mean by this is that the value of a piece of software to any particular user increases, as more people download and use the same software on their machines. Compatibility in the standard sense of a network good is one reason why this is so.... Open source software makes an additional and very important use of network externalities, in debugging....
"The point is that open source software is not simply a non-rival good in the sense that it can tolerate free riding without reducing the stock of good for contributors. It is actually anti-rival in the sense that the system positively benefits from free riders. Some small percentage of free riders will provide something of value to the system, even if it is just reporting a bug out of frustration. The more free riders in this setting, the better. This argument holds only if there are a sufficient number of individuals who do not free ride -- in other words, a 'core' group that contributes to the creation of the good. We have already seen a set of motivations and incentives that taken together in different proportions for different individuals might inspire their active contributions."
Synchronicity on the Consumption Tax
Synchronicity:
Today Vaguely Right writes: According to Bruce Bartlett:
a) "Liberals are opposing [the move from income taxation to consumption taxation] because it would benefit the rich too much."Yesterday, I had the following conversation:
Him: "All this talk of the consumption tax seems to be just another way to justify not taxing the rich. Aren't there already enough ways to not tax the rich in this world?"
Me: "Yes, a consumption tax is another ideological justification for not taxing the rich. But this reason for not taxing the rich does have desirable long-run efficiency properties...
Not Vaguely Right: Exactly Right
One of those moments at which Vaguely Right is exactly right and totally correct:
Vaguely Right * In the spirit of Shorter Steven Den Beste
Vaguely Right Blog presents...
Shorter Everyone:
- I am annoyed and/or bewildered by people who think differently than I do.
Don't These People Watch Any Movies?
Don't these people watch any movies? They should know that this kind of thing never turns out well in the end. Yes, as CNN reports, today the German scientists are only training octopuses to open jars of shrimp. But we already know what is going to happen in the third reel...
CNN.com - Octopus gets in a twist over shrimp - Feb. 24, 2003: MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) --An octopus in a German zoo has learned to open jars of shrimp by watching zoo attendants perform the act underwater.
Frida, a five-month-old female octopus, opens the jars by pressing her body on the lid and grasping the sides with the suckers on her eight tentacles. With a succession of body twists she unscrews the lid.
"Depending on how tight the lid is, it takes her anything from 10 seconds to an hour to get it off," said Frank Mueller, head of the aquarium at the Hellabrunn Zoo. Frida opens shrimp jars before the public at feeding time twice a week.
Mueller said he taught Frida the trick after he remembered seeing octopuses showing remarkable dexterity off the coast of Morocco, where he went diving when he was younger. Frida was imported from Morocco.
"We just did it in the tank a few times and eventually she cottoned on," he said. "You won't see any other marine creatures do this. She's been at it about a month now."
The MinuteMan Has (Abbreviated) Thoughts on Al Sharpton
The MinuteMan presents a very abbreviated version of his views on Al Sharpton--"abbreviated" because his hard disk lunched the full version (or maybe the dog ate it: I forget).
Just One Minute: So, soundbite - if the Dems deal with Sharpton by attacking and marginalizing him, he will remember in November, and to repay he will stay away. Just let him be one more candidate, encourage him to run as a mainstream anti-war lefty, and things will be fine. Well, if not "fine", then tolerable. Force Al to gain relevance by appealing to the radical elements of his base, and Al will raise issues that the Democrats find hopelessly troublesome and divisive. Do we really want to hear each Democratic candidate take a position on slavery reparations before a national television audience? Actually, I do, but only because not since "Your Show of Shows" will we have seen so much live comedy and tap-dancing on TV. Also, because I have an evil heart...
The problem with treating Sharpton as just one more anti-war lefty is that that is not who he is, and legitimating him gives something I find quite scary a potential power base inside the Democratic Party. That cannot be good...
Our Idiot Ottoman Sultan Problem
After the death in the sixteenth century of Suleiman the Lawgiver, the Ottoman Empire went rapidly downhill. One cause was the... peculiar system by which the subsequent Sultans were chosen and trained. It became apparent to ruling Sultans that to allow more than a single one of one's sons to gain experience as a provincial governor or an army commander led to disaster: each son would desperately try to build a faction of clients and soldiers, and each Sultan's death would be followed by a brutal and destructive civil war (if, that is, the sons did not preempt and start the civil war before their father's death. So the sons of the Sultan were kept inside the palace all their life. However, the eldest-son principle being weak, all that did was shift the struggle from outside to inside the palace. Each son (and his mother) would wage a war of intrigue against the others, trying hard to assemble a sufficient coalition to support his accession to the Sultanate when the time came. On the death of one Sultan, all but one of his sons would be executed. Only the one son who had the support of enough clerics, bureaucrats, and--most important--janissary officers would survive, and would become Sultan.
Needless to say, to have spent your childhood and youth trapped in a very large palace preparing for the day when you and your faction could kill all your whole siblings, half-siblings, and their mothers, other kin, and supporters did not prepare Sultans-to-be to rule an empire that extended from Budapest to Basra.
After the death in the twentieth century of John F. Kennedy, the American Empire... did not go downhill. There is, as Adam Smith said, "much ruin in a nation." And we are immensely strong. But we have evolved a... peculiar system by which our Presidents are selected and trained. It has become apparent that Washington experience is the kiss of death for anyone who wants to be President. Of all our Presidents elected since 1972, only once--George H.W. Bush's accession to the throne of Ronald Reagan--has a candidate who has previously spent any time at all in Washington been elected. You see, to spend time in Washington is to have to make choices about national political issues. And to make choices is to make enemies. And enemies have long memories.
It is much, much better to have spent one's previous political career completely outside Washington. Then each national-political faction can imagine that you have their interests at heart (especially because you will make friendly noises to them). They will project their hopes onto the blank screen which is their lack of knowledge about what went on back in your home state. And so you can assemble a large enough coalition to win the party nomination and then the presidency. Since 1972, to be an unknown governor--usually southern--is the way to become an American President.
This is not a partisan point: it applies to Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton as well as to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. In all four cases America--American voters, the American press corps, and other American politicians--had virtually no clue about what they were voting for. All of these Presidents turned out to have extraordinary weaknesses--weaknesses that, had they been widely known before their election, would certainly have disqualified them from serious consideration for the office. Some have turned out to have remarkable and unexpected strengths as well: either dumb luck, or evidence that Divine Providence really does safeguard the destinies of fools, children, and the United States of America.
Moreover, all of these Presidents have come into office drastically underbriefed. They not only don't know what they think of the big policy issues, they barely know what the big policy issues are: they've been governors, not senators, committee chairs, or cabinet secretaries, and the issues that state governments deal with have relatively little overlap with those that the federal government has to deal with. Moreover, the unknown governors whom we elect President these days have a very hard time getting up to speed: they're overscheduled politicians with their days overfilled with ceremonies, meetings, fund-raising trips, state visits, and so on. Only one of the four unknown governors--Bill Clinton--ever got up to speed enough to make the administration his administration following his policies, and even then not until three or so years had passed. (Ronald Reagan might have been able to get up to speed--but I think that by halfway through his first term he was already being hobbled by the early effects of his Alzheimer's Disease.)
So what, then, does a modern President do? He does what an underbriefed and underqualified Ottoman Sultan did. He picks a Grand Vizier (or several Viziers for different issue areas). He picks a Vizier whom he, personally, trusts--not a competent one, or a generally trustworthy one, or a brilliant one. And if he chooses well, things work. If not, things don't. Bill Clinton chooses the less-than competent Ira Magaziner as Vizier for Health Policy. Ira proceeds to mislead the President (and himself) about the likely degree of support for comprehensive health-care reform from the Congress, the interest groups, and the media. Things go badly indeed. Bill Clinton chooses the very, very competetent Bob Rubin to be Vizier for Economic Affairs. Things go well.
Policy becomes a byzantine struggle between high federal officials for the President's ear and confidence. Master of Soldiers for the East Zbigniew Brzezinski conducts a war of character assassination against Minister for Barbarian Affairs Cyrus Vance, and U.S. foreign policy wavers erratically and inconsistently as first one and then the other is shown Jimmy Carter's favor. Good Vizier Colin Powell establishes his dominance and wins the trust of the Sultan, and people sleep more easily for a while. Master of the Treasury David Stockman tries to convince Ronald Reagan that balancing the budget should be priority number one, but loses influence as it is revealed that he has been talking too openly with Atlantic Monthly reporters, and the chance to keep the exploding federal budget from becoming a severe drag on the economy is lost.
Now things aren't, in the grand historical perspective, all that bad. George W. Bush's erratic business career followed by six years as Governor of Texas made him much better prepared to be President than Selim the Sot was prepared to be Sultan. The penalty for losing the struggle for the Sultan's ear in the Topkapi Palace was death. the penalty for losing the struggle for the President's ear in the West Wing is to be invited to spend more time with one's family. In the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires a major mode of politics was assassination. In turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Washington the major mode of internal executive-branch politics is character assassination.
Nevertheless, there is a sense in which American politics since 1976 (save for the Reagan-Bush transition of 1989) has had a distinct Byzantine or Degenerate-Ottoman flavor. A new Sultan takes office. He is an unknown quantity: he has never dealt with these issues before, he has little experience with government on this scale, even his preferences and ideological beliefs are unknown, having been largely hidden from view by the necessities of the campaign. He picks his initial Grand Viziers. Other competing Vizier-candidates are jealous, and work to undermine them. The Viziers in favor flatter the Sultan, and try to strengthen their hold over him. Disasters happen. The Sultan's temper flares. A coterie around the Sultan decides that somebody has to go, and policy shifts as a new Vizier takes the reins...
We can do better. We ought to do better. We need to find some way to elect known, respected politicians with serious Washington experience--rather than unknown, underbriefed, and underqualified governors--to the Presidency.
February 25, 2003
Power Struggle in the Degenerate Ottoman Sultanate II
As merchants and passers-by in Old Constantinople would hear screams and thuds from the Topkapi Palace, so we read in our media faint echoes of a struggle inside the White House over which economic policy faction will gain the ear of our underbriefed President.
Past echoes of the screams and thuds have come from International Economy, the Wall Street Journal, Robert Novak, Business Week, and others. Today's echoes come from the G-7 Group's (very valuable, although usually much less entertaining) daily email:
US Fed : Whither Greenspan?
We can't help but wade into the debate over Alan Greenspan's imminent demise. It isn't happening. Bloomberg, Business Week, and Robert Novak have each contributed to a cyclone of speculation about whether President Bush will fire Greenspan. He won't. Sure, some administration insiders are angry that he didn't find a better way to couch his longstanding opposition to deficits in a way that might sound less critical of the reduced taxes paid on dividends that Greenspan supports in principle. But that isn't grounds for dismissal.
And what about this speculation that Council of Economic Advisers chief Glenn Hubbard is about to ascend the throne? We don't think so. Hubbard, who came to the administration with lots of promise, squandered a good deal of it by working to undermine then Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, National Economic Council adviser Larry Lindsey and others like Undersecretary John Taylor and NSC advisor Gary Edson. You can't alienate that many people and still have the confidence of the overall Treasury. So Hubbard has been threatening to return to Colombia University, from whence he came. We don't see him getting the deputy Treasury slot that he so desires, never mind the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve.
If Greenspan leaves it will be because he decides to step down. We can't imagine that happening before his term expires next year. He'll be 78 then, and may decide to move on. But the notion that the Bush activists would sack him, or deny him the second term he wants, scarcely passes the laugh test.
Bottom Line: Greenspan will remain at the Fed as long as he wants to. Sure, some in the administration would prefer a strong advocate of the Bush tax package. But not at the cost of roiling the markets a few months before the 2004 elections...
I agree with the G-7 Group's analytical conclusions: at the start of July 2004 George W. Bush will face the choice between reappointing Greenspan and having the vote to confirm the next Fed Chair slide until the Congress's post-election session in November. Only a real idiot would fail to renominate Greenspan (or his designated successor) if the alternative is a 50-50 chance that the next Fed Chair will be chosen by a Democratic President-Elect.
But I cannot help that the tone carries more interest here than the substance. The tone tells us that the knives are really out of their places hidden under the robes now, flashing, and covered with gore. Somebody leaking to the G-7 Group really doesn't like Glenn Hubbard, who, "...with lots of promise, squandered... it by working to undermine then Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, National Economic Council adviser Larry Lindsey and others like Undersecretary John Taylor and NSC advisor Gary Edson. You can't alienate that many people and still have the confidence of the overall Treasury..." Who doesn't like Glenn Hubbard anymore (besides Gary Edson, John Taylor, Larry Lindsey, and Paul O'Neill, that is)? I have no idea.
And I also have no idea who the factions really are: clearly my (previous) theory that there were two and only two battling inside the White House for the President's ear--for the position of Grand Economic Policy Vizier--was overly simplistic...
Bill Dickens and James Flynn on Heredity, Environment, and IQ
Nathan Newman points me to an online version of Bill Dickens's and James Flynn's theory that attempts to explain all of the puzzling facts about heredity, environment, and measured test-score IQ. The theory is plausible. It is coherent. It is powerful and sensible. And it is politically correct as well:
Heritability Estimates vs. Large Environmental Effects: The IQ Paradox Resolved: How could solid evidence show both that environment was so feeble (kinship studies) and yet so potent (IQ gains over time)?
Dickens has proposed a model that we believe solves the paradox. It assumes that people who have an advantage for a particular trait will become matched with superior environments for that trait; and that genes can derive a great advantage from this because genetic differences are persistent. A genetic advantage remains with you throughout life, while environmental differences tend to come and go, unless sustained by the steady pressure of genes.
Take those born with genes that make them a bit taller and quicker than average. When they start school, they are likely to be a bit better at basketball. The advantage may be modest but then reciprocal causation between the talent advantage and environment kicks in. Because you are better at basketball, you are likely to enjoy it more and play it more than someone who is bit slow or short or overweight. That makes you better still. Your genetic advantage is upgrading your environment, the amount of time you play and practice, and your enhanced environment in turn upgrades your skill. You are more likely to be picked for your school team and to get professional coaching.
Thanks to genes capitalizing on the powerful multiplying effects of the feedback between talent and environment, a modest genetic advantage has turned into a huge performance advantage. Just as small genetic differences match people with very different environments, so identical genes tend to produce very similar environments?even when children are raised in separate homes.
In other words, kinship studies of basketball, no matter whether they involved people with identical genes or different genes, would underestimate the potency of environmental factors. Playing, practicing, being on a team, coaching, all of these would be credited to genes?simply because differences in them tend to accompany genetic differences between individuals. Genes might seem to account for as much as 75 percent of variance across individuals in basketball performance. If someone showed that the present generation was far more skilled at basketball than the last (as indeed they are), Jensen's math would prove that it was impossible. It would show that those aspects of environment that are not correlated with genes (which is all that environment gets credit for in kinship studies) were very feeble. So feeble that the present generation would have to be within the top one percent of the last in terms of quality of environment for basketball.
The cognitive ability differences measured by IQ tests may have the same dynamics. People whose genes send them into life with a small advantage for these abilities start with a modest performance advantage. Then genes begin to drive the powerful engine of reciprocal causation between ability and environment. You begin by being a bit better at school and are encouraged by this, while others who are a bit 'slow' get discouraged. You study more, which upgrades your cognitive performance, earn praise for your grades, start haunting the library, get into a top stream. Another child finds that sport is his or her strong suit, does the minimum, does not read for pleasure, and gets into a lower stream. Both of you may go to the same school but the environments you make for yourselves within that school will be radically different. The modest initial cognitive advantage conferred by genes becomes enormously multiplied.
Once again, just as different genes are matched with very different environments, so identical genes will be matched with very similar environments. You and your separated identical twin will get very similar scores on IQ tests at adulthood. Using Jensen's model, genes will get credit for all of the potent environmental influences you both share. And environment will appear so feeble that it could not possibly account for the huge IQ advantage your children enjoy over yourself. Our model shows why this is a mistake. It shows that kinship studies hide or 'mask' the potency of environmental influences on IQ. Therefore, they do not really demonstrate the impossibility of an environmental explanation of massive gains over time.
The model's next task it to suggest just how environment performs its demanding role. Social forces affecting the whole of society can provide something that an individual's life experiences normally do not. They provide environmental influences that are just as persistent over time as the individual's genetic endowment, and that are not at the mercy of genes. After all, the present generation has no advantage in genetic quality over the last, indeed, it is often argued that the reverse is true due to the lower fertility of the more highly educated. So between generations, the mask slips and environmental forces stand out in bold relief. Relatively small environmental differences between generations gain enormous potency just as small genetic differences between individuals did: They seize control of the powerful reciprocal causation that exists between cognitive ability and environment.
No one knows for certain what environmental trends caused massive IQ gains but we can suggest a scenario consistent with their history. There is indirect evidence that massive gains in the cognitive abilities IQ tests measure began in Britain as far back as those born in 1872. They probably began with the industrial revolution and were there waiting for IQ tests to be invented to measure them. The industrial revolution upgraded years and quality of schooling, nutrition, disease control, all things that could have had a profound influence in raising IQ, at least up to about 1950.
After 1950, in nations like the US and Britain, IQ gains show a new and peculiar pattern. The are missing or small on the kind of IQ tests closest to school-taught material like reading and arithmetic. They are huge on tests that emphasize on-the-spot problem-solving, like seeing what verbal abstractions have in common, or finding the missing piece of a Matrices pattern, or making a pattern out of blocks, or arranging pictures to tell a story...
Take it away, Mr. Drum...
No Comment Department
One meets such gentlemen on the internet:
Steven den Beste: By the way, have I mentioned lately that I don't give a flying f*** "why they hate us"? Having a lot of people in the world hate us is a bad thing, but there are other things facing us which are worse. I'd rather be hated than to have one of our cities nuked (unless, of course, it's Berkeley).
We Americans have... opinions about people who claim (even mockingly) that they would cheer if one of our cities were to be nuked.
Thoughts on the Republican Economists' Letter
Thoughts on the Republican Economists' Letter
So I downloaded and read the text and signature list of the Republican economists' letter supporting the Bush Administration's budget proposals:
We enthusiastically endorse your economic growth and jobs proposal. It is fiscally responsible and it will create more employment, economic growth, and opportunities for all Americans. Moreover, it will improve corporate accountability and strengthen the nation's international competitiveness.
I was somewhat disappointed for three reasons:
I was moderately disappointed, first, that the letter was so short. If you have an opportunity as a professional economist to gain some media attention, you have a duty to use that opportunity to raise the level of the media debate over economic policy. This letter doesn't. It doesn't tell anyone who reads it why cutting dividend taxes would (if the appropriate adjustments are made to hold the right other things constant) be a good idea. It doesn't tell anyone who reads it why it would improve corporate accountability (a thing that nobody has explained to me to my satisfaction). It doesn't tell anyone who reads it how it would strengthen America's international competitiveness--let along what "international competitiveness" is, or why it is worth strengthening.
I was slightly disappointed, second, to see Greg Mankiw's, Mike Boskin's, and Marty Feldstein's names on the signature list. I don't think the letter accurately reflects their views--meaning that if I held their views about how the economy works and what a good society looks like, and if I held their political allegiances, I would not have signed the letter. From Boskin's, Feldstein's, and Mankiw's perspective, "international competitiveness" is not a productive or a useful way to think about international trade issues. They should have asked for a cut of that last clause before the signed the letter. Moreover, you cannot read the "Stewardship" chapter of the Analytical Perspectives volume of the 2003 Budget and claim that the Bush Administration proposals are fiscally responsible. The most you can sign on to is something like, "It is fiscally responsible, when considered in conjunction with effective proposals to drastically slow the long-run rate of growth of entitlement spending." They should have asked for the addition of that clause before signing on as well.
Moreover, they would have gotten the changes they wanted. Without their names, the signature list of the letter is not all that terribly impressive: the overall impression is of people who don't know very much about the federal budget, old Republicans who should have known better, young Republicans who I hope will soon learn better, political hacks hoping for government jobs, lobbyists hoping to get their names on lists of people owed favors, and a smattering of True Believers with fringe views (not that there is anything wrong with having fringe views: my views on a number of important questions are "fringe": truth is not always with the establishment consensus). Keeping Boskin, Feldstein, and Mankiw on board would have been a high priority.
And--here is the third reason I was disappointed, the reason I was most disappointed--exercising their muscles would have materially improved the chances that Bush Administration economic policy would move in a positive direction. The Bush Administration appears to be dominated by media affairs and political affairs people to a previously-unseen degree. This means that taming media affairs and political affairs has an unusually high prioriity. Even in normal times, professional economists need to be guided in their relationships with White House media and political affairs by the maxim of the Roman Empire Caligula: "Oderint dum metuant": "Let them hate [me], as long as they fear [me]." It is important that media affairs and political affairs know that the professional economists value their own professional standing and value good economic policies more than they value being team players who are helpful to the administration. If media affairs and political affairs recognize that economists won't always do what they are asked, economists can do a lot of business with them: raising the level of the public debate, shifting public policy in a positive direction, and aiding politicians whom you do by and large see as the best (or the least evil) alternative.
But here the muscles weren't exercised. The chance of establishing the dum metuant point, that good substantive economic policies are worth having, if only because otherwise one's stable of economists won't cooperate, has been lost.
Addendum: More interesting than the letter text and the list of who did sign, perhaps, is the list of who did not sign the Republican economists' letter. Of the seventeen living former members and chairs of Republican Councils of Economic Advisers over the past forty years, only four signed the letter. I understand that some people are inactive, and that others are hard to find (even with the astroturf-generating resources at the disposal of the White House). But four of seventeen is a very low score. Anne Krueger, Paul Wonnacott, David Bradford, Richard Schmalensee, Michael Mussa, Thomas Moore, William Poole, Paul MacAvoy, Gary Seevers, Marina von Neumann Whiteman, Hendrick Houthakker, Paul McCracken--pillars of the Republican economic policy establishment--did not sign.
I read the low signature rate from Republican former CEA members as a strong sign that these policies really are out there in the Gamma Quadrant, relative to the policies Republican economists have usually advocated.
Oh yes. The one more Republican CEA ex-Chair who did not sign: Alan Greenspan.
The Honorable George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear President Bush:
We enthusiastically endorse your economic growth and jobs proposal. It is fiscally responsible and it will create more employment, economic growth, and opportunities for all Americans. Moreover, it will improve corporate accountability and strengthen the nation's international competitiveness.
Sincerely,
Douglas K. Adie, Ohio University
Richard Agnello, University of Delaware
William Albrecht, University of Iowa
Donald Alexender, Western Michigan University
William R. Allen, UCLA
Annelise Anderson, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Martin Anderson, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Jim Araji, University of Idaho
Paul Ballantyne, University of Colorado in Colorado Springs
Stacie E. Beck, University of Delaware
Donald Bellante, University of South Florida
Bruce Bender, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
James T. Bennett, George Mason University
M. Douglas Berg, Sam Houston State University
Robert Blake, Forecasters Club of New York
Cecil E. Bohanon, Ball State University
Don Booth, Chapman University
George H. Borts, Brown University
Michael J. Boskin, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Leonard Bower, consultant
Michael Brandl, University of Texas at Austin
Emile J. Brinkmann, Mortgage Bankers Association of America
Horace W. Brock, Strategic Economic Decisions, Inc.
Wayne T. Brough, Citizens for a Sound Economy
Jackson Brown, American Dental Association
Jeffrey Brown, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Phillip J. Bryson, Marriott School, BYU
Todd Buchholz, Enso Capital Management
James B. Burnham, Duquesne University
Michelle Burtis, LECG LLC
James L. Butkiewicz, University of Delaware
Samantha Carrington, California State University at Los Angeles
Kenneth W. Chilton, Lindenwood University
Ernest S. Christian, Center For Strategic Tax Reform
Lawrence R. Cima, John Carroll University
J.R. Clark, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Darin G. Clay, University of Southern California
Daniel M. Clifton, American Shareholders Association
Howard Cochran, Belmont University
John P. Cochran, Metropolitan State College of Denver
John Cogan, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Boyd Collier, Tarleton State University
Phil Colling, Mortgage Bankers Association of America
Roy Cordato, John Locke Foundation
Ted Covey, Prosperity Caucus
Eleanor D. Craig, University of Delaware
Mark Crain, George Mason University
Thomas D. Crocker, University of Wyoming
Coldwell Daniel III, University of Memphis
Lawrence S. Davidson, Indiana University
Ronnie H. Davis, Printing Industries of America
Ed Day, University of Central Florida
Stephen J. Dempsey, University of Vermont
Christopher DeMuth, American Enterprise Institute
John L. Dobra, University of Nevada
Michael Dowd, University of Toledo
Thomas J. Duesterberg, Manufacturers Alliance
Douglas G. Duncan, Mortgage Bankers Association of America
John B. Egger, Towson University
Isaac Ehrlich, SUNY at Buffalo
Michael A. Ellis, Kent State University
Kenneth G. Elzinga, University of Virginia
Michael R. Englund, MMS International
Stephen J. Entin, Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation
Ed Erickson, North Carolina State University
Richard E. Ericson, Columbia University
Paul Evans, Ohio State University
Frank Falero, California State University
Allen M. Featherstone, Kansas State University
Martin Feldstein, Harvard University
John Foltz, University of Idaho
Kristin J. Forbes, MIT
William F. Ford, Middle Tennessee State University
Kenneth C. Froewiss, NYU
Robert C. Fry, Washington, West Virginia
David Garthoff, University of Akron
James F. Gatti, University of Vermont
David Gay, University of Arkansas
Richard F. Gleisner, St. Cloud State University
Claudio Gonzalez, Ohio State University
Ernest Goss, Creighton University
Scott F. Grannis, Western Asset Management
John G. Greenhut, Arizona State University West
Earl Grinols, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Timothy Groseclose, Stanford Graduate School of Business
James Gwartney, Florida State University
David L. Hammes, University of Hawaii at Hilo
J. Daniel Hammond, Wake Forest University
Stephen Happel, Arizona State University
Kevin Hassett, American Enterprise Institute
Joel W. Hay, University of Southern California
Will C. Heath, Heath Economics
Dale M. Heien, University of California at Davis
Pat Hendershott, Ohio State University
James W. Henderson, Baylor University
Melvin J. Hinich, University of Texas
Mark Hirschey, University of Kansas
Harold M. Hochman, Lafayette College
Robert J. Hodrick, Columbia University
Lawrence A. Hunter, Empower America
Thomas R. Ireland, University of Missouri at St. Louis
John D. Jackson, Auburn University
Lowell Jacobsen, Baker University
Sherry Jarrell, Wake Forest University
Michael C. Jensen, Harvard Business School
Clifton T. Jones, Stephen F. Austin State University
Richard E. Just, University of Maryland
Steven N. Kaplan, University of Chicago
Ed Kaplan, Western Washington University
Raymond J. Keating, Small Business Survival Committee
Kristen Keith, University of Toledo
B.F. Kiker, University of South Carolina
E. Han Kim, University of Michigan
Paul Koch, Olivet Nazarene University
Meir Kohn, Dartmouth College
Melvyn Krauss, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Peter Kretzmer, Bank of America
Robert Krol, California State University at Northridge
Larry Kudlow, Kudlow & Co.
Richard La Near, Missouri Southern State College
Arthur Laffer, Laffer Associates
William E. Laird, Jr., Florida State University
Russell Lamb, North Carolina State University
Don Leet, California State University at Fresno
John D. Leeth, Bentley College
Ken Lehn, University of Pittsburgh
Cotton M. Lindsay, Clemson University
Larry Lindsey, The Lindsey Group
Dennis E. Logue, University of Oklahoma
Lawrence W. Lovik, Troy State University
Harold I. Lunde, Bowling Green State University
Donald L. Luskin, Trend Macrolytics, LLC
Burton Malkiel, Princeton University
David Malpass, Bear Stearns & Co. Inc.
N. Gregory Mankiw, Harvard University
Richard Manning, Pfizer, Inc.
Dick Marcus, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
Michael L. Marlow, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Merrill Matthews, Jr., Council for Affordable Health Insurance
Thomas H. Mayor, University of Houston
Tom Means, San Jose State University
Allan H. Meltzer, Carnegie Mellon University
Michael Melvin, Arizona State University
Stephen Mennemeyer, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Lloyd Mercer, University of California at Santa Barbara
John Merrifield, University of Texas at San Antonio
Jim Miller, Director, Office of Management and Budget, 1985-88
Jim Mintert, Kansas State University
Velma Montoya, National Council of Hispanic Women
Steve Moore, Club for Growth
John Moorhouse, Wake Forest University
John Murray, University of Toledo
Harry Nagel, St. John's University
Anthony Negbenebor, Gardner-Webb University
George R. Neumann, University of Iowa
Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform
Seth W. Norton, Wheaton College
William Oakland, Tulane University
Lee E. Ohanian, UCLA
Richard W. Oliver, American Graduate School of Management
June O'Neill, Baruch College, City University of New York
Lydia Ortega, San Jose State University
Karen Palasek, John Locke Foundation
Randall E. Parker, East Carolina University
James Parrino, Babson College
E.C. Pasour, Jr., North Carolina State University
Mark Perry, University of Michigan at Flint
Tomas Philipson, University of Chicago
Barry Poulson, University of Colorado
Edward C. Prescott, University of Minnesota
Jan S. Prybyla, Pennsylvania State University
Gary Quinlivan, Saint Vincent College
Richard W. Rahn, Discovery Institute
John Rapp, University of Dayton
Eric Rasmusen, Indiana University
Martin A. Regalia, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Carmen M. Reinhart, International Monetary Fund
Christine P. Ries, Georgia Institute of Technology
Aldona Robbins, Fiscal Associates
Gary Robbins, Fiscal Associates
Paul Craig Roberts, Institute for Political Economy
Charles K. Rowley, George Mason University
Paul H. Rubin, Emory University
Roy J. Ruffin, University of Houston
Mark Rush, University of Florida
John Ryding, Bear Stearns & Co. Inc.
Andrew Sacher, Caxton Associates
Gary J. Santoni, Ball State University
Thomas R. Saving, Texas A&M University
Kurt Schuler, Office of the Vice Chairman, Joint Economic Committee, US Congress
Michael Schuyler, Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation
Robert Scott, California State University, Chico
Gerald W. Scully, University of Texas at Dallas
Richard T. Selden, University of Virginia
Barry J. Seldon, University of Texas at Dallas
John Semmens, Laissez Faire Institute
Richard J. Sexton, University of California at Davis
Sol Shalit, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
Alan C. Shapiro, University of Southern California
Gary L. Shoesmith, Wake Forest University
William F. Shughart II, University of Mississippi
Charles David Skipton, Florida State University
Amy Smith, formerly with the Office of Management and Budget
James F. Smith, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Rodney T. Smith, Stratecon, Inc.
Vernon L. Smith, George Mason University (Nobel Laureate)
Neil H. Snyder, University of Virginia
John C. Soper, John Carroll University
Frank Spreng, McKendree College
Beryl W. Sprinkel, B.W. Sprinkel Economics
Stan Spurlock, Mississippi State University
William G. Stanford, University of Illinois at Chicago
Ben Stein, actor, writer, economist
Carl H. Stem, Texas Tech University
Craig A. Stepenson, Babson College
E. Frank Stephenson, Berry College
Courtenay C. Stone, Ball State University
Robert Tamura, Clemson University
Fred Telling, Pfizer, Inc.
Rebecca Thacker, Ohio University
Clifford Thies, Shenandoah University
Leo Troy, Rutgers University
Kamal Upadhyaya, University of New Haven
Richard Vedder, Ohio University
Tony Villamil, The Washington Economics Group
Richard E. Wagner, George Mason University
William B. Walstad, University of Nebraska at Lincoln
Stephen J.K. Walters, Loyola College in Maryland
Harold Warren, East Tennessee State University
Marc Weidenmier, Claremont McKenna College
John T. Wenders, University of Idaho
Brian S. Wesbury, Griffin, Kubik, Stephens & Thompson
Walter Wessels, North Carolina State University
Robert Whaples, Wake Forest University
John Whitley, University of Adelaide
John H. Wicks, University of Montana at Missoula
Gary W. Williams, Texas A&M University
Michael E. Williams, University of Denver
Douglas Wills, University of Washington at Tacoma
Michael K. Wohlgenant, North Carolina State University
Charles Wolf, Jr., Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Gary Wolfram, Hillsdale College
Gene C. Wunder, Washburn University
Richard Yamarone, Argus Research Corp.
Andrew Yuengert, Pepperdine University
Paul J. Zak, Claremont Graduate University
M.Y. Zaki, Northern Michigan University
Asghar Zardkoohi, Texas A&M University
Kate Zhou, University of Hawaii
Benjamin Zycher, Pacific Research Institute
February 24, 2003
Outside a U.C. Berkeley Economics Seminar
"Yes, my watch is 20 minutes fast. [pause] It takes me 20 minutes to bicycle to campus. [pause] Or, rather, it does back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. [pause] Yes, my behavior is highly inertial."
Morgan Stanley Reduces Growth Forecast
Morgan Stanley reduces its forecast for U.S. growth in 2003. A 2.1% year-over-year growth estimate carries with it the implication that the unemployment rate will rise in 2003 to 6.5 or higher, depending on how rapid you think underlying fundamental productivity growth is.
Morgan Stanley: Richard Berner and David Greenlaw (New York and London): We're downgrading our US and global economic forecasts. In our view, surging energy prices and the shock to consumer and business sentiment from today's stalemate over Iraq and tomorrow?s likelihood of war will tax growth appreciably. Year on year, we now expect US real growth this year to struggle to an anemic 2.1%...
William Watts Gets Snookered
William Watts of CBS Marketwatch gets snookered. He writes:
EarthLink - Finance: But as is usually the case when politics and economics meet, there are a number of contradictory answers.
Glenn Hubbard, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers and an architect of the tax-cut plan, has argued that the deficit's impact is relatively minor, and partly offset by future economic growth that can stem from income-tax cuts.
"I think that the effects (on interest rates) of the size of the proposals that the president proposed are very, very modest and they are outweighed" by the potential upside benefits Hubbard told reporters last week.
The Economic Report of the President, released earlier this month by the Hubbard-led CEA, laid out a formula that results in a sanguine answer when it comes to the impact of debt on interest rates. Read it.
According to the CEA's calculations, each dollar of debt crowds out about 60 cents of capital. The other 40 cents is offset by larger capital inflows from abroad. "A conservative rule of thumb based on this relationship is that interest rates rise by about 3 basis points for every additional $200 billion in government debt," the report says...
Why is he being snookered? Because the Bush Administration's plan is not to add $200 billion to the national debt, and then stop. It is to add $200 billion to the national debt this year, and then another $200 billion next year, and then another $200 billion the year after that, and then another $200 billion the year after that, and so on, and so forth: bigger deficits as far as the eye can see.
Ask Glenn Hubbard what the effect of raising national debt by $4 trillion--the net impact over the next 12 years of the Bush Administration's proposed budgetary policies if you add in the (uncounted) cost of war and the (uncounted) cost of Alternative Minimum Tax reform--and you'll get a number like 0.6 percentage points, a number in the same ballpark as that of the other people quoted in the article, Mark Zandi and Bill Gale.
There aren't conflicting answers being given at all. Glenn Hubbard is answering a different question from the one that William Watts asked him. Watts had asked about the impact of the Bush Administration budget proposals. Hubbar answered with an estimate of the effect of a one-time $200 billion one-year temporary deficit.
It's been quite a while since I've seen anyone working on the CEA work this hard to muddy the waters, confuse reporters, and lower the level of the debate about economic policy.
Why Are We Governed by These Clowns?
Why Are We Governed by These Clowns? Why is not lying never considered--even as a hypothetical option?
Here is some evidence that whoever is preparing Bush's economic talking points and speeches either has no contact with any of the professional forecasters at the Council of Economic Advisers, the Office of Management and Budget, or the National Economic Council, or simply does not care that the President not tell pointless lies:
Feb. 24, 2003 | Faked forecast: Yesterday the Long Island (and Queens) daily [Newsday]'s economics correspondent James Toedtman broke the kind of important story that requires only a single telephone call to expose lying in the White House.
Last Thursday, the president claimed that the "nation's top economists forecast substantial economic growth" if Congress would only pass his latest tax cut. After scores of Nobel economists warned that said tax cut is economically useless as well as unfair, Bush's desire to make such a claim is understandable. Unfortunately it is also entirely false.
The "top economists" to whom Bush... referred were the 53 highly-respected respondents to a monthly newsletter known as Blue Chip Economic Forecast. They had allegedly agreed that the U.S. economy would grow 3.3 percent in 2003 if the tax cut passes.
Yet when Newsday's Toedtman phoned Randell E. Moore, the editor of the Blue Chip newsletter, his answer to Bush was painfully blunt. "I don't know what [Bush] was citing," he said. "I was a little upset. It sounded like the Blue Chip Economic Forecast had endorsed the president's plan. That's simply not the case." The economists had predicted a potential 3.3 percent growth rate. They had also predicted that "some version" of a Bush stimulus plan would pass. But they had made no connection between the two -- and in fact, most of the nation's "top economists" don't believe there is one. It's hard to say which would be worse: whether Bush doesn't understand the flaw in his phony syllogism, or if he just assumed that nobody else would.
Semi-Daily Journal Welcomes Jane Galt's Return to Her Normal Self
At the conclusion of our last episode, Jane Galt had been bitten by a werewolf and turned into a slavering lycanthrope. She chortled with glee in the expectation that "violence... applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner" by a 2 x 4 would teach demonstrators what's what. Rabid foam dripped from her slavering jaws. The fascist undead rose from their graves and shambled forward into her comments section. And then...
But now it's time for the next episode. And she has recovered completely--expressing concern for the due process rights of those accused of terrorism in a manner that would win her the chairship of an ACLU chapter based in Berkeley, California.
Welcome back.
Asymmetrical Information: So the Florida professor who engendered a storm of controversy when his university tried to fire him over his alleged ties to Palestinian terror groups has now been arrested, along with eight others, for raising money for Islamic Jihad.
I don't know enough about the particulars of the case to comment on whether it's likely that he's guilty. What I want to say is this: we need to watch this case like hawks.
We're emotional about terrorism, justifiably so. But that emotion has got to make it tempting for a prosecutor to make too much out of a weak case because of the political payoff if it sticks has to be enormous. And in cases like this, the evidence is often tenuous. It's better we free a man who is likely guilty than imprison one who is possibly innocent, even in a case involving terrorism.
I'll be looking for bloggers and journalists who expose the facts of the case beyond the press releases from the DA and the defense, and cheering them on whatever the conclusions they draw. I think it's really, really important that we make it attractive for them to try to discover the truth.
Notes: European Economic History
Rui Pedro Estevez: Monday 11-12: Read for Febuary 24: Carlo Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution; Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Economy, difference between 100% and 80% requirement for agreement with an enclosure... Internal trade blockages? Northern France vs. England. Physiocrats. Why was England first? Why was France second? Jean-Laurent Rosenthal knows more than anybody should about eighteenth-century canal building in Provence...
Problems with North and Thomas. Places where the French state was to weak to support eighteenth-century development
Read for March 3, Franklin Ford, Robe and Sword, John Brewer, Sinews of Power. A detour into political and cultural history--Franco-British comparison. Whatever bad things we say about French 18th century institutions, this is still the third-richest economy and second most powerful state in the world in the 18th century. It's institutions weren't that bad.
Reach for March 10: de Vries on the Dutch Republic...
February 23, 2003
WhiteHouseology
These days we see strange and bizarre signs in the media of a bitter, desperate, and hidden struggle over the making of Bush Administration economic policy.
Fred Barnes, writing in The International Economy, says that Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have been the key players in the Administration's "decision to change direction," to reject the belief that "no further stimulus was needed," and to "change tack and... propose a package of tax cuts to assure a growing economy, notably in 2004." By contrast, U.S. Treasury staff "point out privately" while talking to the G-7 Group that the "package was never about stimulus..." But the G-7 Group's Treasury sources' boss, newly-hatched Treasury Secretary John Snow, tells journalists and other industrial country finance ministers that the tax cut package is intended to boost short-term global growth and is especially needed "in view of the uncertainties over Iraq."
Meanwhile, Cato Institute head William Niskanen claims that Alan Greenspan's "statements [about the inadvisability of widening the deficit] indicate he is leaving the job"--that Greenspan has decided that spreading his view of the long-run folly of Bush Administration fiscal policy is more important than being nominated for another term as Federal Reserve Chairman, and that we are now in a position in which the Federal Reserve Chair ruins his chances for reappointment by simply repeating his long-held and widely-publicized beliefs about the shape of good economic policy.
Trying hard to send a different message about what the Bush Administration attitude toward Alan Greenspan really is, those senior Bush Administration officials who leak to the G-7 Group state emphatically that "the people with power [in the Bush Administration] understand that" failing to reappoint Greenspan "would be suicide for the administration.... [T]he administration knows that [Greenspan] commands more international respect than any other single economic figure." They go on to say that the Bush Administration has already privately offered Greenspan another term as Federal Reserve Chair. And they dismiss reports about "hard-core political GOP operatives... refusing Greenspan another term" as "jokes."
However, those senior White House officials who leak to Fred Barnes say something very different. They say that the firing of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was the metaphorical putting of a horse's head in Alan Greenspan's bed: "a shot across [his] bow." They tell Barnes that the firing of O'Neill was intended to be:
...bad news for Greenspan, hardly a friend of the Bush family after his tight money policy helped doom the re-election chances of President Bush senior in 1992. White House aides can recite the date--June 2004--without hesitation. That's the deadline for the chairman's reappointment. For Greenspan, the message in the O'Neill canning is that the same awaits him should he jeopardize Bush's re-election prospects by raising interest rates...
Meanwhile, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank puzzles over strange inconsistencies in Bush Administration rhetoric. Vice President Cheney was sent out on January 30 with talking points about how the Bush Administration's tax cuts would ultimately pay for themselves: produce higher revenue in the long run. Did anybody warn him that President Bush's Economic Report of the President would, less than a week later, assert that "it is not true 'that tax cuts pay for themselves with higher output.... Although the economy grows in response to tax reductions, it is unlikely to grow so much that lost tax revenue is completely recovered by the higher level of economic activity'"? Vice Presidents rarely like being made to look like idiots who don't read or fail to understand their briefing materials. Did whoever made up Cheney's talking points want to mousetrap him--to create the impression that he and his staff are completely out of the loop when those whom the G-7 Group sees as the serious "people with power [who] understand" discuss economic policy?
One thing that does seem clear is that there are two battling factions, and each is desperately asserting that it is in full control over the things that really matter. One faction says that firm control over the substance of economic policy is held by serious people who understand political and economic realities: understand the value of the experience and reputation of Alan Greenspan, understand the risks and dangers involved in widening the deficit, understand the trade-offs and the point of balance between short-run policies to boost demand and long-run policies to boost growth. The other faction says that firm control over economic policy is held by people who think it is long past time to pay Greenspan back for allowing unemployment to reach a peak of 7.6% in the summer of 1992, and that only fools worry about whether Bush Administration policies are creating serious problems that subsequent post-2010 administrations will have to try to deal with.
The fact that each faction wants to convince the outside world that it is really in firm control is no surprise. In the Bush Administration (as in the Ottoman Empire during its decline) the perception of power is often the reality of power: who would win the power struggle inside the Topkapi Palace and gain the ear of the Sultan often hinged on whom outsiders believed had already gained the ear of the Sultan. One consequence of our habit of electing unknown southern governors to the Presidency is that only blind luck will give us a President who is more interested in and informed about economic policy (or, for that matter, foreign policy) than a late-Ottoman Sultan. And nobody I have found (save possibly Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute) believes that this President is profoundly interested in or well-informed about American economic policy. So we have to hope that the internal struggle in the corridors of power produces a good Grand Vizier, one who can gain the confidence of and then manage the Sultan while keeping the substance of policy on the rails.
This is one hell of a way to run a railroad...
One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Puzzles, and Amusements: Number 15
One Hundred Interesting... Index Page
Elementary Ballistics: What Goes Up Must Come Down
The last problem established that if you dropped a cannonball down a very deep well, the distance it falls (with positive numbers being up, and negative numbers being down) could be described by the gravitational fall equation:
yt = -(0.5)(g)(t2)
That is, the vertical position of the cannonball t seconds after you drop it (that's the "yt" part) is equal to minus (that's because it falls--moves downward) 1/2 times the square of the number t of seconds since you dropped it.
Moreover. on earth where the force of gravity g = 32 feet/second/second, this is the same as:
yt = -16(t2)
But usually we are not interested in cannon balls dropped down wells. Usually we are interested in cannonballs fired from cannon. And they have an initial upward velocity--call it vy, "v" for "velocity" and "y" because we are using the variable y to stand for how high above (or far below) our cannonball is from its launching point. What happens to a cannonball that is not dropped, but is instead initially launched with an upward velocity vy--say, 64 feet/second?
Well, if there were no force of gravity, then after one second the cannonball would be 64 feet high, and after two seconds 128 feet, and after three seconds 192 feet, and after t seconds it would be 64t feet above its launching point. In the absence of gravity:
yt = 64t
Or, more generally (if it were to be launched with some different upward velocity):
yt = (vy)(t)
But what if we have both (a) an initial upward velocity and (b) gravity? It is a somewhat miraculous fact that--if we are considering small enough distances that we can ignore variations in gravity, if the object is dense enough that we can ignore air resistance and lift, if it doesn't run into anything (like the ground), et cetera, et cetera--all we have to do is to combine the calculations for the two different kinds of motions to get:
yt = (vy)(t) - (0.5)(g)(t2)
That tells us what the vertical position of the object will be at any positive time t (if it hasn't run into anything yet). After t seconds, the downward pull of gravity will have moved its position downward by - (0.5)(g)(t2). Its upward initial velocity will have carried it up by (vy)(t). And the net position of the object will be just the sum of those two components.
Notice that this equation describes perfectly well what happens to our dropped cannonball. What is a dropped cannonball? Just an object with an initial upward velocity vy = 0. And if vy equals zero, the entire first term is always zero--and we are back to our gravitational fall equation. Conversely, note that this equation describes perfectly well what happens if there is no gravity. If there is no gravity, then g = 0, the second term is always zero, and all we are left with is a cannonball moving upward at its constant upward velocity vy.
Now let's plug in some numbers. Suppose we are on earth, where g = 32 feet/second/second. And suppose we throw a cannonball upward with an initial velocity of 16 feet/second. Then our equation becomes:
yt = 16(t) - 16(t2)
At time t = 0 seconds, this equation tells us, the height y0 of the cannonball is zero. That's good: we're just throwing it upward at time 0, and it hasn't had time to leave the ground.
Now let's calculate y1, the height of the cannonball at t = 1 second after it is thrown upward. Substituting "1" in for "t"...
y1 = 16(1) - 16(12) = 16 - 16 = 0 feet
...uh-oh. Better run fast. At the end of the first second the cannonball is at height zero again, falling downward and hitting the ground (or your foot, if you didn't get out of the way). Halfway between, at time t = 1/2 second, the position is:
y(1/2) = 16(1/2) - 16((1/2)2) = 8 - 16(1/4) = 8 - 4 = 4 feet
That's as high as it gets.
So now let's consider a much faster cannonball: one launched upward at an initial velocity vy of 320 feet/second. We can make a table of its height:
| t seconds after launch... | the cannonball is this many feet high... |
| 0 | 0 |
| 1 | 304 |
| 2 | 576 |
| 3 | 816 |
| 4 | 1024 |
| 5 | 1200 |
| 6 | 1344 |
| 7 | 1456 |
| 8 | 1536 |
| 9 | 1584 |
| 10 | 1600 |
| 11 | 1584 |
| 12 | 1536 |
| 13 | 1456 |
| 14 | 1344 |
| 15 | 1200 |
| 16 | 1024 |
| 17 | 816 |
| 18 | 576 |
| 19 | 304 |
| 20 | 0 |
After ten seconds, the cannonball is lost in the sky: 1600 feet up, it (if it is 1/2 a foot in diameter) is a speck less than 1/60 of a degree across in your visual field. After twenty seconds, the cannonball is back--moving downward this time, it hits the earth with a downward velocity of 320 feet/second.
When the Winds of Change Blow Hard Enough...
...the most trivial of things turn into deadly projectiles.
One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Puzzles, and Amusements: Number 14
One Hundred Interesting... Index Page
Elementary Ballistics: The Kinematics of Falling Bodies
Let's think about falling--the motion of a body dropped from the earth's surface into a very deep pit. Let's assume that what we are dropping is dense enough that we don't have to worry about air resistance (or, conversely, lift)--a cannonball, say. And let's assume that the pit is deep enough that we don't have to worry about it hitting anything and coming to a stop (at least not for a while). And assume that our distances are small enough that we don't have to worry about how the strength of gravity varies as we move closer to and further from the center of the earth.
At the moment of its release, the cannonball has no upward or downward velocity at all. One second later, gravity--accelerating it at a rate of g feet per second per second--that is, every second gravity gives it an additional downward velocity of g feet per second, where on the earth's surface g = 32--has given it a downward velocity of 32 feet per second. Let's adopt the convention that upward numbers are positive and downward numbers are negative, so that after one second the cannonball's velocity is -32 feet per second.
What's its average velocity during the first second? It starts with a velocity of 0, it ends with a velocity of -32, so that its average velocity is -16 feet per second. How far has it fallen after one second? Moving at an average velocity of -16 feet/second for 1 second gives us a total distance of -16 feet: it has fallen 16 feet.
How about after two seconds? What's its velocity after two seconds? After two seconds, its velocity is -64 feet per second. What's its average velocity over the first two seconds? It starts the first two seconds with a velocity of zero, and ends them with a velocity of -64 feet/second, so its average velocity is -32 feet/second. How far has it fallen after two seconds? Moving at an average velocity of -32 feet/second for two seconds gives a distance of -32 feet/second x 2 seconds = -64 feet--four times as far as it had fallen in the first second.
And after three seconds? A final velocity of -96 feet/second. An average velocity of -48 feet/second. A distance of -48 feet/second x 3 seconds = -144 feet--nine times as far as it had fallen in the first second.
And after four seconds? An final velocity of -128 feet/second. An average velocity of -64 feet/second. A distance of -64 feet/second x 4 seconds = -256 feet--sixteen times as far as it had fallen in the first second.
Note the pattern: 0 seconds... 0. 1 second... 1. 2 seconds... 4. 3 seconds... 9. 4 seconds... 16. That's the pattern we see if something is equal to something else squared. We can thus write down a rule--a function--for a falling body. If we use yt to stand for the position of the cannonball after t seconds, and if we note that for each of the first four seconds the distance fallen is sixteen times that number of seconds squared, we can write the rule:
yt = -16(t2)
Where does the 16 come from? It is half of 32, the number g that tells us the strength of gravity at the earth's surface. If the strength of gravity were different, the motion of falling bodies would be different. But it would follow a similar pattern. Thus we can write the more general rule:
yt = -(0.5)(g)(t2)
What does the motion of a falling body look like on the Moon, where g = 5?
February 22, 2003
Operational Risk Management
Looking at the Navy Safety Center's photos of the week has certainly made me a believer in "operational risk management"... or, rather, made me realize that the world is filled with people who should not be trusted with large pieces of self-propelled or other machinery...
P.S.: Note the name of the boat. What happened to the Temporary Insanity I?
Notes: Interesting Math Calculations
A suggestion for an "Interesting Math Calculations" problem--something that I don't know the answer to offhand (both because I don't know how small semiconductor circuit features can be before quantum mechanics ceases to be your friend, and I don't know how large semiconductor circuit features are today).
How long can Moore's Law go on? Starting from the average distance between atoms in a silicon crystal, find the time when chip features will be (supposedly) one atom wide...
100 Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Puzzles, and Amusements, Number 13: Introduction to Compound Growth
One Hundred Interesting... Index Page
Introduction to Compound Growth
"The problem is: 'Suppose there is a town with a population of 10,000. Its population grows at one percent per year. How large a population will it have in five years?' I guess that since .01 x 5 = 0.05, and since 0.05 x 10,000 = 500, that the answer is 10,500."
"Ah. They've tricked you. Do it year by year. What's one percent of 10,000? And how large will its population be after one year?"
"100, and 10,100."
"Right. Now what's one percent of 10,100?"
"101. Oh!"
"Yes. The population grows by 100 during the first year. And the population grows by 101 during the second year. What's the population after two years?"
"10,201."
"And how much does the population grow during the third year? Round the population to the nearest whole person--because that's what it has to be."
"102. So there are 10,303 people after three years?"
"Yes. And 10,406 people after four years."
"And 10,510 people after five years. Still, ten extra people doesn't seem all that many."
"Ah. But as growth compounds the differences add up. How long would you say it would take the population to double to 20,000--if it grows at a steady one percent per year?"
"Well, if you were only adding 100 people a year, it would take 100 years. But it's clearly less than that because of this compounding--the fact that by the time you've reached 15,000 people you're adding not 100 but 150 people a year. I don't know. 90 years?"
"70. After 70 years you have 20,067 people. How many do you think you'll have after 100?"
"This is what computers are good for: (1.01)^(100) = 2.7048. So after 100 years you'll have 27,048 people... Very close to the original 10,000 x e, that number 2.718281828... we have seen before..."
Notes: Relative Wage Gaps by Race
*Sigh* Yet another depressing thing to cross my desk this morning...
Is the Convergence of the Racial Wage Gap Illusory? by Amitabh Chandra | NBER Working Paper No. w9476 | I demonstrate that the literature on the racial wage gap has systematically overstated the gains made by African American men by ignoring their withdrawal from the labor force. Three sources of selection-bias are identified: imposing sample selection criteria based on labor supply, trimming wages on the basis of real-dollar cutoffs, and making inferences based on Current Population Survey (CPS) data whose truncated sampling design excludes the growing incarcerated population. To recover the counterfactual distribution of skill-prices for non-workers, I implement a quasi-bounds estimator that does not require the use of arbitrary exclusion restrictions for identification and find that: (1) Corrected estimates of the racial wage gap indicate a substantial role for the efficacy of the Civil Rights Act and related initiatives in affecting convergence in segregated states; ignoring selection causes estimates of convergence in the South as well as the within-cohort component of this change to be understated. (2) In contrast to the sharp convergence observed in standard wage series from 1970-90, selectivity corrected estimates indicate complete [relative wage] stagnation...
Notes: Capital-Account Openness and Growth Acceleration
Michael Klein from Tufts is arguing that it is middle-income countries that have the most to gain from capital-account openness. The underlying argument appears to be that truly poor countries lack the institutional and educational infrastructure necessary for foreign investment to produce truly valuable growth-enhancing spillovers, and that capital-account openness may encourage kleptocracy as well; while rich countries already have everything they need to take advantage of modern industrial technologies.
Yet another thing to put into the "reread in my copious spare time..." pile...
Capital Account Openness and the Varieties of Growth Experience: he effects of capital account openness on economic growth may vary across countries. Some countries may not have in place the constellation of institutions required to fully benefit from open capital accounts. Other countries may realize only small marginal improvements in the wake of capital account liberalization. This paper presents evidence of an inverted-U shaped relationship between the responsiveness of growth to capital account openness and income per capita. Middle-income countries benefit significantly from capital account openness. However, neither rich nor poor countries exhibit statistically significant positive effects...
Yet Another Procrastination Helper
Dave Sifry provides us with yet another way to widen the scope of our infovore grazing behavior in an interesting way:
Technorati: Top 50 Interesting Recent [We]blogs with Context: Sort of a list of [we]blogs that people are talking about today. This is still experimental, I'm getting a feeling for the usefulness of this search. It should bring up relatively less-known [we]blogs that have new, interesting content posted on them.
In other, related, news, Kieren Healy begs for mercy:
Oh Not Another One: Via Patrick Nielsen Hayden comes yet another interesting goddamn [we]blog, this time from a history prof at Swarthmore. My God, have you people no pity? Give it a rest with your pithy and insighful commentary already. I'm supposed to be writing articles, for crying out loud.
I think I'll be distributing this to my students soon, in the hope that it will do them some good.
Notes: World-Famous Psychologist Arianne Emory on Human Genetic Diversity
C.J. Cherryh (1988), Cyteen (New York: Warner Books: 0446671274).
Dispersion is absolutely essential, but so are adequately diverse 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.
Notes: What Thomas Sowell Thinks of The Bell Curve
Atrios laments: "Every time I refer disparagingly to [Herrnstein and Murray's] The Bell Curve some true believer expects me to write a 50,000 word critique of the book to justify my opinion of it. Frankly, it's as if every time I spoke disparagingly of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion someone expected me to write a 50,000 word critique of it."
You don't have to write a 50,000 word critique. All you have to do is point them to Thomas Sowell's American Spectator review of The Bell Curve. Sowell pulls his punches--no book that goes to the lengths The Bell Curve does to keep from considering education as an independent influence on people's life-paths can possibly be, as Sowell calls it, "very sober, very thorough, and very honest." But even Sowell's pulled punches are absolutely devastating. And no one can call Thomas Sowell a politically-correct left-wing hack:
Upstream: Issues: Bell Curve: Thomas Sowell : Vol. 28, American Spectator, 02-01-1995, pp 32.
[Herrnstein and Murray] seem to conclude... that... biological inheritance of IQ... among members of the general society may also explain IQ differences between different racial and ethnic groups.... Such a conclusion goes... much beyond what the facts will support....
[T]he greatest black-white differences are not on the questions which presuppose middle-class vocabulary or experiences, but on abstract questions such as spatial perceptual ability.... [Herrnstein and Murray's] conclusion that this "phenomenon seems peculiarly concentrated in comparisons of ethnic groups" is simply wrong. When European immigrant groups in the United States scored below the national average on mental tests, they scored lowest on the abstract parts of those tests. So did white mountaineer children in the United States tested back in the early 1930s. So did canal boat children in Britain, and so did rural British children compared to their urban counterparts, at a time before Britain had any significant non-white population. So did Gaelic-speaking children as compared to English-speaking children in the Hebrides Islands. This is neither a racial nor an ethnic peculiarity. It is a characteristic found among low-scoring groups of European as well as African ancestry.
In short, groups outside the cultural mainstream of contemporary Western society tend to do their worst on abstract questions, whatever their race might be....
Perhaps the strongest evidence against a genetic basis for intergroup differences in IQ is that the average level of mental test performance has changed very significantly for whole populations over time and, moreover, particular ethnic groups within the population have changed their relative positions during a period when there was very little intermarriage to change the genetic makeup of these groups.
While The Bell Curve cites the work of James R. Flynn, who found substantial increases in mental test performances from one generation to the next in a number of countries around the world, the authors seem not to acknowledge the devastating implications of that finding for the genetic theory of intergroup differences, or for their own reiteration of long-standing claims that the higher fertility of low-IQ groups implies a declining national IQ level. This latter claim is indeed logically consistent with the assumption that genetics is a major factor in interracial differences in IQ scores. But ultimately this too is an empirical issue--and empirical evidence has likewise refuted the claim that IQ test performance would decline over time.
Even before Professor Flynn's studies, mental test results from American soldiers tested in World War II showed that their performances on these tests were higher than the performances of American soldiers in World War I by the equivalent of about 12 IQ points. Perhaps the most dramatic changes were those in the mental test performances of Jews in the United States. The results of World War I mental tests conducted among American soldiers born in Russia--the great majority of whom were Jews--showed such low scores as to cause Carl Brigham, creator of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, to declare that these results "disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent." Within a decade, however, Jews in the United States were scoring above the national average on mental tests, and the data in The Bell Curve indicate that they are now far above the national average in IQ.
Strangely, Herrnstein and Murray refer to "folklore" that "Jews and other immigrant groups were thought to be below average in intelligence. " It was neither folklore nor anything as subjective as thoughts. It was based on hard data, as hard as any data in The Bell Curve. These groups repeatedly tested below average on the mental tests of the World War I era, both in the army and in civilian life. For Jews, it is clear that later tests showed radically different results--during an era when there was very little intermarriage to change the genetic makeup of American Jews.
My own research of twenty years ago showed that the IQs of both Italian-Americans and Polish-Americans also rose substantially over a period of decades. Unfortunately, there are many statistical problems with these particular data, growing out of the conditions under which they were collected. However, while my data could never be used to compare the IQs of Polish and Italian children, whose IQ scores came from different schools, nevertheless the close similarity of their general patterns of IQ scores rising over time seems indicative--especially since it follows the rising patterns found among Jews and among American soldiers in general between the two world wars, as well as rising IQ scores in other countries around the world.
The implications of such rising patterns of mental test performance is devastating to the central hypothesis of those who have long expressed the same fear as Herrnstein and Murray, that the greater fertility of low-IQ groups would lower the national (and international) IQ over time. The logic of their argument seems so clear and compelling that the opposite empirical result should be considered a refutation of the assumptions behind that logic....
A man who scores 100 on an IQ test today is answering more questions correctly than his grandfather with the same IQ answered two-generations ago, then someone else who answers the same number of questions correctly today as this man's grandfather answered two generations ago may have an IQ of 85.
Herrnstein and Murray openly acknowledge such rises in IQ and christen them "the Flynn effect," in honor of Professor Flynn who discovered it. But they seem not to see how crucially it undermines the case for a genetic explanation of interracial IQ differences. They say:
The national averages have in fact changed by amounts that are comparable to the fifteen or so IQ points separating blacks and whites in America. To put it another way, on the average, whites today differ from whites, say, two generations ago as much as whites today differ from blacks today. Given their size and speed, the shifts in time necessarily have been due more to changes in the environment than to changes in the genes.
While this open presentation of evidence against the genetic basis of interracial IQ differences is admirable, the failure to draw the logical inference seems puzzling. Blacks today are just as racially different from whites of two generations ago as they are from whites today. Yet the data suggest that the number of questions that blacks answer correctly on IQ tests today is very similar to the number answered correctly by past generations of whites. If race A differs from race B in IQ, and two generations of race A differ from each other by the same amount, where is the logic in suggesting that the IQ differences are even partly racial?
Herrnstein and Murray do not address this question, but instead shift to a discussion of public policy:
Couldn't the mean of blacks move 15 points as well through environmental changes? There seems no reason why not--but also no reason to believe that white and Asian means can be made to stand still while the Flynn effect works its magic.
But the issue is not solely one of either predicting or controlling the future. It is a question of the validity of the conclusion that differences between genetically different groups are due to those genetic differences, whether in whole or in part. When any factor differs as much from Al to A2 as it does from A2 to B2, why should one conclude that this factor is due to the difference between A in general and B in general?...
A remarkable phenomenon commented on in the Moynihan report of thirty years ago goes unnoticed in The Bell Curve--the prevalence of females among blacks who score high on mental tests. Others who have done studies of high- IQ blacks have found several times as many females as males above the 120 IQ level. Since black males and black females have the same genetic inheritance, this substantial disparity must have some other roots, especially since it is not found in studies of high-IQ individuals in the general society, such as the famous Terman studies, which followed high-IQ children into adulthood and later life. If IQ differences of this magnitude can occur with no genetic difference at all, then it is more than mere speculation to say that some unusual environmental effects must be at work among blacks. However, these environmental effects need not be limited to blacks, for other low-IQ groups of European or other ancestries have likewise tended to have females over-represented among their higher scorers, even though the Terman studies of the general population found no such patterns.
One possibility is that females are more resistant to bad environmental conditions, as some other studies suggest. In any event, large sexual disparities in high-IQ individuals where there are no genetic or socioeconomic differences present a challenge to both the Herrnstein- Murray thesis and most of their critics.
Black males and black females are not the only groups to have significant IQ differences without any genetic differences. Identical twins with significantly different birthweights also have IQ differences, with the heavier twin averaging nearly 9 points higher IQ than the lighter one. This effect is not found where the lighter twin weighs at least six and a half pounds, suggesting that deprivation of nutrition must reach some threshold level before it has a permanent effect on the brain during its crucial early development.
Perhaps the most intellectually troubling aspect of The Bell Curve is the authors' uncritical approach to statistical correlations. One of the first things taught in introductory statistics is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten, and one of the most widely ignored facts in public policy research. The statistical term "multicollinearity," dealing with spurious correlations, appears only once in this massive book.
Multicollinearity refers to the fact that many variables are highly correlated with one another, so that it is very easy to believe that a certain result comes from variable A, when in fact it is due to variable Z, with which A happens to be correlated. In real life, innumerable factors go together. An example I liked to use in class when teaching economics involved a study showing that economists with only a bachelor's degree had higher incomes than economists with a master's degree and that these in turn had higher incomes than economists with Ph.D.'s. The implication that more education in economics leads to lower incomes would lead me to speculate as to how much money it was costing a student just to be enrolled in my course. In this case, when other variables were taken into account, these spurious correlations disappeared. In many other cases, however, variables such as cultural influences cannot even be quantified, much less have their effects tested statistically....
Where Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?
I don't know. But I do know where you can find a large congregation of the heirs of Bull Connor.
Jane Galt writes "Bring it On": "I'm too busy laughing... laugh even harder when [demonstrators] 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."
The "pre-emptive" beating up of demonstrators who you think might start smashing windows? How... un-American.
It's sad to watch someone cross the boundaries and leave what Max Sawicky calls the "zone of rationality." I hope she recovers soon.
Another Debt Owed to France
Sgt. Stryker's daily briefing talks about another debt that we owe to France--not the France of Petain, Laval, the Dreyfus Prosection, and Action Francaise, but the France of Lafayette, de Gaulle, and M. Pierre Mathy:
Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing: February 16, 2003 - February 22, 2003 Archives: Being of mostly British descent, bashing the froggies should come come easily to me, but I'm going to sit this one out.... I'll forgo play-ground level abuse of the citizens who elected [Chirac]. My family owes a small debt to M. Pierre Mathy. He's not anyone you'd know about, and he died a few years ago, but he owned and ran a little hotel-restaurant in a pretty little town called Toul...
February 21, 2003
What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate
Matthew Yglesias raises a philosopher's objection to the assignment of numerical scores to "intelligence" via intelligence testing. It's a good objection--proof that the kind of stuff taught in Emerson Hall is not completely without applicability:
Matthew Yglesias: I don't even know what it would mean for one test or another to "really" be measuring intelligence. It's not that tests aren't measuring anything or that they're socially constructed or anything it's just that the idea of intelligence doesn't have that kind of determinate meaning. Consider the analogy (put forward by Kevin Drum) to strength. Suppose we had two people. Person A can lift more weight one time than Person B, but given a modest quantity of weight Person B can lift it more times than can Person A. Which one is stronger? This is pretty clearly a pseudo-question ? the concept of strength is just ambiguous on this score ? if you really want to you can settle the issue by fiat, but why bother?
To paraphrase, Matthew is saying that "intelligence" does not mean "the first principal component of a bunch of scores on tests some psychologist thinks have to do with cognitive ability." Of course, you can (for purposes of your own internal and private language) define intelligence to mean first principal component et cetera. But if you do you'll have trouble communicating with people who give the word "intelligence" its normal, vaguer, less determinate meaning. So why bother?
This is a good point. So let me stretch it further, and argue that the word "intelligence" is (or ought to be) more indeterminate in its meaning than you had previously imagined.
Let me put it this way: Barry Bonds is a lot smarter than you. Barry Bonds is a lot smarter than me. Hitting home runs is accomplished in the wrists, the arms, the shoulders, and the chests. But it is also accomplished in the brain. The information-processing problem he solves routinely in less than a second and a half--where, exactly, to get the bat--is one that I could not do if my life depended on it. Very few people can hit big-league pitching. And for those who can, it is not a matter of reflexes, but of a combination of muscles and the correct application of brainpower.
Notes: Peter Singer
Chris Bertram writes that "Moral philosopher Peter Singer inspires powerful feelings, often of loathing, for his willingness to follow consequentialist arguments to their unpalatable conclusions."
I don't think "consequentialism" has much to do with it. I think that what gets people upset with Singer is that he has a strange, narrow, and crabbed view of what the appropriate ends for humans to pursue are. (Although I suppose you could rescue Bertram by saying that that is not a bad definition of what "consequentialism" is.)
Gary Farber Bangs His Head Against the Wall
Gary Farber of Amygdala finds a piece in the Manchester Guardian that is everything that Andrew Sullivan thinks the "Left" is. Guardian writer Jonathan Watts claims that North Korea "...has a good claim to describe itself as an injured party," has a "...woeful public relations effort" that "help[s] other nations demonise it," is "in need of an image consultant," is "...the nation suffering most... desperately poor, threatened with famine and deprived of energy," is losing its industrial base and "slipping back into the dark ages," is "another humanitarian disaster," "has fallen further behind in the field of mass communications than in any other area," and how its political naivete gives "the country's more sophisticated opponents a free hand to manipulate the threat posed by North Korea. When Pyongyang counters, its message is so out of synch with the way of thinking of the rest of the world, that no-one believes it. The message is so incompetently presented that few people listen seriously to North Korea..."
It looks as though Jonathan Watts is too dumb to be able to distinguish between the people of North Korea and the government of North Korea, too dumb to even think that (a) the people of North Korea are miserable, desperately poor, starving, and terrified because (b) the government of North Korea is made of malignant totalitarian f***s who combine all the drawbacks of hereditary monarchy with those of theocracy and those of High Stalinism as well.
Sympathy for the people, yes. Sympathy for the government, no. And Jonathan Watt's claims that the fact that the government has made the people miserable and terrified gives the government some claim to sympathy as an "injured party"? Simply mad.
Pyongyang dispatch
Our fiends in the North
While North Korea has a good claim to describe itself as an injured party, its woeful public relations efforts serve only to help other nations demonise it, writes Jonathan Watts
Friday February 21, 2003
Given North Korea's manifold woes, public relations probably ranks very low on the list of the Pyongyang government's priorities, but if there was ever a country in need of an image consultant it is this one.
Scapegoats rarely come so perfectly packaged. No bullying victim could make life easier for its tormentors. Not even the most wretched, maladjusted child could make itself so unloveable.
North Korea manages to infuriate everyone. It is as if the country has a dose of Tourette syndrome, the hereditary malady often associated with involuntary swearing and obscene gestures.
As a sign of how Pyongyang is detested, George Bush's "axis of evil" comment may have grabbed the most headlines, but it is the least surprising: after all, the United States has technically been at war with the North for more than 50 years.
Less expected is the growing frustration of China, which once described itself as being as close to the north as "lips and teeth". Now, though, Beijing looks askance at the antics of its disturbed neighbour.
The rising middle classes in China laugh embarrassingly at the backward yokel on their northeastern border. The political elite worry that their old friend's nuclear ambitions have made it a dangerously erratic liability.
In South Korea, feelings towards the North have shifted from fear to sympathy, but even though they share the same blood and language, the citizens of Seoul are constantly maddened and disappointed by the behaviour of their brothers and sisters on the other side of the demilitarised zone.
Despite huge amounts of aid and cash from the South, the military in the north continues to engage in espionage and sporadically sparks deadly naval clashes.
Yet, North Korea has a good claim to be the injured party. It is, after all, the nation suffering most in the region. Desperately poor, threatened with famine and deprived of energy, the country - once one of only two industrialised nations in Asia - is slipping back into the dark ages.
Outside of the Pyongyang - where the political elite live - the big cities are turning into ghost towns with no jobs, no food and no electricity. Aid agencies warn of another humanitarian disaster. Satellite pictures of Asia at night show a blaze of lights in Japan, South Korea and China, but a black hole in North Korea.
But how can anybody sympathise while the North's media scream out outlandishly bellicose rhetoric? It seems that the country has fallen further behind in the field of mass communications than in any other area.
While politicians in Washington and London have refined media manipulation into an art form, the regime in Pyongyang still seems to believe that clumsy Orwellian newspeak is the best way to covey a message. Instead of sophisticated spin, Pyongyang jerks between the two extremes of total news suppression and screaming hostility.
There is nothing in between, which gives the country's more sophisticated opponents a free hand to manipulate the threat posed by North Korea. When Pyongyang counters, its message is so out of synch with the way of thinking of the rest of the world, that no-one believes it.
The message is so incompetently presented that few people listen seriously to North Korea when it claims that Washington reneged on the 1994 Agreed Framework, which was supposed to have provided it with two light-water reactors.
The US, of course, argues that Pyongyang was at fault for pursuing an illicit uranium enrichment programme. No matter which country is to blame for destroying that deal, evidence of the devastating consequences are there in the high-rise apartment blocks which lack the power to pump water to the top floors let alone run lifts and heating units.
The North has restarted a 10-year-old plan to build five nuclear reactors that could satisfy many of its energy needs. The outside world not surprisingly worries that the reactors will be used to build nuclear weapons. What else is it supposed to think given North Korea's "military first" policy and its decision to kick out inspectors from the international atomic energy agency.
Given Pyongyang's evident and understandable paranoia and the desperate lack of other bargaining chips, it seems only natural that it desires nuclear weapons. - just as it is only natural that this is the last thing that the outside world wants. North Korea has the potential to pull on the world's heartstrings, but it appears far too proud to seek sympathy.
Access for foreign journalists is restricted to such a degree that it is considered a journalistic triumph to gain entry even to a shop - a market stall would be a global coup. Everything is staged - often absurdly clumsily - to create an impression of a strong, unified nation.
This pride makes the country into its own worst enemy. According to aid agencies, one visit by journalists to a hospital or orphanage in the countryside or one of the derelict urban centres in the northeast could show how miserable the nation has become and how in need it is of outside assistance.
Instead, foreign reporters are shepherded to show facilities like the General Hospital of Koryo Medicine, where doctors claim they are more concerned about fighting America than malnutrition.
Such manipulation is designed to show how tough the country is, but it serves only to add to the suspicions of some visitors that a deeply unpleasant truth is being hidden.
In the war of words, Pyongyang has been massacred. To grab the world's attention it is forced to adopt increasingly desperate means - wild-sounding threats that now generate sniggers in Washington rather than fear.
The very real danger is that North Korea has become such an incompetent communicator that its real intentions are not being taken seriously. A nasty surprise could yet await the world.
Telecom Regulation Is Very Hard
Telecom regulation is very, very important and very, very hard. The very smart Kevin Werbach tries to provide a summary of what the FCC is thinking--and why. It doesn't look good, at least not from where he sits:
Another telecom scenario: Dana Blankenhorn sees a silver lining for DSL providers like Covad and Earthlink in yesterday's FCC decision. He thinks they can use wireless to bypass the Bells. The big problem I see is that they will need capital to adopt this strategy, and Wall Street is unlikely to give it to them in the current environment.
Microsoft and Intel have an opporuntiy to influence the outcome, though. Microsoft put several billion dollars into cable a few years ago when cable stocks were tanking. The investment and vote of confidence helped pull cable into its current broadband lead.
What the FCC was thinking: How could the FCC take such damaging steps for competitive broadband, when it was supposedly pulling back on Chairman Powell's "deregulation" agenda? The answer is in Commissioner Martin's statement.
First, he says this was a compromise between "competition" and "deregulation". These two words have mystical force in telecom policy. If you live in the Beltway echo chamber and not in the real world of business and networks, it's easy to think they mean something in the abstract. Powell (and the Bells) wanted deregulation, the Democrats (and the new entrants) wanted competition, so we get a "principled, balanced approach" that does some of both. Sorry, the world doesn't work that way, as the Wall Street reaction to the decision demonstrates.
Second, the High Tech Broadband Coalition, spearheaded by Intel, successfully convinced the FCC that it was a proxy for "the tech industry". Martin specifically notes in his statement that, "we endorse and adopt in total the High Tech Broadband Coaltition's proposals...." (emphasis his). That's a big flashing red light saying, "hey, tech industry, you should love this and give us credit!"
Trouble is, there isn't a single "tech industry" on telecom issues. There are vendors, and there are service providers. Intel and Microsoft sell software and hardware to broadband service providers, including the incubments. Their interests don't always coincide with companies that make money selling broadband connectivity to end-users.
The technology vendors are rightly focused on next-generation networks that deliver 10-100 megabits per second to the home. I'm far less troubled by the elimination of sharing requirements for new fiber deployments (what the High Tech Broadband Coalition endorsed) than the destruction of line-sharing for today's DSL. The problem isn't with Intel's position, it's with the set of compromises the FCC made.
The trouble is that you can't just give the tech vendors something, and the incumbent carriers something, because they play different roles. Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft won't be the ones building the networks. The telcos have to deploy the infrastructure, and they won't do that if they feel wronged by the FCC's overall decision and have no competitive pressure. The order does precisely that. It re-energizes the Bells' obstructionist strategy, and it takes away near-term competitive threats from independent DSL providers that might have spurred them to invest anyway.
Verizon Senior VP Tom Tauke's quote says it all: "The future of telecommunications is broadband, and on this issue the commission appears to have moved in the right direction but may have important details wrong. Moreover, the future investment in the wireline network is tied to a strong financial base for the overall business." Doesn't sound like someone planning to "jump start investment in next-generation networks," as Commissioner Martin predicted.
Additional (consistent) perspectives from Bruce Kushnick and Dave Burstein.
The market has spoken: Wall Street has passed its snap judgment on yesterday's FCC decision, and the results aren't good. The Bell Company stocks tanked. The stocks of competitors such as AT&T fell slightly along with the market. And competitive DSL providers such as Covad were absolutely crushed.
The message loud and clear is that investors don't fully understand what the FCC did, but they don't like it. If the rationale was to promote investment and broadband deployment, it's hard to see how that will happen.
The majority's notion was that eliminating sharing rules for broadband (both today's DSL and tomorrow's fiber networks) will spur the Bells to invest heavily. Yet those very companies are vocally denouncing the order and threatening more lawsuits. Having investors sell off your stock isn't exactly a push toward new investment. And for consumers, the decision means higher broadband prices, when the clear lesson from countries such as Japan and Korea is that broadband penetration zooms when prices drop.
The Bush Budget Once Again
Michael Kinsley bangs his head against the wall on the Bush budget, saying all the normal and appropriate things. As far as I can see, Bush Administration fiscal policy has no external private supporters (except possibly Kevin Hassett?) at all--at least, not one person I have talked to in private who understands the federal budget has told me that they think that the package as a whole (including future extra military expenditures, AMT relief, and all the other things in the policies but not in the OMB numbers) is good for the country.
If anybody does think this is good policy, please drop me a note explaining why.
The George W. Diet - Lose unsightly pounds by eating like a pig. By Michael Kinsley: Suppose you had a friend who was grossly overweight for years but lately had been looking very trim. Suddenly, though, he puts on 30 or 40 pounds and is waddling around like his old porcine self. He explains that he's found a marvelous new diet: "You eat like a pig and stop exercising until you get so fat that you just have to lose weight." Would you say that your friend is kidding himself?
And if your friend went on to complain that he was getting fat because other people were eating too much, and this diet was the only way to stop these other people from putting those unsightly pounds on him, would you think his self-delusion was becoming clinical? Or would you start to suspect that the joke is on you?
Yet this is essentially the logic adopted by the Bush administration and the Republican congressional leadership to rationalize turning the federal budget surplus back into huge deficits. They say that deficits are actually a good thing?despite what you may have heard from Ronald Reagan and almost every Republican before and since?because deficits create pressure for smaller government. "Conservatives Now See Deficits as a Tool to Fight Spending" was the headline on a recent New York Times article quoting a slew of them?including the chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, Glenn Hubbard.
This line of patter started a couple of years ago, when Bush inherited a budget in surplus. There is some sense in the idea that a surplus stimulates appetites and that prudence suggests giving the money back before it gets spent. But "giving back" money you don't have turns prudence on its head.
Back in the 1980s, liberals used to suspect that Reagan was up to something similar?purposely producing a deficit to discredit the government?and would leap with a great "aha" on any Reaganite remark half-implying as much. Today, what used to be the ulterior motive has become the public excuse. The Bushies apparently would rather be thought of as insanely Machiavellian than as shamefully irresponsible.
In case the chief White House economist, the House majority leader (Tom DeLay), and others actually believe in this magical fairy dust, we'd better explain patiently why it is unlikely to succeed. You see, boys and girls, the trouble with spending is that it costs money. If the government could spend money it doesn't have without running up debts that have to be paid back (with interest), there would be little reason to object. So running up those debts in order to reduce spending is a bit self-defeating.
The psychological trick may not work at all: Does abandoning self-discipline and convincing yourself that it's OK lead to more self-discipline or less? Does handing out tax cuts without equivalent spending cuts make people think, "We've got to stop doing this"? Or, "Hey, this is nice"? But let's suppose that the trick does work: that every extra dollar of deficit creates extra pressure to do something about the deficit. There are still a couple of problems. First, that "something" can be either cutting expenses or raising revenues, and there is no logical reason why deficits should create more pressure for one than for the other. Although Republicans insist that bigger deficits will lead to smaller government, it would be equally plausible to argue that they will lead to higher taxes.
Second, if every dollar of increased deficit represents a certain amount of extra pressure for fiscal responsibility, what happens when that pressure brings the deficit back down to where it was before you started monkeying around? Presumably at that point the beneficial pressure is also the same as it was before. Except that your round trip to the wilder shores of fiscal irresponsibility has added the interest on a few trillion dollars of increased national debt to the annual cost of keeping the government in the style to which it has become accustomed.
The only way this notion of running up huge deficits makes sense as a purposeful strategy is to think of it as a Lenin-style "heightening the contradictions." That is, make things worse until there is a crisis in which you can triumph when the smoke clears. Or, to make the same point with a different metaphor, perhaps the idea is that government spending is an addiction, and the patient has to hit rock bottom before an intervention can start him on the path to a cure.
But who is the patient? Who is this government that is so out of control? Republicans now control the White House and both houses of Congress. Even the Supreme Court has made vividly clear that it stands ready to help if necessary. And self-labeled conservatives are pretty much in control in the party itself. There is nothing to stop President Bush and his congressional cohorts from proposing, enacting, and imposing any vision they may have about the proper size of government and method of financing it. They don't need wacky behavioral schemes and incentives.
The administration's 2004 budget documents include long-run projections, based on its own policy wish list and its own economic assumptions, that show growing deficits from now until ? forever. If Bush really believes that increasing deficits in general, and its own policies in particular, will produce smaller government and more fiscal responsibility, why don't his own numbers reflect this? In the fine print, it seems, the Bush folks don't really believe any such thing. And why should they? It's ridiculous.
Smart Lawns
The imminent arrival of the artificially-intelligent lawn. Yet more evidence that the future is here already, it's just not evenly distributed.
Gizmodo : Wireless sprinkler system:
Possibly the weirdest use of wireless technology yet is a new wireless sprinkler system that's coming out in May from a company called Digital Sun. The X.Sense creates a wireless mesh network using moisture sensors strategically inserted into your lawn that keeps track of when and how much to water. Best of all, the wireless network is encrypted, lest anyone try to hack your sprinkler system.
Paul Krugman Bangs His Head Against the Wall
It's getting really, really, really hard to be a morally-consistent hawk these days--largely because there are more and more signs that George W. Bush's knee-jerk "we don't do nation-building" is in fact the desired policy of the administration:
The Martial Plan By PAUL KRUGMAN
The Marshall Plan was America's finest hour. After World War I, the victors did what victors usually do: they demanded reparations from the vanquished. But after World War II America did something unprecedented: it provided huge amounts of aid, helping both its allies and its defeated enemies rebuild.
It wasn't selfless altruism, of course; it was farsighted, enlightened self-interest. America's leaders understood that fostering prosperity, stability and democracy was as important as building military might in the struggle against Communism.
But one suspects that our current leaders would have jeered at this exercise in "nation-building." And they are certainly following a very different strategy today.
It's not that the Bush administration is always stingy. In fact, right now it is offering handouts right and left. Most notably, it has offered the Turkish government $26 billion in grants and loans if it ignores popular opposition and supports the war.
Some observers also point out that the administration has turned the regular foreign aid budget into a tool of war diplomacy. Small countries that currently have seats on the U.N. Security Council have suddenly received favorable treatment for aid requests, in an obvious attempt to influence their votes. Cynics say that the "coalition of the willing" President Bush spoke of turns out to be a "coalition of the bought off" instead.
But it's clear that the generosity will end as soon as Baghdad falls.
After all, look at our behavior in Afghanistan. In the beginning, money was no object; victory over the Taliban was as much a matter of bribes to warlords as it was of Special Forces and smart bombs. But President Bush promised that our interest wouldn't end once the war was won; this time we wouldn't forget about Afghanistan, we would stay to help rebuild the country and secure the peace. So how much money for Afghan reconstruction did the administration put in its 2004 budget?
None. The Bush team forgot about it. Embarrassed Congressional staff members had to write in $300 million to cover the lapse. You can see why the Turks, in addition to demanding even more money, want guarantees in writing. Administration officials are insulted when the Turks say that a personal assurance from Mr. Bush isn't enough. But the Turks know what happened in Afghanistan, and they also know that fine words about support for New York City, the firefighters and so on didn't translate into actual money once the cameras stopped rolling.
And Iraq will receive the same treatment. On Tuesday Ari Fleischer declared that Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction ? even though experts warn that it may be years before the country's oil fields are producing at potential. Off the record, some officials have even described Iraqi oil as the "spoils of war."
So there you have it. This administration does martial plans, not Marshall Plans: billions for offense, not one cent for reconstruction.
Of course, postwar reconstruction in Europe and Japan wasn't just a matter of money; America can also be proud of the way it built democratic institutions. Alas, the Bush administration's postwar political plans are even more alarming than its economic nonchalance.
Turkey has reportedly been offered the right to occupy much of Iraqi Kurdistan. Yes, that's right: as we move to liberate the Iraqis, our first step may be to deliver people who have been effectively independent since 1991 into the hands of a hated foreign overlord. Moral clarity!
Meanwhile, outraged Iraqi exiles report that there won't be any equivalent of postwar de-Nazification, in which accomplices of the defeated regime were purged from public life. Instead the Bush administration intends to preserve most of the current regime: Saddam Hussein and a few top officials will be replaced with Americans, but the rest will stay. You don't have to be an Iraq expert to realize that many very nasty people will therefore remain in power ? more moral clarity! ? and that the U.S. will in effect take responsibility for maintaining the rule of the Sunni minority over the Shiite majority.
If this all sounds incredibly callous and shortsighted, that's because it is. But then what did you expect? This administration doesn't worry about long-term consequences ? just look at its fiscal policy. It wants its war; there's not the slightest indication that it's interested in the boring, expensive task of building a just and lasting peace.
It's Becoming Genuinely Hard to Be a Hawk
Kevin Drum bangs his head against the wall. It's genuinely hard to be a hawk on Iraq given the composition of the U.S. executive branch. Not only do they lie, but they don't seem to understand what being the "good guys" entails:
AFTER THE WAR....The news on the war front is not good. I suspect that many reluctant hawks like me have held their noses and supported the war because of the possibility that, aside from ridding the world of a dangerous and unstable dictator, we might also make Iraq ? and eventually the rest of the Middle East ? into a better place.
But the downsides seem to be piling up. Transatlantic relations are strained almost to breaking, and Donald Rumsfeld has already declared his eagerness to punish allies who don't support us. We're in the process of paying out a $32 billion (or so) bribe to the Turks. We seem to be abandoning the Kurds. The planned "Shock and Awe" bombing of Baghdad sounds dangerously close to being a war crime. Some factions in the Bush administration talk about appropriating Iraqi oil funds as "spoils of war," and the latest word from Washington and London is that we aren't planning to help fund any reconstruction efforts in Iraq and probably aren't going to promote democratic institutions there either. It might upset Saudi Arabia, after all.
Now, let's take it as given that one result of the war will be a relatively swift regime change in Iraq, with Saddam Hussein and his top lieutenants either captured or killed. As nice as that might be, however, I think there's a bipartisan consensus that there are several other outcomes we would also like to see. For example:
Introduction, to at least some extent, of democratic institutions in Iraq.
Rapid reconstruction of Iraqi infrastructure and introduction of market reforms, food aid, and medical aid.
A clear demonstration to the world that Iraq did indeed have the hidden WMDs that we said they had.
Continued protection of the Kurds and other ethnic minorities in Iraq.
At some level, evidence that Western values introduced in Iraq are starting to make inroads in the rest of the Middle East.
And then there are the possible disasters that a war might bring:
A serious uprising of the "Arab street" that ends up promoting increased terrorist activity.
Additional wars in the Middle East, whether they involve us or not.
Pursuit of WMDs by countries like Iran or Syria, which don't currently have them.
A serious attack, possibly nuclear, on Israel.
An interruption of the Mideast oil supply, either via embargo or war, that causes a serious recession in the rest of the world.
So I have this question: if you're in favor of war, is anything more than regime change needed for you to consider it a success? And would any of the disasters on the bottom list convince you that it was, in the end, a failure?
For anti-war partisans, the question is the opposite. How many of the items on the top list would have to happen to convince you that the war, in fact, turned out to be a positive development?
To put it more simply, what are the criteria for success? Does moral clarity begin and end with forcibly removing Saddam Hussein from power, or is there more to it?
Scientific Literacy Department
But... but... but... a clone is no more the original person than your identical twin is your duplicate.
The American Prospect's weblog* refers to the characters in the MTV show "Clone High" as if they were the original people rather than their clones. But that conceit is the whole point of the story--that these are clones. The fact that Mohandas K. Gandhi's clone is, as a teenager, not a person one would address as "Mahatma" is supposed to be funny. And TAPPED is busy eliding that distinction.
TAPPED: February 2003 Archives: Next, we have a review of MTV's new cartoon, Clone High USA, by Noy Thrupkaew. The show has sparked protests in India for its depiction of a teenage Gandhi as a junk-food eating, attention deficit disorder-addled kid who loves to party. But Thrupkaew says the show is endearing, and treats its historical characters -- among them Abraham Lincoln, JFK and Joan of Arc -- with affection and a weird kind of imaginative accuracy.
"Why does a Berkeley economist care about 'Clone High'?" you ask. I care because Clone High creator Phillip Lord is my first cousin. And there are enough people who are angry at him for insulting the great of the past already...
*I should note that if you chase links from the weblog, you come across a very sensitive and well-written review of "Clone High" by the talented and highly observant Noy Thrupkaew...
Double Vision: MTV's Clone High USA reduces historical figures to their high school selves -- with remarkable insight.
Noy ThrupkaewMahatma Gandhi has had a hard time of it lately. Lad mag Maxim recently featured illustrations of the revered activist being beaten up by an oversized jock -- choice images for the magazine's "Kick-Ass Workout" feature. "Teach those pacifists a lesson about aggression," exhorted the copy, as Gandhi was hoisted, stomped on and thrown around. Mayhem ensued when Maxim received more than 5,000 complaints, prompting the magazine to issue an apology defending its "edgy sense of humor, laced with irony."
Those who have read Maxim might find that last defense particularly funny: Any magazine that treats gadgetry and women's erogenous zones with the same button-mashing enthusiasm has no sense of irony.
And according to at least 150 Indian hunger-striking protesters last week, Gandhi has suffered yet another indignity. MTV's new animated series Clone High USA showcases a teenage, attention deficit disorder-addled Gandhi clone who loves partying and eating junk food.
The trouble is, the South Asian activists haven't been able to watch the show, which only airs in the United States. Newspaper reports and Internet articles about Clone High USA helped stoke the flames of anger that Maxim first ignited -- and it's too bad. If people had the chance to actually watch the show, perhaps they could see that Gandhi isn't being singled out for disrespect; Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln and Cleopatra, among others, suffer the same fate. Clone High USA practices equal-opportunity icon baiting but is never mean; it has an irreverence informed by affectionate familiarity with the historical figures it spoofs.
Plus, it's really funny.
This might not be a surprise to those who remember MTV's animated show Daria, with its deadpan, much-too-intelligent high-school lead. Daria droned through her day, remarking on the stupidity of her school and her dysfunctional family. Clone High USA draws on that angst, but couples it with the manic energy of The Simpsons: Absolutely everything is mocked, with a million sight gags in each frame. And like The Simpsons, the show has a sweetness that keeps it from being too snide.
Stocking a high school with clones of assorted historical figures sounds odd -- and it is. The school is run by a mad scientist turned principal. (Aren't they one and the same, really?) He in turn answers to a board of menacing, shadowy figures who seem to want clone soldiers out of the deal. But for all the strangeness of the show's premise, using clones of dead, famous people is an amazingly effective way to paint the spectrum of high-school personalities. Joan of Arc is the goth chick. John F. Kennedy effortlessly wins sporting events and spends his time "auditioning" girls to be in a film. Cleopatra is the annoyingly perfect girl -- a brainy, vain overachiever with a gravity-defying bosom -- and crush object of the drippily sincere Abe Lincoln.
By saddling each kid with a famous "clonefather" or "clonemother," the show's creators get at the teenage struggle to assert a nascent identity, or at least break away from parents. G-Man -- our Gandhi clone -- is hilarious, a freaky little rapper wannabe who tries so hard to be cool. And he has completely folded under the pressure of being Gandhi's clone; instead of resisting colonialism and practicing nonviolence, G-Man spends his time hatching stupid schemes to draw attention to his life-of-the-party self. I knew that kid -- the frivolous, rap-spewing, desperate-to-be-"in" child of a saintly mom free of superficial longings -- and, watching the show, I found myself groaning, and laughing, in déjà vu.
That familiarity rounds out characters who could otherwise be reduced to one-note riffs on their clone parents. When the school decides to hold a film festival, Abe reveals both his wimpy sweetness and his inherited clone traits while directing his entry: "I want your voice to weep with honesty and goodness," he says. Joan of Arc expresses her mad, unrequited love for best friend Abe through film, and is mortified by what she thinks is a bald confession of her feelings. To everyone else, of course, the movie is just a hideous pastiche of nonsensical images. But after viewing it, Sigmund Freud's clone cackles madly, saying, "It's so obvious!"
Meanwhile, G-Man has enlisted the very serious and peanut-obsessed George Washington Carver to appear in Black and Tan. "Check this out," says G-Man. He wants to be "Tandoori Jones" in a Jackie Chan-like odd-couple action movie. George doesn't buy it, as his rather race-underplaying clonefather wouldn't have either. That genre of film "perpetuates racial stereotypes," George says. G-Man, meanwhile, combining his own idealistic naivete with his clonefather's devotion to social justice, thinks such a movie is about "dissing racial stereotypes." "Black and Tan will prove that even though we're different," he says, "we're ultimately a hilarious combo!"
Clone High USA's creators nail teenage relationships with the same accuracy that they depict each character. I was hooked by Joan's unrequited love for Abe: It takes the pain of being the asexual best friend to its absurd limits. "Don't worry, bro," says Abe to Joan. They have the kind of relationship where they can "sleep in the same bed and never touch or kiss." Right, "amigo, buddy, fella?"
MTV seems to have removed the show's information from its Web site -- perhaps a way to lay low until anger over the G-Man character dies down. I hope, however, that this doesn't mean that the show itself is endangered. It's too funny, too wrenching to die only a few episodes in. If only the protesters had a chance to watch the show, perhaps they could see that it isn't about trashing great historical figures or heroes. For all its clone origins, Clone High USA is about the horrible and hilarious reality of growing up -- something that faces even the most normal of us.
Noy Thrupkaew writes about culture for The American Prospect and TAP Online.
February 20, 2003
Thinking About Aristotle of Stagira and Moses Finley
I'm never sure whether I should begin my economic history survey courses with Aristotle or not. As Moses Finley powerfully argues, Aristotle does not care about the economy. The fragments in his Ethics and Politics that economists like Joseph Schumpeter point to are, mostly, concerned with other things than economic analysis. Karl Polanyi thought that Aristotle's naivete was the result of the fact that a mercantile, market, commercial economy was something very new. He was surely wrong: it was not something new, but rather something that Aristotle as a Hellenic aristocrat would have been embarrassed to be caught thinking seriously about.
Still, I now wish I'd started this semester's history course with more on Aristotle. His perspective is so different from ours that it provides a useful mental shock:
- On Aristotle: Consider, first, that Aristotle of Stagira was not an idiot (even if he did believe that women had fewer teeth than men). For two thousand years people--pagan Hellenes, Christian Europeans, and Islamic Arabs, Egyptians, Mesopotamians,and Iranians--called Aristotle of Stagira "the philosopher", as if there could be only one. Think of the way seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century Britons regarded Newton (or the way we regard Einstein). So we need to take Aristotle seriously.
I want you to think hard about how a very good mind, thinking very hard, in pre-industrial-revolution economic circumstances, could wind up thinking the thoughts on the economy that Aristotle does. Specifically, why does he...
- ...believe so strongly that gross inequality--domination and slavery--is natural and inevitable?
- ...believe that the 'natural art of acquisition'--the getting of the resources necessary to properly run one's household--has a limit: 'a boundary fixed, just as there is in the other arts; for the instruments of any art are never unlimited, either in number or size, and riches may be defined as a number of instruments to be used in a household or in a state...'? (Never mind that Aristotle's "limit" is probably the full-time year-round labor of at least fifty people, at today's OECD wage levels some $3,000,000 a year: in one sense very, very few of us will ever come near to Aristotle's point of satiation; in another sense every single one of us has already gone far beyond Aristotle's limit.)
- ...believe that shepherds are '...the laziest [of men]... lead an idle life... get their subsistence without trouble from tame animals...'?
- ...believe that '[t]here are two sorts of wealth-getting... one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another...'?
- ...believe that of '...the practical part [of wealth-getting] the discussion of such matters is not unworthy of philosophy, but to be engaged in them practically is illiberal and irksome'?
- Note: don't miss Aristotle's story of Thales of Miletos and his corner of the olive-press-rental market on Khios..."
Further reading: M. I. Finley (1970), "Aristotle and Economic Analysis" Past and Present, No. 47. (May), pp. 3-25.
February 19, 2003
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea
I last read this book two years ago, and I read it last weekend on yet another trip to Monterey. I found myself, once again, enthralled.
I also found myself wishing that I had assigned it--or something similar to it--to my students. And then I thought that my reading lists are too long already, and that adding another two to three hours onto their weekly readings would not please them...
I wrote the piece below two years ago...
H.N. Turteltaub (2001), Over the Wine-Dark Sea: A Sea Adventure of the Ancient World (New York: Forge: 0312876602).
I picked this book up from the Barnes and Noble front table on my way down to Monterey for vacation. I had been looking for something light. Instead, I found myself engaged in the book for perhaps four times as many hours as I would usually spend on a book this length. I was entranced because the subject was interesting, because the writing did not get in the way of the story, and because I found myself greatly admiring the project--the historical, educational project--that the author is engaged in.
H.N. Turteltaub is also Harry Turtledove, the author of a large number of heroic fantasy novels and an even larger number of "alternate history" novels. But in this book Turteltaub attempts a very different project. _Over the Wine-Dark Sea_ tells the story of the voyage of a 40-oared merchant galley, the Aphrodite, with its captain, quartermaster, and crew, from Rhodes to Naples and back in the summer of 310 B.C.
The plot does not fit the requirements of unity and cohesion that we have grown to expect from a novel--the idea that if we are told that there is a gun hanging on the wall in chapter 1, it should be fired before the end of the book. Instead, the plot is much more beads-on-a-string: negotiating with suppliers, negotiating with customers, navigating through the Aegean Sea, getting caught in storms, evading pirates, attending drinking parties, and so forth. The focus of the book is not on the development of a character, or on some decisive event in an individual's or a civilization's history, but on the threads and character of daily life in the late fourth-century B.C. Mediterranean. History-with-a-capital-H appears--we are told of the maneuverings of Alexander the Great's generals as they kill Alexander's children and carve up his empire into pieces for themselves, we see Agathokles Tyrant of Syracuse fight the Carthaginians, and we watch the Romans enter the stage of history--but history-with-a-capital H is pure background.
Instead, the focus is on merchant captain Menedemos as he flees outraged husbands, sells peacocks, and exhorts his crew to row faster; and on his quartermaster-cousin Sostratos as he reckons up profit-and-loss in his head and tries to curb the more dangerous enthusiasms of his risk-loving captain.
Does Turteltaub succeed in his project? I would say "Yes, definitely." A book like Courtesans and Fishcakes will tell you more facts about life in the fourth century B.C. Aegean. But Over the Wine-Dark Sea fits them into a pattern--the pattern of a merchant voyage--so that they make sense as the components of a thriving, expanding culture. All in all, I was impressed.
I did, however, have three significant complaints about the book:
First, the book gives little sense the grinding poverty of the working classes in the Hellenistic Mediterranean. During this age the population of the--for the time well-settled and technologically advanced--Greek ekumene was growing at about 2.7% per twenty-year generation. In a civilization that lacked the restraints on fertility imposed by the European nuclear family marriage pattern or the Chinese lineage system, and in which girls were routinely married off at fifteen, such a low rate of population growth tells us horrible things about the disease and nutrition environment in which the bulk of the population lived. In a pre-industrial population in which people are not at the edge of malnutrition, like the colonial United States, populations double every twenty years. Even the population of southern slaves doubled every twenty years. The population is growing so slowly because the people of the Hellenistic Mediterranean, most of them, are at the edge of malnutrition: too little fat and calories for many women to ovulate regularly, too little protein to grow tall, too little nutrition to successfully overcome many diseases.
There are a few hints of what is going on. One young women comments offhand that a peahen is given almost as much food as a slave. She is back in her father's house at 18 because her husband has died of disease. But these are only hints. Instead, the focus is on the ship and what it carries, upper-class consumption patterns and upper-class consumption goods: papyrus, navigation, silk, high-quality wine, and preparations for an extensive feast for which the centerpiece is to be a dogfish. The slaves didn't eat dogfish.
Second, it is hard to get a sense of exactly what the Aphrodite is carrying. We know that it is carrying 125 amphorae of Arousian wine from Khios, yes. But exactly how large is an amphora? Does it take up two cubic feet in the cargo area? How big is the cargo area? How much silk, perfume, and so forth is the ship carrying? And how big are each of the 800 sacks of grain that the ship takes to Syracuse? We are told occasional numbers--costs, sale prices, quantities--but not enough to get a sense for ourselves of how the business is going. (Although we do see Menedemos and Sostratos get happier and happier as the voyage proceeds.)
Third, if I read this voyage correctly, it is an extraordinarily profitable one. Everything goes right. Menedemos runs extraordinary risks in pursuit of extraordinary profits, and wins. And so the reaction of Menedemos's and Sostratos's family when they get back to Rhodes is alarmingly and inhumanly restrained.
First, let's set up some equivalences. In the silver money of the Aegean 100 drakhmai make a mina, 60 minae make a talent. 1 drakhma is a working-class wage for a ten-hour day--call it the equivalent (in labor time) of $50. (Of course, it is *not* the equivalent of $50 today in purchasing power: if we think of a drakhma as a $50 bill, then a pound of grain costs about $10 (compared to $0.30 today at Safeway); a bottle of highest-quality Arousian wine costs $80 (where it is made in Khios) or $250 (when it is sold in Italy) (compared to $20 today at Beverages and More); the two books Sostratos owns (Herodotos's Histories and Thoukydides's Peloponnesian War) probably cost him $5000 each (makes the $8.95 Penguin Classics editions look like a real bargain, yes?). Whether the real labor-time price gap is tenfold, thirtyfold, or five-hundredfold, from our perspective even the rich of the pre-industrial past were appallingly poor in everything except the numbers of their slaves.)
Menedemos and Sostratos ship 125 amphorae of wine from Khios to Italy, buy it at a price of $800 per (ten-bottle?) amphora, sell it at an average price of somewhere around $2500 per amphora, and so reap a gross margin of $212,500 on this part of their cargo. If this wine is 1/5 of their normal cargo, and if the gross margin is the same on the rest of their cargo, then the boat has a gross margin of $1,000,000 from the purchase in Greece and sale in Italy of its normal cargo. From this, we have to subtract the galley's operating costs, the biggest of which is the expense of the rowers: 40 rowers at 1.5 drakhmai a day for a 200-day sailing season gives us $600,000 in direct labor costs.
The $400,000 operating profit remaining seems a reasonable amount for a normal successful voyage. It has to cover the costs of winter maintenance, interest on capital, and allowance for risk of loss of the entire ship and its cargo to pirates or storms. A ship is a valuable and expensive piece of capital equipment itself, worth less (perhaps a third?) but not astronomically less than its cargo, and its loss would be expensive. The possible total loss of the cargo to storms or pirates is an even greater risk.
However, on this voyage Menedemos and Sostratos have a number of extra items that they carry, all of which are astonishingly profitable. They earn $10,000 carrying mercenaries from Greece to Italy. They bring the first peacocks to Italy, which they sell for a gross margin of $260,000. They fill their ship with grain and run past the Carthaginian blockade to resupply besieged Syracuse. How much grain can their 60 foot long, 10 foot wide boat carry? How deep is its cargo hold? If they can carry 36000 lbs of grain, then--if they did collect four times the going rate of $10 a lb for it--they earned $1,440,000 from the Syracusan treasury for that part of the voyage.
The total operating profit, after labor costs but before wear-and-tear on the ship, insurance, et cetera? It looks to me like about 8 talents--$2,500,000. That is enough to (I think) buy ten ships the size of the Aphrodite. That is a fivefold return on invested capital over a six-month voyage. For a couple of 25 year olds on one of their first few voyages in charge of one of the family's ships, that is an amazing profit. The grumpy family members should have been more appeased. The non-grumpy family members should have been boasting of the voyage as one of the mercantile coups of the century. (Nevertheless, it is important to remember that even rich Hellenistic Rhodian merchants were, by our standards, very poor. Menedemos's room at his father's house is "sparsely furnished: a bedstead with a wool-stuffed mattress, a chamber pot under it, a chair beside it, and two cypresswood chests, a smaller atop a larger. The larger one held Sostratos's tunics and mantles. The smaller held his books," both of them, the _Histories_ and the _Peloponnesian War_.) The reaction of the family to their return seems too psychologically restrained to make sense to me.
But these three objections of mine are relatively picky ones. Taken as a whole, the core of the book is its descriptions, and its descriptions--of material life, of culture and attitudes, and of economic transactions--are very thick, and very nice. I found the book entrancing.
Is there a market for this kind of book? I may be overpessimistic, but I doubt it. The treatment of women is historically accurate: brutally sexist. There are no smart-and-sassy princesses-in-disguise who break through gender roles to happiness: there is only a widowed sister confined to the women's quarters who is at 18 old and spoiled goods on the marriage market, a slave-prostitute who plots to become a courtesan and dreams that Sostratos will buy her and rescue her, and worse. The plot is, by its nature, episodic. It does not conform to the expectations that we bring to a standard novel.
Thus the book's principal attraction is to those whose main concern is that they know that the past is another country, and they want to learn how they did things differently then. I fear that this audience is much smaller than the audiences for fantasy or romance or alternate history.
And that is too bad.
February 18, 2003
Now It's Joshua Micah Marshall's Turn...
Now it's Joshua Micah Marshall's turn... to bang his head against the wall. This time it's over the fecklessness of the Bush Administration's Korea policy, and the nonexistence of the Democratic foreign policy establishment:
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: Which is more embarrassing?
1) The fact that Brent Scowcroft, the president's father's foreign policy guru, keeps on having to resort to the opinion pages to warn the president away from some new foreign policy disaster? (These public missives, of course, are widely and I think correctly seen as veiled messages from former President Bush.)
Or
2) The fact that the Democrats apparently have to rely on Scowcroft because they have no public figure of sufficient credibility and expertise who can publicly sound the alarm when the president marches off into another bout of foreign policy ridiculousness?
Here's a hint. It ain't #1.
In Sunday's Washington Post Outlook section, Scowcroft and Daniel Poneman tell the White House what everyone who is a) paying attention and b) not afflicted by a rich foreign policy fantasy life should know by now: that time is not on our side with North Korea and that we must act now.
Tempting as it may be for them, the folks at the White House simply can't let this situation drift into another disaster which they can then pass off on their political and press sycophants as the fault of Bill Clinton.
Very tempting, I know. Just terrible for the country.
Gene Healy Is Irked
Usually Gene Healy pounds his head against the wall in despair at the speed of the steady drift of the Bush Administration to war with Iraq. Today, however, he is just irked, and irked about something else:
genehealy.com: The Quest for Community: Certain phrases really irk me. I saw an ad recently for a Brooks Brothers' "Performance Polo" shirt. I understand "Performance" running shoes--but what is "Performance Polo" supposed to indicate? Something that won't tear when you hoist your Chardonnay?...
Less Than $1 a Gigabyte
Moore's Law gets all the press. But should it? Dan Gillmor writes about the mass-storage equivalent of Moore's law: how hard disk prices have now dropped below $1 per gigabyte:
Mercury News | 02/16/2003 | Dan Gillmor: Disk-drive capacity continues to grow: The cost of disk-drive capacity has dropped below a buck a gigabyte. The news was anticlimactic in a sense, because it was predictable in a time of constant technological progress. It was one of those milestones that still means something -- not just a testament to the storage industry's achievements, but also a reminder of how the seemingly most prosaic of information technologies may have turned out to be the most disruptive.
Like others of my generation, I can remember my first computer with a hard disk, which I bought in the mid-1980s after years of personal computing with floppy disks and, before that, cassette storage. I wondered how I'd ever fill the 10 megabytes on the IBM PC, given that an entire novel's worth of text takes up less than 1 megabyte, or 1/60,000 of the space on today's typical 60-gigabyte hard drive. I soon found out. In a Digital Age corollary to Parkinson's Law, data expanded to fit the available space. I learned this repeatedly as the types of data changed. Text was efficient. Graphics took up more space. Microsoft created file formats for its Office software that took up even more.
Silicon Valley's disk-drive innovators kept pace. Then came multimedia, especially MP3s, the music format that routinely uses a couple of megabytes a song. My Apple iPod MP3 player will fill up one of these days. But the iPod has a measly (!) 10 gigabytes. By this time next year we'll see tiny media players with 40 or 60 gigabytes of storage.
Ah, but what about video? That's the ultimate space hog, right? Yes, for now. My hard-disk video recorder at home has what today is a laughably small capacity, 40 gigabytes, but it holds more than 30 hours of video I record from the satellite, ensuring that there's usually something I want to watch when I get home. The kinds of files we store keep getting bulkier, but the disk-drive wizards are moving fast enough to stay ahead. In the next few years, given their continuing innovation, they're likely to do something I didn't imagine possible until recently -- give us so much storage at such a low cost that we genuinely don't know how to use it all. But in the short term, disk space still will be somewhat constrained.
Here's one example of how we'll use it: I just installed the 2003 Encyclopedia Britannica on my laptop computer. It came on a DVD disk and took up about 2.4 gigabytes of space. This is the same encyclopedia, with multimedia additions, that used to take up a huge bookshelf. Now I carry it around. The immense storage capabilities of computer disk drives also make me wonder whether applications we once assumed should reside on central servers might migrate back down to the desktop. Corporations could install employee Web sites on laptop computers, for example.
I'd also like to have a home server that stored everything -- music, movies, reference materials, software, you name it -- for easy access by devices I use around the house. Of course, I'd want a backup of everything. But the huge capacities of drives for desktops and servers remind us of another aspect of the industry's progress. Disk drives are getting smaller, too. We'll soon embed huge amounts of storage into small devices.
Digital movie cameras are starting to be equipped with hard disks, a natural step. Soon enough, though, all kinds of other things we use every day will make a record of what they're doing. That will raise some new questions. For example, what are the privacy implications of our automobiles keeping track of where we drive and at what speed, as the car makers, insurance industry and government snoops will surely wish? In the medium term, we could fill up disks at the edge of networks in order to help spread multimedia content to people who want to use it. This will be necessary given the near-zero probability that the telecommunications industry will give us sufficient bandwidth -- the speed of network data connections -- for centralized multimedia delivery.
The furor over digital copying is a direct outgrowth of storage improvements. Not until large numbers of songs and videos could be easily stored on personal hard disks did the music and movie industries get seriously worried about the networks that began to connect those disks. Without mass storage, Napster would have been much less relevant. The expanding capacity of portable drives opens a new front in the entertainment cartel's war with its customers. Song traders don't need to use the Internet anymore. They can hold parties in friends' homes, swapping songs from disk to disk. Soon it will be movies.
I rely on futurists to help me understand what we'll store on disks or other storage memory, such as flash memory, in the long term. Gordon Bell, a computer industry legend, imagines wearable devices that hold everything we've ever seen, heard and said. I'm not crazy about that vision, but when disks hold a thousand times more than they do today, your entire life will fit -- plus more books, songs and movies than you could use in a thousand lifetimes. Yikes.
Marcus Noland on North Korea
Marcus Noland is one of the few people in the United States who has given any serious thought to how to deal with the North Korea problem. Here he outlines why an active policy of "engagement" is a no-brainer from the point of view of South Korea--and why the South Korean government would be fools to allow the blinkered and less-than-competent Bush Administration to control the current crisis.
Paper: North Korea and the South Korean Economy: A few years back I asked a South Korean Minister of Finance if he took North Korean behavior into account when formulating South Korean economic policy. "No," he replied, "those guys in the North are crazy. We don't pay any attention to them."
More recently I met with an associate of the incoming Roh Moo-hyun government. When asked which outcome he preferred?North Korea with an ongoing nuclear weapons assembly line or its collapse and absorption by South Korea a la Germany?he chose the former. "We couldn't afford [the collapse outcome]?the US would have to pay for it."
This paper will make the following three arguments: (1) engagement with the aim of transforming North Korea is a desirable policy from the standpoint of South Korea; (2) collapse and absorption along German lines would not be catastrophic for South Korea; and (3) regardless of South Korea's stance toward the North, it remains economically vulnerable to the vagaries of North Korean behavior.
p> The rationale for an engagement policy is quite simple. Pyongyang already holds Seoul hostage with its forward-deployed artillery. The marginal increase in effective threat associated with revitalization of the North Korean economy is minimal. Ergo, it is worth engaging with the North and hoping that through a policy of engagement either Pyongyang will evolve toward a less threatening regime, or engagement will undermine the ideological basis of the Kim Jong-il regime and eventually cause its collapse. Either way the military threat to Seoul is eliminated. (Parenthetically, the same cost-benefit calculus does not hold for the United States, which has strategic interests beyond the Korean peninsula, and this creates the real basis for divergence in US and South Korean preferences regarding engagement with the North.)The risks for South Korea of this engagement strategy are not the ones that would create symmetric dependency as is sometimes alleged. Economic integration with the North would have a trivial impact on the far larger and richer South Korean economy but would have a huge impact on the smaller, poorer North Korean economy. The disparity in the relative economic impact would be reinforced by disparity in political and social impact as well. In sum, the process of economic integration would create highly asymmetric dependency in favor of the South.
Notes: Alex Field: Technology in the 1930s
Alex Field lunch and seminar, "The 20th Century's Most Technologically Progressive Decade." Forthcoming in the AER. Responsibility for thinking about the 20th century as an economic epoch. Second quarter as TFP boom. What is responsible for the boom? The War? Probably not. "Vintage effect" Gordon: "One Big Wave" Serendipity? Was Andrew Mellon right?
1/4 of private capital in the 1930s in railroads
Notes: Catherine Wolfram, California Electricity Deregulation
Catherine Wolfram, "'Fat Boys' and Thin Markets": Trading Inefficiencies in California's Electricity Markets"
Severin Borenstein, James Bushnell, Christopher Knittel, and Catherine Wolfram. Electricity deregulation, executive compensation, et cetera...
California wholesale electricity markets opened in April 1998: PX (Power Exchange) a one-day-ahead market; ISO (Independent System Operator) a spot market.
PX now defunct.
Have expected prices converged in the two markets since they opened?
Why do we care?
- Manipulation
- Learning in a new market
- Interesting economics of a non-storable commodity...
Inefficiencies? Were there $20 bills lying around on the sidewalk?
PX price came to vastly underpredict the spot market price...
Is "underprediction" a peso problem effect? Probably not...
Binding price caps...
At end, underprediction on 70% hours.
- At opening, overprediction
- Significant differences thereafter
- By the beginning of 2000, prices appeared to be converging
- After May 2000, all hell broke loose--and underprediction emerged...
August of 2000: buy from PX at $140 per megawatt hour, sell to ISO at $190 per megawatt hour...
How many megawatts? 40 gigawatts traded through the ISO. $4 an hour difference in October. 40 gigawatts x $4 per hour per megawatt = $160,000/hour x 720 hours/month = $115,200,000 per month.
By August 2000 we have $50 an hour: $1.44 billion left on the sidewalk...
Market rule: you cannot enter as an arbitrageur. Does this guarantee that there are no price-takers in the market? Yes. Difference between large-scale and small-scale arbitrage...
NO STORAGE!!!!
How did Enron ever go bankrupt!?!?
"Why is the daily market less inefficient in the south?" "Because PG&E wasn't there."
Sharpe ratio: 0.7 per day... means Sharpe ratio of 3.5 per month... means Sharpe ratio of 12 per year...
During last seven months of sample, as things go haywire... price of natural gas triples NOx permit prices rise by a factor of 50... NOx permits up to $70 per megawatt-hour...
"NOx affects only two generators" "But they are marginal!"
Notes: Medieval Monies
Notes: Rui Pedro Estevez and the Value of Castillan Monies
Rui Pedro Esteves: He should go and read Sargent and Velde, "The Big Problem of Small Change," and also (perhaps) Usher, "The Early History of Deposit Banking in Mediterranean Europe." Otherwise, idea looks very good. A model of specie value plus "reform expectations" would be a good thing to explore... Data on how the value of the Castillan currency is specie value plus "reform expectations" looks very interesting indeed.
The Slow But Constant Drip-Drip-Drip of Human Progress
Ann Marie: Isn't it great that marshmallow bags now come with zip-loc tops?
And it is--great that is. We've just saved a quarter of a minute fumbling for a twist-tie and tying the bag shut. An extra fifteen seconds of useful time added to our lives--which we've just spent oohing and aahing over this fact.
Full Panoply
Since January 1, I have been keeping a list of things that I have at some moment regretted that I had not been carrying on my person:
palm pilot, cellphone, ipod, sweater, raincoat, laptop, laptop charger, extra battery, laptop bag, readings for next week's course meetings, articles to comment on, articles I should have read six months ago, students' dissertation chapters I should have read last week, sportcoat (when more formality was called for), tie (which much more formality was called for), paperback (to read while waiting), swiss army knife, extra incandescent lightbulb, dog treats, pruning shears, plastic bags (for when dog defecates in an inappropriate place), extra dog leash (don't laugh), dog-drying towel, loung key, fax room key, office key, house key, car key, dress shoes, hiking boots, sneakers, water bottle, pants with more pockets, shirt with more pockets...
Free Trade Simply Not a High Priority
The Economist writes about how free trade is simply not a priority for the governments of the industrial core--not for Japan, not for Europe, and certainly not for the Bush Administration. Given first-world attitudes, I cannot see how the Doha Round can end in anything but a very minor fig-leaf of an agreement.
Economist.com: ...NEVER do today what can be put off till tomorrow. The trade ministers from 22 countries, whose three-day meeting in Tokyo ended on February 16th, managed to live down to their reputation for a reluctance to compromise?and enthusiasm for delay. Hardened trade negotiators are used to deadlines repeatedly missed, crisis talks at the eleventh hour, and second-best solutions. But the outcome of the Tokyo meeting was nevertheless disappointing for those hoping that the Doha round of trade negotiations, conducted under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), were going to be different.
For a time it looked as if they were. When the round was launched in the Qatari capital in November 2001, the atmosphere was one of rapprochement between the rich countries and their poorer neighbours, and between those rich countries that had been at loggerheads on trade issues. The aftermath of the attacks of September 11th 2001, the war on terror and the invasion of Afghanistan had combined to put the developing world at the top of the political agenda. The rich world appeared to recognise that poor countries needed to become full participants in the world economy?and needed help to do that.
Developing countries skilfully exploited this new attitude. They had resisted the idea of a new round of trade negotiations?many of them felt they had got a raw deal from the previous Uruguay round, which had, in the view of the poor countries, been heavily skewed in favour of the industrial world. Developing-country negotiators wrung substantial concessions from their richer neighbours in return for agreeing to launch a new round. Some aspects of the Uruguay round deal would be revisited?and, hands on hearts, the rich countries promised to offer significant progress on issues like agricultural trade. An eventual end to farm subsidies and greater access to rich-world markets was what the poor countries really wanted.
Perhaps they should have known better. Progress since the Doha meeting has been slow. Little headway has been made even on issues about which the arguments seem relatively minor. In November, trade ministers meeting in Sydney appeared to come close to resolving the tricky question of poor countries? access to new medicines. Many modern drugs are simply too expensive for developing countries and the search has been on for a formula that would provide such medicines to them at much-reduced prices?provided some watertight arrangement preventing their profitable resale in the industrial world could be agreed. Yet in subsequent meetings, America has continued to block a deal acceptable to everyone else. No further progress was made on this in Tokyo.
February 17, 2003
They Are Rats! Rats with Cute Furry Tails, but Rats!
In my view, Rich Baker has (i) read the works of science fiction writer Geegory Benford a little too intensively, and (ii) gone a little too far in empathizing with the squirrels who are now using their incisors to destroy key portions of his house:
Death lurking in darkness: The family has started to become comfortable within the Artefact. The vast pillars that stretch towards a ceiling lost in darkness seem almost as natural as trees, the strange machines scattered across the floor as familiar and comforting as bushes. It's almost easy for them to forget that this place is utterly alien, that it and all of its contents were manufactured and then seemingly forgotten by intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic. They've almost ceased to consider what godlike creatures could discard so many pieces of technological detritus.
What the family doesn't know is that lurking out there in the dark are infinitely patient machines whose only purpose is killing. Perhaps they will wait an hour or a day or a month, but they will strike. The vast silent spaces will be filled with sudden, unexpected violence. There will be a blur of metal, the motion faster than thought. Then there will be pain for a brief, brilliant moment. Then there will be death, and silence once more
All of which is by way of saying that the guy from the council has supplemented the poison in our loft with mechanical squirrel traps. My newest duty is to check these each morning to confirm kills. I can't say I'm too happy about any of this, but we are now all suffering from highly disturbed sleep because of squirrels running around up there, and if I'm feeling this sleepy right now then my dad must be feeling much worse. Only now I can't sleep, because every time I hear a squirrel I expect to hear the bang of a trap being triggered, and it's the only thing I can think about in those quiet hours late at night...
A Mirror of Wildernesses
How likely is it that the--weak--intelligence information that the Bush Administration thinks necessitates a conquest of Iraq is in fact correct? Jim Henley has some views:
Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings: A key piece of the information leading to recent terror alerts was fabricated, according to two senior law enforcement officials in Washington and New York. The officials said that a claim made by a captured al Qaeda member that Washington, New York or Florida would be hit by a "dirty bomb" sometime this week had proven to be a product of his imagination.
Here comes the good part:
Does that mean we can take the duct tape back if we kept the receipt? Not necessarily:It was only after the threat level was elevated to orange -- meaning high -- last week, that the informant was subjected to a polygraph test by the FBI, officials told ABCNEWS. "This person did not pass," said Cannistraro.
Still, there's a lesson here:Despite the fabricated report, there are no plans to change the threat level. Officials said other intelligence has been validated and that the high level of precautions is fully warranted.
And Colin Powell's UN report relied heavily on intelligence from defector debriefings and captive interrogations. Hm.It's not the first time a captured al Qaeda operative has made up a huge story and scared a lot of people.
The FBI concluded the information that led to a nationwide hunt for five men suspected of infiltrating the United States on Christmas Eve was fabricated by an informant, and the agency called off the alert sparked by the information.
Some people get offended at the notion that Colin Powell might, you know, lie. But actually, Powell has people for that. He doesn't even have to know he's lying. All that has to happen is that, under ferocious pressure from the White House, the intelligence agencies regrade selected interrogation reports from UNRELIABLE to RELIABLE. Bingo. You now have "intelligence" connecting Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. You had the same reports the day before. You just thought the detainees and defectors were full of shit, probably for good reason. But your bosses want results.
Anyway, be careful out there:
Officials said this one got so far because it coincided with other intelligence, that officials still believe points to a coming attack, timed to hostilities with Iraq.
And maybe they're right.
February 16, 2003
Presidents' Day Weekend in Monterey
Ann Marie, staring at a line on a menu offering kung pao chicken pizza: "I think we can safely say that fusion cuisine has gone too far."
I think it's the combination of hoisin sauce, peanuts, and mozzarella cheese that is distressing...
First pelican sighting. Five sea otters inside the breakwater... $75 of MBAQ membership is tax deductible. Snapping shrimp. Mother-and-child sea otters. Many people are really clueless: "Look! He has a baby on his chest!" Why does kelp have brown leaves? Two more wild otters: one swims right up to us and we look down.... Carmel Mission: Rio and Lasuen, Carmel.... Eat artichokes! 11:00 am high tide... The life of a seal is one of constant activity and danger. There is not a moment's safety or rest...
February 14, 2003
Notes: Macro Field Course: February 12, 2003
Economics 236: February 12 Post-Class Notes
On February 12 I taught Andrei Shleifer's "Implementation Cycles" (Journal of Political Economy, 1986) paper to my advanced macroeconomics Ph.D. students class.
Once again, just has happened the week before, I didn't get through the paper. I had thought it would be easy--that I would finish with plenty of time to sketch extensions and qualifications. After all, the class does run from 12 to 2. However, that was not enough time.
My recurrent problem is that I spend so much time in asides on the modeling strategy--"this term is in this definition because twenty minutes from now it will cancel that when we take a derivative to establish the first-order condition", "note that even though we have started with a rather general and flexible setup in which firms have a number of different decisions to make, the setup has been carefully designed so that when push comes to shove there is only one economically interesting and non-obvious decision a firm ever has to make", "note that if this condition is not satisfied, then the consumer's utility is infinite and it is not clear in what sense we can say that the model even has an equilibrium at all," that kind of thing. These asides on modeling strategy take up a surprisingly large amount of time. Yet I don't think I can cut them out or even cut them down. After all, if I don't teach them this, when will they ever learn it?
I also found a spot in the paper where (I think) Andrei may have said something that is (I think) not quite correct. You see, in Andrei's model there are two deviations from the requirements for it to be an Arrow-Debreu economy. The first is that firms calculate and consider the effects of their own actions on prices--specifically, they know and take into account the fact that if they introduce a new technological advance in their industry segment this year, the market price of their industry segment's product will fall next year. The Arrow-Debreu proofs that a market economy is "optimal" (that is, that there is some social welfare function that has individuals' utilities as its argument that is maximized by the market equilibrium) hinges on firms being price-takers that do not calculate and consider the effects of their own actions on prices. The second is that firms are able to copy the technological advances made by other firms without paying for them: there is a "missing market." the Arrow-Debreu proofs hinge on there being no missing markets. Andrei says that the first of these is important in keeping his model from being an Arrow-Debreu economy, but that the second is not because (IIRC) the absence of profits in the industry after the technological advance becomes widespread implies that the equilibrium price in the missing market is zero, hence that its absence does not matter.
Andrei is right if the added market is one in which firms buy a single license to make unlimited quantities of their products with the new technology. But with a different licensing scheme, I think the equilibrium would be different. With a full-fledged intellectual property licensing scheme in which licensing firms are charged a per-unit-produced fee, it is not clear to me that the equilibrium price of a license to use the better technology is zero.
Looking back on the class, I think I was very smart to teach this paper as a way of pointing students to the issues involved in bringing innovation, technological progress, and market structure into aggregative macroconomics. The underlying basic model is very elegant. It begins with an initial setup that seems rather complicated, yet it rapidly simplifies to produce a situation in which:
- A lot of firms implementing their new technologies at once creates a boom.
- An aggregate demand externality makes it profitable to cluster the implementation of new technologies. A firm with a new technology wants to wait until a boom to implement it because its technology will be quickly copied--its edge is temporary--and it is more profitable to implement when the economy is booming and demand is high than when the economy is not booming and demand is low.
- Partly offsetting this is the fact that the interest rate is high when a boom is expected, and thus the cost of waiting until a boom to implement your technological innovation can be substantial. (In fact with log utility or a utility function less risk-averse than log utility, the interest rate effect always outweighs the aggregate demand externality effect).
- Thus the model can exhibit periodic "implementation cycles" in which technological advance is delayed until periodic booms.
- However, in the basic model households always want new technology to be implemented as fast as possible: these implementation-cycle equilibria reduce welfare.
- But this can be reversed: in a version of the model with fixed costs of implementation and with 'standing on the shoulders of giants' effects in discovery, it is very possible that technological progress is only possible if there are periodic large booms.
There is one dimension in which the paper is not a good guide for students thinking about how to write their dissertations. It is a perfect-foresight model--its equilibria are those in which everyone has point expectations about what the future will bring, and those expectations are always confirmed. Today it's hard to get a job with a perfect-foresight model: too many people will say that the dive was not difficult enough.
It is, however, a great article: all kinds of issues--the role of expectations, of imperfect competition, of market profits as spurs to innovation, and of the relationship between short-run business cycles and long-run development--are raised and dealt with in a very thoughtful way.
Google and Larry Page
Google: 25000 computers all held together by velcro. How much--one cent? ten cents? twenty-five cents?--for each ad click-through. How many searches a day? And now they cannot be unseated from their king-of-search position unless someone has a truly much better software idea...
Scattered notes taken that have very little to do with the substance of Google founder Larry Page's talk:
"Inkjet printers made of legos" "Disk drive cases made of legos" "Actually, they weren't even legos. The point was to save money by building cheaper disk-drive cases. They were knock-off duplos from CostCo."
Larry Page: "Keynote would be really outstanding if you had a fast machine to edit your presentations on." Smart-Ass: "A machine faster than those at the disposal of the founders of Google?" Larry Page: "You know what I mean: a machine faster than this laptop here."
Larry Page: "Google has been profitable since the first quarter of 2001. Why did we make becoming profitable such a priority? It's good that we did, because we might well be gone if we hadn't. The real reason is that we became profitable in the first quarter of 2001 because Sergey Brin made it a priority. You see, Sergey would try to go out on dates. He would call up women. And to impress them he would say, 'I'm the president of a money-losing dot-com.' But in Palo Alto in 2000, a huge number of people were presidents of money-losing dot-coms. And so they would not call him back. And he thought, 'If only I were president of a money-making dot-com, things would be very different...'"
Larry Page: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.
"Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."
Larry Page: "Lucas Pereira: 'You idiots, you spelled [Googol] wrong!' But this was good, because google.com was available and googol.com was not. Now most people spell 'Googol' 'Google', so it worked out OK in the end."
Larry Page: "Our original hardware acquisition strategy was non-standard. We would go out and wait on the loading dock and beg for computers. When new computers arrived at Stanford we would go up to the people taking delivery and say, 'Surely you don't need all ten of these computers. Surely you can give us one. We have a really interesting research project..'"
Larry Page: "We used half the bandwidth of Stanford during our research phase..."
Eric Brewer--another search engine expert--is here.
Larry Page: Google Co-Founder; President, Google Products; Computer Science Ph.D. Student "On Leave"
1995-1998 academic work at Stanford. Terry Winograd advisor. At start interested in telepresence and all kinds of wacky things. Interested in link structure of web. A large graph. Big graphs are fun things. A large graph and the web might together make a doable dissertation.
Sergey Brin. He was interested in data mining. I had this big database of weblinks. We have worked 24 a hours a day together for the past eight years.
"Chance favors the prepared mind" --Louis Pasteur
Interested in reversing the web structure to view annotations--transclusion.
First system: BackRub: "not having an art department": indexed titles and anchors and did pretty well. Showed it to Eric Brewer.
An art museum got upset because we downloaded their content. No robots.txt file. "Occasionally, we would shut down the nameservers at Stanford, and nobody could log into anything."
The point at which it became too much was when we had so much traffic coming to google--10,000 searches per day, one per second. At this point we decided to start a company. Andy Bechtolsteim, "Who do I make out the check to?".
Pizza ovens: roughly that size and that temperature. Heat still a huge problem. Brewer: "I remember you had lots and lots of fans all over the place in your cage... pretty humorous." "The fire marshall got really made at us at one point."
We missed both things. We didn't go public during the boom. We didn't go bankrupt during the bust.
Today: profitable since 2001:Q1, 700+ people, 60+ Ph.D.s, 86 languages, 14 offices, 150M searches/day
AltaVista spent over $120 million in marketing in one year...
Why is google still around:
- We're lucky.
- Deep technical understanding of what we are doing.
- Not true of many companies (not Inktomi, of course).
- Everybody searches.
- Everything successful in terms of traffic has stayed successful in some way (except for napster; although kazaa's doing pretty well: kazaa is well-designed to be illegal; but not my idea of fun).
- How we make money: ads. I would never have guessed that we had ads for steel buildings...
Engineers said we shouldn't run ads from double-click. If the ads were what people were looking for, people would click on them. Ads. Syndication (AOL, et cetera). Providing search for other companies.
The little yellow box... We sell hardware. So we can guarantee performance. And we can guarantee to be up and running in hours...
World Graph of where the searches are coming from... India pretty amazing... Lots more searches coming from India than electric lights at night...
Information wants to be free? Copying doesn't cost anything. Distributing another copy costs basically zero. Google surveys the free part of the web.
A Faculty Lunch Somewhere in Academe...
Professor #1: "I'm proud to announce that my conference has sold out." Professor #2: "In that case, I'm putting my registration up for auction on eBay tomorrow morning." Someone: "Do we have a nanotechnology program here on this campus?" Research Director: "Of course we have a..." Professor #3: "It's just very small, and hard to find." Somebody Else: "We were investigating joining the campus wireless network, but they wanted to charge the department $40,000 up front." Someone: "My God! So what are you doing?" Somebody Else: "We bought four wireless access points for $500 total, and plugged them into our own network." Professor #4: "We have five assistant professor offers that we've voted, and none of them has cleared the administration." Professor #5: "And the grapevine is that Candidate X really wants to come here to teach--if, that is, his offer appears from the administration in finite time, of course." Still Someone Else: "And why do you need a UniversityNet ID to log onto the campus wireless network? This means that visitors for the day are completely out of luck. Why isn't wireless 802.11b dialtone as much a resource available to anybody walking onto the campus as sunlight or air?" Professor #6: "We've now climbed very high up the tree of basic human needs, haven't we?" Someone: "Is there an agenda for this lunch?" Professor #7: "Our only agenda is that at some point we should talk about whether these lunches should be totally unstructured, or should have an agenda." Someone: "If that's the agenda, then that question is already decided: we have an agenda--to decide whether we have an agenda. So our agenda is moot." Someone else: "In which case we have no agenda." Professor #7: "The way to think about it is that we have a meta-agenda, and we may or may not have an agenda..."
The Marquis de Lafayette
Some people in the United States have too short a memory.
Without Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roche Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), his example, and the decision he spurred France to to intervene in the American Revolution on the side of the colonists, this nation would not stand here now. There is a statue of Yves in the central square of what passes for Lafayette, California's downtown. Every time I pass it, I think of the debt for our very existence as a nation that we owe to the Marquis and to France--a debt that we can never repay, but only honor.
He is buried in American soil: he brought some back from the United States to France, and it was used for his gravesite.
February 13, 2003
The Latest "Osama bin Laden" Tape
From Mark Kleiman:
Mark A. R. Kleiman: HUH?
Need some more help here, folks.
1. A tape appears that seems to have Osama bin Laden's voice on it. [Transcript here. As far as I can tell, no American news outlet decided to print or post the full transcript, as opposed to soundbites.] Update: a reader points out that the Bush Administration formally asked the American media to censor al-Qaeda communications more than a year ago. Another reader is upset that I switched the link to the BBC from my earlier reference to World Nuts Daily. WND apparently copied it from the Beeb.
2. The voice on the tape says the following:
We also stress to honest Muslims that they should move, incite, and mobilize the [Islamic] nation, amid such grave events and hot atmosphere so as to liberate themselves from those unjust and renegade ruling regimes, which are enslaved by the United States.
They should also do so to establish the rule of God on earth.
The most qualified regions for liberation are Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, the land of the two holy mosques [Saudi Arabia], and Yemen.
Needless to say, this crusade war is primarily targeted against the people of Islam.
Regardless of the removal or the survival of the socialist party or Saddam, Muslims in general and the Iraqis in particular must brace themselves for jihad against this unjust campaign and acquire ammunition and weapons.
This is a prescribed duty. God says: "[And let them pray with thee] taking all precautions and bearing arms: the unbelievers wish if ye were negligent of your arms and your baggage, to assault you in a single rush."
Fighting in support of the non-Islamic banners is forbidden.
Muslims' doctrine and banner should be clear in fighting for the sake of God. He who fights to raise the word of God will fight for God's sake.
Under these circumstances, there will be no harm if the interests of Muslims converge with the interests of the socialists in the fight against the crusaders, despite our belief in the infidelity of socialists.
The jurisdiction of the socialists and those rulers has fallen a long time ago.
Socialists are infidels wherever they are, whether they are in Baghdad or Aden.
3. Colin Powell says that the voice on the tape is genuine and that the tape proves that al-Qaeda is "in partnership" with Iraq, whose rulers the supposed bin Laden just finished calling "infidels."
4. Glenn Reynolds says:
Personally, I think this is evidence that Osama is dead, and that the CIA is supplying these tapes for purposes of its own. (Not that there's anything wrong with that).
But now that he's admitting a "partnership" with Iraq, it's going to be tough for people who've been saying "you can't even catch Osama" to deny this evidence. Heh.
So let me get this straight:
1. Colin Powell tells an obvious fib. (It wasn't obvious when he told it, because he'd seen the transcript and the rest of us hadn't. But it's pretty obvious now.) Why? Isn't his credibility worth more than that? Or is he just counting on the reporters not to notice, or to be afraid to report, the distance between what he said and what was true?
2. Glenn Reynolds thinks that bin Laden is dead, and the tape is a fake. He also thinks that's OK. Why? This isn't wartime deception; no enemy is being fooled at all. Does Glenn enjoy being lied to by his government? Or does he just think that any tactic is justified to whip up public support for a war? If that's his belief, then is that sort of lying only good when it's done officially, or does Glenn think he too has the right, or perhaps even the duty, to deceive his readers if that's useful to the cause?
3. If they were faking the tape, why wouldn't the CIA make it say what Powell said it said?
4. But if bin Laden is dead and the tape is a fake, then how can anything on it mean that bin Laden is "admitting" anything at all?
A note to the warhawks: This sort of stuff makes it really, really hard for those of us who are trying our best to support your cause but who don't like being bullshat.
A note to the peace camp, and especially to those on the fence: An idea isn't responsible for the arguments made on its behalf. There is no valid inference from the proposition "Bush and his friends are a bunch of liars" to the proposition "Saddam Hussein's acquisition of a nuclear weapon is nothing to worry about."
UPDATE
Here's an explanation that covers all the facts: Iraqi intelligence has bought or intimidated Glenn Reynolds, or alternatively Glenn is dead and the blog is now maintained by an impostor in Iraqi service. In either case, they're using Instapundit to help discredit the case for war. Colin Powell was drugged or hypnotized into making that embarrassing claim.
If you find that unbelievable, don't even try believing what Reynolds and Powell said. You'll just strain your brain.
The following is the full text of an audio message purported to be by al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, broadcast on Arab television station al-Jazeera on 11 February.
In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.
A message to our Muslim brothers in Iraq, may God's peace, mercy, and blessings be upon you.
O you who believe fear Allah, by doing all that He has ordered and by abstaining from all that He has forbidden as He should be feared.
Obey Him, be thankful to Him, and remember Him always, and die not except in a state of Islam [as Muslims] with complete submission to Allah.
We are following up with great interest and extreme concern the crusaders' preparations for war to occupy a former capital of Islam, loot Muslims' wealth, and install an agent government, which would be a satellite for its masters in Washington and Tel Aviv, just like all the other treasonous and agent Arab governments.
This would be in preparation for establishing the Greater Israel.
Allah is sufficient for us and He is the best disposer of affairs.
'Unjust war'
Amid this unjust war, the war of infidels and debauchees led by America along with its allies and agents, we would like to stress a number of important values:
First, showing good intentions. This means fighting should be for the sake of the one God.
It should not be for championing ethnic groups, or for championing the non-Islamic regimes in all Arab countries, including Iraq.
God Almighty says: "Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah, and those who reject faith fight in the cause of evil."
So fight ye against the friends of Satan: feeble indeed is the cunning of Satan.
Second, we remind that victory comes only from God and all we have to do is prepare and motivate for jihad.
God Almighty says: "Oh ye who believe! If ye will help the cause of Allah, He will help you and plant your feet firmly."
We must rush to seek God Almighty's forgiveness from sins, particularly the grave sins.
Prophet Muhammad, God's peace be upon him, said: "Avoid the seven grave sins; polytheism, sorcery, killing, unless permitted by God, usury, taking the money of orphans, fleeing from combat, and slandering innocent faithful women."
Also, all grave sins, such as consuming alcohol, committing adultery, disobeying parents, and committing perjury. We must obey God in general, and should in particular mention the name of God more before combat.
'Media machine'
Abu-al-Darda, may God be pleased with him, said: "Perform a good deed before an attack, because you are fighting with your deeds."
Third, we realized from our defence and fighting against the American enemy that, in combat, they mainly depend on psychological warfare.
This is in light of the huge media machine they have.
They also depend on massive air strikes so as to conceal their most prominent point of weakness, which is the fear, cowardliness, and the absence of combat spirit among US soldiers.
Those soldiers are completely convinced of the injustice and lying of their government.
They also lack a fair cause to defend. They only fight for capitalists, usury takers, and the merchants of arms and oil, including the gang of crime at the White House.
This is in addition to crusader and personal grudges by Bush the father.
Trench warfare
We also realized that one of the most effective and available methods of rendering the air force of the crusader enemy ineffective is by setting up roofed and disguised trenches in large numbers.
I had referred to that in a previous statement during the Tora Bora battle last year.
In that great battle, faith triumphed over all the materialistic forces of the people of evil, for principles were adhered to, thanks to God Almighty.
I will narrate to you part of that great battle, to show how cowardly they are on the one hand, and how effective trenches are in exhausting them on the other.
We were about 300 mujahideen [Islamic militants].We dug 100 trenches that were spread in an area that does not exceed one square mile, one trench for every three brothers, so as to avoid the huge human losses resulting from the bombardment.
Since the first hour of the US campaign on 20 Rajab 1422, corresponding to 7 October 2001, our centres were exposed to a concentrated bombardment.
And this bombardment continued until mid-Ramadan.
On 17 Ramadan, a very fierce bombardment began, particularly after the US command was certain that some of al-Qaeda leaders were still in Tora Bora, including the humble servant to God [referring to himself] and the brother mujahid Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The bombardment was round-the-clock and the warplanes continued to fly over us day and night.
War in Afghanistan
The US Pentagon, together with its allies, worked full time on blowing up and destroying this small spot, as well as on removing it entirely.
Planes poured their lava on us, particularly after accomplishing their main missions in Afghanistan.
The US forces attacked us with smart bombs, bombs that weigh thousands of pounds, cluster bombs, and bunker busters.
Bombers, like the B-52, used to fly over head for more than two hours and drop between 20 to 30 bombs at a time.
The modified C-130 aircraft kept carpet-bombing us at night, using modern types of bombs.
The US forces dared not break into our positions, despite the unprecedented massive bombing and terrible propaganda targeting this completely besieged small area.
This is in addition to the forces of hypocrites, whom they prodded to fight us for 15 days non-stop.
Every time the latter attacked us, we forced them out of our area carrying their dead and wounded.
'Alliance of evil'
Is there any clearer evidence of their cowardice, fear, and lies regarding their legends about their alleged power.
To sum it up, the battle resulted in the complete failure of the international alliance of evil, with all its forces, [to overcome] a small number of mujahideen - 300 mujahideen hunkered down in trenches spread over an area of one square mile under a temperature of -10 degrees Celsius.
The battle resulted in the injury of 6% of personnel - we hope God will accept them as martyrs - and the damage of two percent of the trenches, praise be to God.
If all the world forces of evil could not achieve their goals on a one square mile of area against a small number of mujahideen with very limited capabilities, how can these evil forces triumph over the Muslim world?
This is impossible, God willing, if people adhere to their religion and insist on jihad for its sake.
Iraqi 'brothers'
O mujahideen brothers in Iraq, do not be afraid of what the United States is propagating in terms of their lies about their power and their smart, laser-guided missiles.
The smart bombs will have no effect worth mentioning in the hills and in the trenches, on plains, and in forests.
They must have apparent targets. The well-camouflaged trenches and targets will not be reached by either the smart or the stupid missiles.
There will only be haphazard strikes that dissipate the enemy ammunition and waste its money. Dig many trenches.
The [early Muslim caliph] Umar, may God be pleased with him, stated: "Take the ground as a shield because this will ensure the exhaustion of all the stored enemy missiles within months."
Their daily production is too little and can be dealt with, God willing.
We also recommend luring the enemy forces into a protracted, close, and exhausting fight, using the camouflaged defensive positions in plains, farms, mountains, and cities.
The enemy fears city and street wars most, a war in which the enemy expects grave human losses.
Martyrdom operations
We stress the importance of the martyrdom operations against the enemy - operations that inflicted harm on the United States and Israel that have been unprecedented in their history, thanks to Almighty God.
We also point out that whoever supported the United States, including the hypocrites of Iraq or the rulers of Arab countries, those who approved their actions and followed them in this crusade war by fighting with them or providing bases and administrative support, or any form of support, even by words, to kill the Muslims in Iraq, should know that they are apostates and outside the community of Muslims.
It is permissible to spill their blood and take their property.
God says: "O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: they are but friends and protectors to each other."
And he amongst you that turns to them [for friendship] is of them.
Verily, Allah guideth not a people unjust.
Mobilizing the 'Islamic nation'
We also stress to honest Muslims that they should move, incite, and mobilize the [Islamic] nation, amid such grave events and hot atmosphere so as to liberate themselves from those unjust and renegade ruling regimes, which are enslaved by the United States.
They should also do so to establish the rule of God on earth.
The most qualified regions for liberation are Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, the land of the two holy mosques [Saudi Arabia], and Yemen.
Needless to say, this crusade war is primarily targeted against the people of Islam.
Regardless of the removal or the survival of the socialist party or Saddam, Muslims in general and the Iraqis in particular must brace themselves for jihad against this unjust campaign and acquire ammunition and weapons.
This is a prescribed duty. God says: "[And let them pray with thee] taking all precautions and bearing arms: the unbelievers wish if ye were negligent of your arms and your baggage, to assault you in a single rush."
Fighting in support of the non-Islamic banners is forbidden.
Muslims' doctrine and banner should be clear in fighting for the sake of God. He who fights to raise the word of God will fight for God's sake.
Under these circumstances, there will be no harm if the interests of Muslims converge with the interests of the socialists in the fight against the crusaders, despite our belief in the infidelity of socialists.
The jurisdiction of the socialists and those rulers has fallen a long time ago.
Socialists are infidels wherever they are, whether they are in Baghdad or Aden.
'High morale'
The fighting, which is waging and which will be waged these days, is very much like the fighting of Muslims against the Byzantine in the past.
And the convergence of interests is not detrimental. The Muslims' fighting against the Byzantine converged with the interests of the Persians.
And this was not detrimental to the companions of the prophet.
Before concluding, we reiterate the importance of high morale and caution against false rumours, defeatism, uncertainty, and discouragement.
The prophet said: "Bring good omens and do not discourage people."
He also said: "The voice of Abu-Talhah [one of the prophet's companions] in the army is better than 100 men."
During the Al-Yarmuk Battle, a man told Khalid bin-al-Walid [an Islamic commander]: "The Byzantine soldiers are too many and the Muslims are few."
So, Khalid told him: "Shame on you. Armies do not triumph with large numbers but are defeated if the spirit of defeatism prevails."
Keep this saying before your eyes: "It is not fitting for a Prophet that he should have prisoners of war until he hath thoroughly subdued the land."
"Therefore, when ye meet the unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks."
Your wish to the crusaders should be as came in this verse of poetry: "The only language between you and us is the sword that will strike your necks."
In the end, I advise myself and you to fear God covertly and openly and to be patient in the jihad.
Victory will be achieved with patience. I also advise myself and you to say more prayers.
O ye who believe! When ye meet a force, be firm, and call Allah in remembrance much (and often); That ye may prosper.
God, who sent the book unto the prophet, who drives the clouds, and who defeated the enemy parties, defeat them and make us victorious over them.
Our Lord! Give us good in this world and good in the Hereafter and save us from the torment of the Fire! [Koranic verse].
May God's peace and blessings be upon Prophet Muhammad and his household.
BBC Monitoring
Hal Varian Sees Inflation in Our Future
Hal Varian (whom I rarely see on the Berkeley campus, even though his office is only one building over) offers his prescriptions for what should be done in the short run, the medium run, and the long run as far as U.S. fiscal policy is concerned.
Most interesting, however, is his forecast that feckless politicians combined with the structural features of American politics are likely to push us toward much higher inflation--once the president has obtained "a pliable Federal Reserve Board" which "can probably be arranged."
Deficits and Political Pain: ...let me offer my own prescriptions for the short, medium and long term.
Though there is a good chance that the economy will be significantly stronger this year, it wouldn't hurt to have some modest short-run fiscal stimulus. Consumers have kept on spending; the real budget shortfall is coming from business spending and state government cutbacks. A sensible stimulus package would involve a temporary investment subsidy, like accelerated depreciation or even an old-fashioned investment tax credit, along with direct grants to the states.
State tax increases and budget cuts could well exert a significant fiscal drag on the economy in the next year, so some attempt to moderate their impact would be prudent.
In the medium term, we have to address the operational budget deficit. The economically sensible thing would be to roll back future tax cuts from the 2001 act and reform the alternative minimum tax. Unfortunately, this is not easy to sell politically: those who expect to gain from future tax cuts simply do not understand that much of the tax saving they anticipate will be taken away by the alternative tax. Congress will have to change the alternative minimum tax, but this makes the scheduled tax cuts much more costly in terms of their impact on the deficit than they now appear to be.
Finally, we have to confront the retirement program imbalances. There is no magic bullet for Social Security. Fixing it will involve some combination of increasing the retirement age, cutting the growth rate of benefits and increasing contributions. Medicare and Medicaid will be an even tougher problem.
Mr. Greenspan said that "there should be little disagreement about the need to re-establish budget discipline." But it is always easier to cut taxes than cut spending.
What will happen if nothing is done? If deficits continue to accumulate, the temptation to print money to pay our debts will become almost irresistible. Inflation is all too tempting as an "easy" way to avoid the political pain associated with tax increases or budget cuts.
All a president needs is a pliable Federal Reserve Board, and this can probably be arranged sometime in the next 10 or 15 years. Inflating away the debt is not pretty, but it may well end up being the most politically expedient solution to the burden of accumulated deficits...
February 13, 2003
Deficits and Political Pain
LAN GREENSPAN, the Federal Reserve chairman, called the latest forecasts of budget deficits "sobering." A better word might be "shocking."
A recent study by the economists Alan J. Auerbach, William G. Gale, Peter R. Orszag and Samara R. Potter, "Budget Blues: The Fiscal Outlook and Options for Reform," lays out the facts (emlab.berkeley.edu/users/auerbach).
The economists generate their forecasts by starting with the Congressional Budget Office forecast from August 2002, then adjusting the figures to reflect more plausible assumptions. (The most recent forecasts, alluded to by Mr. Greenspan, yield even more pessimistic results.)
Their conclusion is that current patterns of spending and revenue are just not sustainable. Large future tax increases or drastic spending cuts are virtually inevitable.
The economists' calculations involve four adjustments to budget office figures.
The first is for federal discretionary spending, the money appropriated by Congress each year. The budget office assumes that real discretionary spending will be constant at the level given in the first year of the 10-year forecast. A more appropriate assumption, the economists argue, is that real discretionary spending will grow at the same rate as gross domestic product, as it has in the past.
The second adjustment has to do with temporary tax cuts. The budget office assumes that all temporary tax provisions will expire as scheduled, while a more likely outcome is that most will be extended.
This adjustment is particularly important for the 2001 Bush tax cuts, which are classified as "temporary" for purposes of official budget calculations.
The third adjustment involves the alternative minimum tax. That affects only a small fraction of the population now but, unlike many taxes, is not adjusted for inflation. Even with today's modest inflation, it will kick in for many middle-income taxpayers in the next decade, affecting more than 36 million of them by 2010. This is simply not politically acceptable, so the economists assume that in the future the tax will apply to the same fraction of the population that it does now, about 3 percent.
The final adjustment involves Social Security, Medicare and other retirement programs. These programs now enjoy significant surpluses, which help mask the deterioration elsewhere in the budget. If you want a clear picture of the structural spending imbalance, it's best to take these retirement programs out of the calculations entirely.
So what is the bottom line?
The August budget office forecast was for a $1 trillion surplus over the next 10 years. The first three adjustments, which involve more realistic assumptions about spending and tax policy, yield a $1.9 trillion deficit. But moving the retirement surpluses off budget yields a 10-year deficit of $5.4 trillion.
That is bad enough, but after the next 10 years, things look even bleaker. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are certain to grow faster than national income in the years to come because of the aging population. The economists estimate that covering the long-term deficit will require an increase in federal revenues or a decrease in federal spending of 20 to 38 percent.
Note that there are two distinct causes of the projected deficit. Over the next 10 years, the basic deficit is on the operations side: the government is simply spending more than it brings in, to the tune of $5.4 trillion. But in this same period, the retirement programs bring in more than they pay out, reducing the deficit to "only" $1.9 trillion.
After 2012, the retirement fund surpluses shrink and eventually become deficits. According to the economists' projections, the spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will grow from 9 percent of G.D.P. in 2001 to 21 percent by 2075. "These three programs," the economists say, "would ultimately absorb a larger share of G.D.P. than does all of the federal government today."
The authors make some eminently sensible suggestions about how to deal with this problem, but let me offer my own prescriptions for the short, medium and long term.
Though there is a good chance that the economy will be significantly stronger this year, it wouldn't hurt to have some modest short-run fiscal stimulus. Consumers have kept on spending; the real budget shortfall is coming from business spending and state government cutbacks. A sensible stimulus package would involve a temporary investment subsidy, like accelerated depreciation or even an old-fashioned investment tax credit, along with direct grants to the states.
State tax increases and budget cuts could well exert a significant fiscal drag on the economy in the next year, so some attempt to moderate their impact would be prudent.
In the medium term, we have to address the operational budget deficit. The economically sensible thing would be to roll back future tax cuts from the 2001 act and reform the alternative minimum tax. Unfortunately, this is not easy to sell politically: those who expect to gain from future tax cuts simply do not understand that much of the tax saving they anticipate will be taken away by the alternative tax. Congress will have to change the alternative minimum tax, but this makes the scheduled tax cuts much more costly in terms of their impact on the deficit than they now appear to be.
Finally, we have to confront the retirement program imbalances. There is no magic bullet for Social Security. Fixing it will involve some combination of increasing the retirement age, cutting the growth rate of benefits and increasing contributions. Medicare and Medicaid will be an even tougher problem.
Mr. Greenspan said that "there should be little disagreement about the need to re-establish budget discipline." But it is always easier to cut taxes than cut spending.
What will happen if nothing is done? If deficits continue to accumulate, the temptation to print money to pay our debts will become almost irresistible. Inflation is all too tempting as an "easy" way to avoid the political pain associated with tax increases or budget cuts.
All a president needs is a pliable Federal Reserve Board, and this can probably be arranged sometime in the next 10 or 15 years. Inflating away the debt is not pretty, but it may well end up being the most politically expedient solution to the burden of accumulated deficits.
February 12, 2003
Stan Collender on Fiscal Policy
Stan Collender writes that the 2004 Budget's summary tables--especially Table S-3--"contradicts virtually every major claim the [Bush] administration is making about what it is proposing."
Budget Battles (02/11/2003): The Secrets Of S-3
By Stan Collender
NationalJournal.com
Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2003Summary Table 3, or S-3, is one of the most standard -- and basic -- tables in President Bush's budget. And it contradicts virtually every major claim the administration is making about what it is proposing. (Click here for a PDF of S-3.)
S-3 starts with the baseline -- that is, the White House's estimate of the surplus or deficit if there are no changes in what the federal government is doing. Budget aficionados often say that the baseline shows what will happen if the federal government is on automatic pilot.
OMB's own projections show that by 2006, the annual increase for interest payments on the federal debt will be larger than the increase in defense spending.
The Office of Management and Budget-prepared baseline shows that the deficit will decline precipitously without the changes in tax and spending policies the White House is proposing. In fact, the baseline shows that the budget will be in surplus starting in 2006 and that the surplus will increase every year thereafter. But S-3 also indicates that implementing the Bush budget would greatly increase the deficits in 2003-2005 and obliterate the projected surpluses in 2006-2008.
In other words, in spite of the official line from the White House, S-3 shows unambiguously that the administration's fiscal 2004 budget proposes a massive annual increase in the deficit.
S-3 also shows that the administration's claim that the deficit will bottom out because of its budget is completely wrong. The table shows quite clearly that the deficit would decline slightly from 2005 to 2007 but start increasing again in 2008. (The deficit would likely continue to grow in 2009 and beyond but, in contrast to the common practice in recent years, the administration chose to do five-year rather than 10-year forecasts.)
OMB Director Mitch Daniels told reporters last Monday that the best way to eliminate the deficit is to get the economy growing. He and other administration economic spokesmen also at least implied this budget will do just that.
But the numbers in S-3 belie Daniels' statement. If this budget increases economic growth to the extent and as quickly as the White House says it will, why doesn't S-3 show the deficit being eliminated or at least reduced substantially at some point between now and 2008?
Contrary to what Daniels indicated, S-3 seems to suggest that even if the Bush budget is implemented without change, the economy will not grow as fast as is needed to reduce the deficit. It also makes the connection between economic growth and balancing the budget appear far less strong than Daniels would have us believe.
S-3 shows very convincingly that the economic growth the president says will result from his policies will not be anywhere near enough to offset his proposed permanent changes in outlays and taxes. Contrary to what the White House is saying, the Fiscal 2004 budget projects large structural, not cyclical, deficits, which are very likely to persist even through an economic expansion. And the fact that no one is forecasting such a boom means the deficits the administration says will be short-lived are in fact likely to be around for quite some time.
S-3 also indicates that the increases for defense and homeland security (two of the administration's top priorities) are matched by the projected increase for "related debt service" -- that is, for higher interest payments on a national debt expanded by these growing deficits. In fact, S-3 shows that by 2006, the annual increase for interest payments will be larger than the increase in defense spending.
This puts to rest another of the White House's claims -- that its budget will reduce the size of government. S-3 shows that, while the president's budget does propose tax cuts and limits the growth in appropriated spending, it will also significantly increase the government's participation in the credit markets. Rather than reduce the size of the government, the Bush 2004 budget will really just be changing its shape...
Alan Greenspan Says the Expected, the Reasonable Thing
Alan Greenspan says the expected, the reasonable thing about the prospective return of the deficit and the long-run fiscal policy dilemmas of the American government.
The truly surprising, the bizarre thing that I do not understand is why the Bush Administration PR flacks and their tame dogs in the press ever expected him to say anything else...
Fed chief Greenspan undercuts GOP arguments for tax cuts - Feb. 12, 2003: The 'kiss of death': Warning of growing budget deficits, Greenspan again undercuts Bush, GOP arguments for tax cuts.
February 12, 2003: 2:18 PM EST NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Alan Greenspan stepped up his warnings about budget deficits Wednesday, forcing the White House to admit the Federal Reserve chief was at odds with President Bush's push for quick moves to stimulate the economy.
In his second day on Capitol Hill, Greenspan told the House Financial Services Committee it was crucial that policy-makers ensure that "growing budget deficits [do not] again become entrenched.''
Bush's $695 billion stimulus plans forecasts record budget deficits this year and next -- drawing criticism from opposition Democrats. Administration officials contend the deficits are modest given the size of the $10 trillion U.S. economy and are needed to spur job creation and ultimately, more tax revenues.
But Greenspan warned that a "state of relative budget tranquility'' will end abruptly as Baby Boomers start retiring in a decade. He said now was the time to prepare so that Social Security and other government programs can bear the strain.
The central bank chairman made similar points in his testimony to a Senate panel Tuesday in what was widely seen as a blow to the Bush plan. Under questioning, he amplified that concern by saying he considered stimulus "premature'' because it was hard to gauge the economy's underlying health amid Iraqi war fears.
Though Greenspan supported Bush's plan to eliminate the taxation of some dividends, he said such a measure should only be passed if other revenue could be found to replace the lost tax revenue.
"There should be little disagreement about the need to re-establish budget discipline," Greenspan said in his prepared remarks, especially considering the Baby Boomers' retirement, which will put a strain on Social Security and Medicare programs.
In response to legislators' questions on both days, he also warned against Congress making spending and tax plans -- including Bush's plan to make 2001's $1.35 trillion tax cut permanent and immediately effective -- without safeguards to keep them from wrecking the budget...
Let's Get Snarky!
Daniel Davies's new project: to provide us daily with a "Shorter Stephen den Beste"
As part of my New Year's Resolution to pick a really nasty fight with someone, and as a potential supply of more regular updates, I've decided to become a "watcher ". I believe that this was all the rage in weblog circles about a year ago.
Anyway, I want to do it, and nobody convinced me that there were better targets for a jihad than Stephen den Beste, so I picked him. It also helps that, as far as I can tell, he's incredibly thin-skinned (see my comments board somewhere for proof). Now, I thought of doing "Smarter Steven den Beste" (note that part of my strategy is not to use a consistent spelling of his first name), but that would probably completely dominate my blog, and besides "fisking" is like so five minutes ago. (Being a "watcher", however, is retro and cool).
Besides, people don't necessarily want a Smarter Stephen den Beste . Part of the joy is watching a man who knows nothing about anything except the innards of mobile phones trying to understand a complicated world around him with no sources of information other than the Internet. What people want is a Shorter Stephen den Beste; one that doesn't take about ten thousand words to get from A to halfway through the downstroke of B. So I'll be posting one-sentence summaries of posts on the USS Clueless, on a reasonably regular basis, until I get bored. Here's today's batch:
- I've never served in uniform.
- My dislike of the French is independent of any facts about the world.
- Update: F*** me, this is gonna be more work than I thought. Here's another one: I have intricate knowledge of the command and control structure of the Iraqi Army, and astonishingly enough, the news is Good For The War Party!
- Boy have the French f***ed up, assuming that my predictions of imminent rebellion by French Muslims and a cessation of diplomatic relations with the US are correct.
- A quick Shorter Stephen den Beste : (actually quite a succint post, but I skimmed it for meaning): Did I tell you how we could win this without France? Oh, right.
- After careful consideration, I have reached the conclusion that France would be unwise to enter the Gulf War on the side of Iraq by unilaterally attacking the United States of America
- Jesus wept. It took me a whole lunch break to come up with those four jokes, and SdB has managed another thousand-worder. Summarised thus "The Germans are weasels and America is so awash with international allies it can afford to tell them so".
- Loads of military equipment is moving around and anyone who doesn't want a war is stupid. Update: sorry, not stupid, evil.
- I have ideas about tank warfare which I believe to be revolutionary.
- Matthew Yglesias intervenes: The D-Squared Digest seems to have falled down on the job, so I'll do your Shorter Steven Den Beste for the day.
- Attack of the Clones is worse than the original Star Wars . (1,104 words in the original!)
- The Franco-German war alternative is bad.
- The UN helps terrorists and France is an enemy of the United States.
- The Franco-German war alternative is bad, but it mind spell domestic political trouble for John Howard and Tony Blair. (3,433 words in the original — not counting updates).
- Update: No, f*** it, I am going to last at least a week. "The French are weasels, I like Dungeons & Dragons and when are we going to get that war I wanted" will do for Sunday's output -- obviously these three are themes which underly pretty much 99% of the entire site , but they were out in elemental form on Sunday. I have no real idea whether "I like Dungeons & Dragons" is a fair summary of the one that's illustrated with "anime" characters, but I draw the line at reading it; some things should not be asked of any man. I'm going through a bit of a long dark night of the soul on this one, as you can probably tell.
- Update: This is getting to me. I think I've reloaded denbeste.nu about twenty times today. I'm literally getting stressed that there hasn't been an update. I'm beginning to seriously worry that SdB has more of a life than I do after all. I'm seriously thinking about quitting. I think I'm hitting the wall here. I've got to just fight through it and come out the other side. No way am I going to give up after just five days. No way. God, I think I'm actually sweating. I seriously advise anyone who feels like doing this, don't. You'd be surprised how intense it all gets after a few days' build-up.
- Shorter and more Postmodern Stephen den Beste: Europe has no existence than as a figurative Other, forming the other half of a binary opposition to the USA. Nothing in the world truly exists except the prospect of war in Iraq, a phenomenon wholly defined by the policy of the USA, so any attempt at forming European consensus is mere deferance of the final choice. But even if the French are "with us", they are also, by essence "against us", so the final contradiction is never resolved.
- Update:
- Two more: a massive "I literally cannot understand why anyone might possibly object to the idea of a major war in the Middle East".
- "People have more complicated views than simply for-us or against-us and it's Reuters' fault".
- Update: Rereading, I think I haven't done the long post justice. It's not just monumentally obtuse about the possible motivations of France and Germany. It's also actively barking. I believe (and certainly do not propose to check) that this marks the first description of France and Germany as "active cobelligerents" of Iraq and "our enemies". Also, SdB appears to have blurred the line between his suspicion that France and Germany have been secretly helping Saddam build weapons of mass destruction, and the real world.
- So I retract the summary above and substitute: "The administration which couldn't produce a smoking gun in the case of Iraq is now going to produce one for France and Germany".
- The reason Americans don't get on with Europeans is that Europeans are such liars; this is why they haven't accepted some hypothetical self-consistent subset of the Bush administration's case for was on Iraq.
- alotofmilitaryhardwareisonthemoveandreutersareshillsforyasserarafat.
- We must invade Iraq because Saddam's weapons of mass destruction are a threat to us, and we will win because Saddam's weapons of mass destruction are no threat to us.
- I don't like someone else's screen name
- The French will say that "war is the last resort", and they will be wrong.
- I am in a position to criticise other people for poor English.
- Why do the Iraqis bother, we're going to invade them anyway?
- Update: He thinks he can break me by taking advantage of my weekend break to put up like about a hundred comments. But he can't:
- If Le Monde don't understand why we want to bomb Iraq, they should take a trip to Southern Manhattan.
- Oh, they did. What a bunch of patronising bastards they are for saying so.
- Time to declare war on France!
- Time to declare war on France!
- Turkey aren't co-operating ... clearly the French are behind it!
- We are being diplomatically outmanouevered by the French!
- Saddam's missiles represent a very real threat because their range is long enough to reach troops stationed extremely close to his borders.
- Time to declare war on France!
- I haven't included bits that were just two-sentence comments on news stories; perhaps a reader with some Python skills will construct a program that downloads random feeds from Yahoo news, and appends the sentence "Sometimes I read things that just make my blood boil" to the beginning and "Time to declare war on France!" to the end. But I have to post this final summary because I think that, via subtext, den Beste is crying out for help. He doesn't want to continue this dance of death that me and him have got into, so he's begun serving me up short lobs to smack to the boundary.
- I used to play Go rather heavily. It's an interesting and very complex game, one famous for the fact that the rules of the game are easy to learn but tell you nothing about how you should play. Now here are some of my opinions.
- Update: This can't be accidental. Either he's playing with me or crying for help. I can't believe anyone would just accidentally juxtapose these two:
- It's incredibly tragic when young men die in easily preventable ways for no good reason.
- Time to start a war right now!
- In related news, I think I'm going to try to keep count of the number of times SdB uses his favourite analogy to mobile phones; that, just as you sometimes have to ship a really crappy mobile phone product which isn't ready in order to meet a deadline because marketing is on you ass, sometimes you have to start a pre-emptive war of aggression without the support of anyone else in the world and before you have deployed your troops properly because ... sometimes you have to ship a really crappy mobile phone because marketing is on your ass. Or something. There's a particularly good example today.
- In unrelated news, a number of people have requested "links" to the specific posts being summarised. No. I refuse to "dumb down" this service; the kind of person who can't work out which summary refers to which SdB post without being spoonfed a link is, frankly, going to have a hard time mastering the relationship between Ezra Pound, Marxist accumulation theory and endogenous-money economics, and thus should probably go off and read another blog.
- Furthermore, this is a *summary* service, meant to *replace* USS Clueless.
- I've never heard of anything so silly as to read a summary and then go and read the full length version "to check if the summary was right". If you want to read USS Clueless, then go ahead. Allow yourself. It's OK. You don't need to make excuses like "checking up on d-squared digest". You're still a good person.
- Matthew Yglesias intervenes again:
- The rest of us need to pick up the slack on the Shorter Steven Den Beste project.
- Seems to me that US rox! UN sux! nicely sums up his latest entry. The fact that these absurd rants are taken seriously is, I think, the achilles heel of the blogosphere.
- UPDATE: I see he's also got a post arguing for the novel proposition that the French are arrogant and bad.
- Coffee-break length Steven den Beste
Well, SSdB has been quite a success, by the admittedly low standards I set for it. I've lasted long enough to be able to give up at any point with a semblance of self-respect, and it apparently drew a few favourable notices, if my obsessive and constant vanity searches are anything to go by. This isn't a valedictory, by the way; I aim to keep it going for the forseeable future, both as a source of updates and as an incentive to myself to keep coming up with new material to balance things out (I'd also invite any SdB fans who are frustrated by the lack of a comments board to use mine, and perhaps to request that my regular readers don't gang up on them if they choose to do so). But I thought I'd post a few thoughts on what I've learned from the exercise.
1) To be honest, I thought it would be a chore, but I've grown to rather like the daily read of USS Clueless. The posts are still way, way too long, but they are always very well-informed from a factual point of view and in general well written, and I am hardly in a position to complain about sheer length. I've also substantially warmed toward the author over the last two weeks, and I don't think that it's purely a case of Stockholm Syndrome. My only previous experience of reading SdB was when the left wing blogosphere linked to something absolutely outrageous (like the infamous "kill the Palestinians" post), and that's actually a pretty unfair way to judge a body of work. When you read it on a daily basis, you get a sense of the overall Weltanschaung and you can put things in context. I still think that the authorial tone of USS Clueless is extremely cold and lacking in fellow-feeling, but you don't get the overpowering sense of selfishness that jumps out of most right-wing blogs. I now take SdB's claim to be "neither left nor right" a bit more seriously; I think he's someone with right-wing instincts (a little touch of Adorno's f-type personality), but who is intelligent and open to most forms of reasoned argument. I was also pleasantly surprised at the calibre of posters to the comments board which the SdB link attracted, as I mentioned in comments. None of the above should be taken as any assumption on my part that SdB cares more about my opinion than does an elephant about the opinion of a flea, by the way.
2) I found myself ruminating about geek culture, science fiction and right wing politics a lot over the last couple of weeks. One thing I'd note is that the defining characteristic of science fiction is that it's escapist; it invites the reader to imagine himself in the place of the characters in the novel. Compare that to, for example, Jane Austen, where the invitation is to empathise with the reactions and feelings of one of the characters as themselves, rather than imaging how you might react if you were Elizabeth Darcy. This is at the root of my dissatisfaction with even left wing techno-types; they don't seem to have developed the capacity to imagine a scene or way of life without putting themselves in it; to consider what it would be like to see the world through someone else's eyes, rather than being in someone else's situation with their own set of values and judgements. And I think that this failure of imagination, or something like it, is at the root of the problem of what I find bothersome about USS Clueless.
3) Finally, there's the elements of sheer lunacy which crop up with hilarious regularity. Mainly, the wild-eyed speculation about the French conspiracy (not too strong a word), or the painstaking, Zapruderesque reconstruction of what set of bizarre through-the-looking-glass circumstances might turn everything the US Government does into a series of strategic masterstrokes rather than a painful fiasco. I have my own theory about these ... bear with me ...
About five years ago, I happened to be, as I often was, visiting New York on business. Between meetings, a colleague and I popped into a branch of Starbucks (this was a novelty, because, believe it or not, Starbucks had no UK presence before 1999, when they took over the 40-odd outlets of the "Seattle Coffee Company" in what I still regard as the worst abuse of pooling-of-interests accounting ever). I noticed that the sizes of cups went something like "Short, Tall, Grande, Venti". I happen to know that "Venti" isn't another Italian word for "big", so I inquired what size it was. It's a 20-ounce cup (and is thus a pure Americanism; the Italians wouldn't call it "Venti" because they don't measure things in fluid ounces. God this is all getting like Pulp Fiction isn't it?). It was at that time that I idly wondered the following thought:
I wonder whether it is particularly healthy to drink a pint and a quarter of coffeee in one go, particularly when that coffee is the foul-tasting, high-caffeine kind which Starbucks appears to be using? (I was nursing a particularly nasty espresso at the time) Has any real research been done on this subject? I wonder what the effect on American society will be of a few years of this sort of caffeine intake?
And my theory is, not to put to fine a point on it, that USS Clueless might be on the way to providing an answer to my question. Engineers on mobile phone projects drink a lot of coffee, full stop. And a lot of the longer and more barking SdB posts really do have the air of the kind of wild speculations that you find yourself engaging on when you're up against a tight deadline, full of information and with your brain chemistry slightly altered. Even if SdB himself is a Mormon or doesn't drink caffeine for some other reason (I have no information on this score), the point is still there; a lot of the fevered imaginings of the whole blogosphere seem to partake of a somewhat overstimulated hallucinatory-paranoid reverie.
This is quite serious stuff, by the way. Cultures have, as a matter of extermely arguable historical fact, been brought down by overindulgence in their drug of choice. Opium did a lot of damage to Persian and Chinese civilisation, for example. I really worry, on quiet nights with a glass of wine in my hand and looking out at the stars over London ... am I going to be part of the generation that ends up having to deal with the geopolitical consequences of the world's greatest superpower (a superpower which has always had a very problematic relationship with drugs) finally finding a chemical it truly wants to get fucked up on?- Turkey has been given genuine defensive assistance rather than the massive Kurd-destroying force de frappe it asked for, and this is a defeat for the French in some way.
- Reality television is horrible, particularly in its treatment of homophobic murderers.
- Eveery single op-ed cliche about the European Union is true.
- The Gaullist Jacques Chirac worships Karl Marx.
- Note: SdB fans who are also engineers will be aware of the problem of "compressing white noise" from Shannon & Wiener's information theory. The point being that (say) a computer file of completely random numbers can't be compressed to a smaller size, because the way that you compress things is by taking advantage of their internal structure to eliminate redundant points. Because a file of completely random data doesn't *have* any internal structure, there is no file that you can create which describes the data fully, which is shorter than the file itself. That's what writing today's summary was like. Apologies that the two tries above aren't very good; this isn't my fault, it's the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
- How could I be "right wing"? I believe in evolution!
- Hmmmm, looks like some of those diplomatic masterstrokes weren't so clever after all. Time for unilateral war!
- (seasoned SdB watchers will notice that these posts used to end "time to reveal our smoking gun dossier / the evidence that France has been smuggling weapons / the true identity of the Hooded Claw!". Looks like this claim has been dropped, and the rationale is back to "because we can".)
- Residents of Berkeley might like to know that there is 1 (one) joke about your town being nuked. In fact, anyone else might like to be aware of this, as it offers useful context for exactly how much of a fuck SdB actually gives about the victims of terrorism when they aren't being wheeled on and off stage to provide a handy moral justification for wars of aggression. Note also in this context that when one says "I'd rather be hated by everyone than have one of our cities nuked", that it's not exactly an either / or situation. Finally note that this paragraph constitutes a roughly 150 word summary of a ten word original; I am still plagued by the philosophical ramifications of Shannon's information theory.
Things Are Worse Than You Can Imagine
Things are worse than you can imagine, even after you think you have already taken account of the fact that things are worse than you can imagine.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden learns that the Archdiocese of Boston was not the worst Catholic diocese in the country, and is driven berserk in rage and horror...
What about the boy? ...this fascinating story in today's New York Times...[Rockville Centre is the Catholic diocese just east of Brooklyn and Queens, composed of Nassau and Suffolk Counties.]
A grand jury's assertion that the Diocese of Rockville Centre secretly battled to protect priests while pretending to extend a pastoral hand to sexual abuse victims goes beyond anything seen since the scandal in the Roman Catholic Church erupted a year ago, victims of abuse and their advocates said yesterday. [...]While masquerading as sympathetic listeners, the officials were actually doing everything they could to fend off dozens of victims, keep their charges quiet and keep abusive priests in the ministry, the grand jury said in the report, which was released on Monday.
"I have not frankly seen a team that is so sinister and dedicated to the purpose like this," said one lawyer, Jeffrey Anderson, who added that he had pressed cases in more than half of the nation's dioceses. [...]
In one instance, the official told a parish employee who reported suspicious behavior that the priest would be sent for treatment, the report said. What about the boy, the employee asked. The grand jury report said the official replied: "It's not my responsibility to worry about the boy. My job is to protect the bishop and the church." [...]
While his name never appears, Msgr. Alan J. Placa's shadow hovers throughout the grand jury report.
Monsignor Placa was the architect of the diocese's legal strategy, a national expert in the field and the crucial member of the intervention team. Several months after the panel was ended in April, he was suspended from the ministry after being accused of abusing children. Monsignor Placa is a close friend of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor, and works for Mr. Giuliani's consulting business.
The grand jury report does not mention names. But it often refers to a priest who is a lawyer as dealing with victims. The description fits Monsignor Placa, and lawyers for victims have said he is the author of confidential legal memorandums quoted by the grand jury.
Monsignor Placa, who has defended his work on the panel and denied misconduct, did not respond to a request for an interview yesterday...
February 11, 2003
L.I. Diocese Tricked Victims of Sexual Abuse, Panel Says
Suffolk County grand jury accused Roman Catholic Church officials on Long Island yesterday of protecting scores of pedophile priests for decades by using sham policies and a bogus "intervention team" to trick and silence victims, cover up crimes, avoid scandals and hold down financial consequences.
The panel said the Diocese of Rockville Centre ? the nation's sixth largest, with 1.3 million Catholics in 134 parishes in Nassau and Suffolk Counties ? had protected at least 58 abusive priests with aggressive tactics that purported to help victims and their families but that actually used intimidation, claims of confidentiality, hush payments and other means to avoid lawsuits and publicity.
Since 1990, the diocese has maintained a special "uninsured perils fund" to cover sexual abuse claims, asbestos exposure and trampoline accidents, the grand jury found. It said the fund, raised from parish collections, had paid $1.7 million in claims ? none for asbestos exposure or trampoline accidents ? but still had $11 million in its account last October.
As for dangerous priests, it said they were shuffled from parish to parish and often allowed to minister to children, while recommendations for psychiatric treatments were ignored and a "legal affairs" team, ostensibly set up to help sexual abuse victims, worked to suppress legal claims and husband the money.
"The grand jury concludes that the history of the Diocese of Rockville Centre demonstrates that as an institution they are incapable of properly handling issues relating to the sexual abuse of children by priests," the special grand jury said in a 180-page report based on a nine-month inquiry.
It said the failures, documented in testimony by priests and victims and in church records including secret archives on 43 priests, could not be attributed to incompetence. "The evidence before the grand jury clearly demonstrates that diocesan officials agreed to engage in conduct that resulted in the prevention, hindrance and delay in the discovery of criminal conduct by priests," it said.
The report did not name any diocesan leaders or abusive priests, and the grand jury said it was unable to file indictments against the diocese because of a five-year statute of limitations. But the panel called for new laws to eliminate time limitations on prosecuting child sex-abuse cases and to require that members of the clergy report child abuse directly to the authorities.
The report was one of the most comprehensive accountings of abuse by priests in a diocese since the pedophile scandal engulfed the Roman Catholic Church 13 months ago with disclosures that a Boston priest had attacked 130 boys over 30 years. Since then, hundreds of civil suits have been filed with claims totaling more than $100 million, and prosecutors across the nation have taken their investigations of clerical sexual abuse before dozens of grand juries.
A survey by The New York Times last month found that the crisis had spread to nearly every American diocese and had involved more than 1,200 priests and more than 4,200 victims in the last six decades. Those accused represent less than 2 percent of the priests in America, but research suggests that the extent of the problem remains hidden because many cases have gone unreported.
Yesterday's report was unveiled by the Suffolk County district attorney, Thomas J. Spota, at a news conference in Hauppauge. "This document tells all of us what was really happening in the Diocese of Rockville Centre for years and years and years," he said. "High-ranking prelates protected 58 colleagues from disgrace rather than protecting children from these predator priests."
Mr. Spota added: "Time after time, and despite overwhelming evidence that priests were committing crimes against children, they were willingly sacrificing the truth for fear of scandal and for monetary considerations."
Joanne C. Novarro, a spokeswoman for the Rockville Centre Diocese, called the grand jury report unfair and insisted that the diocese had taken all cases of sexual abuse by priests seriously and had improved its methods of handling such cases under Bishop William Murphy, who took over the diocese last year.
"While sexual abuse of minors is always a grave sin and a crime, the ways of dealing with it have developed over time," she said. "This is every bit as true of law enforcement officials as of church personnel."
Ms. Novarro added: "It is unfair to use today's standards to judge sincere attempts in the past to assist victims and to help perpetrators not to offend again. The diocese took extremely seriously any allegation of sexual abuse of a minor, sent the accused priest away for evaluation and treatment, and worked with the victims for a just settlement."
The spokeswoman also sharply criticized Mr. Spota for releasing the report to the news media before issuing copies to the diocese. She said that the diocesan lawyers were reviewing it and that neither she nor Bishop Murphy had read it.
Bishop Murphy was not at the briefing. Ms. Novarro said he had gone to Boston, where he is to testify on Wednesday before a grand jury investigating whether he and other church officials could be prosecuted for protecting abusive priests there. Bishop Murphy was formerly the top deputy to Cardinal Bernard Law and has been cited in nearly one-third of the pending cases in Boston.
The Suffolk grand jury, impaneled last May, heard 97 witnesses and examined 257 exhibits, including personnel records of the diocese going back to its founding in 1957, and what it called "secret archives" on 43 priests who have been accused of sexual abuse. "The vast majority of priests assigned to the diocese are dedicated to their pastoral ministry," the report said.
But the report ? in what has become a familiar litany ? presented evidence, often in graphic terms, of assaults by priests from the late 1970's: the rape and sodomy of altar boys, cheerleaders and others who were given alcohol, shown pornographic materials and seduced in rectories, churches or their own homes, or were taken to motels, peep shows or sex clubs or on camping trips and other outings.
Identifying the priests only by letters of the alphabet ? A through W ? the report detailed abuse that often continued for years. While many cases were brought to the attention of diocesan officials, it said, only one priest was unfrocked ? for having an affair with an adult woman.
"The response of priests in the diocesan hierarchy to allegations of criminal sexual abuse was not pastoral," the report said. "In fact, although there was a written policy that set a pastoral tone, it was a sham. The diocese failed to follow the policy from its inception, even at the most rudimentary level."
Instead, it said, diocesan officials transferred the abusive priests from parish to parish or out of the diocese, but their records did not go with them. "Abusive priests were protected under the guise of confidentiality," it said. "Their histories were mired in secrecy."
Moreover, to carry out what the panel called its cover-up policy, the diocese in the mid-1980's set up what it called the Office of Legal Affairs, known unofficially as the "intervention team." It was, in fact, two high-ranking priests who were also lawyers.
Ostensibly they recommended treatments for abusive priests ? recommendations that were filed away and forgotten, the grand jury said ? and met with victims and their families, supposedly to discuss possible avenues of action.
"In reality," the grand jury said, "the office and the intervention team had one purpose, protecting the diocese."
To do this, the report said, the team used "aggressive legal strategies" to "defeat and discourage lawsuits, even though diocesan officials knew they were meritorious." Meeting with victims, the team treated crimes of priests as sins, not to be reported to law enforcement officials, and said that offenders were being treated.
"Victims were deceived," the report said. "Priests who were civil attorneys portrayed themselves as interested in the concerns of victims and pretended to be acting for their benefit while they acted only to protect the diocese."
One confidential, self-congratulatory memo written by a team member was quoted in the report as saying: "We have suffered no major loss or scandal due to allegations of sexual misconduct by religious personnel. Since I have been involved in this work, the Diocese of Rockville Centre has paid out a total of $4,000 because of claims of sexual misconduct."
In cases where money was paid from the uninsured perils fund, victims were asked to sign confidentiality agreements so there would be no publicity, the report said.
"The grand jury finds the actions of diocesan officials who were responsible for making and implementing policy reprehensible," it said.
February 11, 2003
When Are Deficits Supposed to Start to Suppress Spending?
Jacob Levy of the V Conspiracy asks an obvious question. If (as Mickey Kaus and others maintain) running a large federal deficit is good because it restrains spending, how come spending growth is not restrained now? We have the deficit, after all--plus the prospect of national bankruptcy a generation hence to concentrate our minds.
Missing from this NYT piece about how conservatives stopped worrying and learned to love deficits: any mention of when this effect of deficits restraining spending is scheduled to kick in. The federal budget is in deficit already, boys and girls... [The Volokh Conspiracy]
This White House Is Very Strange Indeed
This White House is very strange indeed. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard interviews administration officials, and the picture they paint of how economic policy works seems to have no contact with reality:
The Four Horsemen of Bush Economic Policy | From the Winter 2003 issue of The International Economy | by Fred Barnes | 01/20/2003
...Another big name with diminished influence is Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman. Greenspan was close to O'Neill. The firing of O'Neill was "a shot across the bow" of Greenspan, an administration official says. At the White House, there's a feeling the Fed has fallen behind the economic curve. This is bad news for Greenspan, hardly a friend of the Bush family after his tight money policy helped doom the re-election chances of President Bush senior in 1992. White House aides can recite the date--June 2004--without hesitation. That's the deadline for the chairman's reappointment. For Greenspan, the message in the O'Neill canning is that the same awaits him should he jeopardize Bush's re-election prospects by raising interest rates...
You fire a Treasury Secretary to send an oblique message to a Federal Reserve Chair that his reappointment is in jeopardy should he not "behave"? Isn't that rather wasteful?
Isn't it also rather ineffective? It presumes that Alan Greenspan would value an extra term as Federal Reserve Chair more than he would regret the damage that would be done to his reputation were he to swear up and down that the Bush Administration's 2004 Budget is the greatest thing since sliced bread--an inaccurate presumption. Greenspan's open and public position is the same as that of the overwhelming majority of economists: improving the taxation of income from capital is a good thing, but not if it is bought at the price of a substantial widening of the federal budget deficit.
Moreover, the threat not to reappoint a non-compliant Greenspan is not a credible one. Let's climb up to the leaves of the game tree. It's June 2004, and Greenspan's term has expired, and Bush is annoyed at the Greenspan who said that fixing the deficit is more important than reducing taxes on dividends, and so he doesn't renominate Greenspan but instead nominates... somebody else. What happens then?
What happens then is that at the start of July Tom Daschle calls the Democratic Senate Caucus together, and says, "Look: it's the middle of the presidential campaign season. We're in session this July, we're on vacation in August, we're in session in September, by the end of September we are recessed again. Let's stall on the Federal Reserve vote until after the presidential election. Then there's a 50-50 chance that a Democrat will get to appoint the next Fed Chair. And if Bush wins in November, we can approve Greenspan's successor in November and be in no worse position than we are now." Bush can get Alan Greenspan--or perhaps Greenspan's designated successor (Don Kohn or Peter Fisher or William McDonough?)--past a narrowly-divided Senate in the late summer of a presidential election year. But any other candidate? No Republican possibility has the street cred to get a floor vote in July or September of 2004.
So at some point in the spring of 2004, Bush's Legislative Affairs people will sit him down and tell him the facts of life: either reappoint Greenspan, or run a 50-50 chance of having a Democratic president appoint the next Federal Reserve Chair. Unless Bush is a cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face kind of guy, Greenspan gets the nod--if he does want another term. Greenspan knows this. Is whatever White House official is singing to Barnes--Josh Bolten or Karl Rove or one of their deputies--so dumb that they do not recognize how strong a position Greenspan is in? And how stupid it is to make empty threats?
Moreover, Barnes's article gets even stranger.
Barnes writes what he clearly believes is a slam directed against Paul O'Neill and John Taylor:
John Taylor, the treasury undersecretary for international economics, was expected to be a heavyweight in economic policy. But that was not to be. He's been held back both by [Paul] O'Neill's clumsiness in global affairs and O'Neill's failure to play as significant a role in international economics as treasury secretaries Robert Rubin in the Clinton administration and James Baker under President Reagan. In particular, the Bush administration has been inconsistent in assessing the need for bailouts of foreign countries in economic trouble. O'Neill opposed a bailout for Argentina and won. He also opposed a bailout for Brazil, but Bush decided without consulting O'Neill or Taylor to back a large package of financial aid for Brazil.
The line "Bush decided without consulting O'Neill or Taylor to back a large package of financial aid for Brazil" is, in Barnes's mind, supposed to underscore the fecklessness and powerlessness of O'Neill and Taylor. But there is only one group of people in the U.S. government who can do the staffwork to figure out whether a package of financial aid for Brazil is a good idea or not: only one group who can assess the sustainability of Brazilian fiscal policy, understand how the tides of Brazilian politics will flow, gauge which way the wind is blowing in first-world asset markets, and judge whether a large aid package to Brazil is a gamble worth making or not. This isn't a question of political philosophy. This is a question of practical economic management. And that one group of people works in Treasury International Affairs--works directly for John Taylor, and worked at one remove for Paul O'Neill.
So if you keep Paul O'Neill and John Taylor out of the room when the decision on aid to Brazil is made, then--unless you get the staff economists on the Brazil desk in the Treasury into the Oval Office, which is not how the Bush Administration works--the president's decision is made on the basis of no information at all. It becomes a wild-ass guess.
Whose job is it to make sure that presidential decisions are not wild-ass guesses? Whose job is it to make sure that the president hears all the arguments he needs to hear, and thinks about all the sides of the issue he needs to think about, before policy is set? It is the job of the chief of staff: Andrew Card. If it is indeed the case that Andrew Card did not make sure that Paul O'Neill and John Taylor were in the room when the president decided to endorse the loan to Brazil, then Andrew Card is not competent to do his job.
But is Fred Barnes smart enough to realize that his claim that O'Neill had no input into the Brazil decision is an accusation that Andrew Card is incompetent?
NetNewsWire 1.0
NetNewsWire 1.0. A program that may well make my life easier--as much easier as the awesome Movable Type has made my life easier.
Thanks to all the beta testers and folks who’ve helped along the way—NetNewsWire 1.0 is now shipping!
Get it while it’s hot! [Ranchero NetNewsWire 1.0]
Broadband Is an Inalienable Right
Speak of the devil department:
The State of Kentucky will provide broadband Internet access in low-income housing projects:
Taking an aggressive stance on the issue of the digital divide, the Kentucky Housing Corporation, or KHC, has listed broadband Internet access among the inalienable rights of its low-income housing residents.
As part of an effort to enact universal design standards for public housing, the KHC passed a mandate (PDF) stating that all new housing units funded more than 50 percent by the KHC must be equipped with access to high-speed Internet service... [Link to Full Story]
Let's Get Snarky!
More high-quality snarkiness from Matthew Yglesias:
Matthew Yglesias: Sully's mad: Hell hath no fury like a small government conservative scorned, and Andrew Sullivan's series of brief rants on the horrors of Bushonomics is priceless. Of course anyone who noted during the campaign that his original tax cut numbers didn't add up could have predicted that. It's really too bad that there wasn't anyone in America who caught that. I mean, if maybe someone writing for the Times op-ed page had said something, we wouldn't be in this mess. A columnist of some sort. Maybe a trained economist with a flair for popular writing. Named P ... Paul ... Paul something ... there must've been someone like that. Oh well, better late than never.
Life, Liberty, and a Linen Shirt
Take it for granted (as I do) that a good society offers everyone the opportunity to make a decent living without undue toil (and without selling one's internal organs for transplants either). What is a "decent living"? Daniel Davies worries this problem like a moral philosopher, and comes up with three conclusions:
- In late eighteenth-century England, a good society would have offered everyone the right to earn enough to comfortably buy a linen shirt.
- In early twenty-first century America, a good society does not yet require that one have the right to earn enough to comfortably afford a cable mode.
- But just you wait: by 2010 (if Kim Jong Il does not blow the place up) in South Korea anyone who does not earn enough to comfortably afford DSL will be indecently poor.
D-squared Digest -- A fat young man without a good word for anyone: ...My view on the subject of what constitutes a decent living goes right back to Adam Smith, whose views on the subject are not so well known, but exemplify the strand of humanity and sound common sense which has been so thoroughly ignored in his writing ever since he coined that phrase about the Invisible Hand. Smith asked the question in Wealth of Nations, in respect of the minimum standard of living, whether it was part of that standard for a man to own a clean linen shirt (at the time, linen and the laundry thereof were just making the transition from a luxury of the upper class to a mass market product). Smith's answer was that, although a linen shirt was clearly not a necessity for survival, and had not been part of the basic standard of living even ten years earlier, it was at the time of writing. His reason for so concluding was that things had advanced to the point at which any industrious tradesman could afford to wear linen and keep it laundered, so any tradesman not able to afford his linen shirt would be thought lazy or inferior; even if he had happened into that state of penury by bad luck, he would find it very difficult to get employed and get out of it once he was in it.
That seems like, adjusted for technological advance, a good rule of thumb for today. Taking out clue from the fact that the senses of "decent" which refer to the display of taboo body parts, and the senses which refer to material standards of living, must have some common origin, I'd define "a decent standard of living" as "the lowest level of material possessions in a society which allows one to escape shame and prejudice". So for example, while the phrase "trailer trash" is in common usage, a decent standard of living implies not living in a trailer. If it is impossible to get a job without an email address, then maybe a modem of some sort (not necessarily ADSL) is a part of that standard. And so on...
The Increasingly-Strong Case for National Health Insurance
Daniel Davies points out that the rapid approach of genetic screening makes national health insurance inevitable--at least if we don't want to have a *huge* problem as those whose genes are bad for expensive-to-treat diseases find themselves very, very poor indeed.
D-squared Digest -- A fat young man without a good word for anyone: ...Solutions? Sorry, don't really have one, unless one seriously thinks that the genie of genetic screening can be pushed back in the bottle. I'd note, however, that the engine of most of these "problems of asymmetric information" (in this case, the adverse selection problem which makes the pooled equilibrium solution with private information untenable) is usually an embedded option. In this case, it's the option of the insured party to choose whether or not to buy insurance. Since you can't force them to buy the product, they will only do so when it's to their advantage, and this turns out to be enough to knock down the existence of the market. I speak as a member of a health insurance scheme (the National Health Service) which doesn't have the property that you can refuse to buy it if you don't want it, and would humbly suggest that something along these lines might help the insurance industry out of what might turn out to be a nasty hole...
Not Serious on Freeing-Up Trade
WASHINGTON, FEB 10--The Bush Administration's first act in its Free Trade Agreement of the Americas negotiations is to take all discussion of agricultural subsidies off the table. This is not good. To say you won't even discuss what is the major hoped-for objective of the other partners in the negotiation is a very bad negotiating strategy--or is a very bad negotiating strategy if you want an agreement.
Bob Zoellick has got to know better.
As the first stage in negotiations to expand free trade throughout the Western Hemisphere, the Bush administration is offering to lift all tariffs on textiles and apparel within five years.
The proposal will be presented on Tuesday by Robert B. Zoellick, the United States trade representative, who prepared the offer to cover duties on everything from beef to lamps while making special concessions for the poorest nations, a senior trade official said. The goal, Mr. Zoellick said, is the eventual elimination of duties on goods and services from throughout North and South America.
But the administration will refuse to discuss reducing America's multibillion-dollar agricultural subsidies in the negotiations because they are not tariffs, the senior official said.
Let's Get Snarky!
Matthew Yglesias wins the "let's get snarky!" prize for the first quarter of 2003:
2-10-03: Tom Tomorrow goes into outrage overload. 7-24-00: Tom Tomorrow explains that there's no difference between the two parties. I for one am really glad that folks had a third option that fateful November.
The dive was not too difficult--a certain fish-barrel-gun element. But the technical excellence is unsurpassable. Here are the cartoons:
Now:
Then:
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The Wisdom of Anil Dash
Another sign of the increasing density of wireless access points. Maybe Wired should change its name to Wireless...
Note to dumb self: If you still can't connect to the computer that's 10 feet away from you, even after trying fifty million times, you might want to make sure you're logged into your own wifi network, and not one of the 3 neighboring ones that surround you.
Note to dumb neighbor: Turn off file sharing. And run a spell-check on that cover letter before you send it, or there's no chance that place is going to hire you.
What Greenspan Did Say
He called for reestablishment of something like the Budget Enforcement Act--"I am concerned that, should the enforcement mechanisms governing the budget process not be restored, the resulting lack of clear direction and constructive goals would allow the inbuilt political bias in favor of growing budget deficits to again become entrenched..." He refused to support the reduction of taxes on dividends unless other taxes were raised to make the net effect budget neutral--"the Fed chairman said he continues to support elimination of double taxation on dividends... only if other revenue can be found so as not to raise the budget deficit."
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned Tuesday that "geopolitical tensions" have added to the uncertainties dogging the U.S. economy, making a recovery difficult, and called for more discipline to control the growing U.S. federal budget deficit.
In response to questions from senators, the Fed chairman said he continues to support elimination of double taxation on dividends, but only if other revenue can be found so as not to raise the budget deficit.
Greenspan, in prepared remarks for his testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, said uncertainties about a possible war with Iraq were "creating formidable barriers to new investment and thus to a resumption of vigorous expansion of overall economic activity."
Greenspan said that the Fed, the nation's central bank, believes that when the risk of war with Iraq is lifted, business spending and the economy will rebound, although he said that was not certain.
"If these uncertainties diminish considerably in the near term, we should be able to tell far better whether we are dealing with a business sector and an economy poised to grow more rapidly -- our more probable expectation -- or one that is still laboring under persisting strains and imbalances that have been misidentified as transitory," he said in his prepared remarks.
Last week, President Bush presented his budget to Congress that projected a record $304 billion deficit for the current fiscal year. Greenspan, calling those projections "sobering," did not directly address whether the deficit should be reduced through spending cuts or elimination of the administration's proposed tax breaks, although he said, "There should be little disagreement about the need to re-establish budget discipline."
"I am concerned that, should the enforcement mechanisms governing the budget process not be restored, the resulting lack of clear direction and constructive goals would allow the inbuilt political bias in favor of growing budget deficits to again become entrenched," he warned.
The Bush administration has argued that tax cuts will spur economic growth needed to lift the government's tax revenues and control future deficits. Greenspan seemed to challenge this assessment, saying, "Faster economic growth, doubtless, would make deficits far easier to contain. But faster economic growth alone is not likely to be the full solution to currently projected long-term deficits."
In response to a question, Greenspan said he disagrees that deficits can rise without an impact on interest rates.
"There's no question that when deficits go up, contrary to what some have said, it does affect long-term interest rates, it does affect the economy," he said.
Greenspan did call for changes to the formula used to calculate cost-of-living increases in federal benefits and changes in federal income tax brackets that he said would have reduced the federal budget deficit by $40 billion through reduced outlays and increased tax collections. He seemed pessimistic that Congress and the administration will take the necessary steps to restrain growing deficits.
"At the present time, there seems to be a large and growing constituency for holding down the deficit, but I sense less appetite to do what is required to achieve that outcome," he said. "Re-establishing budget balance will require discipline on both revenue and spending actions, but restraint on spending may prove the more difficult."...
Also worth noting. The G-7 Group said this morning that the Washington Post's reporter had been snookered--had been told that Greenspan was going to be much more favorable to the administration than was in fact the case--and that he believed it and printed it.
The G-7 Group says:
This morning's business section of the Washington Post suggests that Greenspan will throw his weight behind Bush's plan to eliminate taxation of dividends for individuals. Well... sort of.
- As we wrote yesterday, Greenspan will acknowledge that he opposes double taxation of any income in principle and therefore believes eliminating such policiy is good long-term tax policy.
- But he also has qualms about slashing federal revenue to the Treasury at a time when costs are rising and destined to rise further as the US grapples with war in Iraq and rising Medicare costs.
... Bottom Line: Greenspan will say that he favors elimination of double taxation in principle. But privately, he certainly didn't encourage moderates to back the Bush plan. And we don't expect him to change any minds today.
And, indeed, when we look at the Post reporters lead:
Greenspan Likely to Back Dividend Plan: Support Before Senate Seen as Crucial to Passing Economic Package: Tuesday, February 11, 2003; Page E01: Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan is expected to endorse President Bush's proposal to end the double taxation of corporate dividends today at a high-stakes Senate appearance that is important to the White House's efforts to pass Bush's economic plan, according to congressional sources and others familiar with his thinking...
he did indeed get snookered.
In many ways, the most surprising thing is the naivete of these reporters--their willingness to take easily-falsified spin for reality.
Andrew Sullivan Admits Paul Krugman Was Right All Along
If Paul Krugman had written this, I would have said that it is a little harsh and over-the-top. But it's from Andrew Sullivan, who has finally woken up to the fact that Paul Krugman has been right all the time in his harsh judgments of Bush Administration economic policy:
www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: ...BUSH'S ACHILLES HEEL: It's the economy, smarty-pants... the explosive rate of current government spending... the president's utter insouciance about how to pay for it... his latest budget removes any [excuse for giving him the benefit of the doubt]... worse than Reagan... ratcheting up discretionary spending... no signs whatever of adjusting to meet the hole he and the Republican Congress are putting in the national debt... illiterate flimflam.... But as the tables in the budget also showed, the tax cuts have also contributed significantly to the deficit - and they've barely taken effect yet... staggered that the budget does not contain any mention of the looming war. I guess you could make a semantic point about its not being inevitable - but not even as a possible contingency? Is that how an ordinary citizen plans his own budget?... an awful legacy in the making. In the first three years of Bush's presidency, Chapman notes, non-defense discretionary government spending will have gone up an inflation-adjusted 18 percent.... But what really bugs me is that the president doesn't seem to give a damn... he told us last year that deficits would be temporary... this year... well he didn't say anything... Even after the last two years of budget-busting recklessness, he's still proposing spending increases far higher than the rate of inflation.... DEBT BE DAMNED: Then again, he might say: I'm deliberately creating new deficits because they're the only long-term way to keep domestic spending under control. But what this amounts to is saying I'm going to spend your hard-earned money now in order to persuade other people to stop spending your hard-earned money later. What other people? You're the government, Mr President. And your party controls all of Congress. There's no way you can pass the buck for plunging the next generation into debt... while blaming someone else... So why the flim-flam?...
What Alan Greenspan Will Say This Week
The G-7 Group predicts:
Greenspan will do a two-step...
- He will say that he opposes the double taxation of dividends on principle, and that ending such policy represents good long-term tax policy.
- But he will also concede that eliminating dividends does little to stimulate the economy in the near term and does so at the risk of high deficits. This is what he told moderates behind closed doors and he will not be able to go soft on this point.
- He will likely warn against a return to long-term budget deficits while stressing the need to curb spending.
- Greenspan will try to avoid endorsing one party's stimulus package over the other's. But anyone paying attention will understand that he believes the Democrats? smaller package aimed at 2003-04 is better for the economy.
On Machiavelli's "Letter to Vettori," or, The Value of the History of Economic Thought
A surprisingly-large number of people have recently asked me why I am interested in the history of economic thought. They make various points. First, we don't learn physics from Galileo's Discourse on Two New Sciences. There are other, better, more complete, more accurate ways of presenting the material. In any real body of knowledge, the more up-to-date has to be preferred to the less because we know more than they did. Second, there are the dangers of promoting dead and dry texts to the status of unquestionable authorities. Karl Marx saw misery in industrial England in the 1840s, jumped to the conclusion that market economies could never deliver persistent, sustained, significant improvements in real wages to the working class, jumped to the conclusion that markets had no place in any truly human mode of social organization, and--because his words became Holy Writ, the sacred gospel that was never to be questioned of a Millennarian World Religion--more than a billion people were doomed to even deeper poverty for more than a generation. Third, there is the danger that one will read texts one has placed high on a pedestal and discover in them a secret message, a crucial form of knowledge that is desperately important and that only you have the wit to decode as it exists in hidden form beneath the surface of the "apparent meaning" of the text.
These are indeed powerful drawbacks, ever-present dangers in any enterprise that contains any substantial intellectual history component. One may well find oneself attached to outmoded and partial knowledge, abandoning one's right mind to become the acolyte of some strange old book-based cult repugnant to reason, or transformed into a madman convinced that only one and one's own sect has been able to master the hermetic mysteries of the vitally-important true-but-hidden meaning of the text.
But there is an upside. What is the upside? Let me approach it in a roundabout fashion. Let me start by quoting a famous letter, a letter from circa-1600 Florentine politician Niccolo Machiavelli to his friend and hoped-for patron Francesco Vettori, describing what Machiavelli's life is like in the internal political exile to which he was consigned after the fall of Florentine Republican government that he had served.
The letter is best known for its description of how Machiavelli spent his evenings, found in the second paragraph below:
I am living on my farm.... I get up in the morning with the sun and go into a grove I am having cut down, where I remain two hours to look over the work of the past day and kill some time with the cutters.... Leaving the grove, I go to a spring, and thence to my aviary. I have a book in my pocket, either Dante or Petrarch, or one of the lesser poets, such as Tibullus, Ovid, and the like. I read of their tender passions and their loves, remember mine, enjoy myself a while in that sort of dreaming. Then I move along the road to the inn; I speak with those who pass, ask news of their villages, learn various things, and note the various tastes and different fancies of men. In the course of these things comes the hour for dinner, where with my family I eat such food as this poor farm of mine and my tiny property allow. Having eaten, I go back to the inn.... I sink into vulgarity for the whole day, playing at cricca and at trich-trach.... So, involved in these trifles, I keep my brain from growing mouldy, and satisfy the malice of this fate of mine, being glad to have her drive me along this road, to see if she will be ashamed of it.
On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.
And because Dante says it does not produce knowledge when we hear but do not remember, I have noted everything in their conversation which has profited me, and have composed a little work On Princedoms, where I go as deeply as I can into considerations on this subject, debating what a princedom is, of what kinds they are, how they are gained, how they are kept, why they are lost...
In short, on the coming of evening Niccolo Machiavelli enters his personal library. There he talks to his friends--his books, or rather those who wrote the books in his library, or rather those components of their minds that are instantiated in the hardware-and-software combinations of linen, ink, and symbols of Gutenberg Information Technology that is his personal library. They are "ancient men" who receive him "with affection," and for four hours he "ask[s] them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and... I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death..."
Remember that Machiavelli lives only two generations after Gutenberg. He is thus one of the very first people in the world to have had a personal library. Before printing, libraries were the exclusive possession of kings, sovereign princes, abbots, masters of the Roman Empire (like Caesar and Cicero). The idea that a mere mortal--a disgraced ex-Assistant for Confidential Affairs to the Republic of Florence--might have a personal library would have been absurd even half a century before Machiavelli. To him, therefore, his personal library is not something he takes for granted, but something new, something he has that his predecessors did not. And so he can see clearly what his personal library does for him.
What does his personal library do for him? It does this: it enlarges his circle of friends. Especially in disgraced semi-exile--when many he would talk to are afraid to be seen in his company, and where he is afraid to be seen in the company of almost all the rest--the ability to read and reread his personal copies of Publius Ovidius Naso, Petrarch, Dante Alighieri, Titus Livius, Plutarch, and the rest makes them his friends: almost the only people who will receive him with affection, and definitely the only people who will honestly answer his questions about politics and history. And it is important to have such friends, and to pay them proper respect. Hence Machiavelli will not go to them in his clothes-of-the-day--those in which he had managed his farm, haggled over the price of firewood, gambled, and on which he had spilled beer. He will, instead, enter his library only in "garments regal and courtly."
To my mind, studying the history of economic thought has much the same effect. It is not that any of us are in Machiavelli's situation--where a single wrong sentence to the wrong person and we would find ourselves under torture in the dungeons of Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. But it is very nice to add some highly intelligent, extremely witty, and very thoughtful people living far away--for the past is indeed far away, and in its strangeness provides an important element of perspective--to our circle of friends.
Moreover, people's rough edges are filed off in their books. Adam Smith found Jean-Jacques Rousseau impossible in person, but that chunk of Rousseau's mind that is instantiated in the hardware-and-software combination of Gutenberg Information Technology is very pleasant company. Nobody outside his family (save Friedrich Engels) could ever stand Karl Marx for any length of time. But that part of Marx's mind that is instantiated in his books doesn't fly into irrational rages, doesn't accuse one of being a police spy, doesn't beg for money, doesn't demand that one accept that he is very much smarter than one. Instead, Marx-in-the-book speaks passionately of his hopes and fears for the future--hope coming from the progressive destiny of humanity and the extraordinary progress of technology, and fear coming from our constant tendency to f*** up our social engineering problems--and (save when he starts raving Hegelian gibberish, or when you see that whole chunks of his argument fall away because he has confused the physical capital-output ratio with the value capital-output raio) can be very good company indeed.
And then there are those whom one really wishes one had gotten to know in person. For who would not like to be good friends with (if one were quick and witty enough to avoid becoming one of his targets) John Maynard Keynes, or David Hume, or John Stuart Mill, or Adam Smith?
Letter from Niccolo Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori
10 December 1513
Magnificent Ambassador:
"Never late were favors divine." I say this because I seemed to have lost--no, rather mislaid--your good will; you had not written to me for a long time, and I was wondering what the reason could be. And of all those that came into my mind I took little account, except of one only, when I feared that you had stopped writing because somebody had written to you that I was not a good guardian of your letters, and I knew that, except Filippo and Pagolo, nobody by my doing had seen them. I have found it again through your last letter of the twenty-third of the past month, from which I learn with pleasure how regularly and quietly you carry on this public office, and I encourage you to continue so, because he who gives up his own convenience for the convenience of others, only loses his own and from them gets no gratitude. And since Fortune wants to do everything, she wishes us to let her do it, to be quiet, and not to give her trouble, and to wait for a time when she will allow something to be done by men; and then will be the time for you to work harder, to stir things up more, and for me to leave my farm and say: "Here I am." I cannot however, wishing to return equal favors, tell you in this letter anything else than what my life is; and if you judge that you would like to swap with me, I shall be glad to.
I am living on my farm, and since I had my last bad luck, I have not spent twenty days, putting them all together, in Florence. I have until now been snaring thrushes with my own hands. I got up before day, prepared birdlime, went out with a bundle of cages on my back, so that I looked like Geta when he was returning from the harbor with Amphitryon's books. I caught at least two thrushes and at most six. And so I did all September. Then this pastime, pitiful and strange as it is, gave out, to my displeasure. And of what sort my life is, I shall tell you.
I get up in the morning with the sun and go into a grove I am having cut down, where I remain two hours to look over the work of the past day and kill some time with the cutters, who have always some bad-luck story ready, about either themselves or their neighbors. And as to this grove I could tell you a thousand fine things that have happened to me, in dealing with Frosino da Panzano and others who wanted some of this firewood. And Frosino especially sent for a number of cords without saying a thing to me, and on payment he wanted to keep back from me ten lire, which he says he should have had from me four years ago, when he beat me at cricca at Antonio Guicciardini's. I raised the devil, and was going to prosecute as a thief the waggoner who came for the wood, but Giovanni Machiavelli came between us and got us to agree. Batista Guicciardini, Filippo Ginori, Tommaso del Bene and some other citizens, when that north wind was blowing, each ordered a cord from me. I made promises to all and sent one to Tommaso, which at Florence changed to half a cord, because it was piled up again by himself, his wife, his servant, his children, so that he looked like Gabburra when on Thursday with all his servants he cudgels an ox. Hence, having seen for whom there was profit, I told the others I had no more wood, and all of them were angry about it, and especially Batista, who counts this along with his misfortunes at Prato.
Leaving the grove, I go to a spring, and thence to my aviary. I have a book in my pocket, either Dante or Petrarch, or one of the lesser poets, such as Tibullus, Ovid, and the like. I read of their tender passions and their loves, remember mine, enjoy myself a while in that sort of dreaming. Then I move along the road to the inn; I speak with those who pass, ask news of their villages, learn various things, and note the various tastes and different fancies of men. In the course of these things comes the hour for dinner, where with my family I eat such food as this poor farm of mine and my tiny property allow. Having eaten, I go back to the inn; there is the host, usually a butcher, a miller, two furnace tenders. With these I sink into vulgarity for the whole day, playing at cricca and at trich-trach, and then these games bring on a thousand disputes and countless insults with offensive words, and usually we are fighting over a penny, and nevertheless we are heard shouting as far as San Casciano. So, involved in these trifles, I keep my brain from growing mouldy, and satisfy the malice of this fate of mine, being glad to have her drive me along this road, to see if she will be ashamed of it.
On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.
And because Dante says it does not produce knowledge when we hear but do not remember, I have noted everything in their conversation which has profited me, and have composed a little work On Princedoms, where I go as deeply as I can into considerations on this subject, debating what a princedom is, of what kinds they are, how they are gained, how they are kept, why they are lost. And if ever you can find any of my fantasies pleasing, this one should not displease you; and by a prince, and especially by a new prince, it ought to be welcomed. Hence I am dedicating it to His Magnificence Giuliano. Filippo Casavecchia has seen it; he can give you some account in part of the thing in itself and of the discussions I have had with him, though I am still enlarging and revising it.
You wish, Magnificent Ambassador, that I leave this life and come to enjoy yours with you. I shall do it in any case, but what tempts me now are certain affairs that within six weeks I shall finish. What makes me doubtful is that the Soderini we know so well are in the city, whom I should be obliged, on coming there, to visit and talk with. I should fear that on my return I could not hope to dismount at my house but should dismount at the prison, because though this government has mighty foundations and great security, yet it is new and therefore suspicious, and there is no lack of wiseacres who, to make a figure, like Pagolo Bertini, would place others at the dinner table and leave the reckoning to me. I beg you to rid me of this fear, and then I shall come within the time mentioned to visit you in any case.
I have talked with Filippo about this little work of mine that I have spoken of, whether it is good to give it or not to give it; and if it is good to give it, whether it would be good to take it myself, or whether I should send it there. Not giving it would make me fear that at the least Giuliano will not read it and that this rascal Ardinghelli will get himself honor from this latest work of mine. The giving of it is forced on me by the necessity that drives me, because I am using up my money, and I cannot remain as I am a long time without becoming despised through poverty. In addition, there is my wish that our present Medici lords will make use of me, even if they begin by making me roll a stone; because then if I could not gain their favor, I should complain of myself; and through this thing, if it were read, they would see that for the fifteen years while I have been studying the art of the state, I have not slept or been playing; and well may anybody be glad to get the services of one who at the expense of others has become full of experience. And of my honesty there should be no doubt, because having always preserved my honesty, I shall hardly now learn to break it; and he who has been honest and good for forty-three years, as I have, cannot change his nature; and as a witness to my honesty and goodness I have my poverty.
I should like, then, to have you also write me what you think best on this matter, and I give you my regards. Be happy.
Niccolo Machiavelli, in Florence
A Short Dialogue on International Trade in Agricultural and Fishery Products
"Okay. One of the things that we are going to eat for lunch has travelled 9000 miles--almost halfway around the world--to land on our table. What is it?"
"Bananas!"
"Very good guess. But no. Bananas come from the Caribbean and Central America, and travel only 3000 miles or so to get here. It's the smoked salmon, from Tasmania, island off of the southeastern tip of Australia."
"I've heard that most animals native to Tasmania are endangered. Is that true?"
"BA-NA-NAS!"
"It's certainly true that large Tasmanian marsupials are under very heavy pressure from introduced Eurasian forms that fill the same niches..."
"BA-NA-NAS HAVE NO THUMBS!"
"But does anybody have an idea why I would buy smoked salmon from Tasmania--Royal Tasmanian brand?"
"So that you can torture your children with another boring lecture about international trade, the international division of labor, and the importance of human pwogwess through the mutual weduction of twade bawwiews?"
"Plausible, but not true in this case..."
"BANANAS STAND UP STRAIGHT!"
"Because they were cheap?"
"Yes, exactly, why were they cheap--half the price of Alaskan smoked salmon?"
"BANANAS HAVE NO THUMBS!"
"Either because you got a bargain, or because you don't know something about the quality of Tasmanian salmon that you really should know."
"Both excellent possibilities. Remember the man who was over for dinner last week? The one who asked you what you thought was the most common name of a city in the United States? He won the Nobel Prize in Economics for developing ways to think about your second possibility--that we're about to eat something that tastes really nasty. But I think the first possibility is more likely. Why is salmon from Australia a bargain right now?"
"BANANAS STAND UP STRAIGHT!"
"You tell me, Dad."
"Because Australians want to buy a huge number of imported goods right now, and their demand for U.S. dollars is high. Because their demand for U.S. dollars is high, they've pushed up the price of the U.S. dollar in terms of Australian dollars. That means that the Australian dollar right now is cheap--about 50 U.S. cents. And that means that things made in Australia--like Tasmanian smoked salmon--are cheap too."
"Well, we'll find out if it's really such a bargain very soon."
"BANANAS EXPLODE!" [General sustained laughter]
"It's too bad we've never been to visit Tasmania..."
"Well, right now a Tasmanian fish has come to visit you. But somehow that's not the same, is it?..."
David Hume Gives Adam Smith Some Bad News
David Hume gives Adam Smith the bad news about the reception of Smith's first book, the Theory of Moral Sentiments.
From DAVID HUME
Lisle Street, Leicester Fields
April 12, 1759Dear Smith,
I give you thanks for the agreeable present of your Theory [of Moral Sentiments]. Wedderburn and I made presents of our copie to such of our acquaintance as we thought good judges, and proper to spread the reputation of the book. I sent one to the Duke of Argyle, to Lord Lyttleton, Horace Walpole, Soames Jennyns, and Burke, an Irish gentleman, who wrote lately a very pretty treatise on the sublime. Millar desired my permission to send one in your name to Dr. Warburton.
I have delayed writing to you until I could tell you something of the success of the book, and could prognosticate with some probability whether it should be finally damned to oblivion, or should be registered in the temple of immortality. Tough it has been published only a few weeks, I think there appear already such strong symptoms, that I can almost venture to fortell its fate. It is, in short, this--
But I have been interrupted in my letter by a foolish impertinent visit of one who has lately come from Scotland. He tells me, that the Univerity of Glasgow intend to declare Rouet's office vacant upon his going abraod with Lord Hope. I question not but you will have our friend, Ferguson, in your eye, in case another project for procuring him a place in the University of Edinburgh should fail. Ferguson has very much polished and improved his treatise on refinement, and with some amendments it will make an admirable book, and discovers an elegant and singular genius.
The Epigoniad, I hope, will do; but it is sometimes uphill work. As I doubt not but you consult the reviews sometimes at present, you will see in the Critical Review a letter upon that poem; and I desire you to employ your conjectures n finding out the author. Let me see a sample of your skill in knowing hands by your guessing at the person.
I am afraid of Lord Kames's Law Tracts. A man might as well think of making a fine sauce by a mixture of wormwood and aloes as an agreeable composition by joining metaphysics and Scotch law. However the book, I believe, has merit; though few people will take the pains of dividng into it.
But to return to your book, and its success in this town, I must tell you--
A plague of interruptions! I ordered myself to be denied; and yet here is one that has broken in upon me again. He is a man of letters, and we have had a good deal of literary conversation. You told me that you were curious of literary anecdotes, and therefoare I shall inform you of a few that have come to my knowledge.
I believe I have mentioned to you already Helvetius's book De l'Esprit. It is worth your reading not for it philosophy, whic I do not highly value, but for its agreeable compostion. I had a letter from him a few days ago, wherein he tells me that my name was much oftener in the manuscript, but that the censor of books at Paris obliged him to strike it out.
Voltaire has lately published a small work called Candide, ou l'Optimisme. It is full of sprightliness an dimpiety, and is indeed a satire upon Providence, under the pretext of criticizing the Leibnizian system. I shall give you a detail of it--
"But what is all this to my book?" say you--
My Dear Mr. Smith, have patience: compose yourself to tranquillity: show yourself a philosopher in practice as well as profession: think on the emptiness and rashness and futility of the common judgments of men: how little they are regulated by reason in any subject, much more in philosophical subjects, which so far exceed the comprehension of the vulgar.
Non si quid improba Roma, elevet, accedas examenque improbum in illa, perpendas trutina, nec te quaesiveris extra.* A wise man's kingdom is his own breast: or, if he ever looks farther, it will only be to the judgment of a select few, who are free from prejudices, and capable of examining his work. Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude; and Phocion, you know, always suspected himself of some blunder when he was attended with the applauses of the populace.
Supposing, therefore, that you have duly prepared yourself for the worst by all these reflections; I proceed to tell you the melancholy news, that your book has been very unfortunate: for the public seem disposed to applaud it extremely.
It was looked for by the foolish people with some impatience; and the mob of literati are beginning already to be very loud in its praises. Three bishops called yesterday at Millar's shop in order to buy copies, and to ask questions about the author. The Bishop of Peterborough said he had passed the evening in a company where he heard it extolled above all books in the world.
You may conclude what opinion true philosopher will entertain of it, when these retainers to superstitition praise it so highly.
The Duke of Argyle is more decisive than he uses to be in its faour: I suppose he either considers it as an exotic, or thinks the author will be serviceable to him in the Glasgow elections. Lord Lyttleton says that Robertson and Smith and Bower are the glories of English literature. Oswald protets he does not know whether he has reaped more instruction or entertainment from it: but you may easily judge what reliance can be put on his judgment, who has been engaged all his life in public business and who never sees any faults in his freinds.
Millar exults and brags that two-thirds of the edition is already sold, and that he is now sure of success. You see what a son of the earth that is, to value books only by the profit they bring him. In that view, I believe it may prove a very good book.
Charles Townsend, who passes for the cleverest fellow in England, is so taken with the performance that he said to Oswald he would put the Duke of Buccleugh under the author's care, and would endeavor to make it worth his while to accept of that charge. As soon as I heard this, I called on him twice with a view of talking with him about the matter, and of convincing him of the propriety of sending that young nobleman to Glasgow: for I could not hope tht he could offer you any terms which would tempt you to renounce your professorship: but I missed him. Mr. Townsend passes for being a little uncertain in his resolutions: so perhaps you need not build much on this sally.
In recompense for so many mortifying things, which nothing but truth could have extorted from me, and which I could easily have multiplied to a greater number; I doubt not but you are so good a Christian as to return good for evil and to flatter my vanity; by telling me that all the godly in Scotland abuse me for my account of John Knox and the Reformation, etc.
I suppose you are glad to see my paper end, and that I am obliged to conclude with
Your humble servant,
David Hume
*"If foolish Rome underweighs anything, neither go up and correct the false tongue in the balance, nor seek anyone besides yourself." Persius, Satirarum Liber
From pages 33-36 of Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross, eds., The Correspondence of Adam Smith 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
Uh-oh. A Corrupted Database
Uh-oh. We have a corrupted database. I'm going to move new posts over to a new movable type installation while I figure out if there is anything I can do.
Meanwhile, however...
A Complete List of Posts Up Through February 9, 2003
What Alan Greenspan Will Say This Week--
The Worth of the History of Economic Thought/Letter from Machiavelli to Vettori--
Additional Information Department--
J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The Real Shopping-Cart Revolution," Wired (March).--
A Short Dialogue on International Trade in Agricultural and Fishery Products--
Excommunication and Hard Disk Space--
Bush's Anti-Alliance Politics--
The Problems of the Human Organism in Deep Space: Purring as the Solution--
BLANK--
David Hume Gives Adam Smith Some Bad News--
Adam Smith--
BLANK--
BLANK--
The Truly Excellent "In Passing"--
The January Employment Report--
In Which a Fired Ex-Cabinet Member Controls the White House From His Home in Pittsburgh--
Arnold Kling Tries to Calm Me Down--
Kevin Hassett Is Off Message--
Market Competition, Microsoft Style--
Fish--Barrel--Gun--
Hooray!--
Innumerate, But Still an International Treasure--
Daniel Davies's Shorter Stephen den Beste Project--
No, I'm Not Being Ironic: I Genuinely Do Not Understand--
BLANK--
Does It All Add Up?--
Andrei Shleifer on Sovereign Debt--
Transclusion: A Piece of the World Wide Web--
Outer Space: After the Space Shuttle--
BLANK--
Deficiencies of Modern Vocational Education--
BLANK--
BLANK--
BLANK--
Chris Bertram Is Unhappy with Robert Fisk--
Paul Krugman Bangs His Head Against the Wall--
The Return of Rosy Scenario--
Unclear on the Concept Department--
Why Are We Ruled by These Fools? Department--
Deficits and Interest Rates Once Again--
Huh?--
I Really Cannot Understand Why Anyone Would Do This--
Dynamic Scoring--
One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Puzzles, and Amusements, Number 12--
Alan Murray Bangs His Head Against the Wall--
Origins of Anti-Krugmanism--
February 4--
More Optimistic than I Am--
Anil Dash Presents: A Modest Declaration--
Why Are We Ruled by These Fools? Department--
BLANK--
BLANK--
Two Views of the American-European Conflict Over the Middle East--
NASA Technical Briefing on the Loss of the Columbia--
Jeffrey Kluger on the Loss of the Columbia--
Tonight's Nighttime Reading--
Doing Corporate Tax Integration the Right Way--
Why Don't We Have a Better Press Corps?--
Do as I Say, Not as I Do Department--
Fuzzy Math II--
Fuzzy Math--
Where Is the Beef Supposed to Be?--
Stephen Roach Becomes Even More Gloomy--
Business Week's Howard Gleckman Bangs His Head Against the Wall--
Don't Confuse the 1990s Boom with the 1990s Bubble!--
I See a Very Big Library in Our Future--
BLANK--
The Soft Patch--
Global Dispatches--
Any Text. Any Where. Any Time. (Any Volunteers?)--
Learn Something Else New Every Day--
BLANK--
Learn Something New Every Day...--
A Slashdotting...--
Tools for Thought--
When Infotech Attacks!!!!--
Memo to Self: Ingredient Substitution--
J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Any Text, Anywere, Anytime (Any Volunteers?)," Wired (February).--
Remember Last Year?--
Cognitive Dissonance--
The Economist Sets the Bar too Low--
Things Everybody Should Read--
It's Not a Stimulus Package--
Alan Murray on What the U.S. Economy Is Scared of--
Almost Surely a Winning Hand--
What Will Be on My Laptop's Hard Disk in 2010?--
An Alternative to "He Is Trampling the Unrighteous with Hooves of Iron"--
The View from 2023--
Economics 211 Economic History Seminar (Spring 2003)--
Spring 2003 Teaching and Office Hours--
Congressional Reaction to Dividend Tax Cut--
J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The Customizer Is Always Right," Wired (January).--
The World Outside the U.S. Will Have to Make Its Own Luck--
The Medium-Term Outlook for the World Economy: Five Questions That Need Answering--
Spring 2003: Economic History Reading Course--
America's Second Gilded Age--
The Ghosts of Economics Past--
Mark Kleiman's Tough Life--
The White House as Seen From Paris and Berlin--
Paging Ronald Coase...--
The Euro: One Size Fits None--
J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Economists Failed to Predict Shift as the Poor Got Richer," Wall Street Journal Europe (January 24).--
Enforcing the Sarbanes Reforms--
Mind Control Rays Department--
Larry Summers Proven Wrong!--
Why Bother to Quote Somebody Out-of-Context?--
Why We Need a Better Press Corps--
[Tweet!!] Intellectual Foul! Fifteen Yards!--
Do Budget Deficits Raise Interest Rates?--
No One Has Ever Washed a Rented Car--
Economics 210a, Introduction to Economic History, Spring 2003--
Economics 210a, Spring 2003, Paper Guidelines--
Economics 210a, Spring 2003, Syllabus--
Economics 210a, Spring 2003, Background and Course Requirements--
Economics 236, Dynamic Economics, Spring 2003--
New Year's Resolutions--
A (Very Short) Guide for the Perplexed--
Clay Shirky on the Big Flip--
What Should We Call the Bush Proposal?--
Big House Pet Is Watching You!!--
Rick Hertzberg Bangs His Head Against the Wall--
Maxims to Live by II--
The Need for Talking Points--
The Customizer Is Always Right--
Letter from Birmingham Jail--
More Bad Business-Cycle News--
Notes: Manuel Amador--
Andrew Sullivan Wonders--
Glenn Hubbard--
Serious TiVo Head--
Maxims to Live by--
The Catholic Archdiocese of Boston Invents a New Sin--
Topic Drift in Comments--
Why Are We Ruled by These Cretins? Department--
Another Platonic Dialogue on Eldred v. Ashcroft--
Gale and Orszag Provide an Informed View--
Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach in the Financial Times--
We Know Why Economists Don't Like the Administration's Non-Stimulus Proposal--
Print to PDF--
Field Exam in Economic History, Winter 2003, U.C. Berkeley--
Field Exam in Macroeconomics, Winter 2003, U.C. Berkeley--
Why Apple Just Might Survive After All--
Demand Side Economies of Scale--
Are We Still in Recession?--
Dr. Gloom--
A Lightbulb Goes On--
Drunkard's Policy--
Life in the Subjunctive Mood--
Penguin Madness!--
Al Sharpton--
Monetary and Fiscal Policy Reading Course--
Garbage Collection as Gift Exchange--
Turn Darwin's Radio to the "Stick Insect" Channel--
Optimism--
What If We Thought About What Would Be Good For the Country?--
David Wessel Writes About Hoyt Bleakley's Dissertation--
Getting Better and Better--
Optimism on Lula in Brazil--
Pathology?--
Let's Get Snarky! Part II--
Let's Get Snarky! Part I--
Talmudic Discourse (in a Good Sense, That Is)--
Dynamic Scoring--
Consequences of Linkrot--
Division of Labor Department--
When User Interfaces Attack--
Interesting Math Calculations Header Pages--
Joe Stiglitz is Losing His Argument--
One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations and Puzzles, Number 11--
One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations and Puzzles, Number 10--
One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 9--
One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 8:--
One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 7--
Steve Cecchetti on Frameworks for Fiscal Policy--
What Elephants Can Remember--
Alan Auerbach on Investment--
The Dangers of Policy-by-Speechwriter--
Steven Weber on Foreign Policy--
The Future of Economics--
One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 6--
Somehow, I'm Not Surprised--
The Unstimulus Plan--
Two Defenses of Glenn Hubbard--
Department of Vocabulary--
Libertarians Confuse Me--
Another Must-Read Weblog--
The Bush Tax Cut: Distributional Issues--
Bad Employment News--
Distribution Table: Bush Tax Proposal--
Republicans Return to Form--
In Defense of the Fire Department--
Argentina's Veranito--
Three Cheers for London Mayor Ken Livingstone--
It's Not a Dividend Exemption, It's a Dividends-Plus-Retained-Earnings Exemption--
Progress on the Corporate Control Front--
David Greenlaw on the Bush Proposal--
The Useful G7 Daily Briefing--
Unclear on the Concept Department--
Translations from the Adolescentese--
After Action Report: KQED Forum 1/8/2003--
Bush at War, Take II--
Investment Banks Settle Conflict-of-Interest Charges--
Talking Points for KQED Forum 1/8/2003 9:00 AM PST--
The G7 Group on the Unstimulus Package--
Daniel Davies Gives Half a Cheer for the Bush Unstimulus Package--
The Conservative Weekly Standard Calls Bush Plan "A Catastrophe in the Making"--
It's Time for Glenn Hubbard to Quit as CEA Chair--
Just One Minute Is Puzzled...--
Incidence of the Dividend Tax Cut--
The Economist Looks at the Unstimulating Stimulus Package--
DEMENTED TURKEYS!!!!--
Jonathan Chait Bangs His Head Against the Wall--
Dangerous Technologies--
Cognitive Biases--
The Non-Work Side of the American Economic Association's Annual Meeting--
Brazil's Situation...--
Unqualified Offerings Bangs Its Head Against the Wall--
Joshua Micah Marshall Bangs His Head Against the Wall--
Only War Can Keep Saddam Hussein From Using His Weapons!--
AEA Notes: Non-Attendees--
The End of the First Era of Globalization--
Forecast of 3.4% Growth for 2003--
Chris Bertram Quotes George Orwell--
The Field Exam in Demography--
Time For a Fiscal Stimulus Package?--
The Field Exam in History--
The Field Exam in Macroeconomics--
Free Trade in the Americas?--
Reading Bush at War--
Ash Nazg Durbatuluk Department --
And They Say the FAA Has No Sense of Humor--
The Great Ski Boot Pain Conspiracy--
AEA Sessions--
Long Live the BBC!--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "The Seasonal Cycle of the Economy," Nightly Business Report (December 30) [TV]. --
The Seasonal Pattern of Economic Activity--
Yet More Bad Business-Cycle News--
Why Not Live in Truth?--
The World Continues to Go to Hell in a Handbasket--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "The Slow Countries: US Productivity Keeps Growing--Right Through the Bust. So What?s Wrong With Europe?" Wired (December).--
The Slow Countries: US productivity keeps growing - right through the bust. So what's wrong with Europe?--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "The Ghosts of Economics Past," Project Syndicate (December).--
Samuel Pepys Diary as a Weblog--
Potential Columns--
Pay Teachers More Money--
Fifteenth-Century Ambassadors--
Bad News About Aggregate Demand--
Jean Dreze on India's Food Distribution Program--
Score: Daniel Davies, 393; Ronald Coase, 0--
Get Your Vocabulary Straight!--
Imminent Death of the Book, Year CVII--
Alan Greenspan's Most Recent Thoughts on Monetary Policy--
Dog Bites Mayberry Machiavellis: Krugman Criticizes Bush Economic Policy--
More Breathtaking Dishonesty From the White House--
A Very Good Day for the Country--
From the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire--
David Wessel Praises Productivity Growth--
The Complete Absence of a Policy Apparatus...--
The Republican "Base"--
A Question That Has No Good Answer--
Richard Nixon's Greatest Treason--
From Skippy the Bush Kangaroo--
Surprise News: Budget Deficits Slow Growth--
Fund the SEC!--
Why Does the New York Times Publish This Dreck?--
No Comment Department--
More Worries About Color--
Worries About the Fundamentals of Physics--
One Reason I'm Boycotting the Products Adobe Systems Sells--
Songs for Trent Lott--
More Solid Research from the American Enterprise Institute--
Profiles in Presidential Courage, Number 376--
Sigh...--
A Failure of Social Engineering--
One Hundred Interesting Math Calculations--
One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 5--
Sometimes I Think There Is Something Very Wrong with Those of Us Who Live in California--
Sometimes My Stupidity and Ignorance Amazes Even Me--
Why I Don't Trust William Safire at All--
John Williamson Defends His Version of the Washington Consensus--
Paging Mr. Democritus, Paging Mr. Democritus...--
Stanley Crouch Bangs His Head Against the Wall--
(One Piece of) The *Real* Headline News--
Why Would the Republicans Choose Trent Lott to Lead Them?--
One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 4--
Peggy Noonan Defends Trent Lott by Attacking Republicans in General...--
Robin Hanson on the "Great Filter"--
Let's Spend the Night/In a Beaver Lodge--
Yes, Virginia, There Is Racial Discrimination in America--
The Economist Praises Bush's Friday Morning Massacre of His Economic Policy Team--
What Goes Around, Comes Around--
One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 3--
More Worth Noting From the Web--
Risks of a Double-Dip Recession?--
One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 2--
The Next Stage of Net Applications--
Learning by Using--
Should Friedman and Snow Accept Their Job Offers?--
Tom Tomorrow Feasts on the Liver of the Washington Times--
The Economist Is Not Happy with Bush Personnel Changes--
Emily Yoffe Slams the New York Times's Coverage of the Boudin Family--
The Washington Post Goes Over the Top--
One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 1--
How Rich Was Mr. Darcy?--
In the Bush Administration, Loyalty Is a One-Way Street Only--
Good News on the Corporate Surveilliance Front--
Theories of the Industrial Revolution--
Eurasia's Inner Steppe Frontier--
What's Going on in the Next Microsoft Trial?--
Why I Could Not Be a Republican, Part III--
Why I Could Not Be a Republican, Part II--
Worth Noting from the Web--
Bad Employment News--
Paul O'Neill Resigns; Paul Krugman Congratulates Himself--
Joel Mokyr Has Written The Gifts of Athena--
The Economist Tries to Figure Out Why the ECB Is So Lousy--
The ECB Cuts Interest Rates--
Notes for Econ 210a Spring 2003--
Sleep Paralysis--
Six Questions About Productivity Growth--
Doug Besharov on Welfare Reform--
The Ninety-Five Theses--
Some Good News on the 911-Civil Liberties Front--
The Medieval Morality Play Continues...--
William Powers Is Clueless About Google--
Yet More Good Productivity News--
Why I Could Not Be a Republican--
Mervyn King to Head Bank of England--
Andrew Sullivan on John DiIulio--
The Catalan Oath of Allegiance--
Howard Gleckman Fears the Destabilization of U.S. Government Finances--
Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy.--
Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne.--
Economist Pocket World in Figures.--
John Keegan, The Face of Battle.--
Benjamin Graham et al., The Interpretation of Financial Statements.--
Benjamin Graham et al., Security Analysis.--
Robert Woodward, The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House.--
Robert Woodward, Maestro.--
Robert Woodward, Bush at War.--
Merton Miller, Merton Miller on Derivatives.--
European Monetary Policy--
Ian Buruma on the Miss World Massacre--
The Future of the Entertainment Industries--
The Bush Administration Policy Process--
High Tech Is Getting Really Cheap--
Roncesvalles--
Books to Read--
Soccer Dad--
The Zimbabwean Model of Development--
What Is Wrong with NAFTA--
Esquire Reports Bush White House Unconcerned with Policy Substance--
2002-12-01 Notes--
2002-12-01: Vernon Smith's Work--
Mickey Kaus Flunks the Turing Test--
Why Do We Do Such a Bad Job at Getting Cheap Drugs to Poor Countries?--
Wow! Isn't "Political Correctness" Horrible?--
In France, They Do Things with More Savoire-Faire--
Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Ashcroft--
Growing Pains of the Information Age--
When Filtering Algorithms Attack!--
Salman Rushdie Wishes for an Aggressive, Confident, Tolerant Islamic Movement--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "America's Second Gilded Age," Project Syndicate (November).--
More Incisive Analysis From the Economic Policy Institute!--
Kudos for Paul Krugman--
Daniel J. Mitchell Is an Idiot--
Arnold Kling Writes About Convenience--
Expanding the Social Insurance State--
Paul Krugman Worries About the Growing Respectability of Inherited Status--
Double Counting Retained Earnings--Glassman and Hassett--
2002-11-23: Rough Notes on Nick Crafts...--
G7Group's View on the Implications of the Recent U.S. Election--
Tastes Like Dead, Rotted Hyena--
Procrastinate NOW!--
The Current World Short-Run Economic Outlook--
Why Doesn't the Administration Have an Economic Policy?--
An Interesting Fact About Horsepower--
Your Love of the Halfling's Leaf Has Clouded Your Mind...--
Andrew Sullivan Has Advice for George W. Bush--
George Lucas Is Scared of Video Piracy--
Dealing with Osama Bin Laden--
A Clever Dog...--
Notes--
The Economic News From Japan Gets Worse and Worse--
The War Process--
No Comment at All Department--
Things That Make You Go, "Hmmm...."--
Wile E. Coyote Explains Bush Administration Fiscal Policy--
More Criticism of Relatively High European Interest Rates--
The Leonids Meteor Shower--
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets--
Well-Done Summary of What the Federal Reserve Is Doing--
To Maintain Ecclesiastical Discipline...--
How Far Does the Apple Fall From the Tree?--
U.S. vs. European Productivity--
Economics Nobel Prize--Vernon Smith--
More From the Right-Wing Slime Machine--
NSF Deadlines--
Coyote--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "The U.S. Is Lucky in Its Central Bank," Nightly Business Report (November 25) [TV].--
The U.S. Is Lucky in Its Central Bank--
Wiki--
A Spreadsheet for Rapid Solow Growth Model Calculations--
The Economist on the Microsoft Trial--
The Economist Is Gloomy on Prospects for Freer Trade--
Royal Scandals Aren't What They Used to Be--
The Economist Worries About Deflation--
2002-11-12: Desiree Schann Oral Exam Prep--
How to Account for Options--
Hearty, Good-Humored, Likes to Crumble the Earth on His Farm Between His Fingers--
O Beautiful for Extremely Large Economic Gaps--
The Curious Incident of the ECB in the Daytime--
Why Did Harvey Pitt Crash and Burn at the SEC?--
A Five-Point Economic Plan--
Deteriorata--
Rain--
Whingeing and Snivelling From a Democrat--
General Purpose Technologies--
The Federal Reserve Cuts Interest Rates--
After the Fall of Harvey Pitt: We Are Still in Bigger Trouble Than We Realize--
The Poor Man Rides Elephants into the Debate Room--
VOTE!!!!--
Dahlia Lithwick on the Supreme Court--
Notes: 2002-11-04--
Stray Note--
Marxism--
NBER Procedures--
VOTE!! VOTE!! VOTE!!--
Vote for Erskine Bowles--
The Ever-Mendacious Wall Street Journal Editorial Page--
Not Your Grandmother's 11 1/2 Inch Fashion Doll--
Dysfunctional Monopoly Maintenance--
Just and Unjust Wars--
The Register's Take on the Microsoft Decision--
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men--
Orbital Resonance--
Pharmaceutical Advertising: One Data Point--
Investment in Computers and Peripherals Once Again--
Eric Alterman in Love...--
A Labor Market Data Puzzle--
Wrose Than Hilter--
2002-11-01: Economic History Lunch Notes--
The Ever-Mendacious Wall Street Journal Editorial Page--
I'm Relieved That Colin Powell Seems to Be in Charge--
Intel Looks at the Future--
The Rittenhouse Review Is on the Edge--
Googlism.com--
A Meta-419 Scam--
Third Quarter Productivity Growth--
Third Quarter Economic Growth--
Why Are We Ruled by These Idiots?--
Notes: 2002-10-30: Harken--
A Couple of Figures That Will Need to Have Another Data Point Added to Them Tomorrow--
Elasticities of Demand for High-Tech Goods--
Asymmetries Which Do Not Appear to Be Inherent in the Phenomena--
A Nation of Wild Optimists--
Optimism with Respect to the Technology, Pessimism with Respect to Its Profitability--
Where Is Moore's Law for Software?, or, The Mythical Man-Month Strikes Back--
Fewer Jobs, More Productivity--
Worse than Weasel-Like Moral Evasion--
Think of It as Evolution in Action--
Why Are We Ruled by These People?--
AOL-Time-Warner and the Coase Theorem--
Why Don't These People Use Google?--
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board Lumbers Down the Runway--
Will the Fed Cut Interest Rates?--
Remarkable Goings-On at the SEC...--
Why Does the New York Times Publish Such Dreck?--
Cubic Zirconia and Investment-Grade Bonds Are Forever--
Liquidity Preference--
Why Does the New York Times publish this dreck?--
Incomes Relative to Poverty Line--
The Powerpoint Anthology of Literature--
Intelligence Test--
Robert Mundell's Top Ten Benefits From Winning the Nobel Prize--
Will Youmans Tries to Figure Out Why He Is Calling For U.S. Divestment From Israel But Not Egypt or Saudi--
2002-10-27: Notes--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Neoliberalism's Argentina Failure," Project Syndicate (October).--
Those That From a Long Way Off Look Like Flies--
Are You a Good Plutocrat, or a Bad Plutocrat?--
Why Choose a Non-Accountant to Head an Accounting Oversight Board?--
The ECB Counterattacks--
More Bad Business Cycle News--
What Is "Security"?--
Why Does the New York Times Publish This Dreck?--
Paul Krugman Is on the Edge...--
Where Are the Robots?--
A Poison-Pen Attack on Paul Krugman--
More Optimism--
There's Something I Don't Understand--
Macroeconomic Implications of Moore's Law--
Survival of the Fittest (Mediawise, That Is)--
2002-10-23: People to Call--
Fear of Worldcom--
Is the Audio Entertainment Industry in Real Trouble?--
Telephone-Based Service-Sector Work Becomes Tradeable--
Ahem!--
Psychology and Macroeconomics Reading List: Inflation--
Robot Vacuum Cleaners Scare Cats--
Pie Iesu domine/Dona eis requiem--
A Tough Pre-Coffee Intellectual Workout--
The Luminiferous Aether, or, A Tough Pre-Coffee Intellectual Workout--
Analogies--
Wombats of Mass Destruction--
Improvements in Baseball--
Toothless SEC?--
Time to Buy Equities?--
Joshua Micah Marshall Is Overcome with Laughter--
Telecoms Should Fail Fast--
Alan Murray on Accounting Oversight--
What I Did in Phoenix--
Huh?--
Move Along--Just the Market Economy Doing Its Job--
Amos Tversky--
Stability and Growth--
First Piece of Good News From the Middle East in Months...--
Economic History Field Exam Reading List: Winter 2003--
For Those Who Are Nostalgic for Punchcards and Need to Procrastinate...--
Clarity on the Middle East--
Paul Krugman Fears Al Qaeda Is Smarter Than the Bush Administration--
Conspicuous Consumption --
Consequences of Income Distribution--
2002-10-20: Romers Seminar:--
Open Spectrum--
The SEC Budget--
The Road to Hell--
Apple Computer's Take on Intellectual Property--
Handout: The CPI and the Inflation Outlook--
The Poor Man Goes Over the Edge--
More on the Economics Nobel Prize--
National Economic Trends--
Nobel Prizes in Economics--
Krugman's Data Sources--
Morgan Stanley's Steve Roach Gets Even Gloomier--
Family Values--
First 10,000 Page View Day--
ABC's Political News Summary Thinks Paul Krugman Is Saying Something Important--
Prison Literacy Programs--
The (Possible and Feared) Big Chill--
Zombie Banks, Zombie Firms, and Now Zombie Traders--
Huh?--
Expectations of Future Short-Term Interest Rates--
Not "Privatization," But "Choice"--
Not So Free Pants, But at Least They Fit--
The Economist Is Disgusted--
Another Hobsbawm Review--
Bob Solow's Views on Pretty Much Everything--
What Is the Difference Between Far Left and Far Right?--
International Relations Heavy Hitters Against an Attack on Iraq--
Keynes's Toast to Economists--
Managing the World Economy--
Chickenhawk Down--
I Cannot Stand It--
Gnomic Utterance (Joke)--
Financial Systems and Growth Prospects in Asia--
FRBSF Conference, Financial Issues in the Pacific Basin Region (September 26-27, 2002).--
The IMF's Current Take on Argentina--
What Eight Words Do You Say to the President?--
If You Think the NASDAQ's Decline Is Large...--
Google Expands--
More Sleazy New York Times-Bashing From Slate--
The IMF Gets Less Optimistic--
The WSJ's Take on the Current Attitude of the Fed--
FOR GOD'S SAKE, PEOPLE, USE GOOGLE!!!--
Talking Points for BBC "Today" Segment on the Stock Market--
Joshua Micah Marshall Worries...--
The Census Bureau Reports the Effect of the Recession on American Incomes and Poverty Levels--
Iraq's Oil Exports--
FOMC Meeting Leaves Interest Rates Unchanged--
Halliburton Confiscates Part of Workers' Pensions--
This Morning's Business Cycle Indicator: Consumer Confidence--
Administrative Law Judge Says El Paso Withheld Capacity--
And Now For Something Completely Different...--
Let Me Apologize...--
Free Higher Education--
Steven Roach in the New York Times--
At Least We in America Got a Lot of Fiber-Optic Cables Out of This...--
More Business-Cycle Pessimism: Leading Indicators--
Thomas Friedman Praises Globalization--
The Roaring Nineties--
Slowed Investment--
The Financial Times Is Pessimistic on the U.S. Recovery--
To Make Us Love Our Country--
Why No Industrial Revolution in Ancient Greece?--
Yet Another Casual Trashing...--
Gary Shapiro of the CEA on Downloading--
Would Anyone Have Noticed Glenn Loury?--
Saracen Olives--
Alternative Minimum Tax--
AOL and MSN Move Into Broadband--
It's 1984 Again!--
Fedwatching--
Metrics--
Not a Pretty Sight--
Glenn Reynolds Finds an Ideological Hack--
The University of Illinois at Chicago's Course on Enron--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "The New German Problem," Project Syndicate (October).--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Change: Nobody Knows Anything," Wired 10:11 (November).--
Army Secretary Tom White--
Jagdish Bhagwati on Drug Prices and Exports--
More Bad News About How the Bush Administration Works--
Bad News About the U.S. Recovery--
Arnold Kling Updates Jim Tobin--
Medley -- Iraq -- 2002/09/13--
Hasn't He Ever Been to Gettysburg?--
Changes 10.11: Nobody Knows Anything--
Drug (Pharmaceutical) Money--
Alan Blinder, "The Quiet Revolution: Central Banking Goes Modern"--
Germany's Dilemma--
Deregulation in the California Electricity Market--
Handout--Employment Is a Lagging Indicator--
Michael Berube on America's Loony Left--
Web Connections--
Michel Camdessus Is Not a Happy Camper...--
Greenspan 5, DeLong 2--
Orientalism--
Daniel Gross, Meet Daniel Gross--
Handout--the Current Economic Situation in the U.S.--
Paul Krugman on the "Economic Rationale" for War Against Iraq--
Jeffrey Frankel on U.S. Economic Policy--
Decoherence--
No Comment Department--
More People Worry About Deflation--
But It's Not Fair Just to Pick on the Right--
Lost in the Gamma Quadrant--
Ken Rogoff on the IMF--
Acts of Remembrance--
Who Benefits Most from the High-Tech Revolution?--
New York City--
Economic Consequences of 911--
Reading Mike Ford--
Why We Probably Aren't Living Inside a Simulation--
August 2002 Economic Indicators--
Larry Summers at 911 Memorial--
Florida Election--
Eleven-Score and Six--
Strangeness-Squared--
No!!!!!!--
Alan Murray on IPO Underpricing--
A Platonic Dialogue on Eldred v. Ashcroft--
Why So Many Things Went Right with the Internet--
Stephen Roach on "The Great Failure of Central Banking"--
Cory Doctorow on DRM-in-Practice--
Six Degrees of Paul Krugman--
Bemusement and Relativity--
Ball and Mankiw on the "Natural Rate" of Unemployment--
Coverage of Mugabe--
Japan's Recession--
Death Knights!--
Traffic Engineer Sadism--
Blaming the Victim--
Think Analytically!--
Figures of Speech--
High-Tech Investment--
American Labor Productivity Growth Trends--
The Economist Joins the Pile on Alan Greenspan--
BLS August Report--
A Correction From John Quiggin--
Who Controls the Past Controls the Future. Who Controls the Present Controls the Past--
Hearts and Minds--
Lord of the Rings--
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out--
The Cyclically-Adjusted Deficit--
Messrs. Lorentz and FitzGerald--
How Stands the Federal Republic of Germany?--
Globalization Will Continue--
Failure of the Suspension of Disbelief--
More From Civilization: Democracy Is Way Too Hard!--
Really Scary--
The Trackback List Keeps Growing--
Europe's Economic Policy Dilemmas--
In the Shadow of the Grand Tetons--
Fareed Zakaria Thinks the Islamic Fundamentalist Moment Has Passed--
The Post-Canine Condition--
Ari Fleischer: Chocolate Is Vanilla--
The Care and Feeding of Redwoods--
Mozambique's Cashew Exports--
Science Labs--
Consequences of European Monetary Union--
So Where Did the Volume Go?--
The New German Problem--
What the Founders Envisioned--
The Economist on the WTO--
More Thoughts on Technology and the Division of Labor--
Paul Krugman on the Fiscal Outlook--
Greenspan Defends His Policy Toward the Late Stock Market Bubble--
A Reader's Guide to the CBO--
Bush to Economists: Don't Worry, We'll Make Sure Our Proposals Don't Pass--
Living in Somebody Else's House--
European Economic History Reading Course: Fall 2002: Second Draft Syllabus--
A Cautionary Tale--
Defending the Economy by Attacking Asset Prices?--
Everyone Should Read the Quran--
The Wall Street Journal on the Budget Outlook--
How Do You Find the Relevant Weblog?--
Updated CBO Outlook--
Skepticism Toward the Skeptical Environmentalist--
Max Sawicky vs. the Hax and Spinmasters of the Eisenhower Building--
2002-08-26: Notes on Corporate Reform--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Go to College!" Nightly Business Report (August 26) [TV].--
The Japanese Economy Is in Worse Shape Than I Had Thought--
Bin Laden's Funding Sources--
Weight Training for Fiscal Policy Analysts--
No Comment...--
Our President Stumps for Wossisname, the Republican Candidate for Governor of California--
Louis Uchitelle of the New York Times Also Worries About Deflation--
Handout - Recent Movements in GDP - Chapter I - Introduction--
Steel Tariff Struggles Continue--
Stockmarkets: The Economist Remains Pessimistic--
Google Bombs--
A Debt Incurred...--
Fall 2002 Teaching and Office Hours--
Max Sawicky Has Been Duped!--
A Riddle Inside a Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma...--
George Kennan: Policy Planning Study 23--
More Blue Blood (and Green, and Violet, and Red)--
Fundamentalism and Civilization--
We're Supposed to Be the Good Guys--
Treasury Department Staff Losses--
How to Run an Auction--
The Fruit Detective--
With the Nine-Year-Old in the Grocery Store--
Hanging Ten in Choppy Waves...--
European Monetary Policy--
The Greening of the Republicans--
Glenn Hubbard Keeps Pitching--
Ordinary Americans, Bush Administration Style--
A Historical Document--
A Short Excursion Into Political Philosophy--
Raptors (and Others) of Summer--
Why We Shouldn't Assume That Discretionary Spending Will Stay Constant--
Go To College!--
The Bush Tax Cut and the Long-Run Deficit--
More on Rhinoceroses--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "America's Date with Deflation," Financial Times (London: August 21).--
Lance Knobel Links to a Map of Corporate Scandals--
Thomas Frank on the "Rah-Rah Boys"--
An Appeal to Avram Grumer to Maintain Standards--
America's Date with Deflation?--
Time to Subscribe to the Financial Times--
Kieran Healy on Brink Lindsey--
Krugman on Bush "Populism"--
Falling Forecasts of Short-Run Growth--
110 Stories--
Strange News From the Federal Reserve--
A Single European Monetary Standard? Forward to 1913!--
Boosting the Signal-to-Noise Ratio on the Internet--
2002-08-18: A Few Stray Notes on Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Empire--
Paul Krugman Sounds Nervous--
Yep, He Has a Two-Year-Old--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "America's Recession: The Risk of a Double Dip," Project Syndicate (August).--
America's Recession: The Risk of a Double-Dip--
Against the New Enclosure Movement--
Curing German Unemployment--
Joshua Micah Marshall Thinks the *Entire* Bush Administration Is Less Than Competent--
Cracked Feet!--
Recolonization--
Daniel Davies--A New Weblog...--
No Comment Department--
How Large Is the Output Gap?--
Making Book--
Determinants of Subjective Well-Being--
Trying to Calculate Expected Inflation--
Green Consumption--
Look What Crawled Out From Under the Rock...--
Sated?--
Identify Things Before Eating Them--
The Course of the Recession--
More Questions, This Time From the Nine-Year-Old--
"Language" Gene--
I Am Envious Again--
Spiderman: Intellectual Property--
Brent Scowcroft Comes Out Against Attacking Iraq--
Lots to Read Here...--
...Shall Not Perish From the Earth--
At Least Some Berkeley Boyfriends Are of Alarmingly Low Quality--
A Tale of Graduate School Burnout--
Did Anything Noteworthy Happen at Runnymede?--
Making Life Difficult--
One of the Ultimate Questions...--
Cats and Dogs Almost Living Together--
Price of Grapefruit--
Communications Gap--
Bob Frankston Thinks the Economist Is Wrong--
Koba and Adolf the Dread--
A Good Reason to Be a Democrat--
Blue Blood--
Resistance Is Futile--
Eldred v. Ashcroft: Could Congress Make Copyright Perpetual and Absolute If It Wanted to?--
Truly Weird--
Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed"--
How Far Can the Division of Labor Expand?--
Monetary Policy in Flux--
Chris Bertram Likes Brink Lindsey's Book--
I'm Envious--
A Little Bit of Social Insurance in the Policy Mix--
More Slime From the Right...--
What Are the Lessons From Japan's Current Crisis?--
I Don't Know Anything About the Brazilian Economy--
I Can't Stand It--
Open Foot, Insert Mouth--
Lunch with Arabist Bernard Lewis--
New Data Confirm Amazingly Strong Productivity Trend--
Dick Armey Prepares to Meet His (Political) Maker--
No Interest Rate Cut Next Week--
The German Economy Remains Stuck--
More Evidence That Mickey Kaus Has Joined the Neoconservatives--
The "Liberal" New York Times?--
EPI's Jobs Picture--
One Sign of Big Trouble in Post-911 Law Enforcement--
Paul Krugman Gets Angry--
Estimates of the Economic Costs of the Corporate Governance Crisis--
We Need to Support Democratization in the Middle East--
Really Good Movies--
Five Nines Instead of Nine Fives--
Katherine Harris in the News--
Grapefruit Juice--
Brink Lindsey on Trade Promotion Authority--
Jim Cooper Is Good People--
I Can't Stand It...--
The Republican Party Badly Needs a Better Class of Candidates--
Tom Tomorrow's Quote of the Day--
It's a Party--
Live Bait Vending Machines--
Dow 36000 Once Again--
Time to Cut Interest Rates Further?--
Nice Things to See on and Above the Ocean--
O'Hare Airport--
Caffeine--
Why Senators (and Others) Have Lost Confidence in OMB Director Mitch Daniels--
Steve Case Is Really Smart--
Tom Friedman on the Importance of a Good Referee For the Market Economy--
Paul Krugman Defends Robert Rubin--
Five Wall Street Journal Reporters Look at Accounting Reform--
Steve Lohr on How Low IT Prices Encourage Adoption--
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill--
Twelve-Year-Old Humor--
Gresham's Law of Policy Debate--
Rudi Dornbusch Is Dead at 60--
Anne Krueger's Take on Argentina--
The Daughter-in-Law Who Doesn't Talk Back--
Mark-My-Beliefs-to-Market Time--
Ancient History: The Deficits of the 1980s--
Larry Lindsey Endorses Strategic Trade Policy--
Who Is "I"?--
How Much Leverage Does Bush Have on Capitol Hill?--
Tom Maguire Briefly But Effectively Deconstructs Paul O'Neill--
Treasury Secretary O'Neill Defends the Steel Tariff--
Another Reason I'm Glad I'm Not a Republican--
Details of Financial Reform--
A 911 Joke--
Senator Sarbanes Talks About What Is in His Bill--
Down and Out in the United States?--
The Economist Calls For Democratic Congressional Majorities This November--
Warren Buffett on Options Accounting and the Senate--
Paul Krugman Separates the Weblogging Sheep From the Rhinoceroses--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Down and Out in the United States?" Project Syndicate (July 24).--
Strange Branding Phenomena: Ghostwriting--
Vulgar Monetarism--
Boomtime in Europe--
Fallout From Fraud Investigations: Freezing Restructuring--
The National Review Is Also Off in the Gamma Quadrant--
The American Economy: In the Balance--
No Comment--
Nick Denton on Comments--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Boomtime for Europe?," Financial Times (London: July 23).--
George Bush Predicts P/E Ratios Will Rise. Megan McArdle Disagrees--
Paul Krugman Tells Bush What To Do--
Alan Murray Worries About Accounting for Intellectual Property...--
The Anti-Globalization Movement Seeks Another Victory...--
Where Is the Civil Liberties Left?--
The Economist Joins the Chorus: Options Make Executives Long Volatility--
Simon Tisdall Said What?--
Financial Times: Bush 'Warned in Advance' of Harken Problems--
Business Week's Washington Watch--
Britain in 1902 and the U.S. in 2002--
Stuck in the Past--
Michael Mandel Reminds Us How Much of the Benefits of the Boom Remain--
Workers' Retirement Accounts Should Be Diversified--
Macroeconomic Vulnerabilities in the Twenty-First Century Economy: A Preliminary Taxonomy--
The Troubles of Harvey Pitt--
Stuck in the Past--
Brink Lindsey Says: The Human Race Has Been Dealt a Winning (and Invisible) Hand--
Andrew Sullivan Attacks CDC For No Reason--
Mirror of Wildernesses--
The FT's Peter Martin Talks About the Increasing Power of Commercial Banks--
So Optimistic I Think the Glass Is Half-Full--Even When There's No Glass at All!--
Sustaining American Economic Growth: Education as the Highest Priority--
Emmanuel Saez Has Evidence That Supply-Side Effects Are Not Large--
Marriage and the Country--
More Thoughts on Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents--
Why the Decline in Health Insurance Coverage?--
Before Paul Krugman Leaves for His Vacation...--
The Economist Looks at the Bear Market of the 2000s--
Another Forecast of a "Jobless Recovery"--
Everything You Feared About Interns--
The Ten Copyright Crimes of Tomorrow--
Unemployment Continues to Creep Upward--
MIT Thinks About How to Build the Universal Library--
Are There Really Worse Things for the Congo Than Mobutu Sese Seko?--
Variants of the Game of Chess--
A Supermarket Epiphany--
Teresa Nielsen Hayden Reminds Us of Some of the Classic Websites--
Caesar's Commentaries--
The Head of the Financial Accounting Standards Board--
Thirteen Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Cuba Remains Reactionary--
An Historical Document--
Computer-Telephone Convergence--
A Matter of Economics--
Senator John Edwards--
I Wish I Could Write Like This--
Google Doesn't Worry About Stickiness--
The Boom in IT Investment--
The Accumulation Century, the Education Century, and What Comes Next...?--
The Upward Shift in Gross Investment in America--
The Two Decade-Long Fall in America's Private Savings Rate--
How Did WorldCom Get Away With It For Even an Instant?--
Bush as a Corporate Director--
Gregg Easterbrook on CEO Overpayment--
Ah. I Had Forgotten Some of These--
IMF Chief Economist Ken Rogoff Unloads Both Barrels in the Direction of Joe Stiglitz--
Our Creeping Suspension of Habeas Corpus--
Still the Frontier of Research into Real-World Bureaucracies--
The Economist Applauds the Recommendations of the German Unemployment Insurance Reform Commission--
California Real Estate Prices--
The Great "Trifecta" Political Mystery Solved--
The Current Fiscal Outlook--
Enron: A Book to Add to the To-Be-Read Pile--
Movie Trailers--
Alan Auerbach Says the Bush Tax Cut Looks Like a Loser for Economic Growth--
A Trillionfold Fall in the Price of Computation--
Older Files--
Micro Climates--
Forecasts for Continued Slow Expansion--
Older Economists' Opinions--
Older Clippings--
Marco Becht and J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "One Boardroom Fits All?" Foreign Policy (July-August), pp. 88-9.--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "The Mysterious Incident of the High-Tech Boom Confined to the United States in the Nighttime," Nightly Business Report (July 1) [TV].--
Awaiting Michael Mussa's Take on Exactly What Went Wrong in Argentina...--
Commodities From Africa--
Bet on Europe to See a "New Economy" Boom in the Next Decade--
My Earliest Forecast of the Late-1990s Boom: May 18, 1994--
Plans?! We Don't Need No Steenkin' Plans!--
Generally, a Policy Not Only Tells Where You Want to Go But How to Get There--
Side-Effects of Agricultural Subsidies--
Macroeconomic Effects of WorldCom--
If We're So Smart, Why Don't We Have a Majority?--
From the Economist's Correspondent in Zimbabwe--
Bruce Sterling on Grand Research Challenges in Computer Science--
Gene Sperling on the Estate Tax--
What Social Security "Privatization" Means--
Is the Returning Deficit Really So Surprising?--
Salman Rushdie: Where Are the Muslims Against Terrorism?--
Let's Propose Policies That Have Little To Do With Our Problems...--
Planning for the Forthcoming Greenspan Succession--
World Com's Bizarrely Transparent Fraud--
The Evil Overlord Bad Plot Generator--
A Very Nice Column From Paul Krugman on Large-Scale Financial Fraud--
The Agnostic's Prayer--
It's the Fast of Tammuz--
Climate Illusion--
Red Eyes--
The Philippines Tries to Develop Using Its Only Abundant Factor of Production: Unskilled Labor Willing to Work Outside the Country--
Clive Crook on Argentina--
The Anti-Globalization of Fools--
Is Now Really the Time to Fight Inflation?--
Why Does the Bush Economic Policy Team Seem So Weak? --
Productivity Growth in the 2000s--
I Wonder If He Believes What He Says...--
The Mysterious Incident of the High-Tech Boom Confined to the United States in the Nighttime--
Republicans: The Stupid Party--
Republicans: The Stupid Party--
The Story of Gaak the Robot--
Things That Make Me Go, "Huh?!?"--
Bequests: An Historical Perspective--
Another Thought on Advertising--
Transistor Density Is Not the Only Locus of "Heroic" Productivity Growth in Our Modern Economy: There's Bandwidth, Storage, and Also Batteries--
Half a Year's Worth of Interesting Graphs and Pictures--
Hoping That the Flaws in the American Economy Throw a Lot of People Out of Work--
Dulce et Decorum Pro Patria Mori?--
Julius Caesar: His Personal Weblog--
What Does Advertising Do? A View From the Sideshow --
Gloomy Forecasts for the World Economy, Based on Fears That the U.S. Will Be Unable to Be an Engine of Growth--
A Primer on Disruptive Telecommunications Technologies--
Our Occasional Peak Into the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous--
The Federal Reserve Says Its Keeping Its Foot on the Gas--
Our Government Is Going About This All Wrong: If Civil Liberties Are to be Suspended, Then Suspend Them--Constitutionally--
Is Bablefish Ready for Prime Time Yet? No.--
The Economist's Fears for the Strength of the U.S. Recovery--
Yasir Arafat, as Seen by David Brooks--
Al-Qaeda Strategy: Our Current Guesses--
My Naivete Shown Up Once Again: Strategic Bequests and the Benefits of Keeping Firm Hold on Your Money as Long as Your Heart Beats--
Microsoft Plays Hardball at the End of Its Antitrust Trial--
Is UNIX the Answer for Office Workers?: It Can Be--
Why So Many Earnings Restatements? Why So Many Bad Accounting Numbers?--
The Math Club in Bedford, Mass.--
More Money For Issue Research and Advocacy on the Left--
Please Do Not Let Dr. Markel Near My Children: Hospital Residents Do Need More Sleep--
A Nice Letter on Why Social Security Privatization Is Oversold: Future Stock Returns Are Likely to Be Low--
The Treaties of Munster and Osnabruck: Why Doesn't the UN Guarantee All Members a Constitutional Form of Government?--
What Fionna O'Sullivan Wants: A Short and Simple List--
Closing Corporate Tax Loopholes with All Deliberate Speed: Why Require Treasury Tax Policy to Wear Boots of Lead?--
Not Enough Information to Tell What Is Going On: The Current State of the Microsoft Case--
The Future of Video: The Implications of Hyper-Cheap Storage--
David Garcia of Nettime on the Value of the Net: Talking to People Who Know What You Desperately Need to Know--
A Declaration of the Rights of Thugs: The American Left Loses Its Way Even More Completely--
Andrew Northrup Offers Insight Into Chomsky (Which Insight He Then Repudiates)--
How Far Out of Whack the Stock Market Really Is: The Answer? Very--
My Very, Very Allergic Reaction to Noam Chomsky: Khmer Rouge, Faurisson, Milosevic--
Osprey Afternoon: Life as a Raptor on the Shore of a Trout-Stocked Artificial Lake Is Good--
Cory Doctorow Learns Not to Blithely Download From Microsoft: All Your Preferences Are Belong to Us!--
Foreigners "Saturated" With U.S. Dollar Assets?: Either Way, They Need to Buy More or the Dollar Is Coming Down--
Repentance Is For Other People: Getting Depressed at the Morals of the Catholic Bishops--
Google as Humanity's First Anthology Intelligent System: Cory Doctorow Once Again Makes the Clouded Clear--
Consequences of the Recent Farm Bill: Does It Mean Deadlock in the Doha Round?--
Apple's Planned Spontaneous Viral Marketing--
Argentina's Recent Collapse: Can't We Find an International Economic System That Doesn't Require Getting Policies 100% Right?--
Civil Emergency Is Not Equal to War--
Wired Writes About the Crash of George Gilder--
David Hale Sees Continental Europe Swinging Right--and to a Reformist, Not a Static Right--
Homeland Security Really Does Sound Creepy--
My Friend Daniel Froomkin Writes About How the World Wide Web Created His Dream Job--
Krugman: Plutocracy and Politics--
High-Unemployment Britain Is Gone--
A Good Thought About 911--
How Economists Think of Lawyers: The Way Cats Think of Small Birds--
The Economist Reviews Oren, "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East"--
Being President Is a Really Hard Job--
The Fall of Global Crossing--
Proposals for Corporate Governance Reform from FORTUNE--
Google Is Thinking, and Learning--
Three Cheers for Andrew Northrup--
Board Room Truth and Beauty--
Comparative Advantage--
A Rich Baker Special--
A Plea For Mercy to Microsoft Word, v.X--
About Movable Type--
Fallout From Bush Protectionism--
The Rout of the Administration's Deficit Hawks--
What Presidents Do--
Issue Briefing: Estate Tax Repeal--
13 Conversations About One Thing--
Bird-Brained--
Wa-Hoo! I Got My Grades!--
The Repeal of the Estate Tax--
For a Serious Look at "Welfare Reform"--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Profits and Productivity," Nightly Business Report (June 11) [TV].--
The Economist Sums Up the Arthur Anderson Trial--
I Can't Stand It...--
No, I Don't Know Why...--
A Can't-Turn-It-Down Offer From Amazon.com--
Cultural Historians Are Different From You and Me--
Europessimism--
Al Hunt Really Dislikes John Ashcroft--
Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents--
Reagan, Hoover, and the U.C. Red Scare--
Today's Festival of Inappropriate Technology In London Looks Like It's Great Fun...--
Barrons on Kleiner Perkins and the Internet Boom--
I Missed This: Economic Policy Institute Gets New President--
California's Electricity Crisis--
Yet Another Sign of Worry That Inflation Is Too Low...--
Meanwhle, We Have Our Own Telecom Mess: HDTV--
Megafauna Morning--
From Forbes--Looking Closely at Earnings Numbers...--
The Use and Value of Stock Options--
Europe's 3G Telecommunications Mess--
A Very Nice Teaser About How the Bush White House Works--
Two Decades After Mrs. T...--
The Information Economy and Inequality--
Is Capital Account Liberalization Worthwhile?--
How Much of a Difference Did Trade Make in the Nineteenth Century?--
Wake-Up Message--
Cory Doctorow Writes About His Weblog--
Cuba--
Treasury Secretary O'Neill Goes to Africa--
PEIS--Notes on Reform...--
Terraforming Breakdown--
Profits and Productivity--
A Truly Loathsome Toad--
Anatoly Chubais--
Philip Habib and Ariel Sharon--
Andre Northrup: Poor Mans Blog: The Cornier--
Republicans: The Really Stupid Party--
European Monetary Policy--
Indignities--
Older Handouts--
J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Do We Have a 'New' Macroeconomy?" Innovation Policy and the Economy 2002.--
We counted on you to stop us from cooking our own books! That's what auditors are paid to do!--
Yet Another Reason Why Paul Krugman Doesn't Like This Decade's Crop of Republicans--
U.S. Feels the Pain of Steel Tariffs--
World Population Distribution 2000--
J. Bradford DeLong (1996), "Keynesianism, Pennsylvania-Avenue Style: Some Economic Consequences of the 1946 Employment Act," Journal of Economic Perspectives 10:3 (Summer), pp. 41-53.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1996), "A Positive Program for Better Economic Growth," Parliamentary Brief (June).--
Carlos Ramirez and J. Bradford DeLong (1996), "Banker Influence and Business Economic Performance: Assessing the Impact of Depression-Era Financial Reforms," in Michael Bordo and Richard Sylla, eds., Anglo-American Financial Systems: Institution and Markets in the Twentieth Century (New York: Irwin), pp. 161-178.--
J. Bradford DeLong, Christopher L. DeLong, and Sherman Robinson (1996), "In Defense of Mexico's Rescue", Foreign Affairs 75:3 (May/June), pp. 8-14.--
Brad DeLong (1996), A Wired Child, Harpers 292:1750 (March), p. 30.--
J. Bradford DeLong and Carlos Ramirez (1996), "Understanding America's Hesitant Steps Toward Financial Capitalism" (Berkeley, CA)--
J. Bradford DeLong and Richard Grossman (1996), "The British Stock Market and British Economic Growth, 1870-1914" (Berkeley, CA)--
J. Bradford DeLong (1995), "Können Finanzmärkte zu liquide sein?: Gefahr der Verstärkung von Kurseinbrüchen," Neue Zuercher Zeitung: Elektronische Borse Schweiz December 5, p. B 14. (English version: "Can a Financial Market Be Too Liquid and Too Efficient?" (Berkeley, CA).)--
J. Bradford DeLong and David Levine (1995), "Not a Capital Idea," The San Francisco Chronicle December 5.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1995), "Ontological Breakdown, or, Pretending to Be a Help System", American Art 9:3 (Fall), pp. 2-5 (edited version).--
J. Bradford DeLong (1995), "Ontological Breakdown, or, Pretending to Be a Help System", in Adam Engst et al., eds., TidBITS #291, August 21.--
J. Bradford DeLong and David Levine (1995), "Welfare Reform that Makes Poor Kids Poorer Will Never Pay Off," The Los Angeles Times October 15.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1995), "Low Marx: Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes" (Berkeley, CA, 1995).--
J. Bradford DeLong (1995), "Farewell to Treasury" (as prepared for delivery, May 24).--
[Ghostwritten] Lloyd M. Bentsen (1994), "Where Does the Deficit Come From?" Wall Street Journal (November 3).--
J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1994), "How Strongly Do Developing Countries Benefit from Equipment Investment?" Journal of Monetary Economics.--
J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1994), "Equipment Investment and Economic Growth: Reply," Quarterly Journal of Economics 109:3 (August), pp. 803-807.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1994), "Notes on John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (London: Macmillan, 1924)".--
J. Bradford DeLong (1994), "Economic Consequences of the Balanced-Budget Amendment" (Washington, DC, April).--
J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1994), "How Robust Is the Growth-Machinery Nexus?" in Mario Baldassari, Luigi Paganetto, and Edmund Phelps, eds., International Differences in Growth Rates: Market Globalization and Economic Areas (New York: St. Martin's Press).--
J. Bradford DeLong and Barry Eichengreen (1993), "The Marshall Plan: History's Most Successful Structural Adjustment Programme," in Rüdiger Dornbusch, Wilhelm Nölling, and Richard Layard, eds., Postwar Economic Reconstruction and Lessons for the East Today (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press), pp. 189-230.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1993), "Very Long-Run Economic Growth, ca. 1870-1990," in Horst Siebert, ed., Economic Growth in the World Economy (Kiel: Institute for World Economics).--
J. Bradford DeLong and Andrei Shleifer (1993), "Princes and Merchants: City Growth Before the Industrial Revolution," Journal of Law and Economics 36 (October), pp. 671-702.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1993), "Globalization and Wage Stagnation" (Washington, DC, August).--
J. Bradford DeLong (1993), "The Macroeconomics of War and Peace: Comment," NBER Macroeconomics Annual, pp. 247-50.--
Robert B. Barsky and J. Bradford DeLong (1993), "Why Does the Stock Market Fluctuate?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 108: 2 (May), pp. 291-312.--
J. Bradford DeLong and Barry Eichengreen (1993), "The Marshall Plan as a Structural Adjustment Programme," in Rüdiger Dornbusch, Wilhelm Nölling, and Richard Layard, eds., Postwar Economic Reconstruction: Lessons for Eastern Europe (London: Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society).--
J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1993), "Macroeconomic Policy and Long-Run Growth," Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Quarterly Review.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1993), The Investment Tax Credit and Economic Growth (Washington, D.C.: American Council for Capital Formation).--
J. Bradford DeLong (1992), "Deficit Reduction and the Short-Run Macroeconomic Outlook" (as of December 1992) (Cambridge, MA, December).--
J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1992), "Equipment Investment and Economic Growth: How Robust Is the Nexus?" Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Fall).--
J. Bradford DeLong (1992), "Machinery Investment as a Key to American Economic Growth," in Mark Bloomfield, Margo Thorning, and Charls Walker, eds., Tools for American Workers (Washington, DC: American Council for Capital Formation).--
J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang (1992), "Are All Economic Hypotheses False?" Journal of Political Economy 100:6 (December), pp. 1257-72.--
J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1992), "Quanto è Forte il Legame tra Crescita e Meccanizzazione?" Rivista di Politica Economica (November).--
J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1992), "How Robust Is the Growth-Machinery Nexus?" Rivista di Politica Economica (November).--
J. Bradford DeLong (1992), "Bull and Bear Markets," in John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman, eds, New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance (London: Macmillan).--
J. Bradford DeLong (1992), "Noise Trading," in John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman, eds, New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance (London: Macmillan).--
J. Bradford DeLong (1992), "J. P. Morgan and His Money Trust," Wilson Quarterly 16:4 (Fall), pp. 16-30.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1992), "Growth, Industrialization, and Finance," NBER Reporter (Fall), pp. 5-11.--
J. Bradford DeLong and Barry J. Eichengreen (1992), "Der Marshall-Plan--ein Strukturhilfeprogramm," in Rüdiger Dornbusch, Wilhelm Nölling, and Richard Layard, eds., Der Wiederaufbau Deutschlands nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg--Lehren für Osteuropa, no. 10 of Hamburger Beiträge zur Wirtschafts- und Währungspolitik in Europa (Hamburg).--
J. Bradford DeLong and Richard Grossman (1992), "Excess Volatility on the London Stock Market, 1870-1990" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Economics).--
J. Bradford DeLong (1992), "Productivity and Machinery Investment: A Long Run Look 1870-1980," Journal of Economic History 53: 2 (June), 307-24.--
J. Bradford DeLong and Andrei Shleifer (1992), "Closed End Fund Discounts: A Yardstick of Small-Investor Sentiment," Journal of Portfolio Management 18:2 (Winter), pp. 46-53.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1991), "Did J. P. Morgan's Men Add Value?: An Economist's Perspective on Financial Capitalism," in Peter Temin, ed., Inside the Business Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use of Information (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press for NBER), pp. 205-36.--
J. Bradford DeLong and Marco Becht (1991), "`Excess Volatility' in the German Stock Market, 1876-1990" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Economics). --
J. Bradford DeLong and Andrei Shleifer (1991), "The Stock Market Bubble of 1929: Evidence from Closed-End Funds," Journal of Economic History 52: 3 (September), pp. 675-700.--
Robert B. Barsky and J. Bradford DeLong (1991), "Forecasting Pre-World War I Inflation: The Fisher Effect and the Gold Standard," Quarterly Journal of Economics 106: 3 (August) , pp. 815-36.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1991), "Review of Stuart Bruchey, Enterprise: The Dynamic Economy of a Free People," Journal of Economic History 51:2 (June), pp. 505-506.--
J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1991), "Equipment Investment and Economic Growth," Quarterly Journal of Economics 106: 2 (May), pp. 445-502.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1991), "Depressions," in Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, eds., Readers' Guide to American History (Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin Company).--
J. Bradford DeLong (1991), "The Great American Universal Banking Experiment," International Economy 5:1 (January/February), pp. 68-71.--
J. Bradford DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1991), "The Survival of Noise Traders in Financial Markets," Journal of Business 64: 1 (January), pp. 1-20.--
J. Bradford DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1990), "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets," Journal of Political Economy 98: 4 (August 1990), pp. 703-738.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1990), "`Liquidation' Cycles: Old-Fashioned Real Business Cycle Theory and the Great Depression" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Economics).--
J. Bradford DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1990), "Positive-Feedback Investment Strategies and Destabilizing Rational Speculation," Journal of Finance 45: 2 (June), pp. 374-397.--
Robert B. Barsky and J. Bradford DeLong (1990), "Bull and Bear Markets in the Twentieth Century," Journal of Economic History 50: 2 (June), pp. 1-17.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1990), "In Defense of Henry Simons' Credentials as a Classical Liberal," Cato Journal 9: 1 (Winter), pp. 105-122.--
J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1990), "Price Level `Flexibility' and the Coming of the New Deal: A Response to Sumner," Cato Journal 9: 1 (Winter), pp. 729-735.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1989), "Review of Nicholas Spulber, Managing the American Economy from Roosevelt to Reagan," Journal of Economic History 49:3 (December), pp. 1058-1059.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1989), "Facets of Interwar Unemployment," Journal of Monetary Economics 49:3 (September), pp. 800-802.--
J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers, "On the Existence and Interpretation of a `Unit Root' in U.S. Real GDP" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Economics, 1989).--
J. Bradford DeLong (1989), "The `Protestant Ethic' Revisited: A Twentieth-Century Look," Fletcher Forum 13: 2 (Summer), pp. 229-242.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1989), "Nassau Senior's `Last Hour' and the `Advances' Conception of Capital Revisited," History of Political Economy 21: 2 (Summer), pp. 309-310.--
J. Bradford DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1989), "The Size and Incidence of Losses from Noise Trading," Journal of Finance 44: 3 (July), pp. 681-696.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1988), "Productivity Growth, Convergence, and Welfare: Comment," American Economic Review 78: 5 (December), pp. 1138-1154.--
J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1986), "Is Increased Price Flexibility Stabilizing?" American Economic Review 76: 5 (December), pp. 1031-1044.--
J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1988), "How Does Macroeconomic Policy Matter?" Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1988: 2 (Fall), pp. 433-480.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1988), "Review of I. Berend and K. Borchardt, eds., The Impact of the Great Depression of the 1930s," Journal of Economic History 48:1 (March), pp. 239-240.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1987), "Review of N.F.R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution," Journal of Economic History 47:3 (September), pp. 790-792.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1987), "Review of Bernard Elbaum and William Lazonick, The Decline of the British Economy," Journal of Economic History 47:3 (September), pp. 792-795.--
J. Bradford DeLong (1986), "Senior's `Last Hour': A Suggested Resolution of a Famous Blunder," History of Political Economy 18: 2 (Summer), pp. 325-333.--
J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1986), "The Changing Cyclical Variability of Economic Activity in the United States," in Robert J. Gordon, ed., The American Business Cycle: Continuity and Change (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press for the National Bureau of Economic Research), pp. 679-719.--
J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1986), "A Comment on John Taylor's `Improvements in Macroeconomic Stability: The Role of Wages and Prices'," in Robert J. Gordon, ed., The American Business Cycle: Continuity and Change (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press for the National Bureau of Economic Research), pp. 667-675.--
J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1986), "Are Business Cycles Symmetrical?" in Robert J. Gordon, ed., The American Business Cycle: Continuity and Change (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press for the National Bureau of Economic Research), pp. 166-178.--
February 10, 2003
Notes: and Klenow
Chang-Tai : Chang-Tai and Peter Klenow (2002), "Relative Prices and Relative Prosperity".
-A broad consensus that rich countries have high investment rates.
-Why do poor countries have low real investment rates?
-Because they have low savings rates?
-Investment distortions?
--taxes, tariffs, monopoly?
--high relative price of capital?
---Juan Domingo Peron
This is a "facts" paper:
-Savings rates not correlated with Y/L.
(Me: Bela Balassa)
-Why this divergence between savings effort and investment outcome? All in the denominator--a low price of consumption goods, not a higher-than-world price of capital goods.
(Me: Fact true when? Just today? In the import-substitution 1960s as well.) Chang's instinct: true in the 1950s: Argentina and India are outliers.
Two sector model:
Distortions: tax on capital income, tax on investment goods.
Simplifying assumption:
tradable = capital goods
nontradable = consumption goods
Tradable capital goods means pk given by investment distortion. pc = pk times ratio of A's.
CRRA preferences.
tk: things that make you not want to save...
ti: things that make investment unprofitable...
ac/ai: bad technology
1980, 1985, 1996 -- focus
Me: low prices and high savings go with high investment... components orthogonal to Y/L...
Correlations: real investment highly correlated with Y/L. nominal investment correlation weak.
black market
Notes: Monetary and Fiscal Policy
Fernanco Machado Goncalves: Dickens; Akerlof, Dickens, and Perry; Truman Bewley. Gali. New institutions. CB secrecy and transparency, unraveling back to K-P bad equilibrium. Thatcher corset Bundesbank monetary aggregate. Jordi Gali. ECB who lends in cases of dernier ressort? Understanding the ECB. Exchange rate policy and interest rate policy: their relationship. Brazil: state-contingent changes of inflation targets are potentially a very good thing. Needed at end of this course: more papers on Wage rigidity, Fed structure, ECB financial stability and dernier ressort issues, fiscal interaction. international monetary coordination.
Liquidity Trap: February 14:
The New Open Economy Macroeconomics: February 21
Notes on Shleifer: The Regulation of Labor
DATA: STRUCTURE OF LABOR REGULATION
Employment Laws
--alternative employment contracts
--job security
Code employment laws in a dumb way
Industrial Relations Laws
--bargaining
--participation in management
--disputes
Social Security Laws
--OASDI
--Health benefits
--Unemployment benefits
Enforcement very different in rich than in poor countries. In rich countries laws are obeyed...
Employment Regulation Statutes
Significantly less regulation of labor in rich countries...
Substitution between labor regulation and social insurance?
Protect privileged-sector workers in poor countries?
IR laws: most regulations in middle income countries
Social Security: most social security in rich countries
Correlation only?
IR and Employment correlated at 50%
IR and SS uncorrelated...
What determines the regulation of labor? Legal origins: socialist, French (Spanish), German (incl. Korea and Japan), Scandinavian. Socialist and French matter. US empl .94 1.47.
Leftism in power matters for social security.
Richard Freeman: Salazar and Franco had the most regulated labor markets in Europe.
Blanchard: poor countries regulate and rich countries redistribute.
Parties don't do very much. Countries that deal with problems through courts and contracts, and countries that deal with problems through regulation. This is much more important than ideology of party in power.
Legal Origin Theory can explain why Latin America is poor. But why is France so rich?
What's wrong with a Downsian interpretation of the impotence of left-right politics.
Italy a weird outlier: because Craxi's Socialists classified as leftist?
Labor regulation/social insurance/legal red tape/steps to start business. Correlations are high. Not due to GDP per capita. Legal styles are overwhelmingly important. Countries' approaches to social control of business are national styles that depend on legal origins.
Not just clientalism.
_JLS_ Mahoney. Data?
Why is France (and the rest of Code Napoleon western Europe) so rich? "Their institutions are suited for their environments." One possibility: "Europe is a museum."
Smith and Montesquieu
Two aspects of securing property rights: controlling private disorder, controlling public disorder. Strong state that fetters itself is the goal...