Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Well, I thought this was a PETS reading list for a moment and now am disappointed. Simon, my parrotlet, likes to read Science Magazine with me or perhaps it's just that he likes the taste of the pages. Think about a PETS reading list next.

Whoa. No indoctrination here, folks. Does anyone leave Berkeley as a Republican? Just curious.

And you would recommend? Donald Rumsfeld is a Republican. Paul O'Neill is a Republican, as is Suskind's other source for the November 26 2002 meeting. Catherine Mann is, I think, an Independent.

The PNAC manifesto.

Tbroz:

Yes, there's this dude that graduated from Berkeley named David Brock. I hear he gave up drinking the Republican kool-aid awhile ago.

Is there some way that we can make a distinction between Republicans and those who happen to believe that the "Neo-Conservative" doctrines were written on stone tablets and passed down from Mount ArrowRoot to Charleton Heston?

The large bulk of the Old School Tie GOP types - the sort who were Goldwater Republicans - are looking at the failure of the current administration to understand basic economics in an american way as the other large betrayal. The first was failing to explain why exactly we needed to Abandon Ike's Maxim of "not a penny more for defense than is needed" - a technical problem that Rumsfeld's papers never address nor deal with prior to hopping onto the hobby horse of where the Bush(41) budget cuts in the DOD would have wound up in 2001 dollars.

The fact that there are these Boomers who have unresolved issues about their 'sixties' experience doesn't mean that they are any more indicative of the GOP than any of the loopies in the Democratic Party are clear proof that all democrats are satanists.

So the real problem with the Bush(43) "kool-aid" is that it is, well, just "Kool-Aid", without any of the sugar, zip, calories, punch, penache, elan.

"Is there some way that we can make a distinction between Republicans and those who happen to believe that the "Neo-Conservative" doctrines were written on stone tablets and passed down from Mount ArrowRoot to Charleton Heston?"

Any current indicator tells us that the stone tableters are the Republican mainstream and those who disagree with them are but a splinter faction. Or otherwise the Republican party is really made up of old-style Goldwaterites who privately disagree with the PNAC doctrines, but who won't speak up in public for fear that dissent will lead to electoral defeat.

Lost a few posts, here.

Perhaps something from Molly Ivins' seminal contribution "Bushwhacked," just to round out the list and give it more weight?

Thanks for the reference to the Fallows article, which I had not seen, and which is superb and right on the mark.

I'm torn: if I have to read The Price of Loyalty, In an Uncertain World, OR the Great Unravelling, what should I do? I'm waiting for all these nifty books to come out on paperback.

Liberal Bias! Liberal Bias!

Why don't you asign An End To Evil?

Julian, read The Price of Loyalty.

"An End to Evil"? Excellent choice. Shows just how wacked the neocons are.

"In their new book, "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror" (Random House), Frum and Perle call for universal biometric fingerprinting, immediate steps to bring about regime change in Iran and Syria, a military blockade of North Korea, a diplomatic approach that treats Saudi Arabia and France as rivals if not "enemies" and a decreasing American involvement in the United Nations. They describe their manifesto as an attempt to present a unifying 'conservative point of view.'"

http://www.forward.com/issues/2004/04.01.09/news3.html

My modest proposal for addition to list: Samuel Bowles' new text -Microeconomics : Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution. The conventional micro may be too elementary for grad students as main reading, but plenty of interesting applications and synthesis of evolutionary game theory, psychological game theory, cellular autonoma approaches with comments on practical signficicance. Good emphasis on significance of insitutional framework and legal/contractual environment. I am reading it chapter by chapter in random order, but now that I am almost done, I like it quite a bit.

It's not like this is a required reading list for a certain class. It's just a suggestion from the department chair who will never know who read these things and who didn't.

It also should not be an accepted principle that both parties deserve equal loyalty from all disciplines no matter what their policies are. You might as well ask my bioengineering instructor to recommend just as many readings on creationism as on gene similarity detection.

I can't wait to see David's suggestion for the Holocaust course.

"Whoa. No indoctrination here"

If I was a student, I'd prefer to know where my department chair stands on important issues. I can always disagree with him (and if he is a good teacher, he'll accept and honour reasoned arguments against his position because he is paid to educate thinking political animals, not to train parrots). But I'd like to see for myself if there is logic and coherence behind political positions and economic theory - rather than having a wishy-washy guy giving me the good old "on one hand - on the other hand" crap.