Brad DeLong

The Deterioration in the Unemployment-Vacancy Relationship Is a Long-Term Unemployment Fact

It is not an "emerging structural skills mismatch" fact. It is a "long-term unemployed lose the weak ties that help them get jobs" fact…

A major empirical win for Rand Ghayad and William Dickens: "What Can We Learn by Disaggregating the Unemployment-Vacancy Relationship?":

It Is Easy to Train a Parrot to Be a Republican Presidential Candidate: All You Have to Do Is Teach It to Say: "Bernanke Bad! Bernanke Bad!"

Witness Marco Rubio:

Sound monetary policy would also encourage middle class job creation. The arbitrary way in which interest rates and our currency are treated is yet another cause of unpredictability injected into our economy. The Federal Reserve Board should publish and follow a clear monetary rule – to provide greater stability about prices and what the value of a dollar will be over time.

Rubio is saying nothing coherent here--besides: "Bernanke bad! Bernanke bad! I'm not sure why, but Bernanke bad!"

Rubio, you see, wants the Federal Reserve to stabilize three things:

1. The path of the price level,
2. The value of the dollar, and
3. The level of interest rates.

But you cannot do this. cannot stabilize the path of the price level and the exchange rate and nominal interest rates. Were we to confirm The One Who Is to chair the Fed, she could not do it.

If you stabilize the exchange rate--i.e., set up a gold standard and join it--interest rates and the price level will do their thing.

If you stabilize the nominal interest rate, you will find yourself in either an inflationary or deflationary spiral.

And if you stabilize the path of the price level, you will have to do some serious leaning against the wind with interest rates, and that will set the currency bouncing around.

I would call for Republicans to step up their game. But what's the use? No Republican primary voter, no advisor, no donor, no fundraiser will care that Rubio is talking economic incoherence. No Republican economist of note will shy away from boosting Rubio because his speechwriters lack basic economic literacy.

This is who they are. We have to deal with it.

"Voluntary Financial Repression" and Fiscal Policy: A Note

One potentially-important case outside the standard framework for thinking about fiscal policy in a depressed economy is the following: What if interest rates remained depressed not just for the short but for the long term as well? Call this case one of "voluntary financial repression". In it, the risk tolerance of investors is so low and the ability of private-sector investment banks to create safe assets is so impaired that investors are willing to pay the government to move their purchasing power forward in time. The economy is not dynamically sufficient in any standard sense, but the interest rate r on Treasury debt is lower than the growth rate g of the economy. There is then no binding government budget constraint. And the math then tells us that the government should borrow and spend--and then borrow and spend some more until it has pushed the interest rate on its Treasury debt back up above the growth rate of the economy and there is a binding government budget constraint once more.

Note that this case of "voluntary financial repression" is profoundly different from other episodes of financial repression. In the past situations in which Treasury bonds have carried negative real interest rates have arisen because of government policies that require financial intermediaries to hold excessive amounts of Treasury debt. The standard argument is then that the apparent free lunch of government borrowing offered by financial repression is really the collection of an inefficient tax on banking customers. The ultra-low interest rates on Treasury debt are a regulatory tax ultimately paid by banking customers and collected for the government by the banks. The policy recommendation is then not that the government should take advantage of low interest rates to borrow and spend. The policy recommendation is then, instead, that the government should reform its bank regulatory system so that it no longer imposes an inefficient tax on banking customers and financial depth.

This time, however, appears to be different. High demand for Treasuries at even ultra-low interest rates is not the result of legal requirements to hold Treasuries imposed by the government. Rather, it is the result of an extremely high degree of effective risk aversion on the part of investors and financial intermediaries. No argument can be made today that the government is levying excessive taxes on the banking sector. It has, instead, provided the banking sector with enormous benefits in terms of bailouts that provide free insurance against macro financial risks. It has not burdened the banking sector with excessive requirements that they hold reserves in the form of Treasuries. It has, if anything, done the opposite: burdened the reast of the economy by not imposing large enough reserve requirements on banks.

There is some lurking underlying market failure here--trusted financial intermediaries that can create safe private-sector assets for investors to hold appear to be absent. The natural fix for this market failure is for the government to create the safe assets that investors seek to hold: the government needs to borrow and spend, and keep borrowing and spending until the benefits from repairing this failure on the part of the private market to supply safe assets are exhausted--which will certainly not be the case until, for Treasuries r > g.

Adolf Hitler Liveblogs World War II: December 5, 1942

Adolf Hitler:

The Führer and Supreme Commander of the Army. 5 December 1942.

During the course of the operations against Stalingrad there arose, as early as October, the danger of a threat developing to the long northern flank of our attacking front. In the first half of November there were indications of an impending attack against the Third Rumanian Army. To meet this threat, I gave orders that the 22nd Panzer Division should take up a position behind the right wing of the Third Rumanian Army and together with the 1st Rumanian Panzer Division should constitute the XXXXVIIIth Panzer Corps, under the command of Lieutenant-General Heim. In the event of an enemy attack or breakthrough, this Panzer Corps was under orders to make an immediate counter-attack, and to prevent at all costs the forcing back of the right wing of the Third Rumanian Army. The forces which were thus deployed to oppose the enemy's attack were exceptionally strong.

From the very beginning, the way in which the 22nd Panzer Division was brought up and deployed gave rise to grave doubts concerning the Corps Commander's efficiency. Of more than one hundred tanks, only a little over thirty reached their appointed  assembly area. I regard it as a most serious dereliction of an officer's duty if, at such a time and in such conditions, he fails to exert the utmost energy in bringing the fighting strength of his units to the highest possible pitch, or alternatively in redressing errors already made.

The leader of the Panzer Corps had a duty to make himself immediately conversant with every aspect of the operation which confronted him. It was his further duty to keep in close touch with the Panzer Divisions assigned to him and to discuss thoroughly with the two divisions all questions concerning this operation. Speed of action was all the more essential, in that it must have been obvious:

• first, that the organisation, leadership and general condition of our Rumanian allies was not of a sufficiently high standard to make them equal to tasks which could be undertaken by German divisions in similar circumstances; 

• secondly, that, especially with regard to anti-tank weapons, they did not possess the necessary equipment.

When the Russians launched their expected attack on the 19th of November, the sector of front directly concerned was to begin with comparatively narrow. If the Panzer Corps, with a strength of over one hundred and fifty tanks, had been rapidly sent into action, this would beyond any question of doubt have resulted in a German victory. But the Panzer Corps did not in fact go into action at all during the first twenty-four hours. During the next twenty-four hours the Corps Commander was attempting to establish contact with the ist Rumanian Panzer Division. It was thus impossible immediately to concentrate the two divisions, so that a concerted counter-attack could be launched. Then, instead of at least grimly battling through to join the Rumanian Panzer Division, so that a joint counter-attack could be mounted, operations by the 22nd Panzer Division continued to be as hesitant as they were unsafe.

This failure by the XXXXVIIIth Panzer Corps was alone responsible for the fact that the Third Rumanian Army was broken through on both wings. This has resulted in a catastrophe of immense proportions, the ultimate consequences of which cannot even now be foreseen. In view of the extremely grave consequences that have followed this disaster, namely the loss of a large number of units and an immense amount of war material and the encirclement of the Sixth Army, the conduct by the Corps Commander must be regarded as not merely grossly careless, but as a crime of negligence hitherto unparalleled in the course of this war.

In addition, the moral effect will have serious repercussions on the German war effort.

I am determined that the conditions which prevailed during the Battle of the Marne in 1914, and which German military and historical research has not, after twenty-five years, yet succeeded in explaining, shall in no circumstances be allowed to reappear in the new army.

In view of the disastrous consequences that have resulted from the failure of this general I have decided :

1. That he shall be immediately dismissed from the Army.

2. That while awaiting final elucidation of the failure of this German officer, no further decisions will be made concerning the ultimate action which, in accordance with military tradition in such cases, may have to be taken against him.

Signed: ADOLF HITLER.

Noted for December 5, 2012

Worth Noting:

• Charles Kenny: The 'Red Dawn' Case for Cutting U.S. Defense Spending

• Transcript: Kathleen T. McFarland talks with Gen. David H. Petraeus about how Roger Ailes wants him to run for President

• Matthew Yglesias: We are probably not getting an [austerity bomb] deal [before January 1, 2013]

• Ta-Nehisi Coates: Thomas Jefferson Was More Than a Man of His Times: "[B]eautiful writing reflecting a clarity of thought and understanding that I have rarely encountered in Jefferson's contemporaries, or beyond, writing about the problem of slavery…. When people say Jefferson was merely a 'man of his times' they sell him short. I don't mean this as some sort of rhetorical jiu-jitsu. I find myself quoting [Jefferson's] words when trying to explain slavery's problems. What Jefferson, the man, did doesn't make these words any less meaningful.  At some point we are going to have to develop something beyond an infantile desire to know whether Daddy was a 'good guy' or a 'bad guy'. In fact, Daddy was an avowed white supremacist, whose words help inspire the black freedom movement. Daddy was an American slave-holder to the end, who brilliantly elucidated the moral and practical problem of American slavery. Daddy railed against miscegenation, while practicing it." 

• Charlie Demerjian: The Doom of Microsoft: http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/14/microsoft-has-failed/

• Tom Slee: When Theories Matter: Uprisings in Authoritarian States

• Mark Thoma sends us to Paul Krugman: "President Obama has done something very cruel… refused to lay out a proposal reflecting what he thinks Republicans want. Instead, he has demanded that Republicans themselves say, explicitly, what they want. And guess what: They can’t or won’t do it. No, really. While there has been a lot of bluster from the G.O.P. about how we should reduce the deficit with spending cuts, not tax increases, no leading figures on the Republican side have been able or willing to specify what, exactly, they want to cut…"

• Robert Skidelsky: Inequality is killing capitalism: "Demand for credit, rather than supply, is the crucial economic driver… Banks are bound to lend on adequate collateral; and, in the run-up to the crisis, rising house prices provided it. The supply of credit, in other words, resulted from the demand for credit…. It was not so much predatory lenders as it was imprudent, or deluded, borrowers, who bear the blame. So the question arises: Why did people want to borrow so much? Why did the ratio of household debt to income soar to unprecedented heights in the pre-recession days? Let us agree that people are greedy, and that they always want more than they can afford. Why, then, did this “greed” manifest itself so manically? To answer that, we must look at what was happening to the distribution of income…"

• John Dupre on Thomas Nagel: "The starting point of Nagel's strategy is that if the general reductionist project is to be successful, then it must be shown how consciousness/cognition/value can be integrated into the materialist worldview. Prima facie these things are not material. The materialist story about how material came to possess these entities or qualities is evolution. So if evolution cannot account for consciousness/cognition/value, it is fatally injured…. The case of cognition…. Nagel thinks that reason gives us insights into reality that evolution cannot account for. Whereas perception gives us a view of the world mediated by a 'mental effect' that it causes in me, something that emerged to serve my evolutionary interests, reason gives me direct, unmediated insight into the world…. These are deep waters…. I will only repeat that we have surely not been offered anything harder to deny than the general truth of evolution…"

• Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Myth Of Jefferson As 'A Man Of His Times':: "A predictable defense of Thomas Jefferson comes up comments: 'It's worth noting that TJ was warped up in a economic system of which no alternative was readily available. Only a single slave owning founding father freed his slaves, Washington in his will.' As is pointed out in subsequent comments this claim, while convenient, is false…. Jefferson lived at a time when it was relatively common to manumit slaves…. Jefferson's cousin John Randolph…. Jefferson's protege Edward Coles--knowing of Jefferson's brilliant anti-slavery writings--wrote to enlist him in the cause of ridding Virginia of slavery. Coles thought to begin this effort by manumitting his own slaves. Jefferson not only declined to help Coles, but told him he was wrong to try to free his own…. Edward Coles ignored Thomas Jefferson's advice, instead becoming the anti-Thomas Jefferson and living up to his word…. Edward Coles doesn't deserve to be forgotten merely to redeem Jefferson."

• Boathouse Tiverton RI

• Felix Salmon: How insurance improves living standards: "It comes as no surprise to find that Alan Greenspan is wrong…. [I]f you think for a moment about the logical implications of what Greenspan is saying here, they’re truly horrific. Imagine a world where the Japanese government did not insure its population against extremely low probability events like the recent earthquake — this is Greenspan’s example, not mine. The toll of death and suffering in one of the richest countries in the world, which was catastrophically high to begin with, would soar, and the Japanese government, through inaction, would be killing thousands of its own citizens, in a heartless and entirely avoidable decision. Meanwhile, the broader Japanese economy would suffer much more greatly than it already is…. [T]he Japanese government doesn’t need to be 'pressed' to save its citizens’ lives in the event of a disaster; that’s its job. What’s more, the second part of Greenspan’s thesis is equally incoherent, if not quite as morally monstrous…"

• Prairie Weather: We're in trouble out here: "In Texas, drier conditions are favored in association with a negative PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation). Therefore, odds favor persistence for the areas of drought in eastern and southern Texas, and two areas of developing drought were introduced in central and south-central Texas…"

• Daniel Kuehn: Facts & other stubborn things: Jefferson was a nasty sonofabitch: [W]hile there's quite a bit we don't like about Jefferson there is a lot to like about Jeffersonianism - that special brand of American liberalism that belongs to Jefferson as genuinely as his slave ownership does. There's certainly a lot I like about Jeffersonianism…"

• Steve M.: "If you'd like to persuade a skeptic that political insider journalism must be destroyed… all the evidence you need is contained in an article by McKay Coppins that was just posted on BuzzFeed: 'How Bobby Jindal Got His Mojo Back In 2012'.… [H]ave you seen any evidence that Bobby Jindal actually has 'mojo'? Even if you thought he once had some, do you believe he's gotten it back? Now move on to the photo accompanying the article. Does this photo say "presidential mojo" to you? Yes, that's Jindal with Rick Perry -- by common consent the worst presidential candidate of 2012, and one of the worst ever. And the photo matches the article's content. You see, according to Coppins, associating with Perry has done excellent things for Jindal…"

• ndm lees: "Gellner sees production, coercion and legitimation as the… primary sources of social power…. Groups and individuals specialise in/monopolise control over one of these three areas, resulting in a division of labour between those castes who live by the plough, those who live by the sword, and those who live by the book…. A large part of the focus of the book is on the transition between three epochs: hunter-gatherer society, agrarian society, and industrial society… what sets PSB apart from other works of historical sociology is the detail and sophistication of Gellner’s discussion of the transition between different modes of cognition within different epochs. This is something which Tilly, Skocpol, Arrighi and so on don’t focus upon…. Via the theological doctrines of the agrarian era, which Gellner insists were an essential waypoint on the journey, contemporary individuals have come to occupy a radically different cognitive universe from that of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. PSB is a fascinating work because it tries to combine an analysis of classes, industrialism, ideology and the nation-state with a rich thesis about the historical development of human consciousness that draws heavily on cultural anthropology…"

Why Do Dylan Byers and Politico Think That Drinking Coffee Is Elitist and UnAmerican?

Scott Lemieux:

I’ve Had Enough Of You Water-Drinking, Air-Breathing Urban Elitists: Ben Jacobs’s piece reminds me of my favorite part of the Politico’s war on Nate Silver.   As others have pointed out, this botched hack cliche is comedy gold:

For this reason and others — and this may shock the coffee-drinking NPR types of Seattle, San Francisco and Madison, Wis. — more than a few political pundits and reporters, including some of his own colleagues, believe Silver is highly overrated.

Look, I knew those snooty elitists in Seattle and San Francisco looked down on me and my kind, but now you tell me that they drink coffee? No real American would ever be caught dead consuming this obscure product.

I tell you, every election cycle it becomes harder to be a regular American. White wine, Lipton Green Tea, orange juice, Gray Poupon, coffee — every day you discover some product that my relatives in rural Saskatchewan would always have in their pantry that marks you as an out-of-touch urban elitist in the eyes of D.C.-based Ivy Leaguers.

Nobody ever told Dylan Byers that it was lattes that were elitist--French, you know--and not coffee.

And Dylan appears to have not had enough of a clue to have picked up the talking point cliché on his own.

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

Strangely, Nate Silver Does Not Make Dylan Byers's List of Ten Breakout Political Reporters of 2012

Curiously, Robert Costa does.

What would you have learned if you had trusted Robert Costa the week before the election? This:

Three blue states could turn red: Ohio is the presidential campaign’s fall blockbuster.... But it is not the only must-watch battleground. Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are looking decidedly purple.... WISCONSIN Status: Toss-up.... Mitt Romney was set to campaign Monday in Wisconsin. He has already rescheduled for later this week — with good reason. The Badger State has suddenly emerged as a potential pickup. In the final days, look for the Romney campaign to put significant time and resources into the state. Local congressman Paul Ryan’s inclusion on the Republican ticket has energized the Romney campaign’s Wisconsin team.... [I]n the latest Rasmussen poll, Romney ties Obama....

You get the picture.

Anybody who trusted Robert Costa wound up more ignorant. He did not have the critical perspective on his Romney campaign sources and their pet pollsters that a reporter needed--no bullshit filter.

And, in Dylan Byers's view, the absence of a bullshit filter makes you a "breakout political reporter"--never mind that what he reported just wasn't so, and that to people not entirely within the right-wing bubble there were no good-faith reasons for him to believe it was so.

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

Robert Greenstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities on the "Austerity Bomb" Negotiations

STATEMENT OF ROBERT GREENSTEIN… IN RESPONSE TO REPUBLICAN BUDGET OFFER:

House Republican leaders portray the deficit-reduction offer that they issued yesterday as a fair middle ground. It isn’t…. [T]he new Republican offer proposes $800 billion over ten years…. Erskine Bowles, Alan Simpson, and some members of their commission… proposed tax changes that would raise $2.6 trillion in revenues over 2013-2022…. Republicans… proposed substantially deeper cuts in… Medicare and Medicaid than Bowles-Simpson…. How… does the new Republican plan get to $600 billion? Republicans do not say. When the well-being of millions of Americans is at stake — as it is with major changes in Medicare and Medicaid — that shouldn’t be acceptable. If… [they] propose $600 billion in health care entitlement savings, as they have every right to do, they should show us the specific changes they would make…. (Some news accounts report the House Republican leaders would raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67 and increase Medicare premiums for more affluent beneficiaries… those measures would raise only about one quarter of the $600 billion and raise questions as to whether House Republicans have an answer for what would happen to many 65 and 66 year olds.)…

TThe good news is that Republican leaders have made an offer, non-specific as it is in virtually all key areas…. The bad news is the guts of the offer itself — and its attempt to lock in a requirement for deep cuts in programs on which tens of millions of Americans of modest means rely, without coming clean on the nature and severity of the cuts that would be required.

Liveblogging World War II: December 4, 1942

Mungo Melvin: Manstein"

[…]

After a Month of Radio Silence, the Weekly Standard's "Numbers Guy" Reappears...

…to kick Mitt Romney up and down the field:

Jay Cost, December 3, 2012:

[D]ecline... a stark decline in public confidence that the nation’s leaders can fix its pressing problems.... Most of the decline came from white voters; in fact, between 6 and 9 million white voters went missing.... Romney... out-of-touch plutocrat... yawning empathy gap.... underperformance relative to Bush.... Voters did not trust.... Romney to represent them.... The country was not persuaded that the Republican nominee had their interests at heart. Part of the blame belongs to the Romney campaign... the failure of the Republican party during the Bush years.... In 2016 the Republican party must find a nominee who can relate to average Americans... deliver the kind of prosperity that has been sorely lacking for the past decade...

But only a month and a half ago, Jay Cost said that Mitt Romney was completely covered with awesome sauce:

[R]eal economic conservatism.... Ronald Reagan... William McKinley... Calvin Coolidge…. Mitt Romney... channeling McKinley, Silent Cal, and the Gipper all at once.... [W]hen it came to the kitchen table issues, Romney focused much more directly on them. And in fact, when it came to the number one issue of this campaign – jobs and unemployment – Romney mentioned them more than twice as often as Obama did. This kind of emphasis on growth, prosperity, income, and jobs... economic conservatism exemplified by McKinley-Coolidge-Reagan... Romney tied pro-business economic policies to mass prosperity... even Calvin Coolidge would be impressed.... Following the lead of the early modern Republicans, Romney even issued a stark warning to China.... China’s systematic cheating… requires a response from economic conservatives. And Romney delivers it... Romney connects this philosophy again and again to jobs. That is the core economic argument of conservative Republicanism, one that the left has never understood. It is not elitist; it is an inherently republican philosophy: the belief that smart pro-business policies generate growth, and therefore jobs, and therefore prosperity for Americans all across the country...

And:

Mitt Romney is likely to win… for two reasons: (1) Romney leads among voters on trust to get the economy going again. (2) Romney leads among independents….

Romney has an edge on the economy…. [T]his election looks to hinge on the economy, and little else…. I do not know of an election where the electorate was so singularly focused on one set of issues, and the person trusted less on them nevertheless won….

Romney’s lead among independents…. [T]he New Deal coalition… broke into pieces in 1980…. This has led to the rising power of the independent vote…. I see Mitt Romney with a lead among independents in almost every poll…. [W]hite Democrats from the Ohio River Valley to the Gulf of Mexico will defect from their own party’s ticket in droves. These children and grand children of FDR’s core backers will support Mitt Romney overwhelmingly….

I am not willing to take polls at face value…. I am more interested in connecting the polls to history and the long-run structure of American politics, and when I do that I see a Romney victory.

The remarkable thing is that Jay Cost sees himself under no obligation to his readers to explain why he was so wrong a month ago--and his readers feel no need to inquire.

Jonathan Chait observes the same phenomenon in John Podhoretz.

National Review's numbers guy has apparently moved to Patagonia, and lacks all internet connectivity.

Michael Barone still insists that he got the analysis of the "fundamentals" of the election right, but that "fundamentals were trumped by mechanics and, to a lesser extent, by demographics"; and still insists that his call of a substantial Romney victory was "reasonable, just as other predictions that either Obama or Romney would win... with more than 300 electoral votes, were reasonable; you could... come up with pretty different conclusions..."

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates: We Are All Welfare Queens Now

Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects on Mitt Romney's "47%", "Gifts", and "Vote for the Other Guy", on Arthur Brooks's The Battle and The Road to Freedom, on Charles Murray's Coming Apart, and on Nicholas Eberstadt's A Nation of Takers:

We Are All Welfare Queens Now: Thinking some more on Mitt Romney's high-handed claim that one in two Americans will vote for Obama simply to better ensure their own sloth, I was reminded of Lee Atwater's famous explanation of the Southern Strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" -- that… backfires. So you say… "forced busing", "states' rights", and all that stuff…. [Now] you're talking about cutting taxes… totally economic things… a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse…. [I]f [the Southern Strategy] is getting that abstract, and that coded, then we are doing away with the racial problem…. [S]itting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

The process Atwater is describing really stretches back to 1790….

[W]hat's often missed in analyzing these tactics is how they, themselves, are evidence of progress…. [F]or a century after the Civil War, the South effectively erased the black vote. But there was an actual black vote that had to be [erased]…. It's worth critiquing how the machine manipulated the black vote in Chicago, but it's also worth noting there was a black vote… people exercising their own wills and prerogatives….

[A]s tactics aimed at suppressing black citizenship become more abstract, they… [begin] enveloping non-blacks. Atwater's point that the policies of the Southern Strategy hurt blacks more than whites is well taken. But some whites were hurt too…. [A]t each level what you see is more non-black people being swept into the pool of victims…. At each interval the ostensible pariah grows, until [now] one in two Americans are members of the pariah class…. [And t]he party of white populism [now] finds itself writing off half the country, we are really close.

Liveblogging World War II: December 3, 1942

Clement Attlee:

This is the third time since this Government was formed that we have had an Independent Labour Party Amendment. In 1940 we had a complaint that we failed to propose a conference to bring the war to an early conclusion and establish a new social order…. Last year… there was no proposal for a conference to end the war. There was a proposal for the ending of the present economic system of financial and commercial rivalry and exploitation… and laying down the basis of a Socialist Charter, which would serve as an incentive to the German and other European workers to overthrow Nazi rule and free the populations in the occupied territories…. This time we… are asked to regret the absence of concrete proposals for the future peace and welfare of the peoples of the world and for removing the causes of war and of any prospect of a new order for the common people…. Gone are those suggestions that peace can be had now by calling a conference. What has happened to that conference? What is the Hon. Member's alternative? Gone is… the suggestion that if only we would adopt the Hon. Member's policy we could arouse the nations of Europe to do the job that the Hon. Member and his friends are not joining in doing; that is, ridding Europe of the Nazi menace….

I am concerned about the peoples who are at the present time in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, Norway, and all those places…. These people are… not seeking their future peace and welfare in these nice phrases. They are looking to the valour and the skill of their fellow men who are fighting. They know, if the Hon. Member and his friends do not know it, that the first need of all is the destruction of Nazism. The fighters in North Africa and the fighters of Stalingrad and the victors of El Alamein are making concrete proposals, not just theoretical proposals…. I ask the Hon. Members below the Gangway what contribution they are making?…. All the other Amendments are put forward by people who say, "We want these things but we recognise that to get these things we must win this war and overturn Nazi tyranny." That is absolutely absent from the Hon. Member's Amendment….

Who would be pleased if the Hon. Member got some people into the Lobby? The only people who would be pleased would be our enemies, the Nazis. They would put across, "Growing strength of the I.L.P. against the war." The hon. Member has so drafted his Amendment that it would suit Dr. Goebbels very well. Last year he talked of a new social order. This time he talked, in the very phrases of Hitler, of a new order for European people. What scope for enemy propaganda that they should be able to say that so many have followed the Hon. Member in his new order. The Hon. Member must be more careful in his drafting….

There were people—of course, not the Hon. Member—who did not understand that for complicated campaigns in war it takes a long time to prepare…. [P]roposals for peace and reconstruction also take a considerable time to prepare…. [I]t was stressed in the Amendment yesterday how necessary it was that we should get at once into contact with other countries, particularly the United States and Russia. Those contacts are already being made….

My Hon. Friend the Member for Llanelly (Mr. J. Griffiths), in his admirable speech, dealt with the economic foundations of peace and pointed out that we must repair the broken fabric of world economy…. I can assure him he is preaching to the converted. The Government are resolved that we shall not go back to a scarcity economy…. An internationalist is not an emigré, because he is at home in all countries. The International Labour Office was no more specially at home in Geneva than it is in Ottawa. The International Labour Office is one of those pieces of international machinery, set up after the last war, that has lived on and will continue to live after this war, and we intend to use it to the full….

In these reconstruction problems you come to a certain point at which you reach the stage of decision and action. Hon. Members say that we ought to have acted earlier. We would like to have acted earlier, just as we would have liked to make some of these attacks earlier, but we have to consider what the position is. It is very easy to think that now, when things are going all right, but things have not been too easy. Industrialists have not had time yet to think very much about the reconstruction of industry. We are only just completing the phase of turning over our great industrial machine from a peace economy to a war economy; it will be a tremendous work to bring it back to a peace economy and put it on a new basis of economy. It is the same with all the other items. Therefore, I say to Hon. Members that if they listened to the review given by the Paymaster-General they will know that not one of these matters is being neglected, but that it is quite impossible for anyone to come to the House and say from this bench, in a quarter of an hour, "Here is my answer to the whole problem"…

Noted for December 3, 2012

Worth Noting:

• Brian Powell: Oklahoma, Where The Denial Comes Right Behind The Drought
• "A spinning penny will land as tails about 80 percent of the time, Diaconis says, because the extra material on the head side shifts the center of mass slightly"
• Daniel Kuehn: "Bob Murphy and Scott Sumner both have a fair chance of being wrong about Krugman on any given dayBut when they agree about Krugman, the probability that they are wrong goes up considerably. And if Bob Wenzel agrees, it's a near certainty…. To be blunt, if you thought the [Krugman 1998] Japan paper was principally about how fiscal policy is the way you fight liquidity traps, you don't understand the Japan paper…"
• Paul Krugman: "Mitch McConnell finally mentioned a few sort-of specifics about what spending cuts the GOP wants: raising the Medicare age, charging higher premiums to affluent Medicare recipients, and changing the price indexing of Social Security…. [A] bit more than $300 billion [added up over the next ten years]. Getting this would, by the way, impose substantial hardship… [and raise] only about one-fifth of what Obama is proposing to raise by higher taxes. And that’s it; has anyone heard even a peep from the GOP about what else they’d like to cut? This is pathetic – and these people are definitely not serious…" And: "John Boehner has just declared that he’s going to hold the full faith and credit of the United States hostage every time we hit the debt limit. Nor will it be a case of holding the nation at gunpoint until it meets GOP demands; Republicans are signaling that they don’t intend to make any specific proposals, they’re just going to yell and stamp their feet until Obama soothes them somehow. So this is going to be nightmarish, unless Obama surrenders — which I don’t think he will (because he shouldn’t). And one thing to think about: if the next two years are, as they seem likely to be, one long Republican tantrum, the 2014 election is not going to be a normal midterm. It will instead be a referendum on GOP obstructionism, which may attract a lot more attention — and much higher turnout — than normal…"
• djw: "[W]hile there’s generally a hefty amount of dishonesty in Douthat’s columns, one claim from today’s stands out: 'with fertility in decline across Mexico and Latin America, it isn’t clear that the United States can continue to rely heavily on immigrant birthrates to help drive population growth.' The US currently admits a tiny fraction of those who apply for legal resident status, and the number who apply is almost certainly depressed by the extraordinarily long odds of success, especially for those without a plausible asylum claim or family reunification angle…"
• Steve M.:: "The Wall Street Journal has just published this interview with wingnut Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield…. 'We have now an American political party and a European one. Not all Americans who vote for the European party want to become Europeans. But it doesn't matter because that's what they're voting for. They're voting for dependency, for lack of ambition, and for insolvency…. [I]f we get serious about what it means to vote, we immediately go to the notion of an informed voter. And if you get serious about that, you go all the way to voting as a wise choice. That would be a true voter. The others are all lesser voters, or even not voting at all. They're just indicating a belief, or a whim, but not making a wise choice. That's probably because they're not wise.'… (Wonder how much Mansfield thinks their votes should count. Three-fifths of a person, perhaps?) Republicans: Do you want to save your party? Do you want it to be viable in future presidential elections? Then you need to cut Murdoch loose…"
• Duncan Black: "I know we mostly can't count on the press to highlight the contradictions, but I wonder if any of the Republican voters who probably were genuinely worried about their Medicare will notice that the Republican demand is that Obama cut Medicare?"
• David Randall: "The Average Investor Is His Own Worst Enemy: Terrance Odean, a finance professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business, has spent his career studying a very specific type of investor: the one who is overconfident, shortsighted and far more likely to snap up a stock at the worst possible moment than to make the kind of contrarian bet that pays off in the long run. Odean's specialty, in other words, is the average investor. 'Many of the mistakes investors make come from a lack of any understanding of the innate disadvantages they face', Odean says…"

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Worth Looking at:

The ultimate public safety video:

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

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

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

AUNT SALLY: "Good gracious! anybody hurt?"

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

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates::

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

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

That's pretty deep. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Liveblogging World War II: December 2, 1942

"…the Italian Navigator has just landed in the New World…"

December 2, 1942: Enrico Fermi and Atomic Chicago:

Early in 1942 Enrico Fermi and a team of physicists gathered at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory. Their goal was to develop a self-sustaining nuclear pile. This was the first step needed to produce the bomb.

Put simply, the scientists would arrange graphite blocks and uranium pellets in a certain way. Since nobody knew what would happen when the pile was finished, control rods were inserted as a safety measure.

A new lab for the project was being built in suburban Argonne. Then the construction workers went on strike. Fermi decided to push ahead without delay, using a room under the stands of Stagg Field, the university's unused football stadium. Since the university president probably would have vetoed the location, he was not told about it.

On the afternoon of December 2, after a hearty lunch, Fermi and his team tested the pile. The control rods were slowly withdrawn. The reactions of the materials were measured. Fermi made his calculations using the most advanced equipment available--a six-inch slide rule.

The scientists were nervous. If the pile got out of control, there might be an explosion, or a radiation leak, or any number of possibilities that hadn't even been imagined. Still Fermi pressed on, adjusting the rods and trying different variables. After four-and-a-half minutes, he gave the order "Zip in!"

"There was a small cheer," one of the team recalled. "The experiment was a success."

The atomic age was launched. Later Argonne Laboratory was finished, and Fermi's team moved out of its cramped quarters under the football grandstand. Argonne is currently operated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Michael Grunwald Is Shrill: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps Weblogging?

Michael Grunwald: Fiscal Cliff Fictions: Let’s All Agree to Pretend the GOP Isn’t Full of It:

It’s really amazing to see political reporters dutifully passing along Republican complaints that President Obama’s opening offer in the fiscal cliff talks is just a recycled version of his old plan, when those same reporters spent the last year dutifully passing along Republican complaints that Obama had no plan. It’s even more amazing to see them pass along Republican outrage that Obama isn’t cutting Medicare enough, in the same matter-of-fact tone they used during the campaign to pass along Republican outrage that Obama was cutting Medicare.

This isn’t just cognitive dissonance. It’s irresponsible reporting. Mainstream media outlets don’t want to look partisan, so they ignore the BS…. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans insisted that anyone who said they wanted to cut Medicare was a demagogue, because I’m more than three weeks old.

I’ve written a lot about the GOP’s defiance of reality–its denial of climate science, its simultaneous denunciations of Medicare cuts and government health care, its insistence that debt-exploding tax cuts will somehow reduce the debt—so I often get accused of partisanship. But it’s simply a fact that Republicans controlled Washington during the fiscally irresponsible era when President Clinton’s budget surpluses were transformed into the trillion-dollar deficit that President Bush bequeathed to President Obama… the fiscal cliff was created in response to GOP threats to force the U.S. government to default…. The press can’t figure out how to weave those facts into the current narrative without sounding like it’s taking sides, so it simply pretends that yesterday never happened.

Noted for December 2, 2012

Worth Noting:

• Paul Krugman: "We now know that Romney’s internal polls were wildly wrong, and that, incredibly, he went into Election Day confident of victory. My immediate question is not so much why those polls were wrong, but rather why the campaign didn’t have severe doubts about what its pollsters were telling them.... Why wasn’t Romney, or someone else at the top level, asking hard questions about why the internal polls were so different, and why the pollsters believed they knew so much better, not just than the public polls, but than the obviously confident Obama team?... All this in turn ties in, I think, with a phenomenon I notice a lot on the right (you can see it often in the comments on this blog): the persistent portrayal of people who disagree with them as marginal figures with trivial support..."
• Mark Thoma sends us to Laura Tyson: "The single most important factor behind the projected growth in federal spending is the growth in health care spending, driven primarily by the growth in Medicare spending per beneficiary. The outlook has already improved as a result of significant changes in the delivery and payment of health care services in the Affordable Care Act. As a result of these changes, growth in Medicare spending per enrollee is projected to slow to 3.1 percent a year during the next decade, about the same as the annual growth of nominal G.D.P. per capita and about two percentage points slower than the annual growth of private insurance premiums per beneficiary..."
• Nate Silver: When Internal Polls Mislead, a Whole Campaign May Be To Blame
• "And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works"
• Jeremy Stein: Large-Scale Asset Purchases
• Jules Dupuit: "It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches … What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich … And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class customers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous"
• Ronald Coase and Nin Wang: Urging Economists to Step Away From the Blackboard
• Duncan Black: "Elsewhere in the article someone discusses the [Romney] family's commitment to public service. Argh. This isn't about Romney, just this conceit that being a member of Congress, or a governor, or the fucking president, is about "public service." There are public servants, like the teachers everybody dumps on these days, but people with high paying cushy jobs which virtually guarantee them a lifetime of future even cushier even more high paying jobs are hardly making some sort of sacrifice for good"
• John Holbo: Political Dog-Whistles Don't Have an Off-Switch for the Dog Whistle Part
• Scott Lemieux: Whitewashing Jefferson: "Corey Robin has largely saved me from having to respond to David Post…"

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Worth Looking at:

No, people who don't drive fuel-efficient Priuses don't guzzle additional gas by driving further...

Noted for December 1, 2012

Worth Noting:

• With a 2012:IV GDP growth rate now forecast at 1%/year, alarm bells ought to be ringing everywhere: more economic stimulus to boost demand is necessary--via monetary policy, via financial policy (especially housing finance), and via fiscal policy. The fuss over the "fiscal cliff" is crowding this out.
• Paul Ryan thinks the "urban vote" doesn't vote based on the issues.
• C.W. Anderson, Emily Bell and Clay Shirky: Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present
• Alberto Alesina continues to evade all the important issues: since 2008 the rebuttal to what he says has been: "yes, usually, but things are very different in a liquidity trap". He has never dealt with this argument. Because he has never dealt with this argument, he has had a baleful influence on public policy. And he continues to fail to deal with the "in a liquidity trap, things are different" argument. I am genuinely at my wit's end.
• David Dayen: White House Makes Aggressive Opening Bid in Fiscal Slope Negotiations
• David Beckworth continues his mission to the unwashed who do not understand what "debt monetization" is. The refusal to think in IS-LM terms continues to exact an extremely heavy price from the minds of the Austerians.
• Michael Grunwald: Fiscal Cliff Fictions: Let’s All Agree to Pretend the GOP Isn’t Full of It
• Lawyers, Guns, and Money vs. the Washington Post and Richard Cohen: We are all SPARTACUS!
• Jonathan Chait: George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush Become Non-People to the Republicans

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Worth Looking at:

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• Matt O'Brien: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/the-stunning-cost-of-bad-economic-ideas-in-the-1930s-and-today/265696/
• Paul Krugman: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/destructive-responsibility/: "Britain… practiced destructive orthodoxy in the 20s [but] floated the pound in 1931, while France clung to its restored gold standard and suffered accordingly…. [A]ppropriate macroeconomic policy depends on the situation. Rules designed to prevent irresponsible inflation and/or deficits may help when inflation is your problem; when you are instead a depressed economy in a liquidity trap, they become a lead-weighted straitjacket."

Liveblogging World War II: December 1, 1942

CA U.S.S. New Orleans:

The Battle of Tassafaronga:

The plan was for Japanese fast destroyers to deliver… [a supply] drop on the night of the 30th November…. [T]he US Navy despatched Task Force 67 to intercept. The US ships should have been well placed to effect an ambush as they had the significant advantage of Radar on a proportion of their ships. The US ships did identify the Japanese force by Radar and launched 24 torpedoes at them. If most, or even any, of the 24 torpedoes had hit their targets the subsequent controversies about the Battle of Tassafaronga would probably have never emerged. Unfortunately they did not. The US Navy had yet to recognise that their Mark 15 torpedoes used from ships, like their Mark 14 torpedoes on submarines, were not effective…. So in this action when the Japanese realised they were under attack they were able to swiftly respond. Their Long Lance torpedoes were very effective and did terrible damage to the US ships….

Herbert Brown, a seaman on USS New Orleans described the scene after the torpedo hit:

I had to see. I walked alongside the silent turret two and was stopped by a lifeline stretched from the outboard port lifeline to the side of the turret. Thank God it was there, for one more step and I would have pitched head first into the dark water thirty feet below. The bow was gone. One hundred and twenty five feet of ship and number one main battery turret with three 8 inch guns were gone. Eighteen hundred tons of ship were gone. Oh my God, all those guys I went through boot camp with – all gone.

The Battle did, however, prove to be a turning point. Despite the damage done to the US ships the Japanese were still unable to complete the resupply mission. Subsequent attempts to drop resupply loads in the water were shot up by the US planes from Guadalcanal. Soon the Japanese had to recognise that their attempt to dislodge the US forces from Guadalcanal had failed and they would have to withdraw.

Nate Silver Tells Us What He Thinks of Politico: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Weblogging

Bill Hickey:

NATE SILVER: What's remarkable for me is that you had some journalist for Politico who tweeted out "All Nate's doing is averaging polls and counting electoral votes? That's the secret sauce?." Well, yeah, and the fact that you can't comprehend that very basic thing, that says more about you than it does about me, right?

BILL SIMMONS: It was like passive aggressive--coming after you but they couldn't find a good way to do it. 

NATE SILVER: Politico is a "who won the day" kind of thing, right? They're trying to cover it like it's sports but not in an intelligent way at all. They want to create noise, basically. Their whole thing is you have to have a lead story about some gaffe that somebody made on the campaign trail…. In politics, you can have a month where nothing of any import whatsoever happens. But you still have to have Politico produce a paper seven times a week, and that's when they're trying to start trouble. 

Nate Silver is, of course, correct: he is a wizard.

And bonus Charles Pierce:

Things In Politico That Make Me Want To Guzzle Antifreeze, Part the Infinity: I've become a connoisseur of Charlie Mahtesian's "On Politics" column in Tiger Beat On The Potomac…. Between belaboring the obvious… and assuring us that Willard Romney had vast reservoirs of support abroad in the land that the rest of us were sadly overlooking, Mahtesian was the go-to source for all things fact-averse…. Today… he returns to the fray…

"Neither of the candidates inspired rural voters to go vote," James Gimpel, a University of Maryland political scientist, told the Daily Yonder, "although there was even less enthusiasm for Obama than there was for Romney." Romney did, however, manage to win the rural vote by a higher percentage than John McCain. In 2008, McCain won 53.3 percent to Barack Obama's 45.6 percent, but Romney won 58.9 percent among rural voters. That figure tracked almost exactly with George W. Bush's rural performance in 2004.

Call me cynical, but I suspect there was another factor that might have held turnout down among "rural" voters as regards the current president of the United States, a factor that does not, ah, apply to any previous Democratic presidential nominee.

My goal in life now is to live long enough to see the last of the "Mitt Would Have Won If Nobody But White Folks Voted" stories.

We Dodged a Real Bullet in Not Electing Mitt Romney

Noam Scheiber:

The Internal Polls That Made Mitt Romney Think He'd Win: It’s no secret that the Romney campaign believed it was headed for victory on Election Day…. The confidence… was such that Romney even passed on writing a concession speech…. Less well-known, however, are the details of the polls that led Romney to believe…. In New Hampshire, the final internal polling average has Romney up 3.5 points, whereas he lost by 5.6. In Colorado, the final internal polling average has Romney up 2.5 points; he lost by 5.4…. Set aside Florida and Virginia, for which I don’t have internal poll numbers, but which the campaign apparently believed it was poised to win…. [T]he Iowa number… showing the race tied even though Romney ended up losing by almost 6 points…. Together, New Hampshire, Colorado, and Iowa go most of the way toward explaining why the Romney campaign believed it was so well-positioned. When combined with North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia—the trio of states the Romney campaign assumed were largely in the bag—Romney would bank 267 electoral votes, only three shy of the magic number.

Furthermore, according to Newhouse, the campaign’s final internal polls had Romney down a mere two points in Ohio--a state that would have put him comfortably over the top--and Team Romney generally believed it had momentum…. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota are also of interest. Although internal campaign numbers for these states are much closer to the actual results… they at the very least reflect a flaw in the campaign’s assumption that undecided voters would break Romney’s way. If the internal polls are correct, roughly 80 percent of undecided voters actually broke toward Obama….

In retrospect, of course, there wasn’t any momentum to speak of, at least not toward Romney. How is it that Newhouse’s polls detected momentum nonetheless?… When pressed on why many of his final numbers showed an erroneous uptick for Romney, he offered that “it may be a function of Sunday polling”—a valid concern given that many pollsters are wary of polling on weekends.

Whatever the case, it’s clear that Romney’s closest aides and confidants interpreted the numbers quite literally. One Romney aide told me that he ran into Tagg Romney, the candidate’s eldest son, as the results came in on election night. “He looked like he was in a complete state of shock,” the aide said. “[As if] these numbers cannot be real.”

Steve M.:

Mitt Romney Would Have Been a Terrible President: The Romney people were not just ignoring the Nate Silvers of the world, who were nearly certain that Obama would win--they were ignoring the Joe Scarboroughs of the world, who said that Romney might win but the race was a toss-up. And they were doing this even though their cockeyed-optimist numbers didn't point to a sure win…. They were 100% certain they'd win because they were "only three [electoral votes] shy"! Close, I guess, counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and GOP campaigns. I think I've said this before, but this is the kind of hubris that leads to Iraq-style quagmires: you believe everything that confirms your worldview and disbelieve everything that doesn't; you get pleasing data stovepiped to yourself, draw conclusions you like, then bump those conclusions even more in your own deluded head.

Tyler Cowen Is Three Months Out-of-Date: No, the Recovery Is Not Strong Enough to Shrug Off a Demand Shock

Ryan Avent:

Fiscal policy: When indeed?: TYLER COWEN tweets: "If we won't face up to "the cliff" at 2.7% gdp growth, when again are we hoping to face it?" One can't be sure, but the point Mr Cowen seems to be making is that America's 2.7% annual growth rate in the third quarter would seem to be fast enough to accept most of the fiscal cuts that are due to hit at the end of the year.

But the current estimate of the fourth quarter real GDP growth rate is less than 1.0%. The recovery is not well-established enough to take a significant adverse demand shock.

Must-Read Weblog of the Month: Lawyers, Guns & Money

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com

Rich Hornbeck and Dan Keniston: Creative Destruction from the Great Boston Fire of 1872: Barriers to Urban Growth Illuminated

Rich Hornbeck and Dan Keniston: Creative Destruction from the Great Boston Fire of 1872: Barriers to Urban Growth Illuminated

What can we learn about rigidities and the process of urban transformation?

Chicago 1871, Boston 1872, Baltimore 1904, San Francisco 1906, Chelsea 1908, Salem 1914. Christine Rosen's book The Limits of Power--on the first four--mostly on how opportunities for change were not grasped because of vested political interests.

Model: you overbuild relative to the current neighborhood, you watch over time as the neighborhood gets richer and richer, and then you tear down and build a new building when your building falls below some relative trigger value. The fire disrupts this process, and requires starting over.

By 1894, buildings in the burned area are higher-quality buildings than elsewhere in Boston by about 30%--and buildings outside the burned area up to 800 feet away from the burned area are higher-quality buildings too.

Thus they see urban amenity spillovers having effects on the scale and quality of new construction...

David Beckworth Correctly Says That the Hard-Money Austerians Are Not Entitled to Their Own Facts

He's looking at you, William Poole, David Warsh, Allan Meltzer, Arnold Kling, John Taylor, Michael Panzner, Mickey Levy, and others…

David Beckworth:

Macro and Other Market Musings: The Fed, The Budget Deficit, and The Facts: My last post generated some heated push back from the hard-money types. That post showed the Fed sill has about the same share of treasuries, 15%, as it did before the crisis. Thus, the large run up in public debt over the past four years has been funded mostly by individuals, their financial intermediaries, and foreigners. The Fed has not been the great enabler of the government deficits as claimed by the hard-money types. This fact seems to have been very uncomfortable for them because they largely ignored it.  Instead, they quibbled with my definition of debt monetization and resorted to ad-hominen attacks. 

Given these responses, it is probably too much to hope for further meaningful engagement with them.

Michael Mann vs. Nate Silver on Global Warming

Ask Nate Silver about global warming skeptics, and he will say something like:

One type of skepticism flows from self-interest. In 2011 alone, the fossil fuel industry spent about $300 million on lobbying activities.... What they say should not be mistaken for an attempt to make accurate predictions.... A second type of skepticism falls into the category of contrarianism. In any contentious debate, some people will find it advantageous to align themselves with the crowd, while a smaller number will come to see themselves as persecuted outsiders.... “If you look at climate, if you look at ozone, if you look at cigarette smoking, there is always a community of people who are skeptical of the science-driven results,” Rood told me.

Liveblogging World War II: November 30, 1942

Nazi training film: how to die fighting Russian tanks:

Macro Advisers Analysis: Effects of the Fiscal Cliff in 2013 and Beyond...

http://macroadvisers.blogspot.com/2012/11/ma-analysis-effects-of-fiscal-cliff-in.html

"global population [may] top out at 8.5 Billion in 2030"

http://alephblog.com/2012/11/29/on-human-fertility-part-2/

jonathan Weisman of the New York Times Is Very Unhappy That the Democratic Plan Is Not a Republican Plan

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

Jonathan Weisman: White House Offers New Fiscal Plan, Prodding G.O.P.: WASHINGTON — House Republicans said on Thursday that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner presented the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a detailed proposal to avert the year-end fiscal crisis with $1.6 trillion in tax increases over 10 years, an immediate new round of stimulus spending, home mortgage refinancing and a permanent end to Congressional control over statutory borrowing limits.

The proposal, loaded with Democratic priorities and short on detailed spending cuts, was likely to meet strong Republican resistance. In exchange for locking in the $1.6 trillion in added revenues, President Obama embraced $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other entitlements, to be worked out next year, with no guarantees.

He did propose some upfront cuts in programs like farm price supports, but did not specify an amount or any details. And senior Republican aides familiar with the offer said those initial spending cuts might well be outnumbered by upfront spending increases, including at least $50 billion in infrastructure spending, mortgage relief, an extension of unemployment insurance and a deferral of automatic cuts to physician reimbursements under Medicare…

"Might well be outnumbered"? Can't Republicans count.

A real reporter would have asked Boehner: "Where is your plan?"

But not Jonathan Weisman.

The Fiscal Cliff: Project Syndicate

And we are live: America’s Political Recession:

BERKELEY – The odds are now about 36% that the United States will be in a recession next year. The reason is entirely political: partisan polarization has reached levels never before seen, threatening to send the US economy tumbling over the “fiscal cliff” – the automatic tax increases and spending cuts that will take effect at the beginning of 2013 unless Democrats and Republicans agree otherwise.

Can't Any Republicans Play This Game?

Ezra Klein looks at the dirigible explosion in bemusement:

The GOP’s Medicare confusion: The austerity crisis talks have hit a peculiar impasse. The problem isn’t, as most analysts expected, taxes…. And the particular Medicare problem isn’t that Democrats are refusing the GOP’s proposed Medicare cuts. It’s that Republicans are refusing to name their Medicare cuts.

Epistemic Closure Watch

Ed Luce:

Right up until he convincingly lost the election, Mr Romney thought he was going to win. Or at the very least, his team believed it would be razor close: on the night of November 6 there were four Romney jets waiting on the tarmac at Boston airport to fly lawyers to the scene of contested swing states.

Wow. Oh wow.

Running Around Cambridge, Massachusetts at the End of November Is a Lot Less Fun When Your Winter Coat Is in Your Suitcase in Dallas

Thank you very much, American Airlines.

That is all.

Fun fact: in the end the national poll that might have been the most accurate was the Rand poll

The Collapse of Long-Run Potential GDP Estimates Continues…

Some happy thoughts…

United States Senate Republican Policy Committee: The Constitutional Option: The Senate’s Power to Make Procedural Rules by Majority Vote

http://web.archive.org/web/20050613001438/http://rpc.senate.gov/_files/Apr2505ConstOptSD.pdf

Mike the Mad Biologist: Something to Remember When You Hear the Heritage Foundation and Other Conservative Faith-Tanks Discuss Our Fiscal Crisis

http://mikethemadbiologist.com/2012/11/23/something-to-remember-when-you-hear-the-heritage-foundation-and-other-conservative-faith-tanks-discuss-our-fiscal-crisis/

Il Houng Lee, Murtaza Syed, and Liu Xueyan: Is China Over-Investing and Does it Matter?

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12277.pdf

May I Say That I Really Have Absolutely No Idea What Robert Lucas Is Talking About...

…when he claims that the post-World War II evidence "overwhelmingly supports the dominant importance of real shocks" to tastes and technologies in explaining fluctuations in unemployment at frequencies higher than 1/10yr?

What is that evidence?

Where is it? What shocks to tastes drove the unemployment rate up from 5.3% in 1989 to 7.6% in 1992? What shocks to technologies did so?

Dave Johnson: I bought Nexus 7, Cant Recommend Highly Enough, Apple Is Over

http://www.seeingtheforest.com/archives/2012/11/update_i_bought.htm

Karl Smith Sends Us to Simon Blackburn on Thomas Nagel on Materialism

http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2012/11/16/blackburn-on-nagel-on-materialism/

Simon Blackburn: Nagel’s central idea is that there are things that science, as it is presently conceived, cannot possibly explain. The current conception is that, given a purely physical beginning, everything else – chemistry, biology, life, mind, consciousness, intelligence, values, understandings, even science – follows on by natural processes. Particles beget atoms beget molecules beget enzymes beget proteins beget life begets Homo sapiens who begets the Royal Society and the rules of tennis. We do not understand every step in this process, naturally, but we can be reasonably confident of its overall shape and confident, too, that any remaining gaps that can be closed will be closed only by more understanding of the same broad kind that we already have….

And:

Karl Smith: I hesitate to contradict Simon Blackburn, but I am not sure his description of the “current conception” does it justice.

Romney Adviser Stuart Stevens Brags About Losing Poor Voters

Romney Advisor Stuart Stevens:

On Nov. 6, Mitt Romney carried the majority of every economic group except those with less than $50,000 a year in household income. That means he carried the majority of middle-class voters. While John McCain lost white voters under 30 by 10 points, Romney won those voters by seven points, a 17-point shift…. The Republican Party has problems, but as we go forward, let’s remember that any party that captures the majority of the middle class must be doing something right. Republican ideals — Mitt Romney — carried the day.

Benjy Sarlin of Talking Points Memo comment:

Unfortunately for Romney, poor and minority votes counted just the same as the allegedly superior votes Stevens favored. The result was an electoral college blowout for the president powered by strong turnout and margins among young voters, Latinos, African Americans, and women. But Stevens had an explanation for that, too. Obama was “a charismatic African American president with a billion dollars, no primary and a media that often felt morally conflicted about being critical. How easy is that to replicate?”

Ezra Klein: Mitch McConnell’s five biggest whoppers on the filibuster

Ezra Klein:

Mitch McConnell’s five biggest whoppers on the filibuster: The specific changes [to Senate rules] Reid envisions aren’t particularly dramatic: He wants to be able to make the motion to debate a bill — but not the vote to pass it — immune to the filibuster; he wants the time it would take to break a filibuster to be shorter; and he wants whoever is filibustering to have to hold the floor of the Senate and talk. None of these changes would alter the basic reality of the modern U.S. Senate, which is that it takes 60 votes to get almost anything done. In my view, that means they wouldn’t do much to fix the Senate at all. Nevertheless, McConnell is furious. But many of the arguments he was making on the floor Monday don’t hold up to even the barest scrutiny.

Liveblogging World War II: November 29, 1942

402745 Pilot Officer Rawdon Hume MIDDLETON R.A.A.F.:

Attached to 149 Squadron, R.A.F.

Night of 28th-29th November, 1942, in raid on Turin, Italy

Flight Sergeant Middleton was captain and first pilot of a Stirling aircraft detailed to attack the Fiat works at Turin in November 1942. Great difficulty was experienced on the way to the target and while over the target the aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire. Flight Sergeant Middleton was badly wounded and his right eye was destroyed. The second pilot was also badly wounded. The possibilities of abandoning the aircraft or landing in northern France were discussed but Flight Sergeant Middleton stated his intention to attempt to reach the English coast.

After crossing the Channel there was only sufficient fuel for five minutes flying. Flight Sergeant Middleton flew the aircraft parallel with the coast and ordered the crew to abandon the aircraft. Five of the crew left the aircraft and two remained to assist him. The aircraft crashed into the sea and all remaining onboard were killed.

Flight Sergeant Middleton was determined to attack the target regardless of the consequences and not to allow his crew to fall into enemy hands. While all the crew displayed heroism of a high order, the urge to do so came from Flight Sergeant Middleton, whose fortitude and strength of will made possible the completion of the mission. His devotion to duty in the face of overwhelming odds is unsurpassed in the annals of the Royal Air Force

Felix Salmon: The economics of artisanal chocolate

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/11/28/the-economics-of-artisanal-chocolate/

Things I Forgot to Note at the Time: Eschaton Memories

Barack Obama's greatest unforced error, via Duncan Black:

Eschaton: Memories: SOTU 2010.

Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will. Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don’t. And if I have to enforce this discipline by veto, I will. ... I know that some in my own party will argue that we cannot address the deficit or freeze government spending when so many are still hurting. I agree, which is why this freeze will not take effect until next year, when the economy is stronger. But understand – if we do not take meaningful steps to rein in our debt, it could damage our markets, increase the cost of borrowing, and jeopardize our recovery – all of which could have an even worse effect on our job growth and family incomes.

We had recovery summer and then it was all better.

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Winged Angelic Reasoning Beings vs. Jumped-Up Monkeys with Evolved Humean Heuristics Weblogging: Lee Arnold Summons the Ghost of Kurt Gödel

Lee Arnold summons the ghost of Kurt Gödel to make the careful argument that are minds might not be "mechanical": after all

Lee Arnold: It could remain problematic. There is also the possibility that if reason is an evolutionary development, we still may not be able to describe how it happened, nor run a Turing machine to evolve it again in silico. Consider Kurt Gödel's remarks on several consequences of his own theorem, quoted in Hao Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy (MIT Press, 1996):

The human mind is incapable of formulating (or mechanizing) all its mathematical intuitions. That is, if it has succeeded in formulating some of them, this very fact yields new intuitive knowledge, for example the consistency of this formalism. This fact may be called the 'incompletability' of mathematics. On the other hand, on the basis of what has been proved so far [1972], it remains possible that there may exist (and even be empirically discoverable) a theorem-proving machine which in fact IS equivalent to mathematical intuition, but cannot be PROVED to be so, nor even be proved to yield only CORRECT theorems of finitary number theory. (pp.184-5)

Either the human mind surpasses all machines (to be more precise: it can decide more number-theoretical questions than any machine) or else there exist number-theoretical questions undecidable for the human mind. [It is not excluded that both alternatives may be true. -- Wang] (p.185)

My incompleteness theorem makes it likely that mind is not mechanical, or else mind cannot understand its own mechanism. If my result is taken together with the rationalistic attitude which Hilbert had and which was not refuted by my results, then [we can infer] the sharp result that mind is not mechanical. This is so, because, if the mind were a machine, there would, contrary to this rationalistic attitude, exist number-theoretic questions undecidable for the human mind. (p.186-7)

Improbable Research: Radioactive Cod Fillets

http://www.improbable.com/2012/11/09/atomic-bomb-v-cod-fillets-1955-study/

David Brin on Fermi's Paradox

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2012/11/are-we-alone-in-cosmos-cursed-by-fermis.html