Brad DeLong

Liveblogging World War II: January 19, 1943

Charlotte News:

General Montgomery's Eighth Army was pursuing Rommel to within 40 miles southeast of Tripoli, at Tarhuna. The day before, the closest British force was reported still 100 miles from the Libyan port. Another column had pushed along the coast road through Misurata to Zliten, 90 miles from Tripoli. The plan apparently was to drive both columns either headlong as pincers to capture Tripoli or to use the coastal column as the capturing vehicle while the other bypassed Tripoli to cut off Rommel's approach to Tunisia.

As the Eighth Army had swept, uncontested, through and beyond Misurata, a central narrows on the coast between the sea and marshes which would have provided Rommel the best position for a stand before Tripoli, it now appeared, accurately, that Rommel was simply conceding Tripoli and was instead concentrating on shifting as much manpower and equipment as he could into Tunisia to shore up the forces of General Walter Nehring….

From the northern Russian front, in the vicinity of Leningrad, news came for the first time in several weeks, indicating, significantly, that the Soviets had recaptured the fortress town of Schluesselburg, 22 miles east of Leningrad, a transportation depot, opening up a five-mile wide land corridor to Leningrad and ending the blockade of that key city endured since August, 1941. During the siege, the only means of supply to the city’s million inhabitants had been either by air transport or over the frozen winter ice of Lake Ladoga.

In the Ukraine, the Russian armies moved to within 118 miles of Russia’s primary steel city, Kharkov.

Finally, from New Guinea came word that MacArthur’s forces had captured Sanananda, the last toehold for the Japanese on the Papuan Peninsula…

Remember, the Dormouse Says Medicare Is the Best-Working Part of Our Health Care Financing System: Not the Jefferson Airplane Weblogging

Ann Marie Marciarille:

Missouri State of Mind: Go Ask Alice: Alice… a friend… octogenarian… had fallen outside her home, broken her hip, had surgery, and was now in rehab for her Medicare-sanctioned 21 day stay… during Medicare’s open enrollment this past fall, financial exigencies had pressed her to abandon fee-for-service Medicare for a Medicare Managed Care plan. And, you guessed it, the Medicare Managed Care plan kicked in mid-treatment on January 1, 2013….

Disenrolled from fee for service Medicare – and unable to keep the surgical follow-up appointment from a surgeon who takes Medicare assignment but does not participate in Medicare Managed Care – and moved to a Medicare Managed Care rehab funded facility, Alice was advised that this was her problem to unravel. Her new Medicare Managed Care insurance plan vacillated between advising her she was not an enrollee in their plan and advising that, even were she an enrollee, no follow up post-surgical appointment was necessary….

Bear in mind that Medicare is that portion of our health care system that ranks highest in patient satisfaction data.

Not Being Asleep at the Switch: DeLong Self-Smackdown Watch

Paul Krugman:

What Did I Know, And When Did I Know It?: People have been poring over the just-released 2007 Fed transcripts, and the main surprise seems to be how complacent the institution was. Some members of the open market committee, including Janet Yellen and, let’s give credit where due, Tim Geithner, seem to have had a sense of dread; but the overall consensus was that nothing really bad would happen….

It seems to me that the really big determinant of whether you were intellectually ready for this crisis was how much attention you paid to events in the late 1990s — the crisis in emerging Asia, LTCM here, and the Japanese liquidity trap. I paid a lot of attention back then (as did Nouriel Roubini)…. And the result is that I’ve had a pretty good stretch; the only big thing I got wrong, I think, was in underestimating the stickiness of wages, and hence inflation, and therefore overestimating the risks of actual deflation…

I, by contrast, got it more-or-less completely wrong in that I drew the wrong lessons from the 1990s and before:

Orin Kerr Picks the Wrong Moment to Set Up a Straw Man, and Gets Properly Smacked Down by James Boyle

James Boyle:

The Prosecution of Aaron: A Response to Orin Kerr: Orin… expresses both explicit and implicit criticism of the people who are protesting Aaron’s treatment for being overly personalistic, focused on his particular qualities, his famous friends etc — there are repeated mentions of his friendship with Larry Lessig, for example.  The implication, it seems clear, is that we should not focus on this one case…. This seems to be a straw man.  I see no one saying “let’s only be angry about Aaron Swartz.”  Indeed, almost all of the commentaries on Aaron’s death have sought to find in it hints about what we should do better in the future…. It is true, of course, that Aaron’s friends, and there are a lot of them, have also written about Aaron.  But one can hardly accuse them of agitating only for their friend. Take Larry Lessig for example.  One can agree or disagree with him.  But one could hardly accuse him of failing to try to change the world in general, not just for his friends…

Noted for January 19, 2013

• LIE!! --> USA TODAY: "USA TODAY is proud of the polling it has done in partnership with The Gallup Organization for the past 20 years." TRUTH --> "USA TODAY is hideously embarrassed by the extraordinarily inaccurate and biased polling it has published as a result of its partnership with the Gallup Organization. It promises to try to do better in the future."

• Ezra Klein: After ‘the end of big government liberalism’: "Republicans swear to protect Medicare and Social Security…. Democrats voted to make the George W. Bush tax rates permanent for almost all Americans. This is not a stable peace. The Democrats have mostly won the debate over what the government should do, while the Republicans have mostly won the debate over how much the government should tax. Sadly, the two sides of that equation don’t come anywhere near to adding up…. For all the sound, fury and impassioned promises of huge deficit reduction, in the end both Republican leaders swore that everyone would get their benefits. The savings, we were told, would come from painless mechanisms…. Democrats aren’t much better on taxes, but they don’t need to be. Historically, it is much easier to raise taxes by a half percentage point of gross domestic product than to kick tens of millions off public health insurance."

• CSI:CIO: Assigning your CIO the job of hedging against tail risk when the major tail risk turns out to be that your CIO office goes insane...

  • The CIO curve trade that never was | FT Alphaville
  • JPM task force stunningly arrives at same conclusion as JPM chairman and CEO | FT Alphaville
  • The London Whale, an oral history | FT Alphaville
  • Did the CIO have a Kodak moment? Like, literally? | FT Alphaville
  • The Whale and the P&L (and the RWA) | FT Alphaville

• David Keohane: Koo, Posen, and other Abenomics dissenters

Neil Irwin: Federal Reserve Largely Asleep at the Switch in 2007

Neil Irwin:

The real surprise in the Fed’s 2007 transcripts: How much they knew, how little they understood: [T]here were hints of clear-headedness. Timothy Geithner… had a consistent view that fall that the financial system was unraveling and that it was no time for policy gradualism. Eric Rosengren of the Boston Fed, Janet Yellen of the San Francisco Fed, and governor Frederic Mishkin were, by the end of the year, arguing for more interest rate cuts and seemingly pulling his hair out over their colleagues’ sanguine views of the outlook….

But I expected to see much more evidence… of understanding the possibility that the entire financial system had become a house of straws built on mortgage securities that were anything but secure, with all sorts of financial institutions over-levered and overly dependent on assets that were near-impossible to value. And I expected them to understand that once a problem that deep begins correcting itself, it can spiral into all sorts of dangerous directions. Which this one did.

In Less than Three Hours, Darryl Issa (R-CA) Falls into Line...

I'm surprised everybody who votes Republican hasn't died of shame yet:

JUST KIDDING: GOP Oversight chair Issa says he no longer believes GOP debt limit plan is unconstitutional: tpm.ly/VbDHnX

— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) January 18, 2013

Joint Speaker John Boehner-Jake Sherman of Politico #FAIL

Jake Sherman:

House Republicans plan debt ceiling vote: House Republicans will vote next week on a bill that would raise the nation’s debt ceiling for three months and stop pay for members of Congress if the Senate doesn’t pass a budget, GOP officials said Friday…. It’s also a shift from House Speaker John Boehner…. But Boehner isn’t retreating on the debt ceiling without conditions; He’s framing this as a way to force Senate Democrats to lay out a budget…

Twenty-seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution:

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

Everybody in the House and Senate now knows that this Charles Krauthammer-John Boehner "no pay for the Senate unless it passes a Budget Resolution" condition is unconstitutional.

But Jake Sherman does not tell the readers of Politico. Why not?

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

The Future of American Political Economy: Deficits-and-Debts the Very Thoughtful Ezra Klein Gets One Wrong, I Think, Weblogging

Ezra Klein writes:

After ‘the end of big government liberalism’: "Republicans swear to protect Medicare and Social Security, and most recognize they can no longer hope to repeal Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Democrats voted to make the George W. Bush tax rates permanent for almost all Americans. This is not a stable peace. The Democrats have mostly won the debate over what the government should do, while the Republicans have mostly won the debate over how much the government should tax. Sadly, the two sides of that equation don’t come anywhere near to adding up. The war currently raging from cliff to cliff is about bringing taxation and commitments closer to alignment. Still, it seems probable that the conflict will, eventually, resolve largely in the Democrats’ favor. Paul Ryan’s budget and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign both proved the difficulty Republicans have in advocating fewer government benefits. For all the sound, fury and impassioned promises of huge deficit reduction, in the end both Republican leaders swore that everyone would get their benefits. The savings, we were told, would come from painless mechanisms such as competition or more flexibility for the states. It is difficult to imagine such rhetoric uprooting treasured programs — all the more so after the Republicans lost the election. Democrats aren’t much better on taxes, but they don’t need to be. Historically, it is much easier to raise taxes by a half percentage point of gross domestic product than to kick tens of millions off public health insurance.

This seems to me to get the future dynamic wrong.

And Nick Rowe Is the Latest Economist to Join the Inarticulate Dorks...

As he himself says: "One more for the 'inarticulate dork' pile. We all keep trying. One day we will all think it and write it clearly."

He's wrong. It is worth reading:

Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: Two extreme fiscal/monetary worlds: I want to imagine two extreme worlds…. In the first world (the "fiscal" world), all financial liabilities of the government are non-monetary liabilities, "bonds", that cannot be used as media of exchange. People use something else for money…. In the second world (the "monetary" world), all financial liabilities of the government are monetary liabilities, "money", that are used as media of exchange…. Government money may or may not pay interest…. Let's start with both worlds in equilibrium, and with balanced budgets. Now let's suppose the government wants to increase spending without increasing taxes. What happens to interest rates on government liabilities?

Taegan Goddard: Republican retreat kicks off with a rocky start

Taegan Goddard:

Republican retreat kicks off with a rocky start: Republicans are regrouping at an image makeover retreat in Williamsburg, Va. this week. But it's not looking so good. Reporters quickly noted that a session for lawmakers called "Discussion on Successful Communication with Minorities and Women" will actually take place in the "Burwell Plantation" room… "named after the Burwell Family, a wealthy family that owned many slaves in 18th century Southern Virginia." The irony of learning how to woo minorities in a room named after slaveholders was not lost on Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.): "I don't pick the rooms we meet in."

Michael Derby: Read the Full Fed Transcripts From 2007

http://federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomchistorical2007.htm

Senator John Cornyn: "We will raise the debt ceiling."

Greg Sargent:

Jig is up. Senator John Cornyn: "We will raise the debt ceiling." http://t.co/Lf088kl9

Brad Plumer Reads Page 69 of Alan Blinder’s ‘After the Music Stopped’

Alan Blinder’s ‘After the Music Stopped’:

Grab a new book. Open it to page 69. If the passage is compelling…. Today’s edition brings us to Alan Blinder’s “After the Music Stopped”…. On page 69, however, we see him pondering the origins of the subprime housing meltdown:

Consider the sad case of Alberto and Rosa Ramirez, a pair of Mexican American strawberry pickers in California whose annual income was in the $12,000 to $15,000 range and whose English was marginal at best. Egged on and assisted by an unscrupulous real estate agent looking for a big commission, the Ramirezes obtained a $720,000 mortgage from the notorious (and now bankrupt) New Century Financial Corporation to buy a $720,000 house. Yes, you read that right: They didn’t put a penny down, and the mortgage was forty-eight to sixty times their annual income!

The real estate agent apparently recorded their income as $12,000 per month and their occupations as “field technicians.” Slight errors. The Ramirezes moved into their McMansion with another family, and somehow, including receiving financial help from the real estate agent, managed to hang on for a few years before defaulting and losing their home to foreclosure.

Now, here’s a simple test of banking IQ: Should that mortgage have been granted? You may not be an experienced central banker, but your no answer is correct.

Unfortunately, New Century got the answer wrong in 2005 when it actually made this loan and many others like it. Other banks made similarly disgraceful loans. Yes, you are asking the right question: What were these guys smoking? Apparently, the weed was called greed. Make the loan, pocket the commission, pass it downstream, and let someone else worry about the consequences.

“Apparently, the weed was called greed.” Yep, unexpected!

I'm reviewing the book for Foreign Affairs. It's very good…

Liveblogging World War II: January 18, 1943

Sergeant Mack Morris on Guadalcanal:

I fail to see how this can last much longer. By actual figure there are 51,000 of us here and something like 8,000 Japs – all of which aren’t effectives – and this still drags on.

It must be incredible to people who have never seen this place. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re not still rounding up strays a year from now unless they all starve to death. It isn’t the Japs so much as it is this god-awful terrain but at the same time the little bastards are as hard to get rid of as a dose of crabs. They dig in and come hell or high water they won’t come out unless you drag them out.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT: Stimulus or Stymied?: The Macroeconomics of Recessions

Panel Moderator: J. BRADFORD DELONG (University of California-Berkeley)

Panelists:

• CARLO COTTARELLI (International Monetary Fund)
• PAUL KRUGMAN (Princeton University)
• VALERIE A. RAMEY (University of California-San Diego)
• HARALD UHLIG (University of Chicago)

DELONG: Between 1985 and 2007--the period of the "Great Moderation"--the Federal Reserve and the rest of the U.S. government on the west edge and the central banks and institutions of the European Union on the east edge of the Atlantic Ocean provided a broadly stable macroeconomic environment within which private-sector businesses, workers and investors could make their economic plans. In the U.S., on an annual basis: the rate of nominal GDP growth dropped below 4% for only 3 of those years and rose above 7% for only 2 of those 22 years; the rate of consumer price inflation rose above 5% for only 3 and fell below 2% percent for only 2 of those 22 years; and the civilian adult employment-to-population ratio remained between 60% and 64% for that entire period. And Western Europe experienced a similar "Great Moderation" with low inflation, relatively smooth growth, and diminishing unemployment.

As Robert Lucas put it in those halcyon days: “the problem of depression prevention has been solved”.

Then in 2008-9 the rate of nominal GDP growth in the U.S. crashed to -3%--a major, major downward surprise to anybody expecting and relying on a continuation of "Great Moderation" rates of nominal spending growth--the rate of consumer price inflation on an annual basis bottomed out at -2%, and the employment-to-population ratio dropped from 63% to between 58% and 59%, since when it has flatlined. In Western Europe the initial recession was smaller, but the subsequent labor market performance was even more disappointing, so that now the net fall relative to trend in Western European production and employment exceeds that in the United States.

The problem of depression prevention—and of depression cure—has not been solved.

Noted for January 18, 2013

• Jonathan Samuels: Sydney Bakes In Hottest Day Ever As Bushfires Rage

• John Quiggin: Utopia and climate change: "Economic development and technological progress provide the only real hope of lifting billions of people out of poverty and destitution…. Yet the living standards of the developed world have been built on cheap energy from carbon-based fossil fuels. If everyone in the world used energy as Americans or even Europeans do, it would be impossible to restrict climate change to even four degrees of warming. For those of us who seek a better life for everybody, the question of how much our environment can withstand is crucial. If current First World living standards can’t safely be extended to the rest of the world, the future holds either environmental catastrophe or an indefinite continuation of the age-old struggle between rich and poor. Of course, it might hold both."

• Bill Black: Bill Black: German Growth Goes Negative but Merkel’s Press Remains Glowing

• Ryan Avent: The euro crisis: Mario Draghi's premature canonisation: "I find it shocking how readily we all seem to be accepting the European Central Bank's inaction on euro-zone economic weakness. Some perspective is in order. Real euro-area output is at roughly the level of the end of 2006 and it is declining. The euro-area economy hasn't grown since the third quarter of 2011. Total employment is below the level first attained in the second quarter of 2006 and it is declining. The unemployment rate is of course at a record high 11.8%. And inflation—both core and headline—was virtually nil in the second half of 2012. That's simply a dismal macroeconomic performance…. [T]he complacency on the macro situation (and on the broader process of institutional reform, for that matter) are just astounding."

• Noah Smith: The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers From the Rise of Robots: "For most of modern history, inequality has been a manageable problem. The reason is that no matter how unequal things get, most people are born with something valuable: the ability to work, to learn, and to earn money… two-thirds of the income of most rich nations has gone to pay salaries and wages for people who work…. But in the past ten years, something has changed. Labor's share of income has steadily declined…. [T]here is another, more sinister explanation for the change. In past times, technological change always augmented the abilities of human beings…. Recent technological advances in the area of computers and automation have begun to do some higher cognitive tasks…. Once human cognition is replaced, what else have we got?"

Revising My Frequent-Reading List: Spring-Cleaning Weblogging

In 2012, the twenty political-economy weblogs that I most often visited were:

• http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/
• http://economistsview.typepad.com
• http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
• http://marginalrevolution.com
• http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/
• http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox.html
• http://noahpinion.blogspot.com
• http://capitalgainsandgames.com
• http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/
• http://jaredbernsteinblog.com
• http://factsandotherstubbornthings.blogspot.com
• http://www.voxeu.org
• http://ftalphaville.ft.com/
• http://thinkprogress.org/economy/issue/
• http://www.econbrowser.com
• http://nakedcapitalism.com
• http://bonddad.blogspot.com
• http://macroadvisers.blogspot.com
• http://www.samefacts.com
• http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/

How should I change this list in 2013?

I went to http://technorati.com and searched for the top weblogs on "economics". After pruning the list of things that I found clearly unsuitable, I found myself with 50 candidates for my frequent-reading list (yes, there is overlap):

• http://www.reason.com/blog
• http://marginalrevolution.com/
• http://crookedtimber.org
• http://www.oilprice.com
• http://delong.typepad.com/
• http://economistsview.typepad.com/
• http://thereformedbroker.com/
• http://www.bigcatcountry.com/
• http://econlog.econlib.org/
• http://theincidentaleconomist.com

---

• http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org
• http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/
• http://blog.foreignpolicy.com
• http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com
• http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/
• http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/
• http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/
• http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com
• http://www.frcblog.com
• http://blog.acton.org

---

• http://mungowitzend.blogspot.com/
• http://dqydj.net
• http://www.econtalk.org
• http://the-classic-liberal.com
• http://skydancingblog.com
• http://capitalgainsandgames.com
• http://www.creditwritedowns.com
• http://www.economicpopulist.org
• http://real-estate-and-urban.blogspot.com
• http://blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopment

---

• http://www.azizonomics.com
• http://middleclasspoliticaleconomist.blogspot.com/
• http://orgtheory.wordpress.com
• http://johnquiggin.com
• http://baselinescenario.com
• http://antzinpantz.com/kns
• http://therealrevo.com/blog
• http://blanksslate.blogspot.com
• http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/
• http://www.progressive-economics.ca

---

• http://scottgrannis.blogspot.com
• http://randomroger.blogspot.com
• http://aguanomics.com
• http://dailycapitalist.com
• http://dollarvigilante.com/blog
• http://beerswithdemo.blogspot.com
• http://thinkafricapress.com/
• http://thisiscommoncents.com
• http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com
• http://seeingtheforest.com

---

That leaves me with three questions:

• What other political-economy weblogs should I add to my candidates for frequent reading?

• Which of those on my candidate list should I add to my frequent-reading list?

• And what things on my frequent reading list should I drop?

If My RAs Acted as JPMC's Modellers Did… Can't Anybody Play This Game? Weblogging

Lisa Pollack:

A tempest in a spreadsheet: But none of that is the spreadsheet error. This is the spreadsheet error (on the last two pages of the 129-page Report — way to save the best for last?):

…further errors were discovered in the Basel II.5 model, including, most significantly, an operational error in the calculation of the relative changes in hazard rates and correlation estimates. Specifically, after subtracting the old rate from the new rate, the spreadsheet divided by their sum instead of their average, as the modeler had intended. This error likely had the effect of muting volatility by a factor of two….

Did we say “error”? We meant errors:

The West End analytic had two options for calculating hazard rates and correlations: a traditional Gaussian Copula model and a so-called Uniform Rate…. The Model Review Group employee discovered that West End defaulted to running Uniform Rate rather than Gaussian Copula… contrary to the language in the Model Review Group approval….

Now, we’re not exactly big fans of the Gaussian Copula, but it is quite a concern when the spreadsheet doesn’t even do what you think it does. There’s more juicy background to this than you think. It concerns the guy who developed the new VaR model. First, there’s the fact that he was overworked (“join the club”, we hear you think):

The modeler is a London-based quantitative expert, mathematician and model developer…. On a number of occasions, he asked the trader to whom he reported for additional resources to support his work on the VaR model, but he did not receive any… increased operational risk and artificially low volatility numbers:

For example, the model operated through a series of Excel spreadsheets, which had to be completed manually, by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another. In addition, many of the tranches were less liquid, and therefore, the same price was given for those tranches on multiple consecutive days, leading the model to convey a lack of volatility….

These two things (manual entry and artificial lack of volatility) came up in the review of the model. The report says there is “some evidence” that pressure was put on the reviewers to get on with approving the model in January because of the risk limit breaches being incurred with the old model…. Hence the Model Review Group “may have been more willing to overlook the operational flaws apparent during the approval process.”… The Numerix analytic suite had been approved by the Model Review Group. But the modeler, when developing the new VaR model, developed his own suite — called “West End”. This suite was not reviewed in advance of the new VaR model being rolled out, but rather only had a limited amount of backtesting completed on it. All of which makes the little errors (in the sense of single-day fat fingers)…

…a spreadsheet error caused the VaR for April 10 to fail to reflect the day’s $400 million loss in the Synthetic Credit Portfolio. This error was noticed, first by personnel in the Investment Bank…

And the more systemic ones…

…the new CIO VaR model for the Synthetic Credit Portfolio in late January 2012 were flawed, and the model as implemented understated the risks presented by the trades in the first quarter of 2012.

…considerably less surprising.

You Really Cannot Make This Up: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Weblogging

Reconciliation:

David Brooks teaches Yale class on humility, compares self to Bono.

Liveblogging World War II: January 17, 1943

World War II Today:

Sergeant Robert Raymond was an American volunteer serving in the RAF. He knew that the ‘tremendous propaganda value’ of hitting Berlin was good for morale. After eight hours sleep following the first raid, when his load included a 4,000 lb ‘blockbuster’ bomb, he went back to do it all over again on the night of 17th….

Verily it is better to send than to receive in this racket.

John Maynard Keynes: The State of Long-Term Expectation

I see that over at Naked Capitalism, the commenters are talking about John N. Grey, whose try for the Stupidest Man Alive prize was his statement that:

Financial markets are moved by contagion and hysteria. Mesmer and Charcot are better guides to the new economy than Hayek or Keynes...

I very much doubt that John N. Gray has ever read a word written by John Maynard Keynes. But it is never too late!

So it is time to once again, give the mike to John Maynard Keynes, and reprint the excellent Chapter 12, "The State of Long-Term Expectation" from The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money:

WE have seen in the previous chapter that the scale of investment depends on the relation between the rate of interest and the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital corresponding to different scales of current investment, whilst the marginal efficiency of capital depends on the relation between the supply price of a capital-asset and its prospective yield. In this chapter we shall consider in more detail some of the factors which determine the prospective yield of an asset.

The considerations upon which expectations of prospective yields are based are partly existing facts... partly future events which can only be forecasted... future changes in the type and quantity of the stock of capital-assets and in the tastes of the consumer, the strength of effective demand from time to time during the life of the investment under consideration, and the changes in the wage-unit in terms of money.... We may sum [these] up... as being the state of long-term expectation....

It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters which are very uncertain.... For this reason the facts of the existing situation enter, in a sense disproportionately, into the formation of our long-term expectations; our usual practice being to take the existing situation and to project it into the future, modified only to the extent that we have more or less definite reasons for expecting a change....

The state of confidence, as they term it, is a matter to which practical men always pay the closest and most anxious attention. But economists have not analysed it carefully.... Our conclusions must mainly depend upon the actual observation of markets and business psychology.... The outstanding fact is the extreme precariousness of the basis of knowledge on which our estimates of prospective yield have to be made. Our knowledge of the factors which will govern the yield of an investment some years hence is usually very slight and often negligible. If we speak frankly, we have to admit that our basis of knowledge for estimating the yield ten years hence of a railway, a copper mine, a textile factory, the goodwill of a patent medicine, an Atlantic liner, a building in the City of London amounts to little and sometimes to nothing; or even five years hence. In fact, those who seriously attempt to make any such estimate are often so much in the minority that their behaviour does not govern the market....

Noted for January 17, 2013

• Report of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Management Task Force Regarding 2012 CIO Losses

• Hurricane Relief Passes with Minority of the Majority

• Adam Posen is no fan of more expansionary fiscal policy in Japan: Japan should rethink its stimulus: "What happens when an economy runs out of fiscal space?… [P]ublic debt exceeds a certain limit and financial confidence collapses…. At times this scenario holds true…. Japan demonstrates a different reality…. Japan was able to get away with… high deficits… [because] Japan’s banks were induced to buy huge amounts of government bonds… Japan’s households accepted… persistently low returns… market pressures were limited by… few foreign holders of JGBs… [and] the share of taxation and government spending… was low…. Each of these factors enabling the ongoing fiscal deficits has had its costs…. The case for continued deficit spending in Japan ended by mid-2003. Though it is often overlooked, Japan’s economy recovered well following a rectification of financial and macroeconomic policies… [f]rom 2003 to 2007, per capita real income growth was the same in Japan as in the US…. Mr Abe’s new fiscal stimulus initiative is therefore questionable…. [C]ombined with monetary expansion and a likely consumption tax rise in the near future, I expect its multiplier and thus short-run impact to be high. The additional stimulus in Japan is counterproductive because it adds to the long-term costs without addressing Japan’s real problem: a return to deflation and an overvalued exchange rate…. When a large country with its own currency reaches its fiscal limit, growth ends not with a bang but a whimper of declining vitality and diminishing resilience."

• Aaron Swartz Memorial JSTOR Liberator sets public domain academic articles free

• Alan Blinder: Alan Blinder: The Debt Ceiling Is Scarier Than the Fiscal Cliff: "If the borrowing limit isn't raised, then spending would contract by 6% of GDP, followed by a swift recession."

Wanted: SF w/ 2 Kids < 10 Making ≥$260K/Year Weblogging

@delong [The] CPS March supplement finds 1-3 each year from 2008-2012 [in their random sample], suggesting a couple of thousand [single mothers with two kids under ten making $260K/year or more], out of 16-17 million single mothers

— Evan Roberts (@evanrobertsnz) January 16, 2013

But they all read the Wall Street Journal, and are miserable:

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

Ann Marie Marciarille:

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

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

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

Just how many female-headed single-parent families with two children under 10 are there in the United States making $260K/year, anyway?

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

Xenos:

Reading is for Snobs: These Are The People The Wall Street Journal Thinks We Should Have Sympathy For?: The Wall Street Journal had an article providing a fairly thorough breakdown of the new tax policies that will now be in effect due to the "fiscal cliff" agreement…. The article itself wasn't too bad…. However, it did include one little thing…. Yes, in that comic, every single one of those families makes a six figure income, the lowest being $180 thousand, and yet because of the new tax hikes imposed by Obama, they all appear as though he ran over the family dog.

The median household income in the U.S. between 2007-2011 was $52,762, but the American people are all supposed to shed tears for those that make between three to twelve times as much? Seriously, how out of touch do you have to be to think that? Of course, this is the same outfit that supported a guy who thought making $250k qualified as "middle income".

Just how many female-headed single-parent families with two children under 10 are there in the United States making $260K/year, anyway?

Austin Frakt: The epidemic of low-value care

Austin Frakt:

The epidemic of low-value care | The Incidental Economist: Craig A. Umscheid, MD, MSCE. Being a physician does not confer immunity from clinical capture disease:

The ophthalmologist was underwhelmed by my findings. But “just in case,” he wanted a brain MRI scan, eye ultrasonography, and a visual field test to rule out multiple sclerosis (MS), subclinical neurovascular disease, masses compressing my fourth cranial nerve, and thyroid disease causing ocular muscle hypertrophy. We agreed that these diagnoses were extremely unlikely because I had no symptoms and no changes in examination findings over 2 years. But he “wanted to make sure.”

I tried to understand and put myself in his place. But it was difficult, because he seemed so unimpressed. Even if I had MS or vascular disease, I wouldn’t do anything differently. I was already getting blood pressure checks and was taking a statin for a family history of early heart disease. An intracranial mass also seemed unlikely given the duration and asymptomatic nature of my findings. But despite my own medical and epidemiologic training, it was difficult to resist his advice. As my physician, his decision making was important to me. I trusted his instincts and experience.

Liveblogging World War II: January 16, 1943

Jack Swab of the Royal Artillery, east of Tripoli:

a.m.: In truck. Barrage crashed out till midnight. Up at 2.30 for orders and moved at dawn. Action about 0830. Now sitting in truck waiting to advance again. Frantic hurry everywhere; breakfast cooked and served in about 20 minutes; eaten in about 20 seconds. Fighters about .. identity uncertain. Suspect Kittyhawks.

Later: In action again some miles nearer the Tripoli road. No rations, water or petrol or ammo have so far come up so the smallest amount of each is vital. The sky is again rather monopolised by German planes (later this situation reversed). So far we have not been attacked.

We have just brewed up. It is about 1315. People are getting tired and irritable from lack of food and sleep. I find Sgt. Sherrat our Sig. N.C.0. the worst offender but there are several others. Buchanan and Cowie are keeping going well, and so is Wagstaff – somewhat ostentatiously.

12 of our fighters just going over. At least they`re probably ours but rather high to be sure. Nobody knows anything tactical. Came up through a minefield on which some of our tanks had been blown up. Lots of enemy trenches, some very deep. Flies are bloody here. Cleaned teeth and shaved at this posn. in 1/4 of a pint of water.

1730: As usual in the middle of our evening stew panic order from R.H.Q.. Equally as usual we are still waiting for the preceding part of the column to come through. B.C. (and my watch) back. A 5.9 is shelling the ridge about 1 1/2 miles forward.

2030, by moonlight: We’ve just received orders. Rommel has gone North fast and this time we’re not sending armour only but 152 (H) Brigade and all the Div Arty with mediums, bofors and what have you.

It means driving all tonight, all tomorrow and maybe tomorrow night. We have no food in hand (Regt. has it I believe) and hardly any water – a bottle full each. Cross country it certainly looks like being a tiring pursuit, [e]specially as most of us have only had from none to 4 hours sleep during the last 3 days. We are at present lined up in bright moonlight waiting to go.

Noted for January 16, 2013

• Jonathan Chait: Math Victimizes Journal Editorial Page Again: One of the things about the Journal editorial that makes it so consistently entertaining is that its supply-side enthusiasts are so bad at their jobs they don’t even know how to do propaganda right… the editorial writer wanted a fact to prove that rich people don’t have enough money to make a real dent in the deficit… tried their best to rejigger the definition of rich… the number came in way too high anyway…. [A] good propagandist would have just kept the fact out of the editorial…. I strongly suspect this is the work of Journal economic editorial writer Stephen Moore, a writer whose work is the subject of a longtime morbid fascination of mine, especially his trademark habit of producing facts or pseudo-facts that utterly refute his point while presenting them as though they confirm it."

• Mark Thoma: Economist's View: 'Skill-Biased Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality'

• FRONTLINE & Longreads: Inside Obama’s Presidency

• John Scalzi: The Human Division

Google Seems to Be Getting Better at Sophisticated User Interfaces Faster than Apple Is Getting Better at Avoiding Catastrophic Cloud Errors

Gordon's Tech: Removing 3500+ iCloud Contacts with no content (No Name) and Contacts.app use of 25GB of virtual memory:

I suspect many people's iOS Contacts have been trashed by iCloud, but only a small percentage realize how bad things are. It may explain some of the mysterious data use and battery life problems some see.

I can't prove this of course; I'm not about to study a random sample of 100 devices. I can only go by my own disastrous experience and Emily's recent malfunction.

In my case the bug had to do with a change between MobileMe and iCloud in the handling of line endings resulting in large numbers of 'Groups' metastasizing between my devices. It was very hard to diagnose and fix that bug; since then things have seemed to go well with my use.

Emily's malfunctions seemed simple at first. I noticed she had both addresses on her device and in iCloud. I didn't expect that, but I figured it would be easy to clean up. [1]. Then I discovered about 3,500 entries in Contacts that showed up only as 'No Name'. This isn't a new problem and I don't know how long Emily had it. She never noticed, I suspect most non-geeks ignore that sort of thing. I wonder if it explains some battery life issues she's had, and even Spotlight and disk access issues on some of our older machines as these malformed entries propagated. (As noted below, during the removal process the OS X Contacts app used 25 GB of virtual memory and locked up my 27" iMac.)

Removing these malformed null-value entries was much harder than expected. Something about processing the deletes using Mountain Lion Contacts.app consumed vast amounts of virtual memory -- almost completely paralyzing my 2 yo iMac. (More about how I got control in a later post.)

Yes, There Are Some Economists Who Are Strongly Ideologically Divided from Reality

A rather obvious statement that 84% of polled economists agree with:

Because all federal spending and taxes must be approved by both houses of Congress and the executive branch, a separate debt ceiling that has to be increased periodically creates unneeded uncertainty and can potentially lead to worse fiscal outcomes.

Luigi Zingales says that he disagrees--presumably he thinks that the separate debt-ceiling vote adds to certainty about future policy and leads to better fiscal outcomes.

Medicaid Expansion

Kevin Outterson:

Reality: Red State Option Edition: Yesterday, Arizona’s Governor [Jan Brewer] stopped pointing her finger and joined the Medicaid expansion. Pundits expressed shock, but no one should be surprised. Most of the plaintiff states will ultimately follow suit, for two reasons: politics & money. First, in most counties, the local hospital is one of the largest employers and these hospitals want the Medicaid expansion. The political pressure will be intense, well-connected, and local. Second, the federal match rate is indeed generous. It is hard to justify turning down such largess. But as the plaintiff states jump on ship voluntarily, it undermines their prior claims of unconstitutional coercion.

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, the Governor is sticking to her guns.  200,000 Oklahomans will lose (or fail to obtain) coverage as a result. The state authorized $500,000 for a consultant to study options to cover these people. Will the report recommend the expansion?

In 1787, when the Congress of the United States Under the Articles of Confederation Passed the Northwest Ordinance Forbidding Slavery Between the Ohio and Mississippi...

…only Massachusetts and Vermont were free states, and only Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had enacted laws that would someday lead to their becoming free states.

What went on in 1787 to make this happen?

American Agriculture

---

http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2007/Online_Highlights/Ag_Atlas_Maps/

Since I Do Not Have a Treadmill Desk, the Quadruple Espresso Was a Mistake...

Is It Wrong to Contemplate Beginning the Workday with a Quadruple Espresso?

Liveblogging World War II: January 15, 1943

"News of day" No.1-2 (1943, January) : Central Newsreel Studio, USSR

National Review Cruise Attendees: Guaranteed Rich. Guaranteed Gullible...

The Republican grifters of the world salivate...

Scott Lemieux:

Bring Back Tech Central Station!: Another milestone in the death of parody, from the National Review cruise:

That prompted a tall, extremely tanned blonde named Kay, from Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to ask Hassett, the co-­author of the 1999 book Dow 36,000, “So what do we do with our money?”

The contact list from the people who paid money for this cruise has to be among the most valuable set of leads in history. I’m pretty sure Mitch and Murray have already given NRO a six-figure bid.

Noted for January 15, 2013

• Eschaton: F The Deficit: "The additional maddening thing is that if you fix the jobs problem you largely fix the deficit problem. The reverse is not true. If you "fix" the deficit you kill the jobs."

If becoming the paid employee of Scientology isn't rock bottom for the Atlantic, I don't know what is. theatlantic.com/sponsored/scie…

— Erik Loomis (@ErikLoomis) January 15, 2013

• Aaron Swartz's Lawyer: Prosecutor Stephen Heymann Wanted 'Juicy' Case For Publicity

• Eric Loomis: Longing for the Days of Megan McArdle: "You thought McArdle was as low as The Atlantic could go? Oh no. Not even close. How about allowing Scientology to write a “Sponsor Content” that looks just like a news article but is in fact a self-written story about the awesomeness of Scientology leader David Miscavige? Wow. If this isn’t rock bottom, I don’t know what is. Also, make sure you read the comment section. I’m sure it’ll soon be inundated with people ripping the magazine. But right now, it’s clearly a coordinated campaign by Scientology to flood the comment section with laudatory comments. It’s all very special."

• Gavyn Davies: How much spare capacity does the world have left?

• Ken Thomas: Middle Class Political Economist: US already has high elder poverty rate; how can cutting Social Security even be on the table?

Japanese Convergence and Non-Convergence and the Financial Crisis of the Early 1990s

Suppose that you believed in the Solow long-run growth model—that economies converge over time to steady-state growth paths with a speed of convergence determined by the factor shares in the production function, and that the different steady-state growth paths of developed economies at least have different levels determined by accumulation rates and population growth rates but all have a constant growth rate given by the world’s frontier rate of labor-augmenting technological progress.

What can we say about the long-run consequences of the Japanese financial crisis as viewed through this particular lens?

Liveblogging World War II: January 14, 1943

Casablanca Conference:

The Casablanca Conference (codenamed SYMBOL) was held at the Anfa Hotel in Casablanca, Morocco, then a French protectorate, from January 14 to 24, 1943, to plan the Allied European strategy for the next phase of World War II. In attendance were United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and representing the Free French forces, General Charles de Gaulle, and General Henri Giraud. Premier Joseph Stalin had declined to attend, citing the ongoing conflict in Stalingrad required his presence in the Soviet Union. The conference agenda addressed the specifics of tactical procedure, allocation of resources and the broader issues of diplomatic policy.

Noted for January 14, 2013

• Russil Wvong

• Steve M.: No More Mister Nice Blog: "Paul Krugman has been supporting the platinum coin option as an end-run around Republican debt-ceiling terrorism, so he's dismayed by the latest news: ;If I'd spent the past five years living in a monastery or something, I would take the Treasury Department's declaration that the coin option is out as a sign that there's some other plan ready to go. Maybe 14th Amendment, maybe moral obligation coupons or some other form of scrip, something. And maybe there is a plan. But as we all know, the last debt ceiling confrontation crept up on the White House because Obama refused to believe that Republicans would actually threaten to provoke default. Is the WH being realistic this time, or does it still rely on the sanity of crazies?…. If we didn't have some history here I might be confident…. But we do have that history…"

• Matthew Yglesias: Jeffrey Lacker: Richmond Fed president keeps being wrong but never changes his mind

• JSTOR: Aaron Swartz: "We extend our heartfelt condolences to Aaron’s family, friends, and everyone who loved, knew, and admired him. He was a truly gifted person who made important contributions to the development of the internet and the web from which we all benefit. We have had inquiries about JSTOR’s view of this sad event given the charges against Aaron and the trial scheduled for April. The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset, since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge. At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content. To that end, Aaron returned the data he had in his possession and JSTOR settled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011."

• Greg Sargent: Business leaders to GOP: No more debt limit hostage taking!

• Nick Rowe: Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: Did inflation targeting make inflation stickier?: "I used to think that if the Bank of Canada succeeded in keeping inflation on target, there wouldn't be deficient-demand recessions…. I was wrong. The Bank of Canada did keep inflation almost exactly at the 2% target, but there was a deficient demand recession. If you had told me in 2008 how long the recession would last in many countries, I would have predicted that inflation would have fallen a lot in those countries. It didn't fall a lot. In some countries, like the UK, it didn't fall at all. I would have been wrong. It didn't use to be like this. In past recessions, absent significant supply shocks, inflation did fall a lot…. Those two things I was wrong on are related…. Why didn't that happen like it was supposed to? One possible answer is that inflation targeting made inflation stickier than it used to be…. Imagine some sort of simultaneous-moves Nash game, which is partly an American Beauty Contest. Each individual player has to pick a number. He is trying to pick a number that is the same as the average number picked by all the other players, plus or minus some amount that reflects a shock specific to him. He knows that all the other players are trying to do the same…. [S]omebody stands up in the middle of the room and loudly calls out "2%! I want you all to choose 2%!". It would be very tempting just to give up on all the Nash stuff, ignore the shocks, and just choose 2%. I know. That's not a model. It's not even a fully-coherent story."

No, We Don't Really Need Any More Deficit Reduction Until 2020

Leave to one side the fact that policies to reduce the deficit in the short run--before 2016, say--are highly, highly likely to actually increase the long-run burden of the national debt. Even making the unlikely assumption that deficit reduction in the near future would reduce rather than increase the long-run burden of the debt, the fact is that the debt-to-GDP ratio is now stable until at least 2020. A lower debt-to-GDP ratio would be a good thing in the long run, but there is absolutely no urgency. And there is enormous urgency in getting the economy moving again.

In focusing in 2013 on further deficit-reduction deals rather than on policies to boost employment growth and infrastructure investment, President Obama is making yet another hideous economic policy mistake.

Paul Krugman:

The Mostly Solved Deficit Problem: The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a graph…. The blue line at the top represents the projected path of that ratio as of early 2011 — that is, before recent agreements on spending cuts and tax increases. This projection showed a rising path for debt as far as the eye could see…. But a lot has happened since then. The orange line shows the effects of those spending cuts and tax hikes: As long as the economy recovers, which is an assumption built into all these projections, the debt ratio will more or less stabilize soon…. True, there are projected problems further down the road, mainly because of the continuing effects of an aging population. But it still comes as something of a shock to realize that at this point reasonable projections do not, repeat do not, show anything resembling the runaway deficit crisis that is a staple of almost everything you hear, including supposedly objective news reporting.

So you heard it here first: while you weren’t looking, and the deficit scolds were doing their scolding, the deficit problem (such as it was) was being mostly solved. Can we now start talking about unemployment?

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Tim Duy Comes to the Defense of and Explains Kansas City Fed President Esther George

Brad DeLong : There Is Something I Do Not Understand About Kansas City Fed President Esther George's Reasoning Here: The Fed's current Quantitative Easing ∞ program involves its buying risky bonds--thus diminishing the pool of risky assets that the private sector can hold. Esther George objects because… it does not make complete sense to me…. Because there is less in the way of risky assets for the private sector to hold--and because that pushes prices of risky assets up and returns on risky assets down--QE ∞ actually makes private-sector portfolios riskier? Is that the argument? It could be--the world is a surprising place, and lots of things can happen. But my first thought would be that a world in which the Federal Reserve takes risk off of private-sector balance sheets and onto the government's balance sheet is one in which the private sector is holding not more-risky but less-risky portfolios…

Tim Duy performs the smackdown:

Safe Assets and the Coordination of Fiscal and Monetary Policy - Tim Duy's Fed Watch: DeLong is looking at a continuum of assets from safe to risky, where cash anchors the safe end of the continuum.  Right next to cash is the somewhat riskier Treasury… by exchanging cash for Treasury securities, you by definition must be removing risk… and thus the public's portfolio is now less riskier. But… this is obviously not how George views the situation…. George… believes that [Fed policies] are in fact making the public's portfolio more, not less, risky…. I think a way you can explain George's position if you consider Treasuries as less risky than cash…. [T]he Treasury bond may be perceived as a safer because it provides some return…. [F]or any given inflation rate, the Treasury bond will thus be a safer store of value [if held to maturity].  If you viewed the world from this perspective, then the Fed is increasing riskiness of the public's portfolio…. George appears to be saying that the Fed is eliminating (more accurately, removing) the safe assets that the public wants to hold.  Suppose that this is true.  Does this mean that the Fed should reverse policy to increase the proportion of safe assets in the public's hands?  Or does it mean that another agency - perhaps a fiscal authority, hint, hint - should take action to increase the proportion of safe assets in the public's hands?  

Once again, we come back to the issue of coordinating monetary and fiscal policy.  If the public has a strong demand for noncash safe assets, monetary policy has something of a secondary role by providing an accommodative environment by which the fiscal authority can issue those assets. If the proportion of safe to risky assets is not "correct", the the fiscal authority should have a role in correcting that imbalance.  In this world, then, it is not really the actions of the monetary authority that is creating the financial sector imbalances that concern George.  It is the lack of action by the fiscal authority that creates those imbalances.  George should be criticizing the fiscal authorities, not the monetary authority.

In other words, if a recession is the result of the public shifting to safe assets, the Fed is trying to respond by taking away the option of safe assets, leaving only risky assets.  Instead, the Fed should view their role creating an environment (making clear that default is not an option) that allows the fiscal authority to issue more safe assets.

All of this, however, suggests that fiscal policy has a much greater role in stabilizing economy activity than conventional wisdom would hold.  I suspect, however, that thinking along these lines is anathema to Federal Reserve officials who maintain that stabilization policy is the domain of monetary policy only.  But if in fact there needs to be greater cooperation, and instead we continue to rely solely on monetary policy, then we will continue to experience less-than-satisfactory economic outcomes which will eventually endanger the cherished independence of central banks.

In short, I don't think you can have a discussion about the influence of monetary policy on the riskiness of the public's portfolio without including some discussion about the role of the issuer of those safe assets, the fiscal authority.

This is, I think, why I want the Fed's QE ∞ policies to take the form of buying genuine long-term risky securities more risky than Treasurys or MBS. If the point is to remove risk from the private sector balance sheet-if the point is to take Vienna--then remove risk from the private sector balance sheet--take Vienna! If the point is to expand the supply of cash to create expectations that interest rates will stay lower for longer, then it is better to buy assets the unwinding of which must by the nature of things be gradual and prolonged rather than buying assets positions in which can be unwound nearly costlessly in the blink of an eye. If the point of QE ∞ is neither to remove risk from the private sector balance sheet nor to back up guidance that interest rates will stay low for a long time, I do not understand what the point of the policy is.

And, of course, he is 100% right that expansionary fiscal policy by credit-worthy governments (or expansionary financial policy via loan guarantees) is the right policy to deal with a shortage of safe nominal assets leading economic agents to try to cut their spending below their income. This is, of course, the reason that I think a proper assessment of Tim Geithner's tenure at the Treasury would be a very harsh one indeed.

Tim's point that for an economic agent with a five-year horizon a five-year Treasury dominates cash is a good one, and I think it points to a flaw in my visualization of the Cosmic All that I do not know how to repair.

Liveblogging World War II: January 13, 1943

Friedrich Paulus, Commander of the Nazi Sixth Army, in Stalingrad:

"Oderint dum Metuant?" Weblogging: Responsibility of Journalists to Place Quotes in Context Edition

According to Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, a favorite saying of first-century Roman emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus "Caligula"…

Justin Wolfers tweets:

Sympathetic to @davidmwessel's view that Krugman & @delong can be too quick to call him a fool for citing their ideological opponents.

— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers) January 5, 2013

I protest. Go to Google, enter "site:delong.typepad.com 'david wessel'" into the search box, press "I'm feeling lucky", and what comes up is:

Brad DeLong : David Wessel's You Are There: Ben Bernanke Five Years Ago Today: David Wessel alone is worth the price of the Wall Street Journal…

Noted for January 13, 2013

• RIP Aaron Swartz: Guest Review by Aaron Swartz: Chris Hayes’ The Twilight of The Elites