Jill Abramson, Formerly of the New York Times, Has Both a Depraved Heart and a Social Intelligence Deficit: She thus made seven changes to Malooley's first sentence, in the process dividing it into two.... She thus made one change to Malooley's second sentence. She then left Malooley's third sentence alone. Clearly the effort of making seven discrete changes to the first sentence had exhausted her...
Note to Self: Thinking About Blanchard's Presidential Address...: Blanchard's calculations of the effect of debt on welfare in his AEA Presidential Address all take the form of evaluating the welfare of a generation of economic agents young in some period t after the resolution of all period-t stochastic elements. That is a fine thing to do. That is not quite the same thing as the effect on expected well-being behind the veil of ignorance...
Note to Self: All of these people are now very, very quiet: Robert J. Barro, Michael J. Boskin, John Cogan, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Glenn Hubbard, Lawrence B. Lindsey, Harvey S. Rosen, George P. Shultz and John. B. Taylor.... James C. Miller III... Barry W. Poulson... Charles W. Calomiris... Donald Luskin... 95 others... Susan Collins...
Note to Self: Speaker: "We are bursting at the seams! We have more students than robots!...
Jeff Yarbro: @yarbro: "The Constitution anticipates a President like this. It does not anticipate a Congress so indifferent to a President like this...
Abba P. Lerner (1943): Functional Finance and the Federal Debt
Patrick Iber: "I hereby donate 'Reichstag Fyre Festival' to the public domain...
Alex Ward: 25th Amendment: Andrew McCabe says in 60 Minutes Interview that DOJ Discussed Option to Oust Trump: "McCabe is back with a vengeance.... Some top Trump officials feel the president isn’t up to the job...
Wikipedia: 1989 murders of Jesuits in El Salvador: "Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J. Ignacio Martín-Baró, S.J. Segundo Montes, S.J. Juan Ramón Moreno, S.J. Joaquín López y López, S.J. Amando López, S.J. Elba Ramos. Celina Ramos...
The Browser
Michael K. Spencer: The Failure of Crypto Tribalism: "The majority of ICOs aren’t genuine companies, don’t have real products and never were intended to be sustainable business models. That’s a severe problem in ethics of these young engineers and young executives playing with Dapps and investors who are prone to fraud, hype and crypto trafficking of the worst kind-deceit...
Zack Beauchamp: Watch Rep. Ilhan Omar hold Elliott Abrams, Trump Venezuela envoy, accountable - Vox: "A rare example of elite accountability...
John Scalzi: Courtesy of @joshtpm, a principle henceforth to be known as "Trump's Razor": Josh Marshall: Dominance and Humiliation, No Middle Ground: "I’ve been praised in recent months for having some handle on the Trump phenomenon. The truth is a little different. Early on I realized that when it came to Trump if I figured out the stupidest possible scenario that could be reconciled with the available facts and went with it, that almost always turned out to be right. The stupider, the righter.... I just kept following that model and it kept working...
Fawlty Towers: Don't Mention the War!
What is going on with "Brexit"? To everybody outside Britain—no, not outside Britain, outside England—it is a bizarre and incomprehensible mystery. But here, I believe, Hari Kunzru gets as close as an outsider can to understanding why the English political class is engaged in this farcical tragedy of policy: Hari Kunzru: Fool Britannia: "Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, by Fintan O’Toole.... The battle over Europe has been fought not over the... open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic... NHS funding, or traffic flow through Dover, let alone harmonized airline regulations or the trading benefits of a Canada-plus model... but through Spitfires, Cornish pasties, singing 'Jerusalem' on the last night of the Proms, and what the Irish historian and journalist Fintan O’Toole calls 'the strange sense of imaginary oppression that underlies Brexit'...
Would somebody please tell me what the Brexiters want? Do they want to stay in the customs union? Do they want a hard border in the Irish Sea? Do they want a hard border within Ireland? What is Theresa May asking for? What are the "alternative arrangements to prevent a hard border with Northern Ireland" and yet allow the collection of customs and the exclusion of commodities that do not meet European standards that they seek? 14.5% of British GDP is exported to the EU. 3.5% of EU GDP is exported to Britain. Demonstrating that being in the EU is a good deal relative to other options is an important value for the EU. Evans-Pritchard never says—nor does he comment that the German economists whom he praises also call for the UK government to abandon its "red lines". What is Theresa May willing to give up that the EU values in order to secure the removal of the Irish Backstop?: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: German Anger Builds Over Dangerous Handling of Brexit by EU Ideologues: "A group of top German economists has told the EU to tear up the Irish backstop and ditch its ideological demands in Brexit talks, calling instead for a flexible Europe of concentric circles that preserves friendly ties with the UK.... The report implicitly rebuked the European Commission for mishandling its negotiations with Britain and for trying to use the legal advantage of the Article 50 process to dictate a harsh settlement, with little regard for long-term strategic and diplomatic interests...
"Now, the thing is, legitimate-seeming businesses can't just give you porn links all the time, because that's Not Safe For Work, so the job of most modern recommendation algorithms is to return the closest thing to porn that is still Safe For Work": Apenwarr: Forget Privacy: You're Terrible at Targeting Anyway: "Let's get rich on targeted ads and personalized recommendation algorithms. It's what everyone else does! Or do they? The state of personalized recommendations is surprisingly terrible. At this point, the top recommendation is always a clickbait rage-creating article about movie stars or whatever Trump did or didn't do in the last 6 hours. Or if not an article, then a video or documentary. That's not what I want to read or to watch, but I sometimes get sucked in anyway, and then it's recommendation apocalypse time, because the algorithm now thinks I like reading about Trump, and now everything is Trump. Never give positive feedback to an AI...
A very welcome shift from a central bank that two months ago looked hell-bent on a policy likely to cause recession. What explains the shift, however? I do not understand why their policy was what it was two months ago. While I understand their policy now, and while I approve of their shift, I do not understand the why: Frances Coppola: What Is The Real Reason For The Fed's Sudden Decision To Stop Raising Interest Rates?: "The Fed has put the brakes on. At its latest monetary policy meeting, the FOMC left interest rates unchanged and said it would be 'patient' about further interest rate rises. Furthermore, the FOMC’s forward guidance about the pace of balance sheet reduction says that it is 'prepared to adjust any of the details for completing balance sheet normalization in light of economic and financial developments', including reversing course and doing more QE if necessary. Yet only a month ago, the Fed was signaling two interest rate rises in 2019 and no change in the pace of balance sheet reduction. What has caused this sudden change of heart?...
The long con, behavioral economics, and the mass- and social-media nature of the modern public sphere collide in ways that I do not understand, but that I think may be very important: Neil Steinberg: What's next? 'Hi, This Is A Scam! Grab Your Wallet So We Can Cheat You!': "'Social Security numbers do not get suspended', the Federal Trade Commission points out on its web page devoted to this scam. 'Ever'. Are there people who don’t know this? Apparently so. Which raises the question: Why base your scam on something a halfway savvy person knows to be false? For exactly that reason.... Fraud is... about identifying the most credulous, the choicest marks, and going after them. It’s a manpower issue.... Scams fall into two categories: fear and greed.... Fear and/or greed already in the victims-to-be make them party to their own defrauding, but inspires an unspoken complicity that blunts their ability to realize they’ve been had. The resilience of the cheated is plain if we look at... those who supported Donald Trump...
Martin Wolf: The Libertarian Fantasies of Cryptocurrencies: "the state can be a dangerous monster. But it is also essential: it is humanity’s ultimate insurance mechanism. The world of anarchy is one of competing bandits. It is far better to have just one, as the late Mancur Olson argued in Power and Prosperity. Moreover, he added, liberal democracy helps tame that bandit. States exist to provide essential public goods. Money is a public good par excellence. That is why dispensing with the role of governments in money is a fantasy. The history of the so-called cryptocurrencies demonstrates this.... The best way to view cryptocurrencies is as speculative tokens of no intrinsic value. One could have value if it became the currency of choice of a jurisdiction. Yet there is a compelling reason why, in normal circumstances, people use the currency of their own government.... As the Financial Times’ Izabella Kaminska and Martin Walker of the Center for Evidence-Based Management argued in evidence for the House of Commons Treasury committee, so far the cryptocurrency craze has made online criminality easier, created bubbles, fleeced naive investors, imposed grotesque waste in so-called 'mining', offered funding for malfeasance and facilitated tax evasion.... It is no longer enough to bleat in favour of 'innovation' or 'freedom'...
Back when the Washington Post was trying to decide how to deal with the internet—and had not yet doubled down on "access journalism", i.e. working for your sources rather than for your readers—Dan Froomkin lucked into the "White House Watch" column, doing explainer journalism on the White House press corps—telling us why the White House press corps was doing what it was doing that week. This was an extremely useful thing to do. Now he is starting it up again. Worth spending your money on: Dan Froomkin: A Case Study in Normalizing Trump, from the New York Times: "Disappointed in how normalizing NYT’s coverage of Trump interview was this morning. He was talking complete megalomaniacal gibberish, they make it sound like he was answering their questions.... I’m glad Sulzberger talked to Trump a bit about press freedom, but the NYT... can also confront him with reality...
Peter Beinart—who has, I think, atoned sufficiently for his time enabling and supporting the bigotries, prejudices, and ignorances of Marty Peretz and his Old New Republic—gets, I think, this one substantially wrong. There are many Americans who feel a deep cultural and religious and political affinity with Israel. Israel is, after all, a fellow near-democracy, in some sense one of the foundations of North Atlantic civilization, and the image of Israel has always been a model for America. Conservative white Christians, however, support and seek a different Israel—a Likud-AIPAC Israel. They want an expansionist Israel for theological reasons: Israel's expansion—and the subsequent destruction by Gog and Magog of all who do not convert to Christianity—is a step on the road to the Second Coming of Jesus. Thus they seek not a secure, democratic, and peaceful Israel but rather a state with a firebase on every West Bank hilltop ruling from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan—or perhaps Euphrates. Plus there are the bribes: I am told that Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave Jerry Falwell a Lear Jet: Peter Beinart: The Sick Double Standard In The Ilhan Omar Controversy: "Omar’s tweet was inaccurate. Yes, of course, AIPAC’s influence rests partly on the money its members donate to politicians. But it also rests on a deep cultural and religious affinity for Israel among conservative white Christians, who see the Jewish state as an outpost of pro-American, “Judeo-Christian” values in a region they consider hostile to their country and faith...
I confess I do not understand columns like this. "Congressional Republicans stepping away from President Trump" is constant and professional Washington access-journalist make-believe. "Congressional Republicans think Trump is a nut but are terrified to cross him because they fear a primary challenge" has been reality since January 21, 2017 and is still reality today. The 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate and the 40-member Tea Party caucus in the House opposed on principle to governing meant and mean that, absent Reconciliation, any legislation required the approval of Ryan, Pelosi, McConnell, and Schumer before January 4—or at least their willingness to not make opposition a matter for caucus discipline—and requires the approval of Pelosi, McConnell, and Schumer today. Trump's role with respect to Republican House Members and Senators was and is the same as Putin's role with respect to Trump: in each case, the first party has the second party on a leash because the second party knows that the first party, if enraged, could destroy their career. But because that threat can only be used once and has power only as long as it is not used, the leash is a long one: John Harwood: Republican Leaders Are Breaking with Trump on Border Wall: "That soft, shuffling sound you hear is Congressional Republicans stepping away from President Trump.... GOP leaders signaled clearly that they, like Congressional Democrats, will no longer play border-wall make-believe with President Trump.... GOP leaders always understood that pledge as fanciful, even as they cautiously avoided saying so out loud. Last December, when Trump changed his mind and chose a government shutdown over a bipartisan spending compromise, they reluctantly went along. But 35 days of political pain, ending with Trump's initial surrender last month, changed their calculations.... The Democratic takeover of the House fundamentally altered Washington's power equation...
Dylan Matthews (2009): How It Works: "It's instructive for people my age who are thinking of careers in foreign policy to know that you can back death squads in Central America, deny mass atrocities, brazenly defy Congressional dictates, get convicted of withholding information from Congress, back a covert coup d'état, actively undermine the peace process in Israel, and be in charge of implementing the Bush administration's 'freedom agenda' and end up with a senior fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations and an offer to be CFR's president should Richard Haass leave. I believe the term for this is 'perverse incentive'...
Jemima Kelly: Niall Ferguson Joins Blockchain Project Ampleforth: "Ampleforth: not just an ideal school to send your kids if you're Catholic and can afford it, but also, 'an ideal money'. More specifically (and perplexingly): 'A decentralised store of value protocol that is volatile in price and supply at launch, but is strictly better than Bitcoin at steady state because it converges on a stable unit of account.' And Niall Ferguson, the rightwing British historian and who once called himself a 'fully paid-up member of the neo-imperialist gang', has joined its advisory board.... Here's Ferguson...
Lawrence Glickman: The Strategic and Political Use of Threats of Backlashes: "Douthat claims that if the Dems adopt the Green New Deal, it 'will empower climate-change skeptics, weaken the hand of would-be compromisers in the GOP' and 'possibly help Donald Trump win re-election.' But wait a minute. Isn’t the current GOP already a Party of climate-change denialists and isn’t its Congressional arm completely lacking in 'would-be compromisers'?... Even granting the dubious assumption that the Congressional GOP includes many potential compromisers, this suggests that, if triggered, they will reactively support policies that exacerbate the problem they purported wish to solve. Douthat’s claim seems to be that the GND will have the devastating consequences of leading the GOP to... embrace precisely the policies and tactics that they are employing already...
Dan Drezner: Anatomy of a Questioning: "the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Omar’s line of questioning was spot-on.... If you... appoint someone who has a history of lying to Congress about human rights abuses... it is entirely fair to question him about prior acts of bad faith. And it was certainly striking to see someone so 'firmly contemptuous of congressional pressure' become the object of it.... Omar... was fully within her rights to bring up the unsavory and criminal portions of Abrams’s backstory.... The other uncomfortable truth, however, is that while Omar might be right to interrogate Abrams, she is mostly in the wrong about Venezuela...
Odds are now 50-50 that the entire Eurozone is or is about to be in a recession: Lucrezia Reichlin: The Threat of a Eurozone Recession: "My company, Now-Casting Economics, first detected a slowdown in the eurozone... started in the third quarter of 2017 and has affected all major eurozone economies, particularly Germany and Italy. This runs contrary to the widely held view of the eurozone as comprising a core of successful countries–especially Germany–and a debt-ridden, slow-growth periphery...
Paul Krugman: What’s Wrong With Functional Finance?: "MMT seems to be pretty much the same thing as Abba Lerner’s 'functional finance'.... So what I want to do in this note is explain why I’m not a full believer in Lerner’s functional finance; I think this critique applies to MMT as well, although if past debates are any indication, I will promptly be told that I don’t understand, am a corrupt tool of the oligarchy, or something...
Digby: "I sure hope that everyone remembers to note in their McCabe pieces that what the IG found him guilty of was lying when he said he hadn't leaked damaging information about Hillary Clinton...
#noted #weblogs
This post first appeared on Bradford-delong.com: Grasping Reality With The Invisible Hand..., please read the originial post: here
