Be Data Dependent!

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-10-11 Tu

CONDITION: Data Dependent!

Lael Brainard is sensible!:

Kristine Aquino: Doves & Hawks: ‘Federal Reserve Vice Chair Lael Brainard articulated a view that the central bank should exercise caution in its rate-hiking campaign. In comments on Monday, Brainard advised the Fed should move forward "deliberately" and in a "data-dependent manner" to gauge how previous rate hikes are working through the economy. This contrasts with strategists at Goldman Sachs, who said it’s too early to price in a dovish pivot from the Fed. Cecilia Mariotti and her team warned two-year yields would need to peak to see a top in Fed hawkishness…

---

FIRST: Amazon Review Average of “Slouching” at 4.4

Plus: All-in-all, with a few notable exceptions, the reviews of Slouching Towards Utopia <bit.ly/3pP3Krk> are very nice indeed. For example:

Claude Ury: Library Journal: ‘This volume, partly an economic history but mostly a thorough record of the global economy’s connection with politics, is destined to become a classic…

&:

I do find myself curious about my three and four-star reviews. Unfortunately, only one of each of them has comments attached:

CanReader 3.0 out of 5 stars :: Gives an economic history, but no new ideas for actually moving towards utopia

This book provides an economic history with an emphasis on the United States from 1870 to 2010. It is well written and I mostly reading it as an opinionated economic history from an American perspective.

The title "Slouching Towards Utopia" might lead you to expect more, such as what could be done to improve the economic system or at least define some elements of a desired utopia. The book does little new in that direction.

Well! They are right! I wish I could have done better!

&:

William J. Brown: 4.0 out of 5 stars :: Wonderful right up until...

I've read a couple of books on the 2008 Great Recession and feel like Dr. DeLong could benefit from reading Geithner's book. DeLong dismisses things that were done, or not done, without appreciating the difficult politics of the moment (he later describes the issues... in general). Also, I feel like the pessimistic tone at the end is based on the Trump administration and things have gotten quite a bit better of late. His "index of the stock of good ideas" seems like an inside joke he never quite lets us in on. Nevertheless, I feel he's made a good case that the US has daunting challenges ahead to return to the growth of the past.

I would say that the fact that the politics of the moment were “difficult”—especially including the fact that a critical mass of White House staffers over 2009-2012 thought that David Brooks was a really smart guy and that their highest-priority task was to seek his approval—was (most of) my point there. I will have to go back and see how I failed to execute properly in that chapter.

& there are this week’s UK-launch events:

Slouching Towards Utopia Monday 10 October 2022 6:00pm

ONLINE PUBLIC EVENT, UNITED KINGDOM

Speaker: J. Bradford DeLong’; Chair: Patrick Wallis

DeLong's new book… charts the unprecedented explosion of material wealth after 1870 which transformed living standards around the world, freeing humanity from centuries of poverty but, paradoxically, has left us with unprecedented inequality, global warming, and widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo.

&:

RSA 763K subscribers: The twentieth century’s sharp upward curve of economic and technological progress…. DeLong’s magnum opus, Slouching Towards Utopia <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>, was an instant NYT bestseller, and has been universally lauded as the must-read account of 20th century economics. Join us as we explore why true economic and human progress is a complicated game of snakes and ladders, and what we need to do to create a better world...

---

Must-Read: “Dark Oily Mustache” Department:

Circling back around to this, which I found very nice indeed:

Steve Donoghue: Slouching Towards Utopia by J. Bradford DeLong: ‘These historical asides are so winningly conversational that they very much help to make the book’s 600 pages surprisingly easy reading. Part of this is likewise attributable to DeLong’s semi-ironic adoption of a “grand narrative” (even though Ludwig Wittgenstein considered such grand narratives “nonsense”), which he doesn’t exactly hide under a bushel. One of the main reasons why humanity’s progress towards utopia has been more of a slouch than a march, you might ask? DeLong cites many factors (this is not a simple book, much though you at times get the impression its author would have liked it to be), but his central villain is gently indicated when he refers to the market economy as “that Mammon of Unrigtheousness.” The free market economy pops up repeatedly in these pages, always wearing a dark, oily mustache like Daniel Day-Lewis deep in character as a homicidal maniac. People are no sooner starting to feel some free-range autonomy, able to smile and play with their children and lay away a little nest egg for the future, when suddenly up pops the market economy to ruin everything…. The crucial economic watershed in DeLong’s long century was the enactment of one of the single worst acts of public pillaging since Alaric sacked Rome: the neoliberalist fantasy-religion of supply-side economics…

As a (somewhat reformed) left-neoliberal myself,

---

Must-Read: Nuclear Blackmail

This is very good:

Robert Farley: <sarcasm>‘As an anti-imperialist and an anti-nuclear activist, I believe that the possession of nuclear weapons gives a country the right to seize any chunk of any neighbor at any given time.’</sarcasm>

To treat the issue a bit more seriously:

• It should be obvious to everyone that the international community ought not roll over in a case in which a nuclear power has seized chunks of its neighbor and then resorts to nuclear threats to hold that territory.

• This would be the kind of Bad Precedent that the term "bad precedent" was invented for. It would be catastrophic for nuclear arms control, non-proliferation policy, etc.

An intellectually coherent policy could probably be constructed around "negotiated settlement under threat, combined with aggressive sanctions regime designed for quasi-permanent containment.” This would recognize the gravity of the situation while also recognizing Russia's grave transgressions against international law and norms of international society. And it's possible that there are folks out there who are advocating something along these lines. I don't agree that we should roll over for every Russian nuclear threat but the argument has some weight.

Unfortunately, most of the folks I'm seeing call for negotiations based on Russia's nuclear threats also tend to be extremely squishy on the idea that Russia should be asked to pay any costs at all for the destructive invasion of its neighbor.

I've agreed from the start that this war will end in negotiation, while at the same time maintaining that the nature and character of negotiation will be determined by the military situation. But negotiation does not mean that Russia gets what it wants territorially, or that Russia escapes the long-term consequences of the war that it started. The re-integration of Russia into international society (at least in terms of its relationship with Europe, which Russia has historically regarded as a core interest) is a long-term question that won't be decided at the negotiating table with Ukraine. Things won't go back to the way they were. Progressive foreign policy thinkers who used to care about international law, nuclear proliferation, and norms of appropriate international behavior should keep this in mind…

---

Other Things That Went Whizzing By…

Very Briefly Noted:

• Martin Sandbu: Central banks are risking the best jobs market in a generation: ‘They are about to address a cost of living shock by willingly inflicting a hit to growth…

• Rana Foroohar: The new rules for business in a post-neoliberal world: ‘Laissez-faire economics in the US is slowly being replaced by a more intensive policy focus from start to finish…

• Dexter Roberts: Trade War: ‘The IMF has described China as a “global outlier.” The country’s gross domestic savings as a percentage of GDP is 44 percent, compared with an average of 22.5 percent among OECD members. Over the long term, much of this is believed to be precautionary savings…. China faces the distinct prospect of following the path of countries such as Russia, South Africa and Brazil that have struggled to achieve the status of a high-income nation…

• Eric Topol: The marked contrast in pandemic outcomes between Japan and the United States: ‘Comparing Japan, the country that has fared the best, with the United States, one of the worst pandemic outcome results, leaves us with a sense that Prof Ian MacKay’s "Swiss cheese model” is the best explanation. It’s not just one thing. Masks, consistent evidence-based communication (3C’s) with attention to ventilation and air quality, and the outstanding uptake of vaccines and boosters all contributed to Japan’s success…

---

Twitter & ‘Stack:

HOISTED FROM ÞE ARCHIVES: Lee Atwater, Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, and Joseph Bailey...

---

¶s:

Margaret Thatcher identified one "enemy within" Britain: the leaders and the militants of the Mineworkers Union who tried to shut down coal production, but did not dare ask their members for a strike vote.

Liz Truss’s “enemies” appear to consist of 80% of the population of the United Kingdom, plus all foreigners:

Camilla Cavendish: The Truss revolution is eating itself: ‘The prime minister is pursuing iconoclasm for its own sake and zealotry with no credo…. [The] Truss, it was a gift to her narrative, that Britain is being held back by an “anti-growth coalition” of eco-loons, “militant unions”, “Brexit deniers”, “talking heads” and the opposition…. I wasn’t surprised by her failure to apologise for disastrous economic mismanagement, or by her patronising nursery-school lecture that we can all get a bigger slice if we grow the pie. What spooked me was her portrayal of anyone who disagrees with her as an enemy—an enemy of growth, an enemy of the state…. It was vindictive of Truss to purge the cabinet of its few remaining talents because they didn’t give her sufficiently full-throated backing in the leadership contest. It was also foolish. She has made an enemy of Michael Gove, who has already forced her to U-turn on cutting the top rate of tax, and now aims to stop her cutting welfare. Her mantra is “deliver”, but few of her ministers have a clue how to actually expedite “more roads, faster broadband, affordable childcare”…

---

I confess I really do not get this. Within a limited domain—say, a circular bus route within a corporate complex, a shopping mall, or a downtown bus route—our computer power is now sufficiently great to make the self-driving problem a solvable one. Yet there is next to no deployment:

Max Chafkin: Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere: ‘They were supposed to be the future. But prominent detractors—including Anthony Levandowski, who pioneered the industry—are getting louder as the losses get bigger: The first car woke Jennifer King at 2 a.m. with a loud, high‑pitched hum. “It sounded like a hovercraft,” she says, and that wasn’t the weird part. King lives on a dead-end street at the edge of the Presidio, a 1,500-acre park in San Francisco where through traffic isn’t a thing. Outside she saw a white Jaguar SUV backing out of her driveway. It had what looked like a giant fan on its roof—a laser sensor—and bore the logo of Google’s driverless car division, Waymo. She was observing what looked like a glitch in the self-driving software: The car seemed to be using her property to execute a three-point turn…