BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-06-25

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

Jun 25, 2021

First:

In a month and a half, in the 50% vaccinated UK, the delta variant went from 100 to 6000 cases a day—a growth rate of 10% per day with substantial social distancing still in effect and with a half-vaccinated country. This thing is likely to rip through the less-vaccinated parts of the United States without the strong social-distancing measures that Red States were never able or willing to implement in the first place:

Gaetan Burgio: ’The issue that Sydney area is facing with delta variant #COVID19 outbreak… how quickly this variant has spread in UK. It is very quick!… <https://twitter.com/GaetanBurgio/status/1407649334913507333>

One Video:

Sahil Sachdev: Phil Libin Fireside and Q&ALINK: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3QeKPRyzyU>:

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

Very Briefly Noted:

David A. Price: Goodbye, Operator: ‘Automated telephone switching eventually displaced the women at the switchboards. But they kept their jobs for decades after the technology arrived… <https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2019/q4/economic_history>
Paul M. Sweezy: Theory of Capital Development <https://books.google.com/books?id=7tJWCgAAQBAJ>
TV Tropes: Kung Fu: ‘When it premiered, it was a unique Western…. It has since become seen as the archetypical Walking the Earth show…. Some of its dialogue became cliches in their own right (calling students “Grasshopper”, and “When you can take the pebble from my hand”… <https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/KungFu>
TV Tropes: Walking the Earth: ‘“I’m just going to walk the earth. …You know, like Caine in Kung Fu. Walk from place to place, meet people, get in adventures.” — Jules Winnfield, Pulp Fiction… <https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WalkingTheEarth>
Wikipedia: Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gascoyne-Cecil,_3rd_Marquess_of_Salisbury>
Ezra Klein: ’Betsey Stevenson explains all the things going on in the economy, and she does such a clear, beautiful, unusually humane job of it. Get excited!… <https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1405615909989851138>
Dylan Patel: Apple’s A14 Packs 134 Million Transistors/mm², but Falls Short of TSMC’s Density Claims <https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/apples-a14-packs-134-million-transistorsmm>
Elizabeth Wayland Barber (1995): Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Women_s_Work_The_First_20_000_Years_Wome/UanOCQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0>

Paragraphs:

Zachary Carter: The Second Death of Milton Friedman: ‘the secret to Friedman’s success in the world of ideas was his ability to influence American liberals… Rank-and-file conservative voters simply didn’t buy what Friedman was selling…. Friedman argued that a free market economy liberated from every possible stricture of government oversight would serve as an effective way to root out racism from American society… [as] racist policies would put the companies that practiced them at a competitive disadvantage…. Not many conservatives believed it back in the 1960s, either. Goldwater supporters didn’t back him because they expected him to wage a more rigorous crusade for racial justice than President Lyndon B. Johnson—they pulled the lever for Goldwater because they thought he would uphold the Jim Crow social order…. [But] by persuading a good chunk of his political opponents that he shared their values and social goals, Friedman built support for a policy program that ultimately undermined those very liberal objectives. Democrats… did adopt much of his economic worldview, believing it could be adapted to the party’s broader social agenda. The ring of power did not have to be destroyed, but could be harnessed for progressive purposes…

LINK: <https://zacharydcarter.substack.com/p/milton-friedman>

Ezra Klein: Maybe Joe Manchin Knows Exactly What He’s Doing: ‘Manchin… is circulating a compromise voting rights memo that he believes could serve as the basis for a bipartisan bill. It… bans partisan gerrymandering, restores key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, makes Election Day a public holiday and puts in place automatic voter registration… [while] mandating that voters show certain forms of identification. But the question Manchin faces isn’t whether there’s a voting rights bill he can support. It’s whether he’s willing to force Republicans to accept it…. Manchin could offer both sides a choice: a bipartisan bill designed by Manchin (and whatever allies he chooses) or the outcome on voting rights they fear most—for Democrats, that would be nothing, and for Republicans, that would be everything…. Core to this strategy is Manchin admitting something he often pretends not to see: It is not in the Republican Party’s interest to cooperate with Democrats on major legislation. Republicans would prefer to pass nothing and watch Joe Biden’s presidency fail. This is not my supposition or slander. This is their own testimony. “Mitch McConnell’s come under a lot of criticism for saying at one point he wanted to make sure that Barack Obama was a one-term president,” Senator John Barrasso, a member of the Republicans’ Senate leadership team, said. “I want to make Joe Biden a one-half-term president.” Just as Manchin believes he needs to force Democrats to agree to compromise bills, so too does he need to force Republicans to agree to those bills…. If Manchin allows Republicans to kill any bill they do not choose to support, he will be strengthening their incentives for partisanship…

LINK: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/opinion/joe-manchin-filibuster-voting-rights.html>

Abraham Lincoln: At Alton, IL: ‘That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle…

LINK: <http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/liberty.htm>

Matthew A. Winkler: California Defies Doom With No. 1 U.S. Economy: ‘The Golden State has no peers when it comes to expanding GDP, raising household income, investing in innovation and a host of other key metrics….If anything, Covid–19 accelerated California’s record productivity. Quarterly revenue per employee of the publicly-traded companies based in the state climbed to an all-time high of $1.5 million in May, 63% greater than its similar milestone a decade ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The rest of the U.S. was nothing special, with productivity among those members of the Russell 3000 Index, which is made up of both large and small companies, little changed during the past 10 years…. While pundits have long insisted California policies are bad for business, reality belies them. In a sign of investor demand, the weight of California companies in the benchmark S&P 500 Index increased 3 percentage points since a year ago, the most among all states, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Faith in California credit was similarly superlative, with the weight of corporate bonds sold by companies based in the state rising the most among all states, to 12.5 percentage points from 11.7 percentage points, according to the Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Corporate Bond Index. Translation: Investors had the greatest confidence in California companies during the pandemic. The most trusted measure of economic strength says California is the world-beater among democracies. The state’s gross domestic product increased 21% during the past five years, dwarfing No. 2 New York (14%) and No. 3 Texas (12%), according to data compiled by Bloomberg.…

LINK: <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-14/california-defies-doom-with-no-1-u-s-economy>

Jonathan Levy: Ages of American Capitalism: ‘The Age of Commerce spans the colonial era through the outbreak of the Civil War…. The Age of Capital traces the impact of the first major leap in economic development following the Civil War: the industrial revolution…. The Great Depression in 1929… sparked the Age of Control…. Recession and stagflation in the 1970s led to… the Age of Chaos…

LINK: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w0yaP82mb4>

Adam Tooze: Chartbook Newsletter #21: ‘Reading Grossman’s Stalingrad and Life and Fate…. Jameson puts it as follows: “as paradoxical as it may sound, what holds his novel together as a unified narrative is also what holds the Soviet Union together in this period, the unfreedom that allowed it, improbably, to defeat Hitler’s Wehrmacht and win World War II.” The only question is, why “improbably”? That casual suggestion of contingency is not innocent. It concedes far too much to Western condescension, to the British and American intelligence analysts who scoffed at Soviet production statistics, to the German generals who bemoaned the victories supposedly stolen from them by Hitler’s meddling. It mistakes the essential point. What Stalingrad demonstrated was precisely that the unfreedom of the Soviet Union, as terrible as it was, was different from that of Nazi Germany or for that matter of the West precisely because it was more historically generative, more potent. It wrought a material, social and cultural transformation on such a vast scale that it overturned the presumptions of historical normality. It shifted the balance of probabilities. It made it probable, not improbable, that the Soviet Union would win World War II. Certainly, that is the view of Grossman and his characters…

LINK: <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-21>