BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-07-25 Su

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:

Jul 25, 2021

First:

‘[Tomas] Philipson praised Mr. Trump’s economic instincts as “on par with many Nobel economists I have worked with at Chicago”… but… “weak advisers” excluded “good advice by the CEA…”’

If the advisors were “weak” how were they able to keep Tomas Philipson out of the room? And if Tomas Philipson really thinks Trump by himself has “instincts” “on par with many Nobel economists”, doesn’t that say that economists are unnecessary for Trump to waste his time listening to—that he already knows what they have to say? And if Tomas Philipson is as big a liar as I think he is, what reason is there to believe that the world would be a better place if he were allowed into the Oval Office ever?

And even if it is cult-membership dynamics, I can understand why a careerist might want to work towards (or beyond) the Führer when his armies command from the North Cape of Norway to the sands of Libya, and from the Pyrenees to Stalingrad. But what is in it for Philipson to embarrass himself so completely in front of his colleagues and professional peers? You can say that Philipson and company bought in unwisely, now realize that they are in intellectual and moral bankruptcy, and yet rather than cut their losses are “gambling for resurrection”. But what kind of resurrection can they possibly envisage?

I mean, seriously: is this the kind of person whom the University of Chicago really wants to have on its faculty? Someone who sees as much insight to be gained in the instincts a good economist have from studying the speeches of Donald Trump as the papers in the Quarterly Journal of Economics?

Nick Timiraos & Andrew Restuccia (2020–06–26): White House Economist Tested Positive for Covid–19: ‘[Tomas] Philipson praised Mr. Trump’s economic instincts as “on par with many Nobel economists I have worked with at Chicago,” but he said other officials had marginalized the CEA, which normally has three members but will be down to just one with Mr. Philipson’s departure. “Weak advisers” excluded “good advice by the CEA, even though the president would have benefited from it,” he said…
LINK: <https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-economist-tested-positive-for-covid-19-11593212011>

Thus I am not sure that Paul has got this right. A few politicians are scared that Trump might get them primaries in 2022. But what is the source of his power over everybody else?

Paul Krugman: ’Rhetoric on the right sounds increasingly like that of Stalinist purges, or maybe even a better analogy China’s Cultural Revolution: the accusations of villainy ever wilder, the circle of non-villains ever smaller. Bernstein says, I think rightly, that it’s signaling: like Maoists in the Cultural Revolution, everyone is trying to prove themselves more revolutionary than their rivals. And to credibly prove your far-right credentials, you have to advocate crazy and harmful things—why, any old RINO could support stuff that might make sense and won’t kill people. What makes this dynamic possible, of course, is the abdication of the party’s saner elements—without credible threats to discipline the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, it ends up being a race to the bottom, or actually a race to maximum crazy. The scary thing is that these right-wing Red Guards have hijacked a party that wasn’t always crazy; lots of Americans will vote R because they don’t realize what the party has become. And our system is structurally biased toward that party. It’s hard to see how this ends short of catastrophic political defeat for the GOP. And that will be a long time coming; America as we know it may not survive that long…
LINK: <https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1415804136742965259>

In other words, why is true loyalty valued on the part of anyone who doesn’t face a Republican primary electorate in 2022?

Paul Krugman: ’Henry Farrell sends me to an article…. It’s on “cult production,” with examples ranging from ancient Rome to modern Syria, but applies almost perfectly to the current GOP. Here’s why cult members say ridiculous things and engage in “nauseating displays of loyalty”. Self-humiliation isn’t a bug, it’s a feature: if you don’t say crazy things and destroy your dignity, how can people judge your true loyalty to Mao/Kim/Trump? And as the article says, there’s a process of inflation: the craziness gets crazier, the displays more nauseating, as cult members try to outpace their peers. What’s amazing is that this is happening to a party that doesn’t even control the (federal) government and has limited ability to punish heretics and reward the faithful…
LINK: <https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1416053484789587975>

Xavier says, correctly, that patronage can be at the heart of things. But the difference between Caligula and Trump is that Caligula controlled patronage and could deliver it, while Trump controls… what levers of patronage? And why would anyone imagine that he will deliver?

Xavier Marquez: The Mechanisms of Cult Production: ‘leader personality cults are typically produced by a specific set of mech- anisms of flattery inflation. It describes how loyalty signaling, emotional amplification, and direct production mechanisms can combine, under specific circumstances, to transform ordinary flattery into full-blown practices of ruler worship. And it argues for attending to the specific conditions that make possible the operation of these mechanisms, showing how patronage relationships in particular provide fertile ground for the emergence of personality cults. Moreover, the chapter argues that both ancient and modern leader cults depend on similar mechanisms, despite clear differences in context and function. I illustrate the operation of these mechanisms with many modern examples and an extended discussion of one ancient example, the abortive cult of Caligula during the Roman Principate…
LINK: <https://openaccess.wgtn.ac.nz/articles/chapter/The_mechanisms_of_cult_production/12971675>

One Video:

Radu Pericol Tiganas: Columbo: Intrigue Without Mystery <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEZuRZHTTLA>:

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

Very Briefly Noted:

Matthew Yglesias: The FDA vs. Cost-Benefit Analysis: ‘The best way… for U.S. public health agencies to have the confidence of the American public is for them to make decisions that are defensible on the merits…. A solid track record of saying true things and giving advice that makes sense helps bolster your reputation over time. Resorting to Wizard-of-Oz tactics… creates an increasingly brittle system… subject to catastrophic failure… <https://www.slowboring.com/p/fda-cost-benefit>
Anna Grzymala-Busse: Tilly Goes to Church: The Medieval and Religious Origins of the European State <https://broadstreet.blog/2021/07/23/tilly-goes-to-church-the-medieval-and-religious-origins-of-the-european-state/#comment-121>
John Burn-Murdoch & David Pilling: Delta Variant Takes Hold in Developing World as Infections Soar: ‘Poorer countries with low vaccination rates face surge in Covid cases and deaths… <https://www.ft.com/content/fa4f248a-a476-491d-a5ce-f128360e9f24>
Noah Smith: Haiti vs. the Dominican Republic: ‘The countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic…. The economic divergence… is… remarkable…. As recently as 1960, the two countries had similar standards of living. Today, the D.R., by some measures, is eight times as rich as Haiti, while Haiti’s standard of living hasn’t advanced at all since 1950… LINK: <https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/haiti-vs-the-dominican-republic>
Eric Topol: ‘Replicated wherever tracked, with gradient increased as infections begin to soar again due to Delta, now 8-fold Δ Our San Diego County data today… <https://twitter. com/EricTopol/status/1419308647054671874>
Columbophile: Columbo: An Origin Story: ‘February 20, 1968… the day “Prescription: Murder” first aired…. But… Columbo, the character, was created by William Link and Richard Levinson nearly a decade earlier and had already graced both the stage and screen… <https://columbophile.com/2018/02/17/columbo-an-origin-story/>
Evan Wallacer: Introducing Vector Networks <https://www.figma.com/blog/introducing-vector-networks/>

Paragraphs:

Noah Smith: Why Is China Smashing Its Tech Industry?: ‘China never really shifted out of survival mode…. Growth has always been toward the telos of comprehensive national power. China’s young people may be increasingly ready to cash out and have some fun, but the leadership is just not there…. They have to avenge the Century of Humiliation and claim China’s rightful place in the sun and blah blah…. China’s leaders look at what kind of technologies they want the country’s engineers and entrepreneurs to be spending their effort on, [and] they… don’t want… stuff… for fun and convenience…. Their consumer internet sector[’s]… link… [to] geopolitical power had simply become too tenuous to keep throwing capital and high-skilled labor at it. And so, in classic CCP fashion, it was time to smash…

LINK: <https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-is-china-smashing-its-tech-industry>

Dan Rosen: Is Xi a Failure? Plus: Older Gentlemen Autocrat Tendencies, Odds of Taiwan Invasion, & What’s the Point of Liberal Governance Anyways?: ‘I wonder if there’s a book to be written ten years from now on how the twelve months from end-of-summer 2015 to December 2016 was the… decisive year…. Suddenly you saw companies… saying, “Hey, our Chinese JV partner just handed us this note requesting we revise our articles of association to give the party committee a de jure role in the corporate governance structure.”… The national champions who stepped up never stepped back and just evolved their role to now becoming investors in everything. So taking little equity nibbles across the entire economy, oftentimes just single percentage points, but nonetheless, now you have Central Huijin and others with investments everywhere…

LINK: <https://chinatalk.substack.com/p/is-xi-a-failure-plus-older-gentlemen>

Katie Baker: The Day the Good Internet Died: ‘For a small slice of time, being online was a thrilling mix of discovery, collaboration, creativity, and chaotic potential. Then Google Reader disappeared…. Google Reader is not the world’s first RSS newsreader…. But it’s the one that caught on. And using it requires little effort to yield satisfying, orderly rewards…. It’s the year 2021…. It’s that blasted “oh hello, are you doomscrolling?” Twitter bot getting retweeted into my feed…. Often it’s sponsored content, and I can never tell which service’s offerings leave me more unsettled…. Logging on feels like participating in the setup to a Yogi Berra 2.0 “terrible food, and such small portions!”–style joke—except that the punch line is about, like, public health statistics instead of prime rib. In the past week alone, the president of the United States and Facebook, each citing the tech company’s handling of pandemic info, have bickered publicly about, oh, just Facebook’s ratio of murderousness to societal benefit…. When Google Reader disappeared in 2013, it wasn’t just a tale of dwindling user numbers or of what one engineer later described as a rotted codebase. It was a sign of the crumbling of the very foundation upon which it had been built: the era of the Good Internet…. Google had purchased Blogger back in 2003, and in an interview with Playboy in 2004, founder Sergey Brin outlined a vision for his company that felt extremely bloggy: “We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible,” he said. But nothing gold can stay, and as smartphones and tablets and apps and social networks began to supplement and then supplant the simple-text-on-a-desktop experience near the start of the 2010s, Google’s corporate frame of mind shifted ever-inward…

LINK: <https://www.theringer.com/2021/7/21/22586870/google-reader-ode-end-of-the-good-internet>