BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-07-29 Th
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
First:
Chris Hanes says that he started a stopwatch to see how long it would take Jeff Williamson to propose a new joint research project. It took 39 minutes before he proposed a joint cooperative effort to jumpstart more research in the economic history of the Philippines:
Australian Economic History Review: Globalisation, Migration, Trade, & Growth: Honouring the Contribution of Jeff Williamson to Australian and Asia‐Pacific Economic History: ‘The July issue of the Australian Economic History Review honours the contributions of Professor Jeff Williamson to Australian and Asia-Pacific economic history. Those who know Jeff are aware that he seems to make important contributions to the economic history of virtually everywhere and ‘everywhen’. However, perhaps his most lasting and important research contributions have involved expanding the scope of economic history in terms of both methodology and geographic area….
It is Jeff’s contributions to the broad remit of this Journal that are emphasised in this issue. Jeff has worked on Asian economic history since the 1960s… ‘Writing History Backwards: Meiji Japan Revisited’ (with Allen Kelley)… visiting ANU and Melbourne… being actively involved with the Journal and Society over this time period. He has contributed more papers to the AEHR than anyone else who has never held a full-time position in an Australian university and been on the editorial board of the Journal since 2003…. The papers in this issue are all written by Jeff’s collaborators and former PhD students and are on topics adjacent to earlier work with Jeff. A table of contents for the issue can be found below (abstracts of the papers can be found at the Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand webpage (<https://economichistorysociety.wordpress.com/australian-economic-history-review/>):
‘Globalisation, Migration, Trade, and Growth: Honouring the Contribution of Jeff Williamson to Australian and Asia-Pacific Economic History’, Australian Economic History Review, 61(2): Andrew J. Seltzer, Guest Editor’s Introduction. Timothy Hatton, ‘Emigration from the UK to the USA, Canada and Australia/New Zealand, 1870–1913: Quantity and Quality’. Kevin O’Rourke, Alan de Bromhead, Alan Fernihough, and Markus Lampe ‘Four great Asian trade collapses’. Sambit Bhattacharya, ‘Commodity boom-bust cycles and the resource curse in Australia: 1900 to 2017’. David Jacks and Martin Stuermer, ‘Dry bulk shipping and the evolution of maritime transport costs, 1850–2020’. Jeff Williamson and Laura Panza, ‘Always egalitarian? Australian earnings inequality 1870–1910’.
One Video:
Claudia Goldin: Journey Across a Century of Women <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CJxBPjmT7Y>
Very Briefly Noted:
Dan Spokojny & Thomas Scherer: Foreign Policy Should Be Evidence-Based<https://warontherocks.com/2021/07/foreign-policy-should-be-evidence-based/>
Bloomberg: Delta Variant’s Spread in Nanjing Tests China’s Covid Containment Efforts: ‘Delta’s Spread Is Testing Even Aggressive ‘Covid Zero’ Defenses. Beijing sees first local case in 6 months as China challenged. Variant has breached Australia’s strict quarantine defenses… LINK: <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-28/delta-s-spread-is-testing-china-s-aggressive-covid-playbook>
Dennis Aftergut: Meet the Corporations That Went Back on Their Word Not to Support the Sedition Caucus: ‘They promised not to support Republicans who voted not to certify the election results. And then they changed their minds and hoped Americans wouldn’t notice… LINK: <https://thebulwark.com/meet-the-corporations-who-went-back-on-their-word-not-to-support-the-sedition-caucus/>
Jeffrey C. Ely: Kludged: ‘A model which illustrates a limitation of adaptive processes: improvements tend to come in the form of kludges… a marginal adaptation that compensates for, but does not eliminate, fundamental design inefficiencies. When kludges accumulate, the result can be perpetually suboptimal behavior… <https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publications/kludged>
Moriah Bergwerk & al.: Covid–19 Breakthrough Infections in Vaccinated Health Care Workers<https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2109072>
Paragraphs:
Janan Ganesh: Vaccination Race Reveals Two Distinct Populisms: ‘US Republicans have a more anarchic vision than some parties they are often grouped with…. Last month Rodrigo Duterte warned Filipino vaccine-dodgers that he would inject it “in your butt”…. Other members of the strongman club are more demure but not less insistent…. Viktor Orban…. The Law and Justice party of Poland…. Two populisms…. The first kind is serious about the business of government…. This paternalist spirit has no place in the other populism. President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil embodies it, as do the US Republicans…. Populism as cussed and near anarchic defiance of received opinion. It is ruthless in the pursuit of power but lax to the point of dereliction in its exercise. On both counts, Donald Trump is the apotheosis of the movement. He elicited foreign help to remain president.…
LINK: <https://www.ft.com/content/8513d0c3-553f-48ae-aeac-09974eaac28e>
Peter Turchin: A Theory for the Formation Of Large Agrarian Empires: ‘Between 3000 BCE and 1800 CE there were at least 60 agrarian “megaempires” that controlled at the peak an area equal to or greater than one million of squared kilometers…. Over 90 percent of megaempires originated at steppe frontiers—zones of interaction between nomadic pastorialists and settled agriculturalists… synthesize recent developments from theories of cultural evolution with insights from previous work by anthropologists on nomad/farmer interactions…
Peter Drucker: Adventures of a Bystander: ’If there was one article of the faith to which all the Polanyis suscribed—from Karl’s father on—it was that the “laissez-faire” Liberals of the nineteenth-century Manchester School were wrong in their assertion that the market is the only alternative to serfdom. Indeed the market creed of the Manchester Liberals may be called the hereditary enemy of the House of Polanyi. All Polanyis searched for another alternative, whether [cousin Odon Pol’s] early fascism, Adolph’s romantic Brazil, [Laura] Mousie’s “rural sociology,” Michael’s stoic desire-free individual, or Karl’s “social principles of economic integration.” But the more Karl delved into prehistory, primitive economics, and classical antiquity, the more proof did he find for the hated and despised market creed of Ricardo and Bentham, and also of Karl’s contemporary bogeymen, Ludwig von Mises and Frederick Hayek of the Austrian School. So Karl retreated into footnotes, into more and more anthropological studies, and into academic busyness…. It was my willingness in The Future of Industrial Man to settle instead for an adequate, bearable, but free society that Karl at the time criticized and rejected as a tepid compromise…. But just as the failure of a whole generation of brilliant thinkers to find the… new synthesis between Catholicism and Protestantism… foreshadowed the end of the Age of Infallible Religion fifty years later, so the failure of the brilliant Polanyis to find the alternative beyond capitalism and communism might well foreshadow the end of the Age of the Infallible Society…
Ed Rampell (2013): An Interview with Richard Wolff: ‘[Richard Wolff:] Many companies, including famous names like Apple computers, if you go back and look at the early days you may be surprised to find out that they were co-ops. The original founders were often workers dissatisfied by being mere employees in somebody’s company, so they got together with others, often at young ages, and pooled their enthusiasm and energy and setup a different kind of enterprise. Very common in Silicon Valley. Every year, hundreds, in some years thousands, of engineers quit their jobs in big companies like IBM, Oracle or Cisco, and get together with friends and say, “okay, we want to start a different kind of business. We’re all going to take our laptops and gather at Harry’s garage, and here’s what we want: We don’t want to come to work every day in a suit and tie or for some executive who doesn’t understand anything about computers telling us what to do. We don’t want any of the rigmarole; it’s stifling, it kills our creativity. We’d like to go to a place where there are no bosses, where we’re all equal. Where we can wear Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts and bring our toddlers.” And that’s what they’ve done. And in many cases they’ve been very strict: All decisions have to be made by consensus. Everybody is equal. No chiefs, no Indians, we’re all equal here……
LINK: <https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/16/cooperatives-and-workers-self-directed-enterprises/> <https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=AsNF7dzy3cs>
Jonathan V. Last: The Damnation of George P. Bush: ‘George P. Bush leaned into this entire affair so hard that he sold merch boasting about the betrayal of his family…. This is from June. Six months after the January insurrection. What did this abasement and betrayal get George P.? A fat load of jack squat. Surely George P. wasn’t foolish enough to think that Trump would go so far as to endorse him. But he probably hoped that, by toadying as shamelessly as possible, he might keep Trump on the sidelines and out of endorsing in the race. At the least, he must have hoped that Trump wouldn’t weigh in until much later in the race, when, if George P. had good poll numbers, maybe Trump would be nervous about endorsing someone else. But you must understand that this election, the Republican primary, isn’t until May 1, 2022. It’s more than nine months away. Trump endorsing this early effectively puts an end to the race. It freezes all of the party establishment and money in place, because now to be for George P. is to be against Trump. Ain’t no Texas Republicans fixin’ to do that there foolishness…. A great many Republicans still believe that if they just get along, they’ll go along. That if they keep their heads down, or truckle under, they can keep running their game. That so long as they’re not like those icky Never Trumpers, the revolution won’t come for them. To go against Trumpism is to court defeat. To abase yourself before it is to add dishonor to the bargain. The funny part—and really, this is the single weirdest irony of our entire nationalist odyssey—is that Trump frequently ended his rallies by reading “The Snake.” Donald Trump literally told the Republican party who he was and what he would do to them. It was not subtext. It was the actual text. He read it from a paper. Over and over again. Most of the party, it turned out, wanted a snake. They embraced the nihilism because it promised a chance to hurt their enemies. But men like George P. Bush refused to believe—even at this late date—that the story could possibly be true. Let his shame be a reminder, a warning, and a lesson…
LINK: <https://thebulwark.com/the-damnation-of-george-p-bush/>
Diane Lim: Will the Infrastructure Bill Fail to Create Jobs Where We Most Need Them?: ‘Two months. That’s how long our most recent economic recession—what some call the “Pandemic Recession”—lasted, as officially called by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). That February to April 2020 “peak to trough” is the shortest recession the NBER has ever recorded (going back to the mid–1800s), and also means we have been back in economic recovery mode for 15 months now!… Policies focus on an economic recovery strategy as the COVID–19 public health crisis has mostly been beaten back where vaccine rollout has been adopted. But does the latest policy effort focused on physical infrastructure (predominately roads and bridges) funding make sense given the economic condition it is intended to treat?… Consumer demand is largely back, especially in the leisure and hospitality sector…. Are these next, very large installments of government spending necessary to get us back to full employment?… The trouble with the administration leading with the physical infrastructure investments and not the family investments in caregiving and other “human infrastructure” is that it might not create the kinds of jobs in the industries and occupations where our economy is still operating below our full capacity…
(Remember: You can subscribe to this… weblog-like newsletter… here:
There’s a free email list. There’s a paid-subscription list with (at the moment, only a few) extras too.)
Re: Will the Infrastructure Bill Fail to Create Jobs Where We Most Need Them?
TL;DR Real men want to build stuff and not deal with the social issues hindering the economy.
This is a good argument for having a much more representative number of working women in positions of leadership and policymaking to counterbalance male-orientated thinking that has proven so poor over the last century.
Re: Delta Variant’s Spread in Nanjing Tests China’s Covid Containment Efforts
The unfolding of the pandemic is looking more and more like Poe's "The Mask of the Red Death". It doesn't matter which approach you choose, all approaches analogous to building a safe castle eventually leak allowing Death to enter. The best you can hope for is to reduce infections and deaths as far as possible. That means building herd immunity with vaccinations and buying time with the standard public health measures used since time immemorial. It is the forces [of ignorance, and stupidity] that operate against both options that result in unnecessary culling of the population.
I am reminded of the brilliant "Yes, [Prime] Minister" episode where the minister for health was up against the minister lobbying for the tobacco companies. His argument for allowing smoking was that it brought in tax revenue and killed the smoker early, saving public pension costs, dashing the aim of the Health Minister to curb smoking. It seems to me that was basically the possible thought of the current UK PM (Covid just kills the 80-year-olds) and various US Republican governors - Better to keep the economy running, let Covid cull the elderly and vulnerable who are a cost to the state. That heartless approach may even be rational from a purely economic POV. Pity they used the exact opposite argument against the specious ACA "death panels". Funny how it is always these "faceless others" that have to die. A world where a Rawlsian lottery was in operation to allocate deaths might change a few minds. [Everyone gets a ticket where about 1% must die (as in the ST:TOS A Taste of Armageddon) and 5% get "long Covid"] I imagine this working by allocating vaccines and denial of health care by lottery only, with no way to game the system. [Rather like how the wealthy countries are treating the poorer ones at the moment...]