BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-10-05 Tu
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember
I wrote that there are, typically, four kinds of conservative parties since the start of the modern age:
“Whig measures and Tory men”.
The party not of tradition and inherited status but rather of wealth and business—of creative destruction and social darwinism.
Reactionaries who see themselves at war with a dystopian “armed doctrine” with which compromise is neither possible nor desirable.
The fearful —those who believe it is they who will be creatively destroyed by the processes of historical change—and the grifters who exploit them.
Commenters on twitter have added more:
(5) Mercantilist/protectionist/autarkic conservatives seeking a self-sufficient polity with natural resources and a labor policy capable of supporting a semicapitalist, aristocratic elite:
(6) Those who seek a new caste system with themselves on top:
All I can say is that my neglect of these reflects one of my blind spots: my perennial tendency to downweight racism and nationalism…
One Audio:
Jeet Heer: Dune Bugs: ‘David Klion shares his enthusiasm for Frank Herbert’s science fiction classic…
Very Briefly Noted:
Janeway Institute: Welcome <https://www.janeway.econ.cam.ac.uk/>
Ross Murray: Mary, 487 Thunder Road, Neptune, NJ <https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/mary-487-thunder-road-neptune-nj>
Matthew Yglesias: The Median Voter Is a 50-Something White Person Who Didn’t Go to College
Paragraphs:
Jagdish Bhagwati: ’[Chicago was] very Friedmanesque … The seminars seemed to oscillate between proving that elasticities were large with markets therefore stable, and formulating competitive hypotheses for apparently imperfectly-competitive industries and coming up with high enough R2s. Econometrics was the handmaiden of ideology: things looked imperfect to the naked eye, especially to that of Chamberlin and Joan Robinson, but they were ‘really’ not so and the world was ‘as if’ competitive…. Market imperfections were ‘demonstrated’ to be negligible and the imperfections rather of government intervention were the subject of active research…
Raghu Rajan: China’s Risky Business Crackdown: ‘Like the earlier campaign against corruption, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s effort to control China’s private sector is agreeable in its stated intentions, but questionable in its implementation…. The campaign for “common prosperity” [may] undermine the economic sectors that China needs to reorient…. For Chinese domestic consumption to increase, both wages and household incomes from invested savings must grow. And for that to happen, China must depart from a growth model that has hitherto relied on significant repression to keep workers’ wages and returns paid to savers low. That means moving toward higher-skill industries that pay workers more, with investment intermediated by a sophisticated financial sector that can generate reasonable returns even without access to cheap capital…. Having previously emphasized fixed-asset investment, China now must deal with a massive overhang of unserviceable borrowing…. When restructuring overleveraged entities, Chinese authorities typically force investors to bear the losses…. But when there is fear of a generalized loss of confidence, especially among foreign investors, these entities have instead been bailed out…. The authorities insist that the crackdown on magnates like Ma and their firms is being carried out in the interest of “common prosperity”… a move against… billionaires… monopoly… and exploitation of workers…. The problem lies not with the stated objectives, but rather with the pursuit of them in a system lacking checks and balances…. Once trust in markets or the government is lost, it is not easily restored. This is especially true of confidence in the financial sector, where millions of Chinese have their savings tied up in half-finished houses and in wealth-management products sold by weakly regulated investment firms…
Brooke Harrington: Vaccine Refusers Don’t Want Blue America’s Respect: ‘The Anti-vaccine Con Job Is Becoming Untenable. Why targets of deliberate deception often hesitate to admit they’ve been deceived…. Erving Goffman… “On Cooling the Mark Out”… targets of con artists eventually come to understand that they have been defrauded, yet they almost never complain or report the crime to authorities. Why? Because, Goffman argues, admitting that one has been conned is so deeply shameful that marks experience it as a kind of social death. The victim, he writes, “has defined himself as a shrewd man and must face the fact that he is only another easy mark. He has defined himself as possessing a certain set of qualities and then proven to himself that he is miserably lacking in them. This is a process of self-destruction of the self…”
Gail Carriger: The Heroine’s Journey: ‘Tired of the hero’s journey?Frustrated that funny, romantic, and comforting stories aren’t taken seriously? Sad that the books and movies you love never seem to be critically acclaimed, even when they sell like crazy? The heroine’s journey is here to help…. What do Agatha Christie, JK Rowling, and Nora Roberts all have in common? They all write the heroine’s journey. Read this book to learn all about it…
LINK: <https://gailcarriger.com/books/the-heroines-journey-for-authors-book/>
Joan Walsh (2012): When the Big Lie Works: ‘Twice as many conservatives believe our Christian president is Muslim as they did in 2008. Congratulations, Mitt!… If you wonder why a desperate Mitt Romney rushed to lie about President Obama’s handling of crises in Cairo and Benghazi and make the ugly claim that Obama’s first response was “to sympathize with those who waged the attacks,” the latest poll from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life helps fill in the blanks. Unbelievably, the poll finds that the percentage of Republicans who believe that Barack Obama is Muslim, not Christian, has doubled since October 2008. It was actually a little higher in August 2010, right before the GOP administered its midterm “shellacking.” But in the most recent Pew poll on the topic, in July 2012, an astonishing 34 percent of “conservative Republicans” and 30 percent of all Republicans described the president as Muslim…. When House Speaker John Boehner dismissed evidence that a growing number of Republicans believe Obama was a Muslim, telling NBC’s David Gregory, “it’s not my job to tell the American people what to think”; when presidential candidate Rick Santorum refused to correct a supporter who called Obama “an avowed Muslim,” saying “the president’s a big boy, he can defend himself and his record”; when Romney likewise remained silent when an audience member accused Obama of “treason” and later told reporters, “I don’t correct all of the questions that get asked of me”; and of course, when Romney “joked” that “nobody’s ever asked to see my birth certificate”–well, moments like those reinforced the big lie and encouraged the right wing to continue to believe it…
LINK: <https://www.salon.com/2012/09/13/when_the_big_lie_works/>
Om Malik: The iPad Mini (2021) Review: ‘I switched my entire workflow to the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. I own a Mac Mini (attached to an XDR Display) because I use Photoshop to edit my photos. Adobe Photoshop is subpar on the iPad…. The Mega iPad does everything I need to do—from Zoom calls to writing documents, answering emails, reading articles, watching videos on various streaming services, and indulging in Twitter…. Most of my iPad use during the day (and sometimes in the evening) is akin to a traditional computer—keyboard-based inputs, and very rarely using alternatives such as Pencil. In the evening, I remove the keyboard, put on the softcover, and watch some YouTube, baseball, cricket, or an occasional TV series…. I do my reading in the morning—with the iPad sitting on the kitchen table and coffee steaming…. Apple sent me a review unit of the brand new iPad Mini…. For the past few days, I have been using it as my primary iPad…. The lighter weight, lower price, and Pro-matching capabilities make it a worthy purchase for any iPad buyer. But to get the best out of it, one has to reimagine how we interact with computers. I find myself scribbling and talking to this piece of glass. That’s not a bad start…
LINK: <https://om.co/2021/09/22/the-ipad-mini-2021-review/>
Steve Campbell: ’I’m struck by how much [Paul Krugman’s] Peddling Prosperity_ is like Merchants of Doubt, the prize-winning book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. Oreskes and Conway showed the climate denialism came from a small group of physical scientists in the Cold War, primarily Bill Nierenberg, Frederick Seitz, and Fred Singer. Similarly, Krugman shows that supply-side economics came from a small number of eccentric economists on the fringe of academia who just happened to have very good PR and a built-in readership at the WSJ…. It can’t be emphasized enough that supply-side economics and climate denialism were so disreputable that virtually no honest academics took them seriously. I’m adding an ever longer list as to why professors are liberal…. It’s not because of any inherent bias among professors and intellectuals. It’s because the conservative political party in the US is so insistent on propagating ideas that don’t live up to any academic scrutiny or rigor…
LINK:
Noah Smith: What Happened to Construction Productivity? Part 1: Measurement: ‘America is finally, FINALLY beginning to wake up to the problem of its ruinous construction costs. The next step is figuring out why those costs are high, so that eventually we can bring them down, thus ushering in a paradise of cheap housing and transportation…. The BLS finds that productivity in multifamily housing construction in 2015 was double what it was a decade ago, after remaining stagnant for a long time, while productivity in single-family housing construction has increased by only 21%…. Similarly, they find that productivity in the construction of industrial buildings grew by over 70% from the mid–2000s to 2015, while road and bridge construction productivity fell by 27%! In fact, the BLS finds that over the period from 2006–15, productivity in industrial building construction outpaced productivity growth in manufacturing!… Construction productivity is not doing well. Now it’s time to figure out why, and what can be done to improve it. Stay tuned for the next post…
LINK:
Re: Brooke Harrington and "slow boring", they both imply that Democrats need to stop demonizing the vast majority of anti-vaxxers, take a gentler persuasive approach that doesn't alienate them, while perhaps vigorously documenting *and advertising* the complete hypocrisy of the likes of Tucker Carlson and his ilk peddling his brand of BS; they are ALL vaccinated.
P.S. Someone please talk me down; I spent 3 weeks in the hospital watching CNN display the excruciating train wreck that is Congress; I have 2 grown sons and I want them to have a decent tomorrow (but I feel we are all doomed- did you see what Hurricane Ida did?)
Productivity increases when ALL of "the workers are empowered to change how things are done", "in an environment of meaningful competition", "where benefit from increased productivity accrues to those doing the work", and "there's effective measurement of results" are true.
NONE of those things are true in construction. It's a structural problem, and it's a structural problem by policy where the scale of the fix is roughly "stop being notionally capitalist".