BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-07-17 Su
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-07-17 Su
A read-around...
I greatly enjoy and am, in fact, driven to write Grasping Reality—but its long-term viability and quality do depend on voluntary subscriptions from paying supporters. I am incredibly grateful that the great bulk of it goes out for free to what is now well over ten-thousand subscribers around the world. If you are enjoying the newsletter enough to wish to join the group receiving it regularly, please press the button below to sign up for a free subscription and get (the bulk of) it in your email inbox. And if you are enjoying the newsletter enough to wish to join the group of supporters, please press the button below and sign up for a paid subscription:
One Video:
Arvind Krishnamurthy: QE: What Have We Learned? <
One Image:
Very Briefly Noted:
Nadine Blanco: Huangcheng Noodle House Owners Work on a New Concept in Berkeley: ‘Kao Kao Grill will combine traditional Chinese flavors with American charcoal grilling techniques… <https://whatnowsf.com/huangcheng-noodle-house-owners-are-working-on-a-new-concept-in-berkeley/>
Benjamin Seto: Shanxi Knife-Cut Noodles Are the Specialty at Huangcheng Noodle House in Oakland: ‘The noodles at this Chinatown spot are a must-order, but you’d be remiss not to try other dishes, like the cold chili chicken and shredded potato with hot oil sauce… <https://www.berkeleyside.org/2018/12/10/shanxi-knife-cut-noodles-are-the-specialty-at-huangcheng-noodle-house-in-oakland>
Matt Levine: Elon’s Out: ‘Elon Musk… the richest person in the world… has some unusual and expensive hobbies. One of his hobbies is that he sometimes likes to pretend that he will acquire public companies. He seems to find this fun… <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-09/elon-s-out#xj4y7vzkg>Clara Ferreira Marques: Abortion Bans Come With a Heavy Economic Cost: ‘Economic gaps will widen: Those who can afford to travel will continue to find the terminations they need in order to live healthy lives, study and work—but the most vulnerable will not. We know this, because multiple studies have told us so, over decades… <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-16/abortion-bans-come-with-a-heavy-economic-cost?srnd=opinion#xj4y7vzkg>
Nicolás Rivero: It’s the Best & Worst of Times for Semiconductor Supply Chains: ‘The state of the semiconductor sector is so muddled because the production of some types of chips has already ramped up enough to meet demand, while manufacturing for other types of chips is still catching up…. Plenty of chips for smartphones and laptops, but not for cars… <https://qz.com/2186673/its-the-best-and-worst-of-times-for-semiconductor-supply-chains/>
Robert Kuttner: Free Markets, Besieged Citizens: ‘Gary Gerstle: The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era…. The neoliberal credo claims that markets work efficiently and that government attempts to constrain them via regulation and public spending invariably fail, backfire, or are corrupted by politics…. Neoliberalism has relied on deregulation, privatization, weakened trade unions, less progressive taxation, and new trade rules…. These shifts have resulted in widening inequality, diminished economic security, and reduced confidence in the ability of government to aid its citizens. The Republican embrace of this doctrine is hardly surprising… [but] the allure of neoliberalism to many Democrats is a puzzle worth exploring…. As a dissenting remnant of pre-Keynesian economics, neoliberalism languished until the New Deal model faltered in the 1970s with the improbable combination of inflation and stagnation…. Gerstle explains how the cultural left also found the libertarian and antibureaucratic aspects of neoliberalism appealing, weakening the New Deal order and its political coalition in yet another way…. Neoliberalism not only protects the market from the regulatory state; more radically, it expands market principles to realms thought to be partially social…. Was it a success or a failure? That depends on who you are. For economic elites and the Republican Party, it has been a splendid success. For the Democratic Party, the neoliberal order has been a catastrophe…
LINK: <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/07/21/free-markets-besieged-citizens-gerstle-kuttner/>
Ken White & Josh Barro: Serious Trouble EP07: ‘What they’ve done here in that agreement is say in advance in the contract that Elon Musk agrees… to allow specific performance… <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I-iVbkJ9kH4uYHS_m4pu2f6cgE0EpVr6p8mrW0GI5uY/edit>
Kevin T. Dugan: Twitter’s Lawsuit Against Elon Musk: 15 Revelations <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/07/twitters-lawsuit-against-elon-musk-15-revelations.html>
Twitter & ‘Stack:
Vivek Kelkar: The Iran Mess: ‘The US sought to halt Iran’s nuclear program, weaken its economy, and isolate it. But Iran’s centrifuges are still spinning—and now the US has brought itself to the edge of the cliff…
Jonathan M. Katz: An FDR-Size Hole: ‘Eric Rauchway makes a case that the true purpose of Franklin Roosevelt’s program was… to save democracy…
I greatly enjoy and am, in fact, driven to write Grasping Reality—but its long-term viability and quality do depend on voluntary subscriptions from paying supporters. I am incredibly grateful that the great bulk of it goes out for free to what is now well over ten-thousand subscribers around the world. If you are enjoying the newsletter enough to wish to join the group receiving it regularly, please press the button below to sign up for a free subscription and get (the bulk of) it in your email inbox. And if you are enjoying the newsletter enough to wish to join the group of supporters, please press the button below and sign up for a paid subscription:
Director’s Cut PAID SUBSCRIBER ONLY Content Below:
¶s:
A very nice review of Koyama and Rubin’s new book by young whippersnapper Davis Kedrosky. I have the standard complaints that their emphases are not mine, but those are standard. The one perhaps-substantial bone I would pick is that I think that they have the hierarchical order of importance of the components of the Great Transformation reversed. For me, the biggest deal is the circa-1870 coming of Modern Economic Growth. The 1770-1870 British surge into the Industrial Revolution, while an essential prerequisite, was a smaller deal. The 1600-1770 “Little Divergence” rise of northwest Europe is a smaller deal even still, but even that is, I think, of much more importance than any 800-1600 “Great Divergence” between Europe and Asia. Caravels and gunpowder weapons turn out to be very important for political-imperial reasons, yes; but they are not the meat and fish of civilizational advance, were quickly transferable, and gunpowder empires across Eurasia as of 1600 look, to me at least, much of a piece:
Davis Kedrosky: Book Review: How the World Became Rich: ‘Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin <https://www.howtheworldbecamerich.com/home> have written what will almost certainly become a beloved economic history classic…. I put another book on pause to read it. As a manic completionist, I never do this, but once I had peeked past the blue-girded front cover I couldn’t put it down. Now I’ve read it twice. So it goes…. The first [part] is a literature review of the five main strands of… the New Historical Economics. The second is… a literature review… of… [the] “rise of the west”… and covers the medieval preconditions for European growth, Britain’s takeoff, and the spread of the Industrial Revolution to the global periphery…. Geography, institutions, culture, demography, and colonialism…. Geography… K&R downplay these…. K&R also take umbrage with the Wrigley-Pomeranz-Allen axis on the indispensability of coal to the Industrial Revolution…. K&R are making a meta-argument resembling Robert Brenner (1976)’s explanation for why the impact of the fourteenth-century demographic crises differed to the east and west of the River Elbe…. We know the partial effects of lots of things in the abstract, but unless we control for context-specific characteristics…. Demography (e.g. the European Marriage Pattern) is treated similarly to geography; only in combination with institutional or cultural forces can beneficient changes in birth rates stimulate growth…. Institutions and culture… show up as universal solvents… limited government and the protection of property rights tend to be globally good, and sometimes decisive in the shift to sustained growth…. For a short work, the coverage is fantastic…. As befits a Jared Rubin book, the section on culture is also particularly weighty…. The authors have little patience for theories… according colonialism a decisive role in promoting Western economic growth. They argue that the negative effects of European expansion abroad came after the onset of the Great Divergence…. A theory of development is just what K&R attempt in the book’s second half…. Europe’s Great Divergence… Northwest Europe’s Little Divergence… Britain’s surge…. Europe had two advantage… a landmass “fractured”… creating several “core” regions that could be dominated by separate polities; and… some distance from the steppe…. In the late-medieval city-states… the rent-seeking of municipal oligarchs and the “low technological base” of the period curtailed the efflorescence…. [In] the forward surge of the Anglo-Dutch commercial kingdoms… the emergence of limited government, specifically parliaments…. The situation becomes more complex when the authors have to explain Britain’s divergence from the Dutch. Why did Dutch institutions follow the medieval Italian city-states into rent-seeking and decay, but Britain establish a stable alliance between mercantile, industrial, and landed power under the aegis of a powerful parliamentary state?… We’re told that the Dutch also suffered from heavy war taxes, which is true—but Britain also boasted a fearsome and often regressive tax regime that funneled enormous sums into military spending…. Ultimately, K&R take a reasonable tack. Many countries shared one or two advantages with Britain, but in hindsight, she appeared to have all of them…. On to the spread of development. K&R favor human capital-based explanations for the Second Industrial Revolution…
LINK:
Time to get up to speed on MuskTwitter!:
Ken White & Josh Barro: Serious Trouble EP07: ‘What they’ve done here in that agreement is say in advance in the contract that Elon Musk agrees… to allow specific performance. Now, you can’t actually contract around judicial power…. [But] what you’re seeing here is a contract that’s very one-sided for Twitter…. There are only two ways you would go into a contract like this… if you wanted to… ride or die… [or] if you never intended to abide by the contract and you’re indifferent to the consequences of breaking the contract…. One pitch sometimes isn’t so much that it’s impossible for money to remedy it, but it’s unreasonably difficult or impossible to calculate the amount of money that would remedy it…. “We just can’t tell how badly or how permanently he’s damaged the share price with all these antics, and it’s unfair to make us be the ones to speculate, and because that can’t be done, therefore, you should give specific performance.” That might be a stronger argument than no number of billions of dollars would do it… LINK: <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I-iVbkJ9kH4uYHS_m4pu2f6cgE0EpVr6p8mrW0GI5uY/edit>
Kevin T. Dugan: Twitter’s Lawsuit Against Elon Musk: 15 Revelations: ‘Twitter’s 62-page lawsuit… blow[s] open a lot of the secrecy around the deal…. 1. Twitter is done playing nice…. 2. Musk asked for a lot of useless data…. 3. But he didn’t look at the most useful thing Twitter gave him…. 4. Musk caved on key provisions…. 5. Twitter is saying that Musk broke his agreement first…. 6. Maybe Twitter is just running out the clock?… 7. Musk said fixing the bots problem would look “terrible”…. 8. Musk’s interest in the deal collapsed with Tesla’s share price…. 9. Musk’s data requests have been all over the place…. 10. Some testy phone calls happened…. 11. Musk apparently broke his NDA…. 12. Poop emoji make it into the docket: What a time to be alive. 13. Text messages were sent…. 14. Musk was generally causing chaos for Twitter: The would-be owner has some obligations as the incoming big shot…. 15. Twitter will use Musk’s Tweets against him…
LINK: <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/07/twitters-lawsuit-against-elon-musk-15-revelations.html>
With 50 Republicans, 48 Democrats, 2 Democrat-leaners who are not really negotiating partners in advancing priorities, and 1 Vice-President in the Senate, Biden’s call for an “FDR-size presidency” was always aspirational campaign rhetoric. That it was unattainable does not mean that Biden has done a bad job:
Jonathan M. Katz: An FDR-Size Hole: ‘Eric Rauchway makes a case that the true purpose of Franklin Roosevelt’s program was not merely to put Americans back to work, but to save democracy. He and his allies in Congress would prove, too, that the system they had “was better kept than abandoned, in the hope of strengthening and extending it”—and thus, that they should not turn to fascism as an alternative…. Eighty-eight years later, Joe Biden tried to harness that energy, and its memory, to tackle the spiraling crises of our time, when he promised an “FDR-size presidency.” But unless something unexpected and radical happens fast, that dream is dead…
LINK:
"That an FDR sized Presidency was unattainable does not mean that Biden has done a bad job."
It has been a pretty good job, but I think we can reduce his grade for letting Progressive aspirations get int the way of attainable reforms (Child Tax Credit, prescription), for not placing revenue increasing tax reforms at the heart of his BBB agenda, not cleaning house as the CDC/FDA, and leaving in place Trumps restrictions on legal immigration and his trade wars.
The neoliberal credo [at least the World Bank version that I thought was orthodox] claims that markets work [reasonably] efficiently and that government attempts to constrain them via regulation and public spending [while necessary, can sometimes] fail, backfire, or are corrupted by politics.…. Neoliberalism has relied on [smart, cost-benefit based] regulation, privatization [of loss-making goods and services producing firms.] [not] weakened trade unions, [not] less progressive taxation] , and new trade rules [reducing government obstacles to importing and (especially for developing countries) exporting.] Nothing in this "credo" necessarily undermines Social Democracy.