BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-03-01 We
RIshi Sunak accidentally says something, you know, true; the blessing of the wanax by Athene Potnia; I am pleased to hear that I have not been fooled by the Cometeer Coffee marketing machine; &...
NOTED: Wait! What!?—BREXIT a Huge Mistake Edition:
So access to the EU market is a very good thing to have? I presume Rishi Sunak is hatching some clever plan to get this enormous benefit for the non-Northern Irish citizens of the UK!
There is grave danger in being a Tory politician: occasionally, one slips up, and accidentally tells the truth…
MUST-READ: Þe Blessing of þe Wanax by þe Potnia, Misinterpreted by Herodotos of Hallicarnassos:
Herodotos: Inquiries: ‘Peisistratos… contrived with a view to his return a device…. In the deme of Paiania there was a woman whose name was Phya, in height four cubits all but three fingers, and also fair of form. This woman they dressed in full armour and caused her to ascend a chariot and showed her the bearing in which she might best beseem her part, and so they drove to the city, having sent on heralds to run before them, who, when they arrived at the city, spoke that which had been commanded them, saying as follows: “O Athenians, receive with favour Peisistratos, whom Athene herself, honouring him most of all men, brings back to her Acropolis.” So the heralds went about hither and thither saying this, and straightway there came to the demes in the country round a report that Athene was bringing Peisistratos back, while at the same time the men of the city, persuaded that the woman was the very goddess herself, were paying worship to the human creature and receiving Peisistratos…
Brad DeLong (2018): Ancient Technologies of Organization and Mental Domination, Clerks, Linear B, and the Potnia of Athens: So your theory <https://delong.typepad.com/creta_capta_late_minoan_ii_knossos_in_my.pdf> is that a bunch of telestai from the Peloponnesos wind up ruling Knossos, and there adopt and develop organizational technologies: clerks and Linear B; one of their number, the wanax, as specially favored of the Potnia; and the Megaron. Then they bring all of these back to Akhaia, where they turn out to be extraordinarily effective in concentrating wealth and power. And then we are off and running, toward Agamemnon, King of Men; the unpleasantness at Wilusa with Alexandru; and everything else? Seems highly plausible, but whaddooino?…
MUST-LISTEN: Marco Arment & John Gruber
Gratified to be reassured that I haven’t been sucked in by some marketing machine in my belief that Cometeer Coffee is worth the price:
<https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2023/02/28/ep-369>
Very Briefly Noted:
John Quiggin: Some hope on global heating: ‘Solar panels are expected to become cheaper…. Rhe need to respond to the cutoff of Russian gas and oil has led to the removal of some of the NIMBY obstacles…. The big exception to all of this is China…. In electricity at least, there has been far more progress than seemed possible ten or even five years ago…
Yi Fuxian: /The Chinese Century Is Already Over: ‘Chinese leaders have long staked their policies on the assumption of a rising East and declining West, but China is already past its prime. The gap between its declining demographic and economic strength and its expanding strategic ambitions now constitutes a major geopolitical risk…
Joe Weisenthal & Tracy Alloway: Five Things You Need to Know to Start Your Day: ‘The 3M-2Y portion of the yield curve has almost totally un-inverted… "higher for longer"… "no landing"…. But… the 2Y-10Y spread is now at -90.4… a level we haven't seen since October 1981…
Simon Kennedy: The Soft Landing Solution: ‘Inside the White House, economist Jared Bernstein calls it a “legitimate head scratcher.” Why is wage growth slowing if the job market is so tight?…
Elroy Dimson & al.: Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2023 Summary Edition…
Stephen Diehl: The surprising effectiveness of crypto regulation: ‘The actions by the Federal Reserve, IRS, OCC, and the Department of Justice have been surprisingly effective at curtailing the crypto industry…. Our regulators and agencies did the right thing, despite the remarkable level of speculative fervour, the unpopularity of scepticism and the biddability of politicians…. Credit is due…
Brian Potter: Construction Productivity - Structural Steel: ‘Our low-end estimate has modern steel erection about as productive as the Empire State Building on a per-worker basis. Our high end estimate has it 4 times higher…
Russell Jacoby (1981): Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism…
Josh Barro: It's Fine to Order the Same Dish as Your Spouse: ‘Joe and Jill Biden… allegedly… the internet burning up with shock and dismay about the idea that two halves of a married couple might order the same dish for dinner…. This is deranged. The whole point… is to… enjoy yourself...
Sean Carroll: Henry Farrell on Democracy as a Problem-Solving Mechanism…
Henry Farrell & Marion Fourcade: The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism: “High-tech modernism”—the application of machine learning algorithms to organize our social, economic, and political life—has a dual logic… like traditional bureaucracy, it is an engine of classification… like the market, it provides a means of self-adjusting allocation, though its feedback loops work differently from the price system…
Rafael Guthmann: The Great Waves in Economic History: ‘Malthusians are wrong: far from being stagnant, in western history, living standards had three "supercycles" of rise and fall of economic activity over the past 4,000 years…
¶s:
Robin Wigglesworth: The implications of China’s mid-income trap: ‘Three decades ago, China’s annual economic output was about $433bn in current dollar terms, making its economy roughly the size of an Austria or South Africa today. It is now comfortably the world’s second biggest economy — with current-dollar gross domestic product of $17.7tn…. The IMF has become much gloomier on the longer-term growth potential of China.… The main issues are well known. A rapidly ageing population means much slower labour-force growth in coming years, and productivity growth has already fallen sharply as the easy gains from investment in technology and skills have mostly been made. But there are some idiosyncratic issues… according to the IMF…. Diminishing returns of investment-led growth, as excessive investment… has been channeled towards relatively less productive SOEs… real estate… and… public capital…. Basically, it looks like China has now found itself in a classic middle-income trap…. If China’s economy keeps downshifting then the implications are . . . not great…. China won’t be coming to its own, or anyone else’s, rescue…
Dan Drezner: Where is the Big China Speech?: ‘You might have noticed that in recent years/months/weeks U.S. policymakers have grown more and more hostile towards China. It is one of the few sources of bipartisan consensus on American foreign policy. And there are a lot of valid reasons to justify this hawkish turn…. That said, there are times where the range of Beltway opinion on this subject echoes the dueling post-9/11 Onion headlines of "We Must Retaliate With Blind Rage” vs. “We Must Retaliate With Measured, Focused Rage.... Biden’s mantra on China has been “competition, not conflict.” It is a decent start of an idea. But the “not conflict” portion of the rhetoric needs to be fleshed out further. Otherwise, the crude and offensive ideas will proliferate…
Paul Campos: Crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good: ‘Donald Trump is going to be the 2024 GOP presidential nominee.... Two things make this inevitable: (1) A collective action problem: the only way any other candidate would have a shot at the nomination would be if the race for the GOP nomination featured only two candidates: Trump and Not Trump. That’s… not going to happen… until it’s far too late…. (2) Trump would absolutely ensure that, if someone else were to get the nomination, that person would lose the general election. He’s making the party an offer it can’t refuse…. It’s going to be Biden against Trump, and whatever reservations one might have about another Biden term — mine are based solely on his age — could not possibly be less relevant in this context…
I think that the regulators are getting too much credit for keeping the banks out of crypto. The big banks were chary of crypto without any regulatory pressure. This was a Good Thing, since the big banks are regulated by Captain Renault, except in times of crisis. The little banks can be pushed around by the regulators. I suppose that this made some difference on the margin.
Quiggins: Imagine how much more progress there would have been if we had enacted that tax on net CO2 emissions in 2008.