BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-03-28 Th

Should I trust the “Economist” on a likely neofascist turn in South Africa?; major U.S. COVID missteps; Ed Glaeser on cities; Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway on the partial eclipse of the office...

Should I trust the “Economist” on a likely neofascist turn in South Africa?; major U.S. COVID missteps; Ed Glaeser on cities; Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway on the partial eclipse of the office; national manufacturing trade balances; very briefly noted; & HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES from 2001: Information Technology in the Service of Society, Dealing with Global Warming Over the Next Fifty Years, DRAFT: Time to Start Thinking About What to Teach in the Fall!, & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-03-23 Sa…

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SubStack Notes:

Neofascism: Should I trust the Economist on the current configuration of politics and the likely outcome of the next election in South Africa? Who should I read to get a more in-depth and well-grounded take?:

Economist: Jacob Zuma’s new party… uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK)…. Cyril Ramaphosa… may be faced with a crucial choice… try to build a coalition of pragmatists? Or… turn to ex-ANC figures, like Mr Zuma, and take South Africa in an even more populist and anti-Western direction?… The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)… hard-left… Julius Malema… generally polls at around 10-12%…. Mr Zuma’s grievances… can pull on… the idea that the ANC has lost its way and must regain its “revolutionary” purpose—a notion also promoted by the EFF. MK… calls itself a “true liberation movement”. Yet, as an extensive judge-led commission of inquiry into “state capture” during Mr Zuma’s presidency found, the only thing that was liberated in that period was public funds…. [Can pull on] ethno-nationalism. Zulus are South Africa’s largest ethnic group…. Ramaphosa may need to do a deal…. Some in his party want to “bring home” the EFF and MK, which both want Soviet-style economic policies, such as land expropriation without compensation, and admire Vladimir Putin. Mr Ramaphosa’s supporters suggest he would prefer a government of national unity… <economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/20…>

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Plagues & State Capacity: There were four major errors in the American governance response to COVID: (1) The CDC’s decision to start lying to people—to say that masks did not work rather than that we wanted to reserve high-quality masks for doctors and nurses at the point of the sphere—(2) Trump’s extraordinary incompetence along so many dimensions, (3) the decision not t ramp up candidate vaccine production immediately upon vaccine design but rather to wait nine months for the Phase 3 trial process, & (4) the decision not to have the U.S. pay to vaccinate the world as fast as possible. Pretty much everything else is underflow, or is downstream from those clusterfuck decisions. But MattY has very good points about how the current retrospective politics-of-blame is highly contingent on Donald Trump’s being an idiot compared to Scott Morrison:

Matt Yglesias: 17 thoughts four years after Covid: ‘The intense partisan and ideological polarization around Covid that became such a dominant aspect of the experience was, I think, pretty contingent. Trump put travel restrictions in place on March 12 <washingtonpost.com/world/europe/europe-…, which was a week ahead of Australia closing its borders <timeout.com/sydney/news/australia-is-cl…. Australia quickly followed that with restrictions on internal travel <health.nsw.gov.au/news/Pages/20200315_0…, which Ron Desantis asked for on March 14 <politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/……. [In] Australia, Scott Morrison was a right-wing populist whose public profile pre-Covid was dominated by anti-immigration stuff…. If the Australian right could implement hard lockdowns to control the virus, I believe the American right could have as well. This probably would have saved a ton of lives…. Huge swathes of the discourse would be different. The USA would have joined right-wing Australia and other very order-oriented Asian countries and had much lower death rates than we saw in Europe, progressives’ favorite continent….

As liberals flailed, a distressingly large share of conservative commentary on Covid centered on just making things up…. They would say the disease was no worse than the flu. Or that it would magically evaporate by April. Or that the Covid deaths were a result of classification error. None of that is true, and its widespread circulation contributed to the much lower vaccine uptake among conservatives, and ultimately, the much higher death toll of the disease among conservative Americans….

It’s a really bad idea to map crisis-management onto… [preëxisting] ideological grooves… <slowboring.com/p/seventeen-thoughts-fou…>

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ONE VIDEO: Ed Glaeser: Triumph of the City:

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ONE AUDIO: Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway:

Future of Work: Why Remote and Hybrid Are Here to Stay:

<https://overcast.fm/+OwaKJuiQ4>

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ONE IMAGE: Manufacturing Trade Balances as Shares of Global GDP:

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Very Briefly Noted:

1. Economics: Sebastian Di Tella, Benjamin M. Hébert & Pablo Kurlat: Aggregation, Liquidity, & Asset Prices with Incomplete Markets: ‘1. Households have a high marginal propensity to consume (MPC) from cash transfers… but a low MPC from capital gains in the stock market…. 2. At the aggregate level, consumption satisfies a simple Euler equation with the… conditionally expected return on a zero-beta equity portfolio…. 3. Aggregate consumption does not satisfy an Euler equation with safe rates…. There is a large and volatile spread between zero-beta and safe rates. 4. The securities market line is flat on average…. These facts can be jointly explained by the presence of liquidity frictions: safe assets are liquid and equities are not.… Trading frictions that prevent smooth rebalancing between a liquid and an illiquid account, and all payments must be made out of the liquid account…. The return of equities is well explained by aggregate consumption, with a large and time-varying zero-beta rate and a small risk premium, while the return of safe assets mostly reflects a large and volatile liquidity premium… <https://gsb-faculty.stanford.edu/sebastian-di-tella/files/2024/03/DiTellaHebertKurlat_March2024.pdf>

2. Rachel Reeves: Let’s Get Britain’s Future Back: ‘It [would not] be right or honest to downplay the impact of the upheavals of recent years. Five Prime Ministers. Seven Chancellors. Twelve plans for growth. Institutions undermined. Decisions ducked and deferred. That political instability has fuelled economic instability and deterred investment…. With populists and protectionists the world over offering false solutions to vast and complex problems then the only defence of an open society and a trading economy is an approach which tackles the grievances on which they prey at root. A new Washington consensus is taking shape. I believe it is in our interest to embrace that consensus. But today Britain is little more than a spectator…. Modern industrial strategy… recognises the informational and capacity constraints of government, working in genuine partnership with business to identify the barriers and opportunities they face… [and] form an assessment of the industries which will be critical in determining our future… sectors in which we enjoy—or have the potential to enjoy—comparative advantage and can compete…. No easy answers, no quick fixes, no short cuts here… <https://labour.org.uk/updates/press-releases/rachel-reeves-mais-lecture/>

3. Adam Tooze: ‘Keynesianism doesn’t abandon… Whiggish liberalism…. But it does deny that these verities translate into simple rules for action in the present….. As [Geoff] Mann puts it, it is… in the ‘short run’… that… maintaining “civilisation” must be undertaken’… [under] the pressures of necessity… ‘acknowledge… uncertainty and disarticulation, recognises imperfection and indeterminacy, and turns away from the long run to the immediacy of the moment’…. Keynesian[ism]… is impelled by an apprehension of the deep tensions within modernity, a highly dynamic socio-economic system that perpetually produces poverty and crises… which it contains by means of political ordering and reordering…. When the survival of the capitalist system is in question, as it was in 2008, the vast majority have too much at stake: we need the crisis-fighters. What’s more, as recent experience has shown, there are good reasons to defend technocratic government against the unreasoning passions of mass democracy…. The ultimate justification of Keynesianism hasn’t been simply the preservation of the status quo, but the promise of progress…. But if growth is the common denominator of the political philosophies we inherit from the 19th century, are those philosophies capable of grasping the existential challenges that are presented by climate change? As the world melts before our eyes, what does Keynesian managerialism have to offer our children and grandchildren? Don’t we need a revolution? But then what, today, is the promise of revolution?… This makes for grim reading… <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n17/adam-tooze/tempestuous-seasons>

4. Brad W. Setser, Michael Weilandt & Volkmar Baur: China’s Record Manufacturing Surplus: ‘China’s broad dominance of manufacturing…. Its 35 percent share far exceeds its share of global output (just over 15 percent). Michael Pettis is right to emphasize that China is a production giant and a consumption pygmy…. China’s post-pandemic surplus in manufacturing—which has now reached about two percent of world GDP—far exceeds the peak surpluses run by export powerhouses like Japan and Germany. More importantly, China’s surplus shows no signs of shrinking. While there was a pause in the expansion of the surplus in 2023, that only came after a huge jump between 2018 and 2022. And now, Chinese policy continues to emphasize upgrading China’s capacity in advanced manufacturing as a major driver of future growth… <https://www.cfr.org/blog/chinas-record-manufacturing-surplus>

5. Economic History: Andrew Garin & Jonathan L. Rothbaum: The Long-Run Impacts of Public Industrial Investment on Local Development and Economic Mobility: Evidence from World War II: ‘Publicly financed plants built in dispersed locations outside of major urban centers for security reasons during… World War II. Wartime plant construction had large and persistent impacts on local development… an expansion of relatively high-wage manufacturing employment throughout the postwar era…. Men born before WWII in counties where plants were built earned $1,200 (in 2020 dollars) or 2.5 percent more per year in adulthood relative to those born in counterfactual comparison regions, with larger benefits accruing to children of lower-income parents…. Iindividuals benefited primarily from the local expansion of higher-wage jobs to which they had access as adults, rather than because of developmental effects from exposure to better environments during childhood… <https://research.upjohn.org/up_workingpapers/399/>

6. James Feigenbaum & Daniel P Gross: Answering the Call of Automation: How the Labor Market Adjusted to Mechanizing Telephone Operation: ‘Between 1920 and 1940, AT&T undertook one of the largest automation investments in modern history, replacing operators with mechanical switching technology in over half of the U.S. telephone network…. How [did] this wave of automation affect… the labor market for young women[?]… It did not reduce future cohorts’ overall employment: the decline in operators was counteracted by employment growth in middle-skill clerical jobs and lower-skill service jobs…. Incumbent telephone operators were most impacted, and a decade later more likely to be in lower-paying occupations or no longer working… <https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/qje/qjae005/7614605>

7. Matthias Flückiger, Mario Larch, Markus Ludwig, & Luigi Pascali: The dawn of civilization. Metal trade and the rise of hierarchy: ‘Latter half of the fourth millennium BC… from simple agrarian villages to complex urban civilizations… as far apart as the Nile Valley, Mesopotamia, Central Asia, and the Indus Valley…. Writing, cities with populations exceeding 10,000, and unprecedented socio-economic inequalities…. The discovery of bronze and the ensuing long-distance trade [may have] played a crucial role…. Trade corridors linking metal mines to fertile lands were more likely to experience the Urban Revolution. We propose that transit bottlenecks facilitated the emergence of a new taxing elite… <https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1878.pdf>

8. Politics: Li Bai: A Hard Road to Walk: ‘And do we not recall?/An independent man, Zhang Han/Whose heart remained untouched by fame,/Achieved great things, but when autumn winds/Recalled his home, he quit the game./The joy wine gives while we still live/Is greater prize for you and me/Than once we’re dead, our names be read/For a thousand years of history…

   The case for caution in public service

9. Neofascism: Gary Saul Morson: Russian Exceptionalism: ‘What exactly ensured a common destiny for a group of people? The answer was geography, what Savitsky called… “place-development.” Geographical environment shapes culture…. The peoples of the Eurasian Steppe… from Hungary to Manchuria… display common psychology and therefore to have harmonious relations…. An unbridgeable chasm must always divide “oceanic” and “continental” cultures. The former embrace risk, entrepreneurship, and individualism… while the latter prefer tradition, conservatism, and collectivism…. This “Russian world” must acknowledge that its greatest enemy is and always will be Western liberalism…. Trubetskoy argued… “ideocracy presupposes the selection of the ruling echelon according to its faithfulness to a single common governing idea…united in a single ideological state organization” that will “control all aspects of life.” This collectivism ensures that the “last traces of individualism will disappear” and that a common outlook will “become the inalienable ingredient” of everyone’s psyche…. Eurasianism was not an alternative to totalitarianism but a different form of it…. Ukraine… despite its cultural and linguistic closeness to Russia, it has treasonously betrayed its proper role as part of the Russian world…. The Baltic states are part of European civilization, but Ukraine belongs to Eurasia… <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/02/22/russian-exceptionalism-foundations-of-eurasianism/>

10. Rajiv Sethi (2023): The Jackson-Johnson Proof: ‘The proof is original, elegant, and undoubtedly correct. But not everyone was in a mood to celebrate. Here is Charles Murray, conjecturing that the proof will eventually be found invalid, that a publication that proudly announced it would bury this uncomfortable truth, and that Hollywood would spin yet another false narrative…

The Jackson-Johnson Proof

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