BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-05-21 Su
Martin Wolf on the threat of neofascist kleptocracy; Sal Kahn on ChatBots as educational tool; Dobbs and female voter registration; Lynley on the Langchain ChatBot framework, Iber on Chile as exemp...
MUST-READ: Pluto-Populism:
Nicely done review of Martin Wolf here:
Jonathan Kirshner: Rigged Capitalism and the Rise of Pluto-populism: On Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism: ‘The middle third of this book, “What Went Wrong,” should be required reading…. When it comes to solutions, unfortunately, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism comes up short. Wolf, ever measured, is convincing in making the case for reform over revolution…. Yet it is disheartening that the sensible, reformist agenda of reasonable, practical measures that Wolf outlines already seems beyond the capacity of our politics…. Massive concentrations of wealth for a sliver of largely-above-the-law plutocrats, combined with stagnation and declining opportunities for the majority—leads to a basic political problem: “How, after all, does a political party dedicated to the material interests of the top 0.1 percent of the income distribution win and hold power in a universal suffrage democracy? The answer is pluto-populism”… [which] unleash[es] forces… [that] render liberal democracy unsustainable…. corruption, arbitrariness of justice, and fear for future prospects are poisonous to the body politic…. Its final sentence, “If we fail, the light of political and personal freedom might once again disappear from the world,” reads less like a call to action and more like an epitaph…
Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism and Barry Eichengreen’s The Populist Temptation are, I think, the best books on theDover-Circle-Plus societies current Time of Troubles. And there is no clear way through.
It was James Madison who wrote, in 1787:
Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths…
And the death of real democracy does not have to be accompanied by the end of the form. The classic example here is the Jim Crow U.S. South from 1876-1965. It was less than half as rich as the rest of the United States for almost a complete century. It was ruled by an oligarchy uninterested in economic development and very interested in corruption. The oligarchy its power by focusing the electorate on the necessity of keeping the Black Man Down, and tarring anyone who wanted a government that was less corrupt or more pro-development with being a negro-lover. That it held rocksolid from 1876 to 1965 shows that the future of anything we could call prosperous democratic capitalism is not assured.
ONE VIDEO: An Optimistic Take Here
Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education…
ONE IMAGE: Effects of Dobbs:
Very Briefly Noted:
Darren Dodd: ‘Global temperatures are likely to exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels within the next five years, the World Meteorological Organization warned in its latest annual assessment…
Andy Haldane: The case for rethinking fiscal rules is overwhelming: ‘Rather than exerting useful discipline, they are constraining government investment…
Josh Barro: This Week in the Mayonnaise Clinic: Debt Limit Scenarios: ‘There are (better) options besides not paying interest on government bonds…. The prospect of failing to raise the debt limit isn’t necessarily dire enough…. The position isn’t actually as crazy as it looks...
Peter Grant: The Return to the Office Has Stalled: ‘Offices remain half empty as companies settle into hybrid work plans…
Noah Smith: Turkey, you were doing so well!: ‘A few macroeconomists… toying with the idea that low interest rates… might actually reduce inflation…. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan… advancing this idea…. Erdogan has relentlessly campaigned for low interest rates…. So… did having a leader who will always push for lower rates translate to lower inflation… as Neo-Fisherians might predict? No…
Liza Tetley & Namitha Jagadeesh: Fed bets: ‘JPMorgan says the market is right to be pricing in rate cuts… seeing a US recession…. Seamus Mac Gorain, head of global rates in London, says recent banking woes have heightened the risk of a recession, and that the Fed may lower its key rate as soon as the third quarter…
Noah Smith: Thus passes Robert Lucas: ‘Farewell to the most influential macroeconomist of his generation…. Lucas and his followers were far too confident…. If they had been less insistent on wiping the slate clean… their theories would have been more helpful when the rubber hit the road…
Paul Crider: How to read like a centrist: ‘This epistemic problem is worse for the antiwoke centrists. Social justice… targets social hierarchies…. But we humans have a tendency also to sympathize with the powerful… “just world bias,” the tendency to think that people generally get what they deserve… the poor are poor because they are lazy, and black-white outcome gaps are driven by black cultural pathologies (or just innate genetic inferiority, as friends of the IDW like Charles Murray suggest)…
Duncan Black: Curious: ‘Is he this stupid, or does he just think that you are this stupid?: Elon Musk: “By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law…. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people…
Dimitar Bechev: Erdoğan’s political momentum puts Turkish democracy to the test: ‘A tougher line on opponents and more economic challenges may follow if the president wins the May 28 run-off race…
¶s:
Matt Yglesias: ‘Democrats should tell people that this is mostly old wine in new skin. The fact that J.D. Vance used to be vocally anti-Trump doesn’t just show he’s a hypocrite; it’s a reminder that his actual interest in Republican Party politics is the stuff that Trump has in common with less-popular-in-Ohio figures like Mitt Romney and John McCain…. You don’t want to say that “democracy” means “doing stuff liberals agree with,” you want to argue that democratic control of society means using the political system to ensure that economic growth is broadly shared. That’s what Trump’s elite backers don’t like about it, and that’s why destroying the mechanisms of electoral accountability is dangerous to the interests of the median voter in Ohio…
Steve Schmidt: Licht to Trump: "Have fun": ‘Those were Chris Licht’s last words to Donald Trump before the CNN/MAGA propaganda event in New Hampshire. Apparently Trump was in a beneficent mood, and promised Licht there would be a boost of ratings for CNN. The ratings materialized for a brief moment — and then plummeted again the next night — but the “fun” was next level. The audience laughed, giggled and cheered as Donald Trump made jokes about E. Jean Carroll, the woman for whom he was found to be liable for sexual abuse and defamation. It was hilarious. Unfortunately, time constraints didn’t permit for Trump to make jokes about the other 25 women who have accused him of sexual misconduct, but there’s still time. The New Hampshire primary is still nine months away…
Patrick Iber: When Milton Friedman Met Pinochet: ‘The true golden years for Chile’s economy were overseen by the reformist center-left coalition that took power after the return of democracy in the 1990s. They restored labor rights and introduced some new social programs. Still, they retained the market economy, openness to trade, and low tax rates, which for some on the left was a bitter pill to swallow. A competitive and consumerist culture would remain; there would be no return to an economy based in solidarity…. [Sebastian] Edwards… does not think all of the Chicago Boys’ advice was extreme or unsound… [but] rejects… the right-wing… tendency to downplay Friedman’s involvement with Pinochet… does not find plausible the protestations of some of the Chicago Boys that they knew nothing of Pinochet’s human rights abuses…. Chile’s is a common political horizon in a world seeking whatever may follow the neoliberal era…. Edwards fears that the benefits of a liberal economic order are not sufficiently appreciated, and regrets that so many who might have defended it quit the field to make private fortunes. But that, I’m afraid, is just the logic of the market at work…. The end of neoliberalism can, and should, be something to celebrate…
Matthew Lynley: Parrots, Geckos, and Frameworks as a Business: ‘LangChain's company dream is a head scratcher among some people in the investor and open source community…. Everyone I speak with agrees that LangChain is a transformative framework on top of emerging AI models. LangChain is also actually a company with real funding and a very real valuation. And there are a lot of questions around the potential staying power of a company built on top of a framework…
Cider: It's going to take more than this to persuade me that Steven Pinker is an Enemy of the People or even one of the useful idiots of the anti-democratic Right. :)
Two other key books for understanding the crisis of democratic capitalism: Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order and Helen Thompson, Disorder