BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-10-10 Tu

Is there a right historical analogy for Gaza 2023; the spreadsheet job apocalype; how is the human brain special?; very briefly noted; lots of people on Claudia Goldin, Dan Wang on China's scale &...

Is there a right historical analogy for Gaza 2023?; the spreadsheet job apocalypse; how is the human brain special?; very briefly noted; lots of people on Claudia Goldin, Dan Wang on China's scale & product expertise, Christopjer es Jones & Benjamin Wittes on the terrorists of Hamas, Twitter goes all-in on spam, yes there are professional Republicans who think Donald Trump is a fashion plate, Katie Martin on the bond-market mincing machine, Josh Barro vainly pleads with Republicans; & I briefly note things…

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MUST-READ: Is There a Right Historical Analogy for Gaza 2023?:

Which is the right analogy for what is going to happen now? First Fallujah, Second Fallujah, or something else?:

For years long-time Israeli Prime Minister pursued a strategy of funding and boosting Hamas, with the idea that a stronger Hamas meant a weaker Fatah, and thus made resisting calls for a Palestinian state more possible. Now it has blown up in his face. As I see it, he wants to keep his job and cannot do so without at least trying to destroy Hamas as a government, as a network, and as an ideology. 40,000 IDF soldiers, 2 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and an unknown number of Hamas terrorists and militants.

Was the Hamas plan to cross the border, attack some military bases, seize some hostages, and hightail it back? Or was the plan to kill as many civilians as possible in order to make it impossible for the IDF to not pursue into the urban soon-to-become-a-hellscape that is Gaza? I do not know. I suspect the second.

So what happens now as the IDF goes into Gaza?

Christopher W. Jones: ‘From Anwar Sadat up to the present… normalization has always been a triangular calculation recognizing the unlikelihood of military victory over Israel versus the economic benefits of peace with Israel and improved relations with the USA. Against the slow tide… Hamas and Hezbollah have always argued "no, armed struggle can still work, just give us a chance." But winning is the only thing that makes this argument convincing. Tension arises because projecting victimhood—the most successful Palestinian diplomatic strategy—requires not winning.

Hamas had to choose one route or the other, and chose to go full ISIS. But how is slaughtering hundreds of civilians winning?… They've hurt Israel. That's what matters. This is the "resistance" that many are euphemistically posting about today. Will it provoke a massive Israeli response? Certainly. Will it undermine Palestinian diplomatic standing in the West. Yes. Does this matter? Not as long as Hamas' government in Gaza survives….

I see many comments calling this a suicide mission by Hamas. This is based on the assumption that Hamas will inevitably lose if the IDF embarks on a full invasion of Gaza. That is not an assumption that should be made. Hezbollah fought the IDF to a draw in 2006.. Hamas has been steadily increasing its military capabilities, gaining experience from every war. They have had over a decade and a half to prepare the ground. New tech such as drones and ATGMs heavily favor the defender. A conventional battlefield victory by Hamas inside Gaza is entirely possible. I don't think the Hamas leadership would have launched yesterday's attack if they thought otherwise…

What is going to be the ratio of Hamas leader and foot-soldier deaths to Palestinian civilian deaths? What is going to be the ratio of Hamas leader and foot-soldier deaths to IDF soldier deaths? And how long and far will Israel push the death and destruction as it executes its just war against Hamas—a just war as long as it takes due care to reduce collateral civilian casualties? And will civilian casualties mount so high that Israel’s war on Hamas will seek to be a just one. A just war, after all, has to be one that produces a better rather than a worse situation—even if your cause is just, your war is not unless it can also be justified on utilitarian grounds.

This was horrible on Saturday as Hamas’s terrorists wreaked murder. This is more horrible now. This is going to get more horrible still.

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ONE IMAGE: Technology & Jobs:

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ONE AUDIO: Suzana Herculano-Houzel: Is the Human Brain Special?:

<https://overcast.fm/+8kS-J0QEo>

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Very Briefly Noted:

1. CryptoGrifts: A great resource: Molly White…

2. 100% concur. Everyone reading and reviewing Michael Lewis should be reading and reviewing Zeke Faux instead: Ezra Klein: ‘Zeke Faux’s “Number Go Up” is the best tour through the crypto crash… the reporting, earns its conclusions, and is clearer on what melted FTX into slag…. Extremely funny, except when it’s actually heartbreaking…

3. War: Yasmine Mohammed: ‘Too many people on this stupid app can’t tell the difference between innocent Palestinian people and terrorists like Hamas…. I have family in Gaza. They hate Hamas. They are not torturing women and parading their dead bodies around…. [Distinguishing] “innocent Palestinians”… [from] monstrous terrorists… should not be difficult…

4. Which is why the House should have met over the weekend to give permission to start ramping-up ammunition and ,issile production: Graeme Wood: The U.S. will need to start rationing its weaponry: ‘The United States will have to start counting its ammunition. How much is left for Israel, after Ukraine has taken its share? And what about Taiwan, now third in line?…

5. Neofascism: George Conway: ‘Greg Sargent: “Trump's vile claim that migrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ points to an ugly trend: The outer boundaries of GOP stances on immigration are pushing deeper and deeper into outright sadism...

6. Economic History: Flag the extraordinary organizational flexibility of post-1500 Europe: Patricia Crone: Pre-Industrial Societies: ‘A mere commercial organization, the East India Company, set up thousands of miles away from its prey, proved capable of establishing control over the entire Indian subcontinent for all that the latter was endowed with a long tradition of political organization of its own. The ability of pre-industrial states to generate action, to co-ordinate and to control was limited. This weakness was a factor of major importance (5 words)...

7. Economics: Guido Lorenzoni & Iván Werning: Wage-Price Spirals: ‘The fact that nominal wage growth is currently exceeding price inflation can be given an optimistic interpretation, as a sign of real wages going back to trend, and not necessarily as a concern of an ongoing spiral…

8. Nick Bunker: September 2023 Jobs Report: Good News Is Good News: ‘Job gains were surprisingly strong… 336,000…. Cruising at a pace more than twice the rate needed to keep up with population growth…. Wage growth continues to moderate and is quickly approaching pre-pandemic rates…. The path toward a more balanced market is widening…

9. China: Chris Anstey: Autos, Upended: ‘The game-changing emergence of China as an export powerhouse when it comes to electric vehicles…. Andrew Batson, director of China research at the Gavekal group, argues that the “full ramifications” of this shift are yet to play out.

10. Journamalism: Matt Yglesias: ‘The NYT covered the jobs report from four different angles, none of which involved the possible benefits of more people getting jobs…

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NOTES & SubStack Posts:

Economics Watch: This: <substack.com/profile/13277993-rajiv-set…>:

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China Watch: Excellence in efficient process technology and scale—those are China’s two aces in the hole as far as economic growth is concerned. If China manages to avoid or escape the middle-income trap, it will in all likelihood be because of those two advantages:

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Economics Watch: Congratulations to Nobel Prize in Economics winner Claudia Goldin!:

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Har-Megiddo Watch: This from Chris Jones—a young historian of ancient Assyria teaching at Union College—seems to me to be quite insightful:

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Public Reason Watch: Wise:

Benjamin Wittes: How Not to Respond to a Terrorist Attack <dogshirtdaily.com/p/how-not-to-respond-…>: ‘Seven ways not to respond to the mass murder of Israelis:

1. Please don’t explain that it shows that the only language that Palestinians (or Muslims) understand is force….

2. With the Israeli body count rising… do not quickly change the subject… to tell us about the “context” of this attack….

3. Do not use any sentence that begins with anything like, “I oppose violence against civilians and terrorism, but…”.

4. Do not use the attack to score points on unrelated matters….

5. More generally, the world doesn’t need to hear your insistence that the attack shows that you were right…. Hamas didn’t launch this attack in order to validate you….

6. We don’t need your conspiracy theory….

7. And finally, we also don’t need your prediction about how this will reshape this or that…

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Neofascism Watch: There is now, apparently, a very big Distrust-&-Danger team at work at Twitter:

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Journamalism Watch: Still gobsmacked by Professional Republican Kathleen Parker’s claim that Donald Trump’s attempt to wear clothes is not humiliating, but some sort of sartorial display of human dignity:

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Macro Outlook Watch: The question was never about whether central banks wanted to reverse course and reverse this tightening cycle, it was whether the economy would force them to reverse course via recession:

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Neofascism Watch: As the Financial Times has pointed out, neither Steve “I’m Klansman David Duke without the baggage” Scalisse nor Jim “I don’t dare testify about what I was doing on January 6, 2021” Jordan are people the Democrats can work with. So in the end either Mike Gaetz shuts up, or the Republican House caucus chooses somebody else to run a co-Speakership with Hakeem Jeffries:

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