BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-10-25 We

Feigin on Kosygin's failure; Wolf on China's political likely middle-income trap; Klein on time to leave Musk's dumpster fire; Robert Farley on ius ad bellum & in bello; Whampoa Military Academy in...

Oct 25, 2023

SubStack NOTES:

Economics: Looking forward to this by Yakov Feigin very much: Feigin, Yakov. Forthcoming. Building a Ruin: The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform. Cambridge: Harvard University Press:

Central Country: The answer is “probably”: probably China is now stuck in the middle-income trap, as the requirements of maintaining one-man authoritarian party rule conflict with those of enabling economic growth. The only way out, it seems to me, would be if the scale of the Chinese economy and the excellence of China’s production-engineering professionals allow it to do what no other authoritarian régime that seeks to control rather than kow-tow to business has ever done, and grow rapidly:

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

Neofascism: A wise and useful nudge to those of us who still occasionally read and post to our Twitter accounts:

Leave a comment

Social Networks: “Ideas of economists and political philosophers… right… wrong, are… powerful…. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back…. The power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas…”—so wrote John Maynard Keynes in 1936. But it is not just ideas diffusing through some parasocial relationship between writer and reader. Concrete, real, on-the-ground friendship- and affinity-based social networks matter as well:

Refer a friend

War: I find Robert Farley is much more polite to the idiot “left” (which is also—not infrequently inside the same brain—the idiot anti-semitic right) than I would be:

Taking a wide-angle perspective, we are, almost all of us, people who derive a distressingly large proportion of our ancestry from people who were disturbingly and horribly capable at the human social practices of war, genocide, and conquest rape.

We today cannot identify any among us descended entirely from those who lived between the river and sea before the waves of conquest and settler colonialism that, to count only the past 3000 years, have seen Egyptians, Philistines, Hebrews, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Judaeans, Romans, Ummayads, Abbasids, Crusaders, Ayyubites, Ottomans, British, and now Israelis rule. None of us come with clean ancestral, clan, or ethnic hands. Going forward, we do not want to continue the human social practices of genocide, conquest rape, and war. We want to outgrow and thus eliminate them—to replace them with discussion, persuasion, and trade. And attempts to glorify them, celebrate them, justify them, and strive to make them even more barbaric and disgusting—those are despicable.

I think that the members of the idiot “left” (which is also—not infrequently inside the same brain—the idiot anti-semitic right) are not confused, but are, rather, very clear about what they are arguing. They are not arguing that Israel’s right-wing government and the IDF have no right to wage its wars against Hamas and Fatah, or that it is waging the wars it has chosen to wage in violation of the Laws of Armed Conflict. For them the LOAC are not a thing as long as you can be certain that your heart is pure. And, for them, a past insult or injury means that your cause is just and your war is righteous—that is it likely to lead to a better world. And so, instead, they are merely regretting that it has turned out to be more capable in its waging of them.

From my standpoint, as someone who wants to argue that Netanyahu’s government and the IDF have (a) no right to wage their current war against Fatah, and (b) no way following the Laws of Armed Conflict to win their war against Hamas, they are not helping.

Give a gift subscription

ONE VIDEO: Vesuvius Buries Pompeii:

Zero-One Studio:

Get 33% off a group subscription

ONE IMAGE: Accelerating Global Warming:

Donate Subscriptions

Very Briefly Noted:

War: Barack Obama: Thoughts on Israel & Gaza: ‘It’s therefore important that those of us supporting Israel in its time of need encourage a strategy that can incapacitate Hamas while minimizing further civilian casualties…
Economics: Henry Farrell: Markets Are Now Battlefields: ‘We face… interlocking complex problems… [that] do not have the right kind of complexity for markets to address on their own. Markets… can’t solve many truly collective problems, or provide synoptic knowledge…. Governmental institutions need to step in—but they are not fit for task. And we don’t have anything that even vaguely approaches the political consensus that we need, in order to make the big changes that have to be made. These seem like impossible challenges—but this isn’t a counsel of despair. Improvised partial solutions can help build up towards bigger ones…
Matthew C. Klein: The U.S. Economy Is Booming (For Now). What Does It Mean?: Every measure of activity indicates remarkable resilience in the face of "restrictive" monetary policy. That is good for many people, but may be trouble for some bond investors. Federal Reserve officials keep saying that “monetary policy is restrictive”, but at least a few of them seem to be having some doubts. They are right to be skeptical. It is at least as plausible that current policy is actually closer to “neutral” thanks to persistent changes in the income distribution, private sector balance sheets, and fiscal policy over the past few years…
Economic History: Yakov Feigin: Building a Ruin: The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform: ‘Institutions designed for warfighting… and… heavy industrial output were… focused on “peaceful socioeconomic competition”… productivity, growth, and the availability of abundant and varied consumer goods. The shift was both material and intellectual…. The result was a long and taxing struggle for the meaning of communism itself, as old-guard management cadres clashed with reformers…. Soviet policymakers never resolved these tensions, leading to stagnation, instability, and eventually collapse…
Richard Hornbeck & Trevon Logan: One Giant Leap: Emancipation & Aggregate Economic Gains: ‘We calculate that emancipation generated aggregate economic gains worth the equivalent of a 4% to 35% increase in US aggregate productivity (7 to 60 years of technological innovation)…
Academic Fraud: Zoe Ziani: A Post Mortem on the Gino Case: ‘I am also not claiming that Francesca Gino committed fraud: Only that there is overwhelming evidence of data fabrication in multiple papers for which she was responsible for the data…. You don’t need to be Data Colada to curb the negative impact of fraud and p-hacking: All you need to do is use your voice…
Global Warming: Nils Bochow & Niklas Boers: The South American monsoon approaches a critical transition in response to deforestation: ‘We use a nonlinear dynamical model of the moisture transport and recycling across the Amazon to identify several precursor signals for a critical transition in the coupled atmosphere-vegetation dynamics…. The transition would lead to substantially drier conditions, under which the rainforest could likely not be maintained…
Central Country: Martin Wolf: The economic future of China: ‘Is it possible for “capitalist communism” to survive politically and flourish economically, or will what Marxists might call its “contradictions” tear it apart? Indeed, are they tearing it apart now, under Xi Jinping’s rule?…
Neofascism: Katherine Faulders & al.: Ex-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows granted immunity, tells special counsel he warned Trump about 2020 claims: ‘ABC News has identified several assertions in the book that appear to be contradicted by what Meadows allegedly told investigators behind closed doors. According to Meadows' book, the election was "stolen" and "rigged" with help from "allies in the liberal media," who ignored "actual evidence of fraud, right there in plain sight for anyone to access and analyze." But, as described… Meadows privately told Smith's investigators that… he has yet to see any evidence of fraud that would have kept now-president Joe Biden from the White House, and he told them he agrees with a government assessment at the time that the 2020 presidential election was the most secure election in U.S. history…
John Quiggin: Retrofuturism: ‘I don’t think I’m the only one to notice that Marc Andreesen’s ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ has a curiously dated feel, as if the author had been cryogenically frozen around the time he cashed out of Netscape… his paean to market processes… his pitch for nuclear fission…. None of this makes me a techno-pessimist. But, having seen lots of glowing visions of the future crumble into dust, I’m not impressed by Andreesen’s revival of 20th century tech-boosterism…