Damned-Soul Republican Staffers; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-02-11 Th
In which I first look into a self-created moral hell, & shudder; & þen I survey things þt whizzed by...
First, why do people do this?:
What Fresh Hell Do Republican Staffers Live in?:
Tweeting out that the COVID threat has been overhyped by Democrats while your boss lies dying in the hospital from COVID—this is a form of performance art that I never imagined would appear, even in this Fallen Sublunary Sphere. Yet first Republican presidential candidate Herman 9-9-9 Cain, and not Republican House member Ron White:
Patricia Kayden: ’Just before he died, Republican Rep [Ron White] sent out these tweets: "Democrats are choosing teachers unions and special interests over the well-being of our students. The CDC says schools can safely re-open if proper precautions are taken. What are we waiting for?…
Democrats are choosing teachers unions and special interests over the well-being of our students. The CDC says schools can safely re-open if proper precautions are taken. What are we waiting for?Reporter Robinson: ’So this man was on his deathbed in a hospital and his staffers were pushing covid hoax bulls— while hiding his hospital admission. Now he’s dead. From covid. Republicans… LINK: <https://twitter.com/djfoxxtrott/status/1358810722210226177>
Mistermix: How Can People Be So Heartless?: ‘Rep Ron Wright (R-TX–6), a man who once said that women should be punished for having abortions, since they had committed murder, has died of COVID–19. Wright was under treatment for lung cancer, apparently for quite a while, so he had an obvious, serious comorbidity…. Our family managed to keep mom from contracting COVID. It was a hell of a lot of frustrating, difficult work. It involved great sacrifice, and, at every turn, our work was made harder by Republicans, who chose to make COVID a political issue rather than a medical one. There were a number of close calls caused by covidiots, and a huge amount of extra anxiety because of the unwillingness of Fox-addled small-town Republicans to take basic precautions. Nevertheless, we persisted…. I’m guessing that Wright’s three children and his wife cared about him. And who knows? Maybe he was very careful, and was just unlucky. But, given the behavior of most of the House Republican sedition caucus, of which he was a member, my guess is that he was careless. Now he’s dead, like ~450,000 other Americans, in part because his party refused to take COVID seriously…
LINK: https://www.balloon-juice.com/2021/02/08/how-can-people-be-so-heartless/
You literally could not make this up. Or, rather, you could only make this up if you were a sick, psychotic creep…
Very Briefly Noted:
Adrian Hon: mssv LINK: https://mssv.net/
Paul Krugman: KrugmanToday: ‘Unstimulus debates… LINK: https://www.krugmantoday.com/today
Arindrajit Dube: Impacts of Minimum Wages: Review of the International Evidence LINK: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/844350/impacts_of_minimum_wages_review_of_the_international_evidence_Arindrajit_Dube_web.pdf
CBO: The Budgetary Effects of the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 LINK: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2021-02/56975-Minimum-Wage.pdf
Jesse Rothstein & Heidi Shierholz: Full COVID recovery Requires Raising The Minimum Wage LINK: https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/538177-full-covid-recovery-requires-raising-the-minimum-wage?rl=1
Markus Nagler, Monika Schnitzer, & Martin Watzinger: Fostering the Diffusion of GPTs: ‘The diffusion of the transistor…. Patents on general purpose technologies are likely to cause considerably more harm than patents on other technologies unless a standardised licensing regime is put in place… LINK: <https://voxeu.org/article/fostering-diffusion-general-purpose-technologies>
N2PE: Events in April 2021: ‘The Chinese Case as a Puzzle for Political Economy… LINK: https://live-berkeleynewpoliticaleconomy.pantheon.berkeley.edu/my-calendar/?yr=2021&month=4&dy=&cid=my-calendar
N2PE: Events in March 2021: ‘Rethinking Political Economy: How to Teach It Right… LINK: https://live-berkeleynewpoliticaleconomy.pantheon.berkeley.edu/my-calendar/?yr=2021&month=3&dy=&cid=my-calendar
N2PE: Events in February 2021: What’s at Stake in the Minimum Wage Debate: A Political Economy Perspective… LINK: https://live-berkeleynewpoliticaleconomy.pantheon.berkeley.edu/my-calendar/
Neil Fligstein & Steven Vogel: Political Economy After Neoliberalism: ‘The government—not the market—is the only viable solution to some of our greatest challenges… LINK: http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/neil-fligstein-steven-vogel-political-economy-after-neoliberalism
Next: A Video Well Worth Your Watching:
Alan Krueger, Richard Blundell, &Arindrajit Dube (2016): RES Plenary Session: Minimum Wages <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf2LWR0bBjs>:
Seven Paragraphs:
Back in 1993, the expanded EITC for childless workers was one of the last things the Clinton Treasury threw out of the wolf-pursued troika as we dashed through the snow in the race to get the Clinton reconciliation bill across the finish line. “We will fix it next year”, we promised ourselves then. Nobody ever has:
Cynthia Miller & Lawrence F. Katz: Biden Wants to Boost the EITC for Workers without Dependent Children—What Does the Research Say?: ‘Many commentators have expressed the hope that the inequalities exposed by the pandemic will lead to renewed efforts to address them by expanding the social safety net and by providing basic protections for workers. An expanded EITC can be an effective part of this effort, increasing workers’ incomes (without depressing work effort) and putting them in a better position to recover from this crisis and weather the next… LINK: https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/538298-biden-wants-to-boost-the-eitc-for-workers-without-dependent-children-what?rl=1#.YCUykA0cLq8.twitter
Really, really cool EDA by one of our graduate students here at Berkeley:
Emily Murphy Eisner: Does Telework Harm Older Workers? A First Look at Technological Change Spurred by COVID–19: ‘I categorized occupation groups by whether or not they had above median or below median take-up of teleworking technology during the pandemic…. Being able to work from home during the pandemic helped…. In high-teleworking occupations, there is a clear increase in the likelihood of facing unemployment as a worker ages. The positive relationship between age and unemployment is not seen in professions that don’t have a high take-up of teleworking technologies…. A good change (working from home to save lives during a pandemic) can find the cracks in our system and do harm (in this case, reducing job security for older workers). Studying this technological change will help us identify these issues, and bolster the gaps… LINK: https://emilymurphyeisner.substack.com/p/technological-change-during-covid
The media diet of Republican stalwarts: a sample:
Christopher G. Adamo: Can a Phony Impeachment ‘Validate’ a Stolen Election?: ‘Honest Americans are aghast at the seeming obsession of leftist Democrats (with support from the usual cadre of RINO traitors) to continue pursuing a wholly unprecedented, unwarranted, and unconstitutional “impeachment” of President Trump after he is no longer in the White House. A little “Constitution 101” for those who are in doubt, the sole purpose of impeachment is to remove an unfit occupant from office. In the wake of the stolen 2020 election, President Trump is already out. So absolutely no legal premise can be claimed for this latest bout of leftist Democrat idiocy. As a result of the flagrant chicanery that occurred on Election Day and in its aftermath, Americans who believe in honesty and decency are outraged. And given the enormity of actual turnout for Trump in the 2020 election, that is a massive number of people who remain adamant that the election theft be dealt with. Allowing it to stand abominates and nullifies the Constitution and the rule of law in America.
In response, leftists are redoubling their efforts to suppress, and ultimately erase, any mention of the theft, vainly hoping that the current situation will at some point be regarded as “normal.”… But Americans aren’t buying any of it, so the left has to continually expand its efforts.Make no mistake. President Trump is not the actual target of this onslaught. The second sham impeachment is… an indictment and conviction of the eighty million (and likely more) Americans who voted for him last November. The goal of the leftist Democrats is to tell us that our President, and more importantly our votes, are “invalid.” But their success in convincing us to shut up and grant them this uncontested power is by no means guaranteed. The scheme will either succeed or fail based entirely on whether or not Americans allow themselves to be cowed into abandoning reality under threats and pressure from the left…
I am thinking this is right—that the inflation of the 1970s was not due to “overheating”, but rather to (a) a high gearing of inflation expectations on recent past inflation taught the economy in the late Johnson and first Nixon administration, (b) the productivity shocks, (c) the oil shocks, and (d) the fact that markets coordinated on the signal provided by spot oil prices—never mind that not that much oil ever moved at the spot price. But Paul could be wrong. I could be wrong:
Paul Krugman: Stagflation Revisited : In the 1970s… the economy never seemed to run hot enough to explain such a big rise in inflation…. So what happened? The natural explanation would emphasize supply shocks—oil and other commodity prices—amplified by the widespread existence of cost-of-living adjustments in wage contracts. Maybe these supply shocks led to a rise in headline inflation which caused expectations to become untethered. We don’t know… more work… is appropriate. But suppose something like this is true. In that case, the narrative that saw stagflation both as the cost of excessively ambitious macroeconomic policy and as a vindication of conservative economic ideas was mostly wrong. And that matters not just for history but for policy right now, which is still to some extent constrained by the fear of a 70s repeat…
LINK: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/stagflation-revisited
In an age of neofascist threat and viral dysfunctional political debate, central banks appear to be one of the few still fully-functional far-sighted institutions still around. Hence the demand that they take on more missions. I share Barry’s belief that this demand should be accommodated": those who can do, should do:
Barry Eichengreen: New-Model Central Bank: ‘Monetary authorities are increasingly expected to address issues such as climate change and inequality, over the objections of those who insist that central banks’ narrow mandate is what sustains their operational independence. But ignoring these issues, or saying they’re someone else’s problem, is no longer an option…. The US Federal Reserve’s Paycheck Protection Program Liquidity Facility, under which the Fed provides liquidity to lenders who extend loans to small businesses in pandemic-related distress. This, clearly, is not your mother’s central bank. Now we hear calls to broaden this ambit still further…. Such calls horrify central-banking purists…. Central bankers cannot snooze quietly in their bunks in the face of an all-hands-on-deck emergency. Calls for central banks to address climate change and inequality reflect an awareness that these problems have risen to the level of existential crises. If central bankers ignored them, or said, “These urgent problems are best addressed by someone else,” their response would be seen as a haughty and perilous display of indifference. At that point, their independence would truly be at risk…
Oooh! This will be fun to watch:
William Janeway: Venture Capital in the 21st Century: ‘In this eight-part lecture series, Bill Janeway investigates the relationship between venture capital and technological innovation, and the interdependent roles of entrepreneurial firms, the mission-driven State and financial speculation in the overall innovation system…
LINK: https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/videos/venture-capital>
And for a preview of what Bill will be talking about at INET:
Nicolas Colin: The Digital Economy w/ Bill Janeway. Reinvention. Bezos. Musk. Communications: ‘a conversation with Bill Janeway, an economist, faculty member at Cambridge University, and author of the landmark book Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy. It’s a book that really has had a profound influence on me—basically containing everything you need to know about how venture capital came to be and why it’s so relevant today in the context of the transition to the digital economy. Bill’s long career in venture capital, primarily with Warburg Pincus, and his academic work let him comment on today’s economy from both a business and an institutional perspective….
I consider myself, and the world at large, really, to be quite lucky that he is also such an affable person and generous with his time and thinking. Our conversation spanned how he’s experienced the very strange year that was 2020, his thesis regarding the retreat from hyperglobalization, the consequences of Joe Biden’s election on America, the world at large, & the tech industry specifically, how he sees Europe’s future, and much more… LINK:
<https://europeanstraits.substack.com/p/the-digital-economy-w-bill-janeway>
The over-60 line is an interesting one regarding long-term unemployment during the pandemic. Most people who came of age in the late 1970's were in no sense digital natives - the TI family of calculators were probably the fanciest device university students of that era owned. But by the end of the 1980's, a substantial fraction of US teenagers had been exposed to personal computers at home. I wonder if that transition back then has echoes in the workforce changes today...
The biggest mistake left-wingers make is underestimating how psychotically evil right-winger leaders are.