8 Comments

"Someone who wishes me ill tells me to go read Pamela Paul in the New York Times." Nicely fills the daily laugh niche.

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re: Harold James: The Poverty of Anti-Capitalism

I think Mr. James is way off base here, he starts his piece by saying "With more and more people lashing out against markets, globalization, and economic growth ..." The only complaints I've heard are against globalization, and specifically that it caused the offshoring of jobs. I don't see any broad based criticism of markets or economic growth, just pointed - and well grounded - complaints about where the fruits of all this growth and activity are going to. The complaints are mostly about the crony part of crony capitalism.

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I used to be a neoliberal myself. Then I discovered political economy. Brad's enlightened neoliberalism is a first-best solution: something that cannot exist in our sublunary sphere. In our political economy, capital (which runs the show) grabs the efficiency now, and never quite gets around to the subsequent redistribution or investment. New Deal left-populist muddled economics has more-or-less worked with something more-or-less like our political system. It's a better bet for the future.

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Gillian Flynn did not have to be kidnapped to write 'Gone Girl' and Charles Dickens did not live in the slums of London to write what he wrote. Of course there is also the elusive Thomas Pynchon who writes a bunch of stuff that belie his background as well. Raymond Chandler never walked the mean streets of Los Angeles looking for trouble I didn't read 'American Dirt' as it wasn't the kind of fiction I routinely enjoy but no author should be castigated for writing a book. The over 100 authors who signed a letter against the book are most like a bunch of sore losers whose books hardly sold at all (I looked at the letter and did not recognize a single name on the list).

I find Pamela Paul and her ex-husband to be among the worst hires of the New York Times in the long history that I've been reading the paper (Ross Douthat is right up there as well). At least Maureen Dowd keeps the opinion section lively.

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"umboðsmaðr" for "ombudsman"?! Now you are really winding us up. The Wikipedia article is interesting though.

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Green subsidies are great on either side of the Atlantic so long as they work as second best substitutes for a tax on net emissions of CO2 and paid for with consumption taxes, not added to deficits.

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Ramping up high-end immigration ought to be a logical counterpart to freer trade in our quiver of Colds War II polices.

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1 and 2 sound like objectives, not policies. Lower structural deficits = weaker dollar would have done a bit in the 1 and 2 directions. Preventing USAID from continuing to be a major investor in LDC infrastructure was also that kind of mistake. Ditto having spend more of the limited negotiating energy on freer trade and less on services patents copyrights.

Nimbyism is a "Progressive" (or at least a Polanyi) idea, not a neoliberal idea.

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