Very Good Reviews of “Slouching Towards Utopia" from People Who Are Not My Friends! Department
No: Paul Seabright is not my enemy; just a lawful relative neutral; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-09-23 Fr
FIRST: Very Good Reviews from People Who Are Not My Friends! Department
WONDERFUL TLS Review of Slouching! <bit.ly/3pP3Krk> from the extremely thoughtful Paul Seabright:
Paul Seabright: Trouble in paradise: Why is economic progress so little cause for celebration? <https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/slouching-towards-utopia-j-bradford-delong-book-review-paul-seabright/>: ‘DeLong is surely right…. Our ancestors... would have been astonished to see [our] material abundance… no less astonished by our inability to be satisfied.... DeLong’s book deserves a wide readership.... DeLong is an engaging writer, full of unexpected information…. I learnt something on almost every page. As a set of thought-provoking essays on themes related to its overall topic, Slouching Towards Utopia is hard to fault....
Yet there is much the book doesn’t give us.... We are even left in some doubt as to how much DeLong is convinced by his own answer[s].... That is not a criticism as such—his question is tough.... But it tells us something about... DeLong... a charming companion, full of entertaining stories... ask[ing] deep questions in newly engaging ways. We don’t want the experience to end. But that’s partly because we sense we’re not getting the answers we thought he was offering...
I blush. I think both of the paragraphs I have constructed from excerpts from his review are correct.
We are well on the way to solving the problem of baking, a sufficiently large economic pie to create the potential for everybody to have enough. But as far as solving the problems of slicing, and tasting the pie—equitably distributing it, and utilizing our enormous technological wealth to empower all of us to live, lives in which we are safe and secure and healthy and happy—we are nowheresville. That would have surprised (most of) our predecessors: solving the problem of scarcity was thought to be the big problem. Once that was solved, governance would no longer have to take the form of an élite elbowing competing potential élites out of the way and running a force-and-fraud wealth-extraction con on humanity. Governance could take the form of writing economy-social software for human interactions to run on top of the technology-driven forces-of-production hardware, and that software-writing exercise ought to have been—was seen by utopians as inevitably being—straightforward.
Why do the problems of slicing and tasting the economic pie continue to flummox us when we have made so much progress at solving the problem of baking a sufficiently large pie? This I think the book has nailed. And I have already given enough overview thumbnails on this weblog to have become tired of repeating myself.
So let me just say that the overview is all very well, but there is a great deal to be learned by telling the stories of the individual failures to slice and taste—to equitably distribute and properly utilize our immense and increasing technology-driven wealth. And to get my selection from these stories, please buy and read the book: <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>!
One Image:
The first ever (to my knowledge) maxing-out of the CPU cores on my M1Pro MacBookPro. It was not associated with a runaway program on the way to a crash. The user interface stuttered… and then recovered…:
No. I do not know what was going on. No. Don’t blame me for Apple’s chip-computer naming “scheme”.
Must Read:
Might the fiscal theory of the price level be coming for Liz Truss and the other Tory Tiny Englanders?:
Tony Yates: “Classic emerging market fiscal crisis pans out something like this: ‘Populist government begins fiscal plan leaving a large hole between spending and revenues usually prompted by perception of what the electorate want, which is not always fiscal coherence. in this case prompted by ideology, or delusion, hope. Markets, who are going to be the ones the government come to to borrow to plug the hole between spending and revenues, think—what is your exit plan? You don't seem to have one. You cannot pile debt up indefinitely. Why not? Because that debt has to be serviced with interest, either as a discount on the loan up front, or explicitly. It has to be rolled over too and refinanced.
Concern rises that the government won't be able to service the debt at some point; higher level concern arises about others' concern [and so on]. The interest rate charged today, well ahead of time before any debt limit is reached, rises… because a small premium gets built in to compensate the investor/lender for the chance that the exit is a messy default [or a messy high inflation to lower the real value of the debt]. Not necessarily a high probability event, but could happen.
That increase in interest rates increases the hole between spending and revenue because one component of spending is spending on interest. This makes the fiscal situation look even worse, and brings forward the time when there would be an unholy reckoning if the government does not change course. So interest rises a bit more as the chance of a default has gone up a bit more. And so on. Dampening this viscious cycle is the chance of a change of government or the Tories deposing Truss and Kwarteng before time. Amplifying it is the threat of a trade war, which would, if it crystallized, tank government revenues and increase spending….
For the interests of the country at large, it would be great to have clarity and detail on how Labour would undo this mess [leave aside what else they might do, redistribution, other funded changes]. That would lower the risks of this getting nasty. Likewise any faction in the Tory party that finds fiscal irresponsibility disagreeable should organize and clarify what it would do differently, and allow us—and markets—to assess its influence over the course of the events.
Time for, surely, the Deficit Research Group?
Other Things I Note:
Very Briefly Noted:
Books Inc.: J. BRADFORD DELONG at Books Inc. Berkeley - Books Inc. - The West's Oldest Independent Bookseller Tuesday, September 27, 2022 - 7:00pm :: 1491 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, CA 94710…
Greg Ip: Markets Brace for Hard Landing as Fed Delivers Sobering Message: ‘Wall Street sees inflation-taming efforts as likely to result in a recession…
Bill McBride: ‘Merrill: "We now look for a hard(er) landing.... Our baseline outlook for the US economy continues to include a recession in 1H 2023.... We project real GDP to fall 1.0% in the four quarters ending 4Q 2023 and for the unemployment rate to rise to 5.6% in December 2023…
Teri Kanefield: Trump's Special Master Lawsuit Backfires
Dan Pfeiffer: All (Elected) Republicans are MAGA Republicans: ‘Every elected Republican is advancing the MAGA agenda… posing an existential threat to our country’s democracy and people’s freedom…
Dr. Frizzle: ‘The first singular use The first use of “they” is so old, it predates the letter combination “th” in favor of the thorn, “Þ” When William and the Werewolf, in 1375 CE, used the singular “they” as a pronoun, it was spelled “Þei”…
Jonathan Korman: ‘Having long had an unwholesome interest in understanding fascism, I had a hard time understanding its radical indifference to policy. I find myself understanding the texture of it now…. Fascism is not a policy ideology deeply concerned with economics like communism or neoliberalism. Fascism is a social & governance ideology like liberal democracy or Dominionism.... It is an oversimplification to say that authoritarianism is gangster logic applied to politics, but it is a useful oversimplification…
Mark Thompson: ‘“Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers…”- first NYT article about Hitler, 11/21/1922…
Steve Schmidt: ‘Imagine hearing Trump for the first time. Now imagine hearing Hitler in 1930 Munich. The speeches are very similar. They scapegoat & stigmatize. They bluster & threaten. They’re built around racial animus & fear…
Adam Davidson: ‘We KNOW Trump's golf courses are losing money. His own audited financials tells us this. Attracting tournaments is not the same as profit. These are wildly overleveraged properties that will, probably, never make any money…
Too bad about Liz. The tax cuts could actually good if the revenue were replaced by lower-dead-weight less regressive taxes. But there is a deficit in conservative politicians understanding of neoliberal economic policy proscriptions.