WEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED: FOR 2024-07-25 Fr

The "New York Times" salivating sooooo hard at the thought of a chaotic Democratic National Convention; Kamala Harris says she’s a prosecutor, not a perpetrator; Brad DeLong on John Stuart Mill...

The New York Times was salivating sooooo hard at the thought of a chaotic Democratic National Convention; Kamala Harris says she’s a prosecutor, not a perpetrator; Brad DeLong on John Stuart Mill on humanity in 1870 hag-ridden by poverty; Ed West on the shadow of Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix; Very Briefly Noted; a whole bunch of SubStack Notes; & PROJECT SYNDICATE: Patriotic Grift; Marking the death of genius James C. Scott; Why won’t the Republican Party move to replace Trump with Vance?; Chocolate & the “Global Left”; Monetary Policy Falsely Claimed to Be Market Manipulation; & WEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-07-19 Fr…

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ONE IMAGE: The New York Times, Salivating:

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ONE VIDEO: Kamala Harris:

Neofascism: Vote for the prosecutor, not the perpetrator:

Kamala Harris: 'Before I was elected as Vice President, before I was elected as United States Senator, I was the elected Attorney General of California. And before that I was a courtroom prosecutor.... I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: "I know Donald Trump's type". In this campaign I will proudly put my record against his… <https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5125151/vp-harris-i-donald-trumps-type>

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ONE AUDIO:

Scene on Radio: Capitalism; Season 7, Episode 5: A New Thing in Human History: ‘Brad DeLong: “[According to John Stuart Mill, as of 1870] all the mechanical inventions of the Industrial Revolution… the steam engines and the railroads and the automatic textile machinery and the forges and the furnaces and the kilns… had… made the fortunes of plutocrats… enabled… a relatively small middle class to be larger and live a life of more conveniences. But the overwhelming bulk of the people were still in the same life of drudgery and imprisonment….Note the word ‘imprisonment’?… John Stuart Mill does not see a real difference between being… in jail, and being so hag-ridden by necessity and in dire poverty that you have little time other than go to your job, work, consume your two thousand calories plus essential nutrients a day, and then go to sleep because you're exhausted. And then start it all over again… on the following day… <https://player.fm/series/scene-on-radio-capitalism/s7-e5-a-new-thing-in-human-history>

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ANOTHER AUDIO: In Sulla’s Shadow:

Ed West on Russell Hogg’s Podcast:
<https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869>
<https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/15469551-in-sulla-s-shadow-ed-watts-reappraises-caesar>

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Very Briefly Noted:

1. Journamalism: I would note that the Convention continues to be fully open. There are now no delegates, found by promises to primary voters anyone other than Kamala Harris who wants to make their pitch for the nomination can. But nobody serious will. The large donors and the small donors have moved in lockstep to tell the delegates what they think they ought to do:
   Josh Marshall: Thunderdomism’s Last Stand: ‘Once Biden made his announcement [Harris] moved rapidly to channel and direct support for herself in a way that all potential challengers threw their support to her within 24 hours. The “establishment” didn’t shut down the Thunderdome contested convention that columnists and reporters were demanding. The convention remains wholly open. Once Biden ended his campaign all the delegates had a total free choice. What killed Thunderdome was the mass of the party making it impossible for anyone to challenge Harris… <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/thunderdomisms-last-stand/sharetoken/1edc2979-6b24-47b0-9f47-73242d3cfa38>
   

2. Economic History: This was a very good paper when I saw it a year and a half ago when Lukas Althoff was on the job market, and it is only gotten better. Jim Crow was a much bigger deal than I had thought. I wish Lukas Althoff good luck at Stanford, and I greatly regret that we could not make a deal work for him here at Berkeley:
   Lukas Althoff & Hugo Reichardt: Jim Crow & Black Economic Progress After Slavery: ‘We track individual-level census records of each Black family from 1850 to 1940, and extend our analysis to neighborhood-level outcomes in 2000 and surname-based outcomes in 2023…. Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth than Black families whose ancestors were free before the Civil War. The disparities between the two groups have persisted substantially because most families enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery ended. In a regression discontinuity design based on ancestors’ enslavement locations, we show that Jim Crow institutions sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress in the long run… <https://lukasalthoff.github.io/jmp/althoff_jmp.pdf>
   

3. Again: very clever when I saw it in person, and it has only gotten better in the past couple of years. The near-simultaneity is, I think, a very powerful point:
   Andrea Matranga: The Ant and the Grasshopper: Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture: ‘During the Neolithic Revolution, at least seven different human populations independently invented agriculture…. How is it possible that these rapid advancements in agricultural techniques all occurred in the same, relatively short period of time?… Rapid agricultural innovation was a response to a large increase in climatic seasonality…. Hunter-gatherers abandoned their traditional nomadism in order to store food and smooth their consumption…. Invention and adoption were both systematically more likely in places with higher seasonality. The findings of this paper imply that seasonality patterns 10,000 years ago, were one of the major determinants of the order in which different regions adopted agriculture... <http://www.andreamatranga.net/uploads/1/5/0/6/15065248/theantandthegrasshopper2022.pdf>
   

4. Economy: Largely true. But even though “variable” lags was always a dodge, lags are long, and waiting until the slowdown is visible before you begin cutting rates guarantees that you will not have the best performance—that your feedback control loop will not produce a critically damped system, but rather an underdamped system, or worse:
   Torsten Slok: Where Is the Slowdown?: ‘Daily and weekly data do not show any signs of a drop-off in economic activity. Instead, the data shows ongoing steady growth around potential…. Some sentiment indicators are weaker, including consumer confidence and long-term inflation expectations, but the list above is all hard data that feeds directly into GDP, employment, and inflation… <https://www.apolloacademy.com/where-is-the-slowdown/>
   

5. These effects are so much smaller than required for the tax cut to “pay for itself” that it is not even funny. And, of course, they bring very adverse consequences for wealth distribution with them. Very bad policy:
   Chodorow-Reich, Gabriel, & al.: Lessons from the Biggest Business Tax Cut in US History: ‘We assess the business provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the biggest corporate tax cut in US history…. Corporate tax revenue fell by 40 percent…. Firms with larger declines in their effective tax wedge increased investment relatively more…. A loose consensus from the literature that total tangible corporate investment increased by 11 percent… increased economic growth and wages by less than advertised… with long-run GDP higher by less than 1%… <https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/BFI_WP_2024-81.pdf>
   

6. I do see the consensus regression probability as low, given the Fed’s delays so far this year in pivoting:

7. Torsten Sløk: Why Would Long and Variable Lags Be Asymmetric?: ‘If it took the Fed two years to slow the economy down…. If the long and variable lags are symmetric, it should take two years before the economy accelerates from when the Fed starts cutting in September 2024. The consensus sees a 30% probability of a recession within the next 12 months…. This is what the Fed’s symmetric logic about long and variable lags would imply… <https://www.apolloacademy.com/the-daily-spark/>
   

8. No. Technological progress has not slowed down:
   Ed Sperling: Intel Vs. Samsung Vs. TSMC: ‘Intel, Samsung, and TSMC… filling in some key pieces in their roadmaps… forging their own paths… [albeit] all are heading in the same general direction with 3D… enabling and expansive technologies… larger and more diverse ecosystems. But some key differences…. Transistor scaling will continue at least into the 18/16/14 angstrom range, with a possible move from nanosheets and forksheet FETs, followed by complementary FETs…. The key drivers are AI/ML and the explosion of data… [which] will involve arrays… with high levels of redundancy and homogeneity…. Chiplets… in a 2.5D configuration… simplifies the integration of high-bandwidth memory (HBM)…. One of the biggest changes involves bringing domain-specific designs to market much more quickly than in the past… <https://semiengineering.com/intel-vs-samsung-vs-tsmc/>
   

9. The modern urban snob for the life of the consumer or rural artisan products available only in season is, I agree, something that is very odd indeed:
   Alan Vanneman: ‘So many intellectuals feel compelled to pass themselves off as connoisseurs of artisanal produce, regardless of political orientation. Leftie Tim Burke bemoans the decline of the durian, while Professor Scott stresses over tomatoes. In his once-legendary book, The Making of the President, 1960, Teddy White (b. 1915) had this to say about apples: “Time was, twenty years ago, when Milwaukeeans who loved apples could have a choice of thirty varieties. Now the homogenization of American life, distribution and agriculture had cut commercially available varieties to four—all of them brighter than red. And where were the Baldwin and the Russet apples of yesteryear?…” Speaking for myself, I am definitely not a tomato man, but I grew up in the fifties eating tomatoes fresh from my father’s garden in our backyard, and I didn’t notice much difference. And no one seems to feel sorry for the struggling masses, who usually had no access to fresh produce in the first place, and couldn’t afford it if they did… <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/marking-the-death-of-james-c-scott/comment/63023661>
   

10. Politics: How many years will it be before I can even begin to dare to think: "Perhaps Ezra client is wrong on the Big Issue of the day”?:
    Ezra Klein (Feb 16 2024): Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden: ‘I’ve had my own journey on this. I’ve written a number of columns about how Biden keeps proving pundits wrong, about how he’s proved me wrong. He won in 2020 despite plenty of naysayers. The Democrats won in 2022, defying predictions…. I’d grown wary of underestimating him…. [But] I think we’re seeing… he is not up for this… not the campaigner he was, even five years ago…. The way he moves, the energy in his voice. The Democrats denying decline are only fooling themselves…. I want to say this clearly: I like Biden. I think he’s been a good president. I think he is a good president. I don’t like having this conversation. And I know a lot of liberals, a lot of Democrats are going to be furious at me for this show… <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/opinion/ezra-klein-biden-audio-essay.html?login=email&auth=login-email>

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