WEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED: FOR 2024-08-01 Th
Kamala Harris does not go high; layoffs at a low; young Steve Jobs; Harris is a prosecutor, not a perpetrator; the wannabe-Sullas of American suburbia; very briefly noted; my SubStack notes; & the...
Kamala Harris does not go high; layoffs at a low; young Steve Jobs; Harris is a prosecutor, not a perpetrator; the wannabe-Sullas of American suburbia; very briefly noted; my SubStack notes; & the Fed’s unbalanced balancing act, the soft landing happened a year ago, & comments on capitalism for Scene on Radio…
ONE IMAGE: Kamala Harris Does Not Go High:
But it is 100% true:
ANOTHER IMAGE: Is This a Sign of a Good or of a Not-so-Good Labor Market?
ONE VIDEO: The Objects of Our Life
Steve Jobs’s talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen
<https://stevejobsarchive.com/exhibits/objects-of-our-life?ref=spyglass.org>
ANOTHER 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>
ONE AUDIO: The Sullas of Suburbia:
Patrick Wyman, Riley Quinn, Milo Edwards, Hussein Kesvani, Nate Bethea, & November Kelly: TrashFuture
<https://overcast.fm/+AA0MYtrf1s4>
SubStack Posts:
Very Briefly Noted:
America’s Future: Also, I would say, an unwillingness to repeat the three key mistakes of the Obama administration—fear that the bankers had us by the plums, belief that the market rapidly restores full-employment equilibrium, and an all-costs desire to be Neoliberal Democrats by striking a Grand Bargain with Republicans:
Lawrence Summers: ‘The Biden-Harris Administration has a remarkable record. I don't think any Administration has so outperformed the economic forecasts on the day it came into office. And that is because of an approach that is about investing in America and investing in America's future. If you look at the things VP Harris has done, they have that orientation to the future… <https://x.com/LHSummers/status/1816166368535822663>Economics: I see this as a simple outlier—something that missed the attention of all the parts of a diversified system for idiosyncratic reasons:
Noah Smith: Why did the U.S. miss the battery revolution?: ‘We were early to the party on every other technological revolution, but we missed this one…. Obama did support some battery companies (including Tesla!). But there was never any big government push… the way there was for genetic sequencing, fracking, or even solar power…. A history of the lithium-ion battery… is all… a scattered network of researchers at British and Japanese universities—and, strangely, Exxon…. The U.S. almost always anticipates each technological revolution, supports that technology with far-sighted government and industry action, invents many of the key technologies, innovates many of the key products, and at least attempts to commercialize the technology via American companies. This is overwhelmingly the norm. But for batteries, the U.S. did only some of these steps…. The U.S. should respond by A) playing catch-up in batteries the way we caught up to the USSR in space in the 20th century, and B) making sure our scientific, governmental, and media institutions aren’t broken in some way that causes them to miss other revolutions coming down the pipe… <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-did-the-us-miss-the-battery-revolution>Economic History: This is a truly great book. And it makes the important point that the hyperinflation was not bad materially for Germany’s Mittelstand in any serious or significant way, but that the annoyance of inflation made them very discontented with any democracy in which socialists or social democrats might be in the driver’s seat:
Angus Bylsma: Printing Time: The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation 1914-1924, Gerald D. Feldman, 1998: ‘Outside of Germany… it [was] stressed that… Germany was not taking reparations seriously; spending beyond its means… while deliberately using inflation as a tool to support heavy industry. Pleading poverty was intended to undermine Versailles: that the eight-hour day, a keystone of the Revolution, remained while reparations payments were left unmet seemed a smoking gun…. But the tensions identified by the balance-of-payments theorists were real. The austerity measures that were called for could have shredded what remained of Germany’s social fabric…. Splitting losses between and within classes… was difficult without a reparations bill…. Feldman writes that “Germany had bought time through inflation”. By late 1922, that time appeared short. In 1923, it ran out…. The ‘middle class’ of Germany[’s]… trauma… [was] an internal disunity exacerbated by inflation, and the sense of falling behind the better organised industrial working-class… a fracturing of Germany’s vaunted centre-right coalition… [stressed] to extreme, unbearable proportions… <https://unevenandcombinedthoughts.substack.com/p/printing-time> <>Tracking Elections: Poll aggregation and model humility have been two of Nate Silver’s strengths ever since I started reading him. And they are still his superpowers:
Nate Silver: Harris is in much better shape than Biden. But she has one big problem: ‘It’s the Electoral College…. Harris will give Democrats a fighting chance. In fact, she’s a slight favorite over Donald Trump in the popular vote…. However, she’s a modest underdog to Trump in the Electoral College…. For the model itself, just click here: this is a permanent landing page and will update roughly once per day… <https://www.natesilver.net/p/harris-trump-electoral-college>Neofascism: I confess I am not at all sure we know at all who the real JD Vance is—or, rather, we do not know who JD Vance would reïnvent himself as should he become president and escape from his current pact of servitude:
Josh Micah Marshall: Taking Stock of JD Vance: ‘The most substantive and real thing is that this creates a deeply and coherently authoritarian ticket: big into Trumpian executive power, very anti-abortion right down to unleashing red states to surveil women’s travel and reproductive health services, deeply anti-U.S. alliances, the whole package…. Vance has embraced a version of conservatism significantly different from the roughshod laissez-faire of pre-Trump Republicans. He wants to weaponize state power against perceived cultural enemies…. That’s the core premise of the “national conservatism” that acolytes have built as a package or container for the raw rage energy of Trumpism…. Vance is another angry and aggrieved white guy, very much a successor to Trump, with all the political momentum and vulnerability that comes with it… <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/taking-stock-of-jd-vance>And Bill Easterly really did not like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy at all:
Bill Easterly (2015): Stereotypes Are Poisoning American Politics: ‘Dumb generalizations about ill-defined groups are… false… [and] dangerous…. “I was born in West Virginia and spent all of 10 days there as an infant before my family moved to Ohio. Perhaps that's a license for me to say why Appalachians are poor, drink too much, and voted for Donald Trump…. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, proceeds along those lines…. Define the group by the outcome…. Invoke a stereotype…. Endow the group with innate permanent properties…. These errors establish a kind of collective guilt…. Vance (who's actually a third-generation Appalachian immigrant to Middletown, in western Ohio) tells how his grandparents smashed up a pharmacy and threatened a clerk who'd told his son not to play with a toy on display…. Defining Appalachians as those who are poor, uneducated, and violent, we find that Appalachian culture causes poverty, lack of education, and violence… <https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-16/stereotypes-are-poisoning-american-politics>But the current JD Vance is indeed someone who has invented himself as the pseudo-tribune of the Appalachians, in the business of picking their pockets while promising to fight a culture war:
Brian Buetler: JD Vance & the Second Faceplant of the Reformicons: ‘If Reformicon Inc. was always just a Trojan horse for Christian supremacy (and for many it was) then the prospect of a Trump-Vance administration smells like success. But taken at face value, the reformers’ failure to actually reform their party looms large. There will again be tax cuts. There will again be no money for working families. There will again, instead, be racial and sexual scapegoats. But this time around there won’t even be a pretense that right-wing moral strictures should apply across the board. Trump—a thrice-divorced sex abuser, libertine, and absentee father—has violated all of them. The ideology has drifted in practice if not in text to one that imposes strict rules of control on women and none on men. Childless women are “cat ladies,” childless men are… what? Based? Women should resign themselves to abusive marriages, without a word of condemnation or accountability for the men who abuse them… <https://www.offmessage.net/p/jd-vance-and-the-second-faceplant?r=d0v>Human Capital: I reject completely Steve Teles’s claim that Harvey Mansfield ever had positive VAR: it was always significantly negative—more now that Mansfield’s profoundly unAmerican George W. Bush-is-Führer ravings from the 2000s are now the law of the land, 6-3. I probably have to read City Politics and Political Order in Changing Societies before I can dig in and reject the claims that (a) early Banfield and Huntington had substantial positive VAR (b) that was due to—rather in spite of—their being conservative. Certainly The Unheavenly City and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order are books that would have been much better left unwritten. As for The Soldier and the State, I grant that there is I grant that James Q. Wilson had substantial VAR, and I should have remembered that he had written the great Bureaucracy. But was his VAR because he was conservative? Yes, I would put JQW among the three best of the Public Interest crowd, along with Moynihan and Glazer. But neither of them was conservative. What did they fail to see because they were not?:
Steve Teles: Beyond Academic Sectarianism: ‘If conservatives' disadvantaged position in academia is not mostly the result of direct discrimination, what explains their scarcity among college faculty?… [The mere] perception of discrimination can have significant systemic effects…. Academic institutions… would be wise to send visible, credible signals that they are not discriminating…. The belief that the social sciences and humanities are profoundly discriminatory has become a feature of conservative identity. Even if that belief were true (and I think in a simple sense, it is not), there are real costs to encouraging young people to believe it…. Conservatives… find the culture of universities… forcing them to endure discomforts or even offenses… case even in fields that have no ideological content…. Conservative intellectuals have many alternative opportunities… Conservative scholars James Q. Wilson, Edward Banfield, Harvey Mansfield, and Samuel Huntington were all part of Harvard's government department in 1975… <https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/beyond-academic-sectarianism>Political Economy: I have some hesitation about this…. It seems just a little too close to neoconservative critiques from the 1960s to the 1990s of the governance of America's dense "chocolate cities". That does not mean that it is (or was) totally wrong, but...:
Timothy Burke: Chickens Come Home to Roost: ‘Post-1993 South African state was a big fat target already full of civil servants who did relatively little and got paid a lot, because that’s how the apartheid state subsidized white life well beyond what the formal economy could provide. You didn’t have to make the state even bigger in order to create an overnight middle-class, you just had to shuffle out a certain number of Afrikaners via retirement or emigration. And as you did, you had a form of state capture already underway well before 2009 and a constituency that would avidly look to expand state capture even further and support leaders who provided those opportunities. Which in turn meant that managerial competency in key areas was not at all valued or selected for, and that the government’s more ambitious goals had to funnel through administrative bottlenecks where there were people positioned from an early moment to divert funds to themselves and to help create networks of support for tenderpreneurs and so on…” <https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/chickens-come-home-to-roost>
And Burke answers me:
Timothy Burke: ‘I think if you expand this somewhat, the critique of American cities in that era should have been seen (but often wasn't seen by neocons) as a continuation of the critique of patronage and municipal corruption back into the 19th Century in the US. Which, if they'd seen it expansively, might have attuned them to forms of state capture in the US in many places besides Atlanta, Washington DC, etc.—say for example many white-majority counties in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, etc., or in nationwide public-private collaborations like the prison industrial complex. It's not specifically a question of the size of the state, either, which was the neocon obsession; it's a question of whether the government is accountable to its citizens and to basic standards of performance, and whether the state is transparent to overlaying sovereignties, to civil society as a whole, and to some form of law enforcement. If neocons had been remotely consistent about standards of probity, performance, transparency and outcomes and less hung up on the assumption that the state can't achieve those standards, they would have been on to something…War: What is Netanyahu’s Israël turning itself into?:
Mathias: ‘Israel's closest parallels now imo are the post empire right-wing states of Eastern Europe during the interwar period that had strong domestic fascist movements, particularly Romania—irredentist ethnonationalism mixed with religious apocalypticism and geopolitical cynicism… <https://twitter.com/bucephalus424/status/1784760925850939484>
Don't we have a problem with inflation that is intellectually worse than Germany's in the 20's? 1) unlike Germany in the '20's our inflation is _mistakenly_ attributed to fiscal policy. 2) Unlike Germany, some part of our 2021-22 inflation was real income-enhancing. 3) Unlike Germany, our central bank is too inclined to pander to popular opinion by engineering less than real income maximizing inflation.
"Also, I would say, an unwillingness to repeat the three key mistakes of the Obama administration—1) fear that the bankers had us by the plums, 2) belief that the market rapidly restores full-employment equilibrium, and 3) an all-costs desire to be Neoliberal Democrats by striking a Grand Bargain with Republicans:"
If any of these are the case, what policy error did 1) or 2) occasion? Why was 3) an error at all?