BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-08-05 Sa
…Martin Wolf on shifts, shocks, & fragilities, & Klein, Bouie, & Beauchamp on a 4% annual inflation target, þe permanent Republican surrender to Trump, & David Brooks being very stupid about “economic anxiety” again…
MUST-READ: SubStack’s Latest Attempt to Find & Promote a “Decent Right” Appears to Blow Up:
I do feel for Chris, Hamish, and company.
They hope to build a multidimensional web of trust and exchange in which good arguments and cooperative values percolate through their segment of the public sphere. That requires that everyone have access to and process the serious writings of people who think differently from them, but not so differently that trust and communication are impossible. And it works much better if the web is multidimensional, so that you can build trust along, wonder dimension in order to reach across a larger golf in values and information along the others. As a result, they very much want to fill-in places in the web that are only sparsely populated, which means promoting “decent” rightists. so they diligently gather eggs and put them in their nest. But there should be no surprise when it turns out that some of the eggs are cuckoos:
The Active Voice: Richard Hanania is seeking ‘enlightened centrism’: ‘Hamish McKenzie talks to Richard Hanania about the origins of wokeness, the long reach of civil rights law, and the future of the culture wars…. Richard… doesn’t hesitate to describe himself as anti-woke. He traces wokeness’s legal underpinnings to civil rights law, which he believes has undermined the integrity of public institutions. He expands on this thesis in his upcoming book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Trump of Identity Politics…. [Hanania:] “I’m just taking some things that are on the right. Even the stuff that I think that they’re very wrong about, like on the race stuff, their facts are not usually completely made-up…
And, of course, we know what follows:
Christopher Mathias: Richard Hanania, Rising Right-Wing Star, Wrote For White Supremacist Sites Under Pseudonym: ‘Hanania… used the pen name “Richard Hoste”… identified himself as a “race realist”… support[ed]… forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black… opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing”… arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves…. A decade later, writing under his real name, Hanania has ensconced himself in the national mainstream media, writing op-eds in the country’s biggest papers, bending the ears of some of the world’s wealthiest men and lecturing at prestigious universities, all while keeping his past white supremacist writings under wraps…. Rich benefactors, some of whose identities are unknown, have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a think tank run by Hanania…. Hanania still… maintains a creepy obsession with so-called race science, arguing that Black people are inherently more prone to violent crime than white people…e said that if he owned Twitter—the platform that catapulted him to some celebrity—he wouldn’t let “feminists, trans activists or socialists” post there. “Why would I?” he asked. “They’re wrong about everything and bad for society”…
Here are two tame examples of the kind of thing Richard Hanania/Hoste likes to say:
Sarah Palin is a… Rorschach test…. The attractive, religious, and fertile White woman drove the ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad well before there were any questions about her qualifications. The loyalty she inspires in the White masses is similarly based on gut feelings rather than rational analysis…
And:
Hispanics are a bad fit for America not because they have the wrong values or are putty in the hands of Leftist activists…. They simply as a group don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation… no matter what language they speak or… religion they follow. The relatively culturally confident Whites in Texas may be managing a large Latino population better than those in California, but eventually the number of Mexicans will simply overwhelm the Caucasians of either state. The ultimate goal should be to get all the post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America to leave…
There was a time when cross-burning Charles Murray was the “decent right” that we could talk to…
Promoting “decent rightists” because they are rightists rather than because they are decent open-minded people is always a mistake. Hamish and Chris f**ed around in trying to do so. And now they have found out.
ONE IMAGE: Global Warming:
The now seem to me to be very high that most or all of our technological wealth dividend over the next two generations will be devoted to dealing with the damage done by global warming, and that the world come 2070 will be little richer than the world today. That seems to me to be baked in the cake. What happens after 2070 is, however, still in our hands:
ONE AUDIO: The Ezra Klein Show:
How Martin Wolf Understands This Global Economic Moment: ‘The world economy has experienced many shocks…. But they’ve also overshadowed a set of deeper, more fundamental shifts—the rise of China as an economic superpower, the fracturing of trade relations, the realities of the climate crisis—that are transforming the global economic order…. Wolf has developed some of the clearest frameworks for thinking about how the global economy is changing and some of the sharpest critiques of how policymakers are responding to those changes…. China’s meteoric economic rise… globalization has remained far more resilient… Wolf is skeptical that President Biden’s industrial policy agenda will succeed, the debate between “onshoring” and “friendshoring”… why a recession in the United States is looking far less likely… virtues and vices of Biden’s “foreign policy for the middle class”… China’s recent economic troubles could signal a more foundational decline, why the U.S. economy has remained so much more stronger than most economists anticipated, and more.
<https://overcast.fm/+oiPXdYACk>
Very Briefly Noted:
Assibayah: Robert Reich: Rudy Giuliani and Broken Windows: ‘Think of the common good as a pool of trust built up over generations—a trust that most other people share the same basic ideals. This pool of trust has great value. It makes everyone’s lives simpler and more secure…
Samuel Hammond: Three Motivations for State Capacity Libertarianism: ‘Or what used to be called “ordered liberty”…. Capturing the benefits of scalable technology while protecting against tyranny requires building privacy and civil-liberty protections into the technology itself…. The growing chasm between the public- and private-sector user experience…. Regulatory capture is ultimately a problem of political economy and institutional design…
Economics: Noah Smith: Interview: Heather Boushey, economist and member of the Council of Economic Advisers: ‘In which we talk all about Bidenomics…
Roberto M. Billi, Jordi Galí, & Anton Nakov: Optimal Monetary Policy with r<0: ‘Optimal policy aims to approach gradually a new steady state with positive average inflation…. The optimal policy implies that the nominal rate remains at its ZLB most of the time. Despite the latter feature, the central bank can implement the optimal outcome as a unique equilibrium by means of an appropriate nonlinear interest rate rule…
Finance: Robin Wigglesworth: Covid condemns value investing to worst run in two centuries: ‘Sought-after but expensive tech stocks have extended their lead during the pandemic,,,
Global Warming: Kate Mackenzie & Tim Sahay: Hot July, stocks and flows, survival: ‘Four “ Heat Domes ”… over West Asia, North America, North Africa, and Southern Europe—contributed to soaring temperatures… shattering records by several degrees. High up in the Andes, winter has turned to a blazing summer. The sun has been blotted out by Canada’s enormous fires…
China: Adam Posen: The End of China’s Economic Miracle: How Beijing’s Struggles Could Be an Opportunity for Washington…
GPT-LLM-ML: Michael Baym: ‘Oh yeah, the <|endoftext|> trick absolutely still works…
App Economy Insights: Microsoft: Data First, AI Second: ‘And why Microsoft 365 Copilot is a “game changer”…
Treason: Julian Sanchez: ‘So reading the vibes, it looks like the defenses are going to be: (1) Criminal conspiracies involve speaking, therefore something something First Amendment, and (2) Yes, but can you prove that deep in my heart I didn’t believe the car I hotwired was really mine, somehow…
¶s:
I strongly suspect that there is still enough deflationary pressure in the pipeline that vacancies will fall and wage growth will moderate over the course of the next year. Thus actual Federal Reserve easing would be required to guide the economy to a 4% annual rate inflation landing. But I could be wrong. That said, it is not too early to think about whether we want a 4% or a 2% target annual inflation rate going forward. Does the Federal Reserve want credibility as an institution that keeps its targets, even if they turn out to be stupid? Or does the Federal Reserve want credibility as an institution that takes in new data, assesses the state of the economy, and makes the best policy that it can? In my view, it clearly wants the second kind of credibility. The first kind of credibility increases people’s certainty that you will not change your policy. But it also increases people’s fear that your rigidity will lead you to do something truly stupid—as you did in 2007, 2008, and brought on the great recession. And fear that you will do something really stupid, is a great destabilizer:
Matthew C. Klein: Settling Into 4% Inflation?: ‘The data on income growth, labor churn, and credit flows are all consistent with a “new normal” where trend inflation is slightly faster than before the pandemic…. Given the rough historical link between wages, output, and prices, the implication is that the trend growth rate of nominal gross domestic product (GDP) is now around 5-6% a year while trend inflation is around 4% a year. As I put it last August: “The growth rates of wages (or prices) can accelerate or decelerate by a percentage point or two without a commensurate change in the growth rate of prices (or wages), but it’s difficult to imagine a massive sustained gap between the growth rates of the two measures.” This is far from a crisis. If anything, it would represent a successful policy reset informed by the arguments of many leading economists in the 2010s. But it is different enough from what people are used to—and might reasonably have expected—to create some potential issues for asset prices…
As near as I can see, nearly all Republicans have been hoping (a) that Trump will have a bad stroke soon and become incoherent, and so (b) their failure to resist him will then be something everyone will agree to forget. So far—unless the only things you care about are low taxes on the rich and right-wing judges with unjudicial temperaments—that has been a really bad bet:
Jamelle Bouie: ‘The 2024 Republican presidential primary… [has been] over… [since] Jan. 7, 2021, when most Republican politicians closed ranks around Donald Trump in the wake of the insurrection… [or perhaps] Feb. 13 of the same year, when the majority of Senate Republicans voted to acquit Trump of all charges in his second impeachment trial, leaving him free to run for office…. Republican elites and conservative media have successfully persuaded enough Republican voters that Trump is the victim of a conspiracy of perfidious liberals and their “deep state” allies. They have done a good job convincing those voters that Trump deserves to be back in office. And sure enough, they are poised to give him yet another chance to win the White House…
The only core left of the “economic anxiety” argument is “if wages and incomes were growing faster, the fact that Blacks, women, gays, and others no longer know their place would be less upsetting to people”. That is a not-implausible argument. But it is not the one that David Brooks is making:
Zack Beauchamp: I regret to report the economic anxiety theory of Trumpism is back: ‘In David Brooks’s new column, he asks the American elite if they’re the baddies. But he’s actually telling them a comforting fiction…. Trump is the avatar of a kind of resentful reactionary politics, one uncomfortable with a changing America, that defines the worldview of a plurality (if not a majority) of the GOP faithful. But this answer offers few easy solutions and makes some people uncomfortable, as it feels a bit too much like a judgment of Trump supporters. So we get efforts to reject the evidence, often relying on long-debunked alternative arguments. The latest example of this phenomenon is David Brooks…. The data supporting this narrative is weak at best. Rather, the best evidence typically points toward identity-based explanations: Racial and cultural conflicts are far, far more important than the kind of economic alienation Brooks wants to highlight. This is true not only in the United States but in other countries facing similar challenges from far-right populist movements—important comparison points that Brooks entirely leaves out…. Trujillo and… Crowley…testing a sense of political and cultural alienation (what they call “symbolic” concerns) versus a sense of economic deprivation in predicting rural voter support for Trump. They found that “only the symbolic subdimensions of rural consciousness positively and significantly correlate with Trump support.” If anything, they found, rural voters who feel more economically deprived are less likely to vote for Trump than their peers…. Trump supporters in poorer areas tend to be the “locally affluent whites:” people whose incomes might not put them in the national one percent, but who are doing a fair sight better than others in the same zip code. Think plumbers and auto dealers, not laid-off factory workers…