BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-11-09 Th

The late-fall California Office; Tim Brook on the Little Ice Age & the fall of the Ming; very briefly noted; Paul Krugman on inflation pessimism, Jay Kuo on Trump filibustering in court, Robert Armstrong on our apparent soft macroeconomic landing, & Soumaya Keynes reviews all the r*s; & The Attention Economy Goes to Court, When Is It a Depression & Not a Rolling Sectoral Readjustment Reallocation, Sociobiology sort-of, & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-11-05 Su…

Subscribe now

ONE IMAGE: The California Office, Early November:

Queen Calafia’s weather sorcery still holds good:

We are very thankful.

Share

ONE AUDIO: Timothy Brook, “The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age & the Fall of Ming China” (Princeton UP, 2023)

Timothy Brook, “The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China” (Princeton UP, 2023):

<https://overcast.fm/+s3EvQPhqg>

Share Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality

Very Briefly Noted:

  1. War: Luke O’Neill: Myths can’t live forever: ‘Rabin was killed by a right-winger who was tired of pretending that he lived in anything besides a Jewish supremacist state, and now the nation’s political leaders have created a reality born of the assassin’s bullet…

  2. Economics: Thomas Caulfield: ‘About 70% of the market for semiconductors is actually 12nm and above. Only 30% are in single-digit nanometers, and why is that? Moore’s Law was always an economic law… to scale transistors… lower cost per transistor… better power per transistor and better performance…. By… 14nm, the economics changed. The cost per transistor went up… you would use those technologies… [only] for applications that absolutely demanded either the performance… or the power…. [So-called “legacy node” chips have] the right functionality, the right feature set and at the best economics…

  3. Barry Eichengreen: Certain Uncertainty in the US Bond Market: ‘With interest rates on ten-year US Treasuries close to 5%, more than triple the levels of two years ago, bond yields are attractive once again. If the fundamental factors driving them haven’t changed dramatically, then it’s possible that interest rates will fall and bond prices will recover now that the inflation scare has passed…

  4. Economist: Forget the S&P 500. Pay attention to the S&P 493: ‘The alternative benchmark offers a better view of America’s stockmarket….

  5. NIMByism: Addison Del Mastro: Prices and Truths: ‘“The primary philosophical task of urbanism might just be to convince people that nice places can be normal. That living on a vibrant, pleasant street is not the moral equivalent of eating chocolate cake for dinner”…

  6. Technoutopianism: Sherry Turkle: Silicon Valley Fairy Dust: ‘Silicon Valley companies began life with the Fairy dust of 1960s dreams sprinkled on them. The revolution that 1960s activists dreamed of had failed, but the personal computer movement carried that dream onto the early personal computer industry. Hobbyist fairs, a communitarian language, and the very place of their birth encouraged this fantasy…

  7. Neofascism: Jay Kuo: Trump Blustered… And Blundered: ‘Trump also tried to claim that Mar-a-Lago is actually worth between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, rather than the $18 million… assess[ed]…. Although the “deed of development rights” for Mar-a-Lago states that “the Club and Trump intend to forever extinguish their right to develop or use the Property for any purpose other than club use”—but to Trump this somehow isn’t binding. “‘Intend’ doesn’t mean we will do it,” Trump said with a straight face…

  8. Ricardo Duque Gabriel, Mathias Klein, & Ana Sofia Pessoa: Political Costs of Austerity: ‘. Fiscal consolidations lead to a significant increase in extreme parties’ vote share, lower voter turnout, and a rise in political fragmentation…. Austerity induces severe economic costs through lowering GDP, employment, private investment, and wages. Austerity-driven recessions amplify the political costs of economic downturns considerably by increasing distrust in the political environment…

  9. Public Reason: Katie Notopoulos: How to fix the internet: ‘[For] online discourse to improve… move beyond… big platforms… [and the] bad incentives…. The way to get a massive audience was often by behaving badly…. Find a way to make money without pandering for attention… promising new gestures…. We, the internet users, also need to learn to recalibrate our expectations and our behavior…

  10. Central Country: Shuli Ren & Elaine He: How Xi Jinping Led China’s Economy Astray: ‘It’s impossible to measure the Chinese leader’s popularity, but slumping property prices and high youth unemployment are enough to make many unhappy…. “Housing is to be lived in, not speculated on” sought to eradicate consumers’ blind faith in real estate as an asset class. His “common prosperity” drive was aimed at broadening the middle class, while painstakingly stressing that he was not advocating for a welfare state or egalitarianism. “Made in China 2025” was an effort to revive manufacturing. But Xi’s policy fixes also turned out to be problematic. He has ruffled too many feathers not only in the private sector but among local officials….

Leave a comment

SubStack NOTES:

Economics: I think Paul overstates his case here: it was not that what appeared to be an adverse Beveridge Curve was confidently predicted to be a new normal; it was, rather, that it had some slope and was not horizontal—that vacancies would not go down without unemployment going up somewhat. But that is what they did. And I confess I am flummoxed:

https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/dynamic/render?CCPAOptOut=true&campaign_id=116&emc=edit_pk_20231107&first_send=0&instance_id=107154&nl=paul-krugman&paid_regi=1&productCode=PK&regi_id=64675225&segment_id=149415&te=1&uri=nyt://newsletter/9a80b4b7-ba66-58e7-b909-2ae805c797b2&user_id=8a3fce2ae25b5435f449ab64b4e3e880","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener noreferrer nofollow","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/dynamic/render?CCPAOptOut=true&campaign_id=116&emc=edit_pk_20231107&first_send=0&instance_id=107154&nl=paul-krugman&paid_regi=1&productCode=PK&regi_id=64675225&segment_id=149415&te=1&uri=nyt://newsletter/9a80b4b7-ba66-58e7-b909-2ae805c797b2&user_id=8a3fce2ae25b5435f449ab64b4e3e880"},{"type":"text","text":": ‘The dire inflation predictions of summer and fall 2022… their non sequiturness…. One strand of argument involved parallels with the inflation of the 1970s… [when] expectations of future inflation were deeply entrenched in the economy—which clearly wasn’t the case…. The other argument was… an unusually high number of unfilled job openings given the unemployment rate, which was supposed to imply that we needed much higher unemployment than in the past to keep inflation down. But… unusual job dynamics… effects of Covid-19… [unlikely to be] a new normal…. These arguments… were also unrelated to each other… as if economists were looking for reasons to be pessimistic…"}]}]}]},"restacks":0,"reaction_count":0,"attachments":[{"id":"d091e2c5-9ece-43a9-ad80-1752cafe0030","type":"link","linkMetadata":{"image":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/a271d964-a688-48c3-98d0-fc2971c13691_50x50.png","title":"Why did so many economists get disinflation wrong?","description":null,"url":"https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/dynamic/render?CCPAOptOut=true&campaign_id=116&emc=edit_pk_20231107&first_send=0&instance_id=107154&nl=paul-krugman&paid_regi=1&productCode=PK&regi_id=64675225&segment_id=149415&te=1&uri=nyt://newsletter/9a80b4b7-ba66-58e7-b909-2ae805c797b2&user_id=8a3fce2ae25b5435f449ab64b4e3e880","host":"messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com"},"explicit":false}],"name":"Brad DeLong","user_id":16879,"photo_url":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/ea5ae644-9822-4ca5-ac6b-e18c017d8fbc_1189x1208.png","user_bestseller_tier":100}}" data-component-name=“CommentPlaceholder”>

Refer a friend

Neofascism: Actually, this is one of the first principles of fascism, and neofascism: words are not communication except—possibly—within some in-group. Aimed at any out-group they are weapons. So, for Trump, if there is no penalty clause attached to its nonfulfillment and no funds placed in advance in escrow for that eventuality, it might as well have never been said:

https://newrepublic.com/post/176687/trump-inflated-mar-a-lago-valuation-fraud-trial-testimony with a straight face…","body_json":{"type":"doc","attrs":{"schemaVersion":"v1"},"content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"},{"type":"italic"}],"text":"Neofascism"},{"type":"text","text":": "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"Actually, this is one of the firest principles of fascism, and neofascism: words are not communication except—possibly within the in-group. Aimed at the outgroup they are weapons. So, for Trump, if there is no penalty clause attached to its nonfulfillment and no funds placed in advance in escrow for that eventuality, it might as well have never been said:"}]},{"type":"paragraph"},{"type":"blockquote","content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Jay Kuo"},{"type":"text","text":": Trump Blustered… And Blundered: <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/trump-blustered-and-blundered?publication_id=283462&post_id=138665854&isFreemail=true&r=d0v","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener noreferrer nofollow","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/trump-blustered-and-blundered?publication_id=283462&post_id=138665854&isFreemail=true&r=d0v"},{"type":"text","text":": ‘Trump also tried to claim that Mar-a-Lago is actually worth between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, rather than the $18 million… assess[ed]…. Although the “deed of development rights” for Mar-a-Lago states that “the Club and Trump intend to forever extinguish their right to develop or use the Property for any purpose other than club use”—but to Trump this somehow isn’t binding. “‘Intend’ doesn’t mean we will do it,” Trump said <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"https://newrepublic.com/post/176687/trump-inflated-mar-a-lago-valuation-fraud-trial-testimony?utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_medium=social","target":"_blank","rel":"","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"https://newrepublic.com/post/176687/trump-inflated-mar-a-lago-valuation-fraud-trial-testimony?utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_medium=social"},{"type":"text","text":" with a straight face…"}]}]}]},"restacks":0,"reaction_count":0,"attachments":[{"id":"4472b2fa-1f9f-4842-b99e-cbe1889a96da","type":"link","linkMetadata":{"image":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/5ed45d3a-0a59-4ba2-a29c-e9594e3450a5_1200x630.jpeg","title":"Trump Struggles to Explain Inflated Mar-a-Lago Valuation in Fraud Trial","description":"This is one of the biggest points in the fraud trial against the Trump Organization.","url":"https://newrepublic.com/post/176687/trump-inflated-mar-a-lago-valuation-fraud-trial-testimony","host":"newrepublic.com"},"explicit":false}],"name":"Brad DeLong","user_id":16879,"photo_url":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/ea5ae644-9822-4ca5-ac6b-e18c017d8fbc_1189x1208.png","user_bestseller_tier":100}}" data-component-name=“CommentPlaceholder”>

Give a gift subscription

Economics: People flashing lights saying that the Fed should start cutting soon, or else:

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/11/02/the-world-economy-is-defying-gravity-that-cannot-last: ‘Threats abound…. Higher-for-longer,,, threatens to pit governments against inflation-targeting central bankers…. These strains make it hard to see how the world economy could possibly accomplish the many things that markets currently expect of it: a dodged recession, low inflation, mighty debts and high interest rates all at the same time…. A more hopeful possibility is that productivity growth soars…. Were it not for the rising valuations of seven tech firms, including Microsoft and Nvidia, the s&p 500 index of American stocks would have fallen this year. Set against that hope, though, is a world stalked by threats to productivity growth… distorting markets with industrial policy… populations age, the green-energy transition beckons and conflicts… require more spending on defence…‘\n\nWhich means that this in my email from Tim Duy comes just in the nick of time:\n\nTim Duy: ‘With it increasingly clear that the Fed reached the peak of this cycle back in July, we can begin wargaming the first rate cut of the cycle… setting policy to prevent the 2024 inflation forecast from rising… while preventing the 2024 unemployment forecast from rising as well…. Powell already set the stage for the Fed to see the balance of risks as equal at the December FOMC meeting…. The sooner the Fed cuts rates, the less likely negative dynamics will snowball into a recession. The Fed delayed rate hikes to its detriment. While the Fed has been preaching “higher for longer,” I suspect that it will realize that delaying rate cuts at a certain point will also be to its detriment…. Powell doesn’t want to be either Burns or Volcker. He wants to be the Chair that stuck the soft landing even after a surge in inflation to a 40 year high…","body_json":{"type":"doc","attrs":{"schemaVersion":"v1"},"content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"},{"type":"italic"}],"text":"Economics"},{"type":"text","text":": "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"People flashing lights saying that the Fed should start cutting soon, or else:"}]},{"type":"paragraph"},{"type":"blockquote","content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Robert Armstrong"},{"type":"text","text":": The case for optimism <"},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"https://www.ft.com/content/b015e904-d4a8-4809-b91b-80b355286990","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener noreferrer nofollow","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"https://www.ft.com/content/b015e904-d4a8-4809-b91b-80b355286990"},{"type":"text","text":": ‘The "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"Economist’s"},{"type":"text","text":" argument is… households’ excess savings will soon be exhausted… higher rates will bite… companies… house prices will fall… banks will have to backfill the hole… and… higher rates will make current levels of fiscal largesse impossible…. Our central forecast, like theirs, is that “the higher-for-longer era kills itself off, by bringing about economic weakness that lets central bankers cut rates without inflation soaring.”… But we think… there is still a path to the soft landing…"}]},{"type":"paragraph"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"And: "}]},{"type":"paragraph"},{"type":"blockquote","content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Economist: "},{"type":"text","text":"The world economy is defying gravity. That cannot last "},{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/11/02/the-world-economy-is-defying-gravity-that-cannot-last","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener noreferrer nofollow","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/11/02/the-world-economy-is-defying-gravity-that-cannot-last"},{"type":"text","text":": ‘Threats abound…. Higher-for-longer,,, threatens to pit governments against inflation-targeting central bankers…. These strains make it hard to see how the world economy could possibly accomplish the many things that markets currently expect of it: a dodged recession, low inflation, mighty debts and high interest rates all at the same time…. A more hopeful possibility is that productivity growth soars…. Were it not for the rising valuations of seven tech firms, including Microsoft and Nvidia, the s&p 500 index of American stocks would have fallen this year. Set against that hope, though, is a world stalked by threats to productivity growth… distorting markets with industrial policy… populations age, the green-energy transition beckons and conflicts… require more spending on defence…‘"}]},{"type":"paragraph"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"italic"}],"text":"Which means that this in my email from Tim Duy comes just in the nick of time:"}]},{"type":"paragraph"},{"type":"blockquote","content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Tim Duy"},{"type":"text","text":": ‘With it increasingly clear that the Fed reached the peak of this cycle back in July, we can begin wargaming the first rate cut of the cycle… setting policy to prevent the 2024 inflation forecast from rising… while preventing the 2024 unemployment forecast from rising as well…. Powell already set the stage for the Fed to see the balance of risks as equal at the December FOMC meeting…. The sooner the Fed cuts rates, the less likely negative dynamics will snowball into a recession. The Fed delayed rate hikes to its detriment. While the Fed has been preaching “higher for longer,” I suspect that it will realize that delaying rate cuts at a certain point will also be to its detriment…. Powell doesn’t want to be either Burns or Volcker. He wants to be the Chair that stuck the soft landing even after a surge in inflation to a 40 year high…"}]}]}]},"restacks":0,"reaction_count":0,"attachments":[{"id":"9e5830fb-a800-4bf0-a1ff-f0c9f9ac13c5","type":"link","linkMetadata":{"image":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/4c08f8db-6631-48b0-808c-9d92a49875df_1280x720.jpeg","title":"The world economy is defying gravity. That cannot last","description":"Threats abound, including higher-for-longer interest rates","url":"https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/11/02/the-world-economy-is-defying-gravity-that-cannot-last","host":"economist.com"},"explicit":false}],"name":"Brad DeLong","user_id":16879,"photo_url":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/ea5ae644-9822-4ca5-ac6b-e18c017d8fbc_1189x1208.png","user_bestseller_tier":100}}" data-component-name=“CommentPlaceholder”>

Get 33% off a group subscription

Economics: My view: (a) A substantial lack of knowledge of economic history—even of Robert Gordon’s observation that the Phillips Curve occasionally “slips derivatives”—and if you do not even know about the WWI, WWII, post-WWII, and Korean-War inflations, your odds of figuring out how this time it might be different than the 1980s are very low indeed. (b) A complete failure to recognize that posting a vacancy and getting online responses in the modern age is a very different and much less significant thing than taking out a classified ad with a phone number to call or an address to call at. It would not have been rocket science to take these into account, but…:

https://bsky.app/profile/pkrugman.bsky.social/post/3kdguj4yvaw22","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener noreferrer nofollow","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"https://bsky.app/profile/pkrugman.bsky.social/post/3kdguj4yvaw22"},{"type":"text","text":" dramatic disinflation without a recession, it seems worth asking how so many economists got it so wrong. Not meaning to pick on Jason here, but he was very mainstream and also, to his credit, very clear…. What went wrong? Predictions are hard, especially about the future, but the scale of the wrongness here is remarkable, and can’t easily be explained by exogenous positive shocks—ie, we didn’t have a sudden outbreak of peace in Ukraine. The miscalling of inflation looks, instead, like the product of a fundamental conceptual error—a misunderstanding of the inflation process. And it really calls for more soul-searching than I’m seeing…. A lot of the pessimism rested on credulousness about the meaning of the Beveridge Curve and bad analogies with the aftermath of the 1970s…"}]}]}]}]}]},"restacks":0,"reaction_count":0,"attachments":[{"id":"026ef67a-1603-44ff-9465-5da591c8e6b0","type":"link","linkMetadata":{"image":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/d41928c2-b799-4694-8c6b-e786eda28508_1000x303.jpeg","title":"Paul Krugman (@pkrugman.bsky.social)","description":"Now that we’ve seen dramatic disinflation without a recession, it seems worth asking how so many economists got it so wrong. Not meaning to pick on Jason here, but he was very mainstream and also, to his credit, very clear 1/","url":"https://bsky.app/profile/pkrugman.bsky.social/post/3kdguj4yvaw22","host":"bsky.app"},"explicit":false}],"name":"Brad DeLong","user_id":16879,"photo_url":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/ea5ae644-9822-4ca5-ac6b-e18c017d8fbc_1189x1208.png","user_bestseller_tier":100}}" data-component-name=“CommentPlaceholder”>

Donate Subscriptions

Economics: A very nice review of all the rs from Soumaya Keynes. But I confess I do not understand her quote from Atif Mian. r is the interest rate that balances aggregate demand and aggregate supply at full employment right now. It depends on market expectations. It has nothing to do whether it is a good and unbiased forecast of future outcomes. Perhaps Atif means that housing-market expectations are not general expectations? But, given overlap in populations, how could they be very different? I confess I do not understand:

https://www.ft.com/content/3c206a67-cd31-4828-94ba-549410d066e4","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener noreferrer nofollow","class":"note-link"}}],"text":"https://www.ft.com/content/3c206a67-cd31-4828-94ba-549410d066e4"},{"type":"text","text":": ‘Methods of estimating so-called R-star are in the spotlight — unfortunately, none are good…. The data-heavy method deployed by the Richmond Fed, which uses a very sophisticated moving average to forecast long-run rates. Given the recent resilience of America’s economy, it should probably be no surprise that it suggests a rising R-star. Unfortunately, it suffers from statistical error bands the size of a bus…. The New York Fed’s method uses more theory. .. [but] over the pandemic… was spitting out such implausible numbers that it was temporarily suspended…. The IMF is the most theory-driven…. Again, the danger is that these results tell you more about modelling than reality…. The other way of measuring R-star is to look at the long-term interest rates implicit in investors’ pricing…. [But] says Atif Mian… the collective wisdom of the… market “could be wrong”…"}]}]}]},"restacks":0,"reaction_count":0,"attachments":[{"id":"22640ec7-30e3-4800-b86b-fdda6cff0454","type":"link","linkMetadata":{"image":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/dfb0c79d-e88a-4b9e-babd-cba56edf9f36_2478x1393.jpeg","title":"Why people can’t agree on where interest rates are going","description":"Methods of estimating so-called R-star are in the spotlight — unfortunately, none are good","url":"https://www.ft.com/content/3c206a67-cd31-4828-94ba-549410d066e4","host":"ft.com"},"explicit":false}],"name":"Brad DeLong","user_id":16879,"photo_url":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/ea5ae644-9822-4ca5-ac6b-e18c017d8fbc_1189x1208.png","user_bestseller_tier":100}}" data-component-name=“CommentPlaceholder”>

Share

SubStack Posts:

Leave a comment

Subscribe now