BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-03-14 Th
We aren’t growing more hands quickly; the Hamiltonian tradition in America; Nicholas Meyer’s saving of “Star Trek”; sources of recent US productivity growth; respect for instability in control; very briefly noted; & having neighbors who vote for Donald Trump is dangerous to your health, on færie-stories—like Frank Herbert’s “Dune”—derived from agrarian-age roots, & BRIEFLY NOTED: for 2024-03-09 Sa…
Quote of the Day:
“The fact that we only have two hands is not changing rapidly…”—John Siracusa, ATP Podcast.
SubStack NOTES:
Economics: A very nice essay by Jacob Soll for all those who do not know that Biden’s “Hamiltonianism” in economic policy is in fact the long-standing American tradition as it stood before the ideology-driven deviation of the Hard Neoliberal era. That, indeed, was the argument of Steve Cohen’s and my “Concrete Economics” <amazon.com/Concrete-Economics-Hamilton-…. But in what sense is this a “secret”?:
Jacob Soll: There Is a Secret Hamiltonian in the White House: ‘This argument over industrial policy versus unfettered free markets has happened before…. Republican champions of historical originalism are attacking an economic playbook that looks much like the one written in 1791 by Hamilton…. Hamilton’s project for state support of American manufacturing… was not only successful at the time, it also laid a template for almost two centuries…. Hamilton claimed that Britain’s “immense progress” came not from agricultural trade, but rather from the cotton mill…. America could encourage home-grown iron and steel manufacturing… through strategic tariffs…. In the 20th century, national economic strategy continued to be central to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wartime policies, and to Cold War strategies of technological investment… <nytimes.com/2024/03/10/opinion/biden-ha…>
Science Fiction: It sounds to me as if Charle Jane Anders’s life was substantially improved by Nicholas Meyer, who did the great bulk of the heavy lifting that gave us high-quality even-numbered “Star Trek” movies in the 1980s. As writer-director of “Wrath of Khan”, writer of “The Voyage Home”, and writer-director of “The Undiscovered Country”, he set the good-Kirk mold:
Charlie Jane Anders: ‘I grew up in the 1980s, which was a great time for James T. Kirk. 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture had leaned into the dark side of Kirk: TMP’s Kirk is self-centered and obsessed with being in command of the Enterprise even if it damages the future of humanity. He’s threatened by the Enterprise’s rightful captain, Willard Decker. But 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan had set the tone for the next decade of Kirk: charming, whimsical, self-aware, magisterial — the kind of guy can say “Gentlemen, gentlemen!” and put a stop to a nerd squabble… <buttondown.email/charliejane/archive/i-…>
ONE IMAGE: Sources of Recent US Productivity Growth:
ONE VIDEO: Gunter Stein: Respect the Unstable!:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Noah Smith: Why Japanese cities are such nice places to live: ‘The secret sauce of dense, mixed-use urbanism…. Even if you live in a tiny apartment, the city around you is so nice that your live can feel very free and luxurious…. Almost every zone is mixed-use…. Almost every zone has some stores in it…. You’re never far from a store or restaurant…. Having stores and restaurants within a couple minutes’ walking distance of your house does something else — it creates public space near your house…. In Japan, even if you live in a tiny apartment, it doesn’t feel like you live in a tiny, lonely space—you’re out and about so much that it feels like you live in a great big open space with lots of other people…. In America, you mostly live your life inside… your home, your car… your office… a shopping mall or big-box store or a large restaurant that you drive to…. In Japan, in contrast, you mostly live your life outside…
Delphine Strauss, Sam Fleming, & Valentina Romei: Europe faces ‘competitiveness crisis’ as US widens productivity gap: ‘Washington reaps benefits from green fiscal stimulus, rehiring and surge in new businesses…. Eurozone productivity fell 1.2 per cent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, while in the US it rose 2.6 per cent in the same period, separate data showed. Labour productivity growth in the US has been more than double that of the eurozone and UK in the past two decades…. Catherine Mann, an external member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, told the FT last month that while labour productivity numbers looked “very attractive” in the US, they were driven by demand factors, pushed in particular by a budget deficit of more than 6 per cent…<https://www.ft.com/content/22089f01-8468-4905-8e36-fd35d2b2293e>
Public Reason: Karl Kautsky: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat: ‘Dictatorship as a form of government in Russia is as understandable as the former anarchism of Bakunin. But to understand it does not mean that we should recognise it; we must reject the former as decisively as the latter…. Dictatorship… [is] only as means of grappling with tasks which… beyond its strength, and the solution of which exhausts and wears it; in doing which it only too easily compromises the ideas of Socialism itself, the progress of which it impedes rather than assists…. The essential achievements of the [Russian] Revolution will be saved, if dictatorship is opportunely replaced by democracy… <https://archive.org/details/cu31924028351439/page/n8/mode/1up?view=theater>
Journamalism: K.C. Raybould: AI Doom in the Sky, By and By: ‘Doomers Are a Distraction from the AI Problems in the Here and Now: The New Yorker has a lengthy look [by Andrew Marantz] at AI “doomers” and their counterparts, effective accelerationists, with an emphasis on the doomers. It is a well written, well researched, sometimes amusing portrait that is effectively useless with respect to understanding the actual problems of AI…. If the argument is about whether or not the AI systems are good for the people of tomorrow, there is less time and space to talk about whether or not it is being used properly today…
Neofascism: Rick Perlstein: The Spectacle of Policing: ‘Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., while yelling, “Free Palestine.”… The first first responder, according to a witness, either a security guard or a cop, asked the man before him who was on fire, “May I help you, sir?” Then he ordered him to the ground. The second first responder—a Secret Service agent, it turns out—then approached “with a gun drawn on the man after he collapses, still consumed by flames.” A picture of that moment emerged. It looks like he thought he was keeping a murderer from fleeing the scene of the crime. It was the third responder who tried to actually put out the fire. As he did, he cried something that ought to live on in popular lore for the way it concentrates attention on just how sick our weapons-addicted society has become. He told the guy aiming the pistol, “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers!”… <https://prospect.org/justice/2024-03-06-spectacle-of-policing/>
Timothy Burke: Entry Point: ‘My father’s parents, once new arrivals themselves to Southern California, ended up owning a small house in a city within Los Angeles County…. By the time they died… majority Asian…. For my grandparents, it meant that the local shopping centers were suddenly full of businesses that didn’t cater to them, that churches fundamentally changed their congregations, and so on. Despite some racist grousing from my grandfather, I don’t think that even they thought any of that was a big deal… but they did find it disorienting…. As in so many other cases, the more conservative you are in your reaction to that, the more you tend to think “the law for thee, not for me”. I should be allowed to go where I want, but not you. But this is why ethnonationalist feeling keeps renewing itself, because all of us also have special places that we think of as home…. Ethnonationalists relocate the highly personal and idiosyncratic terrain of those kinds of feelings to large, amorphous agglomerations of people and ‘culture’… to maliciously pump up a fear of being “replaced”…. A reactionary narrative often seems like the right way to manage what is happening. It might be that the only way to undercut that is to recognize that all of us at times are disconcerted by our inability to decide on the changes we welcome and the changes we detest…
Ron Filipowski: Trump Getting DESTROYED on Truth Social Over His Vaccine Post: ‘In the first major rallies of his post-presidency in 2022, Trump incorporated into his standard speech a few lines about how great the vaccine was and how he should get all the credit for them. It shocked him though when his die hard cultists actually booed and jeered him over it…. Trump hated to cut the Warp Speed World Hero lines out of his rally speeches, but ultimately he was forced to do it…. Trump has gone out of his way to avoid the topic, and his supporters have started to let it go. But last night, he wrecked all of that. When Biden was talking about how much of a mess he inherited from the Trump Admin during the worst of the pandemic, Trump fired off a post saying that he is the one who saved America with the vaccines…. That one post had far more engagement than any other—especially in the replies which were up to 4,380… <https://www.meidastouch.com/news/trump-getting-destroyed-on-truth-social-over-his-vaccine-post>
War: Neri Zilber & Andrew England: Hamas has been shattered. Now it is fighting to survive: ‘With its fighting ranks decimated and Gaza in ruins, the militant group’s goal is to avoid elimination…. The US, Qatar and Egypt face as they struggle to negotiate a deal to halt the fighting and secure the release of more than 130 Israeli hostages still held in Gaza…. “Does Hamas still exist militarily? Yes,” said one senior Israeli military official. “Is it organised? No. The path to completely dismantling them goes on”… <https://www.ft.com/content/2106fb53-64bb-4f2f-86fc-d2b772c0a8d1>
Science Fiction: Sonny Bunch: Dune: Part Two: ‘I’m open to the idea that The Space Jihad is bad! But if you don’t SHOW people why it’s bad, I’m not going to take your word for it that it’s worse than letting Feyd-Rautha and his harem of cannibals have their way with Zendaya!,,, <https://letterboxd.com/sonnybunch/film/dune-part-two/1/>
Max Read: “Dune” (the movie), annotated: ‘You couldn’t pay me to live in a vast desert dotted with non-native palm trees, wracked by feudal-level inequality, and beset by valuable powdered drugs. But enough about Los Angeles, folks!…
