WEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED: FOR 2024-08-30 Fr
My weekly read-around…. JD Vance as what soldiers who have seen the elephant call a Rear-Echelon Mother Fucker; Pakistani growth vs. Indian, Bangladeshi, & Pakistan peer countries; advice on Dealing with the information- & task-overflow firehose; SubStack NOTES—Rajan & Minsky, “Fetishism of Commodities” as comedy, Republicans as full-time policy grifters since 1985, the end of my caffeine detox, the village media swamp works for Trump, Elon Musk is not very smart, Sam Francis set out the playbook for Trumpist neofascism, Adam Posen thinks r* has risen a lot, & Jay Powell announces the Federal Reserve’s rate-cutting cycle is underway—very briefly noted; & SubStack Posts: Econ 135 course syllabus & schedule, making moral judgments as an essential part of doing history, & weekly briefly noted for 2024-08-23 Fr…
ONE IMAGE: Rear-Echelon Mother Fuckers:
A classic WWII “Willie & Joe” cartoon by Bill Mauldin. Apropos of JD Vance’s:
Semper Fidelis—always faithful, right? You hear Marines say it all the time, ‘Semper Fi’. And to me, what it means is that Marines are always faithful to our country. I want to expound upon it because I really do think that Donald Trump exemplifies that motto…
An absolutely classic rear-echelon mother-fucker thing to say:
Found by Michael Harper.
ANOTHER IMAGE: Pakistani Growth vs. Indian, Bangladeshi, & Pakistan Peer Countries:
From the brilliant Atif Mian:
ONE AUDIO: Dealing with the Information- & Task-Overflow Firehose:
David Pierce & Laura Mae Martin: A Googler’s Guide to Getting Things Done <https://overcast.fm/+AAQN1rZrz-Y>
SubStack NOTES:
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Very Briefly Noted:
Cognition: what always most annoyed me about James Scott’s exaltation of what he called metis over tekhne was his fake assumption that metis was some time-honored set of practical knowledge handed down from generations, rather than something that was only as old as the formal quantifiable and theoretical knowledge that underpinned the tekhne. In the modern world since 1870, in which which tekhne has doubled in effectiveness every thirty years and resource scarcity due to the population explosion doubled every 55, few are the professions where metis is learned simply by apprenticeship to someone a generation older than you. Often it has to be rebuilt every decade:
Dan Davies: Horses for Courses: ‘To a large extent, the debate about techne and metis, technical quantifiable knowledge versus embedded and tacit skill, is really about the curse of dimensionality. There’s a point at which, to quote Ben Recht, “math becomes metaphor” and the skill of prediction and management is one of knowing which parts of the mental model to apply; while you learn these things in mathematical terms, the algorithm doesn’t help you any more… <https://backofmind.substack.com/p/horses-for-courses>Economics: The US debt crisis is still very, very far in the future, even on our current fiscal trajectory. And as I read the politics, a big deficit-reduction push over the next five years would repeat the mistakes of Reagan and Clinton in starving very necessary very high-return public investment programs, and would simply set us up for another round of tax cuts for the rich come the 2030s:
Dylan Matthews: The US government has to start paying for things again: ‘Why, and how, the US should fix its debt problem…. We were right about the 2011 economy. But the 2024 economy is not the 2011 economy. Interest rates are much higher. Unemployment is at 4 percent, a number that in 2011 we didn’t dare dream of. Wages are rising, especially for the lowest-income workers…. Spending on older Americans is set to spike, and we need to figure out a way either to tame that spending, raise taxes to pay for it, or do a combination of the two…. [Does what] Valéry Giscard d’Estaing famously called… America’s “exorbitant privilege”… mean the US is immune to the dynamics that have driven debt crises in other places? Perhaps…. There is no law of the universe that the dollar has to be the world reserve currency forever… <https://www.vox.com/policy/367278/us-national-debt-gdp-government-inflation-solutions-recession>Over the course of my lifetime, becoming a father has been a very big and very good deal for men—although to some and perhaps a large degree the causation runs the other way, and men who are getting a good deal are more likely to have society choose them to become the fathers;
Claudia Goldin, Sari Pekkala Kerr, & Claudia Olivetti: The other side of the mountain: women’s employment and earnings over the family cycle: ‘Women earn less than men… is especially true of mothers relative to fathers…. But what happens on the ‘other side of the mountain’ as the children grow up and eventually leave home?… The motherhood penalty is greatly reduced, and by their 50s women with children earn just 7 log points less than those without children, given hours and work experience. But fathers manage to maintain their relative gains…. Fathers earn almost 7 log points more per child regardless of their age, whereas mothers lose 7 log points per child, holding hours of work and work experience constant… <https://academic.oup.com/ooec/article/3/Supplement_1/i323/7708069>Certainly the Federal Reserve does not think it let itself be bullied by chatterers and meme-grifters into falling behind the curve on this rate-cutting cycle. But, in my circles at least, it is hard to understand their actions and thought processes without concluding that that probably did happen. What is the alternative explanation, after all?
Barry Ritholtz: Edge of Rate Cuts: How We Got Here: ‘Consider the possibility of rate cuts in June 2023 (as I was advocating for at the time). Had they cut too soon, and inflation reignited, they look foolish. If it was not too soon, all they would have accomplished was: Providing credit relief for the entire bottom 50% of consumers; making more housing supply available; stimulating CapEx spending; encouraging more hiring; keeping the economic expansion going. But here is the thing: They would have gotten precisely zero credit for that outcome. It was a modest risk with no upside to them.So instead, they played it safe… <https://ritholtz.com/2024/08/how-we-got-here/>
“Anchored inflation expectations” is, I think, the key. And that is the thing that Volcker created at immense costs, subsequent FOMCs have preserved, and that Trump and his Republicans with their desire to assault Fed independence might well break badly:
Robert Armstrong: The Fed’s victory lap: ‘During his speech on Friday — not quite an outright victory lap, but close — Jay Powell gave a lot of credit to anchored inflation expectations: An important takeaway from recent experience is that anchored inflation expectations, reinforced by vigorous central bank actions, can facilitate disinflation without the need for slack [in the economy]. Powell is right. With retrospect, it looks like what has mattered most with falling inflation was supply shocks abating and confidence that the Fed will do what it takes. The particular level of the federal funds rate, and expectations of where it will be in the near term, look beside the point. What the market thinks the Fed would need to do to keep inflation under control has vacillated wildly over the past year. The Fed’s expectations have followed the same general pattern, but in a tighter range… <https://www.ft.com/content/6065eb0b-ce66-46dc-9a2b-bea7c25fe95c>Matt Yglesias tries to give Kamala Harris advice as to how to sell the Abundance Agenda:
Matt Yglesias: The promise and peril of Obama’s YIMBY turn: ‘Framing the housing abundance pitch — which the Biden administration is already committed to on a policy level — as “we are trying to fix some governance issues in the Blue Zone by advocating for deregulation” strikes me as much better than “city-pilled liberals hate the suburbs.” Of course, to an extent, both things can be true: The YIMBY movement gains support both from a free market economic analysis and also an effective appreciation of density. But the former situates its advocates in a broadly appealing national political context, which is what Harris needs to do to win the election… <https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-promise-and-peril-of-obamas-yimby>Historically, when manufacturing jobs were good jobs, it was because they were union jobs, or jobs with elevated rent-sharing pay because they were union-threat jobs. When manufacturing jobs had high regional multipliers, overwhelmingly it was because their location was one in which a lot of money was spent—concentrations of production and thus of spending on upstream inputs, and concentrations of income. In a post-union age manufacturing jobs are not high paid. Manufacturing locations are still locations for growing very valuable communities of engineering practice. Today, manufacturing is worth having adaptive production robustness reasons. manufacturing is worth having for supply-chain robustness. Reasons. But one also wants to focus on developing regions as places where value—or at least income—is created, whether manufacturing value or other value. Agglomeration economies rather than mass-production increasing returns are now the key:
Soumaya Keynes: Are US manufacturing jobs worth fighting for?: ‘Historically, such work was seen as a ticket into the middle class—but data on their pay premium is mixed…. I would say that although the benefits associated with working in manufacturing have certainly fallen, it seems too strong to say that they have disappeared. And finally, I would caution that nostalgia is a powerful drug, best deployed carefully…<https://www.ft.com/content/b072955b-4ad5-4fe7-86b2-a975663e561a>
Yup. If the labor market is less inflationary than it was in 2019, why are interest rates higher than they were then? Yes, fiscal policy. But even so:
Tracy Alloway & Joe Weisenthal: Odd Lots Newsletter: A Quick Dispatch From Jackson Hole: ‘To some extent, what was notable about [Jay Powell’s] speech was its lack of ambiguity. Usually… the whole army of Fed Kremlinologists pars[es] the various lines…. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t significant questions….A 50 bps cut (as opposed to 25) at some point in the future[?]… How the Fed will incorporate the August jobs report into its thinking…. But with regards to this particular speech, there wasn’t much ambiguity. Powell is done…. To emphasize that point even further, he characterized the current state of the labor market as being softer than it was in 2019, pre-pandemic. So arguably, we’ve already gone beyond “normalization”… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-08-23/odd-lots-newsletter-a-quick-dispatch-from-jackson-hole?cmpid=BBD082324_oddlots>Economic History: I need to clear and restock my memory banks: I have been telling people “a quarter” for forty years now:
Saloni Dattani: Measuring the Black Death: ‘George Christakos and his colleagues… hundred European cities…. Jedwab, Johnson, and Koyama estimated… 38.75 percent of Western Europe’s population had died…. John Aberth (2021) and Ole Benedictow (2021) have estimated that 51–58 percent or upwards of 60 percent…. York, Winchester, Coventry, and Lincoln… parish priests[’]… replacements…suggests a mortality rate between 40 and 73 percent…. San Gimignano… a town and… surrounding rural areas…. Comparing the 1350 tax list to the town’s previous tax list, compiled in 1332, suggests that 52 to 60 percent of the population died during the Black Death… <>
Journamalism: Another of the most effective and brilliant reporters of his generation stating the bald truth: the New York Times needs new owners, new management, and a new internal culture, or it would be better for all of us if it were to vanish tomorrow:
Walt Mossberg: ‘Journalists have one core job: to tell the truth, especially when it’s clear. The staff of the New York Times has done it in the past, even at great risk. Why don’t they do it now? If they’re being ordered to normalize an autocratic, lying, convicted felon and sexual abuser, why don’t they stage a walkout? (And I don’t buy the overly simplistic arguments that it’s because the publisher is some right wing stooge or the reporters won’t tell the truth because they want more access to Trump)… <https://www.threads.net/@mossbergwalt/post/C_CXbTyxPD3>