WEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED: FOR 2024-09-19 Th
My weekly read-around…
Yasheng Huang on the history of China; income inequality in the US and Scandinavia since WWII; Monty Python on our debt to the Romans; SubStack Notes; very briefly noted; & Fed Governor Michelle Bowman does Trump’s bidding; the market expectations of Fed policy rollercoaster; reading about Rome; Fed-watcher uncertainty; Cicero is not a man you want at your back in a tight spot; & weekly briefly noted for 2024-09-13 Fr…
ONE AUDIO: History of China
Second-best recent thing on it I have heard recently…
On Humans: ‘The West has ruled history — at least the way history has been written. This is a shame. To tell the story of humans, we must tell the story of us all. So what about the rest? What themes and quirks does their history hide? And what forces, if anything, prevented them of matching Europe’s rise? I aim to cover these topics for several countries and cultures over the next year. But I wanted to start with China. To do so, I’ve teamed up with Jordan Schneider, the host of ChinaTalk. Our guest is MIT professor Yasheng Huang (黄亚生). Huang is the author of Rise and Fall of the EAST – one of my all-time favorite books on China’s past and present.
In this episode, we explore the deep currents shaping China’s history. We trace the forces shaping China’s early mastery of technology to its falling behind Europe in the modern era. We also discuss the surprising role that standardized exams have played in Chinese history, and why certain democratic elements in China’s past actually bolstered the emperor’s authority. The episode covers all of Chinese imperial history, ending with a brief note on the early 20th Century. In part 2, will zoom into China’s economic miracle and its uncertain future.
<https://overcast.fm/+AA8kS_UCixc>
ONE IMAGE:
ONE VIDEO: What Have the Romans Ever Given Us?
SubStack NOTES:
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Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: The peculiar thing is that China did a very, very good job indeed at handling the negative aggregate demand shock of the GFC back in 2008 and 2009. It seems that Xi Jinping and company want investment in building up “new productive forces” and subsidized exports to the rest of the world to make up the aggregate-demand slack created by the collapse of real estate construction, and the political disfavoring of consumer internet. But the rest of the world appears to have decided that the political economy, economic growth, network, and national security consequences of allowing a further boom in Chinese exports are simply too great for it to be accommodated. “New productive forces” are much more a plan to someday have a plan than actual jobs for actual workers. And the government seems ideologically opposed to boosting households’ consumer standards of living. Not to say that I know enough about the subject to have even an idea about what the ending to this particular story might be:
Noah Smith: Xi Jinping vs. macroeconomics: ‘Macro will not be mocked, sir…. China’s online boosters may gush about how high-tech and modern China is, and how wonderful its products are, but Chinese people themselves are very unhappy about how their economy is doing right now…. Youth unemployment… 21%. The Chinese stock market… in the dumps…. Two fundamentally different theories of… recessions… Xi Jinping has probably latched onto the wrong one…. The first… some real cost to reallocating resources from one industry to another…. [Or] the slowdown in real estate is part of an economy-wide [negative] “productivity shock”…. Xi’s response to China’s growth slowdown has been to try to shift real resources out of the “bad” sector (real estate) and into a sector he thinks is “good” (manufacturing)…. The alternative theory… “Keynesian”… includ[ing] Milton Friedman… a lack of aggregate demand…. Everyone is trying to save more money at the same time…. How could China get aggregate demand back on track?… A big consumption-based stimulus package…. Keynesian problems need Keynesian solutions. Macro will not be mocked… <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/xi-jinping-vs-macroeconomics>American bankers not understanding that a trustworthy and trusted regulatory framework is their seed corn, and eating it:
Daniel Davies: Basel III: The US has started a race to the bottom: ‘Banks have played silly endgames on capital. They win silly prizes as a result…. Nobody knows the extent of US commercial real estate risks…. When it comes to capital, bankers seem to be incapable of seeing the big picture. A few basis points on a ratio make hardly any difference in the long term. But a reputation for financial stability is incredibly valuable; the fate of Credit Suisse is a warning that when it is lost, everything is gone. On nearly every results call since the crisis, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan has taken the opportunity to remind investors of his company’s “fortress balance sheet”…. Regulation is not a constraint on the financial industry; it is part of the infrastructure… <https://www.ft.com/content/b112fe68-7b86-45f1-a524-768dd418eb12>Economic History: All pre-industrial societies—and many societies in our age of modern economic growth—were and are primarily societies of domination, in which the big business of the government and of the élite at the top is figuring out how to sustainably take a third or more of what is produced by others for themselves by fraud and force. It is true that in our age it takes a lot less social pressure to do this: the working class is not driven to despair at the edge of starvation because we are so comparatively and absolutely wealthy. But how then do we do history? Do we note Aristotle’s declaration that in a time of low productivity any form of civilization requires that some get enough for themselves and their families, for previous eras did not have “instrument[s that] could accomplish [their] own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the [blacksmithing] statues of Daidalos, or the three-wheeled catering serving-carts of Hephaistos, which, says the poet: ‘of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods’… [no] shuttle[s] would weave and… [no] plectrum[s] touch the lyre without… hand[s] to guide them…”, and damn them all as having nothing to teach us? Or do we put the working class off to one side and talk of civilizations as being better or worse to the extent to which the members of the élite treated each other more or less humanely?:
Amicus: On The Abolitionism of the Ancients (There Was Never Such a Thing) ‘I have a certain fondness for antiquity, despite all it really is. Homer’s bronze-age barbarism is alloyed with a supramodern maturity of spirit…. But it was also a brutal slave society, a barely-human nightmare to put the modern age to shame; it cannot be excused and it cannot be redeemed…. For every cultured Hellene made a household slave whose treatment might, in the right half-light, just barely seem humane, thousands lived and died in darkness to keep the master’s table laden high with silverware and salt…. Homer too is more humane than we might have expected from his age: poor Briseis gets little mention, except as Agamemnon’s spoils—until that is, she speaks, and fears her future as a slave. But then Achilles takes up the spear again, and again the laws go silent…. By code and custom, to the victors go the spoils, first among them the defeated—so it may have been in Homer’s age, so it was in Caesar’s…. Thirty percent of the city of Rome lived in chains at the empire’s height; they lived, on average, to the age of seventeen. And these were the lucky ones: out of the fields, out of the mines, out of the pits and quarries. We have little detailed evidence of how victims of the latifundia would fare; the welfare of their farm equipment is not a historian’s concern. And then at last there were the mines… <https://homosum.substack.com/p/on-the-abolitionism-of-the-ancients>
Political Economy: One of the dodges at the heart of liberalism is that authority is derived from and limited by “the consent of the governed”—simply an unproblematic part of the contract-framework by which we make all of our little agreements with each other, with one kind of those contracts is to hire a straw boss of some sort to coördinate groups of humans and to motivate us when we are not being our best self. That dismissal of authority and hierarchy is clearly, clearly an inadequate way of thinking about the problems here, But what would be a better way?:
Henry Farrell: Patrick O’Brian is a Great Conservative Writer: ‘His concern is the problem of right authority…. There is an argument, which emerges again and again throughout the books about right authority. Stephen usually takes the position that authority is a profoundly corrupting force…. “‘[Happy ships] depend upon the whim, the digestion and the virtue of one or two men, and that is iniquitous. I am opposed to authority, that egg of misery and oppression…’.” O’Brian… lays out a conservative… understanding of authority that ought properly be organic, based on a recognition of relations of authority and power that liberals might prefer to pretend do not exist. A good captain—a good exerciser of authority—ought [to] accept their role and their isolation both, without losing all human connection. They should be “taut”, perhaps sometimes even a “right hard horse”, but they should never be a tyrant…. The various ships described in his books, with their various captains and officers, are so many miniature societies, so many exercises of authority. We can discern the many different ways in which authority goes wrong, and the occasional ways in which it can go right… <https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/patrick-obrian-is-a-great-conservative>
Public Reason: Grasping at straws much here? I would live to hope that this is so:
Lucian K. Truscott IV: There is something happening in the Republican Party: ‘Here is what I think…. One by one, some Republicans are starting to tinker with the calculus of the last eight years that there is only one way to be a Republican and to get ahead in the Republican Party and that is through Donald Trump…. Both Cheneys have announced that they will vote for Kamala Harris; so has Adam Kinzinger, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention. And now there are Republican senators who have said they will not vote for Trump: Romney and Collins and Murkowski and Moran from Kansas, of all places; Cassidy from Louisiana (!); and Young from Indiana…. Mike Pence, has come out against him along with dozens of former cabinet and White House officials, former Republican members of the House and Senate, and yesterday, former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced he supports the Harris-Walz ticket. There is a list of former Republican governors who oppose Donald Trump that is too long to go into here, and so is the list of former Republican state senators and representatives. It’s not a tidal wave, but it is movement in the Republican Party away from Donald Trump, and that should not be ignored… <https://luciantruscott.substack.com/p/there-is-something-happening-in-the>A nice argument that there is no such thing as “liberalism”. There are only attempts to deal with the transformation from ancient-agrarian to commercial-imperial society, steampower society, and beyond—attempts that are more than the so-called “conservative” one of closing our eyes and pretending none of it happened in the hope that it will just go away:
Amicus: Liberalism Is a Plural Noun: ‘Consider rights…. For Bentham, these are legal constructs with a practical aim…. For Thomas Paine, rights were written into the laws of nature…. For William Lloyd Garrison… rights… [were] a higher law, written in the hearts of men. These are not the same concept. They bear a loose family resemblance—but no more so to one another than to the right of labor to all that it creates, or the right of the politai of Athens to speak and be heard…. Are these thinkers part of a single liberal tradition, while Athens remains pre- and the utopian socialists non-? Continuity can disqualify Pericles, but not Proudhon; an austere individualism can bar them both, but catches Hobbes and Tocqueville too. Hobbes… we can do without…. Perhaps we can even dispense with Tocqueville. But if Paine and Bentham are not both liberals, then of what use is the word?… There is a common thread that… you can call… “liberalism”… but… it’s just modernity. Marx belongs to it as much as Mill; it claims Proudhon, and Owen too. The inheritance of Rousseau and Montesquieu is the common heritage of all mankind, and its proper heirs are all those who would defend Man qua Man against all the creatures of the past. There is no such thing as liberalism: only liberalisms, or else the Enlightenment, of which the Left is the best and truest heir. But that story, too, will have to wait… <https://homosum.substack.com/p/liberalism-is-a-plural-noun>
The extent to which Donald Trump’s debate performance was worse than awful is being undercovered massively by the mainstream media, isn’t it?:
James Fallows: Election Countdown, 55 Days to Go: The Debate: ‘Last night I saw the best presidential-debate performance in my memory. And the worst. Conveniently, I could watch them both at the same time…. Some overnight nit-pick articles (for instance, this Pitchbot-style one from the NYT) complained that voters still needed to hear more details about Harris’s economic and foreign-policy plans. Fine. Programmatic details are not what these debates are for—and anyway, she packed in as many of them as this format could handle…. Her other mission was to prompt Trump to behave at his worst—to bait or trigger him on his most sensitive points. Oh boy, did she do that…. Every minute of what Trump said could be used in a DNC ad…. Davis and… Muir were excellent, better than any other debate team in recent memory. They had serious questions; they asked them with a minimum of grandstanding; and several times they came back to ask for follow-ups…. They broke important new ground in showing how live-TV moderators could call out the most egregious falsehoods, tersely and firmly, as they occurred…. Debates that have “mattered,” have often done so in providing what we now call a “permission structure”… <https://fallows.substack.com/p/election-countdown-55-days-to-go>There is still very good reason to hope that Republicans will simply stop funding Trump-Vance and turn downballot, as Democratic big donors and grassroots donors did en masse after Biden’s debate flameout:
Dan Drezner: Will the Second 2024 Debate Fallout Echo the First?: ‘History is not repeating itself but it could be rhyming: In the wake of Donald Trump’s Very Bad, No Good, Almost an Aaron Sorkin Caricature of a debate performance earlier this week, it is worth remembering exactly why Joe Biden’s Very Bad, No Good, Horrible debate performance caused him to exit the race…. Debate performance… co-partisans fracturing… disgruntled staffers… spilling the tea…polling [going] south…. Biden saw the handwriting on the wall and stepped aside. That five-step process [that] took less than a month…. Trump has fulfilled step one—everyone not named “Trump” knows that he screwed the pooch in the debate. The question is whether steps two through four will repeat themselves (step five ain’t happening). How much will recent history rhyme?…. We are starting to see the beginnings… two and three…. After Trump ruled out participating in another presidential debate… stories out about Senate Republicans urging Trump to debate Harris again…. And now both Trump’s staff and supporters are trying to suggest that the fault lies with one of Trump’s informal advisors, the 9/11 conspiracy theorist and super-racist Laura Loomer…. The reporting on Loomer’s coziness Trump is also… let’s say “suggestive.” As intelligence analyst J.M. Berger noted on BlueSky, “the crop of Loomer stories today read the way reporters write when they definitely know something but are not able to source it yet.”… Now it’s a question of seeing whether history will actually start to rhyme. The Harris campaign is not acting like it, which is prudent. The rest of us can wonder… <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/will-the-second-2024-debate-fallout#footnote-anchor-1-148850334>Neofascism: OK. Tell me: Once you claim that not “kidnap[ping] Jewish children who had been baptized [by servants] in secret” is a violation of natural law, hpw are not encouraging the victims of your grift to do so?:
Korey Mass: Debate Over Kidnapping A Jewish Boy Revives Questions About Catholicism’s Compatibility With Political Liberty: ‘In… First Things…Dominican theologian Romanus Cessario defended the papacy’s forcible removal of a six-year-old boy from his natural family in 1858…. Harvard’s Adrien Vermuele… bluntly declared that “Pius IX’s actions were valid,” while also noting that the real debate “seems to be about whether to say so publicly.”… If removing a baptized child from non-Catholic parents was truly just in the nineteenth century, then it remains so today…. Reno… says publishing Cessario’s essay was not meant “to encourage Catholics to kidnap Jewish children who had been baptized in secret.” Nonetheless, such a disclaimer clearly evades the substantive issue… <https://thefederalist.com/2018/02/15/debate-kidnapping-jewish-boy-revives-questions-catholicisms-compatibility-political-liberty/>Cognition: A nice argument that the “risk vs. uncertainty” discourse is really about situations in which (a) you should or must take your shot, (b) you should wait and gather more information, or (c ) refuse to play because the game is rigged against you by a more-informed counterparty:
Gregory Byshenk: ‘“But when your counterparty is Nature herself, does it make any sense to sharply distinguish between risk and uncertainty?…” It seems to me that there are multiple issues… what we know (or have good reason to believe)… what we do with what we know, and… whether what we do is by choice or necessity…. Drezner and Grimmer… are essentially dealing with the first[:]… is there good reason to believe that the polling models are accurate, and are accurately representing risk and uncertainty? If… the answer… is an unqualified ‘no’… the danger… is that we accept their “guesses”… as reasonable measures…. The second issue is what we might do based upon our knowledge or lack thereof, and why. It seems clear that making a bet with some counterparty is always a matter of choice…. Where uncertainty is high, we might conclude that the counterparty has knowledge that we lack, and choose not to accept any odds that they might offer…. In choosing to make such a bet, one is not evaluating the uncertainty (per se), but the state of the counterparties knowledge. At other times, the question is: “do we need to act?” If we do… then we have no choice but to act based upon the best reasons we have…. It seems to me something of a mistake to conflate betting markets… with forced decisions… <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/scratchpad-2024-08-29-why-republicans/comment/68112760>SubStack Posts: