Brad DeLong

It might be worth separating out the parts like the Bill of Rights from the more organizational pieces like the Presidential system and the Electoral College. Some of those pieces are “old as man” and others are the best ideas anyone had in the 18th century. In particular, the Presidential system has failed badly in almost every non-US country it’s been tried in, because it’s inherently unstable when there is a forceful President and polarized political parties. It may be failing us today in the US. https://delong.typepad.com/linz_perils_presidencialism.pdf

it seems worthwhile to note Graeber's extremely loose relationship with aspects of reality that didn't fit his very narrow political stance -- said post if about another book, but it's likely that the bullshit jobs work has similar flaws: https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/the-very-last-david-graeber-pos…

But that is precisely because a lack of autonomous spending in the EU! One theory is that in Europe in the 1980s, workers became so much more empowered that the private sector lost the will to invest. Start with https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf for the basic concept here, but there are many more examples. A VAT-funded balanced budget welfare state is a purely redistributional mechanism which, while great, is not sufficient to undo this sort of thing. Direct government spending like the military sort is a way around this. Maybe the workers are militant, but will the democracy just allow itself to decline military because you don't feel like dealing with that? Workers vote too, so I don't think so.

It's a well-written biography and Graeber comes across as a great guy but on the other hand the Brad DeLong takedown linked in the article [1] is quite something. I'm wondering how he wrote a 500 page book on debt without really understanding banking? [1] https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/the-very-last-david-graeber-pos…

The best thing about reading technical books is that it naturally leads one to get aquainted deeper with the topic at hand. Usually many ideas spawn out of some brilliant work which is published for a while already and its really worthwhile to try to track down those. Knowing history makes it easier to understand works which in some way depend on the original, even small bits - something called syntopical reading. While this is obvious to many I’ve always struggled to get myself to read those early works. Now obvious question is what is the best book to read on the topic of reading books? I think one of the best is “How to read a book” by Mortimer Adler. It is about all books and cannot recommend it highly enough. It is in public domain already unless I’m mistaken so here is a link [1]. [1] https://delong.typepad.com/files/adler-read.pdf

I've reposted this a few times, but it's worth repeating: Graeber, the author of "Debt: the first 5000 years", lies extensively about easily verifiable facts. Here, for example, is Graeber on Apple Computers: > Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages. Someone who's willing to say something like that has blown their credentials in my book, especially when it comes to economics, which is an ideologically touchy field already. Here's a further, somewhat ranty discussion by Brad Delong, a well-respected left-wing economist: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/04/david-graeber-april-fools-day-po…

One of my favorite essays about this is Brad DeLong's "our Economic Appetites" http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/01/we-are-live-at-the-week-our-econ…

Here's the blog entry Maciej wrote about the exodus: https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/03/anatomy_of_a_crushing/ My favourite line comes from the tweet storm (http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/12/the-small-exodus-from-delicious-… > "there are worse things than being DDOS'ed by people trying to give you money"

There's a great amount of truth to this; anyway, it's essentially what Michael Kalecki argued in 1943 in his "Political Aspects of Full Employment". Anyway, I find it unfortunate that the most frightening reform in the face of the rentier class is Marxism-Leninism, a system that simply doesn't work. It honestly seems strange that the radical proposals of Henry George (and his Land Value Tax[1] that would confiscate all rents) aren't used anymore to challenge this class. Last time Georgism infused economic reform, we had the age of trust-busting and worker protections. I hope I'm not dreaming when I think this could return. [0] http://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

Conservative economists like Brad DeLong? Nah, I think it caught a lot of flack because a lot of the research it contains is sloppy at best. Some is downright hilarious, though, as you can see with the story of Apple according to Graeber: "Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages..." http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-the-absence-…

I think the parent poster is misremembering. Economics in One Lesson isn't by Thomas Sowell. Not sure it should be characterized as a libertarian textbook either - most would class it as coming from the school of classical economics. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/04/economics_in_on.html is worth reading.

It's an interesting debate, and the position I find convincing is that Say's law usually holds... except (rarely) when it does not, such as in the recent financial crisis. Believing that it always holds automatically is a fallacy of Classical economics. It's interesting that Jean-Baptiste Say himself was willing to learn from history. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/after-the-british-financial-cris…

All serious economists disregard the Austrian school. And with good reason - they're kooks. There was a central bank during the great depression but the US was still on the gold standard until 1933. When it went off the gold standard the great depression stopped getting worse and started getting better: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/09/yes-recovery-in-the-great-depres…

No national government of an English speaking nation has defaulted on its debt since the “Great Stop of the Exchequer” of Charles II Stuart in 1672: "Here in the Anglo-Saxon world—never mind how few of us in it have any substantial proportion of our ancestors coming ashore with Hengest, Horsa, Esc, Ella, Cymen, Wlenking, and Cissa to loot, pillage, rape, and burn—we have not seen any government default since the “stop of the exchequer” of Charles II Stuart, when he simply got sick of paying his bills and decided to balance his budget by defaulting on his debt and then accepting bribes from Louis XIV of France, who was desperately anxious that Britain not help the Dutch resist his invasion." http://delong.typepad.com/files/20120221-the-budget-and-macro-policy.p…

The question, 'can a great nation fail to inflate its own currency?', seems a little silly. I'm reminded a little bit of Brad DeLong's 'widowmaker': http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/05/the-washington-super-whale-hedge…

At the age of 29, I've likely forever lost the following opportunities due to cost and probable inability to make up for lost wages and career potential: Seriously? Forever lost is a pretty strong statement. I don't see how any of these opportunities are forever lost just because he's 29 and hasn't had a steady job until now. Millions (billions?) of people manage to get married, have children, study, etc while in objectively far worse situations than this kid ever will be. This article overflows with a sense of entitlement. Reminds me of an editorial from a few years back, where a lawyer (professor?) in Chicago claimed destitution at $400K/yr [1]. [1] http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/in-which-mr-deling-responds-to-s… PS: Comment from an older thread that expresses my sentiments precisely: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3991666

good links. i would suggest brad delong's blog, too: http://delong.typepad.com/ and paul kedrosky's infectious greed: http://paul.kedrosky.com/ i wish this blog was more updated, the book was very fun to read: http://nudges.org/ a bigger note, though, is that to be stimulated we need to go beyond our comfort zones, both in terms of intellectual or academic comfort ("i'll never understand this stuff") or opinions and viewpoints. finding such material is easier than ever, but avoiding it is just as easy. the trick to growing and learning is to grow your experiences meaningfully.

We are clearly getting way off track, but anyone who has entertained the (false) idea that the South seceded from the union because of some States Rights principle would benefit from reading the original secession proclamation from the state of South Carolina. The document is available online; here is one source: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/12/the-south-has-risen.html The first section in the linked page is a preface written on a state website, summarizing that the secession document was totally concerned with slavery. It is then followed by the document in its entirety so that you can see the truth for yourself.

You might want to follow Brad DeLong's blog. Krugman also talked about housing bubbles (http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/01/paul_krugman_on.html) back in 2006. He wrote a column that said so explicitly, arguing that "part of the rise in housing values since 2000 [has been] justified given the fall in interest rates, but at this point the overall market value of housing has lost touch with economic reality. And there's a nasty correction ahead." My memory of the blogosphere is that people knew housing was overvalued and a lot of people were taking equity out of their homes by remortgaging them at high valuations. But I do not remember discussion of how much fraud there was in originating and repackaging housing loans, and no-one was talking about how these were getting securitized and distributed.

In the 2003 to 2007 period, a couple of blogs I follow (whatever.scalzi.com , Brad Delong) all had constant technical problems with MT. http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004350.html http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/03/15/ Or BradD, who has no fewer than EIGHT MT installs to try to get their shit software to work. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/10/housekeeping-mo.html Wordpress won because, reason 0, it actually worked and didn't break all the fucking time. Particularly for enduser software, people severely underrate code that isn't brittle shit that breaks if you look at it cross eyed.

> You mean like the great depression which happened not long after formation, which some prominent economists have argued was exacerbated by the fed? The tight monetary policy of the Fed (dictated by the rules of then-orthodox gold standard) made the Great Depression worse: * https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/financial-markets-and-financia… And it was only after leaving the gold standard that countries started to recover: > In the end, recovery from the Great Depression does not begin until countries give up on the combination of the Bagehot Rule and of commitment to sound gold-standard finance. Those countries that have central banks willing to print up enough money so that people are willing to spend it--it is when you adopt such policies that your economy begins to recover. If you don’t, you become France, which sticks to the gold standard all the way up to 1937, and never gets a recovery. When World War II begins, Nazi Germany’s production--equal to France's in 1933--had doubled between 1933 and 1939. French production had fallen by 15%. * https://delong.typepad.com/delong_long_form/2013/10/the-great-depressi… It was the 'sound money' orthodoxy that everyone adhered to that made things bad, and not the Fed specifically. It's not like things were any more stable pre-Fed: *…

> We all know the Central Bank hymn book by now. Yes, but some folks don't seem to accept the evidence and the historical record of what didn't work, and why we moved towards the current system. Some folks still think that FDR (and Keynes) got things wrong. > That said, printing money doesn't create economic activity nor economic growth nor wealth. While liquidity is not (necessarily) sufficient for economic activity it is necessary, and a lack of liquidity certainly hinders it. This is evidenced not least from the Great Depression and that once a country abandoned the gold standard they started to recover: * https://delong.typepad.com/delong_long_form/2013/10/the-great-depressi… Fixed supply monetary systems (like the gold standard) are a hindrance, and it's not like they do anything useful like create a stable monetary base either: * https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/0…

> I think there were a lot of problems, but most of them boil down to "heavy-handed government intervention in the markets". The Fed was very hands off in the early 1930s: > […] At the onset of the Great Depression in 1929–1930, the Fed maintained a “hands-off” approach, believing the economy simply needed to “wring out its excesses.” This is somewhat ironic in that Fed policy itself greatly contributed to the financial excesses of the 1920s. Nevertheless, the Fed failed to recognize the nature of the economy. > When the Great Depression hit in 1929, the Fed’s instinct was to do little and let the economy and markets correct. But the Fed seemed to have no sense of how big the credit bubble from the 1920s was. Consequently, from 1929–1933, the Fed remained committed to a tight monetary policy. Under the gold standard then in force, when the gold balances held by the government contracted, the money supply did so as well. Faced with the increasing economic turmoil, US businesses and the public at large trusted gold more than paper currency. Overseas investors, fearing a potential devaluation of the dollar, preferred gold too. This created a gold drain. As the Fed’s gold stocks declined, the United States unwittingly reduced credit in the economy. Over the 1929–1933 period, the US money supply contracted sharply, declining by roughly one third between 1929 and 1933, and the country experienced its worst ever downturn, with unemployment soaring to roughly 25%. *…

It’s really not hard to understand why if you think about it just a bit. Industrial farming requires very specific growing conditions (e.g., single crop per row/field and in a spacing that allows mechanized seeding and harvest). Growing by hand allows optimizing the ground space by, for example, under planting one crop to another (e.g., radishes can grow quickly so can be sown between larger plants while those larger are still small and the radishes are harvested before the space is needed by the larger plants). This is all very labor intensive, of course. Another example is starting virtually all seedlings inside and then transplanting, which virtually all market gardens do. That gives a head start to your plantings. But of course again it’s labor intensive. A good summary can be found in page 21 and following of the book How Asia Works (which can be found online: https://delong.typepad.com/files/studwell.pdf).

I'd suggest that the apparent shallowness of technology skeptics comes from two principle factors: - The most readily-dismissed skeptics are those whose critiques are readily grasped ... and wrong. Effectively this is a strawman dismissal, as the strong criticisms are not addressed substantively. (Your own criticism fails to detail what specific elements of Malthusian though, either original or current, you disagree with.) - Those who are prone to dismiss skeptics are themselves frequently falling victim to the biases I've mentioned. The principle omission from Malthus's calculus was that humans would spend the next 200+ years consuming the great prize of stored fossil fuels in the Earth, a nonrenewable resource which would eventually overwhelm its environmental sinks as well, at rates of up to 5 million times those of formation.[1] Increases in net human productivity track very closely to per-capita energy usage.[2] Note that in Adam Smith's own arguments over how nations grew their wealth, he also missed the role the Industrial Revolution and fossil-fuel powered machinery would play. That's a significant omission, because Smith was a Scott, living and working in Glasgow at the same time as James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, and more than that, arranged for Watt's appointment to the University of Glasgow and had intimate discussions with Watt about his work. The net result of this is one brief mention within Wealth of Nations, concerning the event by which…

> I’m sorry, but, we’d be foolish to discard anything and everything that we can’t quantify due to complexity or a lack of understanding of what specifically to consider. That's not the criticism here. The criticism is just getting a lot of stuff wrong including stuff he wouldn't have gotten wrong if he just did some basic fact checking. Just look at this mishmash of uninformed summaries, howlers, and bold claims that are disconnected from an awareness of how the systems he describes actually work: "Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages" "When Saddam Hussein made the bold move of singlehandedly switching from the dollar to the euro in 2000, followed by Iran in 2001, this was quickly followed by American bombing and military occupation. How much Hussein’s decision to buck the dollar really weighed into the U.S. decision to depose him is impossible to know, but no country in a position to make a similar switch can ignore the possibility. The result, among policymakers particularly in the global South, is widespread terror." c.f. https://savageminds.org/2013/02/09/delong-and-the-economists-on-debt-c… You can find other examples…

It's worth reading Barry Goldwater's opposition [0] to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, despite him claiming to be "unalterably opposed to discrimination or segregation on the basis of race, color, or creed, or on any other basis". His stance was exactly what you describe: that government did not have a right to force private parties to conduct business against their will. There's a good-faith debate to be had about positive rights vs. negative rights; or the potential backlash from forcing individuals to do the right thing; or the usual right-libertarian arguments about the sanctity of property rights. But I'll bet dollars to donuts, that the vast majority of those cheering for tech media giants booting out those with verboten views, based on private property rights, would also be horrified at the idea of even questioning the CRA under the same logic. [0] https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/06/barry-goldwater-declares-that-t…

> You can only lend money to people (or States) you see as equals. Large scale lending essentially ties your economies together (like the US and China). Debt can also be a thinly disguised bribe if there’s no real expectation that it’s ever going to be paid back. That’s how most lending to extremely poor countries works. The US or other “donors” lend money to the local tyrant to support domestically unpopular policy; the local tyrant pockets a large amount, distributes some to their cronies and some goes on the titular reason for the aid and at some point in the future the debt gets written off. Then the cycle repeats. The US does not view any other states as equals. China has lent a lot of money to Sri Lanka and Cambodia among others. It does not view either as an equal. > I highly recommend Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Grabber. He does a great deep dive into the history of debt (both personal and with States). It's an amazing read. It’s also riddled with factual errors, from saying Apple was founded by engineers working on their ok laptops or that the Fed isn’t part of the USG, among many, many others. Long post on a small selection of the ways the book gets things wrong. https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/the-very-last-david-graeber-pos…

“Would it not be a great satisfaction to the king to know at a designated moment every year the number of his subjects, in total and by region, with all the resources, wealth & poverty of each place; [the number] of his nobility and ecclesiastics of all kinds, of men of the robe, of Catholics and of those of the other religion, all separated according to the place of their residence? … [Would it not be] a useful and necessary pleasure for him to be able, in his own office, to review in an hour’s time the present and past condition of a great realm of which he is the head, and be able himself to know with certitude in what consists his grandeur, his wealth, and his strengths?” — Marquis de Vauban, proposing an annual census to Louis XIV in 1686.[1] Others have noted powers that a country has, that a company doesn't. The converse holds too. It's interesting to re-read James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State" with social networks in mind. Facebook can “read” its users (and many non-users) in ways that states only wish they could. “Filipinos were instructed by the decree of November 21, 1849, to take on permanent Hispanic surnames.[…] Filipinos generally lacked individual surnames, which might ‘distinguish them by families,’ and that their practice of adopting baptismal names drawn from a small group of saints’ names resulted in great ‘confusion.’ The remedy was the catalogo, a compendium not only of personal names but also of nouns and adjectives drawn from flora, fauna,…

Well. There's enough quality content in this thread to start a dedicated cable television channel, a la Viceland ;) Not sure if it's my favorite. And the subject is more technology than "tech". But the talk that keeps haunting me is Michael Dearing's lecture from the Reid Hoffman "Blitzscaling" class at Stanford: Heroes of Capitalism From Beyond The Grave https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vCdfa_aeI8 Dearing draws upon an obscure letter by Daniel McCallum, superintendant of the New York and Erie Railroad, written to his bosses in the 1850s. In the report, McCallum bemoans the stress and frustration of operating a railroad system spanning thousands of miles. All of the joy and magic he used to revel in whilst running a fifty mile stretch back in his home town has long since dissipated. Furthermore, the unit cost per mile seems to be exploding rather counter-intuitively! Dearing goes on to elucidate the absolute necessity of the railroads ("the thing to know about the railroads is: they were startups once") themselves. As guarantors of civilization and progress. Beacons bringing light and reason to the dark swamps of ignorance and inhumanity. And not just in the physical transport of goods, people and ideas across the continent. But as the wealth created from that creative destruction remains the best cure for all of our other inimical maladies: poverty, injustice, disease and stagnation. So, no pressure. But civilization depends upon you! Links to References in the…