There is a podcast with me and Brendan Beare. Here is the earlier article.
Category Archives: links to my essays
So you don’t have to
I read Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth and wrote a review.
It is indeed correct to say that when the government is bidding for resources, the risk of inflation is low if those resources are idle. It is also correct that unemployment is an indication of idle resources. But just because some resources are idle does not mean that the government can spend wherever it would like without affecting prices. The government would have to be an especially perspicacious and adroit entrepreneur to advance its priorities while only using idle resources.
By the way, as I read the market for U.S. Treasuries, investors are betting that Kelton is right.
A neuroscientist looks at polarization
And I review the book, Mending America’s Political Divide, by Rene Levy.
For Levy, the most harmful characteristic of tribal politics is lack of empathy. We lose sight of the humanity of our political opponents and instead treat them as an evil force.
He is part of the old world that’s rapidly agin’.
Everybody hates the libertarians
It’s not just Brink Lindsey. Patrick Deneen writes,
Until recent times, America has never been so foolish to consider itself a libertarian nation, much less had such a view advanced by so-called “conservatives.” We have had a libertarian public policy imposed by the mainstream of each political party: libertarian economics by elites on the right, and libertarian social ethos by elites on the left. This elite coalescence is represented no better than today’s two Supreme Court decisions, one which gives precedence to a corporation’s rights of property and profit (U.S. Forest Service v. Cowpasture River Preservation Association), and the other which continues to elevate sexual autonomy as paramount libertarian good that trumps all contesting claims (Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia). Will and Thompson mistake this aberration – foisted upon an increasingly recalcitrant and unhappy public – as the sum of the American tradition, rather than an aberration and deformation.
I stand by my critique of Deneen from two years ago.
Who else remembers Tom Lehrer?
Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics
and the Catholics hate the Protestants
and the Hindus hate the Moslems
and everybody hates the Jews
We are in the era of what political scientists call “negative partisanship,” where people feel at best lukewarm to their own side but are filled with fear and loathing for the other side.
The agony of the conservative intellectual, 2016
I review a Never Trump, by Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles. The book does well in capturing conservative intellectuals’ thought process in 2016.
Before November, opposition to Mr. Trump could be thought of as having little cost. Because no one expected him to win, the question for intellectuals was how best to position themselves for the aftermath of his defeat.
In 1965, Robert Novak wrote a book called The Agony of the GOP, 1964. It was about the Goldwater movement’s takeover of the Republican Party that year. That resulted in an immediate electoral disaster, but without long-term damage to the Republicans. 2016 may have been the reverse.
Peter Zeihan watch
I have an essay reviewing Peter Zeihan’s Disunited Nations.
Suppose that Tyler Cowen (The Great Stagnation) and Ross Douthat (The Decadent Society) are correct that we have gained affluence but lost our innovative edge in recent decades. Zeihan would say that these developments both reflect the Order. And he predicts that this will soon change. But he would focus on the loss of well-being from the collapse of the Order rather than on any possible benefits that might come from a more fragmented state power system, with societies perhaps placing a higher priority on innovation and having more tolerance for risk than is the case today.
I also recommend this podcast with Zeihan and Anthony Pompliano. In the podcast, Zeihan says that the coronavirus, by lower the demand for oil, makes it easier for Saudi Arabia to drive the price down, forcing some countries to shut down oil wells that cannot easily be re-started. Zeihan argues that this will be particularly hard on Russia, Venezuela, and Iran, but not so hard on the United States.
And in this essay, he lists many ideas (not his) for government spending, at least some of which are likely to be enacted.
My review of Kevin Mitchell
[Note: askblog had an existence prior to the virus crisis. I still schedule occasional posts like this one.]
At some point, take time to read my review of Kevin Mitchell’s Innate. The book really influenced my thinking about nature and nurture. I think that Mitchell’s ideas are something missing in Charles Murray’s work.
I took away two main lessons from Innate. The bumper-sticker versions of these lessons are:
a) gestation matters; and
b) humanity is a set of individual mental disorders.
Dialogue between an Israeli former MK and me
Trying to raise the status of Edward Leamer
[Note: askblog had an existence prior to the virus crisis. I still schedule occasional posts like this one.]
In this article, I say that Edward Leamer deserves a Nobel Prize.
Edward Leamer deserves the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for launching the movement to examine critically the uses of statistical methods in empirical research. The movement has had repercussions that go beyond econometrics. It has affected medicine and epidemiology, where John P. A. Ioannidis has been a leading figure in pointing out methodological failures (Ioannidis 2005; 2016; Begley and Ioannidis 2015). It has impelled psychology and behavioral economics to confront what has become known as the ‘replication crisis’ (Camerer et al. 2018).
. . .After Leamer pointed out problems inherent in the multiple-regression
approach and the inevitable specification searching that it involves, economists
have turned to quasi-experimental methods
The policy of Econ Journal Watch is not to allow the author to give acknowledgments to editorial staff, but Brendan Beare and Jason Briggeman did a great deal to improve the essay.
Who is writing that $1000 check?
I hate to be rude, but I have to ask that question. Let’s say I get a check in the mail, for $1000, payable to me. But I look at the check closely and I see that the payer is also me. I have written a check to myself. Am I stimulated?
If the government were forced to run a balanced budget, then in order to write a $1000 check to me, it would have to tax someone else by $1000. (Or it could cut other spending. As you know, I would favor a Universal Basic Income that replaces food stamps, Medicaid, etc., if I thought that the political process would make that trade.) With deficit spending, the government borrows the money from some future taxpayer. See Lenders and Spenders. Or the government can just print the money. See Modern Ponzi Theory.
I often describe myself as the last fiscal hawk in America. The rest of you have been ignoring me for years, and nothing has gone wrong. Yet.