June 06, 2005
Bolton and Wolfowitz (Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by These Fools? Department)
More thuds and screams from inside the Topkapi Palace:
Here's Thomas Fingar of the State Department sticking his knife into the back of U.N. Ambassador-nominee John Bolton before Senate Foreign Relations:
PAUL FOLDI: What did Mr. Bolton say to you?
MR. FINGAR: That he was the President's appointee, that he had every right to say what he believed, that he wasn't going to be told what he could say by a mid-level INR munchkin analyst.
PAUL FOLDI: Did he actually use those terms?
MR. FINGAR: That's my recollection. He said that, one way or another, several times. Said that he wanted Westermann taken off his accounts. I said, "He's our CW/BW specialist, this is what he does." He expressed again, as I remember it, that he was the President's appointee, he could say what he wanted, I said, "John, I'm coming into this cold, let me go downstairs and find some facts." I said, "I don't even know what you're talking about in terms of a document." And I left. After I looked into it, saw the e-mail that accompanied it, I sent an e-mailed up, which re-versed two points that I made in his presence, again, which was that we had two fundamental obligations in handling material -- intelligence-derived materials to use in speeches -- one was protection of sources and methods to make sure things were properly cleared; and the other was to make sure that policymakers were aware when they were going to say something that would not be supported by the Intelligence Community. That if asked, "Do you agree with this?" that the Intelligence Community would say yes, or no. That we owed it to him to flag that, and I thought that is what Christian was doing.
PAUL FOLDI: What did you tell Mr. Westermann? Did you get a chance?
MR. FINGAR: I didn't see him until the next day, as I remember, and I told him what had transpired in the conversation. I told him that he, Mr. Bolton, wanted him taken off of those accounts. I said we had no intention of doing that, no to worry about it, he was our CW/BW analyst...
FRANK JANNUZI: Was Mr. Westermann ever disciplined, or punished for his conduct in the clearance of this language?
MR. FINGAR: No....
FRANK JANNUZI: Subsequent to this incident, it's our understanding Mr. Westermann was instructed -- perhaps by his office director, perhaps by someone else -- to essentially try to minimize his personal contact with Mr. Bolton, is that correct?
MR. FINGAR: Yes, it was in the context of -- he didn't have a particular responsibility to go to that office, to be the one carrying materials up there -- and it was sort of, why walk into a buzz saw?... I knew I was dealing with somebody who was very upset, I was trying to get the incident closed, which I didn't regard as a big deal. I knew John was mad. I assumed, when people are mad, they get over it. So, did I lean over in the direction of "Sure, we'll take responsibility"? He thanked me for it, at least as far as I'm concerned, in my dealings with Bolton, that closed it....
Here's Thomas Fingar being chosen by new intelligence czar John Negroponte as a principal deputy--as the guy who controls what Bush will see and what he will not see each morning:
Thomas Pincus: Thomas Fingar, head of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, will become Negroponte's deputy director for analysis and chairman of the National Intelligence Council. The intelligence reorganization legislation gives Fingar responsibility and authority for setting standards and coordinating objectives for U.S. intelligence efforts, although it leaves the analysts at their respective agencies with the goal of allowing them to present independent views. Fingar will also have what a senior intelligence official involved in the process described to reporters Friday as "governance" over the President's Daily Brief, the summary of most important items given to Bush daily....
Negroponte does not seem unhappy at Fingar's use of colorful metaphors--"walking into a buzz saw"--or at failure to soften his recollection of what dealing with Bolton was like.
One correspondent writes that the Bush administration's treatment of Bolton and Wolfowitz is best thought of as like:
...that scene in "Animal House" where the dis-favored pledges are sent off to sit with the foreign-exchange students. The Bushies are mad at Bolton and Wolfowitz: they said that Iraq would be easy, and it isn't. But the Bushies don't want to fire them--one Richard Clarke and one Paul O'Neill are enough. So the Bushies send them to the U.N. and the World Bank: getting them out of the White House decision-making loop by sending them to sit with the foreign-exchange students. These moves are sold as promotions--or at least as lateral moves--but the real upshot is that Bolton will be interminably lectured by Third World ambassadors, that Wolfowitz will rack up the miles visiting the world's un-garden spots, and that both will be out of all important loops.
The problem with this, of course, is that the Bush administration is wrong to view the World Bank and the U.N. as unimportant backwaters where nogoodniks can be safely parked.
The jobs of World Bank President and U.N. Ambassador are key to the U.S.'s foreign policy effort: they are how we deploy a great deal of our soft power.
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 10:31 PM in Bushisms, Iraq, Terrorism | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Alan Greenspan Is Worried
Edmund Andrews reports:
Greenspan Says Low Rates Tempt Investors to Risk More - New York Times: Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, warned Monday night that the baffling persistence of low long-term interest rates was driving investors to hunt for higher returns by plowing money into hedge funds that will not be able to deliver on their promises. Speaking to a conference of central bankers in Beijing, Mr. Greenspan reiterated that he is perplexed that long-term Treasury bond rates are lower today than they were a year ago, when the Federal Reserve began systematically raising short-term rates. The persistence of cheap money is 'clearly without recent precedent' and defies simple explanation, Mr. Greenspan said.
Mr. Greenspan warned that low rates are driving investors to seek higher returns by taking on higher financial risks - particularly in hedge funds and private equity funds that hold out the prospect of higher profits through sophisticated trading strategies. He took particular aim at packages of debt known as collateralized debt obligations, which have been one of the fastest- growing businesses on Wall Street. Mr. Greenspan raised worries about the proliferation of hedge funds based on arcane but not fully tested trading strategies. 'I have no doubt that many of the new hedge fund entrepreneurs are embracing a strategy of pinpointing temporary market inefficiencies, the exploitation of which is expected to yield above-average rates of return,' Mr. Greenspan said. But, he cautioned, 'most of the low-hanging fruit of readily available profits' has already been picked.
Normally, long-term rates climb when the Fed raises short-term rates. But rates on 10-year Treasury bonds, which directly affect rates for mortgages and corporate bonds, have declined nearly one percentage point, to less than 4 percent, since the Fed began raising rates in June 2004.
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 09:22 PM in Economics, Economics: Behavioral, Economics: Finance, Federal Reserve | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)
Yet Another Big Mac index
From Rising Hegemon:
The scale is quite illuminating: Australia %u201417 minutes; New Zealand %u2014 28 minutes; Hong Kong %u2014 41 minutes; Malaysia %u2014 1 hour, 26 minutes; South Korea %u2014 1 hour, 29 minutes; Philippines %u2014 2 hours, 19 minutes; Thailand %u2014 2 hours, 45 minutes; China %u2014 3 hours, 58 minutes; Sri Lanka %u2014 5 hours, 53 minutes; India %u2014 8 hours, 34 minutes; and the winner is Pakistan, where it takes a McDonalds worker 14 hours, 14 minutes to buy a lousy burger...
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 09:10 PM in Economics, Economics: Growth, International Trade | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)
External Storage Price Trends
From Paul Kedrosky:
Infectious Greed: Better to Be a Buyer than a Seller of External Storage: "Neat duelling stats in the booming external storage market (from IDC): Year-over-year revenue growth: 6.7% (to $3.8-billion). Year-over-year capacity growth: 58.6% (to 409 petabytes in Q1).
That's a 33% price decline in the price of storage in one year. In the race between processor power, bandwidth, and storage, storage is winning.
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 08:59 PM in Economics, Economics: Growth, Internet, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
BizarroWorld
It's official. BushLand is BizarroWorld. Eric Umansky writes:
Eric Umansky: Payrolls in Iraq: The LAT reports that the Iraqi government is considering doing serious layoffs. I have no doubt the government is full is slacker workers and plenty of others who don't show up. Still, in the midst of a growing insurgency, creating thousands of pissed-off unemployed men seems like Bad Idea Jeans. But here's what really caught my eye is this bit buried deep down:
On Sunday, members of Iraq's elite police commando units, heralded by U.S. and Iraqi officials as a key to stemming the insurgency, staged a protest outside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, saying they hadn't been paid in four months, witnesses said.
WTF? Now, there are all sorts of commando units out there. But anybody heard reports of this before? Swopa? Praktike?
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 08:45 PM in Bushisms, Iraq, Utter Stupidity | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
A Reasoned Reaction to Apple's CPU Choice
The Crazy Apple Rumors website:
Crazy Apple Rumors Site: Apple Switches to Intel: AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!! OH MY GOD! AAAAAAAAAAA!!! NOOOOOOO!!! WHAT WILL BECOME OF US?!!? WHAT WILL BECOME OF US ALL!!! WE ARE DOOMED!!! ALL OF US DOOMED!!! THERE IS NO GOD! THERE IS NO GOD! AHHH-WAHAHAHAAAAAAA!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
We'll have more on this developing story later in the day.
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 08:39 PM in Internet, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
I Guess Nino Scalia Really Wants to Be Chief Justice
I must confess that I am surprised at how shallow Scalia's commitment to federalism is when push comes to shove:
Justices Say U.S. May Prohibit the Use of Medical Marijuana: Justice Scalia, by contrast, explained himself at length. He did not sign the majority opinion, instead offering a separate concurring opinion that was no less definite in its support for federal authority. 'Where necessary to make a regulation of interstate commerce effective, Congress may regulate even those intrastate activities that do not themselves substantially affect interstate commerce,' Justice Scalia said. He cited opinions from the early 1940's, after the Supreme Court rallied to support the New Deal and gave Congress a degree of power over national affairs that was not seriously challenged until the Rehnquist Court began invalidating federal laws in the mid-1990's.... As a prime mover of the court's federalism revolution, Justice O'Connor did not hide her dismay. The court's opinion provided a roadmap to 'removing meaningful limits on the Commerce Clause' and 'threatens to sweep all of productive human activity into federal regulatory reach,' she said....
The sharpest dispute was over the meaning of two of the core decisions of the Rehnquist Court's approach to federalism. Both struck down federal laws, the Gun-Free School Zones Act and the Violence Against Women Act, on the ground that they exceeded Congressional authority, and both were decided by five-member majorities that included Justices Kennedy and Scalia. While Justice O'Connor declared that the marijuana decision was 'irreconcilable' with the earlier ones, Justice Scalia disagreed. Neither of the earlier decisions 'involved the power of Congress to exert control over intrastate activities in connection with a more comprehensive scheme of regulation' comparable to federal drug laws, he said...
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 08:30 PM in Bushisms, Utter Stupidity | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by These Liars? (Bush Tax Cuts Edition)
David Corn writes:
David Corn: I know that only a few of us in the media still bother to worry about Bush's veracity and his tilted-to-the-rich tax cuts. But I was reminded yesterday of how easily Bush has gotten away with lying about his handouts to the wealthy. The New York Times, as part of its ongoing series on class in America, published a large chart on the distribution of all of Bush's tax cuts (including his current proposal to extend his tax cuts indefinitely). The numbers are amazing. The top .1 percent of taxpayers--145,000 taxpayers--receive 15.2 percent of all these tax cuts. (These folks make over $1.6 million a year). The top 1 percent--1.4 million taxpayers who bag over $383,000 a year--pocket 30.6 percent of the trillions of dollars in so-called 'tax relief.' (Is it 'relief' when you give millionaires $100,000 or more each year in tax cuts?) Looking at the other end of the ladder, we see that the bottom 60 percent--those 87 million people making less than $44,000 a year collect 15.1 percent of Bush's tax cuts, averaging a little over $300 a year in annual tax savings.
Three hundreds buck--a dollar a day--may mean something to these people. (Hey, that covers the cost of The New York Times!) But such a princely gain comes at a tremendous cost--which includes nearly $500 a day for the wealthiest.
The Times chart made me nostalgic. I remembered the days of the 2000 campaign, when Bush claimed, 'The vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum.' It wasn't true then. And it's not true now. Does anyone care that Bush misrepresented his plan and continues to downplay his relieve-the-rich actions? Not much, it seems. I'm willing to bet my tax 'relief' that the Runaway Bride has gotten far more coverage on TV news than Bush's tax policy over the past year...
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 08:21 PM in Better Press Corps, Bushisms, Economics, Fiscal Policy, Moral Responsibility | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
When Household Utensils Attack!
From Crooked Timber:
: Do not, under any circumstances, heat an empty Teflon-covered nonstick pan on the range for more than two or three minutes. At temperatures above 500 degrees (beyond the range of normal home cooking), Teflon will release fumes that cause flu-like symptoms in humans and can be fatal to birds. (No birds were harmed in the preparation of this post. One human, however, feels like he%u2019s been chewed up and spit out of something big.)
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 08:16 PM in Food and Drink | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Apple Migrates to Intel
Interesting news of the day:
Economist.com: On Monday June 6th, Mr Jobs was set to use the platform of Apple%u2019s annual developers conference to announce that the firm will switch from the chips supplied by IBM and Motorola for over a decade to products from Intel, the world%u2019s biggest chipmaker.... Apple blamed it's current chip suppliers for slow delivery last year, which held up production of some lines. And chip development has not lived up to promises Apple made for improvements in processing speed. Intel%u2019s chips are faster and run cooler than Apple%u2019s current chips. And cooler chips are important for the production of better laptops, a market growing considerably faster than that for desktop PCs. But there is much speculation that Intel can simply supply chips more cheaply than IBM and Motorola, and that Apple can use the saving to cut the retail price of its computers....
[I]n mid-April the firm announced another blistering set of quarterly results: revenues up by 70% compared with the same period the year before, and net profits 530% higher, at $290m; Apple shipped over 1m computers (a 43% rise) and a staggering 5.3m iPods (over six times more than the year before). The iPod has done wonders for Apple, providing not only profits but a positive brand image to a swathe of new young consumers... it has amassed some two-thirds of the world market for hand-held music devices.... iTunes, Apple%u2019s online music store, leads the field....
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 08:08 PM in Economics, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Life in the Information Age
There are all these people I know... who don't have weblogs... and then when I run into or call them, the usual thing is to find out how each of us is doing by trading stories... but I don't have any stories to trade--they've already read them on my weblog.
It's awkward. I propose a new social custom: if you don't have a weblog, you have to pretend that you haven't been reading the weblog of the person you are talking to until you have listened patiently to at least their three best relatively-new stories.
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 08:08 PM in Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
The Super-Rich
A pretty good article by David Cay Johnston, who writes:
Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind: The people at the top of America's money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population, an analysis of tax records and other government data by The New York Times shows. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.... Draw a line under the top 0.1 percent of income earners - the top one-thousandth. Above that line are about 145,000 taxpayers, each with at least $1.6 million in income... average income for the top 0.1 percent was $3 million in 2002... two and a half times the $1.2 million, adjusted for inflation, that group reported in 1980.... The share of the nation's income earned by those in this uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980, to 7.4 percent in 2002....
The group with homes, investments and other assets worth more than $10 million comprised 338,400 households in 2001, the last year for which data are available. The number has grown more than 400 percent since 1980, after adjusting for inflation, while the total number of households has grown only 27 percent. The Bush administration tax cuts stand to widen the gap between the hyper-rich and the rest of America.... Bush said during the third election debate last October that most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans. In fact, most - 53 percent - will go to people with incomes in the top 10 percent... more than 15 percent will go just to the top 0.1 percent, those 145,000 taxpayers....
The Times set out to create a financial portrait of the very richest Americans, how their incomes have changed over the decades and how the tax cuts will affect them.... To determine those differences, The Times relied on a computer model based on the Treasury's. Experts at organizations representing a range of views, including the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and Citizens for Tax Justice, reviewed the projections and said they were reasonable, and the Treasury Department said through a spokesman that the model was reliable....
The hyper-rich have emerged in the last three decades as the biggest winners in a remarkable transformation of the American economy....
While most economists recognize that the richest are pulling away, they disagree on what this means. Those who contend that the extraordinary accumulation of wealth is a good thing say that while the rich are indeed getting richer, so are most people who work hard and save. They say that the tax cuts encourage the investment and the innovation that will make everyone better off. "In this income data I see a snapshot of a very innovative society," said Tim Kane, an economist at the Heritage Foundation. "Lower taxes and lower marginal tax rates are leading to more growth. There's an explosion of wealth. We are so wealthy in a world that is profoundly poor."
But some of the wealthiest Americans, including Warren E. Buffett, George Soros and Ted Turner, have warned that such a concentration of wealth can turn a meritocracy into an aristocracy and ultimately stifle economic growth by putting too much of the nation's capital in the hands of inheritors rather than strivers and innovators. Speaking of the increasing concentration of incomes, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, warned in Congressional testimony a year ago: "For the democratic society, that is not a very desirable thing to allow it to happen."
Others say most Americans have no problem with this trend. The central question is mobility, said Bruce R. Bartlett, an advocate of lower taxes who served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. "As long as people think they have a chance of getting to the top, they just don't care how rich the rich are." But in fact, economic mobility - moving from one income group to another over a lifetime - has actually stopped rising in the United States, researchers say. Some recent studies suggest it has even declined over the last generation.
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 07:59 PM in Economics, Political Economy, Politics | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Deep Pockets
Brad Setser writes:
Brad Setser's Web Log: So will the proliferation of hedge funds end with a bang or a whimper: To take an example from LTCM: if you are betting on the convergence of the price of a 29 and 30 year Treasury bond -- shorting say the on-the-run 30 year and going long the off-the-run 29 year -- you are hedged against rising interest rates, but not against a widening of the differential between the price of a 29 and 30 year Treasury bond...
But--if you are well enough capitalized--a widening differential between 29 and 30 year Treasury bonds is not a risk but an opportunity. You're long the 29-year and short the 30-year because the 29-year was underpriced. If the price of the 29-year drops relative to the price of the 30-year, it's even more underpriced--and the appropriate response is to double up your position. As long as you are well enough capitalized to be able to hold them both to maturity if necessary--as long as you can wait as long as it takes for their prices to converge--you're still fine.
I have been told that the people who took over LTCM's positions in the fall of 1998 did very well with them indeed.
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 07:52 PM in Economics, Economics: Behavioral, Economics: Finance | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)
Nixonites Lecture Us on Ethics
Perhaps the most bizarre thing I've seen in months: G. Gordon Liddy and Charles Colson lecturing us on ethics. Martin Schram reports:
Newsday.com: Nixon's henchmen lecture us on ethics: History's latest con happened right before our eyes Tuesday night.... [T]hose faces that just popped up in the looking-glass/screen were all the president's men, once in power and then in disgrace, more than three decades ago. Richard Nixon's ex-convicts - who did jail time for their crimes against democracy and then profited from their crimes by writing books and becoming celebrities - had returned to work one more con. Nixon's former senior White House assistant, Charles Colson, and the Nixon team's burglar-in-chief, G. Gordon Liddy, worked the cable news circuit, expressing moral indignation that the FBI's former deputy director, W. Mark Felt, was Deep Throat. He was the source who had blown their cover by feeding facts to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward - truths that helped land many in jail and drove Nixon from office.
'I was shocked because I worked with him closely,' Colson said on MSNBC. 'And you would think the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, you could talk to with the same confidence you could talk to a priest.' Then on CNN: 'I was shocked, because ... I talked to him often and trusted him with very sensitive materials. So did the president. To think that he was out going around in back alleys at night looking for flowerpots, passing information to someone, it's . . . not the image of the professional FBI that you would expect.'
Ah, image. Conjure Colson, with Nixon and others in the Oval Office, as Nixon orders a burglary at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. Meanwhile on CNN, Liddy tells Paula Zahn: 'I view him [Felt] as someone who violated the ethics of the law enforcement profession.' Then, back on MSNBC, Liddy brags that not only had he plotted the burglary of the Democratic Party's Watergate offices but, 'I planned the Brookings break-in.' It wasn't done, Liddy said - 'too expensive.'...
Lost in the wailings of Nixon's men is the one thing Americans need to know to understand Felt's dilemma. Felt couldn't go to his boss... an unqualified Nixon loyalist - L.Patrick Gray III, who proved his worth by destroying documents and slipping others to officials running the White House cover-up. Felt couldn't go to the attorney general... a Nixon loyalist not trusted by many FBI hands... the Senate Watergate Committee didn't exist yet. Felt certainly couldn't go to Nixon.... So he helped his young reporter friend, Bob Woodward.
And, three decades later, these Nixon criminals popped up on our looking-glass/screens, doing their shtick. They wailed like pro wrestlers pounding the mat in feigned pain....
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 07:44 PM in Better Press Corps, Moral Responsibility, Politics, Utter Stupidity | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Our Job Machine Sputters Again
Nightly Business Report: TV: June 6, 2005
The great American job machine is sputtering again: only 79,000 new payroll jobs in May. We are still four million or so payroll jobs below where we might five years ago have reasonably expected to be by now--but at least, at 133.3 million, we are above the last business cycle's peak.
The later stages of an expansion are usually a golden time for workers. Businesses are anxious to grasp opportunities, and bid up wages and salaries, which run ahead of prices, and put downward pressure on profits. In the last business cycle profits peaked three and a half years before the business cycle peaked itself: 1998, 1999, and 2000 were years in which more than 100% of the benefits of each year's growth went to labor, and less than zero went to capital.
Not this time. In the current cycle, wages have fallen 12% and total compensation 8% behind overall growth. And now it looks like the current cycle may be cut short as the Federal Reserve gears up to fight inflation from oil and import prices.
The current cycle may well turn into the only one we know of over which capital gains, but not labor.
I'm Brad DeLong
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 07:29 PM in Economics: Macro | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
Memo to Self
Rajnish Mehra, author of:
Rajnish Mehra and Edward Prescott (1985), “The Equity Premium: A Puzzle,” Journal of Monetary Economics 15, pp. 145-61.
Rajnish Mehra (2003), “The Equity Premium: Why Is It a Puzzle?” (Cambridge: NBER Working Paper 9512, February).
and of much other brilliant work as well, spells his first name with an "i" and not an "ee".
You'd think that an ex-Latin scholar like me would be able to consistently grok this...
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 10:49 AM in Economics, Economics: Behavioral, Economics: Finance, Economists | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
A Missing Piece of the Internet
Well, well, well... I was chasing links and discovered that the American Enterprise Institute seems to have lost chunks of its web archives: http://www.americanenterprise.org/hotflash020314.htm in particular. Let me help them.
As the American Enterprise Institute heads this piece, "author, game show host, and law teacher Ben Stein responds to [Paul] Krugman's allegations":
To: Mr. Paul Krugman
Op-Ed Page
The New York TimesFrom: Ben Stein
Los Angeles, California.Dear Professor Krugman,
In all of my life, I have never seen a more confused column than the one that appeared on March 12, 2002 on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times about the death of the esteemed economist, policy expert, teacher, and public servant, James Tobin, on the sad occasion of Professor Tobin's death. I was honored to be a student and lifelong admirer of Dr. Tobin, and you do him and many others wrong, and display frightening misunderstanding of the field.
Just to start, you say the great depression was “widely blamed” on laissez faire policies. By whom? It has been blamed on many things, but no serious scholar has blamed it on free market economics. In fact, just the opposite--many blame it on price fixing and restraint of trade encouraged by the New Deal.
Your idea that there is or ever was any intellectual rigor in blaming the great depression on the free market is simply a non-starter, period.
Second, your calling a true scholar and genius like Friedman “naive” is simply astonishing especially in context. Again, I was a student of Tobin at Yale. He had great respect for monetarism, for its central text, The Monetary History of the United States by Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, and would have been scandalized by someone at your level daring to call Milton Friedman or his ideas and thorough research naive.
For you to further assert that Friedman's monetarism has not stood the test of time is almost unbelievable. What theory do you think governs current Fed policy if not monetarism? Do you really think that even Tobin believed that changes in asset prices (related to his fascinating doctrine of "Tobin's Q", which you totally ignore) caused business cycles, or were more important than fluctuations in money supply in determining levels of economic activity? If so, you have that opinion largely to yourself. I can well recall Tobin in class at Yale in the late sixties heaping praise on Friedman's explanations of the causes of business cycles.
Finally, for you to assert, on zero evidence, that Tobin's time as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers was unique and that since the early sixties, all other Council members have had to hew to a political line and sacrifice honesty and objectivity is insanely insulting to all other members of the Council and their staffs. The history of honesty and objectivity of members of both parties is unquestioned (except maybe by you, again, on a hunch, without any data at all). However, they all loved their jobs and knew who their bosses were. All. The idea that the Kennedy team of economists alone was above politics and holy men of scholarship is comical. I strongly urge you to read "Presidential Economics" by my father, Herbert Stein, a member and then Chair of the Council of Economic advisors, under Nixon and Ford, and whom you smear along with all of the others similarly sited except Dr. Tobin. This little bit of reading by you might save you from such naive assumptions in the future, as well as from smears of the innocent.
It really is shocking that someone of your limited background in economics presumes to judge a great man like Tobin or in eulogizing him to so pervert his opinions and work…and to heap scorn on one of the great minds of all time in economics, Milton Friedman. In short, your piece is a dismaying morass of confusion, insult, and disinformation.
Sincerely,
Ben Stein—E-mail: tae@aei.org
Paul Krugman's take on Stein, from http://www.wws.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/tobin.html:
YOU KNOW YOU'VE MADE IT WHEN ...
I guess I must be having an impact. You know you're really getting under peoples' skin when they go ballistic over perfectly nice, genteel columns.
I was somewhat surprised, while on vacation, to receive hostile, irrational email attacking my valedictory for James Tobin - the least biting column I've written for ages. Not until I got back and read a short squib in the New Republic did I realize where that came from - a bizarre screed by Ben Stein.
For what it's worth: I can be accused of a lot of things, but a "limited background in economics" isn't one of them. (Thanks to TNR for its put-down - alas, not available online - which points out that I received the Clark Medal, and that Mr. Stein is a game-show host).
Mr. Stein's father was a fine economist, a member of a rapidly vanishing species - moderate Republicans. But while punditry on the right seems to be mainly an inherited position these days (read David Brock's book!), Mr. Stein's genes don't excuse him from the responsibility to do some homework.Vague memories of what he heard in his undergraduate class in the 1960s don't cut it.
I'm tempted to assign Mr. Stein some readings, starting with Tobin's Essays in Economics: Volume 1, Macroeconomics. It gives you a pretty good picture of what he did, of his debate with Friedman (the volume includes Tobin's critical review of Friedman and Schwartz, which Mr. Stein clearly has not read) and much more. I think I understand Tobin's contribution as well as anyone - and no serious economist has quarreled with my depiction of his work. (No, I didn't mention Q explicitly, only by implication; think 730 words, and the need to write something people can understand.)
Oh, and about Friedman: monetarism - which either meant that changes in M2 were the key to the business cycle, or meant nothing at all - has failed. Almost nobody focuses on monetary aggregates anymore; the current fashion in economic policy is "inflation targeting", while the current fashion in academic research is to suppress any explicit discussion of the money supply, and use other indicators of monetary policy.
Friedman's claim to greatness rests not on monetarism, which is now seen as a somewhat embarrassing - and, yes, "naive" - episode in his intellectual evolution, but on two lasting contributions: the permanent-income theory of consumption, and the natural-rate hypothesis.
If I had to psychoanalyze Mr. Stein, I'd say that the idea that I am a serious academic economist deeply disturbs him. After all, if I know what I'm talking about in eulogizing James Tobin, the other things I've been saying in my column might be true, and the politicians Mr. Stein supports might be as dishonest as I claim.
Anyway, I knew Jim Tobin - whom I talked with at length just a few days before his death - a lot better than Mr. Stein. And I certainly know a lot more economics.
Continue reading "A Missing Piece of the Internet"
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 6, 2005 at 07:26 AM in Economics | Permalink | Comments (52) | TrackBack (0)
June 05, 2005
David Brooks Takes Aim at Today's Young Republicans
He writes, scornfully (I don't think he has the juice to attain snarkiness):
Life Lessons From Watergate - New York Times: "Entering the world of the Higher Shamelessness, they begin networking like mad, cultivating the fine art of false modesty and calculated friendships. The most nakedly ambitious - the blogging Junior Lippmanns - rarely win in the long run, but that doesn't mean you can't mass e-mail your essays for obscure online sites with little 'Thought you might be interested' notes.
They create informal mutual promotion societies, weighing who will be the crucial members of their cohort, engaging in the dangerous game of lateral kissing up, hunting for the spouse who will look handsomely supportive during some future confirmation hearing, nurturing a dislike for the person who will be the chief rival when the New Yorker editing job opens up in 2027.
And of course they are always mentor-hunting, looking for that wise old Moses who will lead them through the wilderness and end their uncertainty. They discover that it's socially acceptable to flatter your bosses by day so long as you are blasphemously derisive about them while drinking with your buddies at night.
This is now a normal stage of life. And if Bob Woodward could get through something like it, perhaps they will too...
Perhaps somebody who knows more about Young Republicans than I do can tell me who his principal--but, alas, unnamed--targets really are?
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 5, 2005 at 09:20 PM in Better Press Corps, Politics | Permalink | Comments (25) | TrackBack (0)
Hilzoy on Watergate
She writes:
Obsidian Wings: Watergate: For The Record: I haven't spent a lot of time talking about Watergate recently, but I have encountered a few people who have tried to argue that Nixon didn't do anything that LBJ and Kennedy hadn't done before him. Some, I think, were not old enough at the time to recall, and have just heard, vaguely, that he did some bad stuff and concluded: well, most politicians do bad stuff; so what? Some, like Ben Stein, ought to know better but don't:
"Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible? He ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POW's, ended the war in the Mideast, opened relations with China, started the first nuclear weapons reduction treaty, saved Eretz Israel's life, started the Environmental Protection Administration. Does anyone remember what he did that was bad?Oh, now I remember. He lied. He was a politician who lied. How remarkable."
This sort of historical revisionism bothers me, so, for the benefit of anyone here who was either not around at the time or not old enough to recall, a few quotes to indicate why, exactly, what Nixon did was neither normal nor tolerable. First, William F. Buckley:
"On January 5, 1973, Howard Hunt, an old friend and my sometime boss in the CIA, came to see me, accompanied by one of his daughters (my goddaughter, as it happened). He told me the appalling, inside story of Watergate, including the riveting news that one of the plumbers was ready and disposed to kill Jack Anderson, the journalist-commentator, if word came down to proceed to that lurid extreme."Riveting? Not the word I would have chosen. Ask yourself how Hunt would have known that someone was willing to kill Jack Anderson had it not been seriously discussed.
Next, John Dean:
"Even by the standards of the Nixon White House, the plan to blow up Washington’s pre-eminent think tank seemed crazy, presidential counselor John W. Dean III recalled here Monday.But there was White House aide John Ehrlichman on the phone one day in 1971, telling Dean that “Chuck Colson wants me to firebomb the Brookings (Institution).” Describing the incident Monday to several hundred presidential history junkies at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Dean said he was dumbfounded.
“I said, ‘John, this is absolute insanity,’ ” he remembered. “People could die. This is absurd.” (...)
It seemed incredible, but now that he has listened to earlier tapes, Dean said he has heard Nixon “literally pounding on his desk, saying ‘I want that break-in at the Brookings (Institution).’ " "
From the Nixon tapes:
"Nixon: Did they get the Brookings Institute raided last night? No? Get it done. I want it done. I want the Brookings Institute's safe cleaned out and have it cleaned out in a way that it makes somebody else responsible."This is not just the normal lying, cheating, and minor corruption (although Nixon had a particular flair for that.... This is planning murder, arson, and of course burglary... financial corruption.... (Nixon, from the tapes: "Please get me the names of the Jews. You know, the big Jewish contributors of the Democrats. Could we please investigate some of those c---suckers?")
This is not just "what all politicians do". This was different...
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 5, 2005 at 05:27 PM in Moral Responsibility, Politics, Utter Stupidity | Permalink | Comments (32) | TrackBack (1)
What Did William F. Buckley Know and When Did He Know It?
William F. Buckley writes:
William F. Buckley Jr. on Mark Felt and Deep Throat on National Review Online: Nixon's overreaction to the publication of the Pentagon Papers didn't mean that his mandate to govern was for that reason forfeited.... Mr. Felt... over a period of months, was to report to two industrious journalists at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein... the traffic of dollars to and from the Committee to Reelect the President... the background and the activities of everyone associated with the White House, from the Attorney General down to the plumbers.
As evidence accumulated of wrongdoing and crime, he reported not to the director of the FBI (his immediate superior), not to the Justice Department, but to the two journalists.... Such things happen. On January 5, 1973, Howard Hunt, an old friend and my sometime boss in the CIA, came to see me, accompanied by one of his daughters (my goddaughter, as it happened). He told me the appalling, inside story of Watergate, including the riveting news that one of the plumbers was ready and disposed to kill Jack Anderson, the journalist-commentator, if word came down to proceed to that lurid extreme.
I took what I thought appropriate measures...
So William F. Buckley, on January 5, 1973, learns that:
- Richard Nixon is running a criminal enterprise--a group of people who believe that their job is the burgle and assassinate at Richard Nixon's command.
- Former Attorney General John Mitchell is handling the cover-up.
What, exactly, were the "appropriate measures" that William F. Buckley undertook?
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 5, 2005 at 02:02 PM in Moral Responsibility, Politics | Permalink | Comments (34) | TrackBack (1)
The Complicated State of the Labor Market
Kash of Angry Bear writes:
Angry Bear: Samwick argues that some ancillary statistics that the BLS reports about the strength of the labor market (e.g. the numbers of discouraged workers, and those who otherwise do not have jobs but would like one) agree with the major statistics that the labor market is improving, and that there are not an unusually large number of people involuntarily out of the labor force. DeLong, on the other hand, argues that there are other types of evidence that suggest that the labor market has been very weak for years now, and that Occam's Razor therefore suggests that the labor force participation ratio is low because of this weak labor market - i.e., because people have been involuntarily excluded from the labor market.
Today's employment report gives me a chance to insert a couple of other bits of evidence into the mix. The first is the amount of work that people currently holding jobs are being asked to do by their employers: average weekly hours worked. The second is the real hourly wage that workers are earning.... Hours worked has not risen much from the low levels of early 2003, and real hourly wages have been stagnant. Both of these series therefore support the idea that the labor market has been and remains quite weak. I therefore think that it is time to accept these two stylized facts:
- The labor market is indeed weak, by any number of measures. The demand for labor is unusually low for this point in the business cycle.
- According to household surveys, relatively few people consider themselves to be 'unemployed', and surprisingly few non-working people say that they would like to work if they could.
Now we just need to reconcile these two apparently conflicting facts.
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 5, 2005 at 01:45 PM in Economics, Economics: Macro | Permalink | Comments (21) | TrackBack (0)
Now He Tells Us (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?)
Shouldn't Newsweek's Baghdad bureau chief have been writing stories like this last year? Why wait until now?
Good Intentions Gone Bad - Newsweek World News - MSNBC.com: NEWSWEEK's Baghdad bureau chief, departing after two years of war and American occupation, has a few final thoughts .Scott Nelson / WPN for Newsweek: Two years ago I went to Iraq as an unabashed believer in toppling Saddam Hussein. I knew his regime well from previous visits; WMDs or no, ridding the world of Saddam would surely be for the best, and America's good intentions would carry the day.
What went wrong? A lot, but the biggest turning point was the Abu Ghraib scandal. Since April 2004 the liberation of Iraq has become a desperate exercise in damage control. The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib alienated a broad swath of the Iraqi public. On top of that, it didn't work. There is no evidence that all the mistreatment and humiliation saved a single American life or led to the capture of any major terrorist, despite claims by the military that the prison produced 'actionable intelligence.'
The most shocking thing about Abu Ghraib was not the behavior of U.S. troops, but the incompetence of their leaders. Against the conduct of the Lynndie Englands and the Charles Graners, I'll gladly set the honesty and courage of Specialist Joseph Darby, the young MP who reported the abuse. A few soldiers will always do bad things. That's why you need competent officers, who know what the men and women under their command are capable of--and make sure it doesn't happen.
Living and working in Iraq, it's hard not to succumb to despair. At last count America has pumped at least $7 billion into reconstruction projects, with little to show for it but the hostility of ordinary Iraqis, who still have an 18 percent unemployment rate. Most of the cash goes to U.S. contractors who spend much of it on personal security. Basic services like electricity, water and sewers still aren't up to prewar levels. Electricity is especially vital in a country where summer temperatures commonly reach 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet only 15 percent of Iraqis have reliable electrical service. In the capital, where it counts most, it's only 4 percent.
The most powerful army in human history can't even protect a two-mile stretch of road. The Airport Highway connects both the international airport and Baghdad's main American military base, Camp Victory, to the city center. At night U.S. troops secure the road for the use of dignitaries; they close it to traffic and shoot at any unauthorized vehicles. More troops and more helicopters could help make the whole country safer. Instead the Pentagon has been drawing down the number of helicopters. And America never deployed nearly enough soldiers. They couldn't stop the orgy of looting that followed Saddam's fall. Now their primary mission is self-defense at any cost--which only deepens Iraqis' resentment.
The four-square-mile Green Zone, the one place in Baghdad where foreigners are reasonably safe, could be a showcase of American values and abilities. Instead the American enclave is a trash-strewn wasteland of Mad Max-style fortifications. The traffic lights don't work because no one has bothered to fix them. The garbage rarely gets collected. Some of the worst ambassadors in U.S. history are the GIs at the Green Zone's checkpoints. They've repeatedly punched Iraqi ministers, accidentally shot at visiting dignitaries and behave (even on good days) with all the courtesy of nightclub bouncers--to Americans and Iraqis alike.
Not that U.S. soldiers in Iraq have much to smile about. They're overworked, much ignored on the home front and widely despised in Iraq, with little to look forward to but the distant end of their tours%u2014and in most cases, another tour soon to follow. Many are reservists who, when they get home, often face the wreckage of careers and family.
I can't say how it will end. Iraq now has an elected government, popular at least among Shiites and Kurds, who give it strong approval ratings. There's even some hope that the Sunni minority will join the constitutional process. Iraqi security forces continue to get better trained and equipped. But Iraqis have such a long way to go, and there are so many ways for things to get even worse. I'm not one of those who think America should pull out immediately. There's no real choice but to stay, probably for many years to come. The question isn't 'When will America pull out?'; it's 'How bad a mess can we afford to leave behind?' All I can say is this: last one out, please turn on the lights.
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 5, 2005 at 01:10 PM in Better Press Corps, Bushisms, Iraq, Moral Responsibility | Permalink | Comments (27) | TrackBack (3)
Yes, It's Back!
The machine to end all machines:
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 5, 2005 at 09:05 AM in Funny | Permalink | Comments (28) | TrackBack (0)
June 04, 2005
Richard Nixon = Moses
Andrew Sullivan reads the American Spectator so the rest of us do not have to:
http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2005_05_29_dish_archive.html#111789714700000768: [Mark Felt's] posterity is now dragging out his old body and putting it on display to make money. (Have you noticed how Mark Felt looks like one of those old Nazi war criminals they find in Bolivia or Paraguay? That same, haunted, hunted look combined with a glee at what he has managed to get away with so far?) And it gets worse: it's been reported that Mark Felt is at least part Jewish. The reason this is worse is that at the same time that Mark Felt was betraying Richard Nixon, Nixon was saving Eretz Israel. It is a terrifying chapter in betrayal and ingratitude. If he even knows what shame is, I wonder if he felt a moment's shame as he tortured the man who brought security and salvation to the land of so many of his and my fellow Jews...
Yes, this is Ben "I Want a Crook for President" Stein writing...
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 4, 2005 at 03:11 PM in Moral Responsibility, Utter Stupidity | Permalink | Comments (38) | TrackBack (0)
Lawrence Eagleburger on Richard Nixon
From what I hope was the very last "Crossfire":
CNN.com - Transcripts: And joining us from Charlottesville, Virginia, the distinguished, superb former secretary of state, former Nixon administration official, Lawrence Eagleburger.
LAWRENCE EAGLEBURGER, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: You had to say that, didn't you?
CARVILLE: It was on the prompter, Mr. Secretary. And I might add Reagan administration and Bush administration and every other administration, too.
WATKINS: OK. Secretary Eagleburger, this is the million dollar question. I mean, folks have been waiting for three decades to know who Deep Throat was or is. Is Mark Felt, in your opinion, Deep Throat?
EAGLEBURGER: Probably.
WATKINS: Do you think he's Deep Throat?
EAGLEBURGER: Probably. You know, President Nixon once suspected him. I'm surprised he didn't end up dead somewhere because of that...
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 4, 2005 at 09:06 AM in Moral Responsibility, Politics | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBack (0)
Ed Kilgore on American Social Democracy and the Information Age
He writes from the Josh Micah Marshall Imperium:
TPMCafe || Politics, Ideas & Lots Of Caffeine: The Golden Age of Social Democracy By Ed Kilgore Section: Politics: Matt Yglesias has posed, and Mark Schmitt has elaborated on, a central question about the relationship between the progressive vision and our understanding of where were are as a society in the broader sweep of history. I'll have more to say about the general issue at a later date, but for now, I wanted to immediately respond to a comment Mark made about the transformation we've experienced in the last few decades. "Again and again, we have traded, voluntarily or involuntarily, the security of the 1950s middle class for greater opportunity, but also greater risk."
This axiom captures a major source of the communications breakdown that has long affected discussions between Democrats from different regions and different social backgrounds.
It took me a while to figure this out, but after wondering for years about the strong resistance of many traditional Democrats from the midwest and northeast to economic change, I finally began to understand that the 1950s and 1960s represented for them a sort of social democratic "golden age." It was, if you were a unionized industrial worker in, say, Michigan, an era in which you could graduate from high school, get your union card and go on the line, work your way up, buy a house, raise kids on one salary, maybe even send some or all of them to a state college, and eventually, retire and move to Florida to bask in the sun and maybe bet modest amounts at the greyhound track. Sure, there might be bumps in the road, and periods when you had to rely on strike funds. But this basically secure existence was a reality for many members of what the Marxists called America's "labor aristocracy."
Well, where I come from, in the Deep South, this golden age never existed, and the 1950s in particular were a pretty crappy time, especially if you were black, but so, too, if you were white (per capita income in the South was barely more than half of the national average well into that decade).... Precisely because the South (with the exception of a few heavy industry and unionized pockets) only marginally enjoyed the fruits of the industrial age, southerners, and particularly rural southerners, have a peculiar openness to post-industrial economic opportunities and policies.
If you paid any attention at all to Mark Warner's successful 2001 gubernatorial campaign, you had to be struck by the fact that this stereotypical urban tech magnate actually won in southwest (i.e., Appalachian) Virginia (the same region where Al Gore and John Kerry just got killed in 2000 and 2004) with an economic message based on technology, education and worker training as the salvation for the "backwards" regions of the state. And this same approach is generally accepted in economic development circles elsewhere in the South: people and communities who were basically "losers" in the industrial economy might catch up with, or even leapfrog their urban kin with a combination of distance-shrinking technology, skills-focused education and training, and a superior quality of life.
I make this point for two reasons: (1) I think it's important to understand why the politics of social-democratic nostalgia doesn't work very well in less-industrial parts of the country; and (2) we all need to get over the stereotype that "information-age" economic strategies, including a focus on technology, training, and quality of life, are just a latte-class relic of the 90s tech boom that we should now acknowledge as a partial betrayal of the economic interests of working Americans.
But who knows: maybe my perspective is colored by the fact that I am posting from a cheap motel in eastern North Carolina that nonetheless has an ethernet connection in every room. Or perhaps I am feeling especially southern because I have a belly full of barbecue and brunswick stew.
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 4, 2005 at 09:02 AM in Economic History, Economics, Politics, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBack (0)
June 03, 2005
Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by These Idiots? (Urinating on the Koran Edition)
Just what in Jeebus's holy name is going on in there?!:
Guantanamo Detainees Full Coverage on Yahoo! News: AP - 1 hour, 41 minutes ago: WASHINGTON - The Pentagon on Friday released new details about mishandling of the Quran at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects, confirming that a soldier deliberately kicked the Muslim holy book and that an interrogator stepped on a Quran and was later fired for 'a pattern of unacceptable behavior.'... [W]ater balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Qurans to get wet; a guard's urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Quran; and in a confirmed but ambiguous case a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Quran...
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 3, 2005 at 07:21 PM in Bushisms, Utter Stupidity | Permalink | Comments (35) | TrackBack (1)
A Bad Mistake at the Bookstore
I follow the custom of buying book with "Alan Furst" on the cover as soon as I see them. They're all good, but the best is the truly great Dark Star--in my judgment the best espionage novel ever written. So when I saw Alan Furst's name on the cover of The Book of Spies I snatched it up immediately.
It was only when I got home that I discovered:
- It is not a new espionage novel by Alan Furst.
- It is not a new collection of espionage short stories by Alan Furst.
- It is not even a collection of Alan Furst's favorite espionage stories by other writers.
- It is a collection of excerpts chosen by Alan Furst from espionage novels by other writers.
There's nothing worse than novellitus interruptus when the novel is a good one. I can see that this is in the end going to prove to have been a very expensive and very time consuming purchase indeed.
Novels excerpted are:
Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios
Anthony Burgess, Tremor of Intent
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
Maxim Gorky, The Spy
Graham Greene, The Quiet American
John le Carre, The Russia House
W. Somerset Maugham, Ashenden
Charles McCarry, The Tears of Autumn
Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel
John Steinbeck, The Moon Is Down
Rebecca West, The Birds Fall Down
Alan Furst writes:
The characters... work at the blurred edge of the Manichean Universe, where Good struggles with Evil for the destiny of humankind. Work... plagued by moral uncertainty, and always in secrecy... foreign lands, living the sort of independent and adventurous existence that may lead to love or lechery or both. There were two standards for the selections... good writing... and the pursuit of authenticity.... Taken as a subgroup, the former intelligence officers... sophisticated, cynical, and mordant... write with a kind of cloaked angst... the world is a place where political power is maintained by means of treachery and betrayal.... [L]et us being Chapter One and put a good person--at least one who is trying--into this hell and watch him do even worse. By the final paragraph, it's evident that victory is not moral triumph, and, with a few turns of the globe and changes in politics, no longer victory. Not good.
But not always. Clandestine conspiracy is always good when the opposition is evil.... Steinbeck's... Orczy's.... Clandestine conspiracy is always bad, on the other hand, when initiated by the secret police.... Conrad and Gorky, who knew what they were writing about... West....
For humor... I've included the magnificent Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess. Burgess may have started out with the idea of writing a send-up... but what seems to have happened next is extraordinary. He seems to have become fascinated by the genre... produced a fruity and seductive spy fiction where passages meant to skewer the conventions... don't so much satirize them as do them better, a lot better....
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 3, 2005 at 07:11 PM in Books, History, Politics | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBack (0)
One If By Land, and Two If By Sea...
Tom Burka is a national treasure:
Opinions You Should Have - June 2005 Archives: Republicans today criticized Paul Revere for his famous ride, saying that he had violated professional colonial ethics by divulging military secrets in violation of his duty to his lord, the King of England. 'These were sensitive informations about military troop movements with which he had been entrusted,' said G. Gordon Liddy, an expert on ethics in government and a professor at several unaccredited law schools.
'Paul Revere was a traitor and a law breaker,' said Anakin Skywalker in a confidential interview shortly before his limbs were lopped off and he burst into flame.
Conservatives all over America pointed out that Revere also endangered people's lives by riding willy nilly all over Massachusetts at a full gallop in the dark of night. 'He could have trampled someone,' said Bill O'Reilly. 'Paul Revere was a reckless and irresponsible nazi,' he added.
Pat Buchanan derided Revere as a 'coward' and a 'snake' who was unwilling to be direct with the British government regarding his complaints about the monarchy. 'There were channels,' he said.
Peggy Noonan shook her head. 'There's nothing sadder than Americans who have no respect for the rule of law,' she said.
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 3, 2005 at 04:30 PM in Funny, Moral Responsibility, Politics, Utter Stupidity | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
When Track Coaches Have Fun...
"What's really fun is to take the sprinters to the Piedmont Distance [Running] Festival and enter them in the 800 meters!"
Coach Brady-Smith,
at the track
awards banquet.
He didn't say why it was fun. The reaction of the other contestants at the pace set by the sprinters in the first 100 meters? The reaction of the sprinters when they realize what they are in for?
Posted by Brad DeLong on June 3, 2005 at 04:25 PM in Berkeley the City, Funny, Games | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)