EconoSpeak

The word 'narrative' appears 41 times in the infamous Higgins memo, "POTUS and Political Warfare." Guys, it's time for some narrative critique. The narrative Higgins is most concerned about is something he calls "cultural Marxism," which he defines in a paragraph at the top of page four of the memo: As used in this discussion, cultural Marxism relates to programs and activities that arise out of Gramsci Marxism, Fabian Socialism and most directly from the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt...

I just finished this long, rather convoluted meditation on “rational optimism”.  Must we admit the world is getting better, getting better all the time?Really, there are two types of multidimensionality that need to be considered.  The first is that “better” is, if it’s anything, vector valued.  Many aspects of life go into its calculation, as well as the distribution of outcomes across places and peoples.  Typically some things will be getting better and others worse, so either we abandon...

The book, Democracy in Chains (with an even more lurid subtitle) by Nancy MacLean, a respected (until now) historian at Duke University makes a strong argument that the late James M. Buchanan of UVa, VaTech, and George Mason was the crucial link between the ancient states right racism of John C. Calhoun and the current Trump administration. From Calhoun, incredibly inaccurately labeled a "libertarian," through the Agrarian Populist literary movement that was popular at Vanderbilt where Jim...

Atlantic: An NSC Staffer Is Forced Out Over a Controversial Memo Esquire: This Is Pure, Unadulterated American Crazy Foreign Policy: Here's the Memo that Blew Up the NSC Mother Jones:You Should Read the “Maoist Insurgency” Memo. It’s Bananas Wonkette: Of Course Trump Loves This Fucking Bonkers NSC Memo Calling For Civil War Back in 2011 after mass murderer Anders Breivik slaughtered 77 people in Norway I had a look at his "manifesto" because I  had heard that it spun a conspiracy theory...

Yesterday, August 9, is being widely proclaimed as the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the financial crisis that fully crashed in September, 2008, with the recession that began at the end of 2007 plunging more profoundly and widely after that.  The specific event on August 9, 2007 was the limiting of withdrawals from US mortgage backed hedge funds by the BNP Paribas bank in Paris.  In a post yesterday, one of the leading analysts and prophets of the crisis, Dean Baker, noted that BBC...

Avik Roy entitles his latest spin with: Why Ronald Reagan Embraced Universal Coverage: ‘No one in this country should be denied medical care for lack of funds,’ said the Gipper. Here is more from this select reading of history: Take the example of health care. Most readers of Olsen’s book will be surprised to learn that Reagan embraced universal coverage. In “A Time for Choosing” — Reagan’s celebrated conservative manifesto delivered at Goldwater’s 1964 Republican National Convention —...

Menzie Chinn back on February 20, 2016 had some fun with the defenders of that awful paper by Gerald Friedman (who never even bothered to estimate potential GDP as of 2016 and how it might grow over a decade): One thing that should be remembered is that the trend line extrapolated from 1984-2007 implies that the output gap as of 2015Q4 is …-18%...I want to stress that estimating potential GDP and the output gap is a difficult task. It is a difficult task and perhaps the CBO estimate of the...

This claimed by Catherine Rampell on the Washington Post ed page today, with a column entitled what is in quotes in the title of this post, with the answer being caveated as only being true after "the tweeter-in-chief," clearly the most dangerous man in Washington.  Mulvaney is the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) chief who has been questioning the need to raise the debt ceiling and voted against doing so on a regular basis when he was in Congress.  While Treasury Secretary Mnuchin...

I regularly hear and see on media and the internet that Trump "has accomplished nothing in six months" or variations on that, with some of these remarks focusing more on his legislative agenda, with discussions about whether it is "dead" or not here after only six months, which is either a very long time or a very short time.   I think this rhetoric is both unwise and inaccurate. It is unwise because it suggests that we want his agenda to be passed, to the extent we know what it is...

More Feargus O'Connor (1844) on labour's objections to machinery (see my earlier post on Crowding Out and the Social Overhead Costs of Labor for more context and analysis): And now, sir, let me state my principal objections to the unrestricted use of machinery. First, it places man in an artificial state, over which the best workman, the wisest man and most moral person, has no control. Secondly, while it leads to the almost certain fortune of those who have capital in sufficient amount to...