[Winstonm]

TICK-TOCK

[y66]

From Why Historians Worry More About Trump Than Economists Do by Tyler Cowen at Bloomberg:

Quote

The dangers of the current political moment in the West — with its polarization, harsh rhetoric and growing hostility toward cosmopolitanism — are evident to historians and economists alike. But which group sees the situation as more grave? I suspect it is historians, and it is worth considering why.

To be sure, some of the disgruntlement of historians stems from their political orientation. Historians are relatively left-wing, so it is no surprise that they are hostile to an “alt-right” shift in the political discourse. During the 2016 campaign, the group Historians Against Trump received widespread publicity.

More fundamentally, however, historians stress the importance of contingency, that things really could have gone another way. The decisions of a solitary assassin or the outcome of a single battle can shift the course of history. Particular leadership decisions might have avoided or limited World War I. Or what if the Germans had not, in 1917, put Lenin on a train back into Russia? The Bolshevik Revolution might have been avoided and probably the entire course of history would have been different. A shrewder President Paul von Hindenburg might have prevented the rise of Adolf Hitler.

If you think about these questions enough, you can end up very nervous indeed. Historians have seen too many modest mistakes spiral out of control and turn into disasters.

Economists, in contrast, work more with general models than with concrete historical situations, and those models emphasize underlying structural forces. Economies have fairly set populations, birth rates, natural resources, capital stocks, savings rates, trading partners, and so on. So to an economist, the final outcomes are closer to necessary than contingent.

Economists also study “catch-up growth,” which holds that systems tend to be self-repairing. So if some resources are destroyed, GDP will fall but the system will produce new replacement resources more rapidly, just as a lobster might regrow a lopped-off arm. Catch-up growth tends to make economists less nervous about natural disasters or wartime losses, although of course we think it is better to avoid the resource destruction in the first place. Many of Japan’s major cities were bombed to oblivion in World War II, but in time they regained their former prominence.

Some economic models do emphasize contingency — for instance, how a small force could induce an economy to make a major shift from one equilibrium to another. To give an example, some amount of defense contracting in Silicon Valley later caused the area to blossom into a major technology center. But perhaps the same could have happened in some other regions of the U.S. And these economic models remain the exception rather than the rule, often criticized for the fact that, under some circumstances, they can predict almost anything.

Paul Krugman is the economist who has mounted probably the most consistent and virulent attack on President Donald Trump’s administration, even going so far as to suggest that it might destroy U.S. democracy. But Krugman is an avid reader of history, and he took his early inspiration from history and also science fiction, in particular Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy, a tale of long-scale world history and the degree of its contingency. The notion that “history matters” also is an underlying theme of Krugman’s contributions to economic theory.

A more typical economist’s view is that Trump is promoting some bad policies with respect to trade and immigration and fiscal policy, but that most essential features of America are likely to persist. And when it comes to politics, economists of the “public choice” variety tend to see outcomes as controlled by a fairly tight structure of voter preferences and interest groups, variables which a president can change only at the margin and with great effort.

So which perspective is correct — the historian’s or the economist’s? It is hard to counter the historian’s contention that contingent events can shift the course of a nation or the world. That said, the underlying fundamentals seem to have greater predictive power. The U.S. economy seems fairly robust, the investigation into Russian interference in the election is proceeding, and the courts have repeatedly stood up to Trump. The system seems to be holding up.

I’m not going to deny that the world is sustaining damage from some recent electoral results, including Brexit. But as an economist, I’m still going to say that progress mostly remains on track.

Nonetheless, I find it striking that the number of people studying history in American colleges is plummeting, even more than in the other humanities and indeed all of the other measured fields of study (the fastest-growing major: exercise studies). Perhaps in a time of Instagram and Snapchat, history doesn’t have the allure it once did.

One can be a loyal economist and still find this concerning. In the language of my chosen profession, there is a need for a marginal increase of interest in historical reasoning.

[Chas_P]

 Winstonm, on 2018-November-29, 22:27, said:

TICK-TOCK

Alan Dershowitz

[johnu]

Russian official questions 'true reason' Dennison canceled meeting with Putin

Das Vedanya. A nice helping of Kompromat for Putin's puppet.

[Winstonm]

Quote

There’s little dispute that Rosa Maria Ortega did in fact break the law. Ortega came to the United States from Mexico as a baby and was living in the U.S. as a legal permanent resident. Although it’s against the law for non-citizens to vote in Texas, Ortega registered to vote in 2002 as a Republican and then cast ballots multiple times over more than a decade.

Huffington Post has found those millions of illegal voters.

[Winstonm]

 Chas_P, on 2018-November-30, 18:43, said:

Alan Dershowitz

Quote

Prior to Manafort’s decision to “flip” and cooperate with Mueller, he entered into a joint defense agreement with Trump, which is a common tool used by subjects of federal criminal investigations to ensure that their attorneys can exchange information while maintaining attorney-client privilege.

A common provision of those agreements, whether they’re written or not, is that if one defendant subsequently agrees to cooperate with the government, he is required to notify everyone else who is part of the agreement. Once someone flips, as Manafort did, his interests are adverse to those of everyone else under investigation because the prosecutors will require him to cooperate against everyone else. For that reason, communications between Manafort and other subjects of Mueller’s investigation aren’t privileged.

[Winstonm]

Finally, a definitive answer from Daily Kos:

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We began by selecting a set of search topics that we believed might be especially common among men concerned about living up to the ideals of manhood: “erectile dysfunction,” “hair loss,” “how to get girls,” “penis enlargement,” “penis size,” “steroids,” “testosterone” and “Viagra.”

We found that support for Trump in the 2016 election was higher in areas that had more searches for topics such as “erectile dysfunction.”

And I thought they were all just a bunch of dicks. Turns out I left off the critical adjective.

[y66]

From Paul Ryan is leaving Congress in the most fitting way possible. He’s doing what he does best: saying stuff about policy that’s not true by Matt Yglesias at Vox:

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Paul Ryan is heading out of Congress the way he served: with a blizzard of false statements about substantive matters of public policy.

That started with Thursday’s bizarre exit interview with the Washington Post’s Paul Kane, in which Ryan claimed to regret congressional inaction on debt and immigration when he was, in fact, personally responsible for congressional inaction on debt and immigration.

Now comes a tweet in which he offers the view that the policy vision that made him famous — the Roadmap for America’s Future — has been enacted into law under the Trump administration.

Quote

Paul Ryan ✔ @SpeakerRyan When I was chair of @HouseBudgetGOP, we began to change the debate with the Roadmap for America’s Future. Now, all these years later, those early ideas of tax reform have become law and hundreds of millions of Americans are better for it. 11:38 AM - Nov 30, 2018

One can see why Ryan would like to believe that this is true.

The Roadmap was, after all, the intellectual project of his lifetime. And in its pursuit, Ryan did a lot of things (like risking America’s role in the international financial system, harming the economy with ill-timed austerity budgets, and threatening the basic fabric of the American constitutional order by relentlessly covering for Trump) that earned him a lot of criticism. And in the end, basically none of what Ryan advocated for has come to pass.

A con-man to the end.

[y66]

From There’s something very weird going on with this House election in North Carolina by Dylan Scott at Vox:

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North Carolina election officials have declined to certify the winner of the state’s Ninth Congressional District election, after allegations were made suggesting absentee ballots may have been tampered with.

Elections officials and Democrats have been careful not to allege any specific wrongdoing so far. But the allegations suggest some kind of scheme, undertaken by people supporting the GOP campaign, to influence the results of an election ultimately decided by less than 1,000 votes.

According to the votes as currently counted, Republican Mark Harris beat Democrat Dan McCready by a little more than 900 votes to become the next Congress member from the Ninth. But earlier this week, the state board of elections unanimously agreed it would not certify the election results, making vague references to “unfortunate activities” that raised doubts about their veracity.

Some specific irregularities were later revealed in sworn affidavits sent by Democratic attorneys to the state board. Multiple voters described an unidentified woman coming to voters’ houses and taking their absentee ballots. Some ballots were uncompleted; the woman promised to finish filling them out. In other affidavits, voters alleged that a local political operative was working for the Harris campaign on absentee ballots and that he would be paid a bonus if Harris beat McCready.

Furthermore, political scientists in the state have noted that the Ninth District had an unusually high number of mail-in absentee ballots requested but then not returned to be counted. Almost one in four of those requested absentee ballots were not returned in the Ninth, substantially higher in than any other North Carolina congressional district.

“Currently, there is a serious question as to whether ‘irregularities or improprieties occurred to such an extent that they taint the results of the entire election and cast doubt on its fairness,’” John Wallace, an attorney working for the state Democratic Party, said in a letter sent this week to the board of elections.

The elections board voted on Friday to hold a hearing on the evidence of voter tampering before December 21. Under North Carolina law, the evidence could eventually allow the board to call a new election, no matter the number of ballots in question, state experts say. The midterms might not be over just yet.

[Winstonm]

From Yes magazine concerning deeply red Oklahoma's shift toward Democrats.

Quote

Trump voters cite racial resentments, not economic loss, as what drives them.

The Republican party has serious problems going forward as their base of older white evangelicals dies out piecemeal while new voters overwhelmingly chose the Democratic party.

[y66]

 Winstonm, on 2018-December-03, 09:11, said:

The Republican party has serious problems going forward as their base of older white evangelicals dies out piecemeal while new voters overwhelmingly chose the Democratic party.

Ditto going backward as their disastrous policies since Eisenhower have shown. The only thing more disastrous has been the Dems failure to provide electable alternatives with some notable exceptions on both sides.

[Winstonm]

Raw Story:

Quote

JPMorgan is telling investors that Trump’s declaration this week that China will immediately drop all tariffs on American cars has no basis in reality.

In particular, the note said that investors should have “valid reason for caution” when it comes to investing on the hopes that Trump is on the verge of a major breakthrough with China.

“It doesn’t seem like anything was actually agreed to at the dinner and White House officials are contorting themselves into pretzels to reconcile Trump’s tweets (which seem if not completely fabricated then grossly exaggerated) with reality,” the note states.

Amazing that a bank is warning investors that the president is full of crap - or maybe it is just the alternate reality where the intraday yield curve did not invert yesterday.

[Winstonm]

 Chas_P, on 2018-November-30, 18:43, said:

Alan Dershowitz

https://www.theatlan...n-trump/577264/

Quote

The admission that the Trump Organization was working secretly—colluding, one might say—with the Russian government on a business deal late into the campaign and that Trump knew about this activity led many observers, including those quoted above, to treat this latest plea as the turning point for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

But the underlying metaphors are wrong. There is no sudden bend in the path of the investigation. There is no house of cards. The dominoes will not fall if gently tipped. The administration is not going to come crashing down in response to any single day’s events. The architecture of Trump’s power is more robust than that.

Joshua Zoffer and Niall Ferguson: Mueller and a blue House could bring down Trump

We need to stop thinking of it as a fragile structure waiting for the right poke to fall in on itself. Think instead of the myriad investigations and legal proceedings surrounding the president as a multi-front siege on a walled city that is, in fact, relatively well fortified.

Siege warfare is not a matter of striking precisely the correct blow at the correct moment at a particular stone in the wall. It is a campaign of degradation over a substantial period of time. While those inside the fortified city may rely only on the strength of their walls and their stored resources, the attackers can take their time. Volleys of projectiles—arrows or trebuchets—pepper the city walls and those atop them, while the strength of the defending army diminishes as soldiers slip away and food dwindles. Moreover, active conflict is an episodic, not a constant, feature of siege warfare; the enemy army can encamp outside the walled city and blockade it without firing a shot. Over time, the walls and defending forces become degraded to such a degree that the invaders are able to scale the walls and sack the city.

No, Mueller and his forces are not a Mongol horde, but the Trump White House is very much under siege.

[Winstonm]

Wapo reports:

Quote

President Trump’s claims of a new trade agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping showed signs of crumbling Tuesday, with senior officials seeking to play down expectations of a breakthrough and acknowledging that major provisions remained in flux.

Dennison-to-English translation: He lied. Again.

[y66]

 Winstonm, on 2018-December-05, 12:41, said:

Dennison-to-English translation: He lied. Again.

And, it seems, the masters of the financial universe fell for it again.

[y66]

In Stunning Power Grab, Wisconsin Republicans Pass Bill Weakening New Governor by Kevin Robillard at HuffPo.

The cheese curds are in the fryer now.

[barmar]

 y66, on 2018-December-05, 16:02, said:

And, it seems, the masters of the financial universe fell for it again.

Yep. Trump is Lucy, Wall Street is Charlie Brown, and we're now flat on our backs after she pulled the football.

[Winstonm]

It is hard to imagine that the Republicans are so insulated inside their Fox and Friends bubble that they do not realize that they lost the midterms by 10 million votes - but that is the recent count. A complete repudiation of Dennison and his hateful policies.

[ggwhiz]

 Winstonm, on 2018-December-06, 15:34, said:

It is hard to imagine that the Republicans are so insulated inside their Fox and Friends bubble that they do not realize that they lost the midterms by 10 million votes

Is that not in the realm of stealability, 2020 general wise.

[Al_U_Card]

 Winstonm, on 2018-December-06, 15:34, said:

It is hard to imagine that the Republicans are so insulated inside their Fox and Friends bubble that they do not realize that they lost the midterms by 10 million votes - but that is the recent count. A complete repudiation of Dennison and his hateful policies.

Winston, wasn't Hilbilly a lock for 2016? Were all those in the CNN/MSM bubble so insulated from reality as well? Politics, like climate, appears to be a non-linear, chaotic and coupled (2-party) system that cannot be predicted long term (bubble-wise).