Re: Stiglitz on central banks
Ian Murray wrote: Is acceptance of the crowding out argument a litmus test for econowonks in DC now? Maybe, but Stiggy lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I think he's motivated more by partisanship - Dems good, Reps bad. Dems raised taxes in '93, Reps cut taxes in 2001, 2002, and 2003. Doug No. Liberal Keynesians buy the crowding out argument under two sets of circumstances: (i) if the economy is at full employment, and (ii) if the central bank has a target unemployment rate, and responds to plans for fiscal stimulus by raising interest rates enough to neutralize the effects of fiscal policy. But today neither of those apply. And even this card-carrying neoliberal Keyensian wants a bigger deficit for the next 24 months. (But budget surpluses four or more years out.) Brad DeLong
Re: Deindustrialization? (was Re: Yet another takeon Hubbert's peak)
And there is much capitalist industry that can, without great disagreement among socialists, be decommissioned. That pertaining to the military sector would be a good place to start. Michael K. Military spending is 2% of OECD GDP, of which only 1/4 is the procurement of products that are peculiarly military. We don't live in the late 1950s, when military spending was 10% of GDP and even Eisenhower was scared of the military-industrial complex. Try to keep your arguments from being more than one generation out of date, OK? Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: A reply to Ellen MeiksinsWood
Why are we so obsessed with personalities and their shortcomings? Michael Perelman I'm not. I'm interested in the social construction of the categories of rich and middle class. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: IMF
In my own way I wish to second Fred Guy. Brad DeLong has no doubt overplayed the no-argument argument, which most be quite irritating to someone like Keaney who has put forth serious, well researched responses... Back in the late 1970s I would have agreed with Keaney that the IMF's advice to Britain was counterproductive. But the fact that Mitterand and Carter both tried a Keynesian expansionary approach, and that their policies crashed and burned, has to make you think again. In retrospect, the IMF's fear--and not just the IMF's fear, the U.S. Treasury's fear, and the fear of strong currents of thought both outside and inside the British Labour Party--that an aggressive policy of expansion would bring much higher inflation with little or no reduction in unemployment--seems well founded. Callaghan's problems in the mid-1970s seem (to me at least) to have been caused not by the IMF (which did give him resources to quell balance-of-payments crises) but by the state of the world. You can bet that by 1982 Mitterand wished that their had been an IMF to rein him in on expansionary policy when he took office. And after this point the quality of Keaney's arguments went rapidly downhill as--not coincidentally--the rhetorical garbage pile grew to the sky: --the assertion of an identity between the IMF and Arthur Burns on the one hand and the nutboys of MI5 on the other, which is definitely not the case. --the claim that without the IMF in the middle of the 1970s Thatcher would not have come to power at the end of the 1970s, which seems to me extremely unlikely. --the claim that conditions on budget deficits and monetary growth rates represented mission creep is totally wrong: the IMF's attempts to advise Korea on the proper form that bank-company relationships should have is mission creep, IMF advice on basic indicators of macroeconomic policy is not. I didn't count any more arguments. Perhaps the rhetorical garbage in which they were wrapped led me to underestimate their force, but I don't think so. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: IMF
Jim Devine wrote: There's a big difference between _attacking an individual_ (ad hominem) and _attacking an argument_. The rules of Congress may encourage politeness, but that's a democracy of the few, of the elite and powerful. We need to put said democracy into context, which is what I did. I was NOT attacking Brad personally. However, Brad engages in personal attacks regularly. (or is my perception wrong? he's the one who throws words like bullsh*t around.) The bullshit was in response to Keaney's claim that his language was directed against the economics profession rather than me. There are degrees of mendacity that deserve to be called bullshit. That seemed to me to be one o them. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: IMF
More importantly, I thought the whole point of the criticisms of the IMF was precisely this: that it has treated the financial crises of Mexico and Asia like they were crises of excess demand and exogenous shock for the developed world in the 70's. Why would the remedy for one be similar to the other? It wouldn't. The IMF's demands that East Asian countries balance their budgets during the crisis were counterproductive and harmful. But the IMF also loaned a lot of money to the East Asian economies during the crisis, which gave them the power to keep their interest rates lower and the values of their exchange rates higher (and thus the burden of debt owed to foreigners lower) than would otherwise have been the case. It would be nice to have a kinder, gentler IMF that loaned more money for longer periods of time with less conditionality at lower interest rates, and recognized that there were crises caused primarily by investor panic in the core (East Asia, 1997; Mexico, 1995), as well as crises caused by the fear that the government will never muster the will to bring its commitments in line with its resources (Brazil) or crises caused by governments that have run unsustainable policies (Latin America 1982). But the one we have is better than none at all--unless, that is, you buy the line of the _Wall Street Journal_ editorial page that without the IMF and the moral hazard it creates international capital markets would run perfectly. Brad DeLong
Re: IMF
Brad replies to Michael P.: Re: As if he were a school marm correcting wayward children Michael. Look what I'm dealing with here: ... repeated smart-ass intrusions... deigns... self-delusion ...confirmation of prejudice... disciplinary culture of condescension... brilliant economist... disgusting Schleifer... countries about which he knows very little ...red-baiting ...preposterous assertions ... produce to order analyses showing public bad, private good ...how it can enrich me personally ...criminal enterprise... = Of these, most were directed at the economics _profession_ Oh, God. Not again. For the record: Bullshit. Total bullshit. I count eight directed at me--personally--and four directed at the economics profession in general (but also at me as a member of it). BTW, you take offense at my imputing self-enrichment motives to Schleifer. Surely that's a legitimate assumption. No it isn't. Finance economists who want to become rich went to work on Wall Street either full-time or part-time. Finance economists who wanted to make the world a better place got involved in the morass of Russian reform. If it were clear to me that your contributions here were intended to be constructive, if you were not so routinely dismissive of points that are somehow exogenized from the economic viewpoint, if you were less inclined to reproduce standard Cold War liberal interpretations of historical events, then I would not, could not, use such terms as deign, preposterous, smart-ass. As I wrote to Michael: = You don't enforce the minimal--minimal!--requirements of politeness required for any functioning discourse community that wants to be anything more than an echo chamber for its dominant tendency. See what I mean? That leaves me with a problem. How do you suggest that I deal with it? = This is a very big problem. People like Michael Keaney--people with no social skills whatsoever, who never learned how to behave in any company, polite or not--ruined USENET as a forum. In my view, the--unfortunate--prevalence of such censoreds makes an unmoderated email list unsustainable and non-viable in the long run. The only strategy I have found that works in the short-run is tit-for-tat. The only strategy I think will work in the long run is to adopt the rules of propriety that legislatures typically adopt. Think about it: speech on the floor of the U.S. Congress is--in many ways--the freeest anywhere. Legislators are not to be called to account in any other place for what they say on the floor. But within their chamber they are held to strict rules of politeness and propriety--so much so that Tip O'Neill once landed in a big mess for saying a very weak version of what he thought of Newt Gingrich. All statements are notionally addressed not to other members but to the Chair. Forms of reference to other members are tightly controlled. All of these rhetorical rules exist for good reasons. Unless forums like this adopt analogous rules, I fear that they are doomed. Brad DeLong Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Islam's Black Slaves
Indeed, thanks for bringing this back. That is what I meant. Slaves were not involved in a commodity producing labour process like that of the plantation style, especially one leading to or involving surplus extraction. ??? I see the lack of plantation-style labor to produce staples for a consumer market (and that is important). But isn't the whole point of owning slaves to extract surplus for them? Men slaves were soldiers. The fifth caliphdom in Islamic history is called the Mamlouk, i.e. the slave. Alas! relatively few Middle Eastern and Indian Ocean area slaves were aristocratic warriors like the Mamelukes. Most had a social position that was... much more slavelike. The practice of castration was prohibited and it was practised under the Ottomans as a result of contact with Byzantium But still relatively common in the Middle East and along the Indian Ocean shore after it had died out in Europe, yes? When will there be an end to the eurocentric views of the world and that venting of guilt through recrimination or incrimination of the other. I don't know anyone (well, maybe David Horowitz, but I don't know him and hope I never do) who thinks that Indian Ocean-based African slavery was as destructive as Atlantic Ocean-based African slavery. The smaller gradient in military technology in the Indian Ocean meant that slave raids into the interior were not as destructive. The slower pace of slave extraction (approximately equal numbers in total, but over more than twelve centuries as opposed to three) meant that African social structures along the coast were less poisoned by the institution of slavery. Once the slaves reached their destination areas they were, by and large, with many exceptions, treated significantly better--better health, more individual freedom, longer life expectancy--than new world slaves. Gang plantation labor to produce staple commodities is a uniquely cruel form of social organization, and the Middle East and North Africa had very little of that. (But in my view, at least, the decisive factor is agricultural technology, product, and slave price: non-capitalist Roman staple slave agriculture was at least as cruel as anything in the Caribbean. Look up ergastula.) Nevertheless, the slaves of Islam are part of our history, are they not? And we should remember and study them, shouldn't we? Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: government media is bad foryou
Yeah, but it does get frustrating when you write odes to diversity, putting 'voice' at the very centre of the role of media, cite sources, critique methodology, empirically refute the 'results', suggest alternative approaches to the issue etc - and your interlocutor ignores it all and then tells the world you're siding with the very embodiment of 19th century repression and autocracy!... Touche... But maintaining independence of thought and critique is really hard when you are paid out of a government budget. And the institutional frameworks that preserve the relative independence of state-owned media in some of the industrial democracies may not be as strong as we would hope when the stakes get high, and are hard to transplant. President Niyazov of Turkmenistan is no more interested in diversity and voice than was Vladimir Lenin, or Royal Police Director Geiger of Koeln... Brad DeLong
Re: IMF
I object strongly, however, to repeated smart-ass intrusions by an allegedly brilliant economist who deigns to spend time with the progressively inclined... Michael K. As I said, if you had arguments to make, you would make them. You clearly don't. So why don't you be quiet until you do? Brad DeLong
Re: RE: Re: IMF
Brad DeLongwrote: The IMF loaned Callaghan a lot of money to use for exchange rate management and to stretch out what would otherwise have been a very sharp, short, nasty period of macroeconomic adjustment. As a matter of historical fact, the IMF didn't lend HMG any money at all. None of the facilities were taken up. Mark Touche...
Re: IMF
Jim Devine writes: At 07:59 AM 05/17/2001 -0700, you wrote: I object strongly, however, to repeated smart-ass intrusions by an allegedly brilliant economist who deigns to spend time with the progressively inclined... Michael K. As I said, if you had arguments to make, you would make them. You clearly don't. So why don't you be quiet until you do? this is flame-bait. Michael K. did provide an argument, but Brad simply ignored it. Michael, please warn Brad to stop this behavior. He did? Funny. I read four paragraphs of his email and didn't find one. Brad DeLong
Michael...
Re: As if he were a school marm correcting wayward children Michael. Look what I'm dealing with here: ... repeated smart-ass intrusions... deigns... self-delusion ...confirmation of prejudice... disciplinary culture of condescension... brilliant economist... disgusting Schleifer... countries about which he knows very little ...red-baiting ...preposterous assertions ... produce to order analyses showing public bad, private good ...how it can enrich me personally ...criminal enterprise... You don't enforce the minimal--minimal!--requirements of politeness required for any functioning discourse community that wants to be anything more than an echo chamber for its dominant tendency. That leaves me with a problem. How do you suggest that I deal with it? Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Development Question for Brad
Well, for a start, do you think the experience of India and China (and for that matter East Asia) indicates that it's a good idea not to liberalize the capital account and to hold off with privatization? The 1990s seems to indicate that you *can't* liberalize your capital account unless you have a pretty good system of banking and financial regulation. It's just too dangerous. Privatization... I'm by nature hostile to privatizing natural monopolies. But it's hard to argue that nationalized industries like British Steel and British Coal did right by their customers or their workers. Perhaps this is a terminological problem, but I associate the term neo-liberalism (as opposed to plain old capitalism) primarily with the liberalization of capital accounts and secondarily with aggressive privatization. Perhaps. I would think of it as get the state out of the microregulation business. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Botswana? No thanks... wasDevelopment
Yes. Plus diamonds are a non-renewable resource. And that's why Botswana does need balance. Or it will be seen by historians as a minor flash in the pan which did just a bit better than other neocolonies in retaining wealth, no matter how poorly invested, in such counterproductive ways. Very true. But so far it looks like Botswana is doing *most* of the right things to turn its resource-based wealth into more durable forms. If not for AIDS, I'd be very optimistic... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: government media isbad for you
Brad DeLong wrote: But maintaining independence of thought and critique is really hard when you are paid out of a government budget. But it's really easy when you're paid out of the budgets of advertisers, who don't like anything critical of business civilization, or even anything a bit unconventional that might force people to stop and think for a second - stopping and thinking being the enemies of a friendly advertising environment. Right? Doug I wouldn't say easy I would say less impossible, however. Maybe its the residual Hayekian viruses injected into me during that two-hour blank in my memory when I gave a seminar at Chicago Business School... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Michael...
Brad, once a flame war begins, ugly things tend to be said by all participants. Keaney (one post): ... repeated smart-ass intrusions... deigns... self-delusion ...confirmation of prejudice... disciplinary culture of condescension... brilliant economist... disgusting Schleifer... countries about which he knows very little ...red-baiting ...preposterous assertions ... produce to order analyses showing public bad, private good ...how it can enrich me personally ...criminal enterprise... DeLong (across four posts): *Snort*... Naughty, naughty... He did? Funny. I read four paragraphs of his email and didn't find one... As I said, if you had arguments to make, you would make them. You clearly don't. So why don't you be quiet until you do?.. All participants?
Re: Re: Lindsey speaks
The Journal of Economic Perspectives once had a number of widely differing estimates of the amount of dollars abroad. If the dollar were to suddenly threaten to loose value, say to the Euro, and people wanted to dump them, wouldn't that create serious problems in the US? -- If it happened today? No. The dollar would fall by a lot--50%?--rapidly. But then imports would shrink and exports would boom. If it happened at some future time at which the U.S. foreign debt was largely denominated in euros or yen? Yes. The U.S. would then be in the same position as Korea 1997, in which each decline in the value of the currency raises the home-currency value of debt owed to foreigners and bankrupts more firms and banks... Brad DeLong
Media
G'day Brad, All participants? Well, we all have to watch what we say as much as we do how we say it, I s'pose ... And as for government funding making critical journalism, opinion diversity, and in-depth coverage 'impossible', come 'round and listen to my radio (in fact, get on the net and help yourself to ABC Radio National right now http://www.abc.net.au/rn/default.htm) and watch my telly some time, Brad - and then go home and watch that pap they serve up in the home of the brave (upon which I may comment, because of course we get to hear and see a lot of it). No comparison. You are absolutely and importantly wrong here, mate. I agree: my general view of the world has *big* problems figuring out just why it is that publicly-owned media in other English-speaking countries has managed to maintain both its independence and its remarkably high quality. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to transplant to other places well... As to your prediction that commercial and political pressures are undermining public service broadcasters (all helped by rubbish like your erstwhile roomie serves up, natch), here's a sadly predictable story from Italy... Depressing. Not surprising--but depressing... Brad DeLong
Re: IMF
Brad DeLong writes: Britain's march to socialism halted in 1976 by IMF! *Snort*. = A cocaine habit might explain how it is you would actually believe most of what you contribute here. Naughty, naughty. I take that as an admission that you have no real arguments or evidence, and I agree: you don't. In fact, as you are probably aware, there was a protracted struggle within the ruling Labour Party at that time between the Parliamentary leadership and its National Executive Committee (explaining why Blair's first actions involved emasculating the NEC). This was within a much wider context of political struggle and economic stagnation as a result of the breakdown of golden-age capitalism. Thanks to the IMF the seeds of Thatcherism and monetarism were firmly planted in the UK political economy (Callaghan to 1976 Labour conference: we cannot spend our way out of a recession). Most of the critics of Jim Callaghan in the mid-1970s changed their mind during the five years that followed, for two countries did attempt to spend their way out of recession--the U.S. under President Carter and Federal Reserve Chair Miller, and France under President Mitterand. Both attempts ended in sharply higher inflation in 1978-1979 in the U.S. and in 1981-1982 in France, with no visible acceleration in output or employment growth. I remember going to a talk once at which 1977-1981 CEA Chair Charles Schultze discussed the days in 1978-1979 when the inflation rate kept coming in at 2 percentage points higher and real output growth 2 percentage points lower than their models had predicted. There seems to be every reason to believe--unless there are some key magical differences between the macroeconomies of Britain on the one hand and France and the U.S. on the other that have somehow escaped everyone's notice--that a policy of more stimulus and faster reflation under Callaghan would have made things worse, not better. Callaghan was in a box with no good options: but all the comparative evidence suggests that a stronger resort to vulgar Keynesianism would have been a very bad policy choice indeed. And the claim that Jim Callaghan's neck was under the hobnailed boot of IMF imperialism suggests a basic failure to understand what the IMF does. The IMF loaned Callaghan a lot of money to use for exchange rate management and to stretch out what would otherwise have been a very sharp, short, nasty period of macroeconomic adjustment. In return the IMF sought assurances that British policies would not produce large budget deficits and trade deficits that would put repayment of the IMF loan into question: the IMF is an underfunded agency, and it needs its money back from one crisis so that it can lend it out to the next country that finds itself illiquid. The IMF gave Callaghan additional options (albeit not as attractive options as I would wish it had given Callaghan). If a government judges that the IMF is unhelpful, a tool of the oppressors, and a source of imperialist control, there is a simple answer--don't borrow from it. Jim Callaghan was a smart guy, a good politician, a committed social democrat: he judged that IMF money was worth taking, and I have never seen any plausible argument that he was wrong.
Re: Re: government media is bad for you
We all agree that freedom of the press is very important. And now a bunch of people have gone out and actually done some work: they have compiled statistics on the extent of government control of the media, and actually found that when you look across countries you can begin to see the imprint of a free press in better socioeconomic outcomes. This would seem to me to be something that the friends of liberty would welcome: real statistical evidence that freedom of the press may well make a difference for real people's--not just intellectuals'--lives. So why the casual trashing of a working paper I don't think you've read? Why the eagerness to align yourself with state ownership of the media--thus taking sides with Metternich and President Nyazov of Turkmenistan, owner and founder of *all* the newspapers in the country, and against my ex-roommate Andrei and the editor of the _Neue Rheinische Zeitung_? Brad DeLong
Re: IMF
Most of the critics of Jim Callaghan in the mid-1970s changed their mind during the five years that followed, for two countries did attempt to spend their way out of recession--the U.S. under President Carter and Federal Reserve Chair Miller, and France under President Mitterand. Both attempts ended in sharply higher inflation in 1978-1979 in the U.S. and in 1981-1982 in France, with no visible acceleration in output or employment growth. I remember going to a talk once at which 1977-1981 CEA Chair Charles Schultze discussed the days in 1978-1979 when the inflation rate kept coming in at 2 percentage points higher and real output growth 2 percentage points lower than their models had predicted. = That sidesteps my earlier point regarding the heavy steer Callaghan and Healey were given by your predecessors at the U.S. Treasury. I say that what happened to Carter and Mitterand is strong evidence that the IMF and U.S. Treasury gave Callaghan good advice. You say that this sidesteps [your] earlier point. If the quality of the advice the IMF gives (and the quality of the policy changes it demands) isn't at the heart of the matter, then what is? The conditions insisted upon by the IMF and the Americans were set out in a Letter of Intent despatched by the British government on 15 December 1976. 'An essential element of the government's strategy will be a continuing and substantial reduction over the next few years in the share of resources required for the public sector,' it said. 'It is also essential to reduce the PSBR in order to create monetary conditions which will encourage investment and support sustained growth and the control of inflation.' The specific measures were a reduction in the borrowing requirement from its 'unacceptably high' level... targets for domestic credit expansion, a logical move in view of Britain's balance of payments difficulties... As I said, the IMF loans money so that countries can turn a short, sharp, nasty period of adjustment into a longer, gentler, and hopefully less painful period of adjustment. They don't loan money so that policy changes can be avoided entirely. If a government doesn't want to change its policies, it doesn't borrow from the IMF... And by the way: within a year of coming to power, Margaret Thatcher managed to increase inflation from 10.3% to 22%... I don't like Thatcher, her policies, or her ministers. But the first-year change in inflation under her administration isn't a fair summary statistic of the effects of her policies. ...the full armoury of the national security state was brought to bear upon the miners in 1984/5. And this has what to do with the IMF, or with how a world without an IMF would be a better place? Nothing... As I said, in retrospect it appears that the IMF gave the British government good advice in the mid 1970s, and gave Jim Callaghan a few more options and a little more room for maneuver.
Re: Re: Approval and Condemnation: Must they bebased on Morality?
For some reason, human beings, needing God, This is simply not true, either as a general statement or as an empirical summary of human experience. Most humans (including most of those who claim, if asked, to believe in god) get along very well without any god. are born into a world in which God is materially absent. Therefore, they must find or create God (or the gods, or Nature, or reality -- Nietzche's God-in-the-grammar). _You_ seem to need some sort of god. Most humans don't in fact. God is no more absent than are three-headed field mice, one-ton blue frogs with three eyes, etc. You seem to argue that we need some metaphysical absolute in order to ground our approval and disaproval of this or that. But none exists, so we'd better learn how to get along without one. People seem (no surprise) to be talking past each other. The point that since no God exists, we'd better learn how to get along without one is a good one. But so is the point that human societies seem to be very good at constructing and then believing in Gods... Ahura Mazda
Re: IMF
Brad DeLong writes: The availability of IMF loans gives countries facing financial crises a *few* more options: Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes created it for a reason, after all. They were not dumb. If you want to know how the international financial system would function in its absence, I have always thought that 1931 et sequelae in Austria gives you a good idea of what would be likely to happen... = This assumes that the IMF has remained unchanged since its inception. This might be true of its economic models (Jacques Polak's work of 1957), but, as has been very clearly documented by writers such as Mark Harmon (The British Labour Government and the 1976 IMF Crisis, Macmillan, 1994) and Leo Panitch (The New Imperial State, New Left Review 2,2) and Chalmers Johnson (Blowback, Metropolitan Books, 2000) the goals of the IMF have altered somewhat. The caring US Treasury has, beginning with that UK intervention 25 years ago, employed the IMF as an instrument of imperialism... Britain's march to socialism halted in 1976 by IMF! *Snort*. Look: I think that IMF mission creep--the idea that they know that Anglo-American models of financial organization are superior to Germano-Japanese models, say--is a serious danger. I think that the IMF charged Mexico too high an interest rate and loaned it money for too short a time period in the 1990s. I think that the IMF blew it when it demanded the closing of some (but not all) of Indonesia's insolvent banks. I think the IMF routinely blows it when it demands that countries receiving aid take rapid steps to produce immediate budget surpluses--but that is because the IMF is underfunded, and wants a borrowing government to show a budget surplus so that it can be confident it will be paid back in time for it to have resources to deal with the next crisis. But all these valid criticisms miss the big point: the IMF shows up at the party with lots of money (and conditions) when a financial crisis hits. That's a very valuable function--indeed, Jim Callaghan thought it was a very nice thing to have back in 1976... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: reigniting the inequality debate
On Fri, 11 May 2001, Brad DeLong wrote: The answer to what is happening to world income distribution turns out to depend heavily on whether countries are weighted by population, and whether income in different countries is measured in PPP terms or by using actual exchange rates. Why would one ever want *not* to count people rather than countries? Why would one ever want to *not* use PPP? FWIW, later on in the article, Robert Wade addresses this question, saying: Yeah. But I didn't like any of his answers... In response to Wade's first point, if we are looking at countries as laboratories for different policies the overall summary statistic of cross-country variance is uninteresting--you want to make credible estimates of the benefits and costs of different policy strategies, not statements about cross-country inequality. Wade's second point is totally incoherent: flaws in PPP measures do not justify using exchange rate-based measures that are even more flawed. Wade's third point--that incomes based on actual exchange rates may be a better measure than PPP of relative national power and national modernity--just seems weird to me. Back when Japan and Germany had undervalued real exchange rates and were export machines as a result, were they weak in some sense? PPP-based measures have always seemed to me to give much better measures of national power and national modernity than exchange rate based measures... Brad DeLong
government media is bad for you
No. Britain and Canada are outliers in their regression. Think of Malaysia, or China, if you want a typical country in which the government has a large media share. The government media-inferior health and the government media-inferior education correlations made me think of a possible tie-in with Sen's arguments about famines, publicity, and democracy... Brad DeLong British and Canadian broadcasting is bad for you. One of the authors has been under discussion here recently. NBER WORKING PAPER Who Owns the Media? Simeon Djankov, Caralee McLiesh, Tatiana Nenova, Andrei Shleifer NBER Working Paper No. W8288 May 2001 Abstract: We examine the patterns of media ownership in 97 countries around the world. We find that almost universally the largest media firms are owned by the government or by private families. Government ownership is more pervasive in broadcasting than in the printed media. Government ownership of the media is generally associated with less press freedom, fewer political and economic rights, and, most conspicuously, inferior social outcomes in the areas of education and health. It does not appear that adverse consequences of government ownership of the media are restricted solely to the instances of government monopoly. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
government-owned media is bad for you
From pp. 4-5: We then consider the consequences of state ownership of the media To this end, we run regressions of a variety of outcomes across countries on state ownership of the media, holding constant the level of development, the degree of autocracy, and overall state ownership of the economy. We find pervasive evidence of bad outcomes associated with state ownership of the media (especially the press), holding country characteristics constant. The evidence is inconsistent with the Pigouvian view of state ownership of the media. Still, since we only have a cross-section of countries, we cannot decisively interpret this evidence as causal, i.e., as showing that state ownership of the media rather than some omitted country characteristic is responsible for the bad outcomes. We note, however, that the omitted characteristic must be quite closely related to the inclination of the government to control information flows, since we are controlling for a number of dimensions of badness in the regressions... How much it is worth depends on how good a measure of autocracy their autocracy index is. If it is a lousy measure, then all their regressions show is that autocracy is bad and that adding more information about the degree of autocracy allows for the better prediction of bad outcomes. If their autocracy index is a good measure, then I think it's an interesting--but not totally unexpected--fact that an unfree press has a number of destructive consequences
Re: Re: government media is bad for you
Brad DeLong wrote: No. Britain and Canada are outliers in their regression. Think of Malaysia, or China, if you want a typical country in which the government has a large media share. The government media-inferior health and the government media-inferior education correlations made me think of a possible tie-in with Sen's arguments about famines, publicity, and democracy... What makes Britain, Canada, France, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and Singapore 'outliers' and China and Malaysia 'inliers', ferchrissakes? That there are a lot more countries like China and Malaysia than like the OECD countries with broadcasting monopolies: the BBC gets swamped by Turkmenistan TV. But one of the most interesting things about the paper (not in the abstract) is that it is a high government ownership share of the *press*--not broadcasting--that appears to be truly poisonous... The tie-in with Sen is that I think of his democracy-famine link and this government-owned media result as both being about the beneficial effects of what Hirschman calls voice.
Re: Re: government media is bad for you
Is Brad blaming NPR for the kids here without health insurance? No. The U.S. has a very small government-owned media share. It ought to--or rather their regressions predict--that the U.S. should have better health outcomes than it does...
Re: FW: Palast: IMF's Four Steps to Damnation
And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of the biggest privatisation of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. 'The US Treasury view was: This was great, as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We DON'T CARE if it's a corrupt election. ' Strange. Inside the U.S. Treasury that I was at, there was enormous anxiety about Chubias's loans-for-shares program--that not only was it a bad thing in advance, but that its implicit corruption would retrospectively taint the earlier voucher privatization program (which it has done). The judgment was that a second term for Yeltsin would be a better thing for Russia than the alternative, but I met no one inside the Treasury who did not care. Stiglitz must be talking about some other U.S. Treasury... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Airlinederegulation
G'day Ken, Deregulation surely does not minimize transportation costs for smaller communities and to distant communities. For them deregulation is often a disaster. Before deregulation many smaller cities had to be served as the price airlines had to pay for lucrative routes. Now these cities have to beg airlines to serve them and even when they are served fares are high, and there is no competition at all. Same with broadband IT links. Which makes me wonder if we're not talking about something close enough to a network to ask Brad if the DeLong Law of diminishing returns to and from minor nodes in networks (if I've got it right) might not be relevant to airline policy debates. Waddyareckon, Brad? I think so. Markets aren't friendly toward universal service--they're friendly toward people in the really,really big nodes... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: pen-l malaise
I don't think that we need to bicker about the IMF. It is a tool of the oppressors and does terrible harm. Now, now. If there were no IMF--if there were no one willing and able to loan Argentina $40 billion to try to get it through its current episode of capital flight and foreign investor panic--how, exactly, would the people of Argentina be better off? Every serious attempt to answer this question I've heard involves somehow automagically reconstituting the functions of the IMF--a kinder, gentler IMF--with no plausible story of how the institution to carry out these functions is to be created. The availability of IMF loans gives countries facing financial crises a *few* more options: Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes created it for a reason, after all. They were not dumb. If you want to know how the international financial system would function in its absence, I have always thought that 1931 et sequelae in Austria gives you a good idea of what would be likely to happen... Brad DeLong
Re: Botswana? No thanks... was Development Questionfor Brad
Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 12:16:30 -0700 From: Brad DeLong [EMAIL PROTECTED] But the ability to successfully run a developmental state appears to be confined to (a) East Asia, (b) Northwest Europe, (c) Mauritius, and (d) Botswana. Chiming in from this side (3 hours from Gabarone), my colleague Guy Mhone has contributed part of a chapter that I hope gives Brad some second thoughts about the difference between growth and development: *** Botswana: Economic Success, Development Failure ...Botswana elevated itself to one of the fastest growing countries in the world. Between 1966 and 1980, Botswana_s GDP grew at an annual rate of 14.5%, while industrial production grew at 18% per year, manufacturing at 23% per year, agriculture at 8.3% per year and services at 14.5% per year. Per capita GDP quintupled over the first 20 years of independence During the 1990s, as global integration intensified, Botswana_s economic growth slowed. GDP rose at slightly below 10% per year during the first half of the decadesome scholars argue that income inequality of Botswana citizens is declining...Trends in poverty studied by Jefferis (1997) are hopeful, including a decline in households falling below the poverty datum line from 49% in 1985/86 to 37% in 1993/94... Twelvefold increases in GDP per capita with no rise in income inequality over the first three decades after independence? Botswana's economy is unbalanced toward mining, and it has a ferocious case of Dutch disease because of its mining industry. But the overall record in terms of improvements in material welfare is astonishing. (Although, alas, Botswana is about to be hit very hard by the AIDS crisis.) Botswana doesn't need balance: it needs to find a niche in the southern African regional economy that will sustain further rapid growth, whether or not that niche meets some definition of development. Denmark never developed after all... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Economic Terrorism---MichelChossudovsky
You are correct. This is absolutely flame bait. We do not need this here. We have been over this many times. Please do not even bother refuting this message. Why would you even bother to put something on that you know is almost certain to cause trouble? Michael Pugliese wrote: I know Perelman will hate this (don't blame him!) but, short reply to ~!~. Jared on an hour long debate with David Rohde on Australian Broadcasting Corp. denied ANY massacre in Srbenica. 7,000, you say? Imperialist lies. Why should pointing out that there are apologists for the would-be-genocidal neo-fascists of Serbia cause trouble? It seems to me that people need to hear *more* about ethnic cleansing--whether by the Serbian government, the Croatian government, Kosovar Albanian guerrillas, or others--not less. Brad DeLong
Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Re: brad de long textbook
RE Brad's It is a perfect illustration of how monopolistically competitive markets with entry do not produce anything like the social optimum... It is also a clear example of how firms, seeking to make profits, shape market structure: market structure is often endogenously determined by profit-seeking firms. I recollect this sort of thing being discussed in the NC literature in the mid-to late-1980s but I don't think this point of view has done much to change how micro is taught at the undergraduate level. Competition in NC textbooks is still of the static sort rather than the dynamic type of competition discussed in the classical literature. (Debating note: when in doubt label what you don't like as static and label what you do like as dynamic.) Eric . Which is why I want to lobby Hal Varian to thoroughly revise his micro textbook. His old textbook crossbred with _Information Rules_ would, I think, be very nice indeed... Brad DeLong
Re: reigniting the inequality debate
This article gives a nice summary of some of the issues in measuring inequality. Wade, Robert. 2001. Winners and Losers. The Economist (28 April). Global inequality is worsening as the distribution of income becomes more unequal. The answer to what is happening to world income distribution turns out to depend heavily on whether countries are weighted by population, and whether income in different countries is measured in PPP terms or by using actual exchange rates. Why would one ever want *not* to count people rather than countries? Why would one ever want to *not* use PPP? We are interested in what's happening to people, aren't we? And people don't eat exchange rates: they use their income as a source of purchasing power over goods and services. Brad DeLong
Re: Brad on Massacres
Brad, it would be fine, except for the selectivity. Why do enemies of the U.S. imperialists get so much attention? I have to run in a minute, so I must be brief. What serbia did was a fraction of the harm Clinton/Bush did to the children of Iraq. I know that you don't support that policy. Yes, Serbia, Croatia and the Muslims ALL did nasty things. But the Serbians get singled out... My eight-year-old already knows that She did it too! is not a valid defense or excuse. Brad DeLong
Re: Development Question for Brad
If, for the purposes of argument, we assume all the growth data are accurate and properly indicative, and restrict ourselves to the last 20 years, the neoliberal argument seems to fare much better if one takes China and India as the rule, and Africa and Latin America as the exception, where the anti side seems to fare better if one takes Africa and Latin America as the rule, and China and India as the exception. Well put. In the former case, marketization seems to have dramatically improved the rate of growth in living standards over the previous 20 years; in the latter case, improvement on average looks closer to flat, with several dramatic cases of reversal; and overall, several people have argued, rates of growth are much less than they were during the years 1950-1970. So in the first case, the neoliberal approach looks to have succeeded, and the latter, failed. Both areas contain roughly the same amount of population. The oil shocks of the 1970s and the extraordinarily high interest rates of the 1980s produced as a side effect of the Reagan deficits had a good deal to do with slower growth in Latin America (and catastrophe in Africa) as well. And there are more success stories than just China and India. Over the past decade we have seen, outside of East Asia, average annual rates of real GDP growth of... Chile 7.2% India 6.0% Dominican Rep. 5.8% Sri Lanka 5.3% Costa Rica 5.1% Mauritius 5.1% El Salvador 5.0% Peru5.0% Argentina 4.9% Bangladesh 4.7% Tunisia 4.6% Poland 4.5% Botswana4.3% Mauritania 4.2% Guatemala 4.2% Bolivia 4.2% Panama 4.2% Turkey 3.8% Uruguay 3.8% Honduras3.3% Nicaragua 3.2% Philippines 3.2% Puerto Rico 3.1% Brazil 3.0% I, at least, would agree that if you have a bureaucracy that can successfully run a developmental state--that is, provide subsidies to companies that successfully export rather than companies run by the husband of the niece of the vice-minister, invest in infrastructure like mad, and craft an import tariff policy to boost national saving and improve the terms of trade rather than to provide comfortable protected markets for businesses run by clients of the president--then there is lots of evidence that such a policy can lead to very rapid growth indeed. But the ability to successfully run a developmental state appears to be confined to (a) East Asia, (b) Northwest Europe, (c) Mauritius, and (d) Botswana. So what to do elsewhere, where you can't successfully run a developmental state? Whether neoliberalism is the answer is unclear (although it still seems to me to be a better bet than the alternatives). And, of course, there are the problems of implementation: if privatization means a shift from state-run monopolies to privately-owned monopolies, it is unclear where the efficiency gains from competition are supposed to come from... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Martin Brown's a Liar
On Tue, 1 May 2001, Brad DeLong wrote: I'm trying to be a little more polite than my interlocutors. It's a *strategy*: a version of tit-for-tat. You may think that it is the wrong strategy to follow, but it is not an obviously stupid strategy. And I, at least, am not smart enough to think of a better one. Didn't Robert Axelrod show with his computer simulation tournaments that tit-for-two-tats was demonstrably superior? Indeed... Good point.
Re: Re: Re: brad de long textbook
On Wednesday, May 2, 2001 at 21:20:47 (-0700) Brad DeLong writes: Is there something specific about software that makes the open-source management problem particularly easy? Or can we look forward to the development of similar collective freeware intellectual efforts in other areas as well? Software techniques and modern software language features allow you to decompose problems fairly readily. This decoupling of various parts allows you to work in common on describing what is to be done by designing the interfaces and then to work in smaller groups on how to implement the needed functionality described in the various interfaces. This, coupled with software that is designed to allow developers to share code and to work concurrently on the same body of code (this software is usually known as source code control software, a popular example is CVS), makes it relatively easy to do. An example is the writing of a stopwatch program. You might discuss what the interface would be like: you need to start it, stop it, get the elapsed time, etc. So, you'd need three functions to implement this, and given a bit more info (what the internal data type looks like and a bit more description), the three functions could be coded by three developers in three separate source code files that resided on the same central machine but were shared via the internet through a version control system. There are some aspects of this type of work that are difficult, though: the communication medium is very inefficient compared to face-to-face interchange. Imagine Crick and Watson sitting on opposite coasts and trying to work out ideas via e-mail. It can be quite difficult without face-to-face communication, but you can compensate by being careful in what you write and learning others' assumptions, styles, etc. I might also add that software is written in very highly constrained languages, so perhaps writing natural language texts would be more difficult, but perhaps not. Bill Good and interesting points. I wish you had a bottom line, but I think you would be foolhardy to have one at this stage...
Re: RE: Re: Re: brad de long textbook
Jim wrote, After all, it's the sovereign consumers who decide what sucks and what doesn't suck. But remember one of the key characteristics of the textbook market--the ultimate user (the student) does not pick the book. The professor does (and most often the professor does not have information about the price). Say, rather, that demand for books is highly inelastic once the professor has adopted it, and that total $$$ spent by students doesn't play a large role (it does play some role) in the professorial adoption decision. Publishers and editors will say that although they use their local post-adoption monopoly power to the fullest to extract revenue from students, they and their companies don't get to keep it. They compete for course adoptions by spending more and more money on supplements and add-ons that they hope will make the professor happy, and make him or her adopt the book. This is a highly dissipative activity: the value of the supplements to the professor is much less than the cost to the students of the money spent producing them. It is a perfect illustration of how monopolistically competitive markets with entry do not produce anything like the social optimum... Brad DeLong
Re: RE: Re: brad de long textbook
Title: Microeconomics: The Quest for Profits, the Use of Power, and the Social Good Level: Principles of Microeconomics Cost: ZERO -- downloadable free from the Internet as Adobe Acrobat files (professionally formatted to look pretty). Or, for the cost of shipping ($3?), available on a CD. Publisher: Me Chapter Titles: The Surplus, Different Economic Systems, Development of Capitalism, Profits and the Markup, Competition, Barriers to Entry, Strategies to Boost Firm Profits, Social Limits to the Actions of Firms, The Drive for Large Size, Industrial Landscape of US Economy, Demand, Social Creation of Demand, Monopoly, Oligopoly, Highly Competitive Industries, Supply and Demand, The Employment Relationship, Wages and Work Effort, Technological Change, and Capitalism and the Social Good. It should be 200-250 pages when completed Plus, I think this will be the first open source textbook: you will be able to download Word files that contain all the text, tables, and figures. You will be able to do what you want with this material for your students: only use certain chapters, rewrite it, add to it, etc (as long as you don't do it to make money! You must provide this material to students at the cost of reproducing it). The text is best described as a mix of Bowles/Edwards and a standard micro text that doesn't fetishize mathematics and diagrams. Why am I doing all this work and, then, giving it away free? Answer: Damaged DNA. Eric Nilsson Department of Economics California State University San Bernardino, CA 92407 [EMAIL PROTECTED] No. Not damaged DNA. Premature, perhaps, but perhaps not. If you wished (although God knows why you would) to portray your actions as a gamble by a flinty-eyed amoral profit-maximizing academic careerist, you could say that: --in ten years improvements in display technology and Moore's Law will have brought the cost and convenience of portable book-readers to a level where *no one* would prefer to read a book than read a file on their portable book-reader. --the end of the technological edge of paper over pixels means the end of the money-making academic author. With initiatives like MIT's Open Courseware guaranteeing that professors anywhere, anytime can have MIT's course readings, problems, and assignments, soon no professor anywhere will *dare* require that students pay for a (probably inferior) textbook. --hence professors will write textbooks to gain status or to scratch an educational itch, and will be eager to distribute them online as widely as possible in order to have intellectual influence. Paul Samuelson supposedly said once that as far as his contribution to human progress was concerned, he would rather write a nation's textbooks than make its laws. Future Samuelsons will rather have well-visited websites than either. (Or perhaps they will rather run influential listserves?) --and in this as in so many new economy areas, first movers have powerful advantages. The open source aspect of it is especially interesting. It has proven very possible to design and maintain excellent computer programs with a small charismatic core directing and assessing the voluntary contributions of a floating horde of part-time contributors. Even though the gift exchange model gets only 1/n of each contributor's full-time effort, if you can get m n contributors through the internet--and if you can organize their contributions--you have a powerful programming team. Is there something specific about software that makes the open-source management problem particularly easy? Or can we look forward to the development of similar collective freeware intellectual efforts in other areas as well? I don't know the answer. I think it is a very interesting question.
Re: Re: brad de long textbook
The consumer is the instructor. Mankiw's text is like cotton candy. It gives the student the feeling that the teacher is teaching something. It makes the illusion of teaching simpler. The professors I know who like and teach from Mankiw say that the big virtue of Mankiw's book is that students *read* and *understand* it--that they didn't read or didn't understand the much longer, much denser, and more substantive Dornbusch and Fischer (which is what I learned from). A polar opposite to Mankiw is Olivier Blanchard's textbook, which is a magnificent intellectual exercise but which is all-but-impenetrable to my undergraduates: he simply juggles too many balls in the air at once. It is how Olivier Blanchard thinks about issues of macroeconomic policy, crystalized and set down on paper, and it is absolutely brilliant. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: brad de long textbook
Well said, but I have never seen any of the add-ons that were worth enough to influence my choice. It is possible that the publishers are deluding themselves. But they certainly *think* that the add-ons matter a lot...
Re: RE: Re: brad de long textbook
Brad, when is this puppy coming out? max October...
Re: RE: Re: brad de long textbook
And I'm sure he is donating all his advance and royalties back to UC to underwrite scholarships for low income and minority students, matching in action, his rhetoric to others about thier moral obligations to California society. Learn to spell their.
Martin Brown's a Liar
Actually, I want to apologize to pen-l for these two posts. Offline Brad explained to me his philosophy of being obnoxious to people in email discussion groups because it is a good technique for stimulating intellectual discusssion. But, not agreeing with him on this, I should not have taken the bait so easily. Sorry won't happen again. Liar. The post you are referring to, was, in its entirety: I'm trying to be a little more polite than my interlocutors. It's a *strategy*: a version of tit-for-tat. You may think that it is the wrong strategy to follow, but it is not an obviously stupid strategy. And I, at least, am not smart enough to think of a better one. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Nestor on HDI
I have little quarrel with the substance of Lou's latest argument -- my weasel words were provided you understand what they're measuring. As far as I understand it, in general the data that UN and Bretton Woods agencies report are gathered by national governments, not directly by these agencies. Much should be asked about the insitutions and power used to gather those figures, as I tried to suggest. Of course the inevitable response is OK what *do* you use to make comparisons across time and space. (Any moment now, I expect somebody to accuse Lou of being one of those nihilist antiscience postmodernists.) The only way out of this impasse over data -- it's all we have so we must use it versus it's hopelessly compromised is more specific questions. For example, as Nestor suggests finding a normal or baseline year for Argentina is a mug's game. Nor is it useful to ask generally if things are getting better or worse, going uphill or downhill. Different groups will be differently affected. It's quite possible that in some period in some country, a large majority would see a clear improvement in living standards while a minority was reduced from poverty to absolute destitution. And then there are questions of time periods. For example figures on life expectancy may be mainly giving you a read on shifts in conditions decades earlier. Best, Colin The original question was rather simple: are statistics showing broad and substantial increases in real incomes in the developing world masking a reality of broad and substantial immiserization because (a) the increase in incomes is just a shift from uncounted household to counted market production, (b) people live in cities which are unhealthy places and a higher real income is needed to maintain the same real welfare, and (c) increasing inequality means that social welfare is going down even as average incomes are going up? And the answer is no. If the statistics showing broad and substantial increases in real incomes in the developing world were masking a reality of broad and substantial immiserization we would expect to see infant mortality rates rising, life expectancies falling, and educational levels falling as well as parents pulled their children out of school and put them to work to keep the wolf from the door. And--with the exceptions of the horrible AIDS crisis in Africa, and the collapse in Eastern Eastern Europe--we do not. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Low productivity in the GlobalSouth
Brad, there was a long debate about the standard of living during the Industrial Revolution. You probably know the literature as well as anyone. The issue is complex, but Lou's monetization point cannot be dismissed. Yes it can be dismissed. It's not important or powerful enough to alter trends. There was a long debate about the standard of living during the Industrial Revolution *in* *Britain*. There is no debate about the standard of living during the Industrial Revolution in France, or Germany, or Spain, or Sweden, or Italy because no one maintains that urbanization and industrialization lowered the standard of living of the rural poor, or of those who migrated to the cities and so changed from being rural poor to being urban poor. The United Nations Development Program works hard at compiling a human development index--a weighted combination of life expectancy, educational attainment, and real material standards of living across the world. You can take a look at trends in the HDI since the 1970s at http://www.undp.org/hdro/BackMatter1.pdf. The claim that people in developing countries today are worse off than their counterparts a generation or two ago is, as best as we can tell from the life expectancy data (which is solid), the education data (which is subject to some manipulation, but is by and large consistent with what surveys report), and the real GDP data (much more shaky), completely false. Now you can look at the world as it is--and see global progress (although much less than I would wish to see). Or you can emulate the Bourbons. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Low productivity in the Global South
Michael Perelman wrote: Brad, there was a long debate about the standard of living during the Industrial Revolution. You probably know the literature as well as anyone. The issue is complex, but Lou's monetization point cannot be dismissed. No it can't, but 1) we're a long way past the Industrial Revolution, and 2) does anyone know how many people it applies to today? We seem to have two extremes here, with LNP saying it applies broadly, and BDL saying it hardly applies at all. Does anyone really know? Doug Well, the Human Development Index suggests substantial progress over the past generation. But that would involve actually looking at the world, which is not encouraged in this venue. A cite to Marx's belief that the urban poor of Manchester in 1848 were poorer than their grandparents had been in the British countryside in 1798 is preferable to observing that even in resource-poor Bangladesh today, with U.S. consumers protected against the danger of buying Bangladeshi textiles made with child labor, 80% of newborns are expected to survive to age 40, and that was definitely not the case two generations ago... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Low productivity in the Global South
The debate about the standard of living him in the Industrial Revolution involved some of the best in economic historians. It was quite similar in some ways to the exchanges between Lou and Brad. You asked for conclusive answers. That's easy. Just tell me the answer you want, and we can find the appropriate authorities to support it. One side said that the workers could now drink tea. The other side said that the team was a poor substitute for milk. Bullshit. Everyone--at least everyone who was honest--agreed that improvements in working-class standards of living during the 1790-1850 period in Britain were small or nonexistent if there were any improvements at all. Everyone agreed that improvements in working-class standards of living after 1850 were large--on the order of 1% per year or more average growth in real incomes. Estimates of the average trend in British working-class standards of living between 1790 and 1850 ranged from a lower bound of about -0.3 percent per year to an upper bound of +0.4 percent per year. Any honest assessment of the debate is very, very far indeed from: Just tell me the answer you want, and we can find the appropriate authorities to support it. The more interesting question--and the question about which there is more disagreement--is not what happened to working-class standards of living in Britain during the industrial revolution?--but what would have happened to working-class standards of living in the absence of the industrial revolution? One possibility (advocated by Ken Pomeranz and others) is that Britain would have undergone a full-blown Malthusian crisis with *massive* declines in living standards on the part of the poor until increases in death rates stopped population growth--and that only the coming of the industrial revolution allowed British working-class standards of living to remain roughly constant in the first half of the nineteenth century. Another possibility is that Britain without the social upheaval of the industrial revolution would have had lower rates of population growth, a higher land/labor ratio, and possibly higher real wages. These issues are still wide open. But this kind of nihilistic denial that we know anything about the past--that authorities are driven by ideology and nothing else--is simply false. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Low productivity in the Global South
Well, yes, but isn't it obvious to PK that the latter (competition among workers for jobs) far outweighs the former (competition among capitalists for workers) when 50% or more of the labor force are unemployed sweatshop wages are better than wages of many other kinds of work in the area??? Since he himself argues that sweatshop work is in fact greatly desired by workers who have few other options??? Yoshie No. Wage levels in open developing countries have been increasing rapidly over the past two generations, and so (with the exception of the United States and New Zealand) have wage levels in industrial countries... Brad DeLong
Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: brad de long textbook
For fiscal you should have shown a big truck labeled neoliberalism running the turtle over in the middle of the screen. mbs You have a better way to teach people the relative lags involved in automatic stabilizers, monetary policy, and discretionary fiscal policy? :-) Brad DeLong Shme on you! Now I hve coffee up my nose nd ll over my keybord nd the key won't work nymore!
Re: FW: Why Feds Spend More on Suburban Schoolsthan Poor Ones?
HOW REDISTRIBUTION OPERATES Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia It has been often noticed, both by proponents of laissez-faire capitalism and by radicals, that the poor in the United States are not net benficiaries of the total government programs and interventions in the economy. Much of mbs: Noted by people who can't count, I imagine. It does indicate that even in his high libertarian phase--the mid-1970s--Nozick did not quite dare make the argument that government programs to keep the poor from having to sleep under bridges are bad because they violate the poor's rights to be autonomous liberal individuals. Instead, he felt like he had to make the argument that such government policies were ineffective. To my mind, one of the best things the _New Republic_ ever published was called Anarchy, State, and Rent Control: it was about how Nozick used the Cambridge Rent Control Board to break the contract that he (as an autonomous, liberal individual) had made with Eric Segal, and to keep squatting in Segal's apartment... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Czech issues.
Reminds me of the details in the memoir of Zdenek Mlynar, Nightfrost in Prague. http://www.hfni.gsehd.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/CWIHP/BULLETINS/b2a4.htm Mlynar was on the CC of the Czech Communist Party in '68 (and a former roomate of Gorbachev's in the 50's) and went to Moscow with Dubcek and other members of the CC to negotiate with Brezhnev and Suslov et. al. Comrade Brezhnev related a hotline conversation with LBJ before the Warsaw Pact invasion where he asked point blank if NATO would intervene against the Warsaw Pact in the event of an invasion to normalize the Czech situation. LBJ, said in so many words, You have your sphere of influence, we have ours...We will not risk war to save Czechoslovakia. Good illustration of the E.P. Thompson view that the Cold War was a mechanism used by each systems political ruling class to maintain domination over their respective populations. Michael Pugliese You would rather that Lyndon Johnson would have risked total thermonuclear war to keep Dubcek in power? There were people in the White House then who would have benn glad to oblige... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Low productivity in the Global South
Good God! Do you think that the *entire* World Bank _Human Development Report_ is a lie? I don't mind the personal shit--it indicates a lack of thought, and a lack of argument, as well as a chronic inability to actually *look* at the world. Lou is absolutely correct in his economics -- which means that I agree with him -- but you, Lou, are wrong to personalize your note by challenging Brad personally. On Sun, Apr 29, 2001 at 12:33:25PM -0400, Louis Proyect wrote: No. Wage levels in open developing countries have been increasing rapidly over the past two generations, and so (with the exception of the United States and New Zealand) have wage levels in industrial countries... Brad DeLong Of course wages have been going up. You start with zero when you are a subsistence farmer living outside the cash economy. When a Colombian peasant, who grew his own food and traded the surplus for manufactured goods in a village plaza, gets thrown off his land and takes a job in factory, he has more money than he ever had but he is poorer than ever. That is why there is rebellion in Colombia. Peasants want to return to the days when they could live off the land. Of course, those who end up in a factory are the fortunate exception. Most Latin American or African ex-peasants end up in the informal economy which means prostitution, drug-peddling, shoe-shining, hawking chewing gum or fruit, etc. This is the social layer that formed the base of the Sandinista revolution coincidentally. In any case, I'd love to see somebody like DeLong go work in a maquila factory for a year or so, like his fellow Berkeley prof Michael Burawoy does. Then at least, his interventions on leftwing mailing lists might come across less as propaganda, and more like lived experience. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/ -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: brad de long textbook
A book rep came to my office today telling me how good brad de long's text book would be. Will it be polluted with AS/AD? Minor pollution with AS/AD only--I want to focus on the Phillips curve instead of AS/AD, especially because you have to basically lie to your students to get the AD curve sloping the right way (a price level decline doesn't raise aggregate demand by raising the real money stock, it reduces aggregate demand because it raises real interest rates and causes chains of bankruptcies). It's a heavily American-Keynesian book (for these times, at least). It's a heavily neoclassical book. I think it's a very good book: perhaps one intermediate macro book (Mankiw) is clearer (although I think I'm more interesting), and one intermediate macro book (Blanchard) is clearly superior as an intellectual effort (although Blanchard is really, really hard for undergraduates. A *draft* of the preface is below. Current ms. versions of chapters 1 through 3 can be (or soon will be) found at: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/MHText/Chapter_1.PDF http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/MHText/Chapter_2.PDF http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/MHText/Chapter_3.PDF Why Write This Book? I wrote this book out of a sense that it was time for intermediate macroeconomics to have many of the barnacles scraped off of its hull. It is more than three-quarters of a century since John Maynard Keynes wrote his _Tract on Monetary Reform_, which first linked inflation, production, employment, exchange rates, and government policy together in the pattern that we now call macroeconomics. It is two-thirds of a century since John Hicks and Alvin Hansen drew their IS and LM curves. It is more than one-third of a century since Milton Friedman and Ned Phelps demolished the static Phillips curve, and Robert Lucas, Thomas Sargent, and Robert Barro taught us what rational expectations could mean. And all the while intermediate macroeconomics has been becoming more complicated, as new material is added while old material remains. Thus we now have excellent macroeconomics textbooks--my three favorite are Andrew Abel and Ben Bernanke, Olivier Blanchard, and Gregory Mankiw. But they seem, to me at least, to have too much material that is in there primarily because of the way that macroeconomics has developed, and not primarily to aid students in understanding the material. It seemed to me that all three of these--excellent--textbooks went slower in the water than they might because of insufficient streamlining. It seemed to me that if I could successfully streamline the presentation then I would have a more understandable and comprehensible book. I believe that I have succeeded. I believe that this book does move more smoothly through the water than its competitors, and will prove to be a better textbook for third-millennium macroeconomics courses. I think that this is the case because I have made five changes in the standard presentation of modern macroeconomics. Note that these five changes are not radical: they are shifts of emphasis and changes of focus. They do not require recasting of courses. But they are very important in bringing the organization of the book in line with what students learning macroeconomics need to know. The first two changes have to do with economic growth. They continue the line of development begun by Gregory Mankiw, who first began to recapture the study of long-run economic growth as a major topic in intermediate macroeconomics. But the presentations of long-run growth--both the facts of growth and the theory of growth--in modern macroeconomics textbooks need to be beefed up, and I have done so. I believe that the subject of economic growth is worth much more than one or even two short chapters. One of this book's longest chapters is on the theory of economic growth. A second one of its longest chapters covers the facts of economic growth. Students need to see and understand the broad cross-country and cross-time patterns: the industrial revolution, the spread of industrialization, the East Asian miracle, and the American century. Students have no business leaving macroeconomics courses without understanding the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. The treatment of growth in this textbook will keep them from doing so. More important than the thicker and deeper treatment of the facts of economic growth, perhaps, is a better treatment of the theory of economic growth. Too often undergraduates find the standard presentation of growth theory--with concepts like output per effective worker--to be confusing. The more understandable and robust presentation of growth theory in this book focuses on the economy's steady-state capital-output ratio, which is itself a very simple function of the proximate determinants of accumulation: savings rates, depreciation rates, population growth, and labor-augmenting technical change.
Re: RE: Re: brad de long textbook
I can't wait for the video game version, with the cheetah, rabbit, and snail racing across the screen. mbs You have a better way to teach people the relative lags involved in automatic stabilizers, monetary policy, and discretionary fiscal policy? :-) Brad DeLong
Re: Re: What is going on?
i am not entirely sure about that. it is difficult to tell if things have got worse in tamil nadu, given that the rivers were dry when they were not transporting sewage and industrial waste even back in 1980, but the increased pollution has made life quite difficult in the big cities like madras (tamil nadu) (now called chennai by tamil zealots and foreigners ;-), but always madras to anyone who was born and brought up there) and bombay (maharashtra). this does not counter your point - this degradation might be short term or might only be the flip side of much larger gains for the lower classes, etc. --ravi I suspect increased urban pollution is going to be a long-term problem in India--long-term meaning fifty years or more before local governments find the political will to begin dealing with it. If U.S. or British history is any guide, there will be a substantial period of time during which both business and worker representatives regard sewage and industrial waste as things that they cannot yet afford to curb, or that can be curbed only with worse consequences for their constituents. The hope is that better modes of communication and organization and better technologies will allow developing countries today to take a 'greener' development path than northwest Europe or north America did. But I cannot see any way to realize this hope... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Exporting rubbish
The problem is not so much with their choice as with the conditions that make them accept that choice. There are two problems. The first problem is the conditions that make them accept that choice. The second problem is made up of those who work hard to make their options smaller, and their conditions worse--like the Bush administration spokesmen who say that the problem with Kyoto is it doesn't call for India to cut its CO2 emissions.
Re: Re: Low productivity in the Global South
Does even PK honestly think that, with free flow of capital, there would be competition of sweatshops for labor, as opposed to unemployed workers landless peasants competing with one another for a shot at sweated labor? Yoshie Of course he does. In general there will be both: capitalists will compete with capitalists for workers (out of whose labor they think they can make a profit) and workers will compete with workers for jobs (better than the ones they currently have, or than their other opportunities). brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Exporting rubbish
The social welfare costs are *not* proportional to forgone earnings.
Really? Isn't this exactly how economists think? Isn't this exactly
how they do cost-benefit analysis?
{Change in Social Welfare} = {Change in Real per Capita GDP} - {Terms
Associated with Increased Inequality (Where Exposure to Toxics on the
Part of the Poor Is a Driver of Increased Inequality}
Right-of-center economists may throw the last terms away (or claim
that they are always small). But we card-carrying Democratic
neoliberals do not. Recall that the Bentsen-Rubin-Summers Treasury
pushed very hard for higher top income tax rates and the EITC in 1993
out of a belief that using the tax system to reduce inequality was if
not job 1 at least job 2.5, and recall the Treasury's opposition
(along with the *entire* rest of the cabinet) to welfare reform.
Of course, in the fish-rots-from-the-head department, there are the
stories that my ex-boss Alicia Munnell did not get the Social
Security Commissioner job she wanted because Clinton and Gore were
annoyed that she was a little too effective on the
anti-welfare-reform side in internal debates within the Executive
Office of the President...
Brad DeLong
Re: Exporting rubbish
John Henry wrote: Meanwhile the infamous Larry Summers World Bank memo becomes accepted practice writ large (and one you appear to support). Which memo was that and what is it that I would support? = THE MEMO DATE: December 12, 1991 TO: Distribution FR: Lawrence H. Summers Subject: GEP 'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons: 1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. In my view, point 1 is where Lant Pritchett (the author of the memo) screwed up. The social welfare costs are *not* proportional to forgone earnings. Points (2) and (3), by contrast, seem to me to be correct. World social welfare would rise if we moved polluting industries out of the Los Angeles basin to someplace poorer with cleaner air. And countries like Mozambique should be concerned with fighting malaria, not with reducing rates of prostate cancer in men over 80... Brad DeLong --
Re: Sweatshops and Krugman
For example, could anything be worse than having children work in sweatshops? Alas, yes. In 1993, child workers in Bangladesh were found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart, and Senator Tom Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries employing underage workers. The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets - and that a significant number were forced into prostitution. == Well, why didn't Harkin get Jesse Helms to write a kinder gentler aid/develoment package so that schools and health clinics would be built. Was THAT the anti-sweatshop movement's fault? Yes. Harkin's claim was that the bill would improve conditions in Bangladesh--would make the Bangladeshi government straighten up and fly right. He was wrong. If Harkin had tied his bill to increased development aid for Bangladesh, I would think better of him... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Sweatshops and Krugman
== Well, why didn't Harkin get Jesse Helms to write a kinder gentler aid/develoment package so that schools and health clinics would be built. Was THAT the anti-sweatshop movement's fault? Yes. Harkin's claim was that the bill would improve conditions in Bangladesh--would make the Bangladeshi government straighten up and fly right. He was wrong. If Harkin had tied his bill to increased development aid for Bangladesh, I would think better of him... Brad DeLong Brad, would it have gotten out of committee if he and his legislative aids had written it right? Ian Since the point is that the policy as written was *stupid* and *counterproductive*, that's irrelevant. To get something destructive out of committee is an achievement only to those who view politics as an arena for personal self-expression. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: What is going on?
brad, thanks for your response. your answers are helpful but perhaps i should also mention the hidden question: do you see this rise in growth/GDP as a "good thing" (for india)? Yes... do these numbers translate to anything for the common man? Not (or not yet) for the bottom 40% (or the bottom 60% in places like Uttar Pradesh or Bihar). those who responded to did so in a manner that suggests that you consider GDP as a sufficient measure of quality of life. is that true? No. GDP per capita is correlated with quality of life (because more resources give you more opportunities). But the correlation is not that strong. In fact, I just heard Bill Easterly give a talk about the extraordinary divergence between GDP per capita growth in Pakistan over 1950-1980 and the *failure* of any measures of human development to show significant progress. Things like 3% measured female literacy in NWFP... ...if these gains are at the cost of long term harm (especially in a country like india where environmental regulation are lax and enforcement is non-existant, and that is partly true for labour rights, social security, etc)? Jeff Sachs (who I heard talk about this last fall, when he was giving his "Tropical Underdevelopment" talk http://www.cid.harvard.edu/cidwp/057.htmhttp://www.cid.harvard.edu/cidwp/057.pdf) would answer your question with a "yes" as far as the Ganges Valley (where in his view increased agricultural production has brought with it large-scale present and future ecological devastation), but clearly no in South India, in Maharashtra, and in Gujerat, where the environmental burden of rapid growth is proving far lighter. I know a lot less about this than he does... in short, would you call the changes in india positive and proof of the effectiveness of free market systems working with a liberal social agenda, such as seems to be the claim (not about india, but about the combination of free markets and liberalism) of someone like paul krugman of MIT (princeton?). Another decade of rapid growth, and India may indeed become the poster child for neoliberalism. The shift in measured economic growth rates around the time when the Rajiv Gandhi administration takes the first steps toward dismantling his mother's and grandfather's "license raj" is impressive. I do believe that the state *must* do infrastructure investment (because nobody else will) and *must* use its tax system to equalize the distribution of income (because if it doesn't democracy is unsustainable--and you wind up with rule by the death squads). But I also fear that outside the charmed circles of the "old" nation states of northwest Europe and of the Asian Pacific Rim, the state takes on additional tasks at great peril and great risk: what seem like sensible policies to allocate scarce foreign exchange and so preserve reasonable terms of trade turn into excuses for corruption. I don't, however, think we know much about what pieces of neoliberal reforms are truly beneficial, and what ones simply widen the distribution of income without doing much if anything for the people. Dani Rodrik (who also knows a lot more about South Asia than I do) inclines toward the belief that it was the freeing-up of access to foreign-made capital goods in the mid-1980s that had the big beneficial effect on growth, and that the stuff since (like the expansion of the stock market) has had smaller effects... Brad Delong
Re: Re: Re: Re: What is going on?
Brad, please refrain from the personal jibes. If you want to delete somebody, you are welcome to do so, but there is no reason to announce it. On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 10:04:04PM -0700, Brad DeLong wrote: While I agree that Brad's original note was certain to provoke, this discussion is getting increasingly personal. I won't see Yates's stuff anymore... Effective functioning communities of discourse are possible only if people hold to *minimal* levels of civility. And people need to be made aware of where that *minimal* line is. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: What is going on?
While I agree that Brad's original note was certain to provoke, this discussion is getting increasingly personal. I won't see Yates's stuff anymore...
Re: Re: Re: Re: What is going on?
You will also find horror stories with the CPM, and this is coming from a CPM sympathetizer (that's me). From a distance everything looks sanitized. The ground reality is far more complex. Reality is always more complex. But that doesn't mean that Kerala's accomplishments in education aren't real...
Re: Re: Re: Re: What is going on?
On this I will have to agree with Brad. I think the (advanced capitalist country) left tends to dismiss growth. It is possible that growth is likely to lead to inequality initially (Kuznets curve) but it does not have to remain that way. At the moment, however, the fact that so much of Indian growth is centered in Gujerat and Maharashtra poses major political problems, especially for a government whose electoral base is in U.P. Unless standard-of-living gains are widespread and visible, it is not clear that there is a sustainable long-run political coalition to support Indian reform, at least as reform is currently envisioned. And I do not understand the appeal of the BJP... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: What is going on?
Anthony, I don't think any of the few paleo-Marxists on the list like myself would argue that developing countries can enjoy spurts of remarkable growth at a given time and in a given place. There is just too much empirical evidence against such a view. What we do argue is that such spurts tend to be of a transitory nature and can not lead to elevation of a country like India or Argentina into G7 ranks. Argentina was in "G7 ranks" back before World War II. IIRC, Argentina was fifth in the world in automobile ownership per capita in 1929, and B.A. was twelfth in the world in telephones per capita in 1913. I don't see anything "structural" about Argentina's--terrifying--relative economic decline. Nothing similar happened to Canada and Australia, which had very, very similar profiles in terms of their pre-WWII structural position in the world economy. (But they did have very different political profiles--summed up perhaps in the idea that British investors, property-owners, and bosses weren't "foreign.") Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: What is going on?
My questions to you would be: 1) do you see this as a sustained trend It has been ongoing for two decades. That doesn't mean that it won't be reversed, but rapid growth in India is definitely not just a flash in the pan. 2) to what do you attribute this change? economic liberalisation? Well, that is economists' conventional wisdom--that the "neoliberal" economic reforms of the Narasimha Rao government in the early 1990s were the decisive change. Dani Rodrik, however, argues that the structural break comes more than half a decade earlier, and that the more likely key was the Rajiv Gandhi government's decision to ease restrictions on imports of capital goods, which he argues (and I argue) are a key link in that they not only boost productivity directly but also carry a great deal of technology across national borders. I would have to say that I really don't know what has transformed India from an economy in which it takes more than 60 years for GDP per capita to double to one in which it takes less than 20 years for GDP per capita to double. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: What is going on?
Brad says Brad DeLong wrote: Rates of growth of GDP per capita, India: 1950-1980 1.1% per year 1980-1990 3.3% per year 1990-2000 4.2% per year At the pace of the last decade, India's real productivity is doubling every seventeen years (compared to a doubling time of 65 years before 1980). Any evidence on how this growth has been distributed? Are the bottom 20-40% any better off, or is it mainly captured by a thin urban middle class and the IT sector? Doug Average life expectancy in India is 63 years, 44% of Indians over 15 are illiterate, 53% of Indians under 5 are malnourished. India's poverty rate appears to have held constant over the decade of the 1990s. But I don't see how anything is going to push India's poverty rate down until education improves. Were you an Indian, you would have to root for the Communist Party of India (Marxist), then. * ...Despite overwhelming factors (cultural issues, population, resources), India's literacy is steadily improving. India's literacy rate at the time of independence (1947) was only 14% and female literacy was abysmally low at 8%. In 1981 the literacy rate was 36% and in 1991 it was 52% (males 65%, females 39%). The southern state of Kerala was the first to reach "100% literacy" for a city (Kottayam 1989), then a district (Ernakulam 1990), and finally the whole state (1991)... Yes. The CPI(M) has done amazing things as the government of Kerala... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: What is going on?
Although this thread began with some early taunts and flames, I think it is helping to shape out a picture of what growth means. I have not seen any professional academic journal article -- probably due to my own ignorance -- that describes how growth affects difference classes and sub-classes. Lenin's The Development of Capitalism in Russia is not bad in this respect. Brad typically relies on averages. I have challenged him numerous times on this. [I do not think that his beliefs qualify him as a doctrinaire ideologue of laissez-faire, as some of you have alleged.] Rapid growth seems to be associated, in most cases, with deteriorating conditions for the lowest quintile Brazil yes, Chile yes, Japan no, South Korea no, Taiwan no, Malaysia no, Thailand no, Hong Kong no, Singapore no, Italy no, Botswana no, China no, India maybe. That's 10-2-1. 2 is hardly "most"...
Re: Re: Re: Re: What is going on?
Brad DeLong quotes some dubious growth statistics about India and everyone goes bonkers. Why does anyone pay attention to him? This list is just an amusement for him. He likes to bait people and redbait the leftists from his perch at Berkeley (from which he waits for a Democrat to get elected so he can hop on the political gravy train again.) Someday we'll see him as an old man on some talk show ponticating like that pathetic old war criminal, Walt Rostow (about whom Brad spoke so highly), who was on TV the other night yattering about the national security advisor. Michael Yates Time to enlarge the killfile... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: What is going on?
Mike Yates writes: Brad DeLong quotes some dubious growth statistics about India and everyone goes bonkers. Why does anyone pay attention to him? I think it's good to debate the mainstream economists, if nothing but to keep our wits sharp. It's better than intra-left flames. However, it usually turns out to be very easy to poke holes in Brad's formulations and statistics. It's amazing that he is the best that UC-Berkeley has to offer. -- Jim Devine Time to enlarge the killfile still more. The noise-to-signal ratio is too high... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Market Socialism
Probably not intentionally calculated to do so. Michael Yates suggested that it was a reflexive action. As I said, it is not a reflex action. It is a mere commonplace: If you refuse to *think* about the future--claim that thinking about the future is positively harmful--don't be surprised at whatever future you get. Wrap yourself up in the mantle of Marx and refuse to think about the future, and you wind up with Lenin's understanding of the German planned World War I economy. That's one of the things that happened to world socialism between 1917 and its nadir in August 1939.
Re: Re: Re: Re: What is going on?
Brad DeLong wrote: Rates of growth of GDP per capita, India: 1950-1980 1.1% per year 1980-1990 3.3% per year 1990-2000 4.2% per year At the pace of the last decade, India's real productivity is doubling every seventeen years (compared to a doubling time of 65 years before 1980). Any evidence on how this growth has been distributed? Are the bottom 20-40% any better off, or is it mainly captured by a thin urban middle class and the IT sector? Doug Average life expectancy in India is 63 years, 44% of Indians over 15 are illiterate, 53% of Indians under 5 are malnourished. India's poverty rate appears to have held constant over the decade of the 1990s. But I don't see how anything is going to push India's poverty rate down until education improves. So the answer to your question is that the bottom 20-40% aren't better off not (much, if any). On the other hand, India's middle class--the 50th to the 90th percentile--are still very poor by U.S. standards, and their incomes have grown remarkably. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Market Socialism
I recall how Marx scrupulously tried to avoid discussions about how to organize the future, since it would just set off squabbling. And *not* discussing how to organize the future leads to... Stalin. I'd rather have a *lot* of squabbling myself... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Market Socialism
Brad just can't help red baiting. It's part of the air the breathes. michael yates Brad DeLong wrote: I recall how Marx scrupulously tried to avoid discussions about how to organize the future, since it would just set off squabbling. And *not* discussing how to organize the future leads to... Stalin. I'd rather have a *lot* of squabbling myself... Brad DeLong The observation that the post-1918 Bolshevik Party had no clue what kind of society it should be building--and that that was a big source of trouble--is not red-baiting. It's a commonplace. I've never met anyone so dumb as to claim the fact that the Second International did *no* thinking about what society would look like after the revolution played a role in opening the way for Stalin. Until now... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Market Socialism
"let's you and him fight!" -- is this an effort to divide and conquer (what's left of) the left? -- Jim Devine No. It's an attempt to *think* about the future. If you want to make not thinking about the future a virtue, go ahead...
Re: Re: What is going on?
Michael Perelman wrote: We have people on the list from Turkey, Argentina, Korea, and many other places where very important changes are taking place. Unfortunately, we hear almost nothing from the people on the ground in days places. i am from india and i have contributed some thoughts, though i am really neither trained to be an economist nor very knowledgeable about the subject. the big changes in india, from an economic perspective, came with the rajiv gandhi govt of the early eighties which changed the socialist/protectionist system of the nehru congress, and the janata party that came to power in the 70s. economic liberalisation was the "in" thing under finance ministers manmohan singh and p. chidambaram (at least one of them western - harvard? - educated) and the pressure from WTO/IMF was felt quite acutely. on the positive side the liberalisation led to efforts to lower corruption and bureaucracy. the entry of MNCs with vast monetary resources and consequent power, however, further disempowered grassroots activists for environmental and other causes. Rates of growth of GDP per capita, India: 1950-1980 1.1% per year 1980-1990 3.3% per year 1990-2000 4.2% per year At the pace of the last decade, India's real productivity is doubling every seventeen years (compared to a doubling time of 65 years before 1980). I can't help but think that a society with a per capita productive potential doubling every seventeen years will be able to achieve a *lot* more environmental protection and poverty reduction than one in which productivity increases are glacial. Brad DeLong
Re: (Fwd) Complaint about violation of academicfreedom in hiring
I think all North American academics should be aware of this travesty of academic freedom and human rights. Paul Phillips, Economics, University of Manitoba --- Forwarded message follows --- Date sent: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 15:07:59 -0800 To:(Recipient list suppressed) From: Sid Shniad [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Complaint about violation of academic freedom in hiring by SFU March 26, 2001 To:Jim Turk, Neil Tudiver (Fax 613-820-7244) Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) From: David F. Noble (phone 416- 778-6927/ Fax 416-778-8928) Re:Complaint to Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee about a violation of academic freedom in hiring by Simon Fraser University ...her firm had been retained by SFU to do a reference check on me. Since BC law requires employers to obtain a candidate's permission before consulting any reference, she was calling to ask me to give her permission to talk with four people... agents of activities or enterprises which I had publicly criticized. (Linda Harasim, director of the SFU Virtual U project, and Stan Shapson, York VP/Research, as avid promoters of both corporate-academic partnerships and online education, and Steven Feinberg,a statistician and former York VP, as an advocate of academic- industrial ties and, in particular, of the U.S.- based International Space University which I helped to keep out of Canada). The fourth person, Sheila Embleton, a linguist, now holds Michael Stevenson's job as York VP/Academic... I told her that the list was unambiguously political in that it included my political adversaries and antagonists and that I could not give her permission to consult them... Big, big mistake on David Noble's part. To say that your potential employers cannot talk to X provides those in the bureaucracy who want to halt the process with an excellent procedural excuse to do so. Truth to tell, I also think that David Noble's fear of "Digital Diploma Mills" is relevant to his professional qualifications, and in my view at least shows gaping holes in his ability to construct a logical argument. His central point is that one's instructional materials are one's own intellectual property that should *never* be shared or distributed unless someone pays you a healthy sum, and that the coming of the internet to the university is the same process of deskilling as that laid out in _Labor and Monopoly Capital_. I reread Noble's "Digital Diploma Mills" this morning, and found myself in a sea of phrases and sentences like: "...technology is but a vehicle and a disarming disguise "...the historic plight of other skilled workers... "...technology is being deployed by management primarily to discipline, de-skill, and displace labor... "...the new technology of education, like the automation of other industries, robs faculty of their knowledge and skills, their control over their working lives, the product of their labor, and, ultimately, their means of livelihood... "...teachers as labor are drawn into a production process designed for the efficient creation of instructional commodities, and hence become subject to all the pressures that have befallen production workers in other industries undergoing rapid technological transformation from above... "...once faculty and courses go online, administrators gain much greater direct control over faculty performance and course content than ever before and the potential for administrative scrutiny, supervision, regimentation, discipline and even censorship increase dramatically... "...once faculty put their course material online... the knowledge and course design skill embodied in that material is taken out of their possession... The administration is now in a position to hire less skilled, and hence cheaper, workers to deliver the technologically prepackaged course Their services are in the long run no longer required. They become redundant... "...the use of the technology entails an inevitable extension of working time and an intensification of work as faculty struggle at all hours of the day and night to stay on top of the technology and respond, via chat rooms, virtual office hours, and e-mail, to both students and administrators to whom they have now become instantly and continuously accessible... "...behind this effort are the ubiquitous technozealots who simply view computers as the panacea for everything, because they like to play with them... "...none of this is speculation..." washing over me. It wasn't pleasant. It wasn't persuasive. And it seemed to indicate a very different attitude--an immoral attitude--toward education and the diffusion of knowledge compared to, say, what Charles Vest was able to get his faculty to agree to in their Open Courseware Initiative: 1. What is MIT OpenCourseWare? The idea behind MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is to make MIT
Re: David Noble denied a chair
... permission for the university to call four people of their choice to act as references for him. Mr. Noble says the list of names included people who had publicly criticized his views and who had never worked directly with him. Mr. Noble denied the firm permission, arguing that he had already provided more than a dozen references... So who were the four people? Why did Simon Fraser need Noble's permission to call them? And why should Noble object? Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: ergonomics, etc.
But the idea that the left cannot be taken for granted is profoundly frightening to Dems. And profoundly heart-gladdening for Republicans. The idea that we might be able to exercise real power is absolutely terrifying. If we are to put together a winning party, it means taking votes from Dems, and throwing several elections to the GOP: And with high probability fail to put together a winning party. Meditate on Margaret Thatcher, and how she was able to transform Britain only because the fragments of the Labour Party were too busy trying to make sure that their fragment would be the core of a "winning party"--and throwing elections to the Tories. In the meantime, thanks for the repeal of ergonomic rules, thanks for the abandonment of planning how to regulate CO2, thanks for this extraordinarily regressive tax cut... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: ergonomics, etc.
National exit polls said that half of Nader voters would have supported Vice President Al Gore had Nader not been on the ticket. Thirty percent said they would not have voted and the rest would have gone for Bush. Oh, you are bringing in *facts*. You do understand that that isn't allowed here? :-) Brad DeLong
Re: GOP vs. GOP
It was the Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas who noted that FDR carried out the Socialist program "on a stretcher." But without the Socialists, the Communists, and other insurgent forces, the New Deal would have dwelt on National Recovery Administration-type corporatist "solutions" to the Depression and would have held back from more progressive reforms such as Social Security... And if third parties had split the anti-Republican vote in 1932 in the same proportion as LaFollette split the anti-Republican vote in 1924, the 1932 vote total would have been Roosevelt--38.4%; Third Party--22%; Hoover--39.6%. A highly likely electoral vote victory for Herbert Hoover, and no New Deal at all. Even where it is today the Democratic Party is committed to environmental protection, to workplace safety, to a more progressive tax system, and to no new Cold Wars; the Republican Party is committed to pollution, to employers' rights, to a more regressive tax system, and to confrontation with Russia and China. Only if you think that these issues don't matter can you be proud of a vote for Nader in 2000. And if you don't think that these issues matter, I don't know what you are doing here... Brad DeLong
Re: Demicans or Repugnocrats (was: ergonomics, etc.
...the costs of not trying, which is what you recommend, are the same as the costs of failing. You can think better than that. First of all, there are lots of ways of trying which do *not* involve handing elections and offices on a platter to the right-wing candidate. Second, the costs of "failing" as you put it are significantly higher than the costs of "not trying." Nader was supposed to demonstrate the strength of the left and not hand the election to Bush. He failed on both counts--failed to get anywhere near as many votes as right-wing challengers to Republicans have gotten, and did hand the election to Bush. We are now paying the price. We now have an administration committed to renewed confrontation with China and Russia (God knows why); an administration committed to pollution rather than environmental protection; an administration committed to employers' rights rather than workplace safety; an administration committed to a more regressive rather than a more progressive tax system; and so forth. If you don't think that these shifts in policy make America a worse place, it's not clear what you do believe. Brad DeLong
Emotional Need to Blame Nader...
Mark Laffey wrote: What evidence is there that Nader voters were in fact potential Gore voters? That is, is there any data to show that had Nader not been an option, the people who voted for him would have voted for Gore? Surely that is the correct question to ask. Nader voters may simply have stayed at home rather than voting for Gore. This is a logical and empirical argument, to which bruised Dems are immune. They have an emotional need to blame Nader for the fact that their guy ran a dismal campaign, and blew what should have been a landslide. Doug We're not so much immune, we've just seen no evidence that Nader voters who would not otherwise have abstained were evenly drawn from the Bush and Gore camps. The evidence I've seen suggests that at least two-thirds of Nader voters would have voted anyway had Nader not been on the ballot--and overwhelmingly voted for Gore. Claims that the Nader campaign did not reduce the Gore vote total seem to me to be based on a willful disregard of the voting-pattern evidence--to be not analysis, but comforting lies that Naderites who now have a guilty conscience tell themselves in the middle of the night. That Gore ran a dismal campaign, and blew what should have been a landslide, is not that relevant--for Nader to complain that he played no role is like an assassin complaining that the knife shouldn't have gone in because the victim should have been wearing an armored vest... Brad DeLong
I don't like this question
There have been a number of threads recently on Pen-l which reflect the super-nationalist navel gazing of Americans. First, I would ask Brad De Long. If he had a ballot for president that included Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Ramsey McDonald, who would he vote for? If you meant Ramsey MacDonald, Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1924 and from 1929-1931, that's my answer. But I must say that I do not like what I take to be the undercurrents associated with this question at all. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: GOP vs. GOP
Only if you think that these issues don't matter can you be proud of a vote for Nader in 2000. And if you don't think that these issues matter, I don't know what you are doing here... So, only Demicans are welcome on Pen-l, an interesting view, if a contemptible one... --jks I presumed that everyone here thought that issues of workplace safety vs. employer powers, of progressive vs. regressive tax systems, of environmental protection vs. the right to pollute, of detente vs. new cold wars were important. Now I'm told that that is not so--that to actually care about these issues is in some way contemptible... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Demicans or Repugnocrats (was:ergonomics, etc.
Can Bush be any worse for the rest of the world than Clinton/Gore? If so in what way. Will the civilians of Yugoslavia and Iraq be any less fearful of their lives? Will the peasants of Columbia be more fearful for their lives? Will Canadians fear more for the loss of their jobs, pollution of their climate, etc. I don't think so. Paul Phillips If you had been reading the newspapers, you would already know the answer to your question. You would be frightened of steps toward increased confrontation with North Korea, Russia, and China. I know I am. Brad DeLong
Re: Stop it! [was Re: ergonomics, etc.]
We picked up our daughter yesterday. I am just now of wading through a ton of e-mail. The tone of this thread is pretty bad. Too much noise relative to the signal. It's too late to point fingers at its origins. So for now let us just stop it. No more recriminations. Canada is bad. Nader is bad. The working-class is bad. I don't think anybody on this list (with one exception) thinks that Bush or the Republicans would do a better job than Gore and his crew in terms of this sort of policies that have been enacted so far. The rationale for supporting Nader seemed to be an effort to stop the rightward drift. No. There were four rationales for Nader: --(1) that the Nader campaign would gain extraordinary support and provide a breakthrough into a new, more fluid politics of possibility by destroying two-party gridlock... --(2) that the Nader campaign would demonstrate the strength of the left, and convince the DLC types that there were more votes to be gained by going hunting on the left than by making additional accomodations in the center... --(3) that this could be accomplished without running any significant risk of throwing the election to Bush... --(4) that worrying about throwing the election to Bush--"lesser evilism"--was contemptible, because there was not a dime's worth of difference between Bush and Gore. I don't know about you, but I heard (and read) a lot of these four reasons for much of last fall. Now I don't hear much of (1), (2), and (3). As far as (1) and (2) are concerned, Nader's 3% of the vote was not impressive by the scale of other insurgent efforts like Perot, Anderson, and Wallace. Thus there has been no breakthrough via the destruction of two-party gridlock, and the DLC remains enormously unimpressed. It is only here that I read *anyone* making claim (3). And so I think that is important to point out that (4) is not correct. That there are significant and important differences in workplace policy, labor policy, judicial appointments, environmental policy, tax policy, foreign policy, and so forth between Bush and Gore. I want the people who claimed that there was not a dime's worth of difference between Bush and Gore to count up their change, and not to go into total denial as far as the stakes we lost last fall are concerned. If it were just a question of their going into denial, and by forgetting history being condemned to repeat it, I would not care so much. But I fear that they are going to try to make me repeat it with them. Brad DeLong
GOP vs. GOP
Stop it, Brad. "Assassin," insinuations that only Democans care about good things, etc. It's not my "insinuation.": It's your statements, statements like: ... Brad, hang it up. The thing is, we don't accept your iron cage. We don't accept defeat. We won't go away. Maybe we're mad, whether happy or not, but you won't make nice but unhappy liberals out of us. We don't register our suceess by our influence on the DLC. What matters is a popular movement. Whether that happens only after the election will show. Btw, if we are so deluded, why do you hang out with us, rather than with your sane liberal friends? And stop blaming Nader for your guy's inadequacies. If he loses, _he_ blew a near-sure thing. Don't look to us, we do not share his values and priorities, to pull your chestnuts out of the fire... A pro-union majority on the NLRB, workplace safety rules, a more progressive income tax, environmental protection--those are Al Gore's priorities and values, those are the things that you do not share. Those are the chestnuts that you did not want to pull out of the fire. And lo and behold, they weren't pulled out of the fire, and we--sorry, *I*, you do not share my values and priorities--have lost a good deal. So, once again, if *you* don't share my values and priorities to the extent of thinking that George W. Bush's policies are a bad idea, I don't know what you are doing here. And if you do think that the repeal of the ergonomics rules, the abandonment of steps toward CO2 regulation, and the regressive income tax cut are bad things, then I think your self diagnosis: I am a mushbrain who would happily sacrifice the well-being of my purported constituency to an ideological delusion. hit the nail squarely on the head. The Nader campaign of 2000 was a very expensive, stupid, and counterproductive enterprise. Brad DeLong
Muddled Thought
Brad, that 3 percent of the vote was enough to sink the Gore campaign is a sad commentary on what the Democrats had to offer. Muddled thought. I think--I have always thought--that Gore was a poor candidate who ran a lousy campaign. That Gore was a poor candidate who ran a lousy campaign means that Nader's actions were much more *stupid*, not less. When there is a serious danger that your demonstration will elect the Greater Evil, you wait for a better moment. With regard to the dimes worth of difference, a lot of posts have already mentioned the dreary instances in which Clinton and Gore governed like Republicans. Even more muddled thought. Is there a difference or isn't there? The fact that Clinton and Gore govern like Republicans sometime doesn't mean that they govern like Republicans all the time. I maintain that even by now--two months into the new administration--the difference is large. Count your change. By now it is much more than a dime's worth. I am appalled by what Bush is doing, but probably I would be equally angered by the way the Democrats governed, because I would think that I had the right to expect more from them. Unbelievably muddled thought. If you really would be "equally angered" by a Gore administration at this point--a Gore administration that was not seeking confrontation with China, Russia, and North Korea; maintained ergonomics rules; had proposed a *progressive* tax cut; was seeking to appoint some reasonable federal judges, et cetera... If you really would be "equally angered" by a Gore administration, then you need to remind yourself that it is *results* count. The point of the exercise, after all, is not to make the gap between results and your expectations small. It is to make the results as good as possible. Brad DeLong
Health of Your Camel
If your camel is sick, you *might* want to nurse it a little. You don't always want to pull out your shotgun and blast it with both barrels immediately. Unless, of course, you believe that angels will instantly appear singing sweet hymns and airlift you a newer and better camel immediately... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: ergonomics, etc.
Brad DeLong wrote: Yet another blessing we have received from Ralph Nader... No, from Al Gore. If as many self-identified Democrats had voted for Gore as self-identified Republicans voted for Bush, W would still be governor of Texas. Doug And Nader was in their pitching, telling self-identified Democrats not to vote for Gore... Brad DeLong No, Nader never told anybody, let alone "self-identified Democrats," "not to vote for Gore."... Shane Mage God! The quality of argument here is *really* low. If you vote for Nader, you don't vote for Gore--unless you're in the vote fraud business... Brad DeLong
Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: ergonomics, etc.
And Nader was in their pitching, telling self-identified Democrats not to vote for Gore... Brad DeLong As was 'Dubya; welcome to the world of free speech. Ian Except that Dubya is opposed to ergonomic rules. Nader is supposed to like them--but he likes being a publicity hound more... Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: ergonomics, etc.
Brad DeLong wrote: Yet another blessing we have received from Ralph Nader... No, from Al Gore. If as many self-identified Democrats had voted for Gore as self-identified Republicans voted for Bush, W would still be governor of Texas. Doug And Nader was in their pitching, telling self-identified Democrats not to vote for Gore... Brad DeLong
Re: Japanese development
[was: Re: [PEN-L:9327] Re: Re: Re: Japan] Michael Perelman asked: Another question. Haven't all of the economic "miracles" fizzled. I, too, was under the impression that the Japanese bureaucrats were clever, thinking that there was an exception to the miracle rule. Brad writes: Oh, the bureaucrat of MITI were quite clever--and very interested in promoting economic development. But even during the heyday of the Japanese miracle there were a lot of other bureaucrats regulating agriculture, retail trade, finance, and so on who were clever too but not that interested in promoting economic development... The vagueness of this formulation is amazing! (What happened to the alleged rigor of orthodox economic thinking?) Specifically, what is "economic development"? does that refer to increasing "real" GDP per capita? or do we measure "development" by looking at measures such as the Genuine Progress Indicator, which includes a lot of benefits (and subtracts a lot of costs) missed by GDP? or do we think of "development" in some broader sense that can't be quantified? I was actually thinking of the McKinsey Global Institute's comparative study of manufacturing productivity in Japan, German, and the U.S., and the *extraordinary* dual economy it showed. The contrast between those sectors regulated by MITI and those regulated by other ministries is amazing... But in the future all my formulations will be rigorous. Brad DeLong
