Month: December 2014

…someone mentioned having a problem with one particular far-future (well, set 400 years hence) SF novel that disrupted their reading of it so badly that they ended up giving up on the book…. I think it’s worth taking a look at it, because it’s one of my own pet shibboleths…. These are not bad authors and they don’t write terrible books: that’s part of what makes the problem so jarring for me.

And the nature of the problem? It’s that the stories they’re telling are set in a far future… in an interstellar human polity…. And yet the civilization they portray can best be described as ‘Essex suburbia goes interstellar’… or… ‘Whitebread Middle American Suburbia to the Stars’… gender politics, religious framework, ideologies, fashions(!) and attitudes… has become a universal norm. And nothing else gets much of a look in….

You can make an argument for writing SF in this mode in that it allows the lazy reader to ignore the enculturation issue and dive straight into the adventure yarn for which the SFnal trappings are just a brightly-coloured wrapper. But I still find it really weird to read a far-future SF story that doesn’t deliver a massive sense of cultural estrangement, because in the context of our own history, we are aliens.

Imagine yourself abducted by a mad Doctor in a time machine shaped like a blue Police Box (itself an anachronism in today’s smartphone-networked world) and dumped on the streets of your home city a century ago, in 1914…. How familiar are you going to find things? The answer is actually ‘not very’…. You speak a dialect of the local language, it’s true. But you have some words or terms that nobody recognizes (‘atom bomb’), some words that have changed meaning radically thanks to the spread of technical neologisms (‘virtual’, ‘computer’) or social change (‘queer’, ‘n—–‘), and there are other words and slang that you probably don’t recognize….

The architecture and layout of cities will be vaguely familiar…. Some things will be mildly disorienting…. Some items will be disgusting (horse shit everywhere, and the flies they attract). It may be hard to tell the difference between a shop front and somebody’s living room, if you get away from the market stalls. And it may be hard to tell the difference between a contemporary crack house and the typical living conditions of the early 20th century poor…. Foodstuffs you expect to find are unavailable and exotic (bananas, kiwi fruit, curry), and stuff nobody in their right mind would eat is routinely sold (tripe, kidneys, beef hearts) and eaten…. Don’t ask about medicine….

You don’t want to know what passes through conservatives’ minds in 1914…. It’s worth noting, incidentally, that much of the social change that led up to the current cultural matrix was driven by technological change. Better medicine and family planning… which bananas… cheaper than potatoes, people aren’t worn out unto death by fifty, civil rights for people who aren’t rich white males… you probably aren’t dying of tuberculosis. So why do repeatedly we see the depiction of far future societies with cheap interstellar travel in which this hasn’t bought about massive social change as a side-effect (other than the trivial example of everyone having a continental sized back yard to mow)? Seriously, I feel that if I’m writing far-future SF, I’ve got a duty to at least try and portray a plausible society.

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• Brook Masters:
  Busy times at the top as the CEO carousel gains pace

1. Kevin Drum:
   The Obama Recovery Has Been Miles Better Than the Bush Recovery:
   “Bush benefited not just from a historic housing bubble but from big increases in government spending and government employment. But even at that his recovery was anemic. Obama had no such help. He had to fight not just a historic housing bust, but big drops in both government spending and government employment. Despite that, his recovery outperformed Bush’s by a wide margin…. And as Krugman points out, it’s unclear just how much economic policy from either administration really affected their respective recoveries anyway: ‘I would argue that in some ways the depth of the preceding slump set the stage for a faster recovery. But the point is that the usual suspects have been using the alleged uniquely poor performance under Obama to claim uniquely bad policies, or bad attitude, or something. And if that’s the game they want to play, they have just scored an impressive own goal.’ Roger that. If you want to credit Bush for his tax cuts and malign Obama for his stimulus program and his regulatory posture, then you have to accept the results as well. And by virtually any measure, including the fact that the current recovery hasn’t ended in an epic global crash, Obama has done considerably better than Bush.”
2. Kenneth Rogoff:
   Can Japan Reboot?: “How can aging advanced economies revive growth after a financial crisis?… The first round of… ‘Abenomics’… failed to generate sustained inflation…. The question is… Abenomics 2.0…. My own view is… Abenomics 1.0 basically had it right: ‘whatever it take’” monetary policy to restore inflation, supportive fiscal policy, and structural reforms…. The central bank… has been delivering… the other two ‘arrows’… have fallen far short. There has been no significant progress on supply-side reforms…. The timing of the April 2014 consumption-tax hike (from 5% to 8%) was also unfortunate…”
3. BLS:
   Employment Situation Summary: “Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 321,000 in November and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.8 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today…. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was little changed at 2.8 million in November. These individuals accounted for 30.7 percent of the unemployed…. The civilian labor force participation rate held at 62.8 percent in November and has been essentially unchanged since April. The employment-population ratio, at 59.2 percent, was unchanged in November…”
4. Justin Fox:
   On Annalee Saxenian: What Still Makes Silicon Valley So Special:
   “She hasn’t just heard about it. She was the first to really tell the story, in one of the most important and influential business books of the past quarter century. In Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, Saxenian set out to describe what differentiated California’s Silicon Valley from the tech industry outside Boston…”

Should Be Aware of:

• Tom Ricks:
  In and Out of Time in Iraq
• Pioneer Valley Pizza
• Brad DeLong (2009):
  An Answer to a Question from Michael Berube… (Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality…)
• Neal Stephenson:
  Cryptonomicon: 88 Metis

1. Adam Serwer:
   How Sotomayor undermined Obama’s NSA | MSNBC:
   “When Obama first tapped Sotomayor in 2009, she was savaged as an intellectual lightweight, an affirmative action baby who would never be able to write the sort of far-sighted dissents or concurrences that might persuade judges appointed by the opposite party or potentially become law. That is, the exact sort of concurrence she penned in Jones.  When the woman who would become the first Latina Supreme Court justice wasn’t being attacked as an anti-white racist by the likes of National Journal columnist Stuart Taylor Jr. or former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, leading liberal legal minds were wringing their hands about her supposed lack of sophistication or intelligence. In a 2009 article for The New Republic, Jeffrey Rosen quoted anonymous sources questioning Sotomayor’s intelligence and wondered whether she met the ‘demanding standard’ for a Supreme Court Justice. Sotomayor, Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe wrote to Obama, is ‘not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is,’ and her ‘reputation for being something of a bully could well make her liberal impulses backfire’ and alienate potential swing votes from the conservative wing of the court. Rosen didn’t respond to a request for comment from msnbc. Tribe however, acknowledged underestimating Sotomayor…”
2. Simon Wren-Lewis:
   Government Debt, Financial Markets and Dead Parrots:
   “If you are thinking about buying government debt… you need to worry about… whether the government will choose to default… [and] about forced default, where the government is unable to ‘roll over’ (refinance) its existing debt, because the market will no longer lend to it. The two are… not identical. The second risk… [is] a self-fulfilling crisis: default occurs because the market believes default will happen, even if the government actually has no intention to default…. This is where your own central bank is very useful. It eliminates this second type of risk…. This is what the ECB refused to do until its OMT programme in September 2012. Until that point, markets were worried that governments in Ireland, Portugal and Spain would… be forced to default. With OMT the ECB changed its mind, which brought the crisis to an end. The Eurozone parrot was not completely wiped out because the ECB still made its support conditional… but it is not the bird it once was. The parrot probably never flew in countries like the UK, US or Japan because these countries had their own central banks. Of course many people claim to have seen it, but it seemed to disappear as quickly as it came…”

The only graph that is not stunningly embarrassing for the argument is the one that ascribes all employment losses after his inauguration to Obama-policies and all job losses before the trough of the 2001 recession to Clinton-policies:

The question is: is this the same thing that is going on in Chicago economics, or not? As you know, Bob, when Chicago Lucas models began failing their empirical statistical tests massively, the response was to abandon statistical testing because it was “rejecting too many good models”. When Chicago finance model began failing their empirical statistical tests massively, the response was to redefine what investor psychology was: Investors no longer had a stable utility function relating their consumption spending to their well-being exhibiting declining marginal utility. Instead, investors had whatever and however rapidly changing a function relating their well-being to their consumption spending that was needed in order to keep the efficient markets hypothesis from being falsified.

The question is: Are these different things, or are these the same things? And how are they related to the earlier tobacco money-infused campaign of tobacco denialism? And how are they related to the present oil money-infused campaign of global warming denialism? And how are they related to the Cato Institute’s failure to register that its anti-fiscal stimulus campaign of 2009–along with its anti-ObamaCare campaign, and its anti-debt crisis campaign–now looks like something really not to be proud of?

Answers, anyone?

The very sharp Ken Rogoff muses about Japan:

May I say that I believe that it is inappropriate for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates before it sees at least two quarters in which inflation averages 2%/year and wage growth averages 3%/year or more?

Seriously: now is the time for the Federal Reserve to establish its credibility on the point that, if the economy enters a liquidity trap, the Fed is going to keep stimulating until the economy is out of the liquidity trap and interest rates can normalize. If the Fed does not do this now, future Fed Chairs will curse its name.

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• Richard Sutch:
  The Liquidity Trap, the Great Depression, and Unconventional Policy: Reading Keynes at the Zero Lower Bound
• Laurence Ball, Brad DeLong, and Larry Summers:
  Fiscal Policy and Full Employment
• John G. Fernald:
  Productivity and Potential Output Before, During, and After the Great Recession
• George Selgin:
  A 1920-21 Recovery Myth

1. Mark Thoma:
   Economist’s View: ‘What’s Causing the Increase in Long-Term Unemployment?’: “Salim Furth, who ‘is senior policy analyst in macroeconomics at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis’: ‘What’s Causing the Increase in Long-Term Unemployment?: Some economic indicators, including the short-term unemployment rate, have recovered to levels associated with ‘normal times.’ But long-term unemployment remains high…. Many economists, myself included, expected that the expiration of long-term unemployment benefits at the end of 2013 would sharply lower the long-term unemployment rate. Instead, the rate has continued its slow, steady decline…. Economists have not yet found convincing explanations…. The problem is worth studying.’ They will have to find another social insurance program to blame… instead of, say, lack of demand (a policy failure) combined with the stigma attached to the long-term unemployed.”
2. Jonathan Chait:
   4 New Studies: Obamacare Working Incredibly Well:
   “Four major new sources of information have come out this week, all of which have further demonstrated the law’s success. 1. Increasing access to the uninsured…. Conservatives widely denied that the law would even succeed at its basic goal of increasing access to health insurance. Obamacare ‘created more uninsured people than it gave insurance to. And it promises to create even more,’ argued National Review’s Jonah Goldberg. Fox News panelist Charles Krauthammer proclaimed the law would result in ‘essentially the same number of uninsured.’… 2. Reducing overall health-care costs…. 3. Hospital errors…. 4. Insurance competition. Obamacare is based on an old Republican plan, developed by the Heritage Foundation and first tried by Mitt Romney, whose central feature was market competition…. Liberals did not place much faith in this dynamic…. But the dynamic has turned out to work much better than expected…”
3. David Beckworth:
   Are We Mismeasuring Productivity Growth?:
   “Noah Smith… observed that the Fernald TFP data can be decomposed into TFP in investment production and TFP in consumption production. TFP in investment looks better than the overall…. TFP in consumption… has basically flatlined since the early 1970s and is what is driving the Great Stagnation…. The Great Flattening does not seem reasonable. Has productivity growth in consumption really been flat since the early 1970s?… This suggests there are big measurement problems in consumption production. And I suspect they can be traced to the service sector…”
4. Mark Thoma:
   Economist’s View: ‘Entrepreneurship, Down-Side Risks, and Social Insurance’:
   “In 2009 I argued: A more extensive social safety net can reduce the risk of attempts at entrepreneurship. If there is an extensive social safety net to fall back upon if things don’t work out, you might be more willing to quit the job you hate (the one with health insurance for the kids) and sink everything you have into a small business that you’ve always wanted to run. But I’m not sure the data above support this interpretation, i.e. that there is an obvious positive association between the strength of social insurance and the prevalence of small business. But it is highly suggestive, and regressions that control for other cross-country differences could help to settle the issue. Nick Bunker discusses a paper that provides supporting evidence: ‘Entrepreneurship, down-side risks, and social insurance…. John Hombert… et al. looks at a reform in the French unemployment insurance system enacted in 2002. The reform allowed unemployed workers who start a new business to keep the right to their unemployment benefits for up to three years…. The rate at which firms were created increased by 25 percent after the 2002 reform…. ‘The evidence points toward these new entrepreneurs being capable businesspeople who just needed a safety net before starting a business. What’s more, these new firms had a positive impact on the overall economy….'””
5. Ezra Klein (2007):
   No Exit Revisited: “Andrew Sullivan tries to answer my post from yesterday on No Exit, the [Betsy McCaughey] article he published attacking the Clinton health plan. He says that ‘I don’t think it’s fair to expose the internal editing of a piece but there was a struggle and it’s fair to say I didn’t win every skirmish,’ which is interesting, and he says that ‘I was aware of the piece’s flaws but nonetheless was comfortable running it as a provocation to debate.’ What he doesn’t say is that he believes the piece accurately described the Clinton health care plan. Which is what’s at issue. There were reasons to criticize the delivery structure the Clintons sought to implement, but No Exit simply lied…”
6. Duncan Black:
   So Long, And Thanks For All The Shit):
   “[The New Republic] does publish people I like these days, but there is this weird worship of it as An Institution, as An Important Part Of The Discourse. Yah, thanks for Marty Peretz, Andrew Sullivan, The Bell Curve, Betsy McCaughey, Mickey Kaus, the Iraq War… oh God, I forgot Chuck Lane, who often manages to make Richard Cohen look good…”
7. Ezra Klein:
   Even the liberal New Republic needs to change: “The eulogy that needs to be written isn’t for The New Republic. It’s for the role once played by Washington’s small fleet of ambitious policy magazines. The internet is now thick with outlets that pride themselves on covering… policymaking apparatus. Vox… The New Republic… Wonkblog, the Upshot, Mother Jones, Storyline, FiveThirtyEight, and Politico, to name just a few. And that doesn’t even include the individual bloggers who are must-reads… Kevin Drum, and Tyler Cowen, and Brad DeLong, and Paul Krugman, and Ross Douthat, and Ramesh Ponnuru, and Jonathan Chait, and Scott Sumner, and Megan McArdle, and Jonathan Bernstein, and, again, the list goes on. This sprawling conversation over Washington policymaking used to be centered in a handful of elite-focused policy magazines, of which The New Republic was perhaps the best known and most ambitious…”

Should Be Aware of:

• Richard Mayhew:
  217-60-1-5
• Dana Nuccitelli:
  A new study estimates surface temperature cooling from volcanoes at 0.05–0.12°C since 2000
• Sharon K. Long et al.:
  Taking Stock: Health Insurance Coverage under the ACA as of September 2014
• Sean Davis:
  Hands Up, Don’t Choke: Eric Garner Was Killed By Police For No Reason

1. John Kay:
   The capitalists sold the mills and bought all our futures:
   “If you want to measure the capital possessed by a nation, there are two ways of doing it. One is to travel the length and breadth of the country counting the houses, the bridges, the factories, shops and offices, and adding up their total value. The other is to knock on doors and ask people how rich they are…. The totals are not… the same…. The wealth of Carlos Slim, Bill Gates or Warren Buffett is largely outside [physical capital] data because the market value of América Móvil, Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway far exceeds the tangible assets of these companies…. If ‘capital is back’, as Prof Piketty contends, it is in a very different sense from the 19th-century view, in which the ownership of capital confers authority over the means of production. Messrs Slim, Gates and Buffett… did not acquire control of the means of production by virtue of their ownership of capital; rather they acquired capital from their control of the means of production, which they gained through political influence and success in the market…”
2. Rhoula Kalaf:
   The German club of Putin understanders:
   “Most German Putin understanders were embarrassed into silence after the July downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, and the separatists’ treatment of the bodies and the crash site. That was when public opinion swung decisively behind Ms Merkel’s tough line against Mr Putin…. Putin critics in Berlin worry that the understanders are rearing their heads again. They expect them to begin agitating for an easing of sanctions against Moscow in response to the Ukraine crisis. The most famous understander is Gerhard Schröder, the former chancellor, who counts Mr Putin among his friends… said Moscow had justifiable fears about being encircled…. celebrate[ed] his 70th birthday with the president in St Petersburg, and was pictured warmly embracing him…. Matthias Platzeck, chairman of the German-Russian business forum and former chief of the Social Democratic party (SPD)… suggest[ed] the west should accept the annexation of Crimea to ease tensions with Moscow…. A measure of understanding of Russian policy inevitably creeps in when you want to do business with Moscow. The Eastern Committee… is critical of Russian actions in Ukraine and supportive of Ms Merkel but strongly opposed to sanctions. A delegation was in Moscow last month and met Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister. The visit was low key. “‘It goes without saying that no one wants to see pictures of anyone hugging Lavrov”, says a committee official.'”
3. Zandar:
   Even The “Liberal” New Republic » Balloon Juice:
   “Me?  The number of damns I give about TNR as a going concern at this point equals approximately the number of black voices writing for the magazine, which is to say zero, but YMMV.  The thing survived two world wars, the Great Depression, Watergate, the fall of the Soviet Union, 9/11, New Coke, and 74,927 episodes of Law and Order, but couldn’t handle one Silicon Valley douchebag with a giant checkbook…”

Ezra Klein:
Even the liberal New Republic needs to change: “The eulogy that needs to be written isn’t for The New Republic…

…It’s for the role once played by Washington’s small fleet of ambitious policy magazines. The internet is now thick with outlets that pride themselves on covering… policymaking apparatus. Vox… The New Republic… Wonkblog, the Upshot, Mother Jones, Storyline, FiveThirtyEight, and Politico, to name just a few. And that doesn’t even include the individual bloggers who are must-reads… Kevin Drum, and Tyler Cowen, and Brad DeLong, and Paul Krugman, and Ross Douthat, and Ramesh Ponnuru, and Jonathan Chait, and Scott Sumner, and Megan McArdle, and Jonathan Bernstein, and, again, the list goes on. This sprawling conversation over Washington policymaking used to be centered in a handful of elite-focused policy magazines, of which The New Republic was perhaps the best known and most ambitious….

The policy magazines had two dimensions. The first was what they covered–which was, for the most part, politics through the lens of policy…. The second was the angle and tone…. The New Republic oscillated from editor to editor, but tended towards a hawkish, contrarian neoliberalism (hence the ‘Even the liberal New Republic’ meme)…. To the wonk in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, these magazines were the thrumming center of the policy conversation in Washington…. But they’re no longer the center….

A deeper tension in digital journalism: the pressure for convergence is strong. We feel it at Vox, and sometimes give into it. It’s easy to see which stories are resonating with readers. It’s obvious that John Oliver videos do big numbers. And that’s fine. Right now, almost all successful digital publications are partially built on internet best practices and partially built on that publication’s particular obsessions, ideas, and attitude. Digital publications need to be smart about their mix….

But what made the New Republic and its peer policy magazines so great was how restlessly, relentlessly idiosyncratic they were–that’s how they drove new ideologies and new ideas to the fore. They were worse at covering policy than their digital successors, but probably better at thinking…. I’m less pessimistic about TNR’s future than many… and, as someone who really loathed a number of TNR’s previous eras (see the Bell Curve, or No Exit, or A Fighting Faith, for examples)… a bit less nostalgic for its past. But something is being lost in the transition from policy magazines to policy web sites…

The Martin Peretz-Michael Kinsley New Republic was world-class at snarking, but thinking–I think of Mickey Kaus, Jacob Weisber, Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, Morton Kondracke and a magazine known best for the phrase “even the liberal New Republic“, and I say “no”. Hertzberg, IIRC, dialed down the snark and dialed up the policy substance, but still… And I don’t see how anybody would claim that the post-Hertzberg TNR was good at “thinking”