Things to Read on the Afternoon of March 1, 2015

Must- and Shall-Reads:

• Surge Guriev: “The killers must have assumed that police would not try to pursue them…. Common murderers they would likely have chosen another venue…. Mr Nemtsov’s killers have burnt the regime’s last bridges with its liberal opponents. It would be appropriate, when a new regime arrives, for the site of his murder to be renamed the Nemtsov Bridge.”

1. Martin Feldstein: The Deflation Bogeyman: “The world’s major central banks are currently obsessed with… raising their national inflation rates to… 2% per year…. But is this a real problem?… Fortunately, we have relatively little experience with deflation to test the downward-spiral theory…. [Perhaps] they are concerned about the loss of credibility implied by setting an inflation target of 2% and then failing to come close to it…. [Perhaps] are actually more concerned about real growth and employment, and are using low inflation rates as an excuse…. [Perhaps they] want to keep interest rates low in order to reduce the budget cost of large government debts. None of this might matter were it not for the fact that extremely low interest rates have fueled increased risk-taking by borrowers and yield-hungry lenders. The result has been a massive mispricing of financial assets. And that has created a growing risk of serious adverse effects on the real economy when monetary policy normalizes and asset prices correct.”

2. Boris Nemtsov: A Final Interview: “I have no doubt that the struggle for the revival of Russians will be tough. People see what this crazy politics led to, they see widespread corruption, they have firsthand experience with the inadequacy of the state. But they still believe in the leader because for the past several years, the leader was doing one thing very well: He was brainwashing the Russians. He implanted them with a virus of inferiority complex towards the West, the belief that the only thing we can do to amaze the world is use force, violence and aggression. [Putin] programmed my countrymen to hate strangers. He persuaded them that we need to rebuild the former Soviet order, and that the position of Russia in the world depends entirely on how much the world is afraid of us. He managed to do all these things with Goebbels-style propaganda…. The responsibility for spilling both Russian and Ukrainian blood… lies not only with Putin, but also with such gentlemen as Konstantin Ernst [director general of Channel One] or Dmitry Kiselyov [head of the new, Russian-government-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya]. They operate in accordance with the simple principles of Joseph Goebbels: Play on the emotions; the bigger the lie, the better; lies should be repeated many times. This propaganda is directed to the simple men; there is no room for any questions, nuances. Unfortunately, it works…. We need to work as quickly as possible to show the Russians that there is an alternative, that Putin’s policy leads to degradation and a suicide of the state. There is less and less time to wake up…”

3. Paul Krugman: The Regrettable Man: “CNN: ‘Lonegan also said Friday that in conjunction with the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole symposium in Wyoming this year, a group of conservative economists are planning to hold a meeting of their own ‘directly across the street’ featuring former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan as the keynote speaker.’ I guess we wait for confirmation before adding this to the file of examples establishing Maestrodamus as the worst ex-Fed chairman in history. But consider the notion that this group regards AG as an authority figure. Never mind the bubble denial; almost five years have passed since Greenspan declared that we were on the verge of becoming Greece, Greece I tell you, and wrote one of the most awesomely terrible passages in the history of economic policy: ‘Despite the surge in federal debt to the public during the past 18 months–to $8.6 trillion from $5.5 trillion–inflation and long-term interest rates, the typical symptoms of fiscal excess, have remained remarkably subdued. This is regrettable, because it is fostering a sense of complacency that can have dire consequences.’ Yep: he was annoyed at the markets for failing to deliver the crisis he was expecting, and considered it ‘regrettable’ that the crisis had not arrived. Actually, though, this isn’t too different from the sentiment expressed by Paul Ryan and John Taylor, denouncing the Fed’s actions because they were preventing a fiscal crisis. Anyway, the saga of the inflation cult continues.”

   <–continuing to watch the persistence of the inflation cult…

4. Mary S. Morgan: Modelling as a Method of Enquiry: “Despite the ubiquity of modelling in modern economics, it is not easy to say how this way of doing science works. Scientific models are not self-evident things, and it is not obvious how such research objects are made, nor how a scientist reasons with them, nor to what purpose. These difficulties of definition and understanding are exhibited in a most concrete fashion in an example that lays claim to being the first such research object in economics.”

   <–I am of the school who holds that if Malthus could have built economic models, he would have done so…

5. Giles Wilkes: Radical Rage at the Resilience of the Right: “Tariq Ali… if read as an examination of the frustrations of the radical left, The Extreme Centre is informative…. [For] it is the ideas of the right that have prevailed…. This book does a better job of describing Ali’s sadness at the failure of the left than expanding on why. The closest thing to a consistent explanation is human corruptibility before the temptations of money. But the book never explains why perennially incompetent capitalists always have enough of the folding stuff to keep the system going…. The other consistent theme is admiration for the Bolivarian heroes of South America… each of [whom] needed a tide of oil and gas to stay afloat…”

   <–Since 1970, one of the major themes has been the inability of left-of-center politics to produce a strong-enough book to support a further advance of social democracy. Not that right-of-center politics has delivered better outcomes, mind you…

Should Be Aware of:

• Karen Dawisha: “How, why and when did Putin decide to build a Kleptocratic and Authoritarian Regime in Russia and what is its Future?” <–political coalition-building and seisin in a failing state…
• Charlie Jane Anders**: “In the hands of most… Spock would have been a one-note joke character: the guy who spouts off formulas and equations in a monotone…. But Nimoy imbued Spock with a life and complexity that were impossible to deny…. From his inner torment to his quiet amusement at the humans around him to his occasional flashes of anger, Spock was a constantly surprising mystery…” <–Spock: not just for adolescent male nerds hoping that intelligence and quiet humor could help them be loved and make them insiders even though they were outsiders…

1. Matthew Yglesias: Star Trek is great, and Leonard Nimoy’s Spock was the greatest thing about it: “[Spock was] raised from a young age to valorize logic over emotion, but serving on a ship overwhelmingly populated by all-too-fallible humans. A stranger in a land that was strange to him, but familiar to everyone else. An outsider struggling to fit it, but also not entirely sure that he wanted to fit in. A figure of fun, but often in many ways superior to the more conventional characters surrounding him. He had difficulty relating to people, but always came through when needed. And his crewmates always came through for him. In short, a perfect stand-in for a nerdy audience–more socially awkward than we would ever be and yet exactly as indispensable as we hoped we would prove to be…”

   <–a good start on thinking about perhaps the greatest character of the TV era…

2. Julia Ioffe: After Boris Nemtsov’s Assassination, ‘There Are No Longer Any Limits’: “Already, the Kremlin is muddying the waters. Immediately after the shooting, Putin’s press secretary called the killing ‘a provocation.’ This morning, he clarified that there was no political motive behind the murder. LifeNews, a publication with close ties to Russia’s security agencies, has suggested three possible theories that are under investigation: The killing might have been revenge for forcing Duritskaya to get an abortion; it might have had something to do with money Nemtsov was receiving from allies abroad; or it might have been an attempt to smear the Kremlin. By afternoon, the government’s Investigative Committee had issued a statement saying it believed Nemtsov may have been killed by someone from his own opposition movement who wanted to create a martyr. There was even a suggestion that the assassination was connected to the Charlie Hebdo killings…”

   <–Moscow’s downward spiral continues…