[pilowsky]

I have just downloaded a study on the political meaning of whiteness for liberals and conservatives by Deborah Schildkraut from Tufts (published in The Forum (2019) 17(3):421-446.
http://bit.ly/PoliticalWhite.
It is an excellent study - with actual data - about the attitude towards race in politics in the post-Obama - Trump era.
It differs from the opinion pieces available via Google. It is a scholarly attempt to understand the extent to which 'whiteness' is or isn't important to groups with different political leanings.

I read this after watching the excellent NYT reconstruction of the murderous attack on congress.
What struck me was how well documented the attack was and that everyone spoke English. In this way, it was more "immediate" in its impact than seeing footage of similar scenes where I cannot understand what the people are saying.
It reminded me of Kristallnacht, where an enraged mob - driven forward by the ravings of a madman - decided that Jews/homosexuals/disabled people/blacks were responsible for all of the problems they faced.
Anyone but themselves.
Right down to the smashing of windows.

I have spoken to many Trump supporters (yes, we have them in Australia). They are all like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They walk, they talk, but something is not quite right.
They have an unshakeable encapsulated delusion that isn't based on reality.
You can read Nortons Masters thesis about the film here http://bit.ly/NortonSnatcher.

The pop-culture concepts dramatised in Body Snatchers have recrudesced in the idea that the Chinese communist party attempted to disrupt the wonderful west (epitomised by Superman, Batman and Captain America - Christ, the lone moral agent and the patriot) released a plague onto the Earth.
People willing to cleave to this idea will believe anything that doesn't disrupt their desire to better themselves and their families - no matter the cost to anyone else.
To them, other people are cattle.

[Winstonm]

 pilowsky, on 2021-July-06, 18:56, said:

I have just downloaded a study on the political meaning of whiteness for liberals and conservatives by Deborah Schildkraut from Tufts (published in The Forum (2019) 17(3):421-446.
http://bit.ly/PoliticalWhite.
It is an excellent study - with actual data - about the attitude towards race in politics in the post-Obama - Trump era.
It differs from the opinion pieces available via Google. It is a scholarly attempt to understand the extent to which 'whiteness' is or isn't important to groups with different political leanings.

I read this after watching the excellent NYT reconstruction of the murderous attack on congress.
What struck me was how well documented the attack was and that everyone spoke English. In this way, it was more "immediate" in its impact than seeing footage of similar scenes where I cannot understand what the people are saying.
It reminded me of Kristallnacht, where an enraged mob - driven forward by the ravings of a madman - decided that Jews/homosexuals/disabled people/blacks were responsible for all of the problems they faced.
Anyone but themselves.
Right down to the smashing of windows.

I have spoken to many Trump supporters (yes, we have them in Australia). They are all like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They walk, they talk, but something is not quite right.
They have an unshakeable encapsulated delusion that isn't based on reality.
You can read Nortons Masters thesis about the film here http://bit.ly/NortonSnatcher.

The pop-culture concepts dramatised in Body Snatchers have recrudesced in the idea that the Chinese communist party attempted to disrupt the wonderful west (epitomised by Superman, Batman and Captain America - Christ, the lone moral agent and the patriot) released a plague onto the Earth.
People willing to cleave to this idea will believe anything that doesn't disrupt their desire to better themselves and their families - no matter the cost to anyone else.
To them, other people are cattle.

I like the pod person analogy - but it's not quite enough. I think the Trump supporter is a combination of Amelia Bedelia and Humpty Dumpty, which makes them appear as a pod person.

[pilowsky]

 Winstonm, on 2021-July-06, 21:55, said:

I like the pod person analogy - but it's not quite enough. I think the Trump supporter is a combination of Amelia Bedelia and Humpty Dumpty, which makes them appear as a pod person.

But if they were like Mr H Dumpty, then the shell would be crackable.
Interestingly, the central character in the first (of several) versions of the film was played by Kevin McCarthy.

[y66]

From Noah Smith's interview with Jason Furman

Quote

Economist Jason Furman was chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during Barack Obama’s second term. Now he’s a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He is also one of the most prolific and well-read contributors on Econ Twitter. His ability to see the big picture of the American economy is matched by very few.

In recent months, Jason has expressed ambivalence about the direction the economy is headed. At a time when inflation worries are rising in the media but the economy is still nowhere near full recovery, we need such sensible and knowledgeable voices to help us chart a path back to good times.

In the interview that follows, I talk to Jason about inflation, wage growth, productivity, and what the Obama administration could have done better.

Quote

N.S.: So, you've been fairly ambivalent about where the macroeconomy is headed. You're not sounding the alarm about inflation as much as Larry Summers or Olivier Blanchard, but you're taking the possibility pretty seriously. Has your outlook on near-term inflation and growth changed recently, and if so, how?

J.F.: Before getting to inflation, we should not lose sight of the big picture. What is most important is real economic growth and employment. We don’t have numbers for the second quarter yet but assuming GDP comes in at a 10 percent annual rate we will have had more growth in the first half of 2021 than the Congressional Budget Office had forecast for the entire year. Most forecasters expect GDP to be above pre-pandemic projections by the end of the year. If that happens it would be a remarkable contrast not just to the overly slow recovery from the last crisis but also to previous recessions all of which were associated with output losses.

I believe this is because of the interaction of two factors: first, this was a massive negative supply shock that is going away comparatively rapidly due to vaccination. There is no reason the economy cannot just pick up where it left off now that it is getting safer to do so. But this factor interacts with a second one: the remarkable public policy response that drove a wedge between GDP which fell dramatically and real disposable personal incomes which rose sharply. This has enabled people to increase their spending as it has become safer to do so. The fiscal response was much larger in the United States than in Europe, their comparative economic outlooks over the next year will provide evidence for whether this matters. I expect it will and that the U.S. recovery will be further and faster than Europe’s.

Now that we’ve gotten the very important part out of the way let’s talk about a somewhat important issue: inflation. So far inflation has vastly exceeded what most people expected. It may be transitory (more on that in a moment) but it is worth admitting that even if it is transitory it is much more transitory inflation than almost anyone expected. Back in January and February a number of forecasters did not think we would even hit two percent inflation this year. As recently as May the Survey of Professional Forecasters was expecting 2.1 percent PCE inflation for the entire year, we have already gotten more than that in just the first five months of the year. For the year as a whole inflation is very likely to end up above 3 percent and could even be above 4 percent, amounts that would have—and were—dismissed as scaremongering just a few months ago.

You asked what has surprised me about inflation. First let’s talk about what is not surprising: base effects, pandemic-related prices like restaurants and travel returning to normal, and transitory increases for certain bottleneck-related goods (for example most everything that uses lower-end microchips). Everyone knew those were coming and built them into their forecasts. Other countries are experiencing something similar but the contrast with the United States is telling: over the last twelve months consumer prices have risen 2.0 percent in the Euro area, 2.1 percent in the United Kingdom, and 5.0 percent in the United States (part, but only part, of this difference is due to the fact that we have reopened more). Prices in the United States have been rising at an 8 percent annual rate, definitely a lot of that is special factors but even stripping those special factors out and you are left with something more like a still unusually rapid 4 percent annual rate.

The big surprise to me has been the strength of labor demand and the comparative weakness of labor supply. You see this in record job openings and quits juxtaposed to the labor force participation rate which has barely increased from last summer. This disconnect is evidenced in the most rapid nominal wage gains since the 1980s. Moreover these rapid nominal wage gains come on top of a recessionary period where nominal wage growth never slowed and was even higher for lower-wage workers, something that is extremely unusual and possibly unprecedented. So instead of thinking about the economy as having the substantial amount of slack you would expect from an economy with an unemployment rate of around 6 percent it may have less slack than it has had at almost any point in recent history.

Looking forward, everyone expects the inflation rate to fall from its 8 percent annual rate as bottlenecks get resolved, labor supply returns more fully, and demand cools—particularly for goods. But I still expect it to be elevated because some sectors will see rising prices (shelter is the best candidate), sticky wages and prices will take some time to adjust up, and most importantly, demand is likely to continue to exceed supply because of the combination of lagged effects of past fiscal support, another 3-4 percent of GDP in already enacted fiscal support coming next year, and unprecedentedly loose financial conditions.

The inflation rate could temporarily dip over the remainder of this year as used car and other bottleneck prices come down but then my best guess would be about 3 percent inflation next year—with a massive margin of error around that prediction.

N.S.: OK, so let's talk about inflation a bit more. First of all, I've written that the most likely cause of sustained high inflation is neither supply constraints nor excess spending on its own, but a regime shift -- a public perception that the Fed no longer cares as much about fighting inflation as much as it used to. Do you agree with that? My argument was based on the idea that the Phillips curve is usually quite flat, but can shift substantially in the event of a policy regime shift.

J.F.: I like to think of inflation in terms of micro or bottom-up factors (e.g., what is going on with cars and houses), macro or top-down factors (e.g., what is the balance of supply of demand), and expectations (e.g., what is the regime). I already talked about the previous two and they are a good way to think about inflation over the next year or two but let’s now turn to the regime shift. We may already have had somewhat of a regime shift. It is possible we have had one on fiscal policy given how massively expansionary it has been relative to the past and how no one is talking about reducing the deficit. But I am skeptical given how much the political system has generally returned to the view that everything must be paid for. In fact my own view is that we have not had enough of a regime shift on fiscal policy.

Monetary policy is a better candidate for a possible regime shift—one that we might already have had and might go further in the future. Officially the goal has shifted to flexible average inflation targeting, a small shift from inflation targeting that allows a persistent overshoot. Some argue that framework should allow a sustained overshoot given that inflation undershot for over a decade prior to it. More importantly Fed Chair Powell and the other governors (but not the regional Presidents) are talking very differently about monetary policy, one that has been widely celebrated by the full employment community which has talked about how as a non-economist Powell is avoiding the mistakes macroeconomists have led us into. You cannot celebrate those changes (as many have) and then be indignant at the claim of a regime shift. Just look at how the Fed has declared it will not raise rates to even 37 basis points until we are already at maximum employment and inflation is poised to overshoot 2 percent for “some time”. That is a very, very different approach than we have seen in the past.

It is still uncertain, however, how much the monetary policy regime has shifted because the FOMC appears to believe inflation will come down to its 2 percent target next year and stay there. At the current moment it is hard to distinguish between them having a very dovish reaction function or a very dovish forecast. If it is a very dovish forecast then if inflation comes in higher than they expect they will tighten faster and we will be back to something more like the old regime. I view this as the most likely. But another possibility is that they have a very dovish reaction function and even if inflation is closer to 3 percent next year (the center of my very uncertain forecast) they will find another reason not to raise rates.

Ultimately there is a better possibility than at any point in the last three decades that we will have a few years of inflation well above 2 percent. If this happens I don’t think the Fed will try to get inflation back to its target. And then at its next framework review about four years from now it could end up ratifying reality with a higher inflation target like a 2 to 3 percent range or 3 percent inflation. So far the bond markets and professional forecasters are giving very little weight to this possibility and expect them to keep inflation to 2 percent over the longer term. I’m much less sure and place at least a 20 percent chance of a higher inflation target, but possibly that is wishful thinking on my part because I would like them to raise the inflation target.

Edit:

Quote

N.S.: Anyway, while I have you here, let's talk about some longer term problems. How do we raise productivity growth in America? Are recent tech breakthroughs going to be enough? How can policy help?

J.F.: My idea for speeding up productivity growth: everything. Probably the single most important policy lever is immigration which both increases population and also brings with it ideas and innovations. This is also a conceptually straightforward, but admittedly politically fraught, lever for the federal government to pull. Another straightforward step is spending more basic research by massively increasing the budgets for the NSF, NIH and other scientific research. Ensuring that people can live and work where they are most productivity is another important step, something that requires land use and occupational licensing reforms by states and cities across the country. I don’t know how much extra productivity growth we would get from corporate tax reform but I think we should try because it could even be done in a revenue-raising way, including the proposals President Biden has made plus allowing businesses to expense their investments, disallowing interest deductions, and possibly expanding the R&D tax credit.

More

[Winstonm]

 pilowsky, on 2021-July-06, 22:12, said:

But if they were like Mr H Dumpty, then the shell would be crackable.
Interestingly, the central character in the first (of several) versions of the film was played by Kevin McCarthy.

My assessment is based on the literalness of Amelia Bedelia (to her ‘dust the furniture’ meant to bring in sack of dust and add the dust to the furniture) and Humpty Dumpty’s “a word means exactly what I mean when I say it and nothing more “.

Therefore the Trumpsters know precisely what the Constitution says when it says it and only men are created equal!

Just as god intended - it’s in the book!

[Chas_P]

 kenberg, on 2021-July-06, 08:39, said:

I'm going away for a couple of days, so I will not be posting any such brilliant analysis for a bit.

Enjoy your respite prof. We (I anyway) anxiously await your return.

[johnu]

Kayleigh McEnany Falsely Claims All The ‘Main Founding Fathers’ Opposed Slavery

Quote

“The haters never take a day off from hating, that is clear,” McEnany said. “And they never take a day off from getting the facts wrong. We know most of our forefathers, all of our main Founding Fathers, were against slavery, recognized the evils of it.”

To be clear: McEnany is wrong. Though there isn’t a consensus on the exact number of Founding Fathers who owned enslaved people, historians have said the majority of men at the signing of the Declaration of Independence were slaveowners.

In response to McEnany’s claim, misinformation nonprofit Media Matters For America pointed out that George Washington enslaved hundreds of people, Thomas Jefferson enslaved more than 600 people, and James Madison enslaved over 100 people.

I don't understand the controversy Keyleigh McEnany has a BS in Red America History from Trump University where she graduated summa cum laude by paying for the Platinum Elite Acolyte package which included a signed photo of future Grifter in Chief Trump. Surely classes taught at Trump University are the gold standard of education, and Kayleigh has told the world that she would never lie so she must be telling the truth.

Kayleigh McEnany Says She ‘Never Lied’ as White House Press Secretary

[kenberg]

 mikeh, on 2021-July-06, 17:16, said:

I'm confident only that I don't know what 'woke' means to all who hear or use the term. Indeed, a quick google search shows an initial meaning (being aware of and paying attention to systemic biases and injustices) and exhibiting a pretentious concern about such things. I suspect that the latter definition is somewhat influenced by conservative commentators who wish to deride the very concept of systemic injustices, by turning woke, a word with an (to me) admirable meaning into a derogatory term, intended to get people to ignore the underlying reality by dismissing those who want to bring it into the open.

However, I also suspect that there are those, especially young and privileged, who are indeed pretentious and ostentatious in their claims to be woke.

When I was an undergraduate many of those whose spiritual descendants are now vociferously woke paraded around campus clutching their little red book of Mao's aphorisms, and/or wanted to discuss Marxist-Leninist dialectics.

Speaking to Ken, based on your posts over the years I strongly suspect that you are quietly woke��

Being woke does not, to me, mean that one should join a BLM march or write letters to the editor. Sure, one can do those things if one wants to, but I think wokeness is an awareness more than it is an activity or public performance (I do NOT mean to denigrate those who march or write letters and do not equate doing so with being pretentious). Iow, I think that it's entirely a good thing when woke people protest in various non-violent ways but that one needn't protest in order to be considered woke. One merely needs to be alive to the various biases and injustices that permeate every society of which I have any shred of knowledge, going back through history.

I do think that all woke people owe a duty to their society to vote, and to vote appropriately, if voting is possible. And we owe a duty not to remain silent when friends and family espouse bigotry, as so many do, including a lot of fundamentally good but oblivious people. That doesn't mean being rude or insulting. But one can quietly point to examples of systemic issues in current society, and ask gentle questions about whether they think those things are fair. Almost always, they will admit that things aren't as rosy as they were claiming moments ago. One doesn't need to pay a huge amount of attention to the news to be aware of widespread systemic bias in our western culture even in these relatively wake days.

Long time no see.

There is a line. Of course it is a fuzzy line but still a line dividing how issues of social justice are approached. I am very grateful for the opportunities I had growing up in the middle of the last century (birthdate 01-01-1939). My father finished 8th grade, I have a Ph.D. Not all that unusual back then. I acknowledge that being white helped a lot and being male helped a lot. I strongly support making such an opportunity, and many other opportunities, available to everyone. A strong argument in favor of this is that when many people succeed in developing their talents the result is good not only for them but for society as a whole.

On the other side of this line the argument often comes down to "That's not enough".Well, I am willing to listen. Which side of this line a person falls on might define whether he is woke or not woke. Part of my argument for my approach is practical. To me, it is completely obvious that we all benefit by helping everyone develop their talents (I exclude bank robbers and hit men from "everyone").. This means we can hope for broad agreement on implementation, including getting support from busy people who lack the time or inclination to get deeply involved in political and social discussions. And we are a long way from providing this opportunity. I did not go to a great high school but the differences between my school and the best ones in the city (St. Paul) were not all that large. Now the difference between good local high schools and not good local high schools is immense. So there is a lot that could be done to enhance opportunity.

I am very open to suggestions as to how to improve relations between the police and the citizenry, I interacted some with the police when I was young and I appreciate not being shot, and I agree that the need is greatest in Black communities. Properly thought of, getting this right would again benefit everyone.

"Woke" means different things to different people so let me put it without using that word: I am in favor of many improvements. If someone then says "That's not enough, you are White, you can't understand" then I don't really have a response to that. Maybe just "Good luck, I wish you the best".


I mentioned travel. I am back from my brief visit to the grandkids. One of them starts kindergarten soon. Did I really once run up a staircase as fast as she does? Very tiring.

[y66]

Michelle Goldberg at NYT said:

https://www.nytimes....pgtype=Homepage

On Thursday, the Public Religion Research Institute released startling new polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost. P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the religiously unaffiliated.

One of P.R.R.I.’s most surprising findings was that in 2020, there were more white mainline Protestants than white evangelicals. This doesn’t necessarily mean Christians are joining mainline congregations — the survey measures self-identification, not church affiliation. It is, nevertheless, a striking turnabout after years when mainline Protestantism was considered moribund and evangelical Christianity full of dynamism.

In addition to shrinking as a share of the population, white evangelicals were also the oldest religious group in the United States, with a median age of 56. “It’s not just that they are dying off, but it is that they’re losing younger members,” Jones told me. As the group has become older and smaller, Jones said, “a real visceral sense of loss of cultural dominance” has set in.

White evangelicals once saw themselves “as the owners of mainstream American culture and morality and values,” said Jones. Now they are just another subculture.

From this fact derives much of our country’s cultural conflict. It helps explain not just the rise of Donald Trump, but also the growth of QAnon and even the escalating conflagration over critical race theory. “It’s hard to overstate the strength of this feeling, among white evangelicals in particular, of America being a white Christian country,” said Jones. “This sense of ownership of America just runs so deep in white evangelical circles.” The feeling that it’s slipping away has created an atmosphere of rage, resentment and paranoia.

The way things are going, they're gonna crucify all of us.

[y66]

Tiffany Hsu at NYT said:

https://www.nytimes....896ed87b2d9c72a

Toyota said on Thursday that it would stop donating to Republicans who disputed the 2020 presidential vote after being the focus of an ad campaign by the Lincoln Project, a group that was founded to antagonize President Donald J. Trump with viral video criticisms.

They asked for it.

[y66]

The Bond Market Is Telling Us to Worry About Growth, Not Inflation by Neil Irwin at NYT/Upshot

Quote

For months, the United States has been experiencing the growing pains of an economy rebooting itself — surging economic activity, yes, but also shortages, gummed-up supply networks and higher prices.

Now, shifts in financial markets point to a reversal of that economic narrative. Specifically, the bond market has swung in ways that suggest that a period of slower growth and more subdued inflation could lie ahead.

The yield on 10-year Treasury bonds fell to 1.29 percent on Thursday, down from a recent high of 1.75 percent at the end of March and the fourth straight trading day of decline. The closing price of inflation-protected bonds implied expectations of consumer price inflation at 2.25 percent a year over the coming decade, down from 2.54 percent in early May.

These are hardly panic-worthy numbers. They are not the kind of jaw-dropping swings that markets show in moments of extreme turbulence, and analysts attribute the moves in significant part to technical factors as big investors shift their portfolios.

[Winstonm]

 y66, on 2021-July-09, 05:29, said:

The way things are going, they're gonna crucify all of us.

Quote

Standing in the dock at Southampton
Trying to get to Holland or France
The man in the mac said
"You've got to go back"
You know, they didn't even give us a chance

Christ, you know it ain't easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going
They're gonna crucify me

The Ballad of John and Yoko (and us).

[y66]

Paul Krugman said:

https://messaging-cu...896ed87b2d9c72a

Happy days are here again. No, really. Gallup has been asking Americans since the beginning of 2008 whether they are “thriving.” The percentage answering yes hit a low point in the depths of the 2008 financial crisis and again during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic. But it has soared in recent months, to 59.2 percent, its highest level ever.

[y66]

Meet Tim Wu, the Man Behind Biden’s Push to Promote Business Competition by Ryan Tracy at WSJ

Quote

WASHINGTON— Tim Wu is getting a second chance to change how the government regulates American corporations.

Mr. Wu, a law professor and progressive antitrust leader, is a key architect of the executive order President Biden signed Friday aimed at making U.S. businesses more competitive.

He helped write a similar order in the waning months of the Obama administration, which resulted in a handful of new regulations. Then Donald Trump won the 2016 election, scuttling plans for a broad regulatory push and later repealing some of the new rules.

Now Mr. Wu is back in the White House as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, and he and other Biden administration officials are picking up where the Obama team left off five years ago.

The executive order gives Mr. Biden’s backing to ideas Mr. Wu has publicly advocated, putting in motion dozens of regulatory initiatives the White House says will help workers and small businesses in markets dominated by large corporations, in industries from technology platforms to airlines to hearing aids.

Mr. Wu, in a paper written after he left the Obama White House to return to Columbia Law School, outlined a strategy for “using industry-specific statutes, rulemakings, or other tools of the regulatory state to achieve the traditional competition goals associated with the antitrust laws.”

The White House declined to make Mr. Wu available for an interview. A senior White House official said the executive order matched the president’s campaign commitments to address issues such as prescription drugs, employment contracts and the power of large technology companies.

“We all benefited from [Mr. Wu’s] prior work in this space and the writing that he had done,” the official said. “That’s why the president brought him on as special assistant, is to work on this set of issues. As you can imagine, his vision and work on this was central to the effort.”

Staff work began on the order in earnest after Mr. Wu arrived at the White House in March, as Mr. Wu and others reached out to regulatory agencies to solicit ideas about what to include in the order—and suggested some of their own, the official said.

In 2020, Mr. Wu and other former Obama administration officials called for a new office at the White House that would pressure federal agencies to promote competition. The executive order would create a new competition council, led by the head of the White House National Economic Council, “to coordinate the federal government’s response to the rising power of large corporations in the economy,” according to a White House fact sheet.

Friday’s executive order also tells the Federal Communications Commission to restore net-neutrality rules stopping internet service providers from slowing down certain types of content or traffic. Such rules were adopted under the Obama administration but repealed under Mr. Trump.

The five-member FCC is currently divided between two Democrats and two Republicans, with one vacancy yet to be filled.

Early on in his academic career, Mr. Wu was credited with coining the term net neutrality as he wrote papers warning about broadband providers discriminating between different types of internet traffic.

Mr. Wu’s views aren’t shared by many industry executives.

“We are disappointed that the Executive Order rehashes misleading claims about the broadband marketplace, including the tired and disproven assertion that ISPs would block or throttle consumers from accessing the internet content of their choice,” the trade group NCTA - The Internet & Television Association, which represents internet service providers, said Friday.

More recently, Mr. Wu has been among the most active and prominent members in a growing intellectual movement that argues U.S. policy makers have failed to adequately enforce antitrust laws, allowing large corporations to accumulate too much power over both commerce and politics.

In a 2018 book, “The Curse of Bigness,” he argued the U.S. was in a new Gilded Age where unrestricted economic concentration was increasing income inequality, and threatening democracy itself. “The road to fascism and dictatorship is paved with failures of economic policy to serve the needs of the general public,” he wrote.

Mr. Wu carried copies of the book to a 2019 congressional hearing on antitrust policy in the technology sector, and handed one to a reporter after his testimony.

Mr. Wu’s critics dispute both his policy prescriptions and the premise that the economy is increasingly consolidated.

They say that the prevailing approach to antitrust law, focused on potential harm to consumers rather than a company’s size or an industry’s level of concentration, is more likely to yield positive economic results.

Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank that takes funding from corporations and nonprofit groups, said large companies bring with them consumer benefits, such as a large airline that can coordinate flights between a range of destinations.

By seeking to reduce large companies’ market share, he said, “the risk is that you would end up making companies that have valid economies of scale and scope and other benefits of size—you would start to diminish that.”

Mr. Wu has also dabbled in politics, mounting an unsuccessful 2014 New York campaign for the Democratic nomination as lieutenant governor of New York, as the running mate of gubernatorial candidate Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham Law School professor.

One of their campaign staffers was Lina Khan, another critic of the recent U.S. approach to antitrust policy who is now chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Ms. Khan and Mr. Wu briefly worked together at Columbia Law School before taking their current jobs.

On Friday, the White House executive order encouraged Ms. Khan to adopt a number of new regulations that are in line with ideas she had espoused before her appointment to the FTC, including rules for internet marketplaces, employment contracts and data collection by large technology platforms.

Mr. Wu earned degrees from McGill University and Harvard Law School and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer before taking a series of academic and government posts.

[kenberg]

I certainly do not want to pass up a chance to agree with Paul Krugman.

Quote

Paul Krugman said:

https://messaging-cu...896ed87b2d9c72a

Happy days are here again. No, really. Gallup has been asking Americans since the beginning of 2008 whether they are "thriving." The percentage answering yes hit a low point in the depths of the 2008 financial crisis and again during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic. But it has soared in recent months, to 59.2 percent, its highest level ever.

Getting into the positive spirit, I looked up a song.

https://www.youtube....h?v=rzeLynj1GYM

[kenberg]

 y66, on 2021-July-10, 10:08, said:

Meet Tim Wu, the Man Behind Biden's Push to Promote Business Competition by Ryan Tracy at WSJ

The Ryan Tracy article about Tim Wu is very interesting. It also illustrates a problem. I, like 99 out of 100 others, lack the knowledge to weigh in on the merit of Wu's approach. There can be broad agreement that something must be done about the growing concentration of power of corporate giants (or monsters?). But exactly what?

Wu knows more than I do. A lot more. I hope his choices work out.
It's good someone is trying to do something.

[y66]

 kenberg, on 2021-July-10, 13:34, said:

I certainly do not want to pass up a chance to agree with Paul Krugman.


Getting into the positive spirit, I looked up a song.

https://www.youtube....h?v=rzeLynj1GYM

Any regrets for not letting him into your heart before now?

[kenberg]

 y66, on 2021-July-11, 11:19, said:

Any regrets for not letting him into your heart before now?

The song was intended to reflect the rosy view of life that Krugman described, letting him into my heart would require more caution. Considerably more. And in a more intellectual sense than Piaf has in mind.

So another, less rosy, song:
https://www.youtube....h?v=ei2lpCSVRgw

Btw, sometime back one of your posts mentioned John Gunther's Inside U.S.A. The library got me a copy, courtesy of a college library. I picked it up yesterday. It's a 1947 printing, same year as the copyright. There is a card in back naming students who took it out, the last one being about 45 years ago. I started by reading his discussion of the Midwest in general, and I will now move on to a chapter entitled Stassen: Young man going somewhere. It's a kick reading something that was written when I was 8. He discusses midwestern isolationism and notes that "the United States, to the extent that it faces anywhere, has during all its history faced the Pacific. Europe is what is behind it". I am not sure I agree exactly with that but I'll think about it. In a variant formulation, he speaks of how the many who either came from Europe or are children of those who came from Europe have very much left Europe behind emotionally as well as physically. Phrasing it that way does agree with my memory.

Anyway, it's an interesting book. Very much a book of its time, but that's a good part of what makes it interesting.

[Winstonm]

At the recent CPAC, Trump was the winner of the straw poll for choice of 2024 candidate with Desantis a distant second.This does not bode well for either the future of Republican Party or of the U.S. as a republic.

[y66]

From Inside the Conservative Book Publishing World by Laura Miller at Slate:

Quote

...

Miller: OK, but there are plenty of people who could say that and then would add, “Oh, but I wouldn’t want to work for a conservative imprint because it’s against my own values.”

Eric Nelson, VP and executive editor of Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins dedicated to publishing books by political conservatives: I’m a libertarian, so it’s usually obvious to me what’s awful about both parties.

Miller: I’m going to guess that sometimes you’ve wound up working on books that you really disagree with politically. I’m curious how you have negotiated that. Some people find it so difficult.

Nelson: In the past five years, my primary political belief is in the capital-T truth. It’s really important to me that people are trying to make the world a better place regardless of their ideology. I edited a book called The Trump Century by Lou Dobbs. His argument was that Trump was such a consequential president that we’ll still be living in Trump’s policy world for years and possibly decades to come. I felt that his argument made sense and was compelling. Even if there are some Trump policies that I don’t agree with, I was convinced by Lou’s assessment of the consequential nature of Trump.

Miller: I’m sure that there are plenty of things in that book that Slate’s readers would consider to be untrue.

Nelson: Yeah, this is an argument I’m constantly getting into on Twitter. To me, something is a lie if it concerns a fact. It can be looked up and established that thing is not a fact. A lie is giving a fake statistic or making a promise you have no intention of keeping. Whereas if somebody says, “Experts say raising the minimum wage could cause more unemployment,” there are people who would be mad, call that a lie, and respond that just as many experts would say the opposite is true, and I feel like that’s just having an argument.

I don’t find any arguments on the left or right morally distasteful if they are intelligent and well made. I have had people say, “But wouldn’t you find a pro-racist argument morally distasteful?” But the problem is that it’s impossible to construct a pro-racism argument that’s true and based on solid research.