braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-note…

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...

First: A Snippet from a Dialogue: The Current Plague in India:

Axiothea: How much worse are things in India than the statistics the Indian government is reporting say?

Parmenides: We do... 1/
...think that here in the United States we have had 900,000 rather than 600,000 deaths—out of a total caseload of perhaps 60 million, perhaps 120 million. How bad are things in India right now, really? And how bad are they going to get?

Aesclepius: We do not know. We... 2/
... guess that true plague deaths are between three and eight times officially recorded deaths. And we guess that India is only halfway through this current plague wave.

Axiothea: If so, note that India currently is at 200 reported deaths per million—say the true number... 3/
... is 1000, 0.1% of the population, and it is going to double before this wave is through. With a population of 1.4 billion, that would be 3 million dead by the time this wave ebbs…

The Right-Wing Short Con: With America’s right wing, it is always, always the grift... 4/
... Always: Paul Campos: Josh Hawley, Grifter: ‘I clicked on the link so you don’t have to, and discovered that my $75 contribution will keep happening every month automatically unless I unclick an already helpfully checked box that makes my contribution recurring. Also... 5/
...too unless I unclick another already clicked box I will make yet another $75 contribution on May 15th, to help stem the yellow red black brown tide of Joe Biden’s and Chuck Schumer’s and Nancy Pelosi’s Radical Left agenda. As always, Rick Perlstein’s now nine-year-old... 6/
...essay on the Long Con remains essential reading, although I suspect Sen. Hawley himself is strictly short-time, as they say in the rackets…

LINK: <lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/05/give-a…> 7/END

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12 May
braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexa…

Noah Smith & Brad DeLong's 30:00 < [Length of Weekly Podcast] < 60:00. Key Insights: (1) Economic arguments against higher taxes that may have been somewhat plausible back in the days of 70% or so maximum individual and 40% or so maximum capital... 1/
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(2) Right-wing parties that don't think they can credibly make the argument that cosseting their core constituencies is necessary for rapid economic growth search for some non-economic cleavage in which the rich and the right-... 2/
...thinking poor, or the right-colored poor, can be on one side and the people who seek a fairer and more equal distribution of income and higher taxes on the rich can be put on the other—let's all yell about critical race theory, and maybe they won't pay attention to the... 3/
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12 May
Apropos of:

Charlie Jane Anders: What Samuel Johnson Can Teach Us About Separating Art from the Artist: ‘[Johnson: "]Of Cowley… he in reality was in love but once, and then never had resolution to tell his passion...

<buttondown.email/charliejane/ar…> 1/
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<braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexa…>

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11 May
braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-note…

First: Here we see a striking difference between Paul Krugman and Larry Summers. Krugman sees models as intuition pumps—and believes strongly, very strongly, that if you cannot make a simple model of it, it is probably wrong. Summers believes that... 1/
...our models are, at best, filing systems (and at worst tools for misleading the unwary)—and that the right way to think about the economy is as, in some way, a two-state system, with expansion being one state and recession the other, so that you cannot halt an expansion... 2/
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10 May
braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-note… First: A Snippet from a Dialogue: Anti-Anti Tory Little Englandism:

Kephalos: I am pretty sure that—within the population of Great Britain—the Tories are a marked minority. And—yet—they could easily be governing with a pretty comfortable margin for... 1/
...the next 10 years. It is kind of unnerving how a minority faction has—more or less—run the joint ever since “the strange death of Liberal England”. Even when Blair and Gordon were PMs—they still had to triangulate. And—perhaps the strangest thing of all—the... 2/
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9 May
braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-note… First: Best-case—i.e., most optimistic scenario for employment—is employment corresponding to a “true” unemployment rate of 2.5% in 2023 with core inflation at 2.75%/year. That is enough to get inflation expectations up to the Fed’s target of... 1/
... 2.5%/year on a CPI basis. That is not enough for anyone reasonable to claim that an ever-upward inflationary spiral is on the way. The definition of “stagflation” is a world in which expectations are anchored on the belief that inflation is going to rise over time... 2/
...hence an unemployment rate greater than the natural rate is required in order to hold inflation steady. That does not seem to be the world we are headed for in the optimistic scenario. And that stagflation equilibrium is much further away in the non-optimistic scenarios... 3/
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7 May
Today's thread-of-thread:

To @causalinf: My great-grandfather Roland Greene Usher found it bitter every day when he awoke to remember that he was but a Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, while his brother Abbott Payson Usher was not only at Harvard but had an... 1/
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To: @snitstwits While I strongly defend the need for þis to be said, I strongly oppose David Brooks's placing himself at þe front of þe parade. He built a whole f---ing career on "I'm all right, Jack! Pull up þe... 2/
...ladder!!", and made a mighty contribution to breaking America's web of social trust <>... 3/
Read 10 tweets

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