First: Jason Zweig soft peddles the idiocy of Kevin Hassett and James Glassman on the 18 years-late Dow 36000 day. Buy-and-hold is a good investment strategy for the U.S. stock market. The strategy... 1/
... Hassett and Glassman were pushing—borrow money, leverage up, and go highly long stocks near the peak of a valuation-ratio bubble—led to bankruptcy in 2000 for anyone who acted on the recommendations of Dow 36000. Jason here is much kinder than I would have been... 2/
...:
Jason Zweig: Dow Crosses 36000—Making a Book’s Prediction Just Two Decades Late <wsj.com/articles/dow-j…>...
What is Kevin Hassett saying today, on Dow 36,000 day? In my inbox:
In a wide-ranging interview with _Washington Post Live_ today, author Kevin Hassett... 3/
... discussed his warning that high inflation will drive the U.S. economy into a recession and his new book, The Drift: Stopping America’s Slide Toward Socialism. Hassett is a former senior adviser and chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Donald Trump… 4/
One Video: Pat Gelsinger: Intel CEO Q&A Roundtablee <>:
Very Briefly Noted: Jason Furman & Wilson Powell III: Worker Bargaining Power Has Been No Match For High Inflation: ‘Real compensation growth has been below trend in all sectors apart from... 5/
Gideon Rachman: The Moment of Truth Over Taiwan Is Getting Closer: ‘The US and China are engaged in a dangerous game of military poker over the future of the island… <ft.com/content/9833d4…>... 7/
...Rajiv Sethi: Notes on a Remarkable Finding from Finland: ‘the understanding of meritocracy in public discourse is terribly impoverished. If one wTre to design a truly meritocratic policy, it could well have features that resemble the pursuit of representation targets.... 8/
...Meritocratic policies will not, in general, involve the application of a common score threshold across all candidates….
Michael Pettis: China’s Economy Needs Institutional Reform Rather Than Additional Capital Deepening: ‘Consider European countries after 1918... 9/
...or Europe and Japan after 1945… highly advanced economies that had been devastated by war and thrown into poverty, but because their institutions remained largely intact, they were nonetheless able to grow extremely quickly…. They had… very high Hirschman levels… 10/
... But after many years of spectacular growth driven by capital deepening (in large part restoring the infrastructure and manufacturing capacity that had been wrecked by war), each of these countries reached that point again, after which their growth rates slowed rapidly.... 11/
...Their actual levels of investment had “caught up” not to the capital frontier set by the United States but rather to the Hirschman levels consistent with their own domestic institutions. The same has been true of China.... <carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancial…>
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I see the late David Graeber is in the news today. I do not trust anything he ever wrote. Let me tell you why. Let me pick a chapter at random from Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years… I land on... 1/
...chapter 12… I start reading… I come to the third page <ttps://archive.org/details/DebtTheFirst5000Years/page/362/mode/2up> and find:
"I would hear occasional rumors of secret gold vaults underneath the Twin Towers in Manhattan.... After the Towers were destroyed… 2/
[Graeber, cont.:] ...one of the first questions many New Yorkers asked was: What happened to the money?... Some spoke of legions of emergency workers secretly summoned… desperately carting off tons of bullion…. One particularly colorful conspiracy theory suggested that... 3/
"I would hear occasional rumors of secret gold vaults underneath the Twin Towers in Manhattan.... After the Towers were destroyed… one of the first questions many New Yorkers asked was: What happened to the money?... Some... 2/
[Graeber cont.]: "...spoke of legions of emergency workers secretly summoned… desperately carting off tons of bullion…. One particularly colorful conspiracy theory suggested that the entire attack was really staged by speculators…. The truly remarkable thing… is... 3/
First: Science fiction. But the science is history. That is, as Paul Krugman observes, what made Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series so striking and thought-provoking: Paul Krugman: Introduction to... 1/
... “Foundation”: ‘how do the ‘Foundation’ novels lok to me now that I have, as my immigrant grandmother used to say, grown to mature adultery? Better than ever…<web.archive.org/web/2019091808…> 2/
...One Video: Michelle Holder & Lisa Cook: Child Care & the Economy: ‘A clip from… In Conversation at Equitable Growth 2021: Evidence for a Stronger Economic Future… <> 3/
First: I must say that if I belonged to the Chinese Communist Party, I would not be at all confident about what the future is going to bring... 1/
...Economist: The Confidence of China’s Communist Party Is Striking: ’Since the Ming dynasty, Chinese who are oppressed by local officials have sighed, by way of explanation: “The heavens are high, and the emperor far away.” An earthier variant run... <economist.com/china/2021/10/…> 2/
...One Audio: Alice Evans: Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy: ‘Our world is marked by the Great Gender Divergence. In India, Iran and Egypt, most women remain secluded and surveilled, with few friends. Chinese women work <draliceevans.com/post/ten-thous…> <podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/roc…>... 3/
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-10-28 Th
Things that went whizzing by that I want to note & remember... 1/
...First: Alice Evans sends us to the very good Arash Nekoei & Fabian Sinn: The Origin of the Gender Gap: it is a count of records from the Human Biographical Record, finding that throughout history—save for Egypt in antiquity—only about 10% of women as men have records... 2/
... coming down to us that grant them a place in Human Biographical Record entries, with no significant changes over the millennia. While the 1900s do show the highest female share of entries since the -2000s, the difference is not (yet) very large... 3/
Herbert Hoover published his memoirs in 1952. So perhaps there is some retrospective rightward drift in his recollections of what he... 1/
... thought back in 1928—but only some: he did give the anti-collectivist speech that he quotes at length here.
And yet Al Smith’s pre-Great Depression Democratic Party was not at all a “collectivist” party. As Hoover points out, it was the Bourbon aristocracy of the... 2/
...South combined with the urban machines and with agrarian, consumer, and labor anti-monopolist groups. Labor unions and consumer and farming cooperatives were as far as they went toward “collectivism”. The socialists of the day were Eugene V. Debs—Robert La Follette—... 3/