Hope you’re having a good one. If not, hope it isn’t too awful.
Use as an open thread for nice things if you wish.
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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 22, 2024
By Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Joe Biden, December 16, 2024 [The American Prospect]
…When I took office, the economy wasn’t working for most Americans…. economic policy was in the grip of a failed approach called trickle-down economics. Trickle-down tried to grow the economy from the top down. It slashed taxes for the wealthy and large corporations and tried to get government “out of the way,” instead of delivering for working people, investing in infrastructure, and ensuring America stays at the leading edge of innovation.
But this approach failed. Too many Americans saw an economy that was stacked against them with failing infrastructure, communities that had been hollowed out, manufacturing jobs that were offshored to China, prescription drugs that cost more than in any other developed country, and workers who had been left behind.
[TW: I was surprised BIden’s writing in The American Prospect did not attract much interest. Probably because after the electoral victory by Trump, everything Democrats do seems anticlimactic. There were many more articles on why Bidenomics failed, such as James Galbraith’s article in The Nation on December 9, Why Bidenomics Was Such a Bust. But I think even these pulled back from fully exploring the anger and rage most working people have towards elites, which was fully revealed by the murder of a health insurance CEO in Manhattan. It is exactly that anger and rage that Trump is able to manipulate — “I am your retribution” — but which Democrats are too cowardly to acknowledge and condone. As I posted in April 2008, Euthanize Wall Street to save the economy.
[LORD, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph?
– Psalm 94:3 ]
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
By Tony Wikrent
How Much Do I Need to Change My Face to Avoid Facial Recognition?
[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-09-2024]
An aggregation of quotes from experts in the field. Here’s the most optimistic one: Even the best neural networks struggle with low-quality photos that lack information-rich pixels of the human face, especially when matching against a large list of potential identities. Thus the first step is to deny the algorithm those pixels by occluding the face. Cover the face in cases where that isn’t suspicious, e.g., wear a scarf in the wintertime, sun glasses on a bright day. Hats with wide brims are also a confound, as they can hide the forehead and hair, and cast a shadow on the face. Holding a hand over the face is also good for this. The second step is to look down while in motion so any camera in the vicinity will not capture a good frontal image of the face. Third, if one can move quickly, that might cause motion blur in the captured photo—consider jogging or riding a bike. My best practical advice for evasion: know where facial recognition is being deployed and simply avoid those areas. How long this advice remains useful though depends on how widespread the technology becomes in the coming years.”
Strategic Political Economy
The early American rejection of John Locke
[TW: I want to begin with this, because you will see echoes of the argument over masses versus elites in almost all the subsequent stories. USA is stumbling and faltering because so much of what we are taught and believe is based on lies. One of the biggest lies is that the founding of the republic was based on the ideas of John Locke. It is true that Locke’s ideas later came to predominate American political economy, but it was after a period of ideological combat. Unfortunately, the opponents of Locke lost.
[In the 1820s and 1830s, the Transcendentalist movement in USA, which included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman quite explicitly rejected the ideas of John Locke. Universalist minister Orestes Brownson, wrote in The Boston Quarterly Review, in January 1839,
Locke was a great and good man, but his philosophy was defective… Locke reduces man to the capacity of receiving sensations, and the faculty of of reflecting on what passes within us. According to him we have no ideas which do not enter through the senses, or which are not formed by the operations of the mind on ideas received by means of sensation.
[Locke’s] system of philosophy… is no less fatal to political liberty than to religion and morality… This philosophy necessarily disinherits the mass. It denies to man all inherent power of attaining to truth. In religion, if religion it admits, it refers us not to what we feel and know in ourselves [such a sense of fairness and justice], but was said and done in some remote age, by some special messenger from God; it refers us to some authorized teacher, and commands us to receive our faith on his word, and to adhere to it on peril of damnation. It therefore destroys all free action of the mind, all independent thought, all progress, and all living faith. In politics it must do the same. It cannot found the state on the inherent rights of man; the most it can do, is to organize the state for the preservation of such conditions, privileges, and prescriptions, as it can historically verify….
The doctrine, that truth comes to us from abroad, cannot coexist with true liberty… The democrat is not he who believes in the people’s capacity of being taught, and therefore graciously condescends to be their instructor; but he who believes that Reason, the light which shines out from God’s throne, shines into the heart of every man, and that truth lights her torch in the inner temple of every man’s soul, whether patrician or plebian, a shepherd or a philosopher, a Croesus or a beggar. It is only on the reality of that inner light, and on the fact that it is universal, in all men, and in every man, that you can found a democracy, which shall have a firm basis, and which shall be able to survive the storms of human passions.
But the disciple of Locke denies the reality of this light, he denies the teachings and the authority of the universal Reason…. It is folly, therefore, to repose confidence in the people, to entertain any respect for popular decisions. The disciple of Locke may compassionate the people, but he cannot trust them; he may patronize the masses, but he must scout universal suffrage, and labor to concentrate all power in the hands of those he looks upon as the enlightened and respectable few.
[Merriam-Webster offers this definition of “scout”: “to reject scornfully.”]
[ — The Transcendentalists – An Anthology, edited by Perry Miller. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1950, pp. 207-208. ]
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. (No Mangione/Syria.)
The first is that frozen conflicts are poison. When Russia and Hezbollah and Iran and some Syrian units were winning, rather than make an agreement for a frozen conflict, they should have pushed on. Leaving enemies in the country and the oil fields in US/Kurdish hands was foolish and fatal. Letting enemies flee to Turkey then be sent back was fatal.
The second is that either Russia or Iran should have just stationed some significant ground forces there permanently (Hezbollah is not a full state and doesn’t have the capacity.) Yes, it would be a bleeding ulcer, but the attrition would not be enough to matter. The entire advance could have been stopped by one good, properly equipped Iranian or Russian brigade with air and drone support. The Jihadis didn’t win because they were great fighters, they won because the Syrian army wouldn’t fight.
This assumes that the strategic value of Syria was sufficient: that it was worth the cost.
If Syria’s worth having, then do what it takes. Fighting on and off for thirteen years to then have the regime fall in days is ridiculous.
This argument applies to America in Afghanistan. The difference is that while Russia and Iran have important strategic interests in Syria, or did, the US never had enough in Afghanistan to justify the costs.
Broadly speaking, don’t half-ass. Do it right or don’t do it.
This applies also to Turkey. They should probably cut the bullshit and just occupy the country. Their proxies can’t stand up to Israel and will even have difficulty against the Kurds.
By Tony Wikrent
Tim Harford [via The Big Picture 12-02-2024]
The art of good public speaking is often to say less, giving each idea time to breathe, and time to be absorbed by the audience. But the anxiety of the speaker pushes in the other direction, more facts, more notes, more words, all in the service of ensuring they don’t dry up on stage. It’s true that speaking in public is difficult, even risky. But the best way to view it is as an opportunity to define yourself and your ideas. If you are being handed a microphone and placed at the centre of an audience’s attention for 20 minutes, you’re much more likely to flourish if you aim to seize that opportunity. Everyone is watching; you’re there for a reason. So . . . what is it that you really want to say?
[TW: The ability to speak well in public is a skill that will probably become more and more important as we try to resist the Trump’s regime’s policies and actions. I have often regretted I have not learned public speaking while in high school and college.]
Strategic Political Economy
The Great Grocery Squeeze: How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert.
[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture 12-07-2024]
…The structure of the grocery industry has been a matter of national concern since the rise of large retail chains in the early 20th century. The largest was A&P, which, by the 1930s, was rapidly supplanting local grocery stores and edging toward market dominance. Congressional hearings and a federal investigation found that A&P possessed an advantage that had nothing to do with greater efficiency, better service, or other legitimate ways of competing. Instead, A&P used its sheer size to pressure suppliers into giving it preferential treatment over smaller retailers. Fearful of losing their biggest customer, food manufacturers had no choice but to sell to A&P at substantially lower prices than they charged independent grocers—allowing A&P to further entrench its dominance.
Congress responded in 1936 by passing the Robinson-Patman Act. The law essentially bans price discrimination, making it illegal for suppliers to offer preferential deals and for retailers to demand them….
For the next four decades, Robinson-Patman was a staple of the Federal Trade Commission’s enforcement agenda. From 1952 to 1964, for example, the agency issued 81 formal complaints to block grocery suppliers from giving large supermarket chains better prices on milk, oatmeal, pasta, cookies, and other items than they offered to smaller grocers. Most of these complaints were resolved when suppliers agreed to eliminate the price discrimination. Occasionally a case went to court.
During the decades when Robinson-Patman was enforced—part of the broader mid-century regime of vigorous antitrust—the grocery sector was highly competitive, with a wide range of stores vying for shoppers and a roughly equal balance of chains and independents. In 1954, the eight largest supermarket chains captured 25 percent of grocery sales. That statistic was virtually identical in 1982, although the specific companies on top had changed. As they had for decades, Americans in the early 1980s did more than half their grocery shopping at independent stores, including both single-location businesses and small, locally owned chains. Local grocers thrived alongside large, publicly traded companies such as Kroger and Safeway….
Then it was abandoned. In the 1980s, convinced that tough antitrust enforcement was holding back American business, the Reagan administration set about dismantling it. The Robinson-Patman Act remained on the books, but the new regime saw it as an economically illiterate handout to inefficient small businesses. And so the government simply stopped enforcing it….
Why did Silicon Valley turn right? The “pounded progressive ally” thesis has limits
Henry Farrell, December 04, 2024 [Programmable Mutter, via The Big Picture 12-07-2024]
…The shifting relationship between the two involves- as far as I can see – ideas, interests and political coalitions. The best broad framework I know for talking about how these relate to each other is laid out in Mark Blyth’s book, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century.
Mark wants to know how big institutional transformations come about. How, for example, did we move from a world in which markets were fundamentally limited by institutional frameworks created by national governments, to one in which markets dominated and remade those frameworks?….
As Mark puts it in more academic language:
“Economic ideas therefore serve as the basis of political coalitions. They enable agents to overcome free-rider problems by specifying the ends of collective action. In moments of uncertainty and crisis, such coalitions attempt to establish specific configurations of distributionary institutions in a given state, in line with the economic ideas agents use to organize and give meaning to their collective endeavors. If successful, these institutions, once established, maintain and reconstitute the coalition over time by making possible and legitimating those distributive arrangements that enshrine and support its members. Seen in this way, economic ideas enable us to understand both the creation and maintenance of a stable institutionalized political coalition and the institutions that support it.”
Thus, in Mark’s story, economists like Milton Friedman, George Stigler and Art Laffer played a crucial role in the transition from old style liberalism to neoliberalism. At the moment when the old institutional system was in crisis, and no-one knew quite what to do, they provided a diagnosis of what was wrong. Whether that diagnosis was correct in some universal sense is a question for God rather than ordinary mortals. The more immediate question is whether that diagnosis was influential: politically efficacious in justifying alternative policies, breaking up old political coalitions and conjuring new ones into being. As it turned out, it was.
[TW: “The Great Grocery Squeeze” that resulted from Reagan’s decision to stop enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act, proves the accuracy of Farrell’s and Blyth’s work. So also Stoller’s discussion of federal judge Carl Nicholsm below. This is all a reflection of civic republicanism being supplanted by liberalism as capitalism developed, allowing “sanctity of private property” to become a more powerful “economic idea” than “promote the General Welfare.”]
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 01, 2024
By Tony Wikrent
Jonathan Larson: A Life of Learning, Service, and Curiosity (July 17, 1949 – November 2024)
It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Jonathan Larson, the founder of the Real Economics blog. Jonathan’s insatiable curiosity, dedication to public service, determination to improve the human condition, and deep intellect left an indelible mark on all who knew him….
He authored Elegant Technology: Economic Prosperity from an Environmental Blueprint, a book that showcased his commitment to sustainable development and his vision for a greener future. Published in Scandinavia, the book demonstrated his global perspective and ability to inspire change across borders.
He also authored a paper on heterodox economist and scholar Thorstein Veblen, and supported and closely followed the restoration of the Veblen homestead. Jonathan began this blog, Real Economics, to do as Veblen had — challenge and seek to supplant the failing orthodoxy of mainstream neoliberal and conservative economics….
Jonathan’s passing leaves behind a legacy of intellectual brilliance, moral courage, and unyielding dedication to the betterment of society. His life serves as a reminder that curiosity, compassion, and hard work can create a better world. Those who knew him who will forever cherish his memory.
Strategic Political Economy
Trump tariffs a “10 year project” to make China consume more and manufacture less.
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 11-27-2024]
[TW: The Trump regime’s goal of forcing China to “manufacture less” should be understood in the context of Thorstein Veblen’s explanation of the conflict between business and industry. Business managers and financiers dislike the uncertainty and unpredictability created by technological innovation. Rather than creating wealth through increased and less imperfect production (here, think of the Japanese concept of kaizen), business managers and financiers instead seek to acquire wealth “by a shrewd restriction of output,” causing privation and unemployment. This actually establishes and perpetuates a process of financial sabotage of industry, as Veblen explained in the first chapter of his 1921 book, The Engineers and the Price System.
[By contrast, a foreign policy based on principles of civic republicanism would seek to collaboration and cooperation with other nations to solve the most pressing problems facing humanity, such as transitioning off of fossil fuels, and ensuring universal supplies of clean water, medical care, transportation, and so on.]