Patriots Used to Be Skeptical of the Military
The most recent issue of the Fletcher Security Review features a paper by Alex Nowrasteh and myself on Privateers! Their History and Future. One of the interesting side notes is that Americans supported privateering not just because it was effective but also because America’s greatest patriots, the founding generation, were deeply skeptical about standing armies and navies. Today, the right-wing, uber-patriotic brand of Americanism is pro-military and pro-empire. In contrast, the founders would regard the empire as deeply un-American. Quoting from the paper:
The founders feared standing armies as a threat to liberty. At the constitutional convention, for example, James Madison argued that “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” For the founders, the defense of the country was best left to citizens who would take up arms in times of national peril, form militias, overcome the peril, and then to return to their lives.
As a result, the ideal military for the founders was small and circumspect (remember also that the second amendment was in part about the fear of standing armies, hence the support of the militia). The 1856 Treaty of Paris banned privateering but the United States refused to sign. Secretary of State William Marcy explained why in a great statement of patriotic American anti-militarism:
The United States consider powerful navies and large standing armies as permanent establishments to be detrimental to national prosperity and dangerous to civil liberty. The expense of keeping them up is burdensome to the people; they are in some degree a menace to peace among nations. A large force ever ready to be devoted to the purposes of war is a temptation to rush into it. The policy of the United States has ever been, and never more than now, adverse to such establishments, and they can never be brought to acquiesce in any change in International Law which may render it necessary for them to maintain a powerful navy or large standing army in time of peace.
Today the patriotic brand of anti-militarism, the brand that sees skepticism about the military and the promotion of peace and commerce as specifically American, is largely forgotten. President Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation was perhaps the last remnant in modern memory. It’s a tradition, however, that true patriots must remember.
The battle at the margin is about wealth taxes and families
President Barack Obama will propose raising $238bn by levying a one-off tax on the cash piles held by US companies overseas to repair the US’s crumbling roads and bridges.
The measure, a key plank of the president’s budget to be outlined on Monday, would impose a 14 per cent “transition” tax on the estimated $2tn in earnings US companies have amassed overseas, the White House said on Sunday.
The FT story is here, Vox is here. Part of the plan also involves replacing the 35 percent rate — which many large corporations avoid — with a 19 percent flat rate which would apply to foreign earnings as well.
And what might these taxes eventually go to pay for? Matt Yglesias reports:
…there’s an emerging Democratic consensus over what’s next — children and family policy. There are a few different threads to this, including early childhood education, special tax benefits for working moms, child care subsidies, and paid sick leave and maternity leave.
Greece needs Thatcheropoulous
On Thursday, Russia announced that it would consider extending financial aid to Greece if the latter asked.
There is more here, of interest throughout, though not fundamentally surprising. Greece is seeking to auction its EU veto between the EU and Russia. And over the weekend Chris Calomiris told us that Tsipras is a longstanding admirer of Fidel Castro, and furthermore he named his youngest son “Ernesto” after [Ernesto] Che Guevara. He also has voiced his opposition to Nato in the past.
As I’ve said, these are the Not Very Serious People, enough to make you want to have the Very Serious People back. As Garett Jones has noted, Greece needs its Thatcheropoulous — strong, credible, pro-debt renegotiation, pro-capitalism, anti-corruption, pro-tax fairness, and pro-foreign investment. People, that is not what we are getting.
The best chance scenario is that this is all an elaborate bluff for a pivot toward sensible reform. The bluff I can see, the sensible reform sorry no. Is a Thatcheropoulous possible when one can read headlines such as “Death threats forced me to quit my job, says Greece’s top tax man“? How many of the cultural preconditions of successful reform are present in Greece right now?
Here is the FT on the evolving game of chicken:
Eurozone officials are increasingly worried that Greece’s €172bn bailout will expire at the end of the month and potentially plunge it into chaos, after a series of meetings with the new Greek government convinced them Athens is unaware of how perilous its financial situation has become.
Fortunately, 70% of the Greek public believes that Tsipras will succeed as Prime Minister.
Assorted links
1. The detailed program for the Coase conference, late March in DC.
2. The concept of tipping is spreading.
3. I am very happy to see my former Ph.D student, Shawn DuBravac, who recently finished his degree, at #10 on the NYT non-fiction bestseller list. His book Digital Destiny is here.
4. “The most unforgivable sin in the world,” Mr. McKuen told The Washington Post in 1969, “is to be a best-selling poet.” An excellent obituary.
5. Paul Krugman on how blogging is changing, or not.
7. Can you have a Chinese Communist Party without an ideology?
Super Bowl art museum landscape betting lending markets in everything
Seattle Art Museum and New England’s Clark Art Institute are wagering temporary loans of major paintings based on the outcome of Super Bowl XLIX between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. The masterpieces that have been anted up showcase the beautiful landscapes of the Northwest and the Northeast respectively.
The new Econ Journal Watch
Symposium co-sponsored by the Mercatus Center:
Economists on the Welfare State and the Regulatory State: Why Don’t Any Argue in Favor of One and Against the Other?
The symposium Prologue suggests that among economists in the United States, on matters of the welfare state and the regulatory state, virtually none favors one while opposing the other. Such pattern is a common and intuitive impression, and is supported by scatterplots of survey data. But what explains the pattern? Why don’t some economists favor one and oppose the other?
Contributors address those questions:
Dean Baker:
Do Welfare State Liberals Also Love Regulation?Andreas Bergh:
Yes, There Are Hayekian Welfare States (At Least in Theory)Marjorie Griffin Cohen:
The Strange Career of Regulation in the Welfare StateRobert Higgs:
Two Ideological Ships Passing in the NightArnold Kling:
Differences in Opinion Among Economists About Government and Market EfficiencyAnthony Randazzo and Jonathan Haidt:
The Moral Narratives of EconomistsScott Sumner:
Moral Differences in Economics: Why Is the Left-Right Divide Widening?Cass Sunstein:
Unhelpful Abstractions and the Standard View
The home page for the issue is here.
Consumer rating sentences to ponder
“Highly specific pools of reputation information will become more useful in aggregate,” said Mr. Fertik, co-author with David C. Thompson of “The Reputation Economy,” a guide to optimizing digital footprints. “If you’re a really good Uber passenger, that may be useful information for Amtrak or American Airlines. But if you add in your reputation from Airbnb plus OpenTable plus eBay, it starts to get useful globally.”
There is more here, interesting throughout. But will there be errors in these measurements? As I wrote to Ashok Rao, fresh regressions are a public good.
How Andrew Sullivan changed America
I wrote a short piece on this for Vox, here is one excerpt:
Who is the most influential public intellectual of the last 20 years?
This designation should go to someone who actually has helped change the world, rather than just changing lots of minds. It also should go to someone who has embodied key trends of the time, noting that for both standards I am focusing on the United States.
Based on those standards, I am inclined to pick Andrew Sullivan, who is most recently in the news for his announcement that he is quitting after fifteen years of blogging.
Any discussion of Sullivan’s influence must begin with gay marriage. Thirty-six states and the District of Columbia already have legalized gay marriage, representing a majority of the American population, with possibly Alabama and others to follow. A broader Supreme Court decision for nationwide legalization may be on the way. More generally, gay rights have taken a major leap forward.
…I thought long and hard before selecting Andrew for the designation of most influential public intellectual. Perhaps Paul Krugman has changed more minds, but his agenda hasn’t much changed the world; we haven’t, for instance, gone back to do a bigger fiscal stimulus. Peter Singer led large numbers of people into vegetarianism and veganism and gave those practices philosophic respectability; he is second on my list. A generation ago, I would have picked Milton Friedman, for intellectual leadership in the direction of capitalist and pro-market reforms. But that is now long ago, and the Right has produced no natural successor.
Self-recommending! And again, please note, you should not confuse the designation “most influential” with “the person who, I, the reader, would most like to see elevated in status.” That would be a fallacy of mood affiliation.
Arrived in my pile
Doug Hendrie, Amalganations: How Globalisation is Good.
Arnold Thackray, David Brock, and Rachel Jones, Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary.
Jeffrey A. Frieden, Currency Politics: The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy, somehow this is oddly relevant these days.
Andrew Levy, Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and the Era that Shape His Masterpiece, looks quite good on first glance.
Rafael Yglesias, The Wisdom of Perversity, a novel.
Assorted links
The new Syriza government is against all-inclusive resorts
Nonetheless it is considering tolerating them, as we are told by Air Genius Gary Leff. Here is one short bit:
The tourism minister says that even though the Greek Prime Minister is attacking all-inclusive resorts as it identifies problems with the country’s economy, it has no plans to make crackdown on these properties ‘its mission’.
How reassuring. Greece needs some Very Serious People in charge! Right now it doesn’t have them. And as you know, one thing worse than the Very Serious People is…the Not Very Serious People. I think someone told them that all-inclusive resorts might drain off domestic aggregate demand (p.s. investment matters too, including for demand).
Oh, had I mentioned that tourism provides 15% of Greek gdp? (higher by some estimates, perhaps up to 20%). I’m all for debt forgiveness in this context, but right now the Greeks need to get serious or they will tumble off the cliff and soon.
Social media, and sociability, vs. blogging
…blogging, for better or worse, is proving resistant to scale. And I think there are two reasons why.
The first is that, at this moment in the media, scale means social traffic. Links from other bloggers — the original currency of the blogosphere, and the one that drove its collaborative, conversational nature — just don’t deliver the numbers that Facebook does. But blogging is a conversation, and conversations don’t go viral. People share things their friends will understand, not things that you need to have read six other posts to understand.
Blogging encourages interjections into conversations, and it thrives off of familiarity. Social media encourages content that can travel all on its own. Alyssa Rosenberg put it well at the Washington Post. “I no longer write with the expectation that you all are going to read every post and pick up on every twist and turn in my thinking. Instead, each piece feels like it has to stand alone, with a thesis, supporting paragraphs and a clear conclusion.”
The other reason is that the bigger the site gets, and the bigger the business gets, the harder it is to retain the original voice.
That is from Ezra Klein, there is more here. (I recall Arnold Kling making a related point not too long ago, does anyone have the link?)
If you haven’t already noticed, we have no plans to chase traffic from social media, at least not by changing our basic interests and formula.
Here is another thread I found online:
“The majority of time that people are spending online is on Facebook,” said Anthony De Rosa, editor in chief of Circa, a mobile news start-up. “You have to find a way to break through or tap into all that narcissism. We are way too into ourselves.”
There is more here, from David Carr, mostly about selfie sticks and Snapchat. The human desire to be social used to be a huge cross-subsidy for music, as young people used musical taste to discover and cement social alliances. Now we don’t need music so much to do that and indeed music plays a smaller role in the lives of many young people today. This has been bad for music, although arguably good for sociability and of course good for Mark Zuckerberg.
The “problem” is that the web gives people what they want. Those who survive as bloggers will be those who do not care too much about what other people want, and who are skilled at reaping cross-subsidies.
Addendum: Kevin Drum offers comment.
Oxford, Cambridge, Sweden, Singapore, and Canada (from the comments)
Here’s the data on Swedes at Oxford.
The average acceptance rate for EU applicants was 9.2%. For Swedish applicants it was 3.2%.
For 2013, both Oxford and Cambridge accepted 140 students from Singapore, a country of 3.3 million citizens.
They took 26 from Canada, which has 33 million people.
That is from Chip.
Assorted links
1. Chemists find a way to unboil eggs. And the Obama administration targets occupational licensing.
2. Jodi Beggs example database for Principles of Economics course.
3. When writing about China, it is much easier to acknowledge the importance of the top one percent. A very good post, #moodaffiliation.
4. Afghan carpet weavers are putting drones on their rugs.
5. Will new technology lead to ultraropes, much longer elevator shafts, and much taller cities?
6. Why the left wing sometimes finds it hard to succeed, follow-up post here, I’m not saying you should read those through. And do more expensive placebos work better? Original paper here. And here is Ross Douthat on same.
7. People identified through credit card use alone, often as few as four transactions.
Are British high earners taking the heaviest whack?
Sarah O’Connor reports from the FT:
Pay inequality has lessened in the UK during the past three years because the real wages of highly paid employees have fallen more steeply than those in low-paid jobs.
While there is concern about high levels of income inequality in the UK, analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank suggests the squeeze on wages has been more acute at the top than the bottom. It also shows that men have fared worse than women and the young worse than the old.
The full story is here.