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John Maynard Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency,” 1933
That was then, this is now:
There may be some financial calculation which shows it to be advantageous that my savings should be invested in whatever quarter of the habitable globe shows the greatest marginal efficiency of capital or the highest rate of interest. But experience is accumulating that remoteness between ownership and operation is an evil in the relations among men, likely or certain in the long run to set up strains and enmities which will bring to nought the financial calculation.
I sympathize, therefore, with those who would minimize, rather than with those who would maximize, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel–these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national. Yet, at the same time, those who seek to disembarrass a country of its entanglements should be very slow and wary. It should not be a matter of tearing up roots but of slowly training a plant to grow in a different direction.
For these strong reasons, therefore, I am inclined to the belief that, after the transition is accomplished, a greater measure of national self-sufficiency and economic isolation among countries than existed in 1914 may tend to serve the cause of peace, rather than otherwise. At any rate, the age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war; and if its friends retort, that the imperfection of its success never gave it a fair chance, it is reasonable to point out that a greater success is scarcely probable in the coming years.
And here is Keynes anticipating Dani Rodrik:
But I am not persuaded that the economic advantages of the international division of labor to-day are at all comparable with what they were. I must not be understood to carry my argument beyond a certain point. A considerable degree of international specialization is necessary in a rational world in all cases where it is dictated by wide differences of climate, natural resources, native aptitudes, level of culture and density of population. But over an increasingly wide range of industrial products, and perhaps of agricultural products also, I have become doubtful whether the economic loss of national self-sufficiency is great enough to outweigh the other advantages of gradually bringing the product and the consumer within the ambit of the same national, economic, and financial organization. Experience accumulates to prove that most modem processes of mass production can be performed in most countries and climates with almost equal efficiency. Moreover, with greater wealth, both primary and manufactured products play a smaller relative part in the national economy compared with houses, personal services, and local amenities, which are not equally available for international exchange; with the result that a moderate increase in the real cost of primary and manufactured products consequent on greater national self-sufficiency may cease to be of serious consequence when weighed in the balance against advantages of a different kind. National self-sufficiency, in short, though it costs something, may be becoming a luxury which we can afford, if we happen to want it.
Here is the full text, whether or not you agree this is interesting throughout, and the prose is lovely too.
Thursday assorted links
2. Refugees in Denmark do much better in Copenhagen.
3. Carbon capture update (NYT, good piece).
4. Is Africa converting China?
5. “Royalties on 1983 Finance Classic ‘Trading Places’ Go Up for Bid.” “If it holds until the auction closes Wednesday, the current winning bid of $74,700 would obtain a producer’s share of the residuals generated by television rebroadcasts and streaming, worth $7,988 last year(…)”
My Conversation with Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama
Lots of economic history in this one, with the underlying themes of persecution and tolerance, here is the audio and video.
We talk about the evolution of anti-Semitism, how the Black Death influenced Europe, the economics and politics of volcanic eruptions, how much prejudice will come back, amateur astronomy, Jared Diamond, cousin marriage and the origins of the West, why England was a coherent nation-state so early, the origins of the Industrial Revolution, Schindler’s List, and more. I split the time between the two, here is one excerpt:
JOHNSON: Mark and I have done a lot of work on building datasets of Jewish persecution and Jewish expulsions at the city level and the country level in Europe over a very long period of time. And a question that I, for one, don’t fully understand is, you don’t need to actually kill all the Jews or expel them in order to extract resources from them. In fact, in some way, this is off the equilibrium path. You’re no longer in some optimal equilibrium for both the ruler and for the Jewish community.
Oftentimes, these Jewish communities would be expelled from a city, they would be invited to come back, and they would come back — in 5, 10, 15 years, sometimes even shorter. But that’s a little bit easier to understand.
In the case I gave you in England in 1290s, I think I understand a little bit about why it might have happened that way. I think it was signaling credibility in some political compact between the king and the nobles, but I’m not sure. But that’s an example of top down.
Other times, clearly, people are . . . You have, say, guilds moving against these Jewish communities. An example of this would be in 1614, when the most well-known Jewish persecution was in Frankfurt am Main. It was called the Fettmilch Massacre. Fettmilch was a baker. He was in guild, and he was upset about the terms of the political deal between the city rulers — the city council — and what the guilds were getting. One of the things that the guilds wanted were the Jews to be expelled. This was competition in some sense.
There was this bit from me:
COWEN: If the Black Death raised wages, does that mean that immigration today lowers wages?
And:
COWEN: Large volcanic eruptions earlier in history. From an economic point of view, what’s the single most interesting thing we know about them?
JOHNSON: I think what’s very interesting about the volcanic eruptions is that we are discovering more and more that they may have played a large role in political change that occurred. Joe Manning at Yale, and I believe his graduate student (Bruce M.S. Campbell) have been doing work on . . . They looked at a series of volcanic eruptions that led to the end of the pharaonic empire. That ended around 30 or 60 BC, I forget. Right around that time.
That was an empire that lasted for 300 years, but they experienced all these crop failures. And then once you look at it, you see that in Indonesia, all these major volcanic eruptions were happening in perfect timing with these crop failures that were taking place. Actually, they can tell from looking at the Nile and how much it’s flooding and things.
COWEN: Politics becomes nastier when the volcano goes off?
And from Mark Koyama:
COWEN: Why was China, as a nation or territory, so large so early in world history?
KOYAMA: Yeah, that’s a great question. There are several potential explanations, one of which is geographic. Another one would be an argument from the writing system. But I think the geography story is quite important. Jared Diamond, building on people like Eric Jones, argued that China’s geography . . .
Essentially there are two core geographic regions in China around the Yellow and Yangtze river deltas, which produced a huge amount of grain or rice. If you control those core regions, you can raise large armies. You can have a large population and dominate the subsequent regions.
Whereas, the argument is for Europe that these core regions are, perhaps, arguably more separated by geographical boundaries. The limitation of that argument on its own is that geography is static, so it doesn’t really tell you anything about the timing.
The interesting thing about China, in my view, is not just that it was once unified, or unified early. But it’s persistently unified. It reunifies. Interestingly enough, the periods of de-unification get consistently smaller. So there are always periods where it’s fragmented, like the warlord period in the early 20th century, but over time may become smaller.
Europe doesn’t seem to have that centrifugal force, so a lot of Europe is unified by the Romans, but it’s not able to come back together along those lines later.
And the argument that I put forward in an article with Tuan-Hwee Sng and Chiu Yu Ko of National University of Singapore is that it’s not just the core geographical reason. That’s part of it. But actually, the periodic threat from a nomadic steppe is another key factor.
This is geographic because China has a very sharp slope from really productive agricultural land to land which is only fit for horses, for Eurasian steppe. China could be invaded very easily from the north by these steppe nomads, whereas Europe — it was much less vulnerable to this. And that helps to explain why the Chinese state is often a northern state.
So if I can add, if you think about China today, or even China in the past, the really productive land — a lot of it’s in the quite far south, in Shanghai, Yangtze delta. But the political center of China is near Beijing, or it’s in the north. And that’s due to this political economy threat from the steppe. And it’s these periodic steppe invasions which we argue are responsible for the centralization, an almost militarized character of the Chinese state through history.
And:
COWEN: Max Weber. Overrated or underrated?
KOYAMA: Underrated.
COWEN: Why?
KOYAMA: Because most people just know the Protestant theory, and they misreport it. Whereas, actually, his most interesting stuff is on Chinese religion and ancient Judaism. And the role of —
COWEN: The history of music, right?
There is much more at the link. I am very happy to recommend their forthcoming book Persecution and Tolerance: The Long Road to Religious Freedom.
The new committee to re-elect Donald Trump
It has some surprising members:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been promoting the idea of a 70 percent top marginal tax rate, and Paul Krugman has been defending it. Matthew Yglesias of Vox has written that 70 percent might be too low.
Here is my full Bloomberg column on the topic. You will note by the way that if you only apply the tax on say $10 million and up, it will all be converted into capital income and the tax will distort without raising much revenue. And here is a sentence toward the end of the piece, part of my advice for Democrats:
Recognize that you’ll never be that popular on the tax issue.
I see this as a kind of catnip issue, one where the Democratic Left is so, so tempted to make redistribution the central idea of the party, a disastrous urge in my view.
Saturday assorted links
1. The next generation of Indian intellectuals? Is the list maybe a bit too high-falutin’?
2. How some of China’s spies operate. And update on Chinese CRISPR patients, lots is going on here and we are seeing just the tip of it.
3. “Libraries are incredibly risk averse…” And this bit: “We will err very much on this side of caution. We would rather not gather the information in the first place, then run the risk of holding it and losing it. And we do have to have information. With one exception, we get rid of it the moment we can. The only one exception is fines information.”
5. More skepticism about carbon taxes, from Justin Gillis (NYT).
6. Scott Sumner on how to teach economics (recommended, there is much truth and wisdom in this post).
7. Top economists pick the best research papers of the year.
Thursday assorted links
1. Leather tanners of Ecuador.
2. Science stories from 2018 — are these the important ones?
3. Bach’s most popular works, broader rankings here. Based on YouTube data, not what is played in concert. If there is any composer who in terms of intrinsic quality should not have such a Power Law, it is Bach, yet he does.
*The Economist* covers *Stubborn Attachments*
Philosophers are accustomed to discussions about how to value lives distant from our own in time and place; economists are not. But in a new book, “Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals”, Tyler Cowen of George Mason University argues that the moral status of human lives ought not to be traded off over time in the same way that a bond portfolio might be. He puts the results of discounting in evocative terms: given a 5% rate of discount, one human life today is worth 132 a century hence. Is it really ethically acceptable to save one life now at the expense of so many in the future? The lives of humans born decades from now might be difficult for us to imagine, or to treat as of equal worth to our own. But our own lives were once similarly distant from those taking their turn on Earth; the future, when it comes, will feel as real to those living in it as the present does to us. Economists should treat threats to future lives as just as morally reprehensible as present threats to our own.
Here is the full article, on Twitter attributed to Ryan Avent.
Tyrone on polarization, polarization is good polarization is gone
For a few years now, a number of you have been asking me where Tyrone, my evil twin brother, has gone. The truth is a sad one: I have had to put him away, because in these especially fractious times his particular brand of malfeasance is less funny than before. His wisecracks cut too close to the bone, and so many matters on MR have become more somber — no more dating advice either!
Nonetheless, is there a stable equilibrium to be had? If Tyrone receives little or no surplus, he becomes all the more…unruly. And so, risking punishment, he snuck out this message to Alex T., and I agreed to print it, for fear that further transmissions would occur (I do respect the Laffer Curve, and at an optimal punishment level I still can get away with some editing of his words). Here is the ridiculous nonsense that Tyrone reports this time around, and you can see he is gaming the message to encourage his own liberation:
Tyrone:
Tyler and his media friends keep on reporting that political polarization has gone up. But that’s wrong: it has radically fallen. Just look at economic issues. As of 2011, many Republicans were for some ostensible Tea Party version of economic liberty, or at least they pretended to be. Now both parties are very bad on economic issues. For instance, you’ll find protectionist ideas all over the political spectrum.
The wonderful thing about polarization was this: it forced people who didn’t really believe in economic liberty to act as if they did. The resulting gridlock was better than letting people’s real instincts come out.
Trump of course used to be a Democrat, and our president himself draws bad ideas from both sides of the aisle. Which party again was campaigning against NAFTA? What is they say?: Look into trade as an issue. and you see a man’s soul.
What about abortion, that (supposedly) most polarizing of issues? As Matt Yglesias noted:
About a third of Republicans are pro-choice and about a third of Democrats are pro-life.
Yes that is a real difference, but it hardly sounds like two worldviews, standing irrevocably cleaved and apart. And a lot of those positions are in actuality fairly nuanced in their details.
According to Larry M. Bartels, about a quarter of the Democrats on cultural issues stand closer to the Republican party than to the average position of their own party. And talking through the poll data on Christian black women — often Democrats but on average not exactly “progressives” — would require a lengthy missive of its own.
Nor do I see either party speaking up for free speech on campus, except in the most opportunistic terms. Republicans are pushing bills to crack down on left-wing protests against conservative talks, while the left is trying to limit those same conservative talks. Distinction without a difference, your Tyrone says, and he should know. I yearn for the “good ol’ days” when the New Left was for free speech and the conservatives were largely more skeptical. At least someone was for it, and in an oppositional kind of way.
Contrary to standard reports, the urban-rural divide has not really been growing.
Trump wants to change various governmental rules and norms to cement his own power, such as dumping the filibuster and perhaps reinterpreting the emoluments clause and expanding executive authority of trade and immigration. Democrats talk of dumping the electoral college or, right now, bringing back FDR’s “court-packing” plan.
It is widely granted that traditional political parties are blowing up (NYT). Plenty of people wanted Trump and Sanders to run together as a ticket. And in just about every European country, immigration and terrorism poll as the major issues, neither of those being the traditional territory for previous polarization.
The thing is, when people really believe in something, they end up polarized. Of course they don’t agree on everything, and so polarization ensues along the dimensions of difference. Less polarization is a symptom of believing in less more generally, and don’t confuse the resulting obnoxious fractiousness with greater polarization. Instead, it is a sign that ideas are no longer ruling the day. And indeed, religious participation is down in America and the secularization thesis is finally beginning to bite. Polarization, however unpleasant it may have felt at the time, meant order.
Tyler again:
What can I say people? Tyrone now opposed to obnoxious fractiousness? In spite of his periodically reasonable tone this time around, don’t believe it for a moment — he hasn’t changed. Nor is polarization down. Polarization between Tyler and Tyrone clearly has gone up as of late, thus his enforced silence. Tyler believes in free speech, and he knows that freedom from harm for others requires the silence of Tyrone. And so is freedom realized, and to thunderous applause.
Who knows when you will hear from Tyrone again? Maybe I’ll let him do a restaurant review instead.
Amateur meteorology in India
India’s amateur forecasters are not formally trained in meteorology. Still, many people rely on individual blogs or Facebook pages that have built reputations after years of forecasting. “U r a gr8 help” reads a message Srikanth received from one reader of his Chennai Rains blog, which he manages with two other people. Another reader invited the Chennai Rains team to his wedding.
Weather wonks such as Srikanth are scattered around India. In the financial hub of Mumbai, 64-year-old retired businessman Rajesh Kapadia has become a local hero for the predictions on his blog, Vagaries of the Weather. Kapadia’s passion for meteorology started when his father gave him a wall-mounted thermometer as a teenager. At first, people mocked his weather obsession. “They thought I was a madman looking at clouds,” he said.
In the northern Indian city of Rohtak, 16-year-old Navdeep Dahiya sends local farmers WhatsApp and Facebook weather alerts while studying for school exams. Dahiya describes 2014 as his “golden year” — it was the year he went on a school trip to the India Meteorological Department. “I saw how farmers are helped by the weather,” he said. “I saw how they use all these gadgets to predict weather.”
Dahiya soon set up his own weather station at home; he has thermometers, an automatic rain gauge and a digital screen. Now known as Rohtak Weatherman, Dahiya sends out weather reports in Hindi and gets phone calls from farmers in the region asking for predictions.
That is from Vidhi Doshi at WaPo. I would be very interested in knowing how the forecasts of the amateurs (probably not the right word at this point) compare to the professionals.
What do we know about the economics of storms?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt from the final section:
Greater federal aid to the victims is a likely option. Still, it will not be obvious to many Americans why those who lost homes might end up receiving higher government benefits than people elsewhere who never had homes in the first place, and who may have inferior income prospects, especially if they live in rural areas. Many Texas congressional representatives voted against federal aid when Hurricane Sandy hit New York and New Jersey in 2012. That sounds cruel, but we also have to guard against the tendency for aid decisions to be driven by media cycles rather than the nation’s most serious structural problems.
One commonly discussed “economist’s solution” is to limit federal bailouts, and get the federal government out of providing flood insurance, in the hope that homes will not be built on risky floodplains. It doesn’t make sense to have $663,000 in payouts sent to one Mississippi home, which has flooded out 34 times in 32 years.
That all makes sense in theory, but it also illustrates the limitations of economics. The homes are already built in precarious places, and in the Houston area the damage has already been incurred. Are we prepared to forgo giving federal aid, just to set a precedent for the future? If anything, acting tough could lead to a backlash against the politicians who do so, and make it all the more clear that future bailouts will be forthcoming. Maybe the best we can do is to price flood insurance more appropriately, in recognition that climate risks are higher now. Over the longer run, as housing stocks turn over, that will help limit homeowner and also fiscal exposure to extreme events.
In other words, doing better in response to storms won’t be that easy. At least so far, it seems the human logistical preparation and response has gone fairly well — relative to expectations — this time around.
Is storm damage getting worse?
On a global level, the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr. notes that disaster losses as a percentage of the world’s G.D.P., at just 0.3 percent, have remained constant since 1990. That’s despite the dollar cost of disasters having nearly doubled over the same time — at just about the same rate as the growth in the global economy. (Pielke is yet another victim of the climate lobby’s hyperactive smear machine, but that doesn’t make his data any less valid.)
Climate activists often claim that unchecked economic growth and the things that go with are principal causes of environmental destruction. In reality, growth is the great offset. It’s a big part of the reason why, despite our warming planet, mortality rates from storms have declined from .11 per 100,000 in the 1900s to .04 per 100,000 in the 2010s, according to data compiled by Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser. Death rates from other natural disasters such as floods and droughts have fallen by even more staggering percentages over the last century.
That is from Bret Stephens at the NYT.
China green energy projection of the day
China’s energy companies will make up nearly half of the new coal generation expected to go online in the next decade.
These Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal, according to tallies compiled by Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin. Many of the plants are in China, but by capacity, roughly a fifth of these new coal power stations are in other countries.
Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent.
…Of the world’s 20 biggest coal plant developers, 11 are Chinese, according to a database published by Urgewald.
Here is the full NYT piece by Hiroko Tabuchi. Furthermore, China’s electric cars aren’t actually all that clean.
Keep this all in mind the next time you hear someone tout China as the new leader of the global green energy movement.
The one hundred best solutions to global warming?
Jason Kottke reports:
On the website for the book, you can browse the solutions in a ranked list. Here are the 10 best solutions (with the total atmospheric reduction in CO2-equivalent emissions in gigatons in parentheses):
1. Refrigerant Management (89.74)
2. Wind Turbines, Onshore (84.60)
3. Reduced Food Waste (70.53)
4. Plant-Rich Diet (66.11)
5. Tropical Forests (61.23)
6. Educating Girls (59.60)
7. Family Planning (59.60)
8. Solar Farms (36.90)
9. Silvopasture (31.19)
10. Rooftop Solar (24.60)Refrigerant management is about replacing hydro-fluorocarbon coolants with alternatives because HFCs have “1,000 to 9,000 times greater capacity to warm the atmosphere than carbon dioxide”. As a planet, we should be hitting those top 7 solutions hard, particularly when it comes to food. If you look at the top 30 items on the list, 40% of them are related to food.
Here is the background context:
Environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken has edited a book called Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming which lists “the 100 most substantive solutions to reverse global warming, based on meticulous research by leading scientists and policymakers around the world”.
I will however order the book.
What would count as an explanation of the size of China?
There are two striking facts about China. First, the country is quite large. Second, the country was remarkably large early in its history, compared to most other political units. For instance, here is China in 200 AD:
How did this happen?
Or consider a modern version of the puzzle: currently there are over one billion Chinese in one political unit, and a bit of scattering. And there are over one billion Europeans, spread in fairly significant numbers across about fifty political units. How did such a fundamental difference come to pass?
I can think of many instructive explanations for China’s early size and unity that are nonetheless derivative. For instance perhaps a common language for writing played a key role, or perhaps the civil service and the exam system bound the country together. I don’t mean to gainsay those claims, but they are not fundamental. In part they are simply alternative descriptions of China’s relatively early unity. And there still ought to be reasons why those factors were the case, and some of them seem to postdate unity. On top of that, ideally we would like the explanation to account for China’s periodic descents into fragmentation and sometimes warring chaos.
I can think of a few factors that might count as fundamental, and often they involve economies of scale:
1. There may be greater economies of scale in Chinese agriculture. One specific hypothesis is that China’s “hydraulic” system of rice irrigation favored a centralized despotic authority (Karl Wittfogel, though I’ve never found this particular view convincing, see also earlier takes on “Oriental Despotism”).
2. There may be economies of scale for fighting land battles with horses. Alternatively, when it comes to naval warfare — more common for Europe — small countries have a chance to punch above their weight, witness England and Portugal.
3. China had lower climate volatility than did Europe, and that made it easier for a more stable equilibrium to emerge. (Or the kinds of climate volatility China had mattered less for its agriculture.) Big changes in climate, in contrast, periodically overturn political equilibria, most of all when agriculture was a huge chunk of gdp.
4. China has two main, navigable rivers running east to west, the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. It also has a large space of relatively flat plains.
5. China was formed when the prevailing technologies favored size and scale, and thus size and scale were imprinted onto early Chinese political DNA. This is a bit like the “inflation” theory of the universe. (NB: This part of the explanation is arguably “accidental” rather than “fundamental.”)
6. China and Rome are with regard to size and early unity not so different, but China did a better job absorbing the “barbarians” and thus persisted as a larger political unit.
What else? With some mix of those (and other) factors in place, the more traditional detailed explanations then kick in to promote China’s size as China.
Ideally, an explanation for China’s early size and unity, and why that size and unity bounced back from so many periodic bouts of warring states, should address the following:
a. Why the mountainous Tibet also ended up as a more or less coherent nation-state, and why that too happened fairly early. That seems to militate against purely rice-based explanations.
b. Why Yunnan was absorbed into China at a relatively late date — the 17th century — but once attached did become a stable part of the country in a manner that other parts of southeast Asia did not mimic.
c. Why Korea remained separate.
d. Why the Khmer empire proved unstable and perished, despite a high level of sophistication and state capacity.
e. Why the Aztec Triple Alliance grew to a much larger size than any political unit in North America at the same time.
What else?
I am grateful to a presentation by Debin Ma, and to comments from the Washington Area Economic History Seminar (recommended!), from a seminar last night. None of them are implicated in what I have written. I look forward to Debin’s paper on this topic (here is his earlier 2012 work), and Kenneth Pomeranz is writing an entire book on the question.
Addendum: Here is the Ko, Koyama, and Sng piece (pdf).
How bad a problem is presidential corruption?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here are parts of my analysis:
The upshot is that the possibility of conflict of interest will impose the biggest problems for those areas where a president’s legitimacy and credibility are most important, and also where the president has the most unilateral power. Those factors point to foreign policy as the most significant trouble area.
Domestic corruption is wrong, but I find it less worrying in practical terms, for instance:
Or consider the value of domestic property as a potential source of conflict of interest. If Trump really put the value of his hotel properties before the national interest, that might encourage a lot of policies to foster urban growth, travel, and tourism. Those policies might not spread their benefits efficiently, but they are hardly the worst outcome imaginable. A lot of the most scathing critiques of Trump refer to his proposed climate-change policies, but those seemed common to most of the other Republican candidates, and they are not a result of Trump’s particular asset holdings.
On the other hand:
But when it comes to foreign policy, all of these factors change for the worse, in part because the president has so much unilateral power. It’s hard for a president with perceived conflicts of interest to make credible commitments to allies because the allies can’t be confident that a president will stick to a proposed agreement or course of action. The result is an unraveling of alliances, a decline in international trust and possibly dangerous rearmament and nuclear proliferation. It’s hard for a subsequent president to reverse those losses.
Hostile powers or lukewarm neutrals also will be confused if foreign policy is not run in the usual predictable, bureaucratized fashion. That raises the risk of conflict or it makes an amelioration of tensions less likely.
Furthermore, imagine what would happen if members of the executive branch invited direct or indirect bribe payments from foreign powers. Large, corrupt, and partially hostile countries such as Russia and China – not Denmark – would probably make the biggest offerings.
Overall I find I am seeing too many “theory free” criticisms of Trump on the corruption issue. Do read the whole thing.