The Danger of Overcapacity

While the US frittered away much of the stimulus on throwing money at banks, the Chinese actually created much more capacity. Business Week used to do a good job of understanding real issues. Here the new Bloomberg magazine notes that the extra capacity poses a risk to the West because China will now have to export more, creating a different sort of imbalance.

Roberts, Dexter. 2009. "China's 'Made in China' Problem: The Downside to Beijing's Huge Stimulus is a Glut of Factories and Output That May Spur Trade Frictions." Business Week (21 December): pp. 20-21.

While Beijing's $586 billion stimulus package has helped the mainland navigate the global financial crisis, there's a downside. Fixed asset investment -- money spent on factories, highways, and other big-ticket projects -- soared 40% in the first half and accounted for nearly all of the country's growth.

A Reply to the Union of Concerned Scientists

I have to begin by saying that I appreciate the very civil tone adopted by Rachel Cleetus and UCS. It almost doesn’t feel like the internet.

Now on to the disagreements.

1. I stand by my claim that the least significant part of any climate bill is what it says it will do in 2020 or 2050. In a few more days, 2020 will still be a decade away. A decade ago Alan Greenspan was getting nervous that federal government would retire its bonds, become a net creditor and start buying up financial assets. OK, he gets credit for one out of three. Seriously, we will change our targets for carbon reduction over the next ten years, probably several times. If Rachel wants to put more stress on immediate action, that would make sense, but 2020? As for a science review process, fine, but it’s naive to think that any such mechanism will generate automatic revisions in such a crucial policy variable as cuts in carbon consumption. It will be political every time.

2. The statement that “tropical forests....are a source of 15% of global emissions” is simply wrong. Climate change is not a carbon emissions problem, it’s a carbon cycle problem. We are better off with more forests than less because they buy us some precious time, but in the end it’s about the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. This is an important distinction to make because there are powerful financial interests that want to convince us we can get to a stable climate by shelling out money for forests rather than cutting deeply into our fuel consumption. No.

3. At the risk of dragging the tone of this discussion into the gutter, I will say that Rachel is being disingenuous when she writes that support for tropical forests, clean development in low-income countries etc. is “not about offsets”, when clearly it is. The bill she prefers, Kerry-Boxer, is loaded with them. She is right to say that this falls within the current UN framework, but if you think, as I do, that offsets are the wrong way to go, you have a problem with that framework as well. The Copenhagen fiasco tells me the time is right to change it.

4. As I’ve written on several other occasions in this blog, it is delusional for environmental groups to allocate in their imaginations the billions and billions from carbon offsets to all their favorite causes, from energy conservation to R&D to generous support for the victims of climate change around the world. It’s not that we don’t need all those things. There are just two problems: (1) If there are to be such massive auctions, the income they generate will be taken out of the hide of consumers—it will be a mega sales tax. Such taxes are very regressive. It is very bad social justice to advocate a radical shift in public finance from moderately progressive income taxes to radically regressive sales taxes. And, no, Kerry-Boxer will not protect consumers from these price hikes. If they did we would have paralyzing energy shortages, worse than we had in the 1970s when oil prices were capped. (2) But we won’t have these lovely auction revenues to allocate in the first place. No government that has to face democratic elections will enact carbon restrictions that eviscerate the household budgets of its citizens. Despite all the rhetoric it hasn’t happened yet, and it won’t happen, ever. The only way to get the tight carbon caps we need is to give the money back, and to hard wire that promise into the legislation itself. If the commitment isn’t credible, the politicians will always run for cover when the chips are down. There’s no guarantee that rebating carbon revenues will be sufficient, but it’s a sine qua non. If the Europeans, who are much better informed and more supportive of action on carbon mitigation than we are, won’t tax themselves sufficiently for the cause, why do you expect this of Americans?

5. I agree that in a perfect world we would start by investing in energy efficiency and green R&D. I will support any bill that UCS writes that allocates money from the general budget for this purpose. Sign me up. But: (1) if the money comes at the expense of rebating skyrocketing energy costs it will render politically unattainable the overall cap that has to be the centerpiece of our policy, and (2) as a practical matter, the public will not support a big shift in spending toward these programs until after they see their energy costs go way up. I have put my name on every petition for mass transit and similar causes for 40 years and have seen almost every struggle go down to defeat. In a world of cheap gas, people don’t have to invest in alternatives, so they don’t. I’m afraid that, to quote someone who is not supposed to be quoted any more, when it comes to this topic, it is not people’s consciousness that governs their material conditions, but their material conditions that govern their consciousness.

6. To briefly reprise my previous post: one of the mistakes of the Kyoto-Copenhagen framework was to tie together mitigation and adaptation—to hold joint action on minimizing climate change hostage to arrangements to compensate the victims. I’m certainly for compensating the victims—and more—but not if it leads to gridlock. Fortunately, there is a gathering international consensus that the time has come for global financial mechanisms to address global concerns, like massive, extreme poverty, illiteracy, disease—and adaptation to climate change. Every other developed country except this one has joined the Leading Group and is discussing which financing mechanisms to put in place. The first of these, an airline ticket tax that pays for life-saving pharmaceuticals in the poorest countries, has already been implemented by eleven countries. If UCS wants the US to stand up to its international obligations, a good place to start would be getting the US into the Leading Group and supporting the fundamental reform of international finance. Crippling essential action on climate change by threatening to bleed households and then earmarking a fraction for Good Works Far Away is not a wise alternative.

Aughties, Noughties, Or Just Naughties? The Ten Worst Of The Bush Decade

Some say one reason we are seeing so little commentary on the end of the decade is that nobody knows what to call it. Is it the Aughties, the Noughties, or maybe just the Naughties? Some (the crowd over at Marginal Revolution) argues that much went well in places like China and India, where living standards for millions clearly rose. Cannot disagree. However, most think things not so hot (or maybe too hot) here in the US. Yesterday, Juan Cole at http://www.juancole.com gave a list of the Ten Worst Things for the US in the Bush Decade, which I repeat here without further comment, although he provides more.

10) stagnating worker wages and emergence of new monied aristocracy
9) greater health and food insecurity for Americans
8) environment more polluted
7) imperial presidency ensconced
6) Katrina destruction of African-American neighborhoods in New Orleans
5) mishandling of Afghanistan
4) Iraq war
3) $12 trillion Bank Robbery associated with deregulation
2) 9/11 attack, with Bush laughing at CIA warning on 8/6/01
1) stolen 2000 presidential election.

Happy holidays everybody!

Watching Sausage Being Made - Health Care "Reform"

There is an old saying that there are two things one should not look too closely at: the making of sausages and the passing of laws. In the case of what is left of health care "reform" after all the purging and paying off, which may be passed tomorrow by the Senate, this is the case more than usual. It is not a change of system, but at best an extension of the existing system, even though Obama said he would change it, and many among the Dems in Congress have pushed for more serious systemic change. As it is, I see six different possible systems broadly:

1) pure laissez faire, done in the US in the past, but no longer in place in any high income country, 2) the US system of for-profit private insurance with some state provision (medicare, medicaid), 3) a universal system of non-profit private insurance, what is in place in the Netherlands and Switzerland, 4) a universal coverage system of private-non-profit coverage through employment and a public option for rest, found in Germany and France (whose system has been rated the world's best by the WHO), 5) a single payer public system, with healthcare workers self-employed, Canada an example, and 6) a fully socialized system with healthcare workers state employees as in the UK and the former Soviet Union. I think that Obama was pushing for something like the French system, although keeping our useless for-profit insurance companies, but, well, not only sausage in the making, but pretty smelly sausage coming out the other end...

A Primitive Answer to High Tuition

Given the anti-intellectualism of today, maybe this is the answer for high tuition.

Mill, John Stuart. 1848. Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, John Robson, ed., Vols. 2 and 3 of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965- ).

391: "Before the invention of the art of printing, a scholar and a beggar seem to have been terms very nearly synonymous. The different governors of the universities before that time appear to have often granted licences to their scholars to beg."

Copenhagen: Wall Street Journal vs New York Times

WSJ: "The two-week Copenhagen conference appeared set to end with no agreement at all, until last-minute bargaining among leaders from the U.S., China, Brazil, India and South Africa produced a final statement. A handful of countries, including Sudan, Venezuela and Bolivia, declined to endorse the 11th-hour deal."

NY Times: Andreas Carlgren, the environment minister of Sweden, the country holding the rotating E.U. presidency, said that the summit meeting had been a “great failure” partly because other nations had rejected targets and a timetable for the rest of the world to sign on to binding emissions reductions .... It was obvious that the United States and China didn’t want more than we achieved at Copenhagen,” Mr. Carlgren said at a news conference in Brussels. The obstacles created by those countries were “part of what we regretted,” he said."

Robert J. Gordon is a Buffoon

Gordon: "To engage in this debate in December 2009 requires that we play a fantasy game..."

It is fitting that Professor Gordon admits he is playing a fantasy game. To equate unemployment with vacation is a bizarre and callous fantasy. To equate market income per capita with standard of living is a strange and fantastic category mistake that could only be made by someone for whom "money is reality, while leisure is an empty spot in time devoid of wealth-producing activities."

But Professor Gordon crosses over the line from fantasy into delusion when he invokes the so-called "lump of labor fallacy" to disparage policies that encourage shorter hours of work. The fallacy claim is a weird concoction that many economists fancy to be their "knockout punch" against work time reduction. It consists of the bogus claim that advocates of shorter hours assume there is "a fixed amount of work to be done" regardless of labor costs, work arrangements, demographic trends or consumer demand. Advocates of work time reduction assume no such thing.

Policies to encourage shorter hours do not rely on any such ridiculous assumption. No economist has ever produced a coherent argument or substantive evidence to show that advocates assume a fixed amount of work or that policies rely upon such an assumption. All economists have done is repeat the assertion ad nauseum. Repetition doesn't make it so.

The lump of labor fallacy amounts to little more than schoolyard name-calling. But – and this is a crucial point – it is name calling with a long and very peculiar history that has nothing to do with economic analysis and everything to do with reactionary ideology and polemics. Professor Gordon is sadly unaware that this curious history of the lump-of-labor fallacy claim has been painstakingly documented (see "Why Economists Dislike a Lump of Labor" ).

Bernanke’s Saving’s Glut Hypothesis - Contradiction Number Two.

[Continued from ‘Bernanke’s Saving’s Glut Hypothesis. Contradiction Number One']

In his March 2005 musings [1] on the reasons for a so-called global savings glut Ben Bernanke asserted that the US current account deficit was, by definition, “the excess of U.S. payments to foreigners over payments received in a given period.”

Thus the entire official meaning of ‘current account deficit’ hinges on the US Federal Reserve’s definition of what a ‘foreigner’ is. And what is a ‘foreigner’? Today most world ‘trade’ is dominated by giant transnational corporations (TNCs) who exchange goods, services and money within themselves and/or network with other TNCs. [2] The vast majority of these giant conglomerates are of US in origin. What that effectively means is that the US controls most global ‘trade’[3].

“According to the Forbes Magazine’s ranking of 2007, the first five largest corporations of all times are not industrial but financial institutions.”

It is no coincidence that four out of five of these were from the US. [4]


A single US corporation, Walmart is China's fifth-largest export market, ahead of Germany and Britain [5] and “Wal-Mart is responsible for approximately 10 percent of the United States' trade deficit with China.” [6], [7]

In fact, a new international system has emerged since the 2nd world war. It is unipolar and hierarchical. It is empire. "The United States has become the global 'world state' or 'world power' to which there is no challenger. There are now "extremely high levels of economic and financial integration" that "motivate cooperation especially in trade….[The US] "sets its own legal and moral standards admitting to no external sources of authority." [8], [9]

There is incontrovertible evidence that the US has come to its own unique definition of what is ‘foreign’ in its trading accounts with the rest of the world. As explained above, US companies dominate world commercial exchanges and transact with each other across national boundaries. Much of this trade is unrecorded in that the money transactions that do occur are often understated. The strong trend is for these large firms’ accounting statistics to be designed to actually ‘create’ losses in order to avoid taxation.[10]

The establishment of a myriad of shell companies using offshore tax havens often makes it impossible to trace or measure the proceeds of international transactions. Further, up until early in 2008 the US Treasury’s definition of the words ‘foreign and ‘domestic’ was based on where the commercial entity was "created or organised". In May 2008 the definition of 'domestic' was changed. The purpose of this move was to exclude from 'domestic' those entities 'created or organised' outside of the US and who also had 'substantial foreign ownership'. [11] But the dubious definition of 'foreign' remained.

So where are we headed with this creeping loss of meaning. Despite a reigning US President now wearing Democrat robes ‘preferred nomenclature’ remains the order of the day. In Reagan’s time, just as it is at present, nations that are to be rolled back have governments that are called ‘terrorist’. Countries that are to be supported against unwanted insurgencies are still called ‘democratic’. But in things financial we now have a cleverer and more constant application of propaganda. We can see that money and goods that never change hands is now considered ‘trade’.

"Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth, to see it like it is and to tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth and live with the truth."

Richard Nixon's nomination acceptance speech, Miami, August 8th 1968

[1] The Global Saving Glut and the U.S. Current Account Deficit
http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2005/200503102/

[2] It's NOT international trade. Don't be fooled.
Brenda Rosser. Thursday 24th July 2008
http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2008/07/its-not-international-trade-dont-be.html

[3] The term ‘trade’ itself is open to question when a vast quantity of exchanges happen within the same global corporation or network of such companies.

[4] These corporations are: Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, American International Group. HSBC Holdings is the other, a U.K. bank with approximate assets of $ 1.6 trillion.
From: ‘Finance-Military Complex’
http://democracyandsocialism.com/Articles/FinanceMilitaryComplex.html

[5] The Economic Crisis: A Wal-Mart Economy Dimension. Michael Perelman. Econospeak 18th October 2008

[6] Wal-Mart's 'China Price' By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted November 7, 2005.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/27829

[7] A board member of the Reserve Bank of Australia - Roger Corbett - is a Member of the Board of Directors of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc as well as Fairfax Media Limited (one of Australia's oligopoly media empires). He is also Deputy Chairman, Non-Executive Director of PrimeAg, a corporation established in December 2007 and that has set its sights on a massive land and water grab in Australia using a lot of investor money from overseas.

[8] 'Towards a Hierarchical International System? THIS Network.Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Tampere, Finland. Working Papers 1/2005

[9] The trillion-dollar TARP bailout of large US financial corporations in 2008 displayed the readiness of America to abandon the austerity programs and principles it imposed on other countries (nations suffering from large current accounts, trading deficits and insolvent trading institutions just like America) when it suited.

[10] See the large number of online discussions relating to the practice of ‘transfer pricing’ in exchanges within and between TNCs.

[11] CFIUS Review of Foreign Investment: U.S. Treasury Department Proposes New Regulations to Govern National Security Review of Foreign Investment in the United States
Sullivan & Cromwell LLP - May 8, 2008
http://www.sullcrom.com/publications/detail.aspx?pub=444

After Copenhagen

Copenhagen was a disaster, but it was a disaster foretold, the cul-de-sac for a strategy that was flawed from its inception. The only question now is whether climate activists and political leaders will sink another year or two of our precious time into repeating the errors of the past, or whether we can all make a clean break.

There are more flaws with the Kyoto-Copenhagen agenda than I can enumerate, but here are the big ones:

1. There is an inherent conflict between the environmental requirements for greenhouse gas mitigation, as those policies are currently posed, and the constraint of political feasibility in a world of electoral democracies (or even tolerated dictatorships, as in China). We need deep, deep cuts in fossil fuel use. The only way to get there is to raise the price of these fuels far beyond anything the world has ever seen. But democratic polities will punish any politician who acts to impoverish them. This is not about the economic cost of forestalling catastrophic climate change; it is about the distributional impact. When carbon prices skyrocket, those who pay suffer and those who receive flourish. This problem is not addressed by sidestepping the issue with bland, distribution-blind capping commitments. Rather, those commitments are revealed as false when governments refuse, for obvious political reasons, to carry them out.

2. The strategy of buying off developing countries through payment for forest preservation or “clean development” is ultimately incoherent and unmanageable. (a) There is no scientific basis for treating a ton of carbon temporarily “fixed” in a forest the same as a ton sequestered for virtual eternity as fossil fuels left in the ground. It violates elementary understanding of the carbon cycle, and no forest ecologist I know defends the idea. This means that science cannot provide any formulas to resolve political disputes over which forest practices to reward and by how much. (b) And there is no political resolution either, because there are too many types of forests and other sinks, too many practices, over too many countries, with too much money on the line. (c) The notion of offsets to finance clean development is self-contradictory. The economic challenge is to fundamentally change what development means by decarbonizing it. This can only happen if prices rise to prohibitively high levels from the standpoint of current practices. Offsets seek to suppress price increases and delay this transition, so at best all they can hope to achieve is to replicate current best practice in developing countries—although their actual performance is far below even this standard.

The contradictions of Kyoto-Copenhagen were buried under layers of diplomatic verbiage, but they never went away. The closer we got to the point at which we had to devise a real, working agreement, the more intractable they become.

This is not the place to spell out a new strategy in detail, but the flaws of the existing one point the way.

1. Revenue recycling must be built into the fundamental architecture of any GHG mitigation scheme in order to sell it to a democratic electorate. All, or nearly all, of the money people pay in much higher energy prices must be returned to them, and the promise to do this must be credible. It cannot go to oil producers, government coffers, or even the fine projects advocated by environmental groups. No politician will dare to impose such prices if households see the money going out but not coming back in. Some version of a rebate program is imperative. This means, in turn, that carbon caps or taxes cannot be used in a substantial way for payments to the developing world.

2. The goal of mitigation policy must be brutally simple: to phase out, as rapidly as possible, the use of coal, then petroleum, then natural gas. Everything else, although important, is secondary. Yes, we need energy R&D, better agriculture and land use policies, infrastructure investments and the rest, but the central mechanism that ratchets down our climate forcing must apply specifically to fossil fuels. Leave them in the ground. Politically, I believe this prioritizing is coherent; it is only in a world of extraordinarily high fossil fuel prices that we will get the electoral support we need for public spending to shift our development trajectory.

As a practical matter, I recommend separating adaptation from the mitigation framework; it really doesn’t belong, and it shouldn’t be an obstacle to emergency preventive action. Rather, funding for adaptation should be combined with Millennium Development Goals, biodiversity preservation and similar “global public goods” within a new framework of global public finance. The United States should, as a matter of extremely high priority, join in the work of the Leading Group on Innovative Finance for Development, and together we should put into place financial transaction taxes, taxes on international shipments of goods that present negative externalities (like arms and scarce nonrenewable resources), and solidarity levies like the already-existing airline ticket tax. Together, these mechanisms could raise funds of $100B or more. Add expanded debt relief, shutting down tax havens and a few other virtuous actions, and we could have the financing to meet all the most urgent global goals, including adaptation to unavoidable climate change.

So where can this new politics come from? The road from here to there probably passes through the major social and environmental NGO’s, but they are unlikely to change course on their own. There needs to be pressure from below. I hope the failure of Copenhagen spreads the message that time is very short, and politics needs to be focused on solutions. The day has passed for vague mantras like “another world is possible”. The only world we have is in serious danger, and those who understand what is at stake need to be militantly practical.

Video of My Colloquium Lecture

I have uploaded a video of my colloquium lecture, which is now at
http://www.archive.org/details/MichaelPerelmanColloquiumTalk

Hillary and Me

Hillary Clinton seemed to make a very generous offer in Copenhagen. She promised the poor nations of the world that if they agreed to a compromised climate change program the US would be willing to contribute to $100 billion program to help them by 2020. Maybe I have this wrong, but I could do one better in the same sort of flim-flam. I would be willing to contribute to a $200 billion program that would help these countries if they would agree to accept a compromised program. I even would be to contribute to $1 trillion program -- of course, neither I nor Hillary have made any commitment as to whether we would put up a nickel or serious money.

Samuelson And The Sons Of Samuelson On The Random Walk

The point I made in an earlier post about Paul Samuelson has become clearer due to debates on other blogs, most notably on Marginal Revolution, with the paper, "Proof that properly anticipated prices fluctuate randomly," Industrial Management Review, 1965, available at http://www.ifa.com/Media/images/PDF%20files/samuelson-Proof.pdf. This famous paper, cited by Krugman recently as presenting one of Samuelson's eight (nine really) most important original ideas, has been widely misinterpreted by his followers, a case of the "sins of the Sons of Samuelson." It has been interpreted as an early example of showing that markets follow random walks, which in turn are examples of market efficiency in conformance with rational expectations. Pretty much of this is either a misinterpretation or just plain outright false.

This latter argument depends on very strong assumptions such as Gaussian distributions of noise. Samuelson's proof is very general, allowing for probability distributions to drift over time (ultimate skewness) as well as to have varying variance (fat tails), and even not to rule out speculative trading by agents. He explicitly states in the conclusions that his theorem does not establish any sort of efficiency outcome to such trading.

Many, including most textbooks (such as Campbell, Lo, and MacKinlay) have simply missed the boat on this, identifying Samuelson with an efficiency result, and then proclaiming him to be wrong because such things as technical trading can make money sometimes. The problem arises from confusing "properly anticipated" with "rational expectations" or at least ratex in a simplistic formulation. Samuelson's result implies that agents are anticipating even the endogenous influence of other traders as well as the usual gaggle of exogenous shocks, and is very general to the form of the probability distribution, thus being perfectly consistent with such outcomes as the peso problem identified in an MIT Ph.D. thesis by Ken Rogoff in 1979. Indeed, Samuelson himself declares his result to be so general as to border on being empirically untestable, and lmost "vacuous," his term. It has been his "sinful sons" who have narrowed it down by making stronger assumptions to claim for it things Samuelson himself never claimed for it (indeed, explicitly denied, such as an implied market efficiency result).

Cheney Dream Of US Oil Companies In Iraq Down The Tubes

Late reports made it clear that indeed former VP Cheney was conforming to all those reports about certain US leaders wanting to invade Iraq at least partly so that US-based oil companies could get their mitts on Iraqi oil. Well, now the central government of Iraq has held auctions on the major outstanding fields, and the only US company to get a major concession was Exxon Mobil. Doing much better than any US company were Dutch-British-based Royal Dutch Shell, Russia's Lukoil, along with several companies out of China and France. Juan Cole reported on this on Monday at http://www.juancole.com, claiming that oil production there will be limited because of ongoing security concerns (which scared off publicly held US oil companies). Cole disagrees with Ben Lando at iraqoilreport.com, who forecasts that after these deals, Iraqi oil production could rise to compete with Saudi Arabia's, thereby helping to hold down the price of oil.

There remains an ongoing dispute between the Iraqi central government and the Kurdish regional government over oil concessions, with the Kurds cutting their own separate deals not recognized by the central government, with more fly-by-night companies banned from the central government's auction. The most important US company in Kurdistan is that run by some of the Hunt family, who had inside information from intel sources during the Bush administration. In any case, the idea that US oil companies would dominate Iraqi oil production in the long run, now looks to have pretty much gone down the tubes.

Samuelson And Academic Anti-Semitism

Paul Samuelson was probably the last of the major economists to experience serious academic anti-Semitism, having experienced Harvard refusing to hire him in 1940 despite his prominence at the time, as well as probably the last one to personally know Keynes, Schumpeter, and Hayek. This put him in a special position to comment on the discussion of their respective anti-Semitisms as studied by Melvin Reder, "The anti-Semitism of some eminent economists," History of Political Economy, 2000, 32, 833-856. In footnote 2 of his "A few remembrances of Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992)," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Jan. 2009, 69(1), 1-4., Samuelson said the following (noting that Schumpeter was his strongest supporter for being hired at Harvard):

Most of my gifted mentors, born in the nineteenth century, lacked today's 'political (and ethnic) correctness.' There were of course some honorable exceptions among both my Yankee and European teachers. Reder (2000) has provided a useful exploration of such unpleasantries. Central to his expositions were appraisals of the triad John Maynard Keynes, Joseph A. Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek on the subject of anti-semitism.

Unexpectedly, I was forced in the end to conclude that Keynes's lifetime profile was the worst of the three. In the record of his letters to wife and other Bloomsbury buddies, Keynes apparently remained in viewpoint much the same as in his Eton essay on the subject as a callow seventeen-year-old. Hayek, I came to realize, seemed to be the one of the three who at least tried to grow beyond his early conditioning. The full record suggests that he did not succeed in fully in cleansing those Augean stables. Still a B grade for effort does trump a C-.

I note a curious irony in that about the same time that Samuelson was not getting hired at Harvard largely due to anti-Semitism (although Schumpeter reportedly alleged that it was due to jealousy of Samuelson's brilliance by his erstwhile peers), Milton Friedman had the same experience at my alma mater, the supposedly progressive University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was not renewed for a position after one year of appointment. No, this was not institutionalist progressives upset about his pro-laissez faire views, which were not particularly public at that time. Rather, the other issues involved besides the evident anti-Semitism on the part of certain supposedly progressive institutionalists was that he was identified as being a mathematically oriented econometrician who thus threatened the institutionalism then dominant in the department. Over two decades later the final victory of policy-oriented econometrics in the department over the old institutionalists would be led by another Jewish econometrician, Arthur Goldberger, who died at 79 on Dec. 11. Just to really tie all this up in a knot, the very worthy and justly eminent Goldberger (whom I knew and admired personally) was a student of Nobelist Lawrence Klein (with many saying he should have shared the Nobel with Klein), who in turn was a student of Samuelson, although it is a famous old wisecrack that "Samuelson never ran a regression in his lifeюЭ

Paul Samuelson RIP

My favorite example of Samuelson's wit is his "algorithm" for solving the Transformation Problem:

1. Write down labor values

2. Erase

3. Write down prices.

And then I think he said, "Voila," if memory serves! (I should confess that when I first read it, I was spitting: at that time I thought, a., that the TP was solvable and, b., that it was very important that it be solved -ah, youth!- and how dare Samuelson ridicule the likes of me).

Of everything he did that I know, I think Samuelson 1958 was the best. A beautiful, simple, funny and earth-shaking paper that changes the way you see the world forever. Anyway, he was a mensch. RIP.