I Finally Can’t Take Naomi Klein Any More

She seems like a nice person and she wants the best for everyone, but her writings have become so counterproductive, so utterly wrong and yet so influential within the activist community, that it’s time to stand up.  (Or in my case, sit down at the computer.)

I just read her latest screed in The Nation, “The Change Within: The Obstacles We Face Are Not Just External”.  For the record, not everything in it is nonsense, but the most important parts are.

I’ll start with the less significant gripe.  Klein writes that we are unprepared to deal with climate change because “Climate change is place-based, and we are everywhere at once.”  We move around too much.  We are too global.  We've got to stay in one place for long periods and get to know the local flora and fauna, ID that flower that’s blooming a week earlier this year.  The reason we don’t understand climate change is that we've become too cosmopolitan.

Well, count me as a rootless cosmopolitan.  I like where I’m living, but I like most of the places I used to live too.  I don’t have any particular attachment to local places, local people or local thinking.  Or to put it differently, I appreciate all the local places, people and cultures, and I don’t place my current abode above them.

And guess what?  While many of its effects are local, climate change is the mother of all global problems.  The carbon cycle is planetary, and its impacts are driven by processes that span the planet too.  Above all, the solutions have to be global in scope.  Living your own particular, pristine local lifestyle is not the answer, folks.  We need global collective action, and that’s going to come from people who adopt a global perspective and feel comradery with other people who speak different languages and live thousands of miles away.  Klein has it ever so wrong about localism.  Yes, love the local wonders wherever you may be, but try to summon within yourself an intellectual and emotional frame that’s broader than anything we've ever seen before.  That’s what we’ll need.

But the real whopper is what she leads with: “Climate change demands that we consume less....”  How can I express how angry I feel when I read this?  Yes, it is ignorant and appeals to the prejudices of her tribe (the nouveau righteous), but it is deeply, deeply hostile to human solidarity.  Oh, and it has as much political potential as a suicide cult.

Folks, we’re still not out of the global meltdown that hit us in 2008.  There is massive unemployment throughout the industrialized world, much of it unmeasured because workers have dropped out of the labor force.  Outside our charmed circle, such as it is, literally billions of people lack the basics for health, security and the pursuit of their dreams.  So it is true, a large portion of the world’s people are consuming less than they’d like, and here we have Klein cheering it on.

Let me get personal.  My college is going through another of its periodic spasms of budget cuts.  We've laid off faculty lines and are looking to slash expenses anywhere we can, despite the fact that we've been making these kinds of cuts for years and never restoring them.  I will grant that much of this can be laid to our own failings, but we are part of a larger story, the long-term defunding of public higher education in a country whose progress in that area has come to a standstill.  I can assure Klein that this will lead to less consumption: unemployed faculty will consume less, students priced out of higher education will consume less of this product, and people who supply goods and services to our institution will have to take a hit as well.  And you know what?  This will do nothing at all to stop the climate juggernaut.  (One of the positions we cut was for a faculty member whose specialty is “climate justice”.  What do you think of that?)

There are two massive holes in Klein’s argument that rival any open pit mine you might stumble upon.  First, what do you mean “we” when you say “we must consume less”?  Aha, you didn't mean everyone, just the ones who were overconsuming, right?  And who gets to decide who they are?  And in an economy in which my income is your spending (the fundamental macro identity, in case you were wondering) how are you going to cut the consumption of the “bad” people without starving the “good” ones?  It’s all simply bonkers.

And the other hole is that in an economy that operates on prices, as ours, for all its faults, clearly does, the economic quantity of consumption is not tethered to the physical quantity of resources people consume.  I know this first-hand: the faculty jobs we've cut would not have sped up the extraction of fossil fuels one iota—perhaps even the contrary if our climate specialist would have been ultra-persuasive.  Moreover, the students who acquire less education will not be saving the planet that way either.  (In case you were wondering: yes, education is part of GDP.)

Think about it: how can economic growth be “bad” and recessions, with all the cutbacks they entail, not be “good”?

And by the way, replacing a capital stock built up over decades in response to insanely low fossil fuel prices with one that runs sustainably is going to require a lot of economic activity—you know, GDP.

There was a companion article in the same issue by Chris Hayes that’s soooooo much better, and makes it crystal clear what an immense political task we have in front of us.  One place to start would be to stop doing dumb things, like telling the people whose support we’re trying to get that the solution is for them to have less.

A Supreme Cellphone Moment

The Supreme Court took up the question of whether police can search the cellphones of people they’ve arrested without first obtaining a warrant.  All the argument, according to the report in today’s New York Times, was about criminal cases, remote-controlled bombs or driving without a seatbelt.

Actually, there’s a far more important context, government suppression of peaceful demonstrations.  One of the standard tactics to emerge in recent years has been the mass arrest of demonstrators, scooped up by the hundreds, held in custody and then released a day or two later with charges dropped.  I’d like to see a successful legal challenge to this, but I’m not holding my breath.

If the court, in its wisdom, decides that routine searches of cellphones are permitted, it is only a matter of time before mass cellphone inspection becomes part of the routine.  Why settle for simply squashing a demonstration—why not find out the organizational structure, the informal networks, the pathways by which information and ideas are disseminated?  It’s all there in those little phones.

Minnesota Mafia Challenges Piketty

Let me begin by noting that I have as yet been unable to obtain a copy and so have not read Piketty's smash hit book yet.  However, I think that I know enough about what is in it to post on this particular matter.  Anyway, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has posted a challenge put to him by Tony Smith regarding Piketty's book that can be labeled as coming from the Minnesota Mafia.  The econ department at the University of Minnesota, along with the closely allied research department at the Minneapolis Fed, which have long had people going back and forth or simultaneously in both, has long been the real fountainhead of new classical real business cycle DSGE macro, even if some of those who initiated that movement there are either not there anymore (Prescott, and many former students) or no longer a follower of it (Kotcherlakota, now Minneapolis Fed President, although for its failure to predict the crash or say much useful about Fed policy) or both (Sargent).  Nevertheless, a major contingent remains in one or both of those places, including Chari, Kehoe, McGrattan, Rios-Bull, and several others, and their former students continue to identify strongly with the place while they are now all over the world.

The centerpiece of  post is a paper by Castaneda, Dias-Gimenez, and Rios-Bull (http://www.econ.umn.edu/~vr0j/papers/maxrefin.pdf) entitled, "Accounting for the U.S. Earnings and Wealth Inequality," published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2003.  Several other papers are linked, with the most impressive by Heathcote, Storeslettin, and Violante
, an overview paper of the broader approach from 2009.

These models are variations of DSGE models, except that they involve incomplete markets, with Heathcote, et al. calling this approach the "standard incomplete markets"(SIM) approach.  The difference from usual DSGE models is what markets are incomplete, in this case idiosyncratic uninsured risks.  So, the missing markets are insurance ones, and these are what eventually explains the development of inequality.  The other part needed is that there are heterogenous agents done in the Minnesota way, an interval on some variable, in this case discount factors.  The main paper also adds a social security mechanism.  With proper calibration, they claim to reproduce the pattern of income and wealth inequality in the US economy up to 2003.  Most controversially they claim that introducing an estate tax will make little change in wealth distribution, only raising the wealth Gini from .79 to .80.  Cowen is impressed.

So, what is going on here?  Heathcote et al lay out the various mechanisms and review the broader related literature.  Various models have thrown in as shocks family and human capital ones, with the missing insurance markets including finance, public, and some others.  There is even a policy claim that being able to separate initial condition effects from later shock effects suggest policies focused on early education to improve human capital or others focused on later "insurance."  Obviously this is very different from the reputed story that Piketty ultimately develops regarding dynastic families emerging in a "patrimonial capitalism" and his focus on the overall return to financial capital compared to the overall rate of growth.  The stories are extremely different.

In the end, what is really driving Minnesota models is this distribution of different discount factors.  So, it is at the bottom line that those on top are patient and willing to abstain while those at the bottom are short-sighted and impatient, tsk tsk.  In this view, obviously the losers deserve what they (don't) get, while the virtuous rich deserve theirs.  This is the Protestant Ethic triumphant!

Barkley Rosser

The Illusion of Marginal Productivity

Page 341:

"As noted, the theory of marginal productivity and of the race between technology and education is not very convincing..."

Class dismissed.

Conditional Minimization of Type I Error and the Emergence of Scientific Sects

I think I've figured out a crucial missing link in the account of science I've long supported, and I want to put it in words while it’s clear in my mind.  What follows will be a quick sketch without much detail or example.

The overarching framework is that the key to science as a progressive human activity is its privileging of the goal of minimizing Type I error (false positives).  Research protocols can largely be explained according to this principle, including elaborate validation of methods and apparatuses and rules for replication and statistical significance.  These protocols are often fudged in the grimy day-to-day reality of research, but the stature of a field as scientific depends on containing these breaches.  There are two practical consequences of the strong bias against Type I error: one is that understanding of the objects of research can be expected to improve over time, the other that an immense division of labor can be supported, since specialists in one subfield can rely on and build upon the validated findings of other subfields.

So far so good, but how do we explain the sectarian division of research communities, much less the periodic Kuhnian emergence and overturning of entire paradigms?  How can science be progressive in the sense of the previous paragraph and yet support mutually inconsistent research programs over long periods of time?

Here is my tweak.  Classical Type I error minimization is unconditional; it seeks to prevent false positives that might arise from any form of mismeasurement, misspecification, misinterpretation and so on.  All potential sources of error are taken into account, and the goal is to reduce as far as possible the likelihood that a false positive could result.  The problem is that this can be a herculean task.  There are a great many potential sources of error, and it typically isn't possible to address each one of them.  A fallback position is conditional minimization of false positives.  This describes a strategy in which a (hopefully sparse) set of assumptions is adopted, and then Type I error is minimized conditional on those assumptions.  A research “sect” is a community that shares a common set of assumptions as a basis for minimizing Type I error from the remaining sources.  This is, I think, what Kuhn meant by “normal” science.

And where do these assumptions come from?  That’s a huge topic, which historians and sociologists of science love to study.  Once they are adopted, a set of assumptions is maintained providing the conditional minimization of false positives it permits looks enough to practitioners like the unconditional kind.  If you do everything you’re supposed to, minimizing Type I error conditional on the assumptions of your community, and your results still exhibit numerous and costly false positives, these assumptions become vulnerable to challenge.  Here too, of course, actual scientific practice can be closer or further from the ideal.  Some fields are aggressive at identifying anomalies; others train their adepts to not see them.

Seeing it this way allows me to acknowledge the good faith of practitioners whose assumptions differ from mine, providing they are honest about the conditionality of their work and willing to consider evidence that calls it into question.  They should expect this of me, too.  But skeptical historians of science tell us that self-awareness at this level is extremely rare, for personal and institutional reasons that are all too obvious.

Recognizing the necessity and ubiquity of conditional Type I error minimization makes me a bit more inclined to see economics as scientific.  I have complained in the past, for instance, about econometric work that doesn't so much test models as calibrate them.  Certain underpinnings of a model, like intertemporal utility maximization, are simply assumed, and then great amounts of statistical ingenuity go into devising and improving their empirical implementation.  I now see that this qualifies, at least formally, as conditional minimization of Type I error, and that, from within this research community, it sure looks like models are being progressively refined over time.  But I still think that economics rather stretches the boundaries of science in its willingness to cling to assumptions that, objectively considered, are extremely weak—inconsistent with the findings of other disciplines and at variance with observable fact.

Inequality and Class Struggle

In his discussion of the Cobb-Douglas production function and the presumed stability of the capital/labor income split, Thomas Piketty references the work of "the young German historian and economist Jürgen Kuczynski" (p. 219). Readers of Capital in the 21st Century may be interested to learn a bit more about this intriguing character, whom Marc Linder profiled in a 1994 monograph, "From Surplus Value to Unit Labor Costs: The Bourgeoisification of a Communist Conspiracy" published in the book, Labor Statistics and Class Struggle.

In the mid-1920s, the American Federation of Labor adopted a new wage policy linking wage demands to productivity gains, which Linder described as "strongly reminiscent of the reasoning that Marx had used in an address to the General Council of the First International in 1865 to refute the claims of one of its members, a carpenter named John Weston, that a general increase of wage rates did not benefit the working class." An excerpt from Linder's book:

The reason that Green’s “Modern Wage Policy” Declaration seemed so curiously suggestive of Marx’s own popularization of the theory of exploitation is that it was, implausibly enough, written by a German Marxist mole in the AFL. That person, who was also responsible for developing the data on relative wages for the AFL, and thus for the organization’s conversion to a crypto-Marxist strategy of holding the line on the rate of surplus value, was twenty-two year-old Jürgen Kuczynski… 

In September 1926… Kuczynski departed for the United States, where his father, who spent half of each year at the Brookings Institution and as late as 1931 was a member of its advisory council, had secured him a stipend at the short-lived Robert Brookings Graduate School of Economics and Government. Through his father, Kuczynski again came into social contact with many scholarly and political leaders in Washington, D.C., including Justice Brandeis, a distant relative. 

Shortly before his departure for the United States, Kuczynski was struck by Paul Douglas’s recent article comparing the movements of real wages, production, and productivity. Although Douglas did not draw the parallel or discuss its significance, he presented data showing that from 1899 to 1923, the real earnings of manufacturing wage-earners had risen 28 per cent whereas their per capita output or productivity had increased 52 per cent. Kuczynski then published a piece in the Finanzpolitische Korrespondenz, which his father edited, in which he methodologically went a step beyond Douglas: by dividing the index of real wages by the index of production, he generated an index of “the share of industrial workers in the total product of industry.” This “social standard of living,” which Kuczynski conceded was very rough and in need of refinements, had declined by 50 per cent between the turn of the century and World War I and remained stagnant thereafter. 

In the course of re-reading Douglas on the boat to the United States, a “fundamental idea” dawned on Kuczynski -- namely, that the relationship between production and real wages was nothing but Marx’s idea of relative wages. Whereas only bourgeois theorists and especially social-democratic revisionists contested Marx’s ‘“theory of absolute immiseration,’” relative immiseration seemed, once the absolute variant was accepted, self-explanatory. The reason that no one had thought of calculating relative wages was the lack of relevant data. When Kuczynski realized on the boat that statistics recently published in the United States had made such calculations possible, he arrived in Washington with his “tongue hanging out.” In November 1926, two months after his arrival, he published two more articles in his father’s journal on relative wages, which were both suffused with a primitive version of ameliorative underconsumptionism. In one, expressly referring to Marx’s distinction between real and social standards of living, he loosely defined the latter as (wage-working) consumers’ share of the national product, In the other he presented the first fruits of his calculations of relative wages in several industries as the result of dividing real wages (measured both by a cost of living index and an index of wholesale prices of the particular industry) by productivity. In 1927 and 1928, Kuczynski published additional articles on the same subject in Germany until the relative wage “had again found its place as a category of Marxist doctrine." 

While refurbishing Marxism, Kuczynski also performed a much more spectacular feat: ventriloquizing President Green. Although Frey’s efforts at the 1925 AFL convention had “given a great movement a great idea,” Kuczynski was disappointed that the Federation had “forgotten” about computing the worker’s share of the product or implementing the new principle. To be sure, Kuczynski overstated his own and underestimated the AFL’s initiative: immediately after the Atlantic City convention, The New York Times had published an interview with Green in which he anticipated by a year Kuczynski’s call for a workers’ share index. Specifically, Green stated that the AFL should do research to show workers and the public “how the purchasing power of wages has varied . . . and what relation that curve bears to the output per worker.”

IPAT: Simple and Useful

Miles Kimball has steered me to Matt Ridley, who gets IPAT completely wrong.  Ridley says he used to be an ecologist, but if he was his training had some gaps.  Here’s what he says about IPAT:

In 1972, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University came up with a simple formula called IPAT, which stated that the impact of humankind was equal to population multiplied by affluence multiplied again by technology. In other words, the damage done to Earth increases the more people there are, the richer they get and the more technology they have.

Nope.  IPAT is simply a decomposition:

environmental impact = population x (real GDP/population) x (impact/real GDP)

The name comes from reading this as impact = population x affluence x technology

Old timers will remember that Barry Commoner used this framework to demonstrate that a number of critical environmental problems were due primarily to the latter ratio, not to the first two terms on right-hand side.  Rather than focusing on population growth (like Ehrlich did) or impoverishing ourselves, what we most needed to do was change the technologies we used to produce things.  Contra Ridley, it was not about “less” technology but different technology.

And it’s still a useful way to frame environmental issues.  Take carbon, for instance.  Us humans need to forego 60-80% of the available fossil fuel reserves if we are to avoid potentially catastrophic climate change.  How can we pull this off?  Simple arithmetic, mobilized by IPAT, shows us that neither population reduction nor shrinkage of GDP per capita can get us anywhere near this, short of some sort of nightmare scenario.  Our only option is to reduce the amount of fossil fuel use per unit GDP, and this we can do rather readily, if the IPCC can be believed.  (I’m not convinced personally, but I could be wrong.)  That’s the T part of IPAT.

I don’t like to spend my time correcting every mistake I find on the internet, but the IPAT formulation is worth preserving.

Piketty for Dummies

You look around.  Some people are rich, even very rich, and others are poor.  Most are somewhere in between.  It’s not equal, but you think this is how it has to be if we're going to reward talent and enterprise so that all of us can ultimately benefit.

It’s third grade all over again.  You look around the room.  Some kids are really smart; they know all the answers and it is obvious they will get ahead.  Others may not be quite as smart but they try very hard, and they'll be successful too.  Some are popular, with the ability to make lots of friends and get others to follow them.  A few of the kids have that special blend of imagination and courage that sets them apart.  They take risks to discover how far they can go beyond their “limits”; they explore hidden places, how toys and gadgets work, different ways of doing things.  Meanwhile, there is the majority, nice kids but ordinary, average ability, average motivation.  It’s already laid out who will be who in twenty or thirty years: you can see society separating into the leaders and followers, the rich and the rest.

This is a certain (conservative) view of inequality and how it comes about.  Liberals and lefties have a different view of that classroom, and there has been a lot of argument back and forth.  But now Piketty changes the story.

You're back in third grade again, and everything you saw is still there.  But now there’s something else: there’s another school across town, one you may never have heard of.  It’s at the end of a long private road, behind a locked gate.  The kids at this school live in a part of town you’ve heard rumors about but have never actually seen, with large houses set back from the road and, like the school, hidden from view.  These kids come from very rich families.  Some of them are talented and do well in their special school.  Others are average.  More or less all of them will stay rich when they’re grown up—richer than even the smartest and most motivated kids at your school.  Their families already own much of the town, and, since they’re making money at a faster rate than the town is growing (Piketty has measured this), over time they will own more and more of it.  The kids at your school, the smart ones and the ordinary ones alike, will mostly end up working for them.  Unless something is done to disrupt the process, your town will have a hereditary ruling class.  Piketty says, you have to tax this upper group to prevent them taking over completely.

What Capital in the Twenty-First Century does is to enlarge your perspective.  For decades, the discussion had all been about the kids at your school and how much to reward the ones who have what it takes to go further.  No one talked about that other school because it was smaller, and above all because it was behind a locked gate and hard to find out about.  Piketty and his coworkers have done the heavy digging to get the facts about this other school—who goes there and what awaits them after they graduate.  He’s found that the families of the kids at that school are getting richer by the year, and that the inequalities in your school pale beside the gap between yours and theirs.  He’s adding new questions you need to ask.

WaPo says "Luhansk" is now "Lugansk"

Not too long ago I wondered about who makes the decisions regarding which spelling is to be used in US media for cities for which there are competing spellings in the Latin alphabet whose names are not spelled using that alphabet originally, in some cases this debate involving actual differences in the names or their pronunciation.  I noted in particular four cities in Ukraine, one of which at that time was being spelled in the Russian way ("Kiev" rather than "Kyiv")) versus three that were being spelled in the Ukrainian way ("Lviv" rather than "Lvov," "Kharkiv" rather than "Kharkov," and "Luhansk" rather than "Lugansk").  Well, now the balance seems to be two to two. This morning in the Washington Post I saw that last one being spelled in the Russian way, "Lugansk."  Whassup?

It may be that this is a judgment about political-military conditions on the ground.  Lviv is firmly in western Ukraine, the very heart of Ukrainian nationalism.  While Kiev is firmly in Ukrainian territory, it may simply be that too many people are used to spelling it that way, including as our sometimes commentator on these matters, Bruce Webb, noted, it may just come down to "Chicken Kiev."  But the situation regarding the other two is very dicey and somewhat similar, but not quite.

So, both Kharkiv/Kharkov and Lugansk/Luhansk are in contested eastern Ukraine. Both of them had masked men seize control of a major public building downtown.   But neither is in the Donetsk oblast where both the capital, Donetsk, and a large number of other towns, have had public buildings seized and where violence leading to deaths has occurred.  A major difference between these other two, is that, while they are both much nearer the Russian border than anything in Donetsk oblast, the Ukrainians were able almost immediately to get the masked men out of the building in Kharkiv and regain control of it, whereas they have failed to do so in Lugansk, where today's WaPo story reported on how they are hunkered down and piling up all sorts of arms to resist an expulsion.  Furthermore, although I suspect this is beyond anybody at WaPo, the former was never a part of the odd "New Russia" (Novorossyia) that Putin has rattled on about recently as a vague claim for much of southern and eastern Ukraine, Kharkiv being in the Northeast.  But Lugansk was in that odd territory, and now it increasingly looks like it may revert to Russia in the longer term, along with (maybe) Donetsk oblast, with Russians and Ukrainians having no disagreement about Donetsk's name.

I also note that we have seen no name changes in Crimea (Krim), as none of the towns and cities there were founded by Slavs of either Russian or Ukrainian or mixed extraction.  The names all predate the arrival of the Slavs in the neighborhood, in some cases by more than 2,000 years, and are all of either Tatar or Greek origin, the older ones the latter.  So, reportedly the place is in complete chaos and a lot of people who voted to join Russia are now regretting having done so, having gotten a an especially stinky pig in a poke, but at least none of the chaos there has anything to do with how to spell the names of the conurbations there.

Barkley Rosser

Rand Paul on the Reagan Fiscal Record

Tom Kludt catches Rand Paul praising Jimmy Carter and calling into question part of Ronald Reagan’s fiscal record:

Paul took his GOP blasphemy even further when he said that Republican punchline Jimmy Carter actually had a better record on government spending than Reagan. "The deficit went through the roof under Reagan," he said while stumping for his father, Ron Paul, at a campaign event in 2007. "So how long did it take Ron Paul to figure out that the guy he had liked, endorsed, campaigned for, campaigned for him? The very first [Reagan] budget. Ron Paul voted 'no' against the very first Reagan budget… Everybody loved this 'great' budget. It was a $100 billion in debt. This was three times greater than Jimmy Carter's worst deficit." Paul's office promptly issued a statement to Mother Jones. "I have always been and continue to be a great supporter of Ronald Reagan's tax cuts and the millions of jobs they created," the senator said in the statement. "Clearly spending during his tenure did not lessen, but he also had to contend with Democrat majorities in Congress."

President Carter was a fiscal conservative and Senator Paul is correct to point out that the Federal debt rose rapidly during President Reagan’s tenure. But as I listened to the video, I heard Senator Paul making a lot of false claims. Total Federal spending as a share of GDP did not rise even as President Reagan oversaw an increase in defense spending relative to GDP. So when the Senator claims that Federal domestic spending increased, that is simply not true. As far as the jobs record, let me turn the microphone over to Paul Krugman:

It’s not just that more jobs were created under Clinton, who raised taxes on the rich, than under Reagan; I wonder how many people know that more jobs were created under Jimmy Carter than under either Bush?

I seem to recall Lawrence Kudlow talking about how real GDP grew by 3.5% per year for the second half of the twentieth century, which is an accurate statement as far as it goes. But that omits the fact that average real GDP growth was only 3.0% over the 1981-1992 period. So much for Voodoo Economics!

"One of the Oldest Mistakes in Economics"

Allister Heath:

One secular shift that has made the plight of the young stand out even more is that our oldest workers have done remarkably well. There has been a boom in folk of pensionable age remaining or rejoining the workforce... Far more jobs have been created for pensioners during that time than have been filled by young people. 

This doesn't mean that older people have "stolen" the jobs of the young; the lump of labour fallacy is one of the oldest mistakes in economics. There is no set number of jobs, to be divvied up between young and old; all should theoretically be able to find work and in many cases an increase in the supply of labour also increases its demand. But the numbers are another reminder of how badly young people have fared.

Shorter Allister Heath: It happened but theoretically it isn't supposed to happen and in many cases it doesn't happen therefore it didn't happen.

Losing American Hearts And Minds

That is the title of a column in the Washington Post of April 21, 2014 (just barely yesterday) by editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, signed openly, in which he argues that President Obama is doing things that are popular in the short term, but lose him American hearts and minds in the longer term.  He starts on foreign policy, mentioning pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan and avoiding going into Syria, which supposedly involves "the emerging picture of an America in retreat, and  a leader half-heartedly committed to promoting liberty," which he claims is "not what they [Americans] are looking for."  He may be right, but this is not the part of his piece I wish to dump on hard.

That is when he shifts to domestic policy, which is the main topic of the column.  Here we find that Obama has also failed in the long run, even though he is apparently pleasing public opinion in the short run, by not accepting what "The Bowles-Simpson commission had called for," (higher taxes and slower growth in Medicare and Social Security spending).  Shame on him, even though indeed Hiatt recognizes that his non-acceptance is popular.

Now, I first want to remind everybody of a point that Dean Baker relentlessly emphasizes repeatedly (that is how he does things, good old Dean), that the Bowles-Simpson Commission never actually issued a report.  Talking about what it "called for" or "recommended" or anything else of the sort is simply rank nonsense.  They never came to an agreement because a substantial proportion of its Republican members, led by Paul Ryan, refused to accept the deal of higher taxes for spending cuts or restraints, because of the tax part.  They simply refused to accept any higher taxes, period.  And that was that.  It is true that after this failure of the commission to come to an agreement, Bowles and Simpson themselves issued a set of recommendations that Hiatt accurately characterizes, but this was not a report of the commission, just those two men. But Hiatt simply ignores this and goes on about how Obama somehow missed this great opportunity to "have empowered Republicans in Congress - the Roy Blounts and Bob Corkers - who want to work with Democrats to get things done," even if what they want to get done is silly and unpopular, ignoring that the Paul Ryans outnumbered such folk, to the extent they were really willing to do anything anyway.

As it is, Hiatt grants Obama many points.  He recognizes that indeed Obama supporting something supported by some Republicans may have simply led to that undermining any serious support among Republicans for  such proposals.  He does not mention ACA, but that is the prime example: an originally Republican proposal that in the end received zero GOP votes once Obama came out for it.

He even recognizes that maybe Obama "had no serious Republican partner," which sure as heck looks like it was the case, with again the ACA case paramount.  Obama (and Congressional Dems) negotiated with many GOP congressional members on it, giving them many policy victories, but in the end failing to obtain a single vote from them in its favor. 

Hiatt says he should have been more like LBJ in this time of nostalgia for him as one of those "other presidents would have given it more of a try."  Well, indeed at various times during debt crisis negotiations, Obama even hinted at accepting changes in the Social Security COLA in exchange for some tax increases on the wealthy, the deal that Hiatt so very much wants from his Bowles-Simpson fixation.  But, whenever Obama would float such proposals, they would get shot down by both  sides, Republicans for the tax increase and Dems for the COLA change.  But to Hiatt, he just did not try hard enough, thereby losing American hearts and minds in the long run.

Eventually Hiatt almost throws in his hat on the bottom line, "that Obama was right to steer clear of the 'austerity' of Simpson-Bowles," only then to deny that austerity is what is involved.  He then goes on to paint his picture of doom with baby boomer entitlements gobbling up money for "national defense, national parks, colleges, railroads, Head Start," and so on.  Never does he come to grips with what is really driving the longer term gloomy cost projections, which is health care costs, period.

Indeed, earlier this evening I heard it reconfirmed in a talk by Alice Rivlin, also long one of the VSPs pushing for such bipartisan deals, even praising Bowles-Simpson at one point and also noting her having founded the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office, a fountainhead  of rational and careful budgeteering along VSP lines.  I cannot criticize her on this, particularly as indeed her talk pinpointed health care cost projections as the main issue.  If these can be brought under control, then most of these bogeyman projections of deficit doom pretty much  go away, a point that good old Dean Baker also relentlessly harps on.  Unfortunately, she is not all that optimistic, despite noting some bending downwards of the healthcare cost curve in the wake of ACA, although warning this may be mostly due to the recession now coming to an end, maybe.  I asked her a very Dean Baker question: would not increasing immigration of healthcare professionals help this?  She agreed, but also noted how difficult politically it would be to pass such a reform.

So, I am willing to give Alice Rivlin credit for her tough realism, but Fred Hiatt just continues to wallow in some sort of fantasy land where cutting Social Security benefits is the proof of political manhood, and if only Obama had done this, by gosh by gum, he might even be able to lead the Dems to victory this fall in holding the Senate!  He is simply  a hopeless case, I fear.

Barkley Rosser

Piketty’s Unlikely Path

I’ve only just started K21, so I won't comment on anything substantive, but the mini-autobiography he presents in the introduction got me thinking.  Here’s a guy who was a natural for cranking out theoretical models in economics.  His career was jet-propelled, and at an age when most econ grad students are sweating out their prelims he was already on the tenure track at MIT.  He could spend the rest of his life among the elite of the elite, playing cleverly with algebraic puzzles for a living.  Instead, he quit, returned to France, and spent the next decade digging through archives, laboriously piecing together datasets on income and wealth distribution.

Question: how likely is this to happen?  How many talented modelers, on a fast track to the highest reaches of the profession, would give it up and walk away?  OK, empirically, how many have actually done this?  It is essentially an accident that K21 was written in the first place.

More On Owning Unowned Land

This follows an earlier post by me on April 17 on "Who Owns Unowned Land," which argued that in the US it is the states in the original 13 colonies and the federal government in the rest of the nation, with the precise legal code defining the tenure rights being those of the nation that was ruling the land when ownership was first established.  Which gets us back to this matter of how does this first ownership get established on previously "unowned land," with the implicit question for the US being, "why are not the Indian tribes the original owners?"

So, in a paper by T.W. Merrill from the Yale Law School in 2009, "Accession and Original Ownership," he addresses British common law views on how "original ownership" comes about, finding that the theory presumes that prior to individuals (or sub-national corporate entities) coming to own land, it was presumed to be "held in common," as in traditional medieval grazing commons in England that came to be enclosed, without it quite being clear who ultimately owned such grazing commons.  Merrill cites John Locke on this who wrote, amazingly enough, that we should think of the world as originally "being America," that is a giant commons.  For Locke it was mixing one's labor with the land that established ownership, a labor theory of ownership as it were.  The matter of "accession" is posed as an alternative, but this simply involves a modification of this labor mixing principle, altering it to the first owner is the one who establishes effective control over the land. Once that is recognized, then a chain is established that simply continues, which is why we have this matter of the code holding when land first becomes clearly owned being the relevant one for later property transfers, particularly real estate ones.

Now in fact this does not really answer our question, although it does highlight important details to some extent, particularly when we consider Locke's view of "America."  Why is it that the Indians did not "own" the land, or were not considered to be the owners by the British (and Spanish and French)?  Needless to say, certain areas were used regularly by certain tribes, arguably enough that Locke should have granted them property rights, unless he wanted to argue that they could not due to being subhuman or something like that (am not aware of Locke ever making such arguments).

No, obviously what is involved is recognizing that behind property rights, certainly in land, there is assumed to be some sort of government or state with an organized legal code and system of courts to enforce it, even if it is one that has evolved "spontaneously" a la the common law of Britain, in contrast to the continental codes derived from Roman law, although the argument of  Shleifer and his allies about the differences between these has been way overblown and often full of errors, the famous "Legal Origins" QJE paper by Glaeser and him being notorious for its myriad mistakes, even as it is one of the most heavily cited economics papers of all time.

So, private property comes into play when a government with a legal system recognizes that somebody has "mixed their labor" or otherwise assumed some recognized degree of control over some land with, very importantly, that person recognized as someone with legal rights to do so within the law code of the state involved, with that state itself ultimately having some degree of control or claim to control the land in question.  This gets us back to the question of how America did not come to belong to the Indian tribes, although now reservation lands do, and many individual Indians own land privately in many places.  It was simply a matter of force, although it must be recognized that none of the tribes had organized legal systems of the sort that one found in Europe.  These "commons," in many cases recognized among tribes as being "territory" of one tribe or another, became the property of the relevant European-backed governmental entity that took them from the Indians, one of those acts of "primitive accumulation" of which Marx wrote at length.

In any case, in the eastern US, those entities were the individual colonies, thus allowing them to "own unowned  land," with private ownership being recognized either by the Crown directly or by governors of the colonies assigned by the Crown, and the priority of  their rights continuing into the independence era of the US.  This  also explains how certain areas that had been settled while there was French or Spanish rule with individual properties being established under their rule continued to have their tenure determined by the system of legal land tenure in place when the original ownership was established.  But when the US would take control of these territories by either conquest or purchase, that land not already privately owned would belong to the US federal government, which did the conquering or purchasing, although which agency of the US government might come to have responsibility for such land would depend on acts of Congress.  And, of course, the various Homestead Acts all followed the Lockean principles of mixing labor with the land to assert control and ultimately private property rights.

So, running this back to the matter of Clive Bundy in Nevada and his claim that the "sovereign" state of Nevada owns the BLM lands that he has been grazing cattle on for decades without paying any fees, his argument continues to be completely legless.  If he wants to argue that somebody other than the US federal government is the owner of these lands, then the most legitimate alternative candidates would be either nearby Indian tribes (Shoshones?) or maybe the government of Mexico, from whom the lands were taken by force in the Mexican War.  I am sure he does not want to recognize either of them, who would also presumably demand fees from him to graze his cattle.  I know that he claims that some sort of rights were granted to one of his grandfathers, and maybe he did  "mix labor" with the lands, but the courts have not recognized  that claim.  And the matter of him and his armed friends flying lots of American flags while denying the very existence of the US federal government at all is completely absurd.

Barkley Rosser

Germany and Ukraine: Official and Alternative Views

The official view is on display in today’s New York Times, where a prominent news analysis piece (p. 4) claims that Germany’s pacific attachment to Ruhe and Ordnung (quiet and order) has been shaken by the aggressive behavior of Russia in the last month.  (They also say it’s been undermined by the Snowden revelations, but that is quickly dropped after the opening paragraphs; it’s not why this article was written.)  Quoting an article in Die Zeit and a CDU (conservative) politician, the article concludes that Germany has to face the reality that cooperation and compromise is not how the world works, and that it must rearm and adopt what amounts to a more NATO-friendly foreign policy.

Your first indication that this is about what Germans should think and not what they do think is the fact that both of these “representative” sources are from the right.  Die Zeit, in particular, is an interesting animal: it is literate and thoughtful, the journal whose want ads you would peruse each week if you were an academic looking for a job, but on international matters its tone is set by its editor and boss, Josef Joffe, perhaps Germany’s only high-profile neocon.  (He also holds a visiting post at the Hoover Institution.)  My ninth-grade social studies teacher told me that one of the main ways a newspaper spins the news is by selectively quoting those who agree with them.  (I had to memorize SQECBOP: slanting-quoting-editorial-cartoon-burying-omission-photo.  See, I still remember.)

Now, I’ll admit I’m hardly an expert in What Germany Thinks.  I know a few Germans and have an idea what they think, but I do try to keep up with what’s happening there.  I have an alternative take on how the Ukraine business is affecting most Germans:

1. Germany made a deal after WWII to be “of Europe”; it’s the basis for its return to political and economic power.  This is ingrained in popular consciousness.  The German economy also depends mightily (too much, in fact) on its exports to the rest of Europe.  The mess in Ukraine is seen as a crisis for Europe, and a threat to the European-ness of the other ex-Communist states in the region.  There is also a historical connection: Ukraine has been the home of large communities of ethnic Germans dating back centuries, and many current German citizens can trace their roots to Ukrainian ancestors.  Germans, except on the hard left, want Ukraine to be pro-West.

2. One of the lessons German drew from their disastrous experience before and during the Third Reich is that society must be based on compromise and consensus.  The majority should get the majority of what it wants, but not everything.  All points of view that are willing to join the overall compromise should be respected and have a voice in the final outcome.  I was in Germany during the police invasion of Zuccotti Park, and everyone I talked to was appalled that the government would simply try to wipe out Occupy rather than talk with them and allow opinion and policy to shift a bit toward the Occupiers.

Now we come to the crux: Germany was in the process of negotiating a deal between Yanukovych and the Maidan protesters when the sniper attack occurred that killed over a hundred people, protesters and police alike, and that resulted in a new government in Kyiv.  There is suspicion in Germany that the origin of this breakdown in Ruhe and Ordnung may have had its roots in far-right elements of the protesters themselves.  While Putin himself is unpopular in Germany, there is considerable support for the view that the current Ukrainian government lacks legitimacy.  Its basis was the suppression of compromise and inclusion.  (If you want to be cynical, you could say that there would be more support for the interim government if it included Hamburg’s favorite son, Vitaly Klitschko.)

3. Another lesson Germans learned is that small numbers of armed fascists can cause big problems.  You shouldn't let them form militias, and you shouldn’t bring them into the government, even as junior partners.  There is a much higher level of concern in Germany than in, say, the US over the roles of Svoboda and the Right Sector.  They are less inclined to dismiss the claims by pro-Russian elements that fascism is a real threat.  I’m writing this from the US, but my guess is that most Germans agree with the Russian side that the latest deal requires the Right Sector to disarm at the same time as the pro-Russian militias.  Can anyone back me up on that?

4. The leaked Nuland phone call made a big splash in Germany.  I doubt that most Americans even know what it was.  The only reference to it in the Times in the last month was in an op-ed piece entitled “The Case for Profanity in Print”.  Germans can’t be happy that the US schemed behind the scenes to keep Klitschko out.  Oh, and they didn't like that comment about the EU either.

So do I think Germans are going to abandon Ruhe and Ordnung, compromise and consensus, reliance on diplomacy, because of Putin’s actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine?  I’d say no, and that there won’t be any rush to rearm and extol the use of force.  We’ll see how this develops.