The 1912 Bread and Roses Strike

Elizabeth Warren made an impressive speech just now in the freezing cold of Lawrence, Massachusetts:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren officially launched her 2020 presidential campaign Saturday at a rally in Lawrence, Massachusetts, using the backdrop of Everett Mills -- the site of a historic 1912 labor strike led by women and immigrants -- to issue a call to action against wealthy power brokers who "have been waging class warfare against hardworking people for decades." Over 44 minutes in sub-freezing temperatures, Warren described a political elite "bought off" and "bullied" by corporate giants, and a middle class squeezed so tight it "can barely breathe." "The man in the White House is not the cause of what is broken, he is just the latest and most extreme symptom of what's gone wrong in America," Warren said of President Donald Trump. "A product of a rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else. So once he's gone, we can't pretend that none of this ever happened."

Warren has staked herself as the true progressive in terms of those who have already announced. I’m sure many others will comment on the specifics of her speech so let me note this 1912 strike:

The power looms that thundered inside the cotton weaving room of the Everett Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, suddenly fell silent on January 11, 1912. When a mill official demanded to know why workers were standing motionless next to their machines, the explanation was simple: “Not enough pay.” The weavers who had opened their pay envelopes that afternoon discovered their weekly wages had been reduced by 32 cents. A newly enacted Massachusetts law had reduced the workweek of women and children from 56 to 54 hours, but mill owners, unlike in the past, cut worker’s wages proportionally. For workers who only averaged $8.76 per week, every penny was precious, and 32 cents made the difference between eating a meal or going hungry.

This story notes how this strike grew in force. How did it become known as the bread and roses strike?

Women didn’t shy away from the protests. They delivered fiery rally speeches and marched in picket lines and parades. The banners they carried demanding both living wages and dignity—“We want bread, and roses, too”—gave the work stoppage its name, the Bread and Roses Strike. Lawrence, known as “Immigrant City,” was a true American melting pot with citizens from 51 nations wedged into seven square miles. Although strikers lacked common cultures and languages, they remained united in a common cause. The social networks of the day—soup kitchens, ethnic organizations, community halls—stitched the patchwork of strikers together. And once news of the walkout went viral in newspapers around the country, American laborers took up collections for the strikers and local farmers arrived with food donations.

Warren was smart to pick this town and cite this 1912 strike as its all inclusive nature serves as a perfect backdrop for what will be an all inclusive Presidential campaign.

Ruminations On Vriginia's Difficult Situation

A week ago I posted here supporting VA Gov Ralph Northam, comparing him favorably to the late Robert C. Byrd of WV.  A day later I joined the call for him to resign after his bizarre press conference that has still left unpleasant unresolved issues such as who put that awful photo in his yearbook and why.  Since then much else has come forth, and this continues. In any case it looks like Northam may hang in for at last awhile, although the situation is complicated and constantly changing, to put it mildly. What I intend to add in this post beyond the latest news is a combination of inside local infornation as well as, hopefully, a deeper historical perspective.

Last morning's (Friday, 2/8), Washington Post top headline was that Northam would not resign soon, and late this afternoon I as an employee of the  Commonwealth  of VA received an email message saying he hoped we would all support him continuing to lead the state, while carefully not being too out there too much on that he would stay in office for his full term.

One reason why he was not going to resign immediately, even without the recent collapse of his most immediate successors, is that until Feb. 23 the VA legislature is debsting a serious budget issue.  The Trump tax law has resulted in a revenue windfaall for Virginia.  This involves technical details I know but will not bore any readers of this with. So there is an ongoing debate in the VA legislature on what to do with this extra money, with the barely majority GOP in the legislature saying give it all to upper middle income persons, while Northam and the Dems have proposed giving half of it to lower income people while using the other half to fund various state initiatives. If this current scandal had not appeared I think  Northan would have gotten an agreement not too far from what he wanted. Now in his weakened state, the ultimate compromise will be closer to the GOP version.

For any not following the news since a week ago, both of Northam's immeiate successors hhave themselves come under unpleasant scrutiny.  Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax has now been seriolusly acccused of two sexual assalutls. When accused of the first he denied  it and hired an attorney.  The second accusation coming a few hours ago is of rape, and while earlier many were supporting him to replace Northam, this now seems to have become unlikely.  I note that I never liked Fairfax, Iknow all these people personally, and the African American I would like to seee as governor is Levar Stoney, currently Mayor of Richmond and a grad of JMU where I teach.

And now the second in line to the governorship of VA, assuming that both Northam and Fairfax resign (neither of which at this point has so far remotely come close to doing so), is  Attorney General Mark Herring, now in his second term, having stepped aside from running  for Lt Gov to let the now seriously damaged J. Fairfax run for that.  Last Thursday AG Herring revealed that he also had performed in blacface in 1980 at UVa at age 19.

If  Northam, Fairfax, and Herring all resign or forced out of office, then the acting governor will be the Speakr of the Hoouse, Kirk Cox, not only a Republican, but one how just gave an impassioned anti-abortion speech full of ridiculously irrelevelant Biblical passages, given that there is nothing in the  Bible that directy forbids abortion.

As it is, it appears that all of this blew up because Northam is a pediatrric neurologist, who only recently became a politician. So when Dems in the VA legislature attempted to loosen rules on late abotions, Dr. Northam got into rare and weird cases I was not aware of involving treatment of deformed fetuses and whether one born should be"revived." Personally, I do not know how to deal with such exremely rare cases, although baically siding with mothers and their physicians.  But Republicans cherry picking this overly specfic discussion by Dr. Northam turned it into "infanticide," with Trump making this charge in his SOTU.

More immediatley and seriously the rumor I have heard is that what triggered the revelation of that embarrassing photo in Northam's yearbook came as a result of his professional testimony about this  odd and rare case, which his opponents seized on, blocking any expansion of abortion rights in VA and providing fodder for Trump's ranting in his SOTU about "infanticide," a false charge.

But back in VA, reportedly a rommate from med school of  Northam got ticked off by this medical testimony by Northam, and then leaked the story to whhatever media about  the yearbook photos.  This set off he should resign, leading us to the now  unaccepable (although I read he  has hiired lawyers, puke), and then the now damaged AG Herring. While so far Speaker Cox is "clean," aside from being  a far right  winger, the  GOP majority leader of the stat senate, Norman Tennant, has been accused of a half century ago being an editor of a yearbook containg racist photos.

I have lived in VA for 42 yearss and have deep south ancestry includingVA.  But this matter has made me realize that for all my deep family backgound going back to the 1600s in VA, I was a and am a "damned yankee" to all those born and raised here.  My parents were born and raised in Deep South northern Florida, and when young I spent serious time there.  This made me think I knew the South, but I now know that ultimately I was  an outsider, especially given that i went not only to high school in liberal/progressive Madison, Wisconsin, where the state capitol building has a museum for the Grand Army of the Reuplic, the ultimate hard core of the northern Union that won the Civil War ("War of Northern Aggrsssion according to a cousin of my father that my wife from USSR/Russia met in 1987).

So a big revelation to me in the last week is how widespread this "blackfacing" and related racist manifestations were even into recent times.  The yearbook where Northams  photo appeared (Eastern Medical School of Virginia) had racist photos as recently as 2013, when the then dean just shut down the yearbooks.  I have never seen a blackfaced performance, but now  old very liberal and local friends have been surfacing with old past incidents of racist conduct.  This sort of resembles post-WW II France, where many collaberated with the Nazi Vichy regime, but then later joined the anti-Nazi Reistance. Eventuallly this became a matter of when one  turned from one side to the other, and good liberal close friends have been essentially playing postwar French fessing up to just exactly when they stopped using the "n-word," much less blackfacing.

The deeper history of all this is in Virginia 400 hundred years ago in 1619 when on the one hand the oldest continuing English speaking legislatiive  body in North America was founded, the same one (with some modifications over the centuries), that I noted above is trying to resolve the Trump tax "reform" with VA tax law. The other is the first arrival in what is now the  USA of African slaves.  Needless to say, this latter matter is on many minds and relevant to this current  controversy.

To make things even worse, it was in Virgiinia in 1705 that the crucial laws were passed fully establishing that slavery was to be of people of African descent and that those people could not marry anyone of European descent. So cince then in 1860 the state had more slaves than any other, its capitol became the that of the Confederate States of America, with half the bsttles of the succeeding Civil War (or "War of Northertn Agression" according to some of my cousins of earlier generations), and then its state capital became the capital of the Confedracy. This led to half the battles of the Civil War being fought in Virginia.

More recently we had the  Byrd Machine supporting reistance against racial integrstion of public  schools after Brown vs Board of Education in 1954.  Eventually this was all over come. But in the private places, including many frats on many campuses until very recently, racist practices such as "blackfacing" persisted.  And although the worst violence came from outsiders, in Charlottesville in August, 2017, wwe saw overt racist violence in Virginia.

Eventually this has become personal. With all these revelations, very liberal friends of  mine have now outed thesselves as having been varyng degrees of racist in the past. I now  realize that  while I have deep southern ancestry including high officers in the Confederate army, I was born and raised in the North.  I did  not see all this  stuff, and I did not personally haave to go through this process of personally deracizing myself, which I now realize my deep southern parents went through, my fahter moving from deep south racist Democratic Party affiation when he went to math grad school in Princeton in the 30s to being a Republican, When he took us in 1963 to uber-progrssive Madison, Wisconsin, well, no wonder I did not do blackface.

A final bottom line is that Gov. Northam's still uresolved yearbook photo has the absurd possibility of a racial reconciliation to all this.  I do not know why he continues to claim no knowlege of the origin or handling of this od photo of blackfaced white person standing next to someone wearing a KKK hooded outfit that is in his medical school yearbook.  But while whateveer relation it had to Gov. Northam personally, it could be interpreted in its superficial stupidity as also showing a possible  racial reonciliation for the long and troubled racial history of Viriginia.  This now shocking photo shows a blackfaced man standing peacefully next to somebody wearing a KKK outfit.  While indeed the obvious interpretation of  thos photo supports racism, another interpretation is of harmony among the races, even including the old southern racists of the  KKK.

Obserivng old Virginia friends of mine now confesssing their past racist behavior and  views, it seems that for them this looks sort of like the post-WW II French. After the war they were supposedly all anti-Nazi and supporters of the anti-Nazi Resistance.  But, of course, many did work for the pro-Nazi Vichy regime after the German conquest of France in 1940.  But then, as the Allies increased their obviouly ultimate victory over that regime, more nd more former collaboraters with the Vichy regime would quit and join the Risistance.  Eventually this game became a matter of timing one's switch from working for a ruling Vichy to an anti-Vichy/Nazi Resistance.

Several of my good friends now confessing their past racist conduct have put it in these terms: it has become a matter of timing, just when did one finally stop doing these bad old behaviors?  Reportedly Ralph Northam only learned two years ago that "blackfacing" was not socially acceptable.  Whatever comes out of the current crisis in Virgina, hopefully in the future we shall  have better informed and more deepl understanding leaders in Virginia and more broadly.

Addndum: 2:30 PM, 2/9/19: The VA legilslature has reportedly come to an agreement on its budget dispute.  Apparently the agreement tilts strongly towards what the GOP members favored due to the weakness of the Dems arising from these scandals involving their elected leaders in the state.  Not surpsing.

Barkley Rosser

"I’m not sure I follow the arithmetic here."

"Unless productivity goes up by at least 25% to compensate, everyone will be worse off." 

"Dropping hours from 5 days a week to 4 means that the work that would have been done in 5 days now needs to be done in 4, which means each day needs a 25% increase in productivity. Where on earth do you think such an increase is going to come from?" 

"OK, but to arrive at the same output in 4 days rather than 5 means that people have to become 25% more productive than they are today. That’s an awfully big jump in productivity. I’m not convinced that people today are that unproductive. Certainly when I think of my past workplaces, I don’t think my colleagues were that sub-optimal. A 10% increase in productivity seems more reasonable."

Following up on yesterday's post about comments in the Guardian, here are some thoughts about "where on earth" a productivity increase of 25 percent might come from:

Let's start from a 40-hour week in which the rate of output declines somewhat toward the end of the day when workers are beginning to tire. Let\s assume the least productive eight hours of work produce only 75 percent of the output of the most productive 32 hours of work. Call the average output of the most productive 32 hours "one unit" of output. Total output for 40 hours work is 38 units.

Now, reduce the weekly hours to 32. Better rested, more motivated workers result in a "reasonable" 6.25 percent increase in average hourly productivity above and beyond the productivity gain from eliminating the least productive hours. Total output in 32 hours is now 34 units compared with 38 units previously produced in 40 hours.

Those are physical units of output not the monetary value of that output. Assume diminishing marginal utility of the total output. The last four units of output add less value per unit than the first 32 units. So let's say in value terms 34 units = $34 but 38 units = $37. We are now producing 92 percent of the value previously produced in 80 percent of the time.

Instead of earning $15 an hour for a 40-hour week, a worker now earns $17.23 an hour for a 32 hour week. That's a 15 percent increase in hourly wage coupled with a 20 percent decrease in weekly hours. Not too shabby! Considering that there are costs associated with commuting to work, etc., the 92 percent retention of weekly income might effectively be closer to full compensation.

All of the above, of course, is simply the fleshing out of assumptions. We assumed  diminishing productivity in the last hours, we assumed heightened productivity from a shorter working week and we assumed declining marginal utility of goods and services produced. Finally, we assumed a preference for free time over a vanishingly small increment of total income. The point is that each of these assumptions were relatively modest but when combined "add up" to a rather substantial cumulative result.

"Just doesn't add up'"

• "I’m not sure I follow the arithmetic here."
• "It's all down to the numbers - something the article avoids and so is just pie-in-the-sky."
• "That clearly does not add up."
• "If you produce X in 30 hours you will produce > X in 40 - unless you are just sitting on your arse for the extra 10 hours."
• "If you work 40 hours your total output will be higher than if you work 30 hours - unless you are actually destroying output in those extra 10 hours."

The U.K. think tank Autonomy has published a report on working time, "The Shorter Working Week: A Radical And Pragmatic Proposal." Autonomy's co-director, Will Stronge, wrote an Op-Ed for the Guardian on Friday that outlines some of the proposal's main points. The Guardian piece received over 600 comments, around a quarter of which were opposed to the proposal. I am always fascinated with why people are hostile toward seemingly good things so I downloaded the comments and sorted and coded them. 

Twenty-eight percent of the negative comments included gratuitous disparaging remarks about the article and its author. "Riiiiight. ...whoever dreamed up this silly notion hasn't got a clue about the realities of life." "This drivel is always coming from some useless twit who sits on their backside…" "Yes, the article is nothing but pie-in-the-sky." "Really?  It's all a bit if a pipe dream isn't it?" "Comrades , rejoice!  Tractor production will still be up 130%." "Along with flying cars and pet unicorns for all, presumably." "Following the columnist's logic, why not a three day week? Or a two day week?" "better still just pay me full time but I don't want to turn up at all." 

Fifteen percent of the negative comments dwelt on what they perceived as the mathematical incongruity of the proposal. This compared with less than seven percent of the positive comments that mentioned arithmetic and around two percent of the neutral or digressive comments that did. 

Opponents of shorter working week were confident that the relationship between hours of work and units of output was "a simple sum in arithmetic" the result of which was patently obvious to them: "If you produce X in 30 hours you will produce > X in 40 - unless you are just sitting on your arse for the extra 10 hours." Some critics explicitly assumed that a 20% reduction in hours would have to be made up by a 25% increase in output to be economically feasible. Others conceded that a reduction in hours could result in an increase in hourly productivity but insisted that total output would inevitably be substantially less in the shorter week.

There are several subtleties to the mathematics of shorter hours that opponents systematically overlook. One is that the relationship between hours and output is dynamic and cumulative, not static and instantaneous ("fatigue and unrest"). Second is that the value of aggregate output isn't necessarily proportional to the quantity of output ("diminishing marginal utility"). Third is that the lost value of foregone leisure and additional stress and "wear and tear" to a worker has to be reckoned against the value of additional income ("opportunity cost"). Fourth, a shorter standard working week may shift proportions of income going to labor and to capital, respectively. And, finally, that shift in the distribution of income is likely to have an impact on final demand ("propensity to consume"). All of these subtleties are in addition to the more generally -- albeit, not universally -- acknowledged fact that physical output doesn't necessarily increase in proportion to hours of work even in the static case.

To make a long story short, critics of the shorter work week proposal commit the same errors that adherents to the wages-fund doctrine did in the 19th century and that led Nassau Senior to insist that the profits of enterprise were entirely due to the last hour of the working day. It is none other than the original, the actual, the one-and-only "lump-of-labor fallacy" committed obsessively and unabashedly by opponents of shorter working time!

How To Go After The US Wealthy Reagan Style

Ah yes, this is going to be another one of those ironic posts about what a big leftist liberal Ronald Reagan was compared to the current GOP gang in charge of so many of our policies, especially our tax policies.  Certainlly the image of Reagan is one who cut taxes for the high income wealthy, and in general that is the case.  But there were a few items going the other way, and again, compared to current policies some combination of what came out of the two major Reagan tax cuts looks downright progressive by comparison.

Let us start with taxing wealth, with the Elizabeth Warren proposal to put a 2 to 3% annual wealth tax on those holding over $50 million.  I am not opposed to this in principle, but worry that it faces very serious practicsl problems of implementation due to the high costs involved in simply determining the wealth of these large and complicated portfolios, especially given the hollowing out and reductions at the IRS, which would have to do all of it.  As it is, whereas not too long ago 20 nations taxes wealth, that is now down to three: Norway, Spain, and Switzerland, with the latter lacking either a property tax or a capital gains tax. What have those other 17 nations done?  Well, going in the opposite direction from where the US has gone under Trump with his tax "reform."  Indeed, a moddel might well be what we saw in the Reagan tax laws.  So, one of the most important both as a redistribution mechanism taxing wealth while also raising revenue would be to return to the Reagan 1986 tax law's taxing capital gains at the same rates as income is.  The other one is also to undo the cuts in estate taxes Trump has put it and move back to what Reagan had in place after his 1981 tax law, a much more redistributive system than we see now.  Both of these, especiallly the capital gains tax change, would be easily to implement and enforce.

On income taxes, the proposal byu AOC for a top marginal income tax rate of 70% does not face the implementation problems the straiight wealth tax faces.  As noted putting this only on those earning over $10 million per year should not be too damaging on various fronts, although it would probably not raise all that much revenue.  It might be better to go with what ccame in with the 1981 Reagan tax law of a top marginal rate of 50%, but having it on a broader set of upper income people.  This would arguably both raise more money than the AOC proposal while also arguably having fewer disincentiv effects.  So, rerturning to a combination of the Reagan 1981 and 1986 tax laws might be something that can be adopted, implemented, and enforced, which would both raise more revenues, and engage in wealth and income redistribution.

Barkley Rosser

The End Of The End Of The Cold War

It is a sign of how wacko things hve gotten that the truly most important event of the past week has simply beeen buried in the news by all the juffing and puffing over Trump's shutdown ending and these reveleations about VA Governor Northam.  This would be decidion by the US on Feb. 1 to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) treaty with Russia, followed by Russia's doing so as well shortly thereafter.  This is both historic and very serious, far more so than Trump's wall or Northam's photographs.

The treaty was signed in 1987  between then US President Reagan and then Soviet President Gorbachev, culminateing several years of negotiations.  It led to the destruction of around 36oo short and intermediate range nuclear missiles, including most importantly all of those in Europe that threatened the potential outbreak of a war on that continent between NATO and the USSR..  It was one of the most important moments on the way to bringing about the end of the end of the Cold War, and indeed it is unfortunately accurate to describe the ending of this treaty as the end of that end.

I have seen a number of people speculating that this action somhow shows Trump "standing up" to V.V. Putin, being a tough guy and all that.  But the nearly immediate acceptance with virtually no complaint by Putin of this move suggests otherwise. US and also western European officials have argued that Russia has been in effective violation of the INF since 2014 when it developed a new cruise missile, 97M925,  that can be easily modified to make fly in the forbidden distance ranges.  Russian leaders have arruged that they were not in violation given that this missile alsso had as its main ranges ones not in violation and none violating the lmits had been deployed that they were not in violation.  Putting such missiles with the violating ranges in deployment would directly threaten western Europe.  As it is, Putin is in a position now to rapidly deploy them in a way to threaten western Europe while the US has nothing to put in place to reply to this.  So, Putin gets to gain a major military edge and threaten the western Europeans while getting to blame Trump for having ended the treaty by with drawing and allowing him to do this. The Europeans in question had opposed Trump ending the treaty, with indeed this probably being one of those things Merkel was trying to maintain influence with Trump over by not complaining too loudly about the US pressuring German companies to stop dealing with Iran.

Another factor in this matter emphasized by US leaders is that China was never a part of the agreement, and I gather has been developing such intermediate range missiles.  But those were unlikely to be deployed in Europe, where the removal of such missiles 32 years ago was a ttriumphant movement towards the reduction of mutual tensions and towards peace.

All the way around, there is nothing good at all about this development, and it most definitely soes not show Trump doing something that is against the interests or desires of V.V. Putin. The outcome may well be a new arms race, which will please the military-industrial compleses in both the US and Russia, and maybe China as well.  No, this is not a good development at all.

Barkley Rosser

Will INSTEX Replace SWIFT Bank Exchange?

Probably not, but reportedly a "White House insider" is afraid it might.

Instex is the new exchange created by UK, France, and Germany, to be based i Paris and run by a German banker, to get around US sanctions against Iran.  Apparently it will sell Iran humaanitarian goods such as pharmacueticaals and food not subject to the sanctions, with those being paid for with Iranian petroleum that will then get sold elsewhere, none of this involving any US dollars.  It is probably too small to threaten the dominance of the international SWIFT bank exchange system, but this does open up the possibility for nations to avoid US limits on their international financial transactions, with the US having used the SWIFT system in the past to crack down on unfavored nations.

Addendum:

There is a long, front page story in the Washington Post this morning about this matter Griff White and Erin Cunningham. For sstarters, I can relay that "Instex," which should probably be INSTEX, stands for "Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges."  Second is that the Trump'c campaign to get European, and especially German, companies to obey the anti-Iran US sanctions has beeen very agrressive and largly run out of the US Embassy in Berlin, with US Ambassador ro Germany, Richard Grenell, the point man on this.  He had received press attention and criticism by some German business people when he arrived in Berlin last May and publicly called for German businesses to withdraw from Iran.  That criticism did not slow him down one bit, and his efforts have led to some major German companies to withdraw, notably Siemans, VW, and Daimler-Benz, all of which have large-scale operations in the US.

But Grenell's efforts have gone far beyond that.  People from his embassy have personally visited the HQs of many German companies, many of which have little connections with the US and much larger dealings with Iran, pressuring them in many ways, some friendlier, some involving threats and real actions.  The most dramatic of the latter have come from the US apparently poressuinrg Deutsche Telekomm, which owns T-Mobile in the US, suddenly ending internet access and other telecom privileges for some of these compaines without warning, seriously disrupting their activities.  Unsurpeisingly, this has drawn more sharp criticism from German business leaders.

What it does not seem to have drawn much of is open complaints from the German government, with Angela Merkel apparently for now trying to minimize conflicts with Trump, with there being so many issues at hand over which she and Trump differ.that she is sort of holding her fire for the biggest ones, and so far this stuff seems to be more an annoyance rather than super big, and with perhaps the strong German support for starting INSTEX sending the signal for now.

There is also the matter that Germany and several other of the major European powers are unhappy with Iran for apparently attempting to assassinate some of its own enemies from the MEK on Belgian and French soil last year, with several of those nations having institutes their own tightly focused sanctions on specific  bodies in Iran identified with that effort.  So there is a balancing act going on here, with Germany in particular opposing the US sanctiona and wanting to support the JCPOA backed by moderate Iranian President Rouhani, while themselves sanctioing hardline elements in the Iranian regime causing unwanted trouble in Europe.

I also note that in addition to UK, France, and Germany, the European Union is officially supporting the establishment of the INSTEX.  For now it is a small operation not llikely to have too much effect on all this, but its potential for the future is another matter.

Barkley Rosser

I Support Virginia Governor, Ralph Northam

Current media is denouncing  VA Gov Ralph Northam with many demanding he resign now over an unfortunate incident in his youth.

I note that that the final crucial person who gave us Obamacre was  the late Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia.  He was in his youth a member of the Klu Klux Klan, indeed held some office in it. In the end when the ultimate votes in the Senate came, which had Rebublicans denouncing him over his 1940s support of the KKK, and  some of them openly hoping he would die as he was in bad health and did die rereafter, Robert Byrd did show up for the ultimately  crucial vote, wheeled in in a wheelchair, to cast the ultimstely finsl crucial vote that gave us  ACA/Obamacre, which despite its many flaws has  imroved the health of many people in America.

Regarding Ralh Northam, an extremely excellent and super competent governor  of Virginiia, a  few days ago, affrimered the right of women to make the ultimate desicisons regarding their bodies with the support of just one doctoe (three are now needed), he has just been deonouned on alt-reich and even Hannity outlets for his defense of a woman'ss right to choose. The attacks on him from the organized right on this matter have been horrendous.  They have accused him of supporting "infanticde."  This charge is disgusting and falose.  But the GOP istrying to make his supremely responsible and medically wise view a crime. They are just hypocrites.

I will not call those now demanding Northam's resignation over hiis unfortunate photo from 35 years ago hypocritees.  Indeed I sypathaize, especially wiith African Americans, who have had to facr all kinds of racism here in Virrgina as in the awful violence in Charlottesville in 2017 as well as the ongoing refusal at the sattate level to allow local governments to remove Confederate statues and monuments.   It may well be that Northam will feel in the end that he must resign for his youthful mistake.  But I think iit will be unfortuate as he really has been a good governor ans is personally a nice guy (I have met him).  The pboto certainly does not represent his current views at all.

Addendum, 3:25 PM, 2/2/19

I fear that I am increasingly leaning to Northam needing to resign, despite my generally high regard for him.  He has just made a public statement that has really confused things, and I fear he may simply have fatally damaged his governorship with how he has messed this story up.  He is now claiming that he is not in the photo, but says he did blacken his face once in 1984 to pretend to be Michael Jackson for a dance or skit, where he even won a prize (ugh).  He also says he is not the person now he was then and is begging for forgiveness.  I guess he deserves the latter, but he made a real botch of this, and I fear it will not get better.  Ironically the lt. gov who would replace him if he were to resign, Justin Fairfax, is African American.  Anyway, I am sorry about this whole situation, but now fear Northam simply cannot clean up the mess he has made of it.

Barkley Rosser

Robert H. Nelson Dies: Religion And Economics

Robert H. Nelson of the University of Maryland Public Policy Department died at age 74 on Dec. 15 while attending a conference in Helsinki, Finland.  He was the leading economist writing about the relationship between religion and economics, notably in three books: Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (1991), Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (2001), and The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Enviornmental Religion  (2010).  I spent several days with him some years ago at a conference on forestry issues where he was presenting his views on environmentalism as religion.  In any case, his death has me thinking about the broader issues he wrote about.  I shall note the arguments in these books along with some further observations.

His first book was essentially a history of economic thought that put a certain theological perspectve on thnkers mostly from the fairly distant past. A basic theme in all of his books is that economics is a form of secular religion that posits a material salvation in some distant future as a result of economic  growth and redistribution, a material heaven on earth.  In that book he posed two competing theological strands in the history of economic thought: a Roman (Catholic) "rationalism" and a Protestant "revelationism."  The former started with Aristotle and included such figures as Aquinas, Adam Smith, Saint-Simon, and Keynes.  The latter started with Plato and Augustine, Calvin, Darwin, Spencer, and Marx.  A number of observers criticized this pair of categories, noting particularly that virtually the only economist in the second list is Marx (although Spencer did write on economics somewhat).  I happen to share the criticisms that it is not clear how useful or meaningful this pair of lists is, although the tradition of lining up historiccal intellectual figures as being Aristotelian or Platonic has a long history in philosophy.

But this does make me think about the especially strong theological/religious element in Marxism, with people "believing" in the philosophy and even specific Marxist economics doctrines such as the labor theory of value.  There has been a long history of people "converting" to Marxism and then sometimes "converting" away from it, sometimes becoming religiously anti-Marxists in their disillusionment to a fanatical degree.  As an old recognition of this I note a comparison made by Bertrand Russell, someone who considered himself to be a reasonable Aristotelian against troublesome Platonic idealists (recognizing that Marx claimed to be a materialist, not an idealist).

Yahweh (God) = Dialectical Materialism
Messiah = Karl Marx
The Second Coming = The Revolution
The Saved = The Proletariat
The Church = The Communist Party
Damnation to Hell = Expropriation of the Capitalists
The Millennium = The Socialist Commonwealth

The second book got more attention than the first and in some sense made a more obvious point: that current schools of thought can be viewed as sects whose differences ultimately boil down to matters of belief.  The subtitle of "From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond" indicates the sorts of schools of thought Nelson was thinking of.  My sense is that the Old Keynesian versus Classical Monetarist split was probably less theological/religious than some other splits among economic schools of thought, such as indeeed Marxists and their polar opposites the Austrians.  Nevertheless, many people arguing over the Keynesian versus Old (and newer) Monetarists sometimes seem to fall into the terminology of "belief," often buried in the matter of assuming axioms that cannot be questioned.  So, looking at the New Classical school one finds Sargent at one point declaring rational expectations to be an axiom that cannot be questioned and must be used in any serious economic analysis.  One must "believe in rational expectations," even if one knows that it is factually inaccurate (and Sargent would later grant indeed that ratex is indeed false).  Of course with Samuelson it is not just his Keynesian macro but also his defense of standard neoclassical microeconomics, with this having also a theological/religious aspect to it.

I would add a sociological element to this general Nelson argument that many economics debates between schools of thought often seem to take on a theological or religious aspect, even if most participants usually at least put on a show of respecting facts and logical rigor and so on.  It is an old observation made esepcially by some observers of British economics that especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was a tendency for people who became professional economists to come from families that included actual ministers of the Anglican Church (or other denominations), with this coinciding with a decline of that church and its influence.  To some extent this is conisstent with the origin of economics in Britain in moral philosophy, which is what Adam Smith was a professor of, and with the very first Professor of Political Economy in Britain being Thomas Robert Malthus, who was in fact actually also an ordained Anglican priest.  More generally many economists, although certainly not all, seem to be at least partly driven by motives "to do good," a sentiment easily coming from people who may be secular on the surface but come from family bsckgrounds of religious practitioners (I confess this might apply to me, with both my quite religious mother's grandfathers having been Proetestant ministers).

The third of these books may deal with a more serious and controversial issue, the matter of "economic religion" (more or less as described above) against an erstwhile "environmental religion," with many anti-environmentalist Christian ministers denouncing environmentalism for being a competing anti-Christian religion drawing on paganism and other alternative religious impulses.  For Nelson, both of these are "secular religions," but he recognizes that the environmentalist movement (in contrast to some extent to environmental scientists) has a spiritual side that can be quite fervent and draws on various religious traditions, although it must be noted that increasingly current Christians of at least some denominations are emphasizing environmental themes.  But some opposed to these recent views emphasie how the monotheist Judeo-Christin-Muslim tradition has emphasized humanity dominating nature with a "be fruitful and multiply" view.  Such a view then merges with the materialist economic "Heaven on Earth" to be delivered by economic growth.  In the non-Christian environmentalist "religion" one finds both the Earth Mother worship of neo-paganism but also the Buddhist Economics strand one finds in Schumacher's Small is Beautiful book that de-emphazies economic growth and sees nirvana as being in a low consumption economy that is associated with a condition of envitonmental harmony that is nirvana on earth.

Barkley Rosser

The Two Percent Solution: Warren and the Stochastic Jubilee

Wait long enough, and great ideas come back around, although not necessarily wearing the same garb.  Elizabeth Warren has just come out for a 2% wealth tax (above $50 million).*  But this is simply an annualized version of my lump sum stochastic jubilee.  What’s the advantage of redistributing the whole thing every 50 years (on average) vs a steady trickle?  A periodic reset would interrupt long run processes of wealth inequality more fully than a tax, so long as the rate of return on financial assets is high enough to compensate for the extra annual pinch, which it most likely would be, since wealth holders would demand a higher rate of return.  It would also be a lot more fun.  On the other hand, it would be more complicated to administer and might be resisted by force.

On balance, I’d go for the jubilee, but I’ll take Warren’s version as a close second.

*There’s also an extra 1% on wealth in excess of $1 billion, but this is largely symbolic.

The Testament Of Omar Bin Said

In Washington Post, 1/25/19 metro section there is a story recounting that the Library of Congress of the US has acquired the only diary of an American slave written in Arabic by Omar bin Said  in 1831, originally from Senagal.  The completion of this world historical accesson will now be able to proceed now that the ridiculous US federal governmint shhutdown so stupidly ordered by Preisident Trump has come to an end for now

Omar bin Said was a deeply serious Islamic scholar up until his capture at age 37 in 1807, to be sent across the "Big Sea" into slavery in Charleston, SC, USA. He escaped from his initial captor only later to end up as the slave of the politically powerful Owen family of North Carolina, whom he remained owned by until his death at age 94 in 1864 in the midst of the US Civil War, just before the  freeing of all American slaves.

Omar's manuscript in Arabic opens with Surah 67 from the Qur'an, which affrims that the ultimate ruler and owner of all things in the universe is Allah. Michael A. Ruaae of WaPo reports that he said regarding his arrival in the USA, "And in a Christian language, they sold me. A weak small, evil man called Johnson, an infidel who did not fear Allah at all. bought  me."

Omar's later owners, who lived as he did fot thst later  portion of his life on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, treated him well, and he was in fact treated with great respect, with most people there realizing that he was a deeply wise and scholarly man, with his later owners granting him many privileges and much respect. with him likewise praising them for their kind conduct towards him.  But he died their slave.

Barkley Rosser

BREAKING: Jimmy 'The Brute' DiNatale's daughter "used to put clothes on layaway"

From Siligato v. State:

The story starts in early 1985 when one Arthur Hall, a special agent of the F.B.I., was arrested following a four-month joint investigation by the New Jersey State Police and the F.B.I. into Hall's suspected involvement in an extensive motor-vehicle theft operation in the Atlantic City area. At that time Siligato was asserted to be a confidential informer of both the F.B.I. and the State Police. 

According to Sheeran's affidavit in support of the warrant, Hall, while being interrogated after his arrest by State Police Detective Sergeant Grusemeyer, told Grusemeyer that Siligato had been involved with him, Hall, in the criminal activities under investigation and that Siligato had "once told him (Hall) that he (Siligato) had beaten up a Puerto Rican individual who later died from the said beating and that Jimmy DiNatale, Sr. helped him (Siligato) get away with the crime." Although Hall told Grusemeyer that the murder had taken place in Atlantic County, he, Hall, "was not sure about the time period of the offense." The affidavit goes on to recite that thereafter Lieutenant Kaufman of the State Police interrogated Hall further on that subject. Hall told Kaufman that Siligato operated two businesses on two separate properties in Hammonton, the Silly Gator Bar and the Elm Deli. Hall also recalled that his conversation with Siligato respecting the murder took place in the summer or fall of 1982 and that Siligato had then told him that the victim had owed him money. Hall further told Kaufman that Siligato had a quick and violent temper and that he, Hall, had helped Siligato construct forms for pouring concrete for steps and front and rear pads at the Elm Deli "two or three years ago." Hall was not, however, present when the concrete was poured. Sheeran's affidavit further explained that the Jimmy DiNatale referred to by Hall, who had died in 1983, was "a significant criminal associate of the Bruno Crime Family."

"I was raised by a single mom who used to put clothes on layaway. I wasn't raised in privilege." -- Kellyanne Conway

From Philly Voice News:

DiNatale bought cigarettes for his vending company, Logan, from Bruno, and later from Raymond "Long John" Martorano, who worked under Bruno in the mob. 

After Bruno was killed in March 1980, Martorano came to directly sell smokes to DiNatale and then Siligato. 

Siligato eventually bought the Logan vending company from DiNatale, he said. 

There were always closer cigarette distributors, but they “liked doing business” with Bruno because it gave them “advantages.” 

“People do business with you because they know who he (Bruno) was and what he did,” Siligato said. 

Providing vending machines – smokes, jukes, pinball and later video games – to bars was “a way to maneuver into the bar business.”  

DiNatale would loan money to a bar owner, explained Siligato. In return he would place his vending machines in a bar. Then he would visit the bars “to make collections.”

The Nobel Economists Petitiion on Carbon Tax And Dividend Plan

As many now know, a large group of prominent economists, led by a large group of Nobel Prize winners, has published a petition in the Wall Street Journal.  This petition declares the idea of putting a tax on carbon and then returning the receipts from it to the population on an even per capita basis to be the best and most efficient plan for dealing with global warming.  This group continues to encourage more professional economists to sign this petition.  I had previously received an invitation from Janet Yellen to do so, and today one came from Larry Summers.  I kind of doubt that either specifically directed that I receive the invitation or, less likely, actually sent the message, although I could be wrong as I do know both of them.  This petition shows how powerful this revenue neutral carbon tax fad has become.

As it is, I have not signed it, and my use of the word "fad" indicates my attitude.  I really do not get why so many proiment and clearly highly intelligent economists have signed onto this proposal as being the one and only way to deal with this problem.  Why are these people not mentioning cap and trade as an alternative (formerly known as "tradeable emissions permits").  There are multiple reasons to believe that cap and trade is at least as good if not better than this tax dividend proposal, both in terms of effectiveness and also in terms of the politics of getting something done.

The most famous cap and trade plan was that enacted in the US in 1990 for SO2 emissions.  This plan eventually got superceded, but until that point it was universally viewed as a successful program, substantially reducing such emissions in a manner that did not trigger noticeable economic pain.  There are now a substnatial number of carbon cap and trade systems in place, with the first one out the door being that of the EU, put in place to obey the Kyoto Protocol, which actually favored such systems.  That system has faced criticism and had a major decline in its price in 2006, but has since stabilized, a fact not widely reported. Very recently the system has been put in place by the world's largest emitter, China.  Other nations or major sub-national units adopting cap and trade for carbon include South Korea, California, and Ontario,  The closest we came ot having a national program to deal wiith carbone emissions in the US was early in Obama's first term when he  got a cap and trade plan passed by the House of Representatives, only to have it blocked by Republicans in the Senate.

I note that that the Paris Climate Accords do not favor ither taxes or cap and trade.  Nations are free to use whatever policy they want to meet targets, either one of those or just plain old commands or anything else.  The adoption of those Accords led some advocate of taxes to get all bent out of shape that they did not insist on only taxes as the proper policy, with perhaps the most ridiculous complaint coming from climatologist James Hansen, who denounced cap and trad as being a "capitalist" system, even though taxes also use markets to achieve their results.

In any case, theory says that there is no obvious reason to favor one over the other.  In princople the efficient solution is to set equal marginal social costs and marginal social benefits of pollution removal.  One does this by approaching this from the price side and the other side from the quantity side.  An old paper by Martin Weitzman says one should use one or the other based on whether there is more uncertainty about costs or quantities.  As it is, I would say that the uncertainties are greater on the quantiy than the cost side, which argues for a preference for a quantity approach.  That would be cap and trsde.  Another approach is to use both in what have been called "Lerner markets," following on the Greenwald-Stigliz thorem.  Curiously Stiglitz is one of those Nobelists who has so far not signed this petition, although in the past he has supported using taxes.

Certainly taxes can achieve favorable results in pollutions policy, although the most dramatic cases known have involved somewhat smaller problems.  META in Eruope lists the following as the most successful taxation approaches to environmental problems: a 2002 plastic bag tax in Ireland, a 1994 Finland tax on beverage bottles, a 1996 UK landfill tax, a 2007 fishing licesnse in Iceland, and a 1992 NOx tax in Sweden.  The latter has led to a reduction of 30-40% of such pollution in Sweden, which iis certainly successful, alrhough a bit less than the SO2 reductions in the US from the cap and trade program.

Nations adopting carbon taxes, most of these so recently we have not yet seen results, include Chile, Portugal, UK, Ireland, Australia, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, and France.  As it is, the latter has brought out the potential political problems with this approach, the outbreak of jilets jaunes ("yellow vests") protests against the tax in France, although those protests, still ongoing, have morphed into something much broader against President Macron.

So this uprising in France should have given some pause to all these eminent petition signers, but especially given how many of them are Americans it is more surprising that they do not seem to have taken into account this politicsal reality: raising taxes is especially hard to do in the US, especially given the overwheming opposition of thr Republican Party to raising taxes, and especially for something that they do not approve of.  Now in France it is true that there was not dividend or other payyout to citizens from the tax.  But even in Wasington State, dominated by Democrats and posted on here previously by Peter Dorman, referenda on a carbon tax with payout have failed, with part of the problem arising from disagreements over the form of the payout.

I really do not get it.  Do not alll these eminent economists, especiaally the American ones, not realize this hard reality, that it is essentially barking up a hopeless tree to call for a carbon tax in the US, even one with some system of returning the receipts to the population in some form or other.  Why are they simply ignoring cap and trade, despite its clear successes including here inthe US?  Is it beause of the defeat in Congress of Obama's plan?  Heck, it got pretty far along, a lot farther along than any tax proposal is likely to get.  Really, these people should have supported cap and trade as an alternative, although perhaps they think that would be distracting.  Maybe, but their position has them simply making nonsense statements, namely that this tax and dividend plan is clearly the best way to go.  That is very far from being the truth, especially given the old and well-known arguments of Weitzman from his famous "Prices and Quantities" paper.

(I must note that I may be biaed in favor of cap and trade as I was partly involved in setting up the very first cap and trade program by a government anywhere in the world, an effort led by prominent environmental economist, Tom Tietenberg, this being by the Wisconins Department of Natural Resources for BOD emissions into the Fox River in the mid-1970s, a program still in place and viewed as a success.)

Barkley Rosser

Fighting Outrage with Outrage

Having watched ALL the videos, my humble opinion is "a plague on all your houses." Not so much the hapless participants at the Lincoln Memorial as the viral legions of "outraged" spectators who turned a circus of misperception into a carnival of righteousness and condemnation.

HAVEN'T YOU ALL GOT ANYTHING BETTER TO DO?

Trust me when I say that OUTRAGE has a right-wing bias. There are several reasons for this. One is that the right is fueled by outrage. A second reason is that the Mostly Seagulls Media is easily manipulated by the right-wing outrage Wurlitzer, which is heavily subsidized. The third is that you can't beat something with nothing. Liberals seem to think that outrage is some kind of spontaneous expression of disapproval. WRONG! (see points one and two) It's one thing when a mob of MAGA-hatted brats are disrespectful to a Native American elder beating a drum. But it is something else entirely different when a restaurant owner politely refuses service to a lying press secretary. One is just kids-will-be-kids, the other is incivility.

Having heard that a public relations firm associated with Mitch McConnell wrote the exculpatory explanation for the poster-boy Covington kid, I begin to wonder if maybe that firm staged the whole incident as sort of a rhinestone Reichstag Fire. Because, you know, everything the right doesn't want you to pay attention to is a false-flag carried out by crisis actors.

Maybe if people were busy building the General Strike, they wouldn't have so much time for pointless spectacles of outrage.

Weirdly Non-Monotonic Yield Curves

This is a situation that may be on the verge of disappearing and more or less normalizing, but over the last couple of months US bond markets have exhibited a weird phenomenon of non-monotonicity.  It has been even weirder than what we saw during the period of negative nomial interest rates, when what we saw was interest rates on US treasury securities fell from the shortest time horizon to a low usually around the two-year  time horizon, with the pattern then revetting to its usal upward slope.  What has been going on recently has been a pattern of rates initially rising with the time horizon in the normal pattern, then turning aound and declining, then turning around yet again and rising again.  I do not know what to make of any of this.  I exhibit it in a table below for the three days, January 2, January 10, and January 18 of this year.

                    3 mo.     1 yr.     2 yr.     3 yr.     5 yr.    10 yr.     30 yr.

1/2/19         2.42       2.60     2.50      2.47    2.49      2.66       2.97
     
1/10/19       2.43        2.59     2.56      2.54    2.56      2.74       3.06

1/18/19        2.41       2.60     2.62      2.60    2.62      2.79       3.09

So at the beginning of the year the rates rose from 3 months to 1 year, with rates declining to 3 years, and then rising after that.  The same pattern was still holding on January 10.  On January 18 things were somewhat more normalized with the ind-range decline being a decline from the 2 year to 3 year range, but then reversing to rise in the normal way after that.

I note that we still have not yet seen an explanation of the pattern we saw (and still see in some nations) during periods of negative nominal rates of them declining to around the two year time horizon and then reversing.  One possible explanation may be that central banks have tended to keep the very shortest term rates ither non-negative or not as negative as market forces were pushing them so those rates declined as one moved out of the zone of more immediate central bank control, then to turn around and rise.

In this case it is curious that the rates have been rising to about that two year zone (or just shy of it) and then declinig, and then rising.  If my explanation of what went on in the negative rates perios is correct, well, I do not see any equivalent for this situation to explain it.  We are seeing more changes in directon of the rates, although these variations have not been great  The one thing I can see is that December is when this weird pattern appeared, and on January 3 Jay Powell spoke at the ASSA/AEA meetings shifting the Fed to a more dovish stance.  Has this change been partly in response to this weird yield curve shape and that now we are indeed seeing some normalization as the new policy gradually sinks in?  I do not know, and I doubt anybody else does either.

Barkley Rosser