Oddly enough, Krugman's position seems to be pretty much that Clinton can sell a lie better than Obama. I say this because Krugman has already written that the financial crisis will require massive amounts of federal expenditure in 2009 - and if that is so, it is hard to see how you squeeze in a huge reform of the medical care system. His predictions about what the economy is going to do, in other words, contradict his reasons for being for Clinton over Obama.

Why is Krugman so anti-Obama? Myself, I don't think Krugman is worried about his career - he's doing pretty well now, I'd say - I think his considerable vanity is piqued. Nineties Rubinomics was, basically, Krugman's policy - he was after all one of the architects of the justifications for the trade policy adopted by the Clinton administration - and he resents like hell Obama's attack on Clinton.

Posted at April 25, 2008 11:36 PM in response to Paul Krugman is Confused

The pushing for hostilities with China and Russia by the neo-cons are vanity positions. Our dependence on China is so major that, if they wanted to, they could produce a Depression in this country tomorrow. As for the European dependency on Russian natural gas, we already know how that can smooth out friction.
It is a non-starter, one of those dreambook images for the neo-vampiric wing of the foreign policy establishment - the true monsters, the vicarious killers, overfed, overindulged, ignorant, and powerful only because D.C. has become a horrorshow of corruption. Men who, like the libertines in Sade's One Hundred Days of Sodom, have grown so impotent that they need to imagine ever more bloody scenarios in order merely to get an erection.

Posted at April 10, 2008 3:56 PM in response to The Kagan Subtext

JonF31, to be at the center of the economy is not synonymous with largest population sector being in agriculture. For instance, the average percentage of household disposable income that goes to food dropped from around 22 percent in 1950 to around 6-7 percent now. Up to 1919, agricultural goods constituted 45 percent of American exports.

Of course, modern agriculture isn't gong to attract masses of people once again, but people may well become much more aware of agriculture if the percentage of household disposable income on it goes up. And given how little desire there seems to be for our manufactured goods, it doesn't seem absolutely out of the question that agricultural export could top manufacturing in the next couple of years.

Posted at March 29, 2008 11:46 PM in response to Global Inflation Scare

Good catch. That rice story was a flashback to the 19th century, and the corn law controversy.

I suppose the question is - what if the economist's daydream - that science will always trump Malthus - isn't right?

Glibbertarians have long thought that the whole issue was solved by the infamous bet Jules Simon made with Paul Ehrlich - in which each bet on the prices of a basket of primary products. The underlying assumption was that prices in primary products would either correlate exactly to increases in population, Ehrlich's rather naive idea - or would be effected by discovery, innovation, savings, etc., that could be indefinitely squeezed out of the system - Simon's idea. Simon won - but if the same bet were made with a basket of material in 1998, and ending in 2008, Simon would have lost spectacularly. This doesn't mean that Ehrlich's theory would be proved right - there wasn't any population leap between those years - but that population is more accurately approached by translating it into systematic energy use terms. In that sense, there was a huge population leap - a huge leap in the amount of energy being used in the Third World states - plus the steady rise of the population.

The results might return farming to the center of the economy, where it was until mid 20th century. That would be some crash!

Posted at March 29, 2008 3:06 PM in response to Global Inflation Scare

In particular, I think we need to regulate the creation and distribution of securities. I see no reason that these should be left to the animal spirits and whims of the quants in various quasi-banks. Just as we regulate pharmaceuticals, all securities should first be vetted by a board - maybe a sub-board of the SEC - for their necessity, their downsides, etc. And then we need to make sure everybody knows what they are dealing in. Banks that don't even know what they are swapping are like people wearing blindfolds, playing roulette.

Except of course when they lose, we pay.

Posted at March 28, 2008 5:23 PM in response to JB on PK vs BHO

Weisman's interpretation of Eisenhower's instructions regarding Indonesia makes no sense. If Eisenhower did not want personnel easily connected to the U.S. to implement the operation, that is... what he wanted. That the CIA used people who were easy to connect to the CIA was the whole point of Weiner's narrative. The idea Weissman is pushing is that this was somehow Eisenhower's screw up, but that won't wash. Now, one could say Eisenhower shouldn't have approved the operation in the first place, but the violation of the spirit of Eisenhower's directive was clearly the fault of the CIA, and no lawyer-like construal of what Eisenhower 'should have known" will change that fact.

Posted at March 24, 2008 11:27 PM in response to Tim Weiner Responds to Stephen Weissman

RogerGathman
The end of American hegemony can't come too soon, if you ask me. It is perhaps the only chance for the American working and middle class to regain their power - a power that has been systematically smashed to preserve a structure of unsustainable inequality, a structure that freezes social mobility, a structure that has de-manufactured America and would like to operate, now, on the 'entitlements' that created and still sustain the American middle class. This couldn't have been done without ramping up military spending and using a sort of darkside Keynesian policy, substituting easy credit for real wage gains. The result is a country that largely borrows its raises - taps the mortgage on the ever inflating price of the house it lives in to pay for larger things uncounted in the inflation statistics, like health care and education - and has so adapted to overwork that it doesn't know what to do with its free time anymore. I know - let's shop!

This is not a country that is pursuing happiness, but a country of managed obsession compulsion in which an odd ideology - altruistic greed - reigns supreme. The people on the bottom altruistically support the economic structures that make the greedy people on the top infinitely richer, defending this on idealistic grounds of self-reliance and the like - laughable concepts when one looks realistically at how the top five percent makes its money. An America that no longer had a military edge to make up for its debts would have to go back to savings - and that America would look much different. It would bring vividly into focus the inequality that has been casually assumed by the American public, and we would have to ask whether this is really what we want out of this republic. I don't think we do.

Posted at January 27, 2008 11:08 AM in response to America Diminished

RogerGathman
Chris Matthews should dream of coming up with a masterpiece like Do ya think I'm sexy! Of course, to be properly appreciated, that song has to be properly sung. Not that I am knocking Rod Stewart's version, mind - who am I to fight against the combined forces of strip clubs and karaoke bars, leading indicators of civilization as we know it? but Bob and Ray, as we all know, sang the canonical version.

Posted at January 19, 2008 9:06 AM in response to Two Idle Thoughts for the Weekend

RogerGathman

It seems to me the lesson that should have been learned from Vietnam for Americans is: learn about the culture in which you plan to intervene. Stevenson is right about the range of possible options, but confines his comments to the post Tet atmosphere - in retrospect, the obvious preferable option would have been to let Saigon negotiate with the NLF in 1965. The nominal 'president' of Vietnam, then, wanted to, although of course D.C., with its colonialist mindset, quickly designed a coup to get rid of him. He was in favor of bringing the communists and nationalists - for the NLF was both - into the government. Eventually, such an arrangement would probably have negotiated a unification with North Vietnam - the division between the two countries occurred only to suit the U.S. If this had happened, some 100,000 dead and wounded Americans would have been spared, and a good 2 million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians.

In Iraq, this has been learned a little bit. The U.S. surrendered in Anbar province to the forces they fought in Fallujah. That was an excellent move. If the U.S. would simply give up all its plans in Iraq, accept the situation as the Iraqis create it - which is probably the creation of a highly atomized state, at the moment, and a strong ally of Iran - and get the hell out, it would be the best solution for all concerned. It would be a terrible mistake if U.S. soldiers are still in Iraq at the end of 2009. Bush being in office until Jan. 2009, it is probable we will still have soldiers in to proxy up for our idiot president's vanity, but after that we should be pulling them all out. At the same time, though, if the U.S. has any sense, in order to shift our obsessive focus from the Middle East back to more necessary foreign policy matters - such as the ongoing crumbling of Mexico - we should certainly open up negotiations with Iran leading towards our recognition of that country's government. In this way, the pressure spots in the Middle East will start to subside. America will never have the power it had in the Middle East in the Cold War again - that's final. But we don't have to pour lives and money into a hole as a way of not accepting this reality.

Posted at December 21, 2007 1:19 PM in response to Further Thoughts from Stevenson

RogerGathman

1. Well, I don't think we are disagreeing about labor that much. The variables involved in deciding what was domestic labor and what wasn't are not, after all, my variables - they were recognized and used by the Indian agents, by Knox, and by most American officials who dealt with the Indians thoughout the 19th century. Just as in England or France, there was no 'shutting in' of women in a separate women's quarter. Rather, the civilizing program was directed at keeping women from the management of the crops in all their aspects, subordinating their tasks to the decisions of men, and encouraging household tasks - the spinning and stuff of Washington's letter. This isn't a big mystery, nor is it a mystery that this had the effect of lowering the status of women in the Indian nations. It wasn't the only factor - Plains indians, having increased access to horses and firearms, changed in such a way that the male warriors increasingly came out on top, and women came out on bottom. But it was a constant theme in the encounter between the U.S. government and the Indian nations.

2. I'm not sure what you mean by this: "I don't see your citation of various discrminatory laws as meaning much. Native Americans were regarded legally as citizens of their own nations. They were not US citizens and did not ever have the rights of citizens." You mean the right to testify in trials? Sure they did. That is why those Georgia laws were passed in the first place. The discriminations, far from being meaningless, were essential - by simply stealing Cherokee property, by enabling assaults on cherokees, etc., by asserting the right to arrest Cherokees but not allowing Cherokees to testify in court, the Georgia legislature was trying to drive the Cherokees out. The double status of Indians was put before the Marshall court in the case of the Cherokees, and the court basically plumped for the idea that the Cherokees had a compromise status between being a foreign nation and being subject to U.S. and State law. As is pretty well known, Marshall struck down Georgia's law, Georgia refused to recognize the authority of the Supreme Court, and Andrew Jackson said, "John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can."
3. I don't think you are seeing the point of the Iraq comparison, which is not about 'civlizing' Iraqis, but about the equivalent - pushing the American idea of governance upon them, up to and including a privatization of the Iraqi economy. And these changes are justified with the notion of the U.S. as the 'enforcer' of human rights, and particularly of the rights of women in the Middle East. The parallel is in the legitimation function. The model still constructs the women of the Other - in this case, Iraqis - as being uniquely protected by the Americans. Of course, the fantasy, here, is in violent contrast with history and reality - for just as the Americans 'protected' Indian women into a lower status in the 19th century, they are 'protecting' Iraqi women into Taliban like circumstances in the South and untold chaos elsewhere in Iraq. And, of course, twenty years ago the U.S. was encouraging the jihadist in Afghanistan to defend their traditional order against the Soviets, which meant defending the exclusion off women from the professions, education, etc.

Posted at November 11, 2007 4:16 PM in response to The Science of Insecurity