TEH SOCIALISMZ!!! AAAIIIEEE!!!! by Mike the Mad Biologist

TEH SOCIALISMZ!!! AAAIIIEEE!!!! by Mike the Mad Biologist

Ocasio-Cortez and dignity

How Will Alexandria Ocasio's Big Win Manifest Itself Inside And Outside The Democratic Party? by DownWithTyranny

America has long-championed individualism as the foundation of our democracy and the free market economy. Such values form not only the bedrock of conservativism, but also the pillars of the post-World War II global order, which is under assault from a backlash against globalization and the rise of populist nationalism, both here and abroad. 

By highlighting individual dignity and the dignity of our neighbors, Ocasio-Cortez is advancing a new social value-- one which sees the individual as both a solitary being with certain inalienable rights and as a citizen and member of society. This duality could de-polarize American politics by introducing 21st century social values into today’s political discourse while upholding long-held individualist values. 

The tension between individualist and communitarian values has fostered binary choices between American conservatives and liberals, the market and the state, right versus left, red versus blue, and “us” versus “them.” This dichotomy assumes a left to right continuum in which compromise in the middle is the modality for public choice. The idea of binary choices on the spectrum from left to right is threatening our democracy. 

...What is at issue and more starkly evident in the 21st century is that the individual is vividly embedded in the social fabric and is connected with neighbors, near and far. This web of engagements and entanglements in our globalized era invites a new outlook, one that embraces complexity, contradiction, and conflicting viewpoints. Those with such open mindsets can adopt blended mixes of contrarian perspectives to reach inclusive agreements about the way forward rather than simplistic middle ground compromises. 

The key is that Ocasio-Cortez founds her formulation on both the idea of the individual and social responsibility. 

The truth is that individualist values of liberty, property rights, freedom and sovereignty worked well in the 20th century as the foundations of competition, free markets, democracy and the nation-state. Yet today, well into the 21st century, globalization in the broadest sense has penetrated and transformed our individual lives in ways that make clear our inter-connectedness. 

Today, we need to add to these bedrock American principles new values that embody and honor this connectivity, including by upholding respect for others, fairness for all, trust in one another and a sense of personal (and mutual) responsibility. Adding these social values to the American political discourse would help prioritize actions that could achieve greater social mobility, public access, economic security, and systemic sustainability. 

These actions, which would seek blended, mixed economy, pluralistic approaches, could lead to better social outcomes from the market economy, greater social cohesion, more inclusive markets, less polarization, and greater effectiveness of policies, politics, and governance. These would restore confidence in markets, faith in institutions, and trust in government. 

Thank you, Ocasio-Cortez for bringing America face-to-face with the new understanding we need and the new narrative required to transform American politics for the 21st century.

Cortez the Killer

Matt Bruenig on democratic socialism

Musings on the Meaning of Democratic Socialism by Matt Bruenig

Briahna Gray on Ocasio-Cortez

There's an Easy Answer to Why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Won: Socialism by Briahna Gray

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Jeff Stein on DSA:

DSA has certainly been a beneficiary of the Dirtbag Left and its iconoclastic rage; Chapo Trap House frequently directs its guests to support the socialist organization, and its founders are in Chicago for the DSA convention. Mother Jones called the podcast a “gateway drug” for democratic socialism, and DSA’s leaders recognize that’s correct. Even if DSA won’t adopt Chapo’s insult-humor shtick in its official platform, it’s hard to imagine that some of its beliefs won’t seep in some way into the organization through new membership. 

Chapo’s “dirtbag” politics have alarmed other left-leaning writers. In an essay for the New Republic, Jeet Heer warned against what he called its “dominance politics” as counterproductive to building a coalition with center-left Democrats.

But in an interview last year, Chapo Trap House co-host Matt Christman countered that Donald Trump had captured the “transgressive thrill of defying the cultural expectations of the elite,” and that the left would be wise to reclaim it. Incisive put-down humor, he suggested, isn’t just useful for amassing a podcast following; it could also be helpful to an ascendant left-wing politics. 

“The gonad element of politics is now totally owned by the right. All the left has now is charts and data. You cannot motivate people with charts and data and lecturing,” Christman said. “If we’re going to win, we cannot allow [right-wing provocateur] Milo Yiannopoulos and all of these carnival-barking Nazis to have all of the fucking fun.”

After Janus

Labor’s Choice After Janus by Chris Maisano

full employment and rising productivity

Robots? TraininRobots? Training? Factories Tackle the Productivity Puzzleg? Factories Tackle the Productivity Puzzle by Ben Casselman

destroy the right

Marshall Steinbaum

The first question I would ask any 2020 Dem primary candidate is “what is your plan for the destruction of the conservative movement?”

the Left,Trump and Republicans

George Will says to vote Democratic

Osita Nwanevu:

These folks are actually proud that they don't know how to do politics. "Mueller will save us." "Good Republicans will save us." "A recession (!) will save us." 

What will save you are a long-term electoral strategy and structural reforms aimed at politically dismantling the GOP. 

Another part of the package is passing policies that have significant, positive, & easily comprehensible impacts on people's lives when Dems are in power. Free stuff's great. People like free stuff. You "pay" for it by raising taxes on the wealthy & corps, which people also like

Listened to Chapo which was thought-provoking.

How do you sideline the 30 percent who are Trump supporters?

Clean house in the Democratic Party. We need a strong socialist movement which should include a resurgent labor movement and poor people's movement.

Make it so the white nationalists/anti-immigrants no longer have a veto.

flattening yield curve

Who’s Afraid of a Flattening Yield Curve? by David Glasner

Dillow on growth

THE INFINITE DESIRE FOR GROWTH: A REVIEW by Chris Dillow

productivity and anti-immigration/ anti-trade

You keep productivity up by maintaining real full employment.

Bob Allen's new "poverty machine" and its implications by Branko Milanovic

Per Martin Sandbu (paywalled) at the Financial Times, Italy has slow productivity growth. This has led to anti-immigration and xenophobic-populist parties succeeding. Sandbu points out the way to increase productivity is to maintain full employment and close the output gap, not by paying workers less. 

Germany has become more competitive by paying workers less. Krugman doesn't seem to emphasize this and doesn't seem to emphasize Sandu's story. Italy needs better fiscal policy since it can't do a devaluation. 

Better fiscal policy can be a substitute for a devaluation. 

Labour UK wants the central bank (Bank of England) to focus on productivity growth. This would entail a dialogue with fiscal policy makers since they would need to pull their weight.

Simon Wren-Lewis doesn't like this.

A new mandate for monetary policy by Simon Wren-Lewis.

flattening yield curve

The Treasury Yield Curve Blues by David Beckworth

TV

C.B. Strike is interesting with Tom Burke and his assistant Holliday Grainger. Sherlock: "conventional is the enemy of interesting." Stargate Atlantis's John Sheppard: "42, the ultimate answer to the great question of life, universe and everything." (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, and Jackie Robinson's number.)

Labour monetary policy reforms

Labour pledges to boost Bank of England role with productivity target by Jim Pickard and Chris Giles 

Labour has said it will set the Bank of England a new 3 per cent target for productivity growth but refused to specify when this should be achieved.

John McDonnell, shadow chancellor, will on Wednesday launch Labour’s final report on the UK’s financial system. 

Written by Graham Turner, an economist at GFC Economics, the report will make a series of recommendations, including that the BoE should move to Birmingham. 

But its most eye-catching proposal is that the central bank should target productivity “to better help drive economic growth”. The bank’s mandate would be expanded to include a 3 per cent productivity growth target. 

“The Bank of England and government should sign an accord at the start of the next government, detailing how each will work towards achieving this 3 per cent target,” the party said. “The Bank of England will be required to report, after each Budget, on the government’s plans in light of this 3 per cent target.” 

However, the party was unable to explain whether the target would cover a period of months or years or even decades. “It is open for consultation,” it said. 

 The report, called Financing Investment, highlights Britain’s poor rate of productivity growth and emphasises the low level of investment into manufacturing, ICT and other critical sectors. 

Its other recommendations, some of which have been previously announced, include setting up a Strategic Investment Board; using RBS, the publicly-owned bank, to deliver more lending to small companies; and establishing an applied sciences investment fund to deliver state funding to research and development.

Raising productivity growth is a key aim of all political parties because increasing each worker’s output would help raise the national growth rate, increase incomes and bring more tax revenues into the Treasury. 

Productivity growth has never exceeded 3 per cent a year in Britain. Over the past decade it has increased by just 0.2 per cent a year. 

Last November, the Office for Budget Responsibility calculated a “strong productivity” scenario in which Britain’s public finances would move into surplus by 2022 if annual productivity growth improved to 2 per cent a year by the early 2020s. 

In the same month, Philip Hammond, chancellor, admitted in the Budget that productivity growth had been “stubbornly flat” for years. 

However, one of the few aspects all the BoE’s policymakers agree on is that central banks only have the ability to smooth booms and busts in the economy, and have no power over the underlying productivity growth rate. The BoE estimates the likely growth of productivity and sets interest rates on that basis. 

Last autumn, Mark Carney, BoE governor, criticised those who wanted the central bank to solve problems such as productivity. The BoE “cannot deliver lasting prosperity and it cannot solve broader societal challenges,” he said, adding that calls for it to solve poor UK productivity “confuse independence with omnipotence”. 

The BoE refused to comment. 

Simon Clarke, a Tory MP, said: “Labour’s refusal to put a timeframe on their target shows their attempt to meddle with the Bank of England’s independence is already unravelling.”

Bernanke on QE at AEI

Lessons learned from 10 years of quantitative easing (video, June 7, 2018)

accomplices

Paul Krugman:

Sorry, Mr. Donohue, this IS who you are. People like you made a deal with racists so you could get deregulation and tax cuts. Every step you took was leading to this moment.

John Harwood:

new from US Chamber President Tom Donohue: “Thousands of children are being forcibly removed from their parents by our government. There is no other way to say it, this is not who we are and it must end now”

Big Business and old-timey conservatives famously made a deal with Nazis against the Communist and SocDem left in Germany. Didn't turn out well.

I agree with Krugman, but I sort of feel this way about liberals and neoliberals. Their incrementalism, minor-tinkering and focus on technocrats instead of mass mobilization are partly complicity in the situation we find ourselves in. They're attacks on the Left and socialists certainly don't help things.

They focus on a small number of 3rd party types who refuse to support Democrats, but to me those people are numerically insignificant compared to non-voters and to working class and middle class voters who are voting against their interests.

Center left parties have moved towards the right and have lost support b/c of it, not just in the US but in Europe.

By not delivering a robust, prosperous economy, certain elites have enabled Trumpism.

Milanovic: Bob Allen's new "poverty machine" and its implications

Bob Allen's new "poverty machine" and its implications by Branko Milanovic

But, intriguingly, Allen’s work in this area has also implications for his work in another area: the origins of the Industrial Revolution. As is well-known, Bob is the originator of the hypothesis of High Wage Economy (HWE), an argument that the Industrial Revolution was driven by high cost of labor in England (and low cost of energy) which made the substitution of labor by capital profitable. This was most famously seen in the evolution of the welfare ratios (nominal wages divided by the cost of the subsistence basket) for North-West Europe vs. Italy vs. China/India. While all three welfare ratios were about equal in the 15th century, they diverged afterwards with North European being much higher and China/India’s welfare rations plummeting. Allen saw in that divergence the origin (and not the effect) of the Industrial Revolution.

Now, with the poverty lines that are subscripted for place and time, what we see to be a welfare ratio from the worker’s perspective is no longer the same thing as the cost of that worker to a capitalist. The new methodology introduces a wedge between what is the worker's welfare and what is the cost of labor for the capitalist. This is most obviously seen in Allen’s former and new results for Russia. With the same basket across all countries (the earlier approach) Russian welfare ratio during most of the 19th century was 2; with a climate/country specific baskets, the welfare ratio is around 1 (that is, is much lower because of high requirements imposed by a cold climate).

But note that the cost of that worker to a Russian capitalist is still twice as high as the cost of an equivalent worker (at the same subsistence) in India. When we now draw the welfare ratios using Allen’s new methodology, we have to explicitly state that they reflect welfare ratios from the worker’s perspective, not the cost of labor. The implication of this wedge is that, following Allen’s own HWE hypothesis, introduction of machines is --everything else being the same—more profitable in the North than in the South.

If that’s the case, then a geographically-determined explanation for the Industrial Revolution suddenly looks more plausible than before. So, I thought, perhaps one (unintended) effect of Bob’s new and much improved methodology is to help the geographical explanations for the rise of the West.

The Mask It Wears by Pankaj Mishra - human rights, democracy, capitalism and socialism

The Mask It Wears by Pankaj Mishra