I strongly encourage you to read the excerpt from John McWhorter’s book on neoracism, posted at Persuasion or buy the book itself and read that. Here’s the opening:

One can divide antiracism into three waves. First Wave Antiracism battled slavery and segregation. Second Wave Antiracism, in the 1970s and 1980s, battled racist attitudes and taught America that being racist was a flaw. Third Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010s, teaches that racism is baked into the structure of society, so whites’ “complicity” in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.

Those “waves” can be associated with the ascendancy of three different views of the role of blacks in American society. The “First Wave” marks the ascendancy of the views of Booker T. Washington which are very similar to those held by Martin Luther King, Jr. Developments during the “Second Wave” more closely reflect the views of W. E. B. Du Bois: the “talented tenth” prosper while the fortunes of the remaining 90% of blacks languish.

The “Third Wave” is basically black supremacy and, unless squelched, will inevitably point in the direction of the realization of Marcus Garvey’s plans.

Don’t miss the following ten “oppositions” in the excerpt. They will explain for you a lot of what’s presently going on.

I had racism, much as it’s presently construed, explained to me by a black friend more than a half century ago. To make a long story short only whites can be racists because whites have power. As I’ve pointed out before that is a category error in more than one way. First, groups don’t have power. Individuals have power. Second, the overwhelming majority of whites have no power, either. Most importantly from my point of view in the U. S. whiteness has always been malleable. Nowadays the Irish, Italians, many Hispanics (a linguistic distinction not an ethnic one) and Jews are all white. Unless they themselves impede the evolution of whiteness in the American consciousness Arabs (another linguistic distinction) Hispanics, East Asians, and South Asians will all become white.

IMO Third Wave antiracism is just plain old racism and will not produce good results. I think it’s also heavily influenced by Marxism, replacing class consciousness with race consciousness. It’s a foreseeable consequence of having been radicalized with respect to race.

Jonathan Chait’s piece in the New Yorker opens with this statement:

Joe Biden assumed the presidency confronting an economic crisis reminiscent of the one that faced him when he and Barack Obama took office 12 years earlier.

and there’s so much wrong with it that I simply couldn’t get past it. Let’s start with why it’s bad economics.

The interpretation of the Great Recession and the subsequent phlegmatic recovery that is kindest, i.e. most favorable to the Obama Administration’s response to it, is as a “balance sheet recession”, i.e. a consequence of excessive private debt. That is emphatically not the case with the present recession. Private debt has actually declined substantially during the recession. The strongest similarity is that they’re both recessions. There are additional differences for example that the recession was already over by the time the first dollar of the ARRA was actually disbursed.

On top of that there are enormous political differences. Obama had considerably more charm than Biden does as well as much more energy. Obama actually had a mandate. Democrats had significantly greater majorities in both houses of Congress than at present. We hadn’t had a couple of decades of incredibly self-serving governments. And of course social media were in their infancy.

Read it if you must. It opened with such a blooper I couldn’t continue on.

Assume that this report from Reuters and Ember’s cited in it are accurate:

(Reuters) – China’s aluminium sector must shut dedicated power capacity equivalent to more than Germany’s entire coal fleet over the next decade to keep Beijing on track to meet its carbon pledges, climate think tank Ember says.

China accounts for more than half of global aluminium production, churning out 37 million tonnes in 2020. President Xi Jinping has vowed China will achieve peak emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060.

Ember, in a report to be published on Monday, says China’s record aluminium output last year emitted more C02 than some entire countries, including Indonesia and Brazil.

Avoiding conspiracy theories and science fiction, what conclusions can you reasonably draw from that? For me two leap to mind.

First, the Chinese authorities are relatively unconcerned about carbon emissions. Whether they are concerned at all is indeterminate but they have priorities that loom much larger for them. From that in turn I think we can speculate that either they’re taking a IBGYBG attitude towards it, they don’t believe the same things that Western climate scientists do, that their reputation for longitudinal thinking is greatly exaggerated, or some combination.

Second, they have no intention of doing anything under the Paris Accords. That in turn renders the Paris Accords moot.

I haven’t read Stefanie Kelton’s book and I probably won’t. At the American Institute for Economic Research Joakim Book synopsizes it and critiques several points:

1. A currency issuer (a “monetary sovereign”) cannot run out of money
2. Taxes don’t pay for government expenditures but generate demand for money
3. Inflation is the only constraint that a monetary sovereign faces.
   and
4. Capitalist economies have lots of idle resources (unemployment, spare capacity, fiscal space)

but I think there are a few important omissions in his exposition. Unless Dr. Kelton is what I’ve referred to a a “folk MMT-er”, she actually believes that creating more money will increase inflation unless it’s matched by an increase in aggregate product.

The other are the concepts of substitutability and friction. Resources are not automatically substitutable and spare capacity is sometimes just a sunk cost. When you have a thousand idled buggy whip factories because no one is buying buggy whips any more, increasing the money supply by issuing yourself credit won’t inevitably cause people to start buying more buggy whips and bring those factories into production again. And it will take some capital investment to convert those buggy whips so that they can be used to produce something that people are buying. Governments are notoriously bad in picking the right areas for capital investment and expanding the money supply actually discourages private investors from investing their money themselves.

The same is true of labor resources. It is simply untrue that idled coal miners get always be retrained as computer programmers. Why not propose that they be retrained as lawyers or architects or ballet dancers? A 60 year old miner is not going to be retrained for any job for which there is actual demand for the simple reason that by the time he’s gotten the training he’ll be too old to use it.

Trying to mount a defense of the Greek and Latin classics against the onslaught of criticism launched by Wokedom against them, Andrew Sullivan does make one excellent observation: if you’re going to throw them out as supportive of white supremacy, you’ll also need to discard famous black figures who endorsed them. That would include Martin Luther King, Jr.:

One of the more eye-opening documents you can find online is Martin Luther King Jr’s hand-written syllabus for a seminar he was teaching at Morehouse College in 1962. It’s a glimpse of what King believed an educated black man should know. It’s a challenging list: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s City of God, all the way to Bentham and Mill. There’s also a copy of the exam questions he set. Among them: “List and evaluate the radical ideas presented in Plato’s Republic”; “State and evaluate Aristotle’s view of slavery.”

What King grasped, it seems to me, is the core meaning of a liberal education, the faith that ideas can transcend space and time and culture and race.

and W. E. B. Du Bois whom he quotes:

I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?

If you’re going to cancel Plato and Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Milton, you’ll need to cancel King and Du Bois, too.

Don’t dismiss the move to cancel anyone not explicitly “anti-racist” as an irrelevant crackpot fringe. It’s informing the curricula in many public school systems and has motivated mass renamings in more than one public school system.

I should also mention that neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament are explicitly anti-racist but they’re not alone. Not only are Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism tolerant of slavery, at least there is presently no country with a Christian (or post-Christian) majority in which slavery is practiced openly and without legal consequences. Meanwhile slavery is practiced openly in some countries with Muslim and Hindu majorities and although it’s illegal in China slavery in all but name continues to be practiced there.

Returning to Mr. Sullivan’s original subject, for the ancients Greek, Roman, or Egyptian were not descriptions of races, ethnic groups, or even bloodlines. They were linguistic communities. Egypt was wherever the Egyptian language was spoken. That’s somewhat the way in which “Arabic” is used now. Anywhere in which Arabic is spoken by the majority of people is an Arab country.

My concerns about Wokedom are that a) I think the standards that they’re applying are artificial and capricious and b) I don’t believe that what they’re advocating leads to a good place.

The editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette profile Congressional Representative Marcy Kaptur, not merely the woman presently having served in the House the longest but the woman who has served in the House the longest full stop—20 terms:

Ms. Kaptur still lives in the same simple house where she grew up, in Toledo.

She is an old-fashioned Roosevelt-Truman Democrat. But does she feel like a minority, a lonely voice, in the House caucus and in her party? “Yes, I do,” she says.

Well, Ms. Kaptur is not going to retire or change parties or become a congresswoman without a party. She will keep on, and keep fighting for what she believes. Her latest cause is to establish an infectious disease unit in the National Institutes of Health.

But she, like many Democrats, is disillusioned and alienated.

A devout Catholic, she cannot share the obsessive enthusiasm of her party for abortion. She is for women’s rights and rights to privacy, but not for government funding of abortion or late-term abortion.

She is an environmentalist, passionate about saving Lake Erie, but she also wants to save the auto industry — all that is left of industry in Toledo or Detroit.

Cultural questions are tough ones, morally and politically, but most people seek a balance.

And, no small thing, Ms. Kaptur has been seriously disrespected by her party. She has been denied a major committee chairmanship after all these years — 20 terms in the House. Think about that and what it means to disrespect that.

“I think economics can bind us. I think that when we divide into too many subgroups, we lose the overarching theme,” says the congresswoman.

She’s right. Dead right.

The overarching theme should be opportunity, not identity.

Democrats in the House need to respect Marcy Kaptur, respect the people she represents, and respect what she identifies as the right and resonant overarching theme: opportunity, jobs. They need to counter the GOP’s appeal to the working class, and not simply surrender the field.

Ms. Kaptur has watched her beloved Ohio, once the ultimate swing state, become more and more deeply red. The Dems will lose a lot more people if they do not start to listen to, and represent, middle America. They will wish they had first listened to Marcy Kaptur.

I think they fail to make their case. As long as they can capture the White House, House, and Senate by controlling major urban areas like New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee, why should Democrats care about anywhere else? It doesn’t really matter if such a strategy is inimical to republican government. It’s democratic.

There’s a lot I disagree with and a few things I agree with in Holman Jenkins’s latest Wall Street Journal column. Here’s the part I thought worth passing along:

In the New Yorker’s recent Covid opus, which took up an entire edition of the magazine, these lessons don’t appear. It cites two “missed opportunities” to defeat the virus: China’s failure to fess up about human-to-human transmission and the early U.S. testing fiascoes.

It’s wrong about both. Covid was out of the bag globally before Beijing even knew it existed. And U.S. testing could hardly have isolated early Covid sufferers when 59% of spreaders have no symptoms and most of the sick have symptoms indistinguishable from the colds and flus millions suffer every day.

The new coronavirus was an efficient spreader and was not going to be stopped, as much as politics resists the idea of realities that can’t be changed by politics.

A third “missed opportunity” was mask adoption, but masks are only one element of social distancing. Research by the Covid States Project shows that, starting early last summer, Americans donned masks but curtailed their physical separation, contributing to the year-end surge.

We can intelligently say only that America’s social distancing could have been better. It also could have been worse.

Governing is the hardest thing people do, period, so don’t take this the wrong way. All along messaging has had to target two bogeys, a political one and a public-health one, but the distortions are adding up.

It’s absurd that only now the CDC, very quietly, has begun recognizing, as it does with the flu, most cases go unreported. As of Dec. 31, when the media was highlighting 19.7 million “confirmed” cases, the CDC now estimates 83 million were infected.

The consequences will never be acknowledged. We prioritized a vast testing enterprise that could not possibly help us control the spread. We failed to invest in antibody studies that might now be helping us guide early vaccine doses away from 100 million or so who already have some natural immunity.

A long-running University of Southern California survey shows that risk perceptions have been distorted in exactly the way you would predict: Americans overestimate their risk of dying from Covid and underestimate their risk of catching it, with the result that millions likely have been selecting a level of risk that ill serves them, their families and society.

What can you say other than that publicity works? Whether you call it “fake news” or “partisan press” or just plain yellow journalism being taken uncritically, we’ve had a pretty solid diet of it for the last year.

It’s always gratifying when you run across someone who, presumably, is better informed than you who corroborates what you’ve been saying for many years. That was the case with this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by John J. Miller, the individual is sociologist Richard Alba, and the idea is the notion of a “majority minority” United States:

“The majority minority narrative is wrong,” says sociologist Richard Alba, referring to the idea that nonwhite Americans will outnumber whites by 2050 or so. In his recent book, “The Great Demographic Illusion,” Mr. Alba, 78, shows that many “nonwhites” are assimilating into an American mainstream, much as white ethnic groups did before them. Government statistics have failed to account for this complex reality, partly for political reasons, and in doing so they’ve encouraged sloppy thinking about the country’s future.

“The surge in mixing across ethno-racial lines is one of the most important and unheralded developments of our time,” says Mr. Alba, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He rattles off facts and figures: Today, more than 10% of U.S.-born babies have one parent who is nonwhite or Hispanic and one who is white and not Hispanic. That proportion is larger than the number of babies born to two Asian parents and not far behind the number of babies born to two black parents. “We’re entering a new era of mixed backgrounds,” Mr. Alba says.

Maybe the reason that I was skeptical of the notion as soon as I encountered it a couple of decades ago is that the mother of my closest blood relatives other than my siblings was Mexican. It was obvious to me that many “Hispanics”, a term I don’t much care for since it conflates a linguistic community with an ethnic community, consider themselves white and even more would do so in the years to come. I don’t see Mexican-Americans as “persons of color”. I see them as cousins and, sadly, to whatever extent they subscribe to the “persons of color” they will impede their own progress. Maybe it’s because when I was a kid the polite term was “colored people” and it meant blacks, cf. the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

I think that both political parties are miscalculating rather badly. Democrats, I presume, have visions of Mexican immigrants, Central American immigrants, South Asian immigrants, and East Asian immigrants being as solidly Democratic as African Americans have been for the last 90 years. If the progressive Democratic leadership really believes that party affiliation will overrule the generally socially quite conservative views that today’s immigrants hold, I think they’re misreading history.

I’ve mentioned this before but when I was in college, taking economics courses, Keynes was king. I continue to think that Keynes was right: Fiscal stimulus, properly structured and timed, can help to counter economic recession. Today the editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the Biden Administration’s stimulus package:

All of this suggests that the economy is poised for a strong rebound as the pandemic eases even without new federal spending. Money for vaccines and low-income workers who are suffering the most is justified, but much of the rest will far exceed the economic or social need. As Mr. Summers puts it, if the Biden plan passes, Congress will have spent the equivalent of 15% of GDP responding to Covid before addressing any of Mr. Biden’s other priorities like public works.

Sooner or later all of this spending will have economic and political costs. The Biden spending bill is the wrong remedy for an economy that is growing. The best economic stimulus is to end the lockdowns and accelerate the vaccine rollout.

The problem with most fiscal stimulus and the Biden Administration’s approach is no exception is that it is rarely properly timed and almost never properly structured. What the editors fail to point out is that the Obama Administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was neither. The recession was over before the first dollar had been disbursed under the act and its structure was either wasteful or targeted to political objectives. The only arguments you might make for its effectiveness rely on “animal spirits” and that it might have prevented the recession from being even deeper. The former argument is Keynesian but darned hard to make while the second is not Keynesian at all. The better explanation for its effects is that it produced asset inflation and contributed to income and wealth inequality. The available evidence supports that conclusion.