I sometimes wonder what one would believe about the world if all of one’s information were derived from reading op-eds in the New York Times. In her op-ed in today’s NYT, author Lindy West laments Seattle’s smog:

Seattle this week looks like one of those old photos of America’s smog-socked skylines from before the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, an echo as oddly hopeful as it is horrifying. The thing about human-made climate change is that it’s human-made, which means that humans, to some degree, can unmake it. It will take more than good liberals composting their pizza boxes. We need to make profound changes to the way that industry, commerce and corporations function in this country, which means that we need government intervention, which means, unfortunately, that we need a different government. Let your representatives know that, and remember it in 2018.

The problem with this is that regardless of the merits of the arguments about anthropogenic climate change due to emissions of carbon dioxide, climate change has little or nothing to do with smog in Seattle. Seattle has always had smog. Los Angeles and Seattle have smog because of their physical geography and too many people. When the Spaniards first saw the Los Angeles area in 1542 they called it Baya de los Fumos, the Bay of Smokes. That wasn’t because of human-produced carbon emissions.

Even were Seattle to implement draconian measures to curb smog, its air quality problems won’t go away. Look at the wind patterns in the North Pacific. Seattle has at least one additional smog day per year because of Chinese air pollution.

In the New York Times this morning Obama Administration National Security Advisor and UN Ambassador Susan Rice has an op-ed in which she makes the claim that North Korea can be deterred. I agree with this passage:

Either Mr. Trump is issuing an empty threat of nuclear war, which will further erode American credibility and deterrence, or he actually intends war next time Mr. Kim behaves provocatively. The first scenario is folly, but a United States decision to start a pre-emptive war on the Korean Peninsula, in the absence of an imminent threat, would be lunacy.

which are the points I’ve been making for some time. However, I disagree with the premise of her op-ed. There is no evidence that North Korea is deterrable. For example this:

By most assessments, Mr. Kim is vicious and impetuous, but not irrational. Thus, while we quietly continue to refine our military options, we can rely on traditional deterrence by making crystal clear that any use of nuclear weapons against the United States or its allies would result in annihilation of North Korea. Defense Secretary James Mattis struck this tone on Wednesday. The same red line must apply to any proof that North Korea has transferred nuclear weapons to another state or nonstate actor.

ignores the very long list of miscalculations by authoritarians over the period of the last 80 years. Hitler, Tojo, Mr. Kim’s grandfather, Saddam Hussein, and Moammar Qaddaffi all believed that the U. S. would never go to war with them or that they could prevail or at least escape scot free in a war with the United States. Security states are predisposed to such miscalculations.

What I think that a nuclear-armed North Korea capable of reaching the U. S. with its weapons is likely to do is use nuclear blackmail to achieve its political, military, and even personal goals. Policy by other means.

I agree that the North Koreans can be prevented from using nuclear weapons but doing so requires the active cooperation of the Chinese rather than the verbal support they’ve provided so far. If you’re looking for a way of dealing with the situation on the Korean Peninsula short of war, you’ve got to be considering sanctions against China.

As I read this article in Seattle’s The Stranger about the Democratic Socialists of America, this passage leapt out at me:

In general, DSA advocates for taking basic needs like housing and health care off the market, empowering workers to organize and control their workplaces, and weakening the influence of corporations, all toward the long-term goal of abolishing capitalism.

I wonder if they’re aware there are only two known methods of allocating resources: a command economy that is inherently authoritarian and a market system?

I welcome any organization that has the goal of breaking the stranglehold that the present establishment Democrats and Republicans have on American politics. I think that an organization with the objective of ameliorating the worst effects of a market system is healthy and benign.

Market systems can lead to some people not having enough. Not enough food or housing or health care or whatever and that’s something that needs to be countered. But command systems always create shortages. The experience of the last couple of hundred years is that mixed economies are best despite needing constant tinkering.

I don’t look as favorably at having the objective of “abolishing capitalism” in the short, middle, or long term. That inevitably leads to murdering your neighbors.

I think there are four takeaways from Jordan Weissman’s Salon article on effective and nominal tax rates. They are:

1. The nostalgia that progressives seem to have for high marginal tax rates on the highest income earners is misplaced.
2. Effective rates of taxation in the U. S. have been quite persistent for a remarkably long time.
3. Effective tax rates weren’t a lot different 53 years ago than they are now and that’s true at all income levels.
4. Individuals with higher incomes pay slightly lower average tax rates while middle income and lower income earners pay higher average tax rates than was the case 50 years ago
5. Despite all of this progressives continued to be “obsessed” (Mr. Weissman’s characterization) by high marginal tax rates.

The most charitable explanation for that obsession, advanced by Mr. Weissman, is the not particularly well-founded belief that high marginal tax rates produce greater income equality. A somewhat less charitable explanation is that high marginal tax rates provide greater opportunities for extracting favors, rents, political donations, and other quids pro quo than low rates do.

My preference would be for middle and lower income people to have more disposable income rather than making rich people poorer and methods for doing that are straightforward. Naturally, that’s already been rejected on a bipartisan basis.

In his Wall Street Journal column William Galston lurches uncontrollably into the point I made way back when before China’s admission to the World Trade Organization:

Some policies undertaken with the best of intentions don’t work out as expected. In March 2000, President Clinton (for whom I worked during his first term) said of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization: “Economically this agreement is the equivalent of a one-way street. . . . It requires China to open its markets . . . to both our products and services in unprecedented ways. All we do is to agree to maintain the present access which China enjoys.” The gains would be more than economic, he added: “By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values—economic freedom.”

In his remarks later that year, when Congress effectively ratified China’s entrance into the WTO, President Clinton predicted that “10 years from now we will look back on this day and be glad we did this.” He was not alone; I could fill this column with optimistic predictions from senior officials of both political parties.

Ten years later, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission convened to examine the effects of this momentous agreement. In lengthy testimony, Robert Lighthizer, a Reagan administration trade official who now serves as President Trump’s U.S. trade representative, argued that this policy had failed in virtually every respect. Mr. Lighthizer attributed part of the blame to our underestimation of the extent and persistence of China’s mercantilist practices. But more fundamentally, he argued that the very structure of the WTO cannot accommodate countries that deploy large state sectors to advance their national interest at the expense of others.

China never lived up to the commitments it made on being admitted to the WTO, particularly in the area of banking. Its banking system is still opaque and mostly state-owned. And it’s no coincidence, as I have documented here, that the number of complaints about unfair trading practices lodged against China is disproportionately high, even taking the volume of China’s export trade into account.

If her recent Washington Post column is any gauge, Katrina vanden Heuvel has just figured out that the Republican and Democratic foreign policy establishments are in lockstep in pursuit of American military hegemony:

The neocons — led by the likes of Bill Kristol, Max Boot and Dick Cheney — were the ideological motor behind President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the worst foreign policy debacle since the Vietnam War. The indispensable-nation crowd — personified by Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Michele Flournoy — were initial supporters of the Iraq War, championed President Barack Obama’s “surge” in Afghanistan and helped orchestrate the disastrous regime change in Libya. Neither the neocons nor the indispensable-nation crowd has been instructed nor daunted by failure.

Illustrative of their emerging alliance, as Glenn Greenwald reports, is yet another Beltway foreign policy initiative: the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The Alliance describes itself as a “bipartisan, transatlantic initiative” focused on Russia. Its purpose is to “develop comprehensive strategies to defend against, deter and raise the costs on Russian and other actors,” while working to “expose Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.” Consider this an updated version of Kristol and Robert Kagan’s 1997 Project for the New American Century, which fulminated for the invasion of Iraq. The Alliance’s advisory council includes Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s foreign policy adviser, and Mike Morell, acting CIA director under Obama. They sit comfortably with Kristol, Mike Chertoff, homeland security secretary under Bush, and hawkish former Republican congressman Mike Rogers. With a record of catastrophic foreign policy fiascoes, the establishment comes together to strike back.

In practice there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference among them. Their persistent and dominant view is marked by continuous war and repeated failure.

Perhaps I’m overly optimistic but I don’t believe that represents what most Americans believe. I don’t think most Americans care what goes on outside our borders enough to desire American military hegemony.

The lights will be dimmed on Broadway today in her honor. Barbara Cook, a great Broadway star of the 1950s and early 1960s has died at the age of 89. From Variety:

Barbara Cook, the golden-age Broadway ingenue who became a beloved cabaret and concert performer in the second act of her career, has died. She was 89.

Her son, Adam LeGrant, confirmed to Variety that she died early Tuesday morning at her home in Manhattan, surrounded by friends and family.

Known for her rich, clear soprano with an astonishing range, Cook shot to Broadway fame in “Candide” and won a Tony for her turn in the original 1957 production of “The Music Man.” In later years, she was hailed as one of the premier interpreters of the songs of Stephen Sondheim, thrilling audiences with both her technical skill and her ability to mine a song for the depth and complexity of its emotions. She received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2011.

Her obituary in the LA Times, also notable, closes with this anecdote:

When asked what her advice usually was to aspiring singers, she told the AP it boiled down to three words that she learned early on and have been her guide.

“You are enough. You are always enough. You don’t ever have to pretend to be anything other than what you are. All you have to do is deeply embrace who you are, and you’ll be fine,” she said. “In life, aren’t you drawn to the more authentic people? Of course. You’re not drawn to phonies.”

Ms. Cook struggled with alcoholism in the 1960s and 1970s, a struggle which robbed her of her marriage, her career, her slim figure, and, for a time, her voice. After she stopped drinking she had a lengthy second career in cabarets and on the concert stage. She created three important Broadway roles: Cunegonde in Candide, Marion Paroo in The Music Man, and Amalia Balash from She Loves Me.

Her interpretations of songs had a warmth and depth rarely equalled.

Update

This tribute to Barbara Cook at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony is particularly fine:

I stumbled across an interview with economist Robert Gordon at Quartz that highlights the point I made earlier about lagging U. S. labor productivity growth. Here’s its opening:

Economist Robert Gordon has spent his career studying what makes the US labor force one of the world’s most productive.

And he has some bad news.

American workers still produce some of most economic activity per hour of any economy in the world. But the near-miraculous productivity growth that essentially transformed the US into one of the world’s most affluent societies is permanently in the country’s rearview mirror.

and here’s a telling snippet:

My book forecast, going out 25 years in the future, productivity growth of 1.2%, which is not that different than in the 40 years since 1970. We had a brief respite from slow productivity growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the so-called “dot-com” era when we had massive investment to convert offices to use the internet [and] the beginning of e-commerce.

But if you leave aside that decade from 1995-2005, labor productivity growth in the US has only been 1.4% since 1970. And I’m predicting a slight slowdown in that.

The emphasis is mine. Read the whole thing. 1.4% is certainly slower than previous trend and, for practical purposes, is flat.

The graph at the top of the page, courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, provides a visual version of that story. Look at the part of the curve since 2009.
Articles at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Congressional Budget Office tell the same story.

It’s reasonable to wrangle about why productivity growth has slowed. My own preferred explanation consists of a set of interrelated factors including a period of high returns on capital investment followed by subsequent capital investment inadequate to boost productivity and the non-linearity of returns in terms of productivity to investment, i.e. doubling investment won’t double productivity. But it’s not reasonable to question that productivity has slowed. That’s a fact.

We could increase productivity by increasing investment. We might increase productivity by adding high value labor assets which, presumably, would come from overseas. We cannot increase productivity by adding low value labor assets. That flies in the face of the history of the world over the last three centuries.

Recently, I was challenged in one of my claims and I was astonished at the challenge. I don’t have the time to do all of the research but I did want to lay down a marker. Yes, real labor productivity in the United States is flat. Go to the site of the St. Louis Federal Reserve and search for “real output per unit of labor” and it will show you that for some years labor productivity has been flat.

Searches at the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Congressional Budget Office will show the same thing (although their measures of output may be based on nominal dollars). I don’t honestly see how anybody could doubt it. Economists and other economics writers have been pointing it out for years.