I think that I understand the theory of trade better than Allan Golombek does. In his post on reciprocity in trade at RealClearMarkets this:

Given that the advantages of free trade are obtained by any country that embraces it, why should adopting it depend on reciprocity? When Great Britain adopted free trade in 1846 by abolishing the Corn Laws, it did so unilaterally. The Brits did not demand that any other country match its move to free trade. They wanted, instead, to curb spiraling food prices that had exacerbated the Irish famine. The result of Great Britain’s unilateral embrace of free trade? Food prices went down, the cost of living declined, manufacturers were better able to afford workers’ wages – and Great Britain prospered.

is a fair characterization of the theory of trade but this:

Faced with a protectionist U.S. Administration, the G20 for the first time issued a final statement that included the concept that trade must be “reciprocal.” There are advantages to reciprocity, of course. But the truth is, even if a country reduced trade barriers unilaterally, without any guarantee of reciprocal access for its goods, its people would be better off. The biggest advantage of free trade isn’t that it makes it easier for us to export – it is that it makes it easier for us to import.

is not because the theory of trade is about countries not individuals. On average free trade makes the people of the countries that embrace it better off but it can penurize some people while making other fantastically wealthy because it has nothing to say about distribution within countries but only about trade between countries.

That defect could be remedied if countries like the United States that adopt free trade also adopted policies that taxed the beneficiaries of trade and redistributed the proceeds to those harmed by free trade. But somehow that never happens.

I found James Duesterberg’s essay at The Point, “Final Fantasy”, fascinating but I don’t really know how to characterize it. It purports to be a discursion on “neoreactionary politics”, his vague term for what is equally vaguely deemed the “alt-right”, but it aspires to be much more. Here’s a snippet:

Western democracy, Mencius Moldbug tells us, is an “Orwellian system,” which means that its governments are “existentially dependent on systematic public deception.” Nominally, a democracy like the U.S. is founded on the separation of church and state, and more fundamentally, of government policy and civil society. With a state church, government power shapes what citizens think, which means citizens can no longer shape government policy. Rather than expressing or even guiding the will of the people, the state aims only to increase its own power by producing the people it needs. But a state church, according to neoreaction, is what we have: Moldbug calls it “the Cathedral,” and exposing it, critiquing it and trying to destroy it is neoreaction’s avowed goal. The Cathedral, like the Matrix in the 1999 film (a favorite reference point for neoreaction), is everywhere; it infects every experience, shapes all aspects of our waking lives. Its main centers of power are the university, the mainstream media and the culture industry.

Want to earn enough money to support your family? You’ll need a college degree, so you’d better learn how to write a paper on epistemic violence for your required Grievance Studies 101 class. Want to keep your job? You’d better brush up on climate-change talking points, so you can shift into regulatory compliance, the only growth industry left. Want to relax with your friends after work? It’s probably easiest if you like movies about gay people, pop music that celebrates infidelity and drug use, and books about non-Christian boy wizards. Want to communicate with other people? Better figure out how to use emoticons. Which race of smiley face do you use when your employer texts you on the weekend?

It characterizes the modern world as a duel between competing fictional mythologies. Since I don’t share the aspirations of either of the conflicting armies, I find it all terribly sad and actually destructive to my preferred outcome. But that’s the modern world for you.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

I found Matt Seybold’s poetic essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books, “The End of Economics”, interesting, uniting, as it does, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and John Maynard Keynes. That sounds like the beginning of a joke but as it works out, as related in Woolf’s journal, the three were friends, at least to the extent that any of them could be a friend. The essay makes intriguing reading.

Artificial intelligence is much in the news these days and the term covers a lot of territory. It includes rules-based systems, natural language processing, and machine learning. Contrary to what’s suggested in Mr. Seybold’s article I don’t believe that its inherent contradictions, its lack of predictive power, or the irresistible temptation that economists face to pursue their own preferences and agendas over where the science leads them that will doom economics. I think that artificial intelligence will.

First they excommunicated the conservatives. Then they expelled the moderates. Then they removed the moderate leftists. At Quillette Uri Harris asks the question “Are the Social Sciences Undergoing a Purity Spiral?”:

A couple of years ago, six social scientists published a paper describing a disquieting occurrence in academic psychology: the loss of almost all its political diversity. As Jonathan Haidt, one of the authors of the paper, wrote in a commentary:

Before the 1990s, academic psychology only LEANED left. Liberals and Democrats outnumbered Conservatives and Republican by 4 to 1 or less. But as the “greatest generation” retired in the 1990s and was replaced by baby boomers, the ratio skyrocketed to something more like 12 to 1. In just 20 years. Few psychologists realize just how quickly or completely the field has become a political monoculture.

It seems to me that ship had sailed before most of the people alive today were born. It was true when I was in college a half century ago and I can’t even imagine what it’s like now. Those many years ago I sat in on one Intro to Sociology class in which the prof said “People become psychologists to come to an understanding of their own psychological problems. People become sociologists to come to an understanding of their own sociological problems. That’s why all sociologists are Jews or black.”

If that’s the case, why do people become economists?

This morning I’ve read several interesting posts and articles about which I don’t actually have much to say. Since I think they’re deserving of your attention I’ll post on them anyway.

The first is at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, written by Bob Vulfov, and is entitled “Welcome to Our Startup Where Everyone Is 23 Years Old Because We Believe Old People Are Visually Displeasing and Out of Ideas”. Here’s a snippet:

As you can probably tell by looking around, every employee at our startup is 23 years old. On the morning of your 24th birthday, the barcode on your employee ID stops working and you can no longer enter our building. We do this to ensure our company has a ceaseless, youthful energy. We believe old people are displeasing to look at and also, bad at ideas.

Recently, I spent several months on an assignment at just such a startup and I can testify that there is more truth in the piece than not.

If you’re not familiar with McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, I recommend it. If you swing by there, check out “Kafka’s Joke Book”.

I want to encourage to visit a delightful web site: Harpo’s Place. Written by Bill Marx, one of Arthur “Harpo” Marx’s kids, it is dedicated to his father’s life and work:

Welcome to the Harpo Marx Website. My name is Bill Marx, and my dad is Harpo Marx. I created this site on behalf of The Harpo Marx Foundation and his family so that visitors who stop by can see a different perspective on Harpo… and learn sides of the man that might not be very obvious from that crazy fright-wigged character who chases girls in Marx Brothers movies. In other words – the complete man.

Dad always said there were two Harpos – the actor and the man. The actor was the one who horsed around with his brothers and pulled all sorts of junk from that bottomless pit of a trench coat. But it was also the man who sat down and played the harp.

And it was the man that I knew best. The man I just called – Dad.

When I was a kid Harpo was my favorite of the Marx Brothers for a simple reason: he wasn’t cruel.

I learned a few things in reading it, for example, that the original characters portrayed by the Marx Brothers were intended as stereotypical vaudeville characters: Groucho as the “stage Jew”, Chico as the “stage Italian”, and Harpo as the “stage Irishman”. Pretty obviously by the time their movies came around those characters had changed considerably and Harpo in particular had much more in common with Arthur Marx than he did with any Irishman who ever lived, onstage or off.

When you’ve got a few minutes to spare go and visit a gentle, loving place dedicated to a gentle, loving man. You’ll be glad you did.

I sometimes wonder whether there is any phrase more frequently misused than “soft power”. Coined by Harvard scholar Joseph Nye it is distinguished from hard power. Hard power is either military or economic power. Soft power is much more subtle. It consists in getting people to want what you want to accomplish. There are multiple ways of doing that. Setting the agenda is one of them. The strength and prevalence of your culture is another.

Foreign aid is not an exercise of soft power unless it results in people wanting what you want to accomplish. I think we should increase our foreign aid not to use soft power but because it’s the right thing to do.

As an exercise in soft power I think we should come to the sad conclusion that foreign aid has been a flop. Following the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan the U. S. spent billions on aid and, indeed, for years afterwards the U. S. Navy was Pakistan’s major health care provider. That didn’t stop terrorists based in Pakistan from killing Americans or induce the Pakistani government to turn over Osama bin Laden (make no mistake: the Pakistani government knew where he was all along). The reality is that lots of people don’t want what we want and no amount of foreign aid will convince them of anything but that we’re suckers.

Now to Adm. James Stravrides’s op-ed at CNN:

(CNN)Ten years ago, a little boy walked for two days with his mother to the USNS Comfort’s eye clinic. The Comfort is a Navy warship that operates as a hospital ship in the Caribbean and South America, with a crew from both the military and non-profit sectors providing free medical care. After his eye exam and treatment, the 8-year-old looked up and said, “Mama, veo el mundo.” “Mom, I see the world.”

In 2007, when I was commander of the US Army Southern Command, the Comfort treated close to 100,000 patients in 12 countries, performed 1,700 surgeries, issued more than 32,000 immunizations and trained 28,000 medical students and technicians.

Some people are shocked that military leaders are such strong advocates of what Harvard’s Joseph Nye called “soft power,” or the ability of a country to persuade without force or coercion. But I know first-hand how it enhances America’s security.

Which is why I am so concerned about the Trump’s administration proposed budget cuts to soft-power programs throughout the government. Under the budget proposal for 2018, military spending amounts to about 16% of the budget, while State Department programs account for less than 1%.

Worst yet, recently the President proposed a cut of 26% for global health programs — “the lowest level of funding since FY 2008,” according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Funds for AIDS alone would drop by about $860 million.

While I am not proposing a specific ratio of spending, I believe there is a symbiotic relationship between hard and soft power and that, in both cases, we need to invest in the programs that succeed.

Adm. Stravrides should go back to his sources. Whatever the merits of our foreign aid, what he’s describing isn’t soft power. It’s just another form of hard power and it isn’t convincing the world that we aren’t so bad any more if it ever did.

You used to read about “Eurosclerosis”, slow economic growth in Europe, quite a bit. At Bloomberg View Noah Smith points out that the United States has contracted it, too:

…the implication is clear — the U.S. needs to put the Great Recession behind it. During the downturn, it made a certain amount of sense to ignore those who called for structural reform of the U.S. economy — after all, there were more pressing, immediate issues to deal with. But now that the recession is long over and slow growth seems to be here to stay, economists and policy makers should put much greater focus on raising productivity growth and getting more Americans into the workforce. Rooting out Amerisclerosis won’t be easy, but it has to be done.

If I had to pick a single subject matter for this blog, that would be it. I’ve been writing about it now for nearly 15 years.

The most appealing target for fixing what ails us is reducing the deadweight loss of government and that in turn means returning government to its historic relationship to the rest of the economy, i.e. restraining taxation to 22% rather than surging towards 30%. That doesn’t mean cutting government spending to the bone. It means making prudent choices.

As me auld mither used to say we can have anything we want but we can’t have everything we want. It continues to be the case that there are no substitutes to thrift, industry, and other traditional American virtues.

I realize that Medicaid spending is an enormous drag on state budgets and is increasing at a frightening rate. I wish there were more recognition in the press that a third of Medicaid expenditures are devoted to long-term care and there is no other obvious alternative way of paying for it.

You can’t just send Mom to live with her eldest daughter any more. That daughter is working a full-time job now. She needs to. Without that job the family won’t be able to afford the mortgage payment. Very few people have enough income or savings to pay for long-term care. Very few people have insurance that will cover it.

35 years ago there was an attempt at finding another solution but it was repealed more quickly than it was enacted. It created an enormous flap. Elders outright refused to pay the insurance premiums.

Consequently, if you’re going to get Medicaid spending under some sort of control, you’ll need to come up with a solution for long-term care to do it. If your solution is compulsory savings, keep in mind that will reduce the consumer spending on which our economy is far too dependent.

If this stuff were easy, we’d’ve done it a long time ago.