StephenKMackSD's Blog

After Ms. Tett’s essay of April 22, 2020:

Headline: How much should it cost to contain a pandemic?

Sub-headline: Assigning an economic value to life is taboo — but we must confront the trade-offs

https://www.ft.com/content/9a74f748-8427-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6714

Mr. Luce’s essay doesn’t surprise, or even offer anything like a solution to the present conundrum. Perhaps the very nature/concept of that ‘conundrum’ makes it more amenable to extemporaneous political free association? Yet The Pandemic threatens the very Capitalist Enterprise in toto! What must ‘our’ response be? The bleak tone of Mr. Luce about, what is essentially a collapse of Capital, offers what?

Ms. Tett finds ‘hope‘ in the model offered by Bryce Wilkinson:

In “Quantifying the Wellbeing Costs of Covid-19”, a research note written for the pro-free-market New Zealand Initiative and published earlier this month, Bryce Wilkinson sets out to examine some of the fiscal trade-offs around coronavirus when it comes to health, wellbeing and cost. Whether you agree with his approach or not, the results are worth reading. 

The ‘as if’ here is that the fate of ‘our fellow citizens’ is not a compelling reason for political action, a reason that the State, and its vital civic dimension, should act as the glue that holds ‘us’ together? ‘A research note written for the pro-free-market New Zealand Initiative’ offers the reason for Mr. Wilkinson’s ‘research note’, whatever that is? Or should it be called by its name propaganda? A very particular kind of political advocacy/apologetic: red in tooth and claw Social Darwinism, that the Hayek/Mises/Friedman Trinity draped with the tattered cloak of Economics. 

Old Socialist 

https://www.ft.com/content/ecca2149-ddfc-47e0-983c-9bf0a6c3fae1

Ms. Tett is almost convincing by putting ‘the costs’ of The Pandemic at arms length from herself, via Wilkerson ‘speculative models’, but then she gives the game away:

So I salute Wilkinson for publishing his speculative models — however contentious — and I wish others would do the same, including national treasuries, which must make their own private calculations of such trade-offs. Taboo or not, these numbers could at least spark proper democratic debate. In these troubled times, that’s something we badly need.

 

Checking my old copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, page 675 provides not an exact description of Tett’s thought process, self-apologetic strategy? via her self-presentation as an advocate of ‘proper democratic debate’…

‘What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything , and the value of nothing’

Oscar Wilde

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/9a74f748-8427-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6714

Note the use of antitheses in Mr. Paulson’s political intervention:   ‘Isolationism vs. Globalism’ , Populism vs  Integrationism, forces of openness rooted in market principles vs. those of closure across four dimensions: trade, capital flows, innovation and global institutions: The Potemkin Village of Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction with its permanent residents of Hayek, Mises, and Friedman, has now been deserted .The Brotherhood of Capitalists, have moved to the tonier address, of the overcrowded yet  luxurious Keynesian villa.

The Paulson Economic Melodrama unfolds in the hyperbolic mood. In sum, ‘we’ must remain in that Keynesian abode, and dedicate ‘ourselves’ to Capitalism’s full recovery until? The Multilateral Organizations, that is the touchstone, the instrument of that full recovery of ‘our’ economic health are NGO’s, without allegiance to any Nation State, nor to any political constituency except itself. Are they worthy of our faith and trust?   

The forces that advocate for closure will resist strengthening multilateral organisations. But that only increases the risks to our citizens. While the near-term prospects of reform seem dim, I am more optimistic that this crisis will ultimately spur co-operation among major nations to begin the hard work of building a more peaceful, sustainable future. 

The above is the penultimate paragraph of Mr. Paulson’s essay, that amounts to a collection of not very convincing cliches.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/da1f38dc-7fbc-11ea-b0fb-13524ae1056b

From the hysterical opposition to the Free Speech movement, that rebellion led by the heroic Mario Savio, washed up Movie Star and FBI snitch Ronald Reagan, parleyed this into the Governorship of California…the rest is ‘History’. To S.I. Hayakawa, and later by the redoubtable Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind : its Star, a generation of incurious Students addled by Rock-Music, and other False Prophets, perhaps with a liberal sprinkle of weed? 

 Or the latest iteration of anti-student hysteria The Coddling of the American Mind  by Haidt and Lukianoff, a link to the Atlantic Magazine’s  shortened version (Behind a Pay Wall), is helpful to those who don’t want to waste their time on a book, of hysterical political propaganda, featuring an utterly unfit, indeed spoiled, younger generation. The ‘as if ‘ here is that New Democrat propagandist Haidt and Lukianoff , whose FIRE is funded by a collection of notorious Conservatives, can offer a balanced critique of a generation of ‘the coddled’.    

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

From one of the New York Times’ resident coterie of apologists for the political present, David Brooks, once the protege of the self-invented Brahman, and political poser Wm. F. Buckley Jr. (Imagine Buckley senior as a rough-hewn Texas wildcatter ? ) Brooks takes up the coddling metaphor, with the assistance of Haidt and Lukianoff as part of the tried and true public shaming of the Younger Generation, who must adapt to The Pandemic. The imperative that Brooks offers is as unimaginative as it is hackneyed: toughen up!

How many times, in my Middle School and High School years, did I and my class mates, hear this shit from our teachers? But mostly from the coaches, that ‘taught’ the mandatory Physical Education classes, in the Dark Age of the mid-fifties and early sixties!  

The last two paragraphs of the Brooks exercise in public shaming of the ‘overprotected’ offers insights into the ineradicable nature of the Puritan Ethic, and its hero like Jonathan Edwards and one of its many villains, Cotton Mather!    

I’m hoping this moment launches a change in the way we raise and train all our young, at all ages. I’m hoping it exorcises the tide of “safetyism,” which has gone overboard.

The virus is another reminder that hardship is woven into the warp and woof of existence. Training a young person is training her or him to master hardship, to endure suffering and, by building something new from the wreckage, redeem it.

Old Socialist 

Macron, who hungers for The World Stage, is interviewed by a not just friendly   newspaper :  He ‘warned of the collapse of the EU as a ‘political project’ unless it supports stricken economies’ ! Neo-Liberalism in all its guises, from Monnet’s Cartel to Macron’s ‘Reforms’ will be/are the victims of The Pandemic! Is my rhetoric too hyperbolic?  

The Post-Industrial/Globalist Economies will make way for the resurgence of The Nation State, in its Welfare State iteration, as the means by which to save ‘ourselves’ from both the ravages of a collapsing , misbegotten Utopianism and The Pandemic? The shared fate of Humanity and all Biological Life, via the crisis quickened by The Pandemic, is bringing the benighted Neo-Liberal Age to its dead end, with breathtaking celerity.  Macron’s newest political ‘evolution’ is his advocacy for a joint virus recovery fund, that sounds like Socialism. How will Macron overcome the long held prejudice, about the Malingering Southern Tier, seems an obvious , indeed pressing, question?     

Old Socialist 

https://www.ft.com/content/d19dc7a6-c33b-4931-9a7e-4a74674da29a

The reader must agree that Mr. Ganesh has, not just a talent for hyperbole, but is a Master of that rhetorical style:

It feels rude to point out how little was expected of Harry Truman when he became US president 75 Aprils ago. He was “just” a Missouri haberdasher. He is still the last non-graduate to attain the office. After Franklin Roosevelt, who matched Albert Einstein as the man of the 20th century, snobs viewed his instalment as an act of bathos.

Truman would end up curating the second half of that century. Nato was his doing, as was Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan and the nuclear age. Perhaps a Napoleonic gift for command always lurked underneath that Everyman bonhomie. More likely, though, the world happened to be at its most pliable in 1945. Circumstances counted for more than the individual.

Harry Truman hasn’t had this kind of good press,well!, since the Convention of 1948? but then there is this:

…

Truman, a failed haberdasher turned politician, had the appearance of a meek bookkeeper. In fact, he was feisty and prone to occasional angry outbursts. His upper-South twang did not resonate with much of the country. His many detractors wrote him off as a “little man” who had been unable to deal with difficult post-World War II issues—inflation and consumer shortages, civil rights for African-Americans and a developing cold war with the Soviet Union.

In the off-year elections of 1946, Republicans had gained firm control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1928. Few Democrats believed Truman could lead them to victory in the presidential race. A large group of cold war liberals—many of them organized in the new Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)—joined with other Democratic leaders in an attempt to draft America’s greatest living hero, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, as their candidate. The general seemed momentarily persuadable, then quickly backed away.

…

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1948-democratic-convention-878284/

Mr. Ganesh recons the rise of Truman provoked the  ‘snobs viewed his instalment as an act of bathos.’ and ‘Circumstances counted for more than the individual.’ What is absent from Mr. Ganesh’s historical precise of Truman’s accomplishments, here referred to as ‘the nuclear age’ was Truman’s dropping of two Nuclear weapons on Hiroshima  and Nagasaki  in successive weeks. Some essential background: 

Headline: Did We Need to Drop It

By Michael R. Beschloss

Not to get lost in a history of Truman, as some kind of political touchstone for the political present, when in fact Joe Biden is, in Mr. Ganesh’s telling, that virtuous Leader born out of Circumstance. Truman was that man, even though the ADA faction of  ‘snobs’ Schlesinger, Niebuhr and Eleanor Roosevelt did some ‘window shopping’, and Ike was their choice.

Biden is most assuredly not just ‘a horse-tranquilisingly dull candidate, at once verbose and content-free,’ he is a man suffering from a completely obvious cognitive impairment. He is also the representative of the Neo-Liberal politics of the Clinton’s, that is being abandoned with an arresting celerity, driven by The Pandemic. As the death toll mounts and Capital collapses, being almost unconditionally  bailed out, by a bought and paid for Political Class.

Not to fear Mr. Ganesh abandons hyperbole, in his last paragraph, for a strategically exercised political kitsch, as he dons the guise of an oracle. 

So it could be with Mr Biden. This pandemic is not the cold war, much less a hot one, but it is the largest disruption for a generation. Next January, if the worst of it has passed, the world could go in one of two directions. The early decisions of the US will determine which. As such Mr Biden’s plans must widen from the merely curative — fumigate America of Trumpism, make bruised allies good — to the creative work of crafting a post-virus world. Perhaps it is too much to hope that an unremarkable leader can make the planet safe for globalism. But it would not be the first time. 

American Writer 

https://www.ft.com/content/cb3085e2-7ef9-11ea-82f6-150830b3b99a

Mr. Zevin’s history of the Economist offers insights on every page, but this from pages 206 and 207 is so very worthy of thinking about:

And its footnote 115: 

Political Observer

Read two of the earlier letters from William to Henry last night. The subject, art and artists recently viewed, and lividly recalled, very impressive. While William was taking the cure in Germany. When I first got the book, I made the mistake of skipping ahead, to the later letters, between the brothers, in these letters their focus was their mutual constipation problems :

American Writer

Headline: Coronavirus and the threat to US supremacy

Sub-headline: Two questions serve as a reality check on excessive American declinism

It has reached such a point that Mr. Rachman feels compelled to link to his January 3, 2011 essay at Foreign Policy titled ‘Think Again: American Decline This time it’s for real.’
Along with his collection of the other political hysterics… American Hegemony is evaporating like smoke in the face of The Pandemic!
Why not look to Political Nihilism’s Prophet in Residence Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The Decay of American Political Institutions’ from 2013?

The Decay of American Political Institutions

The de-industrialization of America was about the myth that ‘we’ were ‘Post Industrial’ & represented an ‘evolution’ in our development. Which was just a way of decimating powerful Unions, and Capital finding sources of cheap labor. The Supply Chain was/is our undoing!

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/2e8c8f76-7cbd-11ea-8fdb-7ec06edeef84

Niall Ferguson, in his Sunday Times essay of April 12 , 2020 , features John  Maynard Keynes as its main protagonist.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/dont-bet-on-a-quick-global-resurrection-z553527tx

Keynes appears first an a negotiator of the Treaty of Versailles, who collapses from overwork or The Spanish Flu. Yet Ferguson’s animus to Keynes dates from this 1995 essay in The Spectator:

Click to access let-germany-keep-its-nerve.pdf

Mr. Ferguson makes the charge that Keynes’ sexual attraction to German negotiator Carl Melchior of the Versailles Treaty was determinative:

Even before he arrived as a Treasury representative at Versailles, Keynes believed that any reparations imposed on Germany should be on the low side. There is, however, no question that a series of meetings with Carl Melchior, one of the German representatives at the armistice and peace negotiations, added a vital emo- tional dimension to his position.

Melchior was a partner in the Hamburg bank M.M. Warburg & Co. — ‘a very small man,’ as Keynes described him, `exquisitely clean, very well and neatly dressed, with a high stiff collar . . . The line where his hair ended bound his face and forehead in a very sharply defined and rather noble curve. His eyes gleam. . . , with extraordinary sorrow.’

Ferguson repeats Keynes’ sexual partners year by year, and a confession made by Keynes to Virginia Woolf :

It is not too much to infer from these emotive phrases some kind of sexual attraction. After all, this was a time in Keynes’s life of considerable homosexual activity: a bizarrely meticulous list of sexual encounters from 1915 suggests that he had at least eight male partners in 1911 (including liftboy of Vauxhall’), four in 1912, nine in 1913, five in 1914 and seven in 1915. In the immediate post-war years, he had at least two homosexual relation- ships. This explains Virginia Woolf s amused but not incredulous reaction when, recalling his ‘curious intimacy’ with Melchior some years later, Keynes declared openly that ‘in a sort of way, I was in love with him’.

Homosexual promiscuity and a confession of an ‘unrequited love’ ? by Keynes frames , the remainder of Ferguson’s essay, while his 1995 essay is devoted to portraying Keynes as a collabo of the Germans, in thrall to a disingenuous Melchior. 

Brad DeLong supplies the PDF of the essay, above . And here is the link to the original article, behind a pay wall: 

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/22nd-april-1995/21/let-germany-keep-its-nerve

After this clear demonstration of Mr. Ferguson’s sexual prejudice and his adaptation of the less salacious aspects of Keynes’ life, career and his Economics, his essay becomes a defense of Conservative Economists via this question, adapting the title of Keynes’ most infamous/famous work:

Who among today’s great economists will write The Economic Consequences of the Plague?  

Next in order of appearance in his essay: the US Congress, the arch-liberal Paul Krugman, Kenneth Rogoff — one of Harvard’s few conservative professors —,Larry Summers, who lies somewhere between those two ideologically, followed by this declaration:

I am with Rogoff and Summers. This is a disaster, the economic consequences of which cannot be offset by even the biggest monetary and fiscal splurge. Over the past three weeks 16.8 million Americans — slightly over 10% of the workforce — have filed for unemployment benefits. According to our best estimates at my macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm Greenmantle, GDP has declined by even more and is currently running at 75%-82% of its level in the last quarter of last year.  

What follows is the protracted Doom-Saying of an Economic Historian, framed by his fealty to the economic wisdom, of his newly minted alliance between Rogoff and Summers,  followed by this return to the kitsch of his opening sentence.

Opening sentence: 

‘Easter never felt more Eastery.’

Closing paragraph:

In short, I can’t honestly wish my readers a happy Easter. In the Bible, Christ’s resurrection happens in just three days. The resurrection of the world economy will take far longer. I only wish Keynes could rise from his eternal rest to tell us exactly how long.

Note that Keynes, from 1995 to the political present, is transmogrified, by Ferguson imaginings, from a promiscuous homosexual, given to reporting his sexual liaisons in his Diaries, to a German callabo, to a modern day Tiresias. The reader should call this by its name Political/Economic Fabulism !

Political Observer