economist, writer • int'l & european political economy, geoeconomics, history, climate • host: @eurotrashpod, @statesmarkets • alt: @domlsdr • ✍🏼 book on trade
Joined October 2009
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New Left EViews retweeted
8h
For @nybooks, I wrote about the UFC
> All this testifies to how
thoroughly the UFC has become the lingua franca of a strange new
twenty-first-century formation: the nationalist international.
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Just as America mints its first trillionaire, we're seeing real wages fall for most American workers. And the previous strong wage growth at the bottom is starting to unravel.
A painful juxtaposition.
Jun 12
Those who celebrate @elonmusk's $1 trillion fortune need to be reminded of a simple and vital truth:
That there is a fundamental tension between extreme wealth and the very possibility of democracy.
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I think the vitriol hurled at Piketty, Stiglitz, Zucman and Ghosh is completely absurd, but part of the proposal is definitely problematic. My two cents:
1. All our evidence suggests that growth has been the sine qua non of sustained poverty eradication, that is beyond big ‘post-feudal’ redistributions of land and income. For developing countries arguably nothing is more important than brute forcing nominal output growth. But even for advanced economies, long spells of growth stagnation are linked to declining living standards. Italy is a great recent example where pure growth, no matter how chaotic, has proven beneficial.
2. It could well be that comfortably meeting resource sustainability and emissions reduction targets in a timely manner without giving up on growth-led development strictly necessitates convergence on consumption levels that imply a significant reduction for rich counties.
3. This might be compositionally impossible: a managed decline in rich countries could foreclose on development in poorer countries.
4. Even if it is possible, it is very likely that de-growth in the Global North is not just a political non-starter but politically corrosive to any decarbonisation effort and ends up having the opposite intended effect for our emissions path.
To me this just seems intractable. Either side claiming that their path is feasible is misleading either themselves or others.
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New Left EViews retweeted
Jun 12
“The G-7 and its partners should offer China a clear choice,” argue @Brad_Setser and @Shahinvallee. “Beijing can elect to face coordinated tariffs against its exports, or it can allow a coordinated appreciation in its currency—to the benefit of all.”
foreignaffairs.com/china/rea…
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“If Europe’s problem is insufficient investment and dynamism, why advocate policies that discourage investment?”
Indeed.
Jun 13
(A disastrous speech) #IMF ’s apparent contradiction:
If #Europe's problem is insufficient investment and dynamism, why advocate policies that discourage investment? - chart @IMFNews
imf.org/en/news/articles/202…
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I thought @adam_tooze was on point in his Draghi report Chartbook. Whatever the legitimacy of the diagnosis, the direction of the policy change doesn’t follow:
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What happened in the re-trial—the judge making a pre-trial ruling on a terrorism connections for sentencing and the prosecution’s strategy reflecting this in the choice of the lesser charge of criminal damages which was likely to lead to a conviction by a jury that was in the dark about the sentencing escalation—was precisely how the section 69 mechanism as expanded by the Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Act 2021 was always gonna be deployed.
I base this on the opposition it faced in 2021 by Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (lib-dem barrister in the lords). Clause 1 of the Bill extended s69 so that any non-terrorism offence carrying a maximum sentence of more than two years on indictment could be found by a judge to have a ‘terrorist connection’ at sentencing and aggravated accordingly. The point is that before that, only a specified schedule of serious offences had been within section 69’s reach.
Lord Marks’s point was essentially that bringing low-level offences within the same regime would produce dramatic sentencing escalations on judge-only determinations, using a procedure originally designed for offences where a terrorism connection was obvious.
See: hansard.parliament.uk/lords/…
I frequently encounter mildly patriotic rumbles about how “being judged by a jury of peers” is some sort of ancient British privilege. In this pure form, this is entirely alien to me as European.
But it don’t want to hear it again from people who are quiet about let alone supportive of a trial whose outcome was enabled by legislation that allows for the effective circumvention of the jury, well beyond what seems appropriate even considering that sentencing is the sole prerogative of judges in the UK.
It's as if the thing that the judge feared would cause a jury to acquit the group, a mitigating circumstance such that it would lead to that result in the eyes of the jury, is kept from them so he can rule it an aggravating circumstance! We cannot trust ordinary people.
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NB: I think pure jury systems are insane and reactionary in general but this, to me, seems like another common law problem. Most civil-law and mixed-system jurisdictions integrate lay participation across both stages (conviction and sentencing) by design. Even the US, the worst legal system in the West (depending on whether you include Japan or not) judge-only sentencing findings that ratchet up exposure beyond the statutory maximum are now unconstitutional based on the fifth and sixth amendments; in those cases sentencing actually now requires jury participation.
Get a proper constitution, losers.
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RT @NewLeftEViews: 1. It’s a bit late for that: for now the priority is to prevent disorderly industrialisation. You can’t make policy for…
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Many commentators, journalists and academics now seem to feel the need to volunteer their opinion that there’s nothing wrong with extreme oligarchic wealth and that redressing it is necessarily bad. As if they fear for their credibility if they don’t. A sorry state of affairs.
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Even if you, correctly, doubt the valuation (Space X doesn’t have a P/E ratio for one) you might still feel compelled to append “oh but of course he’s a genius”.
Jun 12
I have been skeptical of Musk related valuations for years now. But so far I have been proven wrong, in returns at least (fundamentals are different).
Not to say he’s not a genius entrepreneur: just that I have difficulties rationalizing the valuation of his companies.
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One already needs to be quite ideologically deluded to believe that ever growing oligarchic wealth doesn’t present an economic, political and social threat in general, but with a guy who is this openly deranged and fascist and who already tried to gut the US state?
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It gives me a thrill that USMNT supporters are becoming hopeful, because it just means they will crash and burn when they eventually play a team that isn’t as poor as Paraguay.
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New Left EViews retweeted
They’re calling it the “kill yourself and everyone around you” economy
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