The deep state is hiding evidence that the Chinese government tried to subvert our election:

President Donald Trump’s spy chief won’t meet Friday’s deadline to submit a classified report to Congress on foreign efforts to sway the Nov. 3 election, officials said, because of arguments within the intelligence community over whether China should be cited more prominently for its attempts to influence American voters.

Ratcliffe and other Trump appointees — including National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr — suggested over the summer that China posed a bigger election threat than Russia even though intelligence assessments at the time didn’t support that assertion.

It’s good that proud Americans like Ratcliff are willing to seek out the truth, which is being hidden by Chinese operatives within the CIA.

Meanwhile Trump has exposed the CCP takeover of Georgia’s Republican government:

But the conspiracy goes deeper, much deeper. There is evidence that Senator Majority leader Mitch McConnell is a Chinese mole:

I was intrigued by the reference to McConnell’s wife. Why does his wife know so much about Chinese infiltration of the highest levels of the US government? And then I recalled who he had married:

When are you people going to wake up to what’s going on here?

1. Matt Yglesias made a very wise observation:

To me, one of the big takeaways from this pandemic has been that in a genuinely novel situation where you need to make decisions based on imperfect evidence, listening to smart generalists has been more useful than listening to credentialed subject matter experts.

That’s also my impression. Here I’m thinking of bloggers like Alex Tabarrok, Tyler Cowen and Razib Khan. When issues strongly impact society, the science no longer “speaks for itself”.

2. Tyler recently posted a tirade against bioethicists, written by one of his commenters. The amazing thing is that the list of errors is just the tip of the iceberg. There is no mention of the role that bioethicists play in the deaths of as many as 40,000 people per year due to the prohibition on selling kidneys.

3. People wonder why I suggest that there’d already be a million Covid deaths in America if there hadn’t been any social distancing. Actually, that’s probably an underestimate. To get a million dead in the US you need a fatality rate of 3000/million. New Jersey’s is now over 2000/million and still rising fast—and that’s with lots of social distancing.

New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts currently have the highest death rates (but not for long—the Dakotas are on a tear), because the disease spread widely in those states before it was recognized, and thus before social distancing.

If the US had not adopted social distancing in March, the disease would have quickly spread across the country. As we see in the Dakotas, even being thinly populated doesn’t prevent a disaster. And most of the deaths would have occurred quickly at a time when helpful treatments like steriods had not yet been proven effective and the IFR was significantly higher. Hospitals everywhere would have been as overwhelmed as in New York, indeed much worse, with no effective treatments at the time.

New Jersey likely won’t reach 3000/million dead before vaccines ride to the rescue, but it surely would have reached that level had social distancing not began in March, as would the entire country. This disease moves fast if unconstrained. Even Sweden did lots of social distancing. And the old can’t be protected in isolation; they interact too much with younger workers. The nursing homes in the Great Plains tried and failed.

[I am discussing social distancing here; none of this is a comment on lockdowns.]

4. Tyler linked to an excellent Ross Douthat column:

What separates these two parties is not necessarily ideology or partisanship or even loyalty to Donald Trump. (Nobody had Brian Kemp and Bill Barr, both prominent members of the first group, pegged as NeverTrumpers.) It’s all about power and responsibility: The Republicans behaving normally are the ones who have actual political and legal roles in the electoral process and its judicial aftermath, from secretaries of state and governors in states like Georgia and Arizona to Trump’s judicial appointees. The Republicans behaving radically are doing so in the knowledge — or at least the strong assumption — that their behavior is performative, an act of storytelling rather than lawmaking, a posture rather than a political act.

This postelection division of the Republican Party extends and deepens an important trend in American politics: The cultivation of a kind of “dreampolitik” (to steal a word from Joan Didion), a politics of partisan fantasy that so far manages to coexist with normal politics, feeding gridlock and stalemate and sometimes protest but not yet the kind of crisis anticipated by references to Weimar Germany and our Civil War.

If all the Republicans in authority are acting like the fraud charges are a joke, you can be sure that all the GOP politicians not in authority privately believe the same. But tens of millions of GOP voters really believe these nutty theories. Thus the leadership of the GOP presides over a party that is foreign to them, like Roman generals leading barbarian troops.

Perhaps Fukuyama was right after all—we are at the end of history. Both democracy and neoliberalism are deeply entrenched, and all the nonsense from the Proud Boys and the Wokesters is just performative.

Maybe there’s a sort of NIMBYism in politics, where nothing substantive can be done by either party; the special interests opposed to change are too strong. Instead, we’ll repeats all the horrors of the 20th century, the communism and fascism, but this time as mere theatre:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Let’s hope so.

PS. I was reminded of Trump and the wokesters this morning when reading Schopenauer’s discussion of knightly honor:

The truth is that conduct of this kind aims, not at earning respect, but at extorting it.

Here are a few thoughts on cultural appropriation:

1. Racists don’t like cultural appropriation.

Racist prefer their own culture, and don’t wish to appropriate ideas and styles from other cultures.

Note that by ‘cultural appropriation’ I mean appropriation motivated by respect for the other culture. I’m not referring to cultural ridicule, which racists might well be interested in doing.

2. Collectivists don’t like cultural appropriation.

Here’s Brian Morton:

Susan Scafidi, a professor of law at Fordham and the author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, defines it as “Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorized use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”

Obviously, it’s infeasible for entire cultures to give permission to individual people. Even worse, opponents of cultural appropriation don’t care about the views of the “victimized” culture. When told the Japanese are not at all upset when Westerners wear kimonos (just as we don’t care when they wear business suits), they respond that this fact doesn’t matter. All that matters is the feelings of ethnic Japanese people living in the West with post-graduate degrees. In other words, the feelings of people who have appropriated Western culture.

3. Economic nationalists are hypocrites on cultural appropriation.

Western life has been immeasurably enriched by the importation of Asian cuisines, which are vastly superior to the “meat and potatoes” cuisine that boomers like me grew up with. This cuisine was stolen from Asia with no compensation. And yet economic nationalists moan and complain that Chinese theme parks use women dressed up vaguely like Snow White, with no compensation to the Disney Corporation (which of course stole Snow White for its films, with no compensation to the country that first produced the charming character.)

Indeed the key inventions that allowed Europe to rise to a position of supremacy in the world (gunpowder, the compass, paper and printing) were all stolen from China with no compensation, and Western economic nationalists feel no sense of shame over that fact.

But Snow White? Those evil Chinese are stealing our property! Cultural appropriation! Unfair!

PS. I recommend Morton’s essay.

HT: Gordon Hanson

There’s a certain group of people who believe that if you want to know how money affects the economy, then you need to talk to bankers. I’m not one of them.

As an analogy, consider the following imaginary conversation:

Fred: I worked at BestBuy during the 1990s.

Me: Was it interesting?

Fred: Yes, it was a period of soaring demand for personal computers.

Me: Um, don’t you mean the supply of personal computers was soaring?

Fred: Well more supply too, but the market was really driven by soaring demand. Extra supply just piles up in inventory if you don’t have buyers. It’s demand that drives the market; supply is just a necessary condition. Trust me, I worked there.

If you’ve studied economics from a textbook that teaches NRFPC (in other words, mine), then you know that Fred is speaking nonsense. To establish whether supply or demand was the driving force in the 1990s, you look at the correlation between quantity and price. And given that soaring sales were associated with plunging prices, we can infer that supply was the key factor.

Fred was too close to the picture to see it clearly. To him it looked like quantity sold was fueled by demand. He overlooked how Moore’s Law was sharply boosting supply, which led to much lower prices and many more people buying PCs.

I often hear people say that bank reserves don’t drive bank lending, look into paystubs creator. That no banker looks to see if he has enough reserves before deciding whether to make a loan. That’s like saying that the BestBuy salesperson doesn’t look at Dell Computer production data before making a sale.

More reserves can lead to more loans in one of two ways. In the Keynesian model, more reserves lead to lower interest rates on loans, and this encourages more lending. In the market monetarist model (my view), more reserves leads to more NGDP via the excess cash balances effect. As NGDP rises, firms and individuals wish to borrow more money.

In the Keynesian model, real bank lending rises, and in the long run monetarist model nominal bank lending rises. In reality, you have some of each.

Here’s Paul Krugman:

Actually, Tobin-Brainard is to many of the controversies that swirl around banks and money as IS-LM is to controversies about interest-rate determination. When we ask, “Are interest rates determined by the supply and demand of loanable funds, or are they determined by the tradeoff between liquidity and return?”, the correct answer is “Yes”— it’s a simultaneous system.

Similarly, if we ask, “Is the volume of bank lending determined by the amount the public chooses to deposit in banks, or is the amount deposited in banks determined by the amount banks choose to lend?”, the answer is once again “Yes”; financial prices adjust to make those choices consistent.

Now, think about what happens when the Fed makes an open-market purchase of securities from banks. This unbalances the banks’ portfolio — they’re holding fewer securities and more reserve — and they will proceed to try to rebalance, buying more securities, and in the process will induce the public to hold both more currency and more deposits. That’s all that I mean when I say that the banks lend out the newly created reserves; you may consider this shorthand way of describing the process misleading, but I at least am not confused about the nature of the adjustment.

Yes, it’s a simultaneous system. Adding reserves (base money) has a million indirect effects on every nominal variable in the economy, and, if prices are sticky, real variables as well. If you don’t want to call that “lending out reserves” that’s fine (I don’t use that phrase either), but we understand the dynamic process.

And this Krugman comment also rang a bell with me:

I’m actually kind of reluctant to even get into this, because any discussion of these issues brings out the people who believe that they have discovered the hidden secrets of the monetary universe, somehow missed by generations of economists. But here goes anyway.

Yes, I know the feeling.

The vast majority of people that die of Covid-19 are old. Nonetheless, I see a tendency for people to understate the Covid risk to non-old people. Here’s some Covid fatality data from December 2 from the Heritage Foundation, by age group in the US:

In fairness, the infection fatality risk is even more lopsided, as there are many fewer people in the 75-84 and 85+ categories. The old really are at much higher risk of dying. However, it’s still true that 48,000 middle-aged people (35-64) have died of Covid and even a couple thousand younger people.

At this point people say, “Yeah, but those middle-aged people have pre-existing conditions like asthma and obesity”, as if that makes it all OK. I don’t get that. I’m 65 and have the pre-existing condition of crappy lungs. If I’d been born in 1800, I might well have died in my mid-30s, like lots of famous artists and composers. But antibiotics likely saved my life and I still play tennis 3 times a week. My mom and stepfather are still alive in their mid-90s. Fat people often live well into their 70s or 80s. Why are middle-aged people with pre-existing conditions now viewed as disposable?

Again, I’m not denying that the risk for old people is more than 10 times higher on a per capita basis, but our society (including conservatives) freaks out about risks that are utterly trivial compared to Covid, such as terrorism. I bet you could find millions of middle-aged people who scoff at the risk of Covid but would be terrified to fly in a MAX737 (where your risk of dying is probably 1000 times lower than from Covid.)

Also keep in mind that the 48,000 figure is a moving target, indeed it’s likely already above 50,000 and will go much higher.

I’m not taking a position here on any public policy issue (I’m skeptical of “lockdowns”, for instance). But people really need to be consistent. If you want to argue that Australia’s success is not that significant because Covid doesn’t kill all that many people who don’t already have one foot in the grave, then you permanently forfeit the right to freak out over any other societal risk that is orders of magnitude less severe.

How many conservatives want to take away the “liberty” of Syrians to move to Germany because the immigrants might boost the murder rate by a few dozen? So what’s more important, liberty or safety?

Where was the conservative criticism of Trump’s various travel bans?

PS. LOL

PPS. LOL squared