Haffner, Hitler and Us

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”--Jefferson

Brian is really seeing a lot of theft and wanton destruction of scooters.

Bad scene from Pirate game last night. Pirates threw at Dietrick again, Hughes hit Marte, some trouble between the bench and Garrett, who lost his mind and attacked the Pirate bench. Puig recognized lunacy and joined in. Really ugly. Two really bad teams, suffering and miserable, bonding.

A man who was involved in a middle school shooting when he was 11 years old in 1998 died in car crash on a northeastern Arkansas highway, the State police said. He was released when he was 21, changed his name and moved to a town near you.....

The new anxiety of income inequality is stalking the free world. The widely-used flawed data from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez exclude both taxes and transfers in its calculations--but everyone uses it anyway. 
But by adjusting for different household size,  the highest 20% earned only 6.5 times as much after-tax income per person as the lowest 20%.  

But income is likely to be higher in households with two or more workers than it is in households with no workers or only one. By further adjusting for the different number of earners, the highest 20% earned only 3 times per worker as much as the lowest 20%, after taxes. That seems to imply a lot of uncertainty regarding the problem and wrenching the economic system to adjust such a low disparity seems excessive.

Many well-meaning people favor legal minimum-wage rates in the mistaken belief that they help the poor. These people confuse wage rates with wage income. It has always been a mystery to me to understand why a youngster is better off unemployed at $15 an hour than employed at $7.25 (updated). The rise in the legal minimum-wage rate is a monument to the power of superficial thinking.--Freidman

On Tuesday, Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University (PSU) in Oregon, publicly shared a letter he’d received from his employer, outlining the results of an academic misconduct investigation into his now-famous 2018 “grievance-studies” investigation. As was widely reported in the Wall Street Journal, Quillette and elsewhere, Boghossian, researcher James Lindsay and Areo editor Helen Pluckrose submitted nonsensical faux-academic papers to journals in fields such as gender, race, queer and fat studies, some of which passed peer review—and were even published—despite their ludicrous premises. The project was defended by 1990s-era academic hoaxer Alan Sokal, who famously performed a somewhat similar send-up of fashionable academic culture two decades ago. While many cheered Boghossian’s exposé, some scholars within these fields were horrified, and it has long been known that Boghossian, by virtue of his PSU affiliation, would be vulnerable to blowback.PSU’s Institutional Review Board decided that Boghossian has committed “violations of human subjects’ rights and protection”—the idea here being that the editors who operate academic journals, and their peer reviewers, are, in a broad sense, “human subjects”—and that his behavior “raises concerns regarding a lack of academic integrity, questionable ethical behavior and employee breach of rules.” As punishment, he is “forbidden to engage in any human-subjects-related [or sponsored] research as principal investigator, collaborator or contributor.” (from Quillette)
The paths of satire lead but to the grave.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is leading his colleagues to cut interest rates this week for the first time since 2008, even though the economy looks healthy, partly because it isn’t behaving as expected.
So they are reacting forcefully to something they don't understand in an effort to influence it?

GDP Numbers: Gross government spending, which accounts for about 17.5 percent of the GDP pie, spiked 5 percent. Non-defense spending rose by 15.9 percent!

Thus, without the spending binge, which will be accelerated by the budget betrayal promoted by the president and backed by more Democrats than Republicans in the House, the topline number would have been lower.

While government spending juices up the economy in the short run, the debt that we must incur to continue that spending is permanently weighing down the economy in the long run.

Which leads us to the third component – gross private domestic investment. That is the engine of a supply side economy. Those numbers contracted by 5.5 percent this past quarter, the worst showing since 2015. Investment in non-residential structures plummeted by 10.8 percent, highly unusual with such a good job market.

Then, of course, there is the final component: exports. Net exports were down 5.2 percent because of the tariffs.

“Homicide is the leading cause of death for non-Hispanic black male teenagers,” notes the Center for Disease Control, while accidents remain the top cause of death for teens from other racial backgrounds. The homicide rate in 2017 for black teens was almost 16 times higher than the rate among white teens.
It is actually more likely for black and Hispanic citizens to be killed by black and Hispanic police officers than by white officers.

On July 31, 1917, the Allies launched a renewed assault on German lines in the Flanders region of Belgium, in the much-contested region near Ypres, during World War I. The attack begins more than three months of brutal fighting, known as the Third Battle of Ypres. Haig ordered a final three attacks on Passchendaele in late October. The eventual capture of the village, by Canadian and British troops, on November 6, 1917, allowed Haig to finally call off the offensive, claiming victory, despite some 310,000 British casualties, as opposed to 260,000 on the German side, and a failure to create any substantial breakthrough, or change of momentum, on the Western Front. Given its outcome, the Third Battle of Ypres remains one of the most costly and controversial offensives of World War I, representing–at least for the British–the epitome of the wasteful and futile nature of trench warfare.

                    Haffner, Hitler and Us

From an FT article I could not read completely comparing the current American leadership to Germany in the 1930s through Sebastian Haffner's memoir of the rise of Nazism in Germany.  It is an assessment I just can not completely understand. There is a great difference between pointed mendacity and bloviating, between focused political ambition and Trump's casual shallowness. More, there is little difference to me between disdain for minority groups and disdain for working class tax payers and their children, but there is a lot of difference between hatred and disdain. Nonetheless, it is presented here as a reasonable concern:

. Then, as now, political moderates were constantly having to ask the question, how serious is this? Is it just distasteful or is it truly dangerous? . . .

. . . One strong temptation was simply to stop paying attention to the news and “shut one’s windows tightly and withdraw into the four walls of one’s private life.” Another was to take comfort in the things that had not changed — the parts of the state and of public life that still seemed solid and familiar. . . .

. . . The US president has just told black, Hispanic and Muslim congresswomen to “go back” to the “places from which they came”. Britain’s likely incoming prime minister has said that Muslim women wearing the niqab look like letter boxes. But it still seems unimaginable that storm troopers might one day drive minority groups out of public places.

But when do you sound the alarm? From exile in London, Haffner reflected: “It took me quite a while to realise that my youthful excitability was right and my father’s wealth of experience was wrong; that there are things that cannot be dealt with by calm scepticism.”

My instinctive reaction to the rise of Mr Johnson and the rhetoric of Mr Trump is still “calm scepticism”. But then again, I’m at roughly the same stage of life as Haffner’s father was in 1933.