Loki Jinx is settling in

We're keeping them separate for a little while. Bartleby knows someone is in the other room though. He's been sniffing it all with great trepidation. I think they're going to get along well.

 

UPDATE: Jinx was his original name... we were going to call him Loki, but we keep calling him Jinx and it's grown on us :)

 

Tracking U.S. protest activity

I've been getting Facebook updates from a former student about a protest she's been involved with, about budget discussions of some sort. Yesterday I guess they had an event - 400 people attended, 19 were arrested. I was thinking about the fact that this was a relatively small and typical, but really still substantial action. Hundreds of participants in a public political confrontation, with over a dozen arrested.

The U.S. has a reputation for being pretty riot- and protest-averse compared to our global neighbors in both the developed and developing world. At the same time, stuff like this small protest is going on all the time without garnering much news coverage. The Occupy movement continues as the prime example of continued large-scale protest that really doesn't get much coverage any more.

I was wondering... in the absence of broad news coverage, does anyone know of a place that tracks protest movements in this country? I wonder whether we really are a more status quo society, or whether the commitment to the status quo is more characteristic of our press than our populace. My anecdotal perspective is that we actually have a pretty robust culture of political protest, but I may be wrong. Or it may be that while protest is alive and well in the U.S., it's primarily a practice of a politically active minority, and for the most part the status quo does reign pretty supreme. Thoughts?

Tea Party Math

So on C-Span this morning I heard the director of Tea Party Express, one of the Tea Party organizing groups, say (paraphrasing - but the two claims are entirely faithful and they came one after another): "I'm tired of President Bush getting blamed for all the debt. President Obama ran up a third of the debt that we have today. He's run up more debt than all other presidents in American history combined."

Hmmmmm...

Why did Virginia go for Obama?

Lots of reasons.

But one of them was the fiscal cliff and sequestration, which got an immense amount of coverage here because of how much military spending goes on in this state (including my wife's paycheck). Nobody was running on making the fiscal cliff happen, of course. Although both candidates brandished austerity talk throughout the campaign, there was one candidate who seemed particularly enthused about it. And with sequestration looming, that was not encouraging for a lot of people.

Barkley Rosser discusses the reaction to the fiscal cliff in Richmond here (Rosser teaches at one of our fine institutions of higher learning, out in the Shenandoah Valley, where my sister went to school [unfortunately she was not lucky enough to take economics there]). He has a couple points - first reminding everyone that it's a little exaggerated. It's not so much a cliff as it is a steeper-than-we'd-like-downward-slope that we hit in January. Still, when you bring expectations into account I'm not entirely reassured. He also points out that Medicaid - because it relies a lot on state matching and discretion - is likely to be the biggest casualty of all this.

Question on a book

We are reorganizing which means moving and reshelving and I'm trying to get rid of books I don't need. Honest question: as an open-minded guy interested in economic history do I need Amity Shlaes's history of the depression on my shelf or is it not worth the inch and a half?

Hayek is rolling in his grave

Paging Bob Murphy: time to resurrect your incredulity at the claim by Sumner that Hayek is on his side.

I can't think of a much more un-Hayekian statement than "it doesn't matter where the money is injected". For some reason Greg Ransom is retweeting this.

I am able to go to sleep at night by telling myself that it does matter where the money is injected, but we inject it in pretty reasonable places and to the extent that the injection does cause real distortions that problem is completely swamped by the aggregate demand benefits of doing the injection.

The name of this blog was always meant to be self deprecating

Not sure if that was clear to everyone...

TFP is like the public dump for the empirical macroeconomist. Most of us just throw our crap into it, and the occasional eccentric comes along and declares that it's full of treasures

That's all.

A few propositions

1. So I never had a problem with the existence of Guantanamo or holding prisoners indefinitely for the duration of the conflict. But I had a problem with a lot that went on at Guantanamo. A lot of people don't seem to get that difference. I think that if Gary Johnson were elected and on Day 1 said "look, there's nothing wrong with having a military prison and holding prisoners of war [I don't think Johnson is a pacifist... am I wrong?] as long as we are legal and ethical in how we do it", 90% of libertarians would get my take on this overnight and would protest vehemently if they were told they continued Bush's policies. Genuine pacifists wouldn't, obviously. The whole problem with Bush was torture and lack of due process, not the mere fact of holding prisoners of war or killing terrorists.

2. If there was a Democratic challenger that supported Obama on everything but all the war stuff you all worry about, I think that challenger would get a ton of support. He might not win - incumbency is a powerful force. But he'd make major headway. You guys are harping on a false choice. Romney is worse than Obama on all counts, and Johnson is better than Romney on some and worse than Romney on a lot of really important stuff (health reform, Social Security, environmental protection, social safety net, macroeconomics etc.). Seriously. I get why you guys think honest Democrats shouldn't vote for Obama. But who do you expect honest Democrats to vote for? Exactly what viable alternative is there? It sure as hell ain't Johnson or any other libertarian. If you bracket the weed/war/gays stuff, Johnson is worse than the most right-wing Republican. I don't understand why libertarians don't understand how important that is.


So that was a blend of proposition and rant but I really don't think a lot of people think through this stuff.

This is pinging a little off Brennan's post.

[UPDATE: 3. I've been curious what people think of this... I think if Ron Paul ran on the libertarian ticket they might have gotten the 5% they were looking for. Yes the man has baggage. But he is in an entirely different class of politican compared to Johnson. Anyway, I think he could have dramatically increased the LP vote. Which says two things: (1.) the libertarian movement is very personality cult/charisma driven, and (2.) is Ron Paul interested in the success of libertarianism or does he care more about using it to advance his own career and now just dropping it to ensure his son's career in the Republican party?]

Not long now...

...very excited. Visited him yesterday. Then we have to stop acquiring small cats and get down to the business of acquiring small humans (a prospect I'm also very excited about).