Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Soon after Janet Yellen's confirmation hearing, Nouriel Roubini prepared a list of ten important questions nobody had asked her, and tweeted them. Of course, given the nature of twitter, he had to offer these questions one by one. Given the nature of a blog, I can put them all together for him here. 1. Do you support optimal control, the notion that inflation sometimes has to be allowed to go above target? 2. You have written that inflation may have to go above target for awhile to reduce labor slack. Do you support this optimal control? 3. Do you agree with Governor [Jeremy C.] Stein that macro-pru will not be sufficient to control bubbles? Would you raise rates sooner to prick bubbles? 4. While you say 'no bubble' today, what is the risk that slow QE exit and policy rate normalization over  4 years will cause bubbles down the line? 5. If the current approach to too-big-to-fail will not work would you down the line support breaking up big banks to deal with ...

I'm quite happy with the way my review of this book for The Federal Lawyer  turned out. Reviewing Khan Regular readers of this blog may remember the book, which I discussed with you here, this spring. I'll quote myself, only briefly: " Riba is always a negative.  Whatever exactly riba is, it is bad. Thus, any devout Muslim who believes as an empirical matter that interest is a critical part of a successful financial system will have to have an understanding of riba that allows him to support the charging of interest while still condemning riba."

The photo above is from the movie Shakespeare in Love (1998). I have used it just to lure you cinephiles in. I have nothing to say about that movie at all. Or movies in general -- I'm thinking of live theatre this morning for some reason. And I'll present without further comment the following, from a review by Terry Teachout in last Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. "Broadway is one of the worst places in America to see Shakespeare done right -- not because nobody there knows how to mount his plays (though I sometimes have my doubts), but because virtually all of the theatres on the Great White Way are conventional proscenium-style houses in which the actors and audience are placed on opposite sides of a rectangular arch that frames the stage. Shakespeare's plays, by contrast, were written for a far more intimate kind of space, the closest contemporary counterpart of which is a thrust stage that allows the audience to sit on three sides of the actors."

Writing as I did yesterday about Hoover dam and the hydraulic theory of history, I came to think also of the American institution of lawns. In other countries, homeowners have plots and they do various things to garden and decorate their plots. But in America, everyone seems agreed on the proper way to decorate your plot: blade after blade of grass regularly mowed to keep all the blades to a uniform height, the congeries of blades as dense as possible to convey a sense of lushness, as much like your neighbor's as possible -- except a darker green -- to lull him with your conformity to type while also driving him mad with envy. Michael Pollan wrote back in 1989 that the standard issue lawn was like the interstate highway system, or fast-food franchises. Together, these innovations make "the suburbs of Cleveland and Tucson, the streets of Eugene and Tampa, look more alike than not." The love of lawns goes back a long time. Gatsby, in Fitzgerald's novel, sends a ...

On a recent visit to Las Vegas I visited Hoover Dam. You can see one of the resulting photos above. I'm told that I over-intellectualize things ,and I sometimes resent that observation. But in this case ... I have to report that I couldn't help but reflect on the theories of Karl Wittfogel when I looked at that sight. Wittfogel, professor of Chinese history at the University of Washington from 1947 to 1966, developed the "hydraulic theory of state formation." This is the view that sovereigns and empires rise and fall based largely on their control of water, especially for flood control in wet regions and irrigation in dry regions. A state that organizes forced labor for these purposes will inevitably be despotic, but since the irrigation/flood-control projects will be so indispensable for the life and livelihood of much of the population it will be able to maintain its despotism over long periods of time. Wittfogel began his academic career as a Marxist, and h...

Too easy. Toronto's mayor says, "yes, I have smoked crack cocaine. Am I an addict? No. Have I tried it? Um, probably in one of my drunken stupors, probably approximately a year ago." I'm a laissez-faire kind of guy. I don't have an issue with regard to his drug of choice. But this statement displays the pathology that makes the liberty-eviscerating War on Drugs possible. He tries to mitigate the significance of his use of an illegal substance by referring to his abuse of a legal substance. Further, he did this only after staunchly denying for months that he had smoked the stuff or that there could possibly exist a video showing that he did so. So, essentially, he acknowledges the badness of what he was doing by the denials and the excuses, and fuels the 'War on Drugs,' a brushfire of a war that desperately requires buckets of dousing water, not further fuel. He has made this statement only after the Toronto police announced that they obtained t...

This name only recent came across my cognitive radar: Todd Zywicki. He's a George Mason University Law school professor, with controversial views about insolvency and bankruptcy. Let's just make this a link farm. Here is his GMU page. Here's a page at Mercatus. He's on Facebook. But he came across my radar courtesy of CreditSlips . I find CreditSlips a valuable source of ideas for blogging and for more lucrative writing as well. Some of my work on Argentina was more-or-less directly inspired by Creditslips' coverageof that particular insolvency. So I'm inclined to pay attention when they kvetch. And here they are, kvetching about Zywicki. That is their latest Zywicki-jab. But as you'll see if you follow that link, CS and Z have a history. Here's a bit more of it. If you follow that, you'll see that it concerns a dispute over "interchange regulation" (regulation of the fees charged for the use of a credit or debt ca...