Posts Tagged ‘Santa Claus’
“Is this a holy thing to see / In a rich and fruitful land / Babes reduced to misery / Fed with cold and usurous hand?”*…
David Stein explains how the Democratic party abandoned New Deal Keynesianism in favor of balanced budgets, what that’s yielded, and how we might chart a saner, more humane path forward…
In the 1940s, liberals debated various means of direct and indirect government investment, but they took as a given that the private sector was ill-equipped for the task of stabilizing investment across business cycles, and thus stabilizing the production of needed goods and services (Harris 1948, 372). The ascent of Democratic deficit hawks ratcheted down the expectations of governments, suggesting that the most important thing policymakers could do is not to provide for the public, but to satisfy private investors.
Democratic deficit hawks believed shrinking the deficit would encourage the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, which would catalyze private investment and ultimately create new jobs (Rubin and Weisberg 2004, 355–56). Producing a public good or service ceased to be the key metric of sound economic policymaking. Instead, a policy’s cost-effectiveness or impact on the deficit took precedence. The government’s role was thus mainly to create a climate that pleased private businesses and investors, upon whom, they believed, the social and economic vitality of society overall now rested. As this form of politics became entrenched within the Democratic Party, the deficit hawks constrained social spending proposals at all times, even during recessions.
To be clear, the deficit is important to economic policy, though not in the way that deficit-hawk rhetoric represents it. According to sectoral-balance analysis, developed by British post-Keynesian economist Wynne Godley, a federal government deficit will be offset with a surplus in the nongovernmental sector, and vice versa: A government surplus will be counterbalanced with a nongovernmental or private deficit (Godley 1999). Sectoral-balance analysis emphasizes governmental and nongovernmental sectors as different accounting identities.
Versions of this viewpoint were influential within New Deal–era economic debates. When he was at the Treasury Department in 1934, economist Lauchlin Currie developed a data series called the “Net Contribution of the Federal Government to National Buying Power.” This series would render the net surplus or deficit of government expenditures minus tax receipts to analyze the government’s impact on the economy. If the government took in more tax receipts than it spent—i.e., reducing the budget deficit—it would generally operate as a contractionary force on the economy. And by contrast, if the government received less in taxes than it spent—increasing the deficit—then it would serve to stimulate the economy (Currie 1938). Decades later, economist Alan Sweezy, Currie’s Keynesian compatriot, emphasized the importance of Currie’s innovation: “This was both a technical improvement on the official deficit as a measure of the impact of the government’s fiscal operations on the economy, and even more important a semantic triumph of the first magnitude,” he stressed (Sweezy 1972). Yet, this perspective was never able to become hegemonic in the Roosevelt administration or beyond, as Currie’s boss, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, adhered to more traditional fiscal conservatism (Zelizer 2000).
Instead, relative intellectual incoherence would become a hallmark of post–New Deal economic policy, with the disjointedness on the issue of public debt a particularly salient feature of this general dynamic (Smith 2020, 59). While most Democratic policymakers after the New Deal generally agreed that some degree of ameliorative countercyclical economic policy was necessary during a recession, there was never firm agreement on the specific role deficits and their composition should play. Additionally, even from a sectoral-balance—or Currie-inflected “net contribution”—perspective, the composition and distribution of specific fiscal policies would shape their impacts.
In exploring how deficit hawks came to dominate Democratic policymaking between the 1970s and the 2000s—and what was lost as a result—this paper argues that we need a new approach…
Rethinking fiscal responsibility: “The Deficit-Hawk Takeover: How Austerity Politics Constrained Democratic Policymaking,” from @DavidpStein and @rooseveltinst. The full brief is here.
* William Blake, Songs of Experience
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As we reengage our roots, we might recall that it was on this date in 1897 that The (New York) Sun ran an editorial entitled “Is There a Santa Claus?” Written by Francis Pharcellus Church in response to a letter from 8 year-old Virginia O’Hanlon, it is now remembered best by one of its lines: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”*…
We live in ontologically challenged times, what some call a “metacrisis“:… but then we humans mostly always have. Peter Kauffman reviews an important new book, Carlos Eire‘s They Flew, that explores our capacity to believe the unbelievable…
This past July, the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and the Associated Press published the results of a May 2023 poll. Of the 1,680 American adults whom they interviewed (a representative sampling of the population at large), 69 percent said they believe in angels, 69 percent said they believe in heaven, 58 percent believe in hell, 56 percent in the existence of the devil, and 50 percent that spirits from the dead can communicate with the living. Reincarnation? The power of prayer? Astrology? Karma? Yoga as a spiritual practice? The idea that spiritual energy can be rooted in physical objects? Just six percent of us believe in none of these things. With this poll’s margin of error at plus or minus four points and other national polls over the years indicating much the same thing, it’s safe to say that 90 percent of all Americans today believe in something supernatural.
There is so much that is urgent for us to learn from what the social sciences call the dynamics of belief. Belief in things that come without any ostensible proof or evidence—that presidential elections are stolen, that horse tranquilizers cure COVID-19—is a root cause of the epistemic chaos that we find ourselves in today. How timely, then, for this extraordinary new history of belief to appear, even if the author seems to be focusing on the 16th and 17th centuries. And what a time that was. One accomplished British historian of the period, Keith Thomas, tells us, in his 1971 study Religion and the Decline of Magic, that most people back then were, by our contemporary standards anyway, “exceedingly liable to pain, sickness, and premature death”—also to poverty, “sudden disaster,” and “utter despair.” There was, understandably, a concomitant preoccupation, among the general public and elites alike, with the explanation and the relief of human misfortune; devil’s curses and God’s possible antidotes thus played a supersized role, especially before the so-called Age of Reason and Enlightenment learning started to take hold. The natural world of that time, Carlos Eire tells us, “constantly pulsated with the possibility of the miraculous.” It’s a patch of human history that seems very long ago. Yet today, under the existential terrors of climate change, a global pandemic rivaling the medieval plagues, and media that bombards us with news of one catastrophe after another, yesteryear has a familiar ring.
Eire is a master storyteller…
What the past can teach us about our troubled present: “Trances, Ecstasies, Raptures, and Levitations: On Carlos Eire’s ‘They Flew’,” from @pbkauf in @LAReviewofBooks.
Apposite: “This Simple Philosophical Puzzle Shows How Difficult It Is to Know Something” (read to the end).
* The Red Queen, to Alice, in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass
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As we ponder pondering the imponderable, we might recall that today is the Feast of Saint Nicholas (in Eastern Christian countries using the old church Calendar). It celebrates Saint Nicholas of Myra, an early Christian bishop, who attended the First Council of Nicaea; because of the many miracles attributed to his intercession, he is also known as Nicholas the Wonderworker. His legendary habit of secret gift-giving gave rise to the traditional model of Santa Claus (“Saint Nick”) through Sinterklaas.
“The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do”*…
André Forget with an appreciation of an all-too-timely classic…
One hundred years ago, a young American journalist named Walter Lippmann published a book called Public Opinion. Though it is one of the most important books of the twentieth century and still acknowledged as a foundational text in the study of social psychology, media, and propaganda, its centenary has passed, for the most part, unacknowledged. This is ironic, because its central question—put simply, “How can a truly self-governing society function under the conditions of ‘mass culture’?”—has rarely been more relevant. Our current debates about disinformation and the pernicious effects of social media could be rather more productive if the participants would bother to read Lippmann—not because Lippmann provides any workable solutions, but because his analysis of the extent of the problem is so clear-eyed.
…
Lippmann’s book stands as the first attempt to comprehensively explain how individual psychology, political and social movements, and the mass media both create and unravel shared experiences of reality. The argument he lays out is fairly straightforward: Most of what we think we know about the world has been filtered down to us through external sources, and this information creates a sort of mental map, a collection of simplified representations of the world that help us navigate it more effectively. Inevitably, the accuracy and detail of our maps is directly related to our individual needs and interests—my mental map, for example, contains a great deal of information about Canadian literature, and almost none about how my computer works—but even the things we think we know are mostly just agglomerations of facts we’ve taken on trust from people and institutions relaying them at second- or third-hand. My confidence in saying that reality as I understand it corresponds to the real environment around me is a barometer of my faith in the sources of my information.
The mental maps we carry in our heads determine how we will act in the world, though they will not determine the outcomes of our actions. If I believe that Alaska has white sand beaches, I might book a holiday in Anchorage, but I will probably be disappointed after I arrive. While personal experience can help us correct misconceptions, not everyone can have personal experience of everything that affects their life, so the more abstracted from our personal experience a problem becomes, the more we will need to rely on the guidance and expertise of others. But these guides and experts are also finite individuals who must rely, in turn, on guidance and expertise from other sources, and the information they provide is shaded by their own prejudices and interests, as well as the inevitable distortions and elisions involved in any process of simplification and transmission…
If Lippmann is basically right—and it seems difficult, then as now, to argue that he isn’t—then the implications for democracy are troubling. When we invoke the rule of “the people,” we are invoking an abstraction, because the public body is in fact made up of an endless array of sets and classes and interests, cultivated and then pandered to by opinion-mongers and press barons who inflame the worst impulses of their audiences in order to create a steady market for their content. This is the opposite of the sort of feverish conspiracy about how the press works that cranks of all kinds have stipulated. If there is a larger purpose at work, it is generally of the most venal sort, often directed by nothing more than the need to present an opinion opposite to that of one’s competitor. If you squint, something like consensus may emerge during one moment of crisis or another, but it is usually illusory, and always fleeting.
…
Arguments about the relationship between freedom and information are present in the founding of modern democracy. A decade before the thirteen colonies declared their independence from Britain, the rebel John Adams had argued that “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” But the president John Adams sang a different tune when “general knowledge” became a threat to his administration. Seen from a certain angle, the Sedition Act of 1798 is the U.S. government’s first attempt to combat disinformation. The relationship between a truly free press and functional democratic government has been strained from the beginning, and if the tension between the two seemed particularly fraught in Lippmann’s age, it wasn’t for the first or the last time…
Walter Lippmann’s seminal work identified a fundamental problem for modern democratic society that remains as pressing—and intractable—as ever: “Public Opinion at 100,” from @ayforget in @BulwarkOnline. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
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As we contemplate civil discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1897 that The (New York) Sun ran an editorial entitled “Is There a Santa Claus?” Written by Francis Pharcellus Church in response to a letter from 8 year-old Virginia O’Hanlon, it is now remembered best by one of its lines: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”
“A helluva, helluva, helluva, helluva, hell of an engineer”*…
College fight songs are Saturday staples, memorized in freshman orientation and blasted by marching bands at every game. The best ones are shouted from the rooftops and during Heisman Trophy presentations; the worst barely register with alumni.
We gathered the fight songs of 65 schools — all those in the Power Five conferences (the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC), plus Notre Dame — to see exactly how these teams are musically willed to victory. We counted which clichéd elements (like shouting “Rah!” or spelling something out) appear in each song’s lyrics and determined how fast the song is played and how long it lasts (for the version available on Spotify)…
Saturday’s anthems get the FiveThirtyEight treatment: “Our Guide To The Exuberant Nonsense Of College Fight Songs.”
* “(I’m a) Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech”
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As we pick up the tempo, we might recall that it was on this date in 1897 that The (New York) Sun ran an editorial entitled “Is There a Santa Claus?” Written by Francis Pharcellus Church in response to a letter from 8 year-old Virginia O’Hanlon, it is now remembered best by one of its lines: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”
“Dear Santa, before I submit my life to your scrutiny, I demand to know who made YOU the master of my fate?!*…
Father Christmas as pictured in Josiah King’s The Examination and Tryal of Father Christmas (1686)
Contrary to what many believe, Santa Claus as we know him today – sleigh riding, gift-giving, rotund and white bearded with his distinctive red suit trimmed with white fur – was not the creation of the Coca Cola Company. Although their Christmas advertising campaigns of the 1930s and 40s were key to popularising the image, Santa can be seen in his modern form decades before Coca Cola’s illustrator Haddon Sundblom got to work. Prior to settling on his famed red garb and jolly bearded countenance, throughout the latter half of the 19th century, Santa morphed through a variety of different looks. From the description given in Clement Moore’s A Visit from St Nicholas in 1822, through the vision of artist Thomas Nast, and later Norman Rockwell, Mr Claus gradually shed his various guises and became the jolly red-suited Santa we know today…
The illustrated story of St. Nick at “A Pictorial History of Santa Claus.”
* Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes)
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As we finish our letters, we might recall that it was on this date in 1913 that Arthur Wynne’s “word-cross,” the first crossword puzzle, was published in the New York World:
2-3. What bargain hunters enjoy. 6-22. What we all should be.
4-5. A written acknowledgment. 4-26. A day dream.
6-7. Such and nothing more. 2-11. A talon.
10-11. A bird. 19-28. A pigeon.
14-15. Opposed to less. F-7. Part of your head.
18-19. What this puzzle is. 23-30. A river in Russia.
22-23. An animal of prey. 1-32. To govern.
26-27. The close of a day. 33-34. An aromatic plant.
28-29. To elude. N-8. A fist.
30-31. The plural of is. 24-31. To agree with.
8-9. To cultivate. 3-12. Part of a ship.
12-13. A bar of wood or iron. 20-29. One.
16-17. What artists learn to do. 5-27. Exchanging.
20-21. Fastened. 9-25. To sink in mud.
24-25. Found on the seashore. 13-21. A boy.
10-18. The fibre of the gomuti palm.
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