« The New MacArthur? | Main | They Really Hate Us » A Surge of Random Links10 Sep 2007 01:07 pm Some items to chew over while I'm pondering the testimony:
Enjoy. Comments (10)
No pictures. It's only unsafe for work if someone is reading over your shoulder, and if they are, then you shouldn't be reading fucking blog comments, should you? 
kid bitzer, Just tell your bosses that they're a bunch of squares if they don't get this cool blog post: "She was on her hands and knees. He moved behind her, and using his hand to guide himself, slide into her. Rocking his hips back and forth, he found a steady pace and slowly fucked her... If you do get snagged, you can always offer an interpretation of it that'll impress them: tell them to substitute "Matthew Yglesias" for "Liz Phair" and "The Atlantic" for "Capitol".
you have a job where you get to work from home or a cafe, or wherever the hell you want, and you think that working stiffs in cubicles should just loosen up and quit worrying about getting fired? Dunno about Matt, but I'll put those words in my mouth if yeh want.
No pictures. It's only unsafe for work if someone is reading over your shoulder, and if they are, then you shouldn't be reading fucking blog comments, should you? Maybe, maybe not. My workplace is somewhat casual, where no one would care about me taking a few spare minutes to read something harmless for fun. In addition, a political blog could pass for work-related. (Not every political blog, not for every task, but sometimes.) Therefore, my boss might walk by and look at my screen, but a blog is almost always safe. If Fred's blockquote is taken from the link, though, that is neither harmless nor plausibly work-related. The point is, it's entirely possible that a blog is work-safe but some other equally texty Web site isn't.
For those of us that want to talk about the non-erotic links: Brad's entire argument seemed to be based on the idea that the prices of slaves rose, but he didn't present any empirical evidence that this happened. Given how many things economists predict should happen, but don't, I'd really like to see more proof of that. Also there would be another pretty significant change in these price factors when the US outlawed importing additional slaves.
Brad's argument is a classic example of the imperial tendency in economics. The assumption is that everyone other than the economists are idiots and that they all have much to learn and nothing to teach. First, who claims that only slaveholders benefited from slavery? Not historians, who will tell you that the wealth of the New York mercantile class was built on the cotton trade - to the point that New Yorkers were strongly against Lincoln and the Republicans, and the mayor of New York actually threatened to secede after Lincoln's election. And it's common knowledge among historians of public health that the greatest advance in disease control of the early 19th century was the drop in price of the cotton shirt- which, because it could be washed and dried much more easily than wool, was an important factor in the control of lice and other parasites. So it's common knowledge among historians that merchants and consumers greatly benefited from the use of slave labor to grow cotton. Second, Brad seems oblivious to the fact that slaveholders benefited from slavery in the form of services, not only in the form of profits. A big slave-holder was the ruler of a small kingdom. His house was built, his food was grown, his horses groomed,his boots shined, his clothes made and mended, his children raised, his wife pampered, his sexual desires satisfied, all outside the money economy. These are enormously important benefits - benefits that men killed and died to retain - and they are not captured in Brad's model. Third, Brad does not understand that there were two different forms of slavery in the US. In the upper south - Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware - slaves were worked less hard and better fed, so that their numbers increased. Slaveholders in these states profited by selling slaves south. In the deep south, cotton plantations were much more harsh, and slave numbers did not increase. Thus, some slaveholders - those in the upper South - benefited from cotton growing not directly, but indirectly as the supplier of labor. Brad's model does not account for them. Lastly, Brad's model has the common economist's defect of confusing what "must be so" - that is, what one's reason tells me is true - with "what is so" - that is, what the facts reveal. Brad's little essay is a fine starting point, a hypothesis for investigation. But he thinks that because these ideas have come out of his head, they must be true. This is no way to do history, or any social science.
Re: Not historians, who will tell you that the wealth of the New York mercantile class was built on the cotton trade Maybe this is true (though there was a heck of a lot moret han cotton being traded in 1860) but was the cotton trade entirely built on slavery? I don't think so. Contrary to what many people seem to think most Southern whites owned no slaves at all, and most who did had just a domestic or two. Most Southern farmers worked their own lands in fact: plantations were very much the exceptions no the rule. For those who have read Gone With The Wibnd, the O'Haras with their 100 slaves were very much exceptional while the "white trash" Slatterys living next to them were the general rule. Re: His house was built, his food was grown, his horses groomed,his boots shined, his clothes made and mended, his children raised, his wife pampered, his sexual desires satisfied, all outside the money economy. Again, the big slave owners were as rare as the Trumps and Gates are in our own world. And they were not entirely oustide the money economy: slave labor weas not "free". Slaves had to be bought, fed, clothed and medicated. When they grew old or disabled they had to be supported despite being idle. Ditto for their infants and children. Granted, they were not supported at anything beyond the bare subsistence level (with exceptions among the domestics), but this is true of unskilled labor everywhere in the 19th century.
Brad DeLong may have done a nice job of illustrating how some economic equations work, but it's plain to see he doesn't know much history. For example, most of the planter class was in perpetual debt to the English merchants, a fact that doesn't show up at all in Brad's first six pages. (The first six pages were so silly that I didn't read the whole thing.) Simply asserting that the Egyptian cotton wouldn't have been available seems a little brazen, considering that during our Civil War the English switched readily to Egyptian and Indian cotton. Frankly, I have no patience with American economists. They can easily dream up silly ideas like Brad's paper, but seldom or never discuss big ticket items like how the switch from coal to oil may have impacted the Depression. It also seems a little strange that Brad would claim people saved on taxes because of the tariffs that were paid, when, in fact, up to the time of the Civil War the Federal government really didn't have anything to spend money on. Learn economics if you want to make money in the stock market. For everything else, there's history.
PS- I made these same comments over on Prof DeLong's blog, and I've been disappeared. Brad tends to do that -
Comments closed September 24, 2007. |
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Heads in the Sand
"I think people are too cautious about that sort of thing"????
you have a job where you get to work from home or a cafe, or wherever the hell you want, and you think that working stiffs in cubicles should just loosen up and quit worrying about getting fired?
i'm sure that isn't what you meant. 'cause if it were, you'd be offering a lot of job-hunting advice to a lot of pissed-off people.
Posted by kid bitzer | September 10, 2007 1:56 PM