In reality, Trump’s election would be a gift to bad cops and riot-ready radicals in equal measure, and his every intervention would pour gasoline on campuses and cities — not least because as soon as any protest movement had a face or leader, Trump would be on cable bellowing ad hominems at them.
.. Putin is more likely to pocket concessions and keep pushing, testing the orange-haired dealmaker at every opportunity and leaving Trump poised, very dangerously, between overreaction and his least-favorite position — looking weak.
.. From the Pacific Rim to the Middle East, revisionist powers will set out to test Trump’s capacity to handle surprise, hostile actors will seek to exploit the undoubted chaos of his White House, and our allies will build American fecklessness into their strategic plans. And again, all of this is likely to happen without Trump doing the wilder things he’s kind-of sort-of pledged to do — demanding tribute from allies, trying to “take the oil,” etc. He need only be himself in order to bring an extended period of risk upon the world.
.. Trump’s foreign policy hazing, his rough introduction to machtpolitik, promises more danger for global stability — still a real and valuable thing, recent crises notwithstanding — than the risks incurred by George W. Bush’s interventionism, Barack Obama’s attempt at offshore balancing, or (yes) Hillary Clinton’s possible exposure of classified material to the Chinese, the Russians and Anthony Weiner’s sexting partners.
.. No mathematical proof can demonstrate that the chance of a solidly-conservative Supreme Court justice isn’t worth a scaled-up risk of great power conflict.
.. But I think that reluctant Trump supporters are overestimating the systemic durability of the American-led order, and underestimating the extent to which a basic level of presidential competence and self-control is itself a matter of life and death — for Americans, and for human beings the world over.
Getting Radical Might Be the Most Practical Way to Fix Inequality
If you look back at the story of advanced economies over the 20 years before 2007, you see an interesting pattern. During that period, the total value of national income — what economists call “nominal GDP,” meaning income unadjusted for inflation —grew at about 5 percent per year in a reasonably steady fashion. The central banks patted themselves on the back and said: This is great! Things are running smoothly. We’ve got the “Great Moderation.” Why we need more radical policies so that we don’t just repeat the debt-fueled booms all over again
Yet during all of that time, the value of all credit, unadjusted for inflation, grew at about 10 to15 percent per year. At the time, it seemed like we needed that pace of credit growth, but when you think about it, if your credit is going to grow at 10-15 percent per year in order to get your 5 percent GDP growth per year, eventually you’re going to have a problem. This isn’t a stable system. In my view, one of the reasons that it seemed that credit had to grow faster than total income was rising inequality.
.. The richer people, when they get another $100,000, or another million, or 10 million, don’t tend to spend it as much as the poorer people would if they got another $100 or $1,000 or $5,000. All the empirical evidence suggests that the rich tend to consume a lower proportion of income than middle and lower-income people. So rising inequality can lead to a major problem with the demand for goods and services. The rich aren’t spending their additional money, so overall, more money gets taken out of the economy. Unless the richer people decide to invest their money, there would be a slowdown in the economy.
.. If you look at the bottom 20 or 25 percent of the population, their real wages haven’t gone up for about 35 years! Meanwhile, the incomes of the top 1 percent have gone up 200 percent. This is a dramatic increase.
.. We need more radical policies so that we don’t just repeat the debt-fueled booms all over again and do another blow-up in 2025 or 2035.
.. Now if you print that, many people in Germany will just sort of explode over their morning coffee! But I have argued this in Germany and I have very good relationships with many German economists. Lots of them share my analysis of how we got it into this mess but they are very wary of agreeing to my proposal for how we get out.
.. the Eurozone will have to progress to a much greater degree of federalization with an element of a federal budget, federal taxation, and federal expenditure. If it can’t agree to that, it would be better to break up.
.. Then something very odd happens in the 1960s and 70s — economists stopped talking about the banking system and the credit system. We then develop a set of modern monetary economics—whether New Keynesian Economics or New Classical Economics — where we imagine that we can think about the dynamics of the macroeconomy without a rich understanding of the banking system and without understanding that the banking system creates credit, money and purchasing power.
.. Piketty describes very significant increases in the ratio of wealth to national income, rising in many advanced economies from about 2 to 3 in 1950 to about 4 to 6 today, and he develops a theory of why that occurred. But what is striking, when you look at Piketty’s own figures, is that in countries like the U.K. and France and in several others, though not quite to the same extent, the majority of all wealth resides in the value of urban real estate. And the vast majority of the increase in the wealth-to-income ratio, which Piketty describes, comes from the increase in the value of urban real estate. The majority of that increase derives, in turn, not from new construction investment but from the increase in the value of land.
..
Instability mostly comes from the interface between the fact that the banks (or shadow banks) can create credit, money, and purchasing power in infinite quantities if we don’t constrain them, and the fact that credit is primarily created to fund the purchase of urban real estate and land, which is somewhat fixed in supply. In economics, when you put together a highly elastic thing and a highly inelastic thing, you create extraordinary potential for turbulence, volatility, and for unstable prices. Both of those issues are largely absent from the way we have taught economics over the last 50 years.
The First Time Hillary Clinton Was President
What her Wellesley classmates remember about Hillary’s first term—in 1968.
.. She had just spent much of her summer in Washington, interning on Capitol Hill. At a historic juncture of acute anti-establishment fervor, she told them to trust the system. Progress at Wellesley, she explained, “often results through action taken by the Senate of the College Government Association.”
.. During a period of immense social upheaval, she was the most prominent intermediary between her increasingly radicalized fellow students and a change-resistant faculty and administration.
“Hillary tended always to be what I will call a consensus person,” classmate Connie Hoenk Shapiro told me.
.. centrist, cautious, respectful of authority, progressive but never at the expense of maintaining access to the seats of power.
.. “She knew how to temper things.”
.. The graduation speech offered a largely progressive message, but she delivered it in language that was far from incendiary, more of a manifesto of moderation than a revolutionary’s battle cry.
.. The thrust of the thesis was what Rodham viewed as the inherent limits of radical activism
.. by the spring of her freshman year, his daughter was the gung-ho head of Wellesley’s Young Republicans organization.
.. “If we get this going, maybe we’ll see a change before we graduate,” she announced, according to the next day’s Boston Globe—one of the first public signals of her patient, incrementalist disposition.
.. In a letter to a friend from high school, she said she was an “agnostic intellectual liberal” but “an emotional conservative.”
.. “Can one be a mind conservative and a heart liberal?”
.. Her platform, such as it was, characteristically leaned heavily on a faith in Robert’s Rules of Order.
.. Black students who had founded a civil rights group called Ethos threatened a hunger strike if the administration of the college wouldn’t agree to their demands for more black students and more black professors. All of them considered Rodham a friend.
“Hillary was always supportive of the African-American students,” Karen Williamson, one of the most active Ethos members, told me. “I know she signed the petitions.”
.. Rodham helped put together—she stood up to an economics professor who suggested students not going to class was “a know-nothing attitude” and not much of a sacrifice.
.. the typed-out minutes of the meetings Rodham ran as college government president show an interesting, unmistakable pattern: Rodham is mentioned actually relatively infrequently. She opens the meetings, and she usually closes them. The rest of the time, it’s almost always other people doing the talking.
.. She was a capable orator, many of them told me, but was much more comfortable as a listener.
.. she stressed that this wasn’t just a vehicle for student demands. “The committee,” she explained, “will include nine students, four faculty members and the president of the college …”
.. “Alinsky’s conclusion that the ‘ventilation’ of hostilities is healthy in certain situations is valid, but across-the-board ‘social catharsis’ cannot be prescribed,” she wrote. “Catharsis has a way of perpetuating itself so that it becomes an end in itself.”
What It Takes For Faith To Survive
if there is no prayerful, contemplative dimension to your Christianity — because after all, the Christian life is about becoming fully united to Jesus Christ — then you run the risk of becoming like the tribal Catholics inSpotlight. That is, you risk becoming people who idolize the tribe (community) and its chieftains, even if it means sacrificing the ideals that the community is supposed to embody. If “being Catholic” (or Protestant, or Orthodox) requires you to turn a blind eye to the rape of children, or some other grave sin and crime, then you may as well adorn yourself with a millstone and jump off a cliff into the deep blue sea. Life in community is not enough in itself; in fact, as we see in Spotlight, it can lead you to make a false god of the community, such that you, in effect, murder the true God.
.. Either be radical, or don’t be at all.
.. in our post-Christian culture, either you will be radical in the sense Marco means, or you won’t be Christian, because it will cost too much, and be too difficult.