Historian Stephen Davies names three persistent myths about the Great Depression. Myth #1: Herbert Hoover was a laissez-faire president, and it was his lack of action that lead to an economic collapse. Davies argues that in fact, Hoover was a very interventionist president, and it was his intervening in the economy that made matters worse. Myth #2: The New Deal ended the Great Depression. Davies argues that the New Deal actually made matters worse. In other countries, the Great Depression ended much sooner and more quickly than it did in the United States. Myth #3: World War II ended the Great Depression. Davies explains that military production is not real wealth; wars destroy wealth, they do not create wealth. In fact, examination of the historical data reveals that the U.S. economy did not really start to recover until after WWII was over.
March 3, 2012
Three persistent myths about the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War 2
March 2, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly column at GuildMag is now posted: http://www.guildmag.com/this-week-in-guild-wars-2-12. This week, there’s less raw gameplay footage from the press closed beta weekend and more analysis and further spectulation as we wait for the next Guild Wars 2 beta event later in March. More than a million eager players are watching their email inboxes for one of those treasured beta invitations (although a million applied, ArenaNet is inviting an unspecified number to take part in the next beta event).
After the leap of faith, I’d posted a recounting of my most recent vanquish in Guild Wars to Facebook and thought one or two of you might be interested…
At least one politician thinks we should keep the Victoria class submarines
In the National Post, Senator Pamela Wallin offers a counter-argument to John Ivison’s suggestion that the submarine fleet is a net drain on Canada’s military resources (linked from this post):
I’m with Vice-Admiral Maddison, who said, “For a G8 nation, a NATO country like Canada, a country that continues to lead internationally and aspires to lead even more, I would consider that [cancellation of the program] to be a critical loss of a fundamental capability and a very difficult one to regenerate at a future date.” Submarines provide Canada the ability to add to our knowledge of what’s happening at sea, a way of moving around without being noticed and, if fighting breaks out, a unique strike capability in support of Canadian or allied forces.
Most importantly, Canada has the longest coastline in the world. We need to be able patrol it and to guard our three enormous ocean approaches — quietly and unseen. As well, 90% of the world’s trade moves on ships. Canada is heavily reliant on maritime trade, especially through sensitive narrow waterways like the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca. Some of that trade is threatened by piracy, a growing concern for all trading nations, especially off Africa’s east coast where pirates now range all the way east to India. These are not the charmingly rakish pirates that Hollywood portrays — they are brutal, ruthless criminals. Canada, as a maritime nation, needs to know what’s going on in all domains, including underwater, and to be able to fight back.
HMCS Victoria near Bangor. (Image from Wikimedia).
In spite of the tone of my comments in the earlier post (generally agreeing with Ivison’s criticisms), I’m pro-RCN and very much pro-submarine as part of our navy. But what we need are submarines that can perform the duties required, and ever since we acquired the Victoria class, they’ve signally failed to do this. Anyone who’s ever watched a WWII film or newsreel knows that submarines fire torpedoes — except the Victoria class, which still do not have effective torpedo armament. We bought these submarines in 1998. HMCS Victoria has been in commission since 2000 and we’re only just getting around to test-firing a torpedo later this year? This is insane.
Of course, it’s not fair to blame the RCN for all the problems: the government of the day bought the subs on the cheap and then didn’t fully fund the necessary repairs to bring the boats back into operation in a timely fashion (but the military may not have done proper due diligence before recommending the purchase, either). Today’s government may cut funding as part of the austerity budget we’re rumoured to be facing soon. If so, we can expect fewer days when any of our submarines are in the water, operational, and fully crewed.
Gary Johnson profiled in the Huffington Post
Joel Sucher meets Gary Johnson:
At 59, Gary Johnson still projects the energetic aura of an athlete. But these days, the two-time Republican governor of New Mexico and imminent Libertarian Party Presidential candidate has the rumpled look of someone who spends too much time in Starbucks hunched over a laptop. At a sandwich shop near Rockefeller Center where we met for an interview last week, he talks with a quiet kind of energy: non-intimidating; a bit self-effacing, but sincere.
His voice is not mellifluous like Obama’s; his style is nothing like Mitt’s trying-too-hard; and his rhetoric is far from Santorum’s coarse and unbalanced rambling. Johnson’s speech lacks the “uhs,” “y’knows” or similar pauses that usually indicate a bad case of public overthink.
No, Johnson speaks with the conviction of a true believer, one convinced that abandoning the Republican Party for a run as a Libertarian will sow seeds that will take root — if not this year, then perhaps in 2016.
The preening and posturing of Romney and Santorum, looking to score at the socially conservative beauty contest, are anathema to Johnson. He wants to stick close to Libertarian core values, and if that means butting heads with former Libertarian Party presidential candidate (1988) Ron Paul, so be it.
Privateers? In our Maritimes? It’s more likely than you think
Pirates and Privateers is a half hour documentary airing Sunday, March 4, 2012 at 12 Noon on CBC Land and Sea, that explores the rough-and-tumble history of piracy and privateering in the Maritimes.
The ugly twins: censorship and surveillance
Cory Doctorow in the Guardian:
There was a time when you could censor without spying. When Britain banned the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the 1920s and 1930s, the ban took the form on a prohibition on the sale of copies of the books. Theoretically, this entailed opening some imported parcels, and it certainly imposed a constraint on publishers and booksellers. It was undoubtedly awful. But we’ve got it worse today.
Jump forward 80 years. Imagine that you want to ban www.jamesjoycesulysses.com due to a copyright claim from the Joyce estate. Thanks to the Digital Economy Act and the provision it makes for a national British copyright firewall, we’re headed for a system where entertainment companies can specify URLs that have “infringing” websites, and a national censorwall will block everyone in the country from visiting those sites.
In order to stop you from visiting www.jamesjoycesulysses.com, the national censorwall must intercept all your outgoing internet requests and examine them to determine whether they are for the banned website. That’s the difference between the old days of censorship and our new digital censorship world. Today, censorship is inseparable from surveillance.
Britain’s railway engineering heritage
Sarah Bakewell at the Guardian on the wonderful products of the railway building era in Britain:
Once I saw merely bridges, tunnels and stations, and mostly I didn’t even notice these, so busy was I rushing to get over or through them. Now, I see a delicate ecosystem of rivets, cleats, plates, gussets, joggles, spans, arches, ribs of attenuated iron and steel.
Scholars can already study railway archives in repositories all over the country, but Network Rail has just put part of its beautiful archive of Victorian and Edwardian infrastructure diagrams on the web. This amounts to an invitation to anyone, anywhere, to contemplate such images out of sheer curiosity and love of beauty. They give us plans of the high-level bridge at Newcastle upon Tyne, with its columns trailing down the screen like tall sepia waterfalls, and Bristol’s neo-gothic Temple Meads station, in ethereal ink outline. The Forth bridge of 1890 appears side on, elongated and webby as if someone had pulled a string cat’s cradle as far as it would go. Its vertical columns climb visibly week by week; target dates are marked at each level, like the tracking of a child’s growth against a wall.
Maidenhead bridge, designed in brick by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1839, has two middle arches spanning the river in great cheetah leaps. They were lower and broader than anything previously constructed in brick, and the Great Western Railway’s directors feared the bridge would collapse: they insisted on the bridge’s temporary timber supports remaining even after it opened. Annoyed, Brunel secretly lowered the supports a bit so they did not actually support anything.
(All links in the original article.)
March 1, 2012
A Kickstarter campaign for … Greece
I guess it’s about their last available option:
Greece is a small country in the south of Europe known for inventing democracy and western philosophy and for its national motto, “Release the Kraken!” Our shores are a popular destination for backpackers and tourists wishing to relax amid sun-drenched beaches by day and intoxicated British tourists by night.
We wish to continue this good work, but to do so our creditors are demanding €14.5 billion ($18.6 billion) by March 20. We do not have this money, nor do we think we can raise it in time: Our asset sales have gone nowhere, and the EU has nixed our plan to close shop and re-open a few blocks away as “Greeze”. And so we come to you, our friends, for help.
A donation of any amount is appreciated, and gifts are available for those who give at premium levels. We promise these funds will be used only to pay down debt, and any funds received above the requested amount will be rolled over to our next, inevitable Kickstarter campaign.
A “Confederation theme park”? The jokes write themselves
In the National Post, Lorne Gunter has a bit of fun with the notion of what kind of attractions to put in a theme park celebrating Confederation:
“It’s easy to mock Preston Manning’s idea for a Confederation Theme Park … for starters, it’s somewhat odd to see the pro-small-government, West-wants-in Reform Party founder to be proposing a large government expenditure on a historically slanted amusement park to be located, of all places, in Ottawa.”
So said the Ottawa Citizen’s Mark Sutcliffe — two years ago!
It’s still easy to mock.
Although ultimately endorsing Mr. Manning’s idea (in his own altered form), Sutcliffe called the project “Epcot Centre on the Ottawa River,” a dig at the multinational exposition at Disney World in Orlando, Fla. (The one lasting impression I have of Epcot is that every pavilion was tedious and getting from one to the other required a lot of uncomfortable, fruitless walking. Hey, maybe that would be a good blueprint for a celebration of Confederation after all.)
Sutcliffe had his own satirical ideas of what rides a Confederation Park might offer. There could be “Universal (Health Care) Studios” and the “Sovereignty Movement Roller Coaster” that soared to the same dizzying highs and plunged to the same gut-turning lows as Quebec nationalism has experienced over the past 40 years. Patrons could also “board the Avro Arrow as it sits on the runway and never takes off!”
[. . .]
Imagine the joy on tots faces when Mom and Dad tell them that instead of going to central Florida for Pirates of the Caribbean, It’s a Small World (gad, I still have that cloying song stuck in my head), Space Mountain, Splash Mountain and Typhoon Lagoon, they’ll be heading to Ottawa in February to watch an animatronic debate between robot John A. Macdonald and robot Joseph Howe over the British North America Act’s division of federal and provincial powers at the authentic recreation of Charlottetown’s Founders’ Hall at the PEI display.
Then there’ll be a ride on the Drop of Western Alienation Doom; the Endless Trip to the Sovereignty-Association Dentist (sponsored by “money and the ethnic vote”); the Constitutional Reform Merry-go-round (also dubbed the Canada Round); topped off by the Centre-of-the-Universe Centrifuge where riders strap themselves into cars resembling Canada’s regions and the entire contraption revolves around Toronto.
The plight of Britain under austerity
Vuk Vukovic wonders why the notion that the British government has imposed austerity still has any traction in the media:
The UK had the one of the strongest fiscal stimuli (relative to the size of its economy) in the world as a response to the crisis, during the premiership of Gordon Brown. The result was making the situation much worse with a rising public debt and the third highest budget deficit in the world behind only Greece and Egypt in 2011, and behind Greece and Iceland in 2010. This comparison is striking since these countries were doing much worse than the UK at the time and were countries with highly unstable economies – Iceland before the restructuring, Greece whenever, and Egypt after a year-long revolution which saw the downfall of a dictator and an inability to consolidate ever since.
So the argument of Keynesians is that this wasn’t enough, and that Britain is crippled with austerity. The media is supporting the former view as well. Britain is running the hardest austerity policy in Europe and this is resulting in terrible growth performance and the inability to start up the recovery. However, Britain is far from austerity. Yes, some painful cuts have been made, tuitions were rising, unions were hit, wages in the public sector are stagnant, a lot of public sector workers have been laid off, but what does the government do with this saved up money? It “invests” in credit easing, housing subsidies, the youth contract and infrastructural projects. On the other hand, it’s guiding private sector investment and centrally planning credit, it announces an increase of the minimum wage, abolishing of the default retirement age, more regulation after claiming to remove regulation, the 50p tax rate and so on. None of these policies are policies aimed at growth. They are all part of a Keynesian response to the crisis.
After all, if one would just observe the spending data for the UK, it is still increasing, both relatively (as percent of GDP) and absolutely.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” To call a situation where government’s share of GDP is rising as “austerity” requires a brand new definition for the word.
