Year: 2013

Kevin Lees is unimpressed by Venezuela’s new president:

[Nicolás] Maduro, it’s safe to say, is no Chávez. A former Caracas bus driver, Maduro was a loyal Chávez lieutenant from the beginning of the proclaimed Bolivarian revolution, and he served as Chávez’s dutiful foreign minister for six years prior to his elevation to the vice presidency last December. But the skills that allowed Maduro to remain in the top echelons of Chavismo didn’t lend themselves to leading a compelling campaign. His win owes more to the Chavista electoral machine, coercive mobilization tactics, a largely state-dominated media, and the resources that come from a decade of blurring the lines among Venezuela’s governing United Socialist Party (PSUV), PDVSA, and the government. Maduro was undeniably a lackluster candidate, and he wrapped himself in the legacy, and in some cases, the actual godhead, of Chávez—one plucky website tracked how many times Maduro has mentioned Chávez during the campaign (over 7,200). After saying that the United States may have caused Chávez’s terminal cancer, Maduro claimed earlier this month that a little bird spoke to him to tell him that the ghost of Chávez had blessed Maduro’s campaign.

Alejandro Tarre’s view:

Maduro inherits a country in crisis.

Four novels based on Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott’s wife, are due out this year. Abigail Grace Murdy assesses her legacy:

Confined to a mental hospital, Zelda wrote a novel about her breakdown, Save me the Waltz, which she finished in a mere two months. She sent it off to Scott’s publisher without telling him. When Scott found out, he was enraged. He had been writing a novel about her breakdown himself, Tender is the Night.

“Everything we have done is mine,” he told her. “If we make a trip…and you and I go around, I am the professional novelist, and I am supporting you. This is all my material. None of it is your material.” He insisted that she remove the overlapping sections of her novel. “What’s left of Save Me the Waltz is a jagged, unfinished book. We don’t know what it could have been,” says Sally Cline, who wrote a biography of Zelda in 2002.

Therese Anne Fowler, author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, tries to set the record straight:

It is the persistent, damning mischaracterisation of Zelda as “insane” that most needs undoing. The trouble lies in the diagnosis she was given in 1930: “schizophrenia”. While today we know it to mean severe mental illness requiring delicate and often lifelong treatment with medications, therapies, and sometimes institutionalisation, in Zelda’s time it was a catch-all label for a range of emotional difficulties. It was often applied to women who suffered depression or exhaustion brought on by impossible circumstances. Zelda did suffer some mental health crises – depression, primarily – and was an uninhibited, uncensored woman who didn’t always think before she acted, but she wasn’t crazy. Unwise? Sometimes. Insane? No.

Last week marked the 93rd wedding anniversary of the Fitzgeralds. Steve King reflects on their bittersweet union: 

The Fitzgeralds’ personal life has the same sense of a long and irrecoverable springtime. The legendary champagne-and-dancing anecdotes begin with their wedding celebrations — the raucous party was forced out of two of New York’s finest hotels — and last for precisely a decade, until Zelda’s first mental breakdown in April 1930. The following letter is from April 26, 1934, Scott writing to Zelda with hopes for a new beginning even as she undergoes treatment for her third breakdown:

You and I have been happy; we haven’t been happy just once, we’ve been happy a thousand times. The chances that spring, that’s for everyone, like in the popular songs, may belong to us too — the chances are pretty bright at this time because as usual, I can carry most of contemporary literary opinion, liquidated, in the hollow of my hand — and when I do, I see the swan floating on it and — I find it to be you and you only…. Forget the past — what you can of it, and turn about and swim back home to me, to your haven for ever and ever — even though it may seem a dark cave at times and lit with torches of fury; it is the best refuge for you — turn gently in the waters through which you move and sail back….

In an echo of the closing to The Great Gatsby (April 1925), the two would be borne back ceaselessly to only the most troubling and trying aspects of their past.

Mike Springer takes the above video with a grain of salt:

We’re not sure, for example, that the clip purporting to show Zelda being “very lively in a street” is actually of her. It appears to show someone else. And one of the captions claims that Fitzgerald is pictured writing The Great Gatsby, but according to the University of South Carolina’s Fitzgerald Web site, the sentence he is writing on paper is: “Everybody has been predicting a bad end for the flapper, but I don’t think there is anything to worry about.”

Proponents of austerity have repeatedly cited this paper (pdf) by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which found slowed growth among countries with high debt-to-GDP ratios, to make the case for cuts in government spending. Mike Konczal highlights a new study that casts some serious doubts on the strength of the Reinhart-Rogoff argument:

In a new paper, “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst successfully replicate the results. After trying to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results and failing, they reached out to Reinhart and Rogoff and they were willing to share their data spreadsheet. This allowed Herndon et al. to see how how Reinhart and Rogoff’s data was constructed.

They find that three main issues stand out. First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth. Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries. Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries. All three bias in favor of their result, and without them you don’t get their controversial result.

Dean Baker ponders the impact of the paper:

This is a big deal because politicians around the world have used this finding from R&R to justify austerity measures that have slowed growth and raised unemployment.

In the United States many politicians have pointed to R&R’s work as justification for deficit reduction even though the economy is far below full employment by any reasonable measure. In Europe, R&R’s work and its derivatives have been used to justify austerity policies that have pushed the unemployment rate over 10 percent for the euro zone as a whole and above 20 percent in Greece and Spain. In other words, this is a mistake that has had enormous consequences.

Tyler Cowen’s view:

The “case for austerity” didn’t rest much on R&R in the first place, rather on the notion that the bills have to be paid, dawdling on adjustment is not always so easy, and the feasible sum of international redistribution is quite low.  For this reason the UK should be relatively uninterested in immediate austerity and many nations in the eurozone periphery more interested.

Jared Bernstein’s addition to the debate:

I suspect R&R will say, assuming they acknowlege they messed up, that it still shows slower growth.  But that’s been the problem with their work from the beginning.  As I’ve written many times, riffing off of Bivens and Irons for one, if you mush everything together they way they do, you’re likely to get the causality backwards.  You’ll convince yourself that higher debt leads to slower growth when it’s more often the opposite.  Certainly in the US case, the most progress we’ve made against our debt ratios have been in periods of fast growth (and the biggest increases have been in periods of recession, slow growth, or war).

Part of Reinhart and Rogoff’s response:

The JEP paper with Vincent Reinhart looks at all public debt overhang episodes for advanced countries in our database, dating back to 1800. The overall average result shows that public debt overhang episodes (over 90% GDP for five years or more) are associated with 1.2% lower growth as compared to growth when debt is under 90%. (We also include in our tables the small number of shorter episodes.) Note that because the historical public debt overhang episodes last an average of over 20 years, the cumulative effects of small growth differences are potentially quite large. It is utterly misleading to speak of a 1% growth differential that lasts 10-25 years as small.

Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, known for his moderation and efforts at state-building, retired over the weekend. Matt Duss sums up his legacy to date:

He attempted to reform and develop the Palestinian economy, with a particular focus on greater transparency and accountability, in order create a sense of momentum among Palestinians toward statehood. In one of the surest signs of the Western intelligentsia’s blessing, the doctrine was endowed by The New York Times’ Tom Friedman with its own special title: “Fayyadism … the simple but all-too-rare notion that an Arab leader’s legitimacy should be based not on slogans or rejectionism or personality cults or security services, but on delivering transparent, accountable administration and services.”

Four years later, Fayyadism has foundered on the reality that economic development—genuine, sustainable economic development—is all but impossible amid the conditions of a hostile military occupation that the West Bank continues to experience under Israeli rule.

Beinart argues America and Israel blew their chance to work with a committed moderate leader:

In 2011, after Obama failed to convince Netanyahu to enter peace talks based upon the 1967 lines, Abbas bypassed the U.S.-led peace process and took his case for statehood to the U.N. instead. In 2012, he went there again, and won, in a vote in which America was abandoned by its key allies. Now Fayyad, who for more than a decade has been the most pro-American Palestinian official, is leaving the scene. Unless John Kerry can restart meaningful peace talks—which seems unlikely given Netanyahu’s continued hostility to using the 1967 lines as a benchmark—it’s likely that Abbas will take his case to the International Criminal Court, thus bypassing the United States yet again.