Hi, It's Stupid: The Last Post on Modern Monetary Theory

 

Statue from 2009 by the late William Fawke, in the Garden of Heroes and Villains, Warwickshire, via Ellen Herold's Pinterest.

Hi, it's Stupid to say Modern Monetary Theory is all wrong, but I just can't help myself.

George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, the great Irish philosopher midway between Locke and Hume, argued brilliantly that things don't exist—I mean things, material objects, the out-there stuff we see and touch, in that you can have a perfectly coherent picture of the universe without them: all you need are minds, full of perceptions, and that's enough. Things corresponding to the perceptions don't have to be there. "Berkeley's system," says the Stanford Encyclopedia mildly,

while it strikes many as counter-intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections.

Which made Dr. Samuel Johnson, the irascible lexicographer whose portrait serves as my avi, pretty mad. Because obviously the theory was revolting to his stolid English soul, but he didn't even know how to participate in the discussion. One day as he was leaving a church with his future biographer, James Boswell, they started chatting about it, Boswell observing that "though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it." As they spoke, they passed a big stone along the path and Johnson turned to give it a powerful kick, no doubt hurting his foot: "Thus I refute it!" 

Meaning, more or less, GTFOOH, are you telling me this doesn't exist? Deze nutz!

This is my problem with so-called Modern Monetary Theory. 

Of the faking of Brooks...

...there is no end.

Another Reynolds portrait of Johnson, wigless and somewhat younger (via Wikimedia).

David Brooks's sudden and startling jump into commentary on literary classics inexorably calls to mind the words of Dr. Samuel Johnson, in Rambler 28, on "The various arts of self-delusion":

There are men who always confound the praise of goodness with the practice, and who believe themselves mild and moderate, charitable and faithful, because they have exerted their eloquence in commendation of mildness, fidelity, and other virtues. This is an error almost universal [jump]

Faint praise

Lord Chesterfield Be Wiser Wisdom Onesie, from Zazzle.com.

David Brooks on The News Hour (via Driftglass):

And so, if I had interrupted Mark -- or if anybody came on the "NewsHour" and behaved the way Biden did, we would kick them off in the middle of the set. It is just not what discussions should be like.

Or, as Lord Chesterfield memorably advised his illegitimate son in 1748,

I would heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill-manners; it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy at silly things; and they call it being merry. In my mind there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter. I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical disposition, and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as anybody; but I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason nobody has ever heard me laugh.

Someday, Brooksie, somebody might name a couch after you. "Appalled by his crude remarks, Lydia fell fainting upon the plushly upholstered brooks." Or maybe wait for you to walk comfortably off the set, and then kick you downstairs, something known to have happened on occasion in the 18th century, in spite of everybody's good breeding. It's hard to say. I don't watch those TV shows but I'm sure you're occasionally in company less refined than that of Judy Woodruff.

Brooks, Shields, and Woodruff on The News Hour.

Lord Chesterfield certainly thought good manners were much more important than telling the truth. Citing the biography from the great 1911 Britannica, Wikipedia goes on to say,

Chesterfield was selfish, calculating and contemptuous; he was not naturally generous, and he practised dissimulation until it became part of his nature.... As a courtier he was utterly worsted by Robert Walpole, whose manners were anything but refined...

And of the famous letters to his son, my old Tory avatar Dr. Johnson observed that "they teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing-master," a formulation increasingly apt to young Brooks, as his teeth grow longer.

MaartenDeCeulaer Mutation Series Blue Sofa on ISaloni, 2012.

How many Americans does it take to lay some pipeline?

From a patent application by Ezra Cornell, 1844, for a machine to cut trenches and lay pipes for telegraph cables. Cornell University's Chronicle Online.

It seems the proportion is about 67 US citizens to one Canadian. That's at any rate, according to a Greenpeace Report (via ThinkProgress), what the TransCanada company (aka TRP) told its investors when it was selling that Keystone XL pipeline from the Alberta tar sands out through the Ogallala Aquifer to Texas; that is, the figures they gave the Canadian National Energy Board suggested the total amount of employment they were going to create with the Canadian part of the project would be about 442 person-years, while for the US portion, four times as long, the US Congress was given a number amounting to 118,000.

Of course when people asked Dr. Johnson how he expected to finish his Dictionary in three years when it had taken 40 years for the 40 Immortals of the Académie Française to complete theirs, he replied,

This is the proportion. Let me see: forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.

I guess those Canadians must be really patriotic.  Or maybe they're just making the numbers up because they know what the Congresspersons like to hear. How did they come up with the 20,000 construction jobs that will build the pipeline to start with? On the basis of a $7-billion budget; but

Simple arithmetic shows that this figure is grossly overstated, possibly by more than 350 percent, because Perryman included three major budget items that have little or nothing to do with investment or job creation in the U.S.:

• The $1.6 billion Canadian portion of KXL;   

• The $683 million section of Keystone Phase II in Kansas that is already built; and

• The $3.1 billion already spent or committed, most of it on pipes and pumping component from companies outside the U.S.

  This means the total spending in the U.S. may be $2 billion or even lower. That translates into significantly fewer jobs simply because the true budget for KXL in the U.S. is less than a third of Perryman’s budget. Dividing TRP’s claim of 20,000 jobs by three equals 6,667 – a number that may still be overstated but is much closer to reality for a project such as KXL.

According to the US Chamber of Commerce,

We can put 20,000 Americans to work right away and up to 250,000 over the life of the project

and the American Petroleum Institute's Keystone XL Pipeline website still says

Projects like this, along with additional investment in oil sands development in Canada and expansion of pipelines and refineries in the U.S., make it possible to realize an additional 500,000 U.S. jobs in 2035.

So who knows? Maybe the Keystone XL Pipeline will end up employing everybody in the world. Or maybe (since they not only lied to the US Congress, but far worse, to their shareholders, just maybe, something bad will happen to them for once. I mean, no doubt jail is too much to hope for, but if we could hurt their feelings a little bit?

I fear if you are at all hip this may not be funny—it's four years old, for one thing—but I think it's a gas, as it were.