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A
R
Project Syndicate: Notes from
Lockdown
J. Bradford DeLong
Department of Economics & Blum Center for Developing Economies at
U.C. Berkeley
, & WCEG
http://bradford-delong.com
::
brad.delong@gmail.com
:: @delong
Revised 2020-04-24
722 words
I. Where We Are & What I Am Doing
s of now, the guess is that one person in 80 in California has or had
the coronavirus. We rank 30
th
among the United States with 40
confi rmed (and probably 60 true) coronavirus deaths per million.
I am trying not to catch the disease, so that I do not then become one of
those who spread it. I am going for long (isolated) walks in the hills of
Berkeley and Oakland. I am watching lots of old movies. I am trying to let
the orange-haired baboon who is President Trump live rent-free in my
brain only between 8:00-8:15 PM, and spend only 8:15-9:00 PM thinking
about coronavirus. And otherwise I am trying to play my position.
II.
I
Am, for Relaxation
ewatching old movies:
I was, fi rst,
most impressed
this time through
by:
The Thin Man
and
After the Thin Man
—1930s detective
comedies,
William Powell
&
Myrna Loy
directed by
W. S. Van
Dyke
with story by Dashiell Hammett and screenplay by
Albert Hackett
and Frances Goodrich
. I found myself most interested by the portrayal of
class in America in the 1930s that Hollywood was then serving up.
I was,
second, profoundly re-impressed by:
Stardust
—2000s romantic fantasy,
Claire Danes
&
Charlie Cox
,
with over-the-top-supporting-excellence
from Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer,
Ricky Gervais
, Mark Strong, and
Ian McKellan, directed by
Matthew Vaughn
with story by Neil Gaiman
and screenplay
by Vaughn and Jane Goldman.
Rereading
Barry Eichengreen
:
Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression,
the Great Recession, and the Uses-and Misuses-of History
(about the
Great Depression and the Great Recession) and
The Populist Temptation:
Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era
(about the
repeated erosions of democracy in the global north in the 20th and early
21st centuries). They are both excellent—even better than I had
remembered. I can no longer just walk down the hall to Barry’s offi ce and
talk to him. But, as Nic
co
lo Machiavelli, in one of the fi rst generations in
which a person could have a personal library, said, when he went into his
library he: “enter[s] the ancient courts of ancient men… received by them
with affection… I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the
reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me…” It is,
actually, not the same. Barry’s books are not a Turing-class instantiation of
his mind, but they are a remarkably close substitute.
Reading
Glen Weldon
:
The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd
Culture
: Why and how the character of Batman has turned out to have
more legs over the generations than the others of the “superhero” genre,
precisely because he is not a superhero, and on the dialogue between
character, writers, artists, and readers that has produced so many different
forms and emotional tones in the tellings and retellings of the stories of
what is still, recognizably, the same character.
Frank Miller
&
David Mazzucchelli
:
Batman: Year One
: Available on
Kindle Unlimited, and perhaps the best telling of the “Dark Batman”
version of the story.
2
h
Gwendolyn Leick
:
Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City
: Our current
mode of human existence has remarkably deep roots in the choices made
by the societies of Sumer and Akkad more than four millennia ago. What
those choices were, and how they have echoed and continue to echo.
Tobias Straumann
:
1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler
: The best
thing I have read in a decade about how the policymakers of Germany did
even worse in the mid-stage of the slide into the Great Depression than the
policymakers of Western Europe and North America did in the Great
Recession.
Notes, etc.
tml fi le: <
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/04/notes-from-lockdown-draft-for-project-
syndicate.html
>
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https://github.com/braddelong/public-fi les/blob/master/ps-notes-from-lockdown.pdf
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