David > Recent Status Updates

Started with an opening salvo directed against Charles Beard. Disappointing, to say the least.

Mankiw's absolute free market dogmatism makes Krugman look like a socialist in comparison.

I HATE QUANT HISTORY I HATE QUANT HISTORY I HATE QUANT HISTORY

Surprisingly ambivalent on the issue of private vs. single-payer healthcare, which just demonstrates how absolutely broken the American system is. Trade treated as an unqualified good without considering the historical economic destruction wrought by NAFTA, neocolonialism, etc. A high school history textbook is more complex than this stuff man, I'm very surprised by the total lack of counterexamples.

Mankiw is somewhat clever. Whenever he is making a broadly conservative/mainstream economic statement that is obviously disagreeable, he qualifies it with "may" or "can" without ever providing a counter-example to the opposite.

Idealization of trade, demonization of state intervention, flawed theory of inflation as well as its relation to unemployment. What did I expect?

Goodwyn obviously idealizes the Populists a bit more than modern studies like Postel, but is still in the same vein of liberal/democratic process studies that attack Hofstadter's view. Good information but firm class-based analysis is sorely missing.

"The central theme in Progressivism was this revolt against the industrial discipline: the Progressive movement was the complaint of the unorganized against the consequences of organization."

They're saying it's the worst summation of the Progressive Era of all time. Richard what the hell are you talking about. Patently absurd.

Bad sourcing is a Hofstadter special. Ridiculous critique of Ignatius Donnelly as "sadistic" for his dystopian fiction. Hofstadter's attacks on the Populists from a liberal angle fall flat because he doesn't acknowledge the Herrenvolk nature of America writ large, only in the progressive Populist movement and rural anxieties. Reads like Clinton-Schumerian theory lol

Class-based social historiography is exactly what is missing from Populist history, even including excellent works like that of Postel. This is a breath of fresh air but nearly infuriating in that no other historian of Populism writes in this vein.

Extremely pleasant surprise in a discussion and critique of Thompson's view of class and Marxist theories thereof, including Althusser, Anderson, and Calhoun.