Author Archives: CarleyFreehill

Commerce Secretary Amazed At How Friendly Saudi Arabia Is

by CarleyFreehill Posted on May 22, 2017

Mother Jones

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was in Saudi Arabia with President Trump this weekend, and today he appeared on CNBC to chat about it. This comes via TPM:

Ross: I think the other thing that was fascinating to me … there was not a single hint of a protestor anywhere there during the whole time we were there, not one guy with a bad placard, instead …

Host: But Secretary Ross, that may be but not necessarily because they don’t have those feelings there but because they control people and don’t allow them to to come and express their feelings quite the same as we do here.

Ross: In theory that could be true. But boy there was certainly no sign of it, there was not a single effort at any incursion. There wasn’t anything. The mood was a genuinely good mood. And at the end of the trip, as I was getting back on the plane the security guards from the Saudi side who’d been helping us over the weekend all wanted to pose for a big photo-op. And then they gave me two gigantic bushels of dates, as a present, as a thank you for the trip that we had had. That was a pretty from the heart, very genuine gesture. It really touched me.

Is everyone in the Trump administration a senile old man? The alternatives here are: (a) Ross is an idiot, (b) he’s just spinning but doing an epically bad job of it, or (c) he’s losing his mind. What the hell is it with this administration?

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Commerce Secretary Amazed At How Friendly Saudi Arabia Is

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McDonald’s Creates Worst Marketing Campaign in History of Marketing

by CarleyFreehill Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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This morning, Kate Bachelder went into McDonald’s to get an Egg McMuffin. When she tried to pay the cashier, however, things turned weird:

I wouldn’t need money today, she explained, as I had been randomly chosen for the store’s “Pay with Lovin’ ” campaign, the company’s latest public-relations blitz, announced Sunday….Between Feb. 2 and Valentine’s Day, the company says, participating McDonald’s locations will give away 100 meals to unsuspecting patrons in an effort to spread “the lovin’.”

If the “Pay with Lovin’ ” scenario looks touching on television, it is less so in real life. A crew member produced a heart-shaped pencil box stuffed with slips of paper, and instructed me to pick one. My fellow customers seemed to look on with pity as I drew my fate: “Ask someone to dance.” I stood there for a mortified second or two, and then the cashier mercifully suggested that we all dance together. Not wanting to be a spoilsport, I forced a smile and “raised the roof” a couple of times, as employees tried to lure cringing customers into forming some kind of conga line, asking them when they’d last been asked to dance.

The public embarrassment ended soon enough, and I slunk away with my free breakfast, thinking: Now there’s an idea that never should have left the conference room.

Speaking personally, I can say that the Pay with Lovin’ scenario did not look touching on television. It looked horrifying. And I suspect very strongly that in real life it’s even more horrifying than my feeble little imagination can imagine.

And for what it’s worth, when I saw the ads, it actually wasn’t Mickey D’s guinea pig customers who I initially felt sorry for. It was the cashiers. Those are the poor folks who have to execute this marketing monstrosity. Every morning they have to paste on a smile and pretend to be thrilled at the opportunity to force some sleepy customer to write a poem or declare who she loves or perform a jig or whatever. Isn’t it exciting!?! You get to pay with lovin’ today!

Somebody needs to be fired at McDonald’s. Maybe a whole bunch of people. I don’t know who, but someone has to pay. Right now.

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McDonald’s Creates Worst Marketing Campaign in History of Marketing

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Isn’t It About Time to Ask Republicans to Start Acting Like Adults?

by CarleyFreehill Posted on November 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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David Brooks is unhappy that President Obama continues to be a liberal even though Democrats lost in this year’s midterm election:

The White House has not privately engaged with Congress on the legislative areas where there could be agreement. Instead, the president has been superaggressive on the one topic sure to blow everything up: the executive order to rewrite the nation’s immigration laws.

….I sympathize with what Obama is trying to do substantively, but the process of how it’s being done is ruinous. Republicans would rightly take it as a calculated insult and yet more political ineptitude. Everybody would go into warfare mode. We’ll get two more years of dysfunction that will further arouse public disgust and antigovernment fervor (making a Republican presidency more likely).

This move would also make it much less likely that we’ll have immigration reform anytime soon. White House officials are often misinformed on what Republicans are privately discussing, so they don’t understand that many in the Republican Party are trying to find a way to get immigration reform out of the way. This executive order would destroy their efforts.

I continue to not get this train of thought. In 2006, Republicans lost. President Bush’s first action was to order a surge in Iraq, which infuriated Democrats. In 2008, Republicans lost. They responded by adopting a policy of obstructing every possible action by Democrats—including even a modest stimulus package during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In 2012, Republicans lost. They responded with brinkmanship over the fiscal cliff, a flat refusal to fill open judicial positions on the DC circuit court, and an endless bellowing rage over Benghazi and other manufactured outrages.

By comparison, all Obama is doing is something he’s been saying he’ll do for nearly a year. It’s not even all the big a deal if you step back for a moment and think about it. Several million undocumented immigrants are going to be told they’re officially free of the threat of deportation for a temporary period, as opposed to the status quo, in which they’re effectively free of the threat of deportation. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a big deal for the immigrants affected. But in terms of actual impact on immigration policy writ large? It doesn’t really do much.

And yet, this single action is apparently enough to—rightly!—put Republicans into warfare mode. If that’s true, I can only conclude that literally anything Republicans don’t like is enough to justify going into warfare mode. That’s certainly been how it’s worked in the past, anyway.

Look: Republicans can decide for themselves if they want to go to war. If they want to pass yet another bill repealing Obamacare, that’s fine. If they want to sue the president over the EPA or immigration, that’s fine. If they want to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, that’s fine. I assume Obama will win some of these battles and lose others, but in any case will treat them as the ordinary cut and thrust of politics instead of declaring them calculated insults that have infuriated him so much he can’t possibly ever engage with the GOP again. In other words, he’ll act like an adult, not a five-year-old.

This is what we expect from presidents. Why don’t we expect the same from congressional Republicans? Why are they allowed to stamp and scream whenever something doesn’t go their way, and everyone just shrugs? Once and for all, why don’t we demand that they act like adults too?

POSTSCRIPT: I didn’t bother with Brooks’ claim that Republicans are “privately” discussing real, honest-to-goodness immigration reform, but color me skeptical. If they want to engage on this subject, they need to discuss it with Obama, not between themselves. They’ve had plenty of time for that, and have never been willing to buck the tea party to get something done. Why would it be any different now? For more, I think Ed Kilgore has about the right take on this.

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Isn’t It About Time to Ask Republicans to Start Acting Like Adults?

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Thomas Piketty Says That r > g. But Is It, Really?

by CarleyFreehill Posted on May 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’ve mentioned before that I have a few misgivings about Thomas Piketty’s thesis in Capital in the 21st Century. One of my misgivings is pretty basic: Piketty argues that r (the return on capital) is historically greater than g (the economic growth rate). Since the rich own most of the capital, this means that the rich accumulate wealth faster than everyone else, which in turn means that rising income inequality is inevitable. But as capital accumulates, surely the return on capital should decline? After all, that’s what happens in every other market when there’s a glut of supply.

Piketty briefly addresses this objection, and concludes that although r will indeed decrease as capital accumulates, it won’t decrease much. But is that true? Larry Summers doesn’t think so:

Piketty’s rather fatalistic and certainly dismal view of capitalism can be challenged on two levels. It presumes, first, that the return to capital diminishes slowly, if at all, as wealth is accumulated and, second, that the returns to wealth are all reinvested. Whatever may have been the case historically, neither of these premises is likely correct as a guide to thinking about the American economy today.

Economists universally believe in the law of diminishing returns. As capital accumulates, the incremental return on an additional unit of capital declines. The crucial question goes to what is technically referred to as the elasticity of substitution….Piketty argues that the economic literature supports his assumption that returns diminish slowly (in technical parlance, that the elasticity of substitution is greater than 1), and so capital’s share rises with capital accumulation. But I think he misreads the literature by conflating gross and net returns to capital. It is plausible that as the capital stock grows, the increment of output produced declines slowly, but there can be no question that depreciation increases proportionally. And it is the return net of depreciation that is relevant for capital accumulation. I know of no study suggesting that measuring output in net terms, the elasticity of substitution is greater than 1, and I know of quite a few suggesting the contrary.

There are other objections to Piketty’s thesis, but it seems to me that this is one of the key criticisms—perhaps the key criticism. If r > g isn’t inevitably true, or even if it’s only slightly true (that is, r is only slightly greater than g), then everything falls apart. I suspect that this is going to be one of the main technical battlegrounds in the macro literature as Piketty’s theory gets hashed out over the next few years.

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Thomas Piketty Says That r > g. But Is It, Really?

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