Tiny, tiny people

[koganbot]

This long post by Steve Randy Waldman has been getting attention in the econ blogosphere and is a slamming bit of writing that's also clear and coherent and seems to explain a lot.

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5965.html

The two money quotes, so to speak:

With respect to

Comments

[dubdobdee]

a lot too much too quickly to gather my thoughts -- but for now i think i'm going to stick with my feeling that greece's relative success at the strategic level is significant (as outlined above), if only in the sense that two distinct camps with the EU are increasingly evident: not only did renzi give schauble a public and face-to-face telling off yesterday, but schauble and draghi more or less got into a screaming match (schauble: "DON'T TAKE ME FOR AN IDIOT" <-- "we take you as we find you" is said to be the classic response), and (from within germany) der spiegel was sharply critical of the german govt's stance (this being the german paper i think many teachers would read, to pick up your example of who ought to be seeing themselves in the greek pensioners)

the widespread #thisisacoup hashtag may have been twitter hyperbole, but it's an indication of a collectivity of support and sympathy that very much crosses national (and indeed continental) boundaries -- and that, within the euro, is exactly where the anti-austerians need to begin from, as a political counterforce (i continue to believe that this counterforce has to be within the EU rather than outside it: because outside i think the potential and necessary collectivity will always be too easy to pick off and defang with bilateral agreements with the local hegemon)

(in a sense the primary medium-term problem for any resurgent populist pro-keynesian politics is that it -- almost by definition -- tends to be top-down and technocratic) (i don't see an easy solution to this, except in the corralling of sheer numbers without them splintering into mere regional groupings) (ie not an easy ask AT ALL)

[koganbot]

Don't know how much the Twitterverse is indicative of anything, but there's this from Alex White:

My comment yesterday critical of German approach: retweeted 730 times. My comment pointing out the risks of alternative: retweeted 6 times
- Alex White (@AlexWhite1812) July 13, 2015

[koganbot]

Yeah, fiscal stimulus is hard to implement on the street level by community organizers.

My feeling is that to achieve better-informed voters we need to create more interested voters, and I mean "interested" in an aesthetic sense: people who discover that they find the economic ideas FUN.* That's a hard one even among intellectuals, though I do think it's one of Krugman's strengths: in a sense he's the Stephen Jay Gould of economics, or one of several. This does mean that, in the U.S., he reaches PBS type leftists but not the downtrodden. In Europe is there more of a chance to interact with the latter, say an actual working-class/underclass marginal intelligentsia that converses with the official intelligentsia?

*So, more interesting voters, as well.