The View from Right Field

America’s Future Foreign Policy: “The Jungle Grows Back” – Do We Care?

Dr. Robert Kagan has written a fascinating book on the future of American foreign policy: The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World.  His main points are laid out in this excerpt available at Amazon.com:

“The American-led liberal world order was never a natural phenomenon.  The past seven-plus decades of relatively free trade, growing respect for individual rights, and relatively peaceful cooperation among nations – the core elements of the liberal order – have been a great historical aberration. … Our own era has not lacked its horrors …. Yet by historical standards…, it has been a relative paradise. … The great Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union ended peacefully, a historical rarity. … Since the end of the Second World War the world has also enjoyed a period of prosperity unlike any other …. Since 1945, some four billion people around the world have climbed out of poverty. … But all this has been an anomaly in the history of human existence. The liberal world order is fragile and impermanent. Like a garden, it is ever under siege from the natural forces of history, the jungle whose vines and weeds constantly threaten to overwhelm it. …

Unlearning the Lessons of the Financial Crisis – One at a Time

In an interview with FT Weekend,¹ former Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen said that, even though work on the post-financial crisis regulatory framework is yet to be finished, Washington is already moving to ease “burdens” on financial firms.  Among the key concerns for Ms. Yellen is lending to indebted, less-creditworthy corporate borrowers, which she sees as a potential source of systemic risk.

In light of her comments, one wonders what she thinks of an article in The Wall Street Journal last week indicating that Fair Isaac Corp., the company that created the FICO credit rating score, is planning on revising the way the score is calculated.  In addition to measuring how people manage their credit, which is what they do now, Fair Isaac will look at how people manage their cash.  The idea, according to the article, is “to boost the number of approvals for credit cards, personal loans and other debt”.

2016 – And Other Memories of a Cubs Fan

With the 2018 World Series upon us, it is time, for Cubs fans, to look back two years.  For Cubs fans, 2016 was the year.  Cubs fans had waited 108 years for a World Series championship.¹  Then, after one of the most gut-wrenching Game 7s in history, which the Cubs finally won, 8 to 7, in ten innings, our wait was over.²  So, the question is, with 2016 fixed in our memory, what about our other memories, from years before 2016 – and after.

I am asking because I was recently going through some old tee shirts, and I came across a few that brought back memories.  There was a “Boys of Zimmer” shirt from 1989 and another from the NLDS against the Braves in 1998.  There was even a shirt specifically for the September 1-4 series against the Cardinals in 2003.

Jamal Khashoggi: What’s Worse? Foreign Policy Edition.

What’s worse (it’s easy until you think about it):

(i)  Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist, has been living in self-imposed exile for the last year, while writing articles critical of the Saudi government for, among others, The Washington Post.   On October 2, he enters the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and is killed at some point thereafter, while in the embassy, by people connected with the Saudi government.

(ii)  Between October 2015 and December 2015, five employees of Causeway Bay Books, a bookseller in Hong Kong, disappear.  At least two of them disappear while in the People’s Republic of China, one while he is in Thailand, and another in Hong Kong itself.  All five are later confirmed to be in the PRC in connection with an alleged investigation of an old traffic incident involving one of them.  Causeway Bay Books sold political books, banned in China, that were critical of the Chinese government.

State Solvency: Worst to First Just Takes 500 Miles and a U-Haul Trailer

The Mercatus Institute at George Mason University has once again ranked all 50 states according to their financial condition.  The most recent ratings were based on 2016 reports and considered:

• Cash solvency. Does a state have enough cash on hand to cover its short-term bills?
• Budget solvency. Can a state cover its fiscal year spending with revenues, or does it have a budget short-fall?
• Long-run solvency. Can a state meet its long-term spending commitments? Will there be enough money to cushion it from economic shocks or other long-term fiscal risks?
• Service-level solvency. How large a percentage of personal income are taxes, revenue, and spending? How much “fiscal slack” does a state have to increase spending if citizens demand more services?
• Trust fund solvency. How much debt does a state have? How large are its unfunded pension and healthcare liabilities?

Brett Kavanaugh: Thoughts on a Story That May Never End

While Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed as a justice on the Supreme Court, one assumes the controversy over his nomination will go on for a long time (forever-?), so it is probably not too late for me to make a few comments.

First, there is the question of whether we must automatically “Believe Women,” as a full-page ad said in The Wall Street Journal (and probably lots of other papers).¹  With respect to this question, Megan McArdle’s column in The Washington Post on Susan Collins’s vote on now-Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation, talked about some things I hadn’t thought of before:

“Women know, in a visceral way that men never can, what it is like to live your life in consciousness of a single, inescapable fact: that virtually every man you meet is capable of physically overpowering you and taking what you won’t give them freely. We also know that if some man attacks us, it is likely to be in a private place, with no witnesses, and that the physical evidence will often be little different from the aftermath of consensual sex.

If You Wonder Why Football Is So Dangerous, Look at Jim Taylor’s Obituary

Unlike baseball, I have not written much about football.  I was, however, a football fan a long time ago,¹ which is why I noticed an obituary in Sunday’s newspaper for Jim Taylor, a Hall of Fame fullback, who played for the Green Bay Packers in the late 1950s and 1960s (Chicago Bears fans may boo now).

There were a couple of interesting things in the obituary, especially comparing pro football today with pro football back then.  First, Jim Taylor died at 83.  How many football players today, who play ten years in the NFL, like he did, are going to live to 83?

Larry Summers Drives from Chicago to Oregon and Discovers a Strange New Country: America

Lawrence Summers, former President of Harvard University (and currently a professor there), as well as Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton and director of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in Tuesday’s Washington Post¹ about a trip he took to a place he had apparently never been before: America.  Instead of flying over the people he helped govern in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, Dr. Summers and his wife took a two-week road trip from Chicago to Portland, Oregon.  And he found a country, and people, who were different from the economic models he helped write or from what he saw “looking down from a plane”.

Here are some excerpts from his column, with my comments in italics:

“Again and again, we encountered signs warning us to check our gas because it would be 50 miles to the next station.  [And you could get to that station about as fast as you could drive across Manhattan in rush hour.]  I’m sure there were moments when we were 250 miles from any place where I could have purchased an iPhone charger.  Often there was no cellphone service to be had, either.”  [Oh my gosh, not able to buy an iPhone charger – or get cellphone reception.  Civilization is at end.]

2019 Cubs: It Could Be That “Salary Hikes Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine”

Theo Epstein has talked about the current Cubs team as having a window of opportunity to make postseasons and win World Series through 2021, probably because Kris Bryant is a free agent in 2022 and the Cubs have team options on Anthony Rizzo through 2021.

But it’s not just KB and Tony, it’s just about the whole team.  There are four more players going free agent in 2022: Javier Baez, Kyle Schwarber, Addison Russell, and Mike Montgomery.  Throw in Kyle Hendricks being a free agent in 2021, and Willson Contreras, Carl Edwards, Jr., Albert Almora, Jr., in 2023, and you have a team with a real “use by” date.

The Confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh Brings Long-Awaited Balance to the Supreme Court – Between Yale and Harvard

With the Senate’s confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh yesterday, the goal of balance on the U. S. Supreme Court has finally been achieved.  With Justice Kavanaugh on the bench, we now have four justices who graduated from Yale Law School (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, and Brett Kavanaugh) compared to the four who graduated from Harvard Law School (Stephen Breyer, John Roberts, Elena Kagan, and Neil Gorsuch).¹ 

Harvard may try to claim it still has the edge because, while Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated from Columbia Law School, she started at Harvard before transferring to Columbia.