So I’m tracking online book sales, and it turns out that there are three major categories: 50 Shades of Grey, Hunger Games, and everything else. I don’t know if there’s any 50 Shades of Grey music, and I doubt that I want to know. They did, however, commission songs from some of my favorite musicians for the Hunger Games CD; here are two of them.

I’m on Chris Matthews, starting at the top of the hour at 5, then repeated at 7 I think.

Then Anderson Cooper.

Then Eliot Spitzer on Current, 8-8:30 or so.

Interview with Ezra Klein.

Video of event at EPI.

Today’s FT is all Hollande, all the time. Some of it is sensible; some of it is like, well, this piece by Josef Joffe, which declares that Hollande’s likely victory is “a bleak prospect for all but new Keynesians and old socialists.”

I guess I should be flattered that Joffe considers the great debate to be between austerity hawks and … me. But he says that it’s a “tired” debate — because debating how to fight mass unemployment just gets boring, you know?

Joffe is, however, useful as a guide to the German view, which is basically that we got ourselves competitive and restored growth, so why can’t everyone else. Somehow he never mentions that Germany’s recovery in the 2000s was driven by a huge move into trade surplus; is everyone supposed to do the same thing, all at once? What’s the Germany for “fallacy of composition”?

Philip Stephens has a very good pushback against Hollande hysteria:

The influential Economist has declared on its front cover that Mr Hollande is “dangerous” – though, being British, it did add a qualifying “rather” to this disobliging epithet. The would-be president, the magazine observed, “genuinely (my italics) believes in the need to create a fairer society”. Well, what could be more dangerous than that?

Such alarmism rests on some curious premises: that the lesson of the recent past is that governments should never meddle with the markets; and that Europe’s present economic strategy has been a roaring success in rebuilding public finances and restoring economic growth.

And Wolfgang Munchau is cautiously hopeful, as am I.

The New York Review of Books has another extract from my new book. This one discusses both what might be done politically and the evidence on the effectiveness of fiscal policy, which is, as Christy Romer has been arguing, now overwhelming.

Lawrence O’Donnell tonight, near the end of the hour, from Princeton.

Karl Smith gets shrill about Raghu Rajan’s latest (pdf), which he calls “nonsense on stilts.” He’s right — and it’s deeply depressing that stuff like this passes for wisdom.

Read more…

Just a quick picture. On the right, it’s an item of faith that the crisis in Europe represents a failure of the welfare state. So what is the correlation between the size of government and recent economic performance?

None at all, as far as I can see.

Matt Yglesias, who just spent time in Argentina, writes about the lessons of that country’s recovery following its exit from the one-peso-one-dollar “convertibility law”. As he says, it’s a remarkable success story, one that arguably holds lessons for the euro zone.

I’d just add something else: press coverage of Argentina is another one of those examples of how conventional wisdom can apparently make it impossible to get basic facts right. We keep getting stories about Ireland’s recovery when there is, in fact, no recovery — but there should be, darn it, because they’ve done the “right” thing, so that’s what we’ll report.

And conversely, articles about Argentina are almost always very negative in tone — they’re irresponsible, they’re renationalizing some industries, they talk populist, so they must be going very badly. Never mind this:

Just to be clear, I think Brazil is going pretty well, and has had good leadership. But why exactly is Brazil an impressive “BRIC” while Argentina is always disparaged? Actually, we know why — but it doesn’t speak well for the state of economics reporting.

Jean-Claude Trichet, 2010:

As regards the economy, the idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect.”

Incorrect?

“Yes. In fact, in these circumstances, everything that helps to increase the confidence of households, firms and investors in the sustainability of public finances is good for the consolidation of growth and job creation. I firmly believe that in the current circumstances confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery, because confidence is the key factor today.”

Oh, and industry surveys suggest that it’s about to get much worse.

Via Greg Sargent, Nick Confessore has another eye-rolling look at the incredible pettiness of the ma-he’s-looking-at-me-funny crowd on Wall Street:

One of the guests raised his hand; he knew how to solve the problem. The president had won plaudits for his speech on race during the last campaign, the guest noted. It was a soaring address that acknowledged white resentment and urged national unity. What if Obama gave a similarly healing speech about class and inequality? What if he urged an end to attacks on the rich? Around the table, some people shook their heads in disbelief.

Because the distrust of wealthy financial wheeler-dealers is just like the legacy of racial tension in America.

I guess being that rich means that you can surround yourself with people who never tell you how ridiculous you sound.

Update: Whoops. Reasonable conservatives are so rare that I shouldn’t get them confused, but anyway now I have the right name.

There’s such a blizzard of misinformation out there that it’s hard to pick any one thing to single out, but David Frum Noah Kristula-Green picks up on one bit from the Paul/Paul show: the remarkable way many on the right now portray the postwar years of prosperity as a triumph of libertarian principles.

Yeah, it was a libertarian paradise all right — with a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent, a third of the work force in unions, and a minimum wage much higher relative to the average wage than it is today.

Propose a return to those conditions now, and everyone on the right would predict utter disaster. What we actually had was unprecedented prosperity.

So, in case you’re wondering, the reason I’m suddenly everywhere is the reality of the book trade, which is that to have a best-seller you must be a best-seller: “momentum”, getting on to those lists, is crucial, so a burst of sales in the first few weeks is all-important.

So far, so good; as of this morning End This Depression Now! was #21 on Amazon, which is better than you might think given the way that the top 20 are dominated by Fifty Shades of Grey and Hunger Games.

That said, I can’t wait for this to be over.

Ryan Avent writes what I’ve been meaning to write about the backlash against the austerity backlash. It’s all about attacking a straw man. Nobody — certainly not me — believes that, say, Spain or even France can simply go back to Keynesian policies unilaterally. Instead, the point is that if European leaders want the euro to survive, they have to recognize that the austerity thing isn’t working, and offer Europe-wide alternatives. Avent:

I think the reaction to Mr Hollande’s success is telling. The overwhelming criticism is a sort of “look how inappropriate fiscal expansion would be for the French economy” take. The point is that the economy that matters is that of the euro zone as a whole. And when one steps back and looks at the dynamics in play, it becomes clear that the robotic push for national-level austerity across the euro zone is undermining integration and thereby exacerbating the crisis.

For in the end, Spain and others do have an alternative to endless austerity, one that may be forced on them by events: exit the euro, with all the financial and political fallout that follows. And on the current course, that’s what’s coming.

So a former partner of Romney’s at Bain says, in a new book, what Romney probably believes: we should be really grateful to the rich for all the rich things they do. Because, you see, they don’t spend all their wealth building homes as big as the Taj Mahal; some of it they invest in innovation.

This actually represents a break with the previous defense of the rich. Until now, the official line has been that what we need are incentives — that jaawwb creeaytohrs won’t do their thing unless we dangle the carrot of immense wealth in front of them. But now we’re supposed to think that it’s not the prospect of future wealth, but wealth in being, that’s what is really so wonderful.

There are many things you could say about this, but surely high on the list is the degree of historical ignorance it requires. I mean, this argument might have some surface plausibility if the era when America didn’t have such an overweening plutocracy — the 50s and 60s, when the top 0.01% received only about a fifth the share of income that it commands today — were a time of economic stagnation and low innovation. In fact, the postwar generation experienced the best economic growth — and the fastest productivity growth — of any era in the past century.

But this is how it’s going. If the right continues to make political gains, coming next is a reaffirmation of the hereditary principle.

Ah. In this afternoon’s Reddit, I was asked how the Fed can help the Emperor Diocletian escape the zero lower bound. My answer, I realized later, missed a crucial aspect of the situation: the ancient Roman economy could not have trouble with the zero lower bound, because the Romans didn’t have the concept of zero. They had to set the Fed Imperial funds rate at LXXV basis points, or whatever.

It wasn’t until the Arabs invented Arabic numerals that the liquidity trap became a possibility.

PS: The whole thing is here.