On a less contentious and less depressing note that most aspects of the trip, I’ve been continually amused by Palestinian disdain for other people’s trademarks:

There’s also a “Ritz” in East Jerusalem, “Star and Bucks” coffee, etc.

In the American imagination, the Netherlands is famous for its “coffee shops” and laissez faire approach to marijuana. But one thing I found out when I visited Amsterdam a few years ago is that the trend in recent years has been toward stricter rules on coffee shops (for example, banning the sale of alcoholic beverages in establishments that also serve marijuana) and a reduction in their number.

And now it seems that the new right-wing coalition government taking office is certain to crack down even further:

Certainly the outlook for coffee shops is bleak. Among the few policies that the three parties in the new coalition government agree on is the need to reduce their numbers. The governing agreement released last week laid out plans that will force them to become members-only clubs and shut down those shops located near schools.

The coalition is also advancing the idea of prohibiting the sale of cannabis to non-Dutch residents, which amounts to a death knell for many coffee shops.

There are various ins and outs to this, but as I understand it there are two main problems with the status quo. One is that under the old tolerance regime there’s still no way for a coffee shop to legally obtain the supply of marijuana you need to operate on the scale of a business. Consequently, de facto legalization hasn’t actually eliminated the black market and associated criminality. Secondarily, the main market for the coffee shops turns out to be drug tourists from abroad. That reduces the Dutch political constituency for keeping them open. And the two factors interact together to create a situation where there’s a strong case to be made that legal coffee shops (by bringing drug tourists from the UK and the US into shops that need to tap an illegal wholesale market to gain their supplies) increase the scale of organized crime in the Netherlands.

I think that if you’re looking for stable alternatives to prohibition you either need to more to a more robust form legalization than the Dutch had—complete with totally legitimate marijuana farmers—or else adopt the Mark Kleiman “grow your own” proposal in which growing pot, smoking pot, possessing pot, etc are all legal but commerce in marijuana would be illegal.

Ron Brownstein has an excellent column on the globally unique position of the American conservative movement’s climate change denialism, a view that’s completely different from the posture outlined by mainstream conservative parties in the rest of the world. Dave Roberts spins this out into a speculative notion about climate politics, but I think the main takeaway is that everyone needs to ease up on the idea that the failure of climate change legislation primarily represents a tactical failure of the Obama administration or US legislative leaders.

If you had a dynamic where the reality of greenhouse gas emissions causing warming causing substantial ecological problems was broadly accepted, you would still have a substantial political challenge in terms of doing something about it. There are a lot of relevant interest group stakeholders, a lot of room for disagreement about the details of economic and ecological ramifications around the margin, etc. And the role of skilled politicians in such a world would be brokering an acceptable deal.

But it really does all start with an act of volition on the part of political leaders across the board. You have to admit there’s a problem. It’s not possible to bargain with people who reject the premises underlying any possible diagnosis, and it’s not possible to force members of the opposition political coalition to accept the diagnosis. A posture of willful ignorance simply leaves the United States—and by extension the world—with an unsolvable problem.

I thought I might highlight this passage from an interview the Cleveland Fed conduct with Laurence Meyer, a former Fed governor who also founded the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers. The content of his assertions sound completely insane, and yet to the best of my knowledge are 100 percent true:

I was educated at MIT. I was a research assistant to Franco Modigliani, Nobel laureate, and the director of the project on the large-scale model that was used at the time at the Federal Reserve Board. This is the beginning of modern macro-econometric model building. That’s the kind of models that I would use, the kind of models that folks at the Board use.

There’s also another tradition that began to build up in the late seventies to early eighties—the real business cycle or neoclassical models. It’s what’s taught in graduate schools. It’s the only kind of paper that can be published in journals. It is called “modern macroeconomics.”

Think about that for a second. The field of macroeconomics features two kinds of models. One is the kind that policymakers and private sector forecasters use. The other is the kind that’s taught in graduate schools and can get published in academic papers. And this isn’t like how physics departments talk about general relativity but practical engineers can get by with Newtonian mechanics as a workable approximation. The two kinds of models are genuinely incompatible.

It seems like something people working in the profession might want to try to put some time into working on.

I would further note that this tends to introduce some weird dissonances into the political conversation because there’s an ideological valence to the methodological dispute. Basically the “modern macroeconomics” approach only appeals to people with right-of-center views and also only appeals to non-policymakers. So when conservative politicians are in office, they turn to the Mankiws and Feldsteins and Bernankes of the world who share an analytic approach with left-of-center economists. But when progressive politicians are in office and it’s convenient to exaggerate the scope of disagreement, there’s this whole other army of people using a totally different methodology you can turn to.

I’m behind the curve in congratulating Liu Xiaobo on his Nobel Peace Prize, but I thought I’d take the opportunity to recommend that everyone actually take the time to read the Charter 08 document he’s associated with.

One of its planks that I’ve been particularly interested in since visiting China is this one:

Rural–Urban Equality. The two-tier household registry system must be abolished. This system favors urban residents and harms rural residents. We should establish instead a system that gives every citizen the same constitutional rights and the same freedom to choose where to live.

When I wrote about the hukou system previously I speculated that one consequence of its existence may be to give the urban population a vested interest in resisting democratic political reform. I think Charter 08′s critique of hukou tends to support that view as he specifically says it favors urban residents. And yet it’s the educated urban middle classes to whom westerners often look in anticipation of a movement for democracy. As it happens, there’s a University of Ohio professor named Jeremy Wallace who’s working on a book about “Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Migration, and Authoritarian Resilience in China” so I’ll wait to read that before drawing any firmer conclusions.