I’m not sure it made a ton of sense to launch my “read more books” resolution by reading something as long as Quicksilver, but it certainly did turn out to have the extension treatment of monetary policy themes I was looking for.

As is often the case with the later work of successful “genre” writers, I thought this got a bit annoyingly self-indulgent at times, with Stephenson sometimes eager to show off some bit of 17th Century trivia (like that to “realize” your investment comes from the name of the Spanish currency, the real) in a distracting way. But at other times it’s quite engaging and brilliant.

The message is that it’s wrong to think of modern liberal capitalist democracy as a natural state of things from which bad deviations occur due to blundering or malfeasance. Rather, the world we know is a deliberate, contingent, human creation whose key elements had to be thought up by particular people for particular reasons. People think of things like telescopes as invented, but forget that banking and religious tolerance and nation-states are also inventions.

Ezra Klein observes that the Obama administration is mainly staffed with veterans of the Clinton administration since that’s the only administration there are veterans of:

It’s all a reminder, though, that party often matters a lot more than candidates do. Thinking back to the primary, Barack Obama was the guy who was going to transform Washington and chart an alternative to Clintonism and prioritize energy reform and wrest foreign policy away from the class of Democrats who had mucked it all up so badly. His was supposed to be a new, or at least somewhat different, Democratic Party than we’d seen in the ’90s.

But then he got to Washington, sat down with the people who seemed to know what they were doing, and found that moving his agenda meant playing by the town’s rules, that the people with the most relevant experience to the tasks he needed done were mostly Clinton veterans, that the voters weren’t there for energy but were potentially there for health care, and that it made sense for him to put Hillary Clinton herself in the top foreign-policy slot. It’s hard to imagine that Hillary Clinton or John Edwards would’ve done anything all that differently. For all the sound and fury of the primary, the state of the party and of the country told you a lot more about who would be in charge and what they’d be doing than did the rhetoric of the candidates.

I think there are giant, heaping important elements of truth in that. But there are also gaps. There are moments when an awful lot really does hinge on the president himself. Lots of important Democrats thought it made sense to push ahead with health care after Scott Brown’s win. Lots of other important Democrats thought it made sense to surrender on health care after Scott Brown’s win. Both “camp surrender” and “camp advance” included influential members of the Obama administration, both camps contained people who’d worked for Bill Clinton and people who hadn’t worked for Bill Clinton, etc. But this was an important decision, not something sorted out on the staff level, so it turned out to be quite important that Barack Obama had an important job in the Obama administration. There’s a substantial chance the call could have gone the other way with someone else in that office.

Look back on it, the main reason I ultimately agree that party matters a lot more than candidate attributes is because even though people matter a lot, it’s hard to predict how they will matter. It turned out to matter, a lot, that in December 2009 Barack Obama was the kind of guy who wanted to gut it out and win ugly on health insurance reform. But I don’t think if you asked me in March of 2008 to say what I thought distinguished Obama from Clinton and Edwards that “desire to gut it out and win ugly on health reform” would have been high on my list. And actually I don’t think the candidates themselves are even in a good position to predict how they’ll react to the vicissitudes of governing.

Another one for the “ideological dissonance” files comes via Sallie James who observes that Jeff Sessions, one of the Senate’s fiercest conservatives, is also a fierce defender of sleeping bag oriented industrial policy:

Under [the Generalized System of Preferences], Bangladeshi sleeping bags that competed with the Exxel Outdoors product were able to enter the U.S. duty-free. On behalf of Exxel Outdoors, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) last year refused to let any renewal of GSP pass that would not remove at least some sleeping bags from the scope of the GSP program (Inside U.S. Trade, Dec. 23).

With the future of the GSP program still uncertain, Kazazian said he is now expanding his Alabama plant in part to put pressure on Congress to either not renew the GSP program, or renew it in a modified form that would exclude imported sleeping bags from its scope.

That an Alabama Senator would be campaigning for higher sales taxes on Bangladeshi-made sleeping bags seems bizarre until you realize that they also make sleeping bags in Alabama. This kind of rent-seeking is unfortunate, but also pretty banal. But as I’ve been saying, what’s so remarkably about Sessions’ selective embrace of high taxes and big government is how dissonant it is with the contemporary conservative movement’s insistence that the United States is facing some kind of ideological Götterdämmerung as the forces of freedom face off against Barack Obama’s sharia socialism.

It’s both true that the quantity housing construction has declined sharply and also that the unemployment rate has risen sharply, but as Scott Sumner points out for all that people want to keep talking about construction workers you just can’t make the numbers add up on this:

January 2006 — housing starts = 2.303 million, unemployment = 4.7%

April 2008 — housing starts = 1.008 million, unemployment = 4.9%

October 2009 — housing starts = 527,000, unemployment = 10.1%

In a well-managed sectoral shock, what happens is a lot of construction workers lose their jobs and then . . . most of them get new jobs. But when you let aggregate demand collapse, that’s not what happens and instead you end up with 10 percent unemployment. Instead of the construction workers getting new jobs, folks who sell things to construction workers lose their jobs and the cascade tumbles forward.

How is this supposed to play out in 2040?:

Here’s the US by way of comparison. I’m thinking Italians would do well to start feeling a lot more positive about immigration.