Must-Read:
- Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Summers: Rethinking macro stabilization: Back to the future: "Lessons from past crises...
- Tim Duy: Kevin Warsh, Very Serious Person: "Scott Sumner is perplexed by... Kevin Warsh['s in 2010]...
- Noah Smith: Defending Thaler from the guerrilla resistance: "This... by Kevin Bryan... [who] instead of explaining Thaler's research, Kevin decided to challenge it, in a rather dismissive manner...
- Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2017: "Richard H. Thaler... 'for his contributions to behavioural economics'...
- Simon Wren-Lewis: Economics: too much ideology, too little craft: "Paul Krugman argued... that... belief in the need for new economic thinking after the financial crisis was incorrect...
- Wolfgang Dauth, Sebastian Findeisen, Jens Südekum, and Nicole Woessner: The rise of robots in the German labour market: "Robots have had no aggregate effect on German employment, and robot exposure is found to actually increase the chances of workers staying with their original employer... http://voxeu.org/article/rise-robots-german-labour-market
Should-Read:
- Paul Krugman: Subsidies, Spite, and Supply Chains: "I’ve been fairly complacent about NAFTA’s fate...
- @delong @pseudoerasmus @leahboustan: On Twitter: What high skilled jobs did the domestication of the horse eliminate?: "@leah_boustan: @pseudoerasmus @de1ong To me, robot has connotation of 'artificial intelligence' so CNC would be robot-like but assembly line would not be...
- Geoffrey Pulham (2013): Why Are We Still Waiting for Natural Language Processing?: "Try typing this, or any question with roughly the same meaning, into the Google search box... http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/05/09/natural-language-processing/
- Luigi Iovino and Dmitriy Sergeyev: Quantitative Easing without Rational Expectations : "We study the effects of risky assets purchases financed by issuance of riskless debt by the government (quantitative easing) in a model without rational expectations...
- Bruce Bartlett: I helped create the GOP tax myth. Trump is wrong: Tax cuts don’t equal growth: "Even if they had released a complete plan — not just the woefully incomplete nine-page outline released Wednesday...
- Paul Krugman: Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies: "Modern conservatives have been lying about taxes pretty much from the beginning of their movement...
- Simon Wren-Lewis: How Neoliberals weaponise the concept of an ideal market: "I would tend to suggest...
- Martin Wolf: A political shadow looms over the world economy: "Optimism about the global economy is tempered by fears of populism...
- Ben Bernanke: Monetary Policy in a New Era: "Outside of making a stronger case for proactive fiscal policies, there are two broad possibilities...
- Bridget Ansel: Weekend reading, “racial health disparities, wealth inequality, and labor market tightness” edition: "Equitable Growth released three new working papers...
- Paul Krugman (2015): QE Truthers: "Everyone knows about the infamous open letter warning Ben Bernanke not to engage in quantitative easing...
- Tim Duy: Fed Is Ignoring Actual Inflation Data: "Policy makers may be relying on the wrong model as they push for a December rate hike...
- Nick Bunker: Just how tight is the U.S. labor market?: "From the end of the 1991 recession until the second quarter of 2017, the prime employment rate explains about 80 percent of the variation in nominal wage growth...
- Karl Smith: Pax Sinica: What Is To Be done?: "Tyler Cowen reminds me of an issue I used to think a lot about...
- Vitor Gaspar and Mercedes Garcia-Escribano: Inequality: Fiscal Policy Can Make the Difference: "Income inequality among people around the world has been declining in recent decades...
- Nick Bunker: On Twitter: "That one is not even close to being shifted back!": "The Beveridge Curve is so close to its pre-recession spot...
- Jörg Mayer: Industrial robots and inclusive growth: "Robots are not yet suitable for a range of labour-intensive industries...
- Justin Fox: Nobel Winner Richard Thaler's Savvy, Calculating Insurrection: "'Dumb stuff people do' was an expansion, not a rejection, of mainstream economics...
- Michael Strain: Republicans, It's Way Past Time for a Real Tax Plan - Bloomberg: "The way to keep critics from assuming the worst about your intentions is to say exactly what you want to do..."
- Paul Krugman: Rationality and Rabbit Holes: "Like the vast majority of economists, I was delighted to see Richard Thaler get the Nobel...
- Paul Krugman: Why Do You Care How Much Other People Work? Revisited: "Greg Leiserson has an interesting post on assessing tax reform, in which he argues that distribution tables... https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/why-do-you-care-how-much-other-people-work-revisited/
- INET: Reawakening: "This fall, hundreds of leading scholars, policymakers and public officials will gather at the Edinburgh International Conference center for the INET 2017 conference...
- Davide Cantoni, Jeremiah Dittmar, and Noam Yuchtman: Religious Competition and Reallocation: The Political Economy of Secularization in the Protestant Reformation: "We document an unintended, first-order consequence of the Protestant Reformation...
- Chye-Ching Huang and Brendan Duke: Vast Majority of Americans Would Likely Lose From Senate GOP’s $1.5 Trillion in Tax Cuts, Once They’re Paid For: "The Senate Budget Committee will vote on a budget resolution that would allow Congress to move forward with tax-cut legislation that adds $1.5 trillion to deficits over ten years...
- Edward Hadas: Review: Dani Rodrik gives economists a better name: "Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy... this easy-to-read and sometimes loosely connected collection of columns and essays...
- Larry Summers: America’s tax plan is not worth its name: "The US administration’s tax plan... a mélange of ideas put forth without precision or arithmetic.... The claims of Steven Mnuchin, Treasury secretary, Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, and Kevin Hassett, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, are some combination of ignorant, disingenuous and dishonest...
- Tim O'Reilly and Heather Boushey: Future of Work and What We Can Do About It: Conversation: "What’s the outlook for workers in an economy increasingly dominated by intelligent machines and the global elites who own them?...
Links:
- Karen Weese: Behavioral economics has a plan to fight poverty—and it's all about redesigning the "cockpit": "'Scarcity'... changes the way we think. We get tunnel vision, able to focus only on the present problem—the thing we lack—in a kind of fire-fighting mode, leaving us with less bandwidth for everything else..."
- David Anderson: CSR won’t be paid: "I’ve been working with Charles Gaba, Louise Norris, Andrew Sprung and a few others trying to inventory how states are allowing insurers to deal with the uncertainty of whether or not Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) payments would be made.... This is a living document that we will be modifying as we learn more..."
- Walter Frick: The Real Reason Superstar Firms Are Pulling Ahead: "Superstars... IT per se... combine it with other intangibles, like good management, well-known brands, or intellectual property..."
- Carola Binder: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy IV
- Sean Illing: 20 of America's top political scientists gathered to discuss our democracy. They're scared. - Vox: "If current trends continue for another 20 or 30 years, democracy will be toast..."
- Ted Bergstrom (1986): Soldiers of Fortune: "This paper repairs what I think is a major flaw in standard general equilibrium theory, which assumes away the nonconvexity of preferences that follows from the discreteness of occupational choice..."
- John Scalzi: My Annual Unsolicited Endorsement of WordPress, 2017 Edition
- Nancy LeTourneau: How Trump Is Sabotaging the Republican Tax Cut Plan: "The White House... proposed... eliminating the deduction for state and local taxes.... On whether or not this item is negotiable or if the president is re-thinking it, so far we’ve heard: yes, no, yes, no. Got that? The White House position on this is as clear as mud..."
- Steve M.: I FOUND IT -- THE ABSOLUTE WORST HARVEY WEINSTEIN TAKE: "Conservatives... choose to portray themselves as weak, terrified, relentlessly persecuted omega males..."
- Mark Thoma: Economist's View: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy: "There is a conference on Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy 'coordinated by Olivier Blanchard... and Lawrence H. Summers...' taking place today and tomorrow (wanted to go, but couldn't)..."
- Frank Levy: Comments on Frey and Osborne’s “The Future of Employment”: "The authors’ understanding of computer technology appears to be average for economists (= poor for computer scientists). By my personal guess, they are overestimating what current technology can do..."
- Tim Jost: Trump Executive Order Expands Opportunities For Healthier People To Exit ACA
- Josh Barro: Republicans don't understand why Trump tax plan hits middle class: "Abolishing personal exemptions is a revenue-raising option that hits middle-income families unusually hard..."
- Richard Thaler: Anomalies Columns
- Barry Ritholtz: Understanding What Makes Vanguard So Successful: "Low costs help, but that's only part of the explanation..."
- Agnel Philip: Krugman Says Potential Fed Chair Warsh Is ‘Wrong About Everything’: "'It’s kind of almost awesome. You could almost make money by taking whatever he thinks is going to happen and betting the other way', according to Krugman. A spokesman at the Hoover Institution, where Warsh is now a fellow, did not immediately respond to a request for comment..."
- Naftali Tishby, Fernando C. Pereira, and William Bialek (1999): The information bottleneck method: "We define the relevant information in a signal x ∈ X as being the information that this signal provides about another signal y ∈ Y.... Understanding the signal x requires more than just predicting y, it also requires specifying which features of X play a role in the prediction. We formalize this problem as that of finding a short code for X that preserves the maximum information about Y..."
- Eric Martin, Josh Wingrove, and Andrew Mayeda: U.S. Offers Proposal That Could Kill Nafta in 5 Years: "‘Sunset clause’ requires nations to decide to maintain accord. Canada, Mexico say measure would create business uncertainty..."
- MSRI: Celebration of Mind 2017: Math, Magic, Puzzles, Games!
- Gabriel Sherman: We're at "lunge for the nuclear football" stage of Trump presidency: "Gabriel Sherman says a GOP source tells him that General Kelly and Secretary Mattis talk about what they would do if Donald Trump lunged for the nuclear football..."
- David Warsh: Going West: "Before there was Walter O’Malley, there was Kenneth Arrow..."
- Paul Romer (2015): Stigler Conviction vs. Feynman Integrity
- Stephen Maurer: On the Shoulders of Giants: Colleagues Remember Suzanne Scotchmer's Contributions to Economics
- William Darity: WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City: "The New (Incorrect) Harvard/Washington Consensus on Racial Inequality..."
- Ben Thompson: Trustworthy Networking: "Zuckerberg’s own bubble makes him inclined to dismiss the possibility of filter bubbles, while the bubble Facebook’s most strident critics live in means they too are focusing on the wrong thing..."
- Paul Krugman (1987): Adjustment in the World Economy: "It is Keynes versus Ohlin, not Tobin versus Friedman... the old question of the relative price effects of an international transfer..."
- Corey Robin: Triumph of the Shill
